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I probably agree with you (although I doubt I have been as thoughtful about it), but what I don't get is this:
humans trying to get more of what they want
Farber is extolling this positive-sum game that is human freedom and trade, and I read it as Farber claiming that humans on net get more of what they want if they pursue the positive-sum game than if they pursue violence and domination.
I read him as saying that the great success of the human endeavor to get more of what we want in the last few centuries (as compared to the centuries that came before) is due to more people pursuing the positive-sum game.
Why is it the case that some humans still do not seem to get it?
Maybe it's like hand washing stopping the spread of germs. It's not necessarily clear to people that thorough hand washing really will result in less sickness. So they either don't wash or they "annoint" their hands with some water as a nod to the good juju of washing. And it supposedly was difficult for the doctor who discovered the benefits of hand washing to convince others to do it.
Just so, we know intellectually that violence actually gets us less of what we want, but there are still very many people who don't really believe it.
But Farber seems to be saying that there was a moment in history where the scales tipped and now more and more people believe the path to getting what they want is best achieved through freedom and trade and creativity rather than violence. I'm curious what might have caused this scale-tipping -- and if we believe they actually did tip.
Why is it the case that some humans still do not seem to get it?
Most people don't care how they get what they want. If it's violence, great. If it's from making the pie bigger, great. A few other things persisting violence:
- I think violence is viscerally more satisfying - not only do you get a bigger slice, someone else gets a smaller one, and we're primarily concerned about relative slice size.
- The pie getting bigger threatens the relative slice size of all existing slice holders. In a zero sum pie, they merely have to play defense to keep the same proportion of the pie. When the pie is getting bigger, they have to play defense and offense.
I'm curious what might have caused this scale-tipping
I believe it's the coercion groups seeing freedom groups getting more of what they want. So long as we don't have a monoculture, cultures compete and it's culture-see-culture-do
and if we believe they actually did tip.
I believe it did tip more recently, but I don't think there's much preventing it from tipping back if say China ends up being the world superpower.
I also don't fully buy that coercion is under all circumstances incompatible with growing pies. There are many factors that cause a pie to grow or not grow. Freedom is an important factor, and perhaps the simplest and most powerful factor, but not the only factor.
I think the benefits of freedom and desire to oppress stem from the same thing: humans trying to get more of what they want. In groups, many wants are competitive so you have to ascend social and economic hierarchies to get more of what you want. Free from coercion and the ability to coerce, you must be productive to ascend and there's no external ceiling to how far you can ascend. Given the power to coerce, you can ascend relative to others by limiting/slowing their ascent or reversing their ascent by stealing from them.
That's all to say that I'm not sure we can have the benefits of freedom without the desire to oppress. They will always be in tension so long as humans have competitive wants, and I think it is fundamental to human nature and our success to have competitive wants. Competitive wants are the result of us reaching consensus on what is desirable.[1] Competitive wants are our organizing principle.
I tend to take Girard's view that we get our desires from money-see-monkey-do. I think it's our nature to be in conflict with one another and we evolved so because sharing desires, somewhat paradoxically, also causes us to cooperate more than we would otherwise. ↩