The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [43]
Moreover, some ancient hunter-gatherer societies reached such a pitch of trade and prosperity as to live in dense, sophisticated hierarchical societies with much specialisation. Where the sea produced a rich bounty, it was possible to achieve a density of the kind that normally requires agriculture to support it – complete with chiefs, priests, merchants and conspicuous consumption. The Kwakiutl Americans, living off the salmon runs of the Pacific North West, had family property rights to streams and fishing spots, had enormous buildings richly decorated with sculptures and textiles, and engaged in bizarre rituals of conspicuous consumption such as the giving of rich copper gifts to each other, or the burning of candlefish oil, just for the prestige of being seen to be philanthropic. They also employed slaves. Yet they were strictly speaking hunter-gatherers. The Chumash of the Californian channel islands, well fed on sea food and seal meat, included specialist craftsmen who fashioned beads from abalone shells to use as currency in a sophisticated and long-range canoe trade. Trade with strangers, and the trust that underpins it, was a very early habit of modern human beings.
The trust juice
But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest? There was once a German philosophical conundrum known as Das Adam Smith Problem, which professed to find a contradiction between Adam Smith’s two books. In one he said that people were endowed with instinctive sympathy and goodness; in the other, that people were driven largely by self-interest. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it,’ he wrote in Theory of Moral Sentiments. ‘Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour,’ he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.
Smith’s resolution of the conundrum is that benevolence and friendship are necessary but not sufficient for society to function, because man ‘stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons’. In other words, people go beyond friendship and achieve common interest with strangers: they turn strangers into honorary friends, to use Paul Seabright’s term. Smith brilliantly confused the distinction between altruism and selfishness: if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic? As the philosopher Robert Solomon put it, ‘What I want for myself is your approval, and to get it I will most likely do what you think I should do.’
This ability to transact with strangers as if they were friends is made possible by an intrinsic, instinctive human capacity for trust. Often the very first thing you do when you meet a stranger and begin to transact with him or her, say a waiter in a restaurant, is to smile – a small, instinctive gesture of trust. The human smile, the glowing embodiment of Smith’s innate sentiment of sympathy, can reach right into the brain of another person and influence her thoughts. In the extreme case, a baby smiling causes particular circuits in its mother’s brain to fire and make her feel good. No other animal smiles in this way. But even among adults, a touch, a massage, or, as experiments have shown, a simple act of financial generosity, can cause the release of the hormone oxytocin in the brain of the recipient, and oxytocin is the chemical that evolution uses to make mammals feel good about each other – whether parents about their babies, lovers about their