By Stevie Arnott
One of the advantages of being an activist in the SSP is that you rarely have
time to watch TV – being out fighting for socialism is not only a good thing
in and of itself, it also saves the brain from the sclerotic effect of today’s
mind-numbing schedules of crass game shows, stagey docu-soaps, and
fly-on-the-wall, lowest-common-denominator, voyeuristic crap like Big Brother.
Unfortunately, while I regarded it as a moral and aesthetic imperative not to
watch last year’s viewing sensation, I would have had to be blind and deaf to
all other media not to have been aware of it and its vacuous and
attention-seeking participants.
So it was that, flicking through the channels in exhais detractors. Despite
his mother’s fine legacy, on public occasions Paul preferred to talk about his
father’s more humble origins.
Trust Me – Nick Bateman’s attempt to carve out a post-Big Brother
television niche for himself – has a very simple premise. If it’s ever
repeated, catch it. You’ll follow the argument of this article much more
clearly. Even now I’ve no doubt it’s being shown in first- and second-year
philosophy tutorials all over Britain. Two contestants, or two teams of
contestants, are locked in individual cells. They can communicate with each
other, by telephone, and through Nasty Nick. In each cell are two buttons. One
button means Share, the other Take Everything. The contestants are allowed to
agree with each other, truthfully or deceitfully, and to ask questions to try
and guess at each other’s character. At the end of the process, each
contestant must choose which button to push – without knowing the other
contestant’s true decision.
It works like this: If both contestants press Share, they receive £1000
each.
If one presses Share, and other presses Take Everything, the greedy one walks
away with £3000 and the co-operator wins nothing.
If both press Take Everything, both lose everything.
I watched this gruesome ritual often enough to see its Channel 5
entertainment value. More often than not the contestants would end up in mutual
destitution, or one cynical, lying opportunist would walk away with all the cash
while the more trusting citizen of this mini-society would end up with zilch.
The similarity to a much studied phenomenon in this magazine (beginning with
capital and ending in -ism) was not entirely coincidental.
But the reason I was fascinated, as someone who a few years ago did a degree
in philosophy, was that Channel 5 hadn’t just produced another cultural
throwaway appealing to our basest instincts, they had taken us into the realms
of games theory. What I had been watching was a dumbed-down game-show version of
one of the oldest “thought experiments” in philosophy and economics – The
Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Making sense of selfishness?
Prisoner’s dilemma type games are applicable whenever there is a conflict
between co-operation (the common good) and self interest, and they can have many
different forms. In the original, two prisoners are held in separate cells
facing a 10-year sentence. If one prisoner grasses on the other, the other will
face the full sentence and the defector will go free. If both stay silent there
is no evidence and both are free to go. If both grass on each other, both will
get 5 years.
To understand the influence this thought experiment has had on both economics
and biology (until now), we have to leave our ethics at the door for the moment,
to return to them later. What matters here is what a bourgeois economist might
call the rational self-interest. Working it out logically, what is the best
course of action each prisoner can take for him- or herself? The problem has to
be understood mathematically.
(Imagining yourself as a sort of cross between Mr. Spock, Nick Cotton from
Eastenders and a bookie might help).
Bearing in mind that one prisoner has no idea what the other prisoner will
do, that his choice is made blind, he has a one in four chance, if he stays
silent, of going free and similar odds for silence, of landing the ten year
term. Likewise, he has a one in four chance, if he grasses, of going free, but a
one in two chance of avoiding the ten year sentence, because if both prisoners
talk the sentence is only five years. On a purely algorithmic basis then,
selfishness (so we are told), will always pay better odds.
Capitalist economists for many years have used such games theories to justify
the predatory nature of the capitalist system as inevitable. Altruism and
co-operation may be nice ideas, but, they tell us, since, like the eponymous
prisoner we can never rely on other human beings to keep up their side of the
agreement, we are compelled likewise, by rational self interest, to always put
ourselves first.
Such ideas have also made the crossover into biology, particularly
evolutionary biology, and thence into culture and sociology. What is Darwinian
natural selection but ‘the survival of the fittest’, a pitiless struggle of
each organism against its environment and its contemporaries for the right to
reproduce? (Incidentally, this was a term coined not by Darwin, but by Herbert
Spencer, a contemporary of the great evolutionist and one of the first promoters
of primitive eugenics).
Ideologically, in the modern era, reductionist models of human behaviour,
like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, have found their highest expression in the
socio-biology of right-wing thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, and more famously and
popularly in Richard Dawkins’s concept of the selfish gene (The Selfish Gene,
Unweaving the Rainbow, The Blind Watchmaker etc.). Dawkins, a zoologist by
training, and Daniel Dennett, the American liberal philosopher.
Of course, unlike the prisoners in Nasty Nick’s game, genes are not making
conscious choices. Darwinian selection takes place because of variation across
populations of species in given environments and over multi-generational
time-scales. And in this both Dawkins and Dennett are fundamentally right –
natural selection is a blind algorithmic process tending towards optimum fits to
specific eco-sytems, food supplies and modes of reproduction.* Those individuals
of a species which have inheritable characteristics which tend to enable them to
survive long enough to reproduce in a given environment will pass on those
inherited characteristics, while those individuals of a species lacking those
characteristics will tend to die out prior to mating. Consequently, the favoured
characteristic (brighter plumage, a better facility with language, a keener
ability to smell blood over large distances, etc.) will tend to increase in a
given population group over time, until that characteristic becomes a defining
characteristic of a species. All organisms are the way they are today because
they all had ancestors who successfully passed on their genes. It is a
scientific tautology that no-one reading this has ancestors who died childless.
Marxists accept this scientific view of constant creation and the emergence
of new species. Indeed, Marx was a great admirer of Darwin and sent him a
complimentary copy of the first volume of Capital. But capitalist society tends
to interpret the findings of science in terms of its own dominant ideology. For
those with vested economic interests to propound in culture, education and
politics, both economic games theories, imbued with the idea of rational self
interest, and the notion of the selfish gene seemed to be a welcome addition to
the ideological armoury of capitalism.
Of course, they argued, as good liberals we could always try to ameliorate
the worst effects of human nature, but nevertheless science had showed, had it
not, that as human beings individually we were driven fundamentally by the
‘selfish’ desire of our genes to reproduce, and as human beings socially and
economically, perhaps also partially as a consequence of that very genetic hard
wiring, we were compelled always to act in our own self-interest, even at the
expense of others. Surely, such a scientific ‘double whammy’ rendered any
concept of socialism, of collectivism, of a society based on co-operation and
solidarity, a mere pipe-dream?
Fortunately, as almost always proves to be the case, these same capitalist
ideologists are guilty of both hopeful opportunism and bad science. As one of
Dawkins’s close co-thinkers, Matt Ridley, points out in his 1997 book The
Origins of Virtue, far from the real evidence indicating such a bleak picture
for biology and humanity, all the best evidence from both recent evolutionary
studies and the further development of games theory into more ‘lifelike’ and
complex scenarios seems to show that co-operation, reciprocation and
collectivism are at least as much a part of our social and biological make-up as
self-centredness, and may, in fact, be even more critical to our development as
a species than had previously been thought.
Hawks, Doves and Tit-for-tat
Ridley points out that when Prisoner’s Dilemma type games are played
repeatedly between partners or multiple players where one player can remember
whether another is trustworthy or defects against him, then an entirely
different set of results begin to show up.
One of the first to demonstrate this was a biologist in the 70s called John
Maynard Smith. He was the first to see the connection between games theory and
what he called ‘evolutionary stable strategies’. If self-interest was always
rational then why did animals in the wild not turn upon one another at every
opportunity?
He set up a game called Hawks and Doves. A Hawk always Took Everything, if we
can refer back to Nasty Nick’s show. A Dove always Shared. Not surprisingly,
Doves did fairly well in game scenarios against other Doves, Hawks tended to
drive each other to extinction, but Hawks always profited when they came up
against Doves.
No evolutionary stable strategy there. But Maynard Smith’s insight and
genius was to devise a third category of game player - Retaliator. Retaliator
was a Dove that turned into a Hawk when it met one. This proved to be an
enormously successful strategy. Whenever the game was played Retaliator soon
became the “species” to dominate the game space.
A number of years later a political scientist named Robert Axelrod who, like
ourselves, was interested in the logic of co-operation, confirmed and developed
these findings. He set up a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament on computer and
invited people to submit programs (strategies). Surprisingly the eight best
(most successful, most evolutionarily stable) programmes were all, first and
foremost, co-operators. None of them initiated Hawk like behaviour, and the most
successful was a programme designed by a man called Anatol Rappaport, a concert
pianist with an interest in the politics of nuclear confrontation. His
programme, Tit-for-tat, was astoundingly simple.
It began by co-operating, but it had a memory. It would then simply do
whatever the other programme did last time. If the other guy Shared, fine. If he
took everything, Tit-for-tat would retaliate next time. If on the third occasion
the other programme moved back to sharing, Tit-for-tat would return to
co-operating behaviour also.
Axelrod explained the success of the programme thus:
“What accounts for Tit-for-tat’s robust success is its combination of
being nice, retaliatory, forgiving and clear. Its niceness prevents it from
getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side
from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore
mutual co-operation. And its clarity makes it intelligible to the other player,
thereby eliciting long term co-operation”.
Finally, by moving from a two-prisoner, two-cell reductive scenario to a more
complex and, dare I say it, dialectical scenario, with multiple players with
memories and the ability to adopt and develop strategies, Games theory had begun
to show results a bit more like how the mass of humanity act in everyday life
(or, perhaps we should say, would ideally act if human relations were not
distorted by capitalism).
The race was now on to find examples in biology of co-operation, both between
individuals of species, and in the cellular aggregates that constitute organisms
themselves.
Bloodsuckers and biochemistry
In 1983 the biologist Gerald Wilkinson detailed an example of co-operation in
biology that mirrored almost exactly Rappaport’s Tit-for-tat programme. He had
studied vampire bats in Costa Rica. The bat’s main source of food is blood
sipped from small cuts in large animals at night. Occasionally bats will, of
course, go without a blood meal, but after sixty hours without blood the bat is
in danger of starving to death.
Wilkinson discovered the Costa Rican bats had ‘devised’ a way around this
problem. Fortunately, when a meal is found the lucky bat can usually drink more
than it immediately requires. This allows it to donate the surplus to another
hungry bat by regurgitating the extra blood mouth-to-mouth. The bats tend to
roost in the same tree hollows over a number of years and seemed to have
developed the ability to recognise and memorise each others generosity to one
and other. A bat that has received blood in the past will, in turn, donate to
its benefactor. A greedy bat that refuses blood will be refused blood in turn.
And this is not simply bats looking after their own genetic heritage by looking
after their kin – most of the bats studied were not directly or indirectly
related. Here was something that could in no way be explained by a narrow appeal
to the selfish gene.
Ridley terms this phenomenon reciprocity (2), and details interesting
examples amongst primates, sea-going mammals and others (the co-operation of
bees and ants can mostly be explained by the kin selection dismissed above.
Drone bees strive to pass on their genes through the genes of a near relative,
the Queen.) He even cites the instances of ‘cleaning stations’ at coral
reefs; specific spots where larger fish go knowing they can be cleaned of
parasites by smaller fish and shrimps, and those smaller creatures know in turn
that, at that spot, for that time, they will not be eaten by the larger fish.
In fact, co-operation, rather than self-interest seems to permeate the world
of biology, even at the level of the organism or individual cell. “Genes team
up to form chromosomes”, he tells us. “Chromosomes team up to form genomes;
genomes team up to form cells; cells team up to form complex cells; complex
cells team up to form bodies...”
And, of course, bodies team up to form schools, flocks, herds, clans, tribes
and societies.
Eternal human ‘nature’ or pre-dispositions to learn?
It now appears that after a generational struggle over “nature versus
nurture” some of those very same scientists, popularisers, and their disciples
who propounded the reductionist model that genetics was all, are now, given the
weight of hard evidence, attempting to ‘bend the stick the other way’ to use
Lenin’s phrase. The publication of the findings of the Human Genome Project
recently seemed to deal a death blow to the idea of a ‘gene for everything’
– there were simply too few separate genes and we shared too many of them with
our mammalian, reptilian and avian cousins for a behavioural claim for genetic
biology to continue to have pre-eminence.
But Marxists should be vary too of ‘bending the stick’ in relation to the
relationship between genetics – the biological given – and what we
assimilate through the environment and culture. We are clearly not simply blank
pages upon which great social experiments can be writ (or anything else for that
matter). We are creatures with a certain genetic heritage, drives and instincts.
It is important, however, to understand what that means. Ridley, in the
introduction to his book, sums it up: “Instincts, in a species like the human
one, are not immutable genetic programmes; they are predispositions to learn.
And to believe that human beings have instincts is no more determinist than to
believe they are products of their upbringings”.
Humans have the innate capability both to be incredibly selfish and
heroically altruistic. The potentiality for co-operation and self interest are
hardwired into us, it would seem, but they are only potentials. Co-operation, or
self-interest, the Hawk or the Dove can only be realised in our interaction with
a real, living complex society.
In this sense Marx completed Darwin, 150 years ahead of schedule, when he
said that ‘conditions determine consciousness’.
There is nothing in biology or economics which precludes a different, better
and more harmonious way of organising society. There is nothing in our
“natures” which would doom a genuine socialist project before it even began.
As a Marxist I have always believed one can be an optimist and a realist
about the human race at the same time. It was a human brain that revealed the
evolutionary processes behind the creation of species, a human brain that
developed scientific socialism, and a human brain that gave us Beethoven’s
Ninth. Similarly, human brains, diseased by capitalism and class society,
engineered the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Coming full circle, and on a more
mundane level, it was a human brain that gave us the emotionally manipulative
Big Brother and the millennial cipher of Nasty Nick.
But the message from science is plain: the game is on, and the Hawks needn’t win.
NOTES
1 Left wing biologists like Steve Rose and Stephen Jay Gould
consider this view too simplistic. More about that debate perhaps in another
article.
2 Ridley favours the term reciprocity rather than co-operation for ideological reasons it seems. In the weaker second half of his book he perversely turns these arguments into an argument for... free trade and privatisation! A Darwinist but no Marxist he.
