Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

4. Tribalism is used to mean people that form rigid groups among those like themselves while viewing others as less worthy.

"The 'self' is a composite of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity."

"Aristotle was perhaps the first Western philosopher to worry about repressive unity. He thought of the city as 'synoikismos', a coming together of people from diverse family tribes - each 'oikos' having its own history, allegiances, property, family gods. for the sake of trade and mutual support during war, 'a city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence'; the city thus obliges people to think about and deal with others who have different loyalties. Obviously mutual aggression cannot hold a city together, but Aristotle made this precept more subtle. Tribalism, he said, involves thinking you know what other people are like without knowing them; lacking direct experience of others, you fall back on fearful fantasies. Brought up to date, this is the idea of the sterotype."

Will first-hand experience weaken sterotypes? Samuel Stouffer observed whites that fought along with blacks in WW2 were less prejudiced than those who had not. Robert Putnam, however, noticed the opposite: as those living in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world. Putnam's study profiles attitudes more than behavior.

9. "De-skilling is occuring in the social realm in equal measure people are losing the skills to deal with intractable differences as material inequality isolates them, short-term labour makes their social contacts more superficial and activates anxiety about the Other. We are losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work."

18. Aristotle in 'Politics', 'though we may use the same words, we cannot say we are speaking of the same things' "the aim is to come eventually to a common understanding. Skill in practising dialectic lies in detecting what might establish that common ground.

19. Theodore Zeldin who authored a book on conversation says "that the good listener detects common ground more in what another person assumes than says.[23] The listener elaborates that assumption by putting it into words. You pick up on the intention, the context, make it explicit, and talk about it."

"'Dialogic' is a word coined by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to name a discussion which does not resolve itself by finding common ground. Though no shared agreements may be reached, through the process of exchange people may become more aware of their own views and expand their understanding of one another."

20. "The heart of all listening skills, though, lies in picking up on concrete details, on specifics, to drive a conversation forward. Bad listeners bounce back in generalities when they respond; they're not attending to those small phrases, facial gestures or silences which open up a discussion. In verbal conversation, as in musical rehearsal, exchanging is built from the ground up"

"Inexperienced anthropologists and sociologists can suffer a peculiar challenge in conducting discussions. They are sometimes too eager to respond, going whever their subjects lead; they do not argue, they went to show that they are responsive, that they care. A big issue lurks here. A dialogic conversation can be ruined by too much identification with the other person."

21. Empathy v. Sympathy. "In a musical rehearsal, a string player may realize that his or her fellow musicians hear a musical phrase in an entirely different way and so phrase differently with their bows; he or she registers the difference. The sympathetic response would be to identify with and so imitate them. The empathic response is cooler: 'You do an up-bow, I do a down-bow. . .'; the difference may be left hanging in the air but a sign of recognizing what you are doing has been given. In an interview, the listener's empathy can be expressed by maintaining eye-contact even while keeping silent, conveying 'I am attending intently to you' rather than 'I know just what you feel'. * This is why, in training young ethnographers, I work as much with bodily gestures and the use of the eyes as with their questionnaires. Curiosity figures more strongly in empathy than in sympathy.

        Both sympathy and empathy convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but the one is an embrace, the other an encounter. Sympathy overcomes difference through imaginative acts of identification; empathy attends to another person on his or her own terms. Sympathy has usually been thought a stronger sentiment than empathy, because 'I feel your pain' puts the stress on what I feel; it activates one's own ego. Empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or herself.

        Both these recognitions are necessary at different times and in different ways to practise cooperation. If a group of miners is trapped below ground, 'I feel your pain' activates our desire to help them out; it doesn't matter that we may never have been down a mineshaft; we leap over that difference. But there are situations in which we help other people precisely when we do not imagine ourselves like them, as in letting someone in mourning talk, not presuming to intrude on what they are going through. Empathy has a particular political application; by practising it a legislator or union leader could - certainly it's a distant possibility - learn from his or her constituents rather than simply speak in their name. More realistically, empathic listening can assist the community worker, priest or teacher mediate in communities where people do not share the same race or ethnicity.

        As a philosophic matter, sympathy can be understood as one emotional reward for the thesis-antithesis-synthesis play of dialectic: 'Finally, we understand each other,' and that feels good. Empathy is more linked to dialogic exchange; though curiosity sustains the exchange, we don't experience the same satisfaction of closure, of wrapping things up. But empathy does contain its own emotional reward."

23. Subjuction. "The subjunctive mood counters Bernard Williams's fear of the fetish of assertiveness by opening up instead an indeterminate mutual space, the space in which strangers dwell with one another, whether these strangers be immigrant and natives thrown together in a city or gays and straights living in the same street. The social engine is oiled when people do not behave too emphatically.

        The subjunctive mood is most at home in the dialogical domain, that world of talk which makes an open social space, where discussion can take an unforeseen direction. The dialogic conversation, as noted, prospers through empathy, the sentiment of curiosity about who other people are in themselves. This is a cooler sentiment than sympathy's often instant identifications, yet empathy's rewards are not stone-cold. By practising indirection, speaking to one another in the subjunctive mood, we can eperience a certain kind of sociable pleasure: being with other people, focusing on and learning about them, without forcing ourselves into the mould of being like them."

"...a casual conversation requires skill to become a meaningful encounter; refraining from assertiveness is a discipline that makes a space for looking into another person's life, and for them, equally, to look into yours."

29. "'Rehearsal', as I've tried to show in these pages, is a category of experience, rooted in infant and child development, which expands the capacity to communicate. This is the paradoxical thing about GoogleWave: it showed that, in undertaking cooperation, users are capable of handling more complexity than the programmers provided..."

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. "...have been an inspiration for me, and provide the orienting theme for this book: people's capacities for cooperation are far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be. "

30. Book Outline Described. "This book is divided into three parts, exploring how cooperation can be shaped, weakened and strengthened. Each part explores cooperation in the round, drawing on research in anthropology, history, sociology and politics. I've framed these for a dialogical discussion rather than cut-and-thrust dialectical argument; I'll try to enlist your critical engagement rather than to score points or wrestle you into a particular position. I want to practice cooperation on the page.

        Part One begins with how cooperation is shaped in politics. The focus here is on solidarity, since us-against-them is writ large in the modern political landscape. Is there a sort of politics of cooperation which can contest it? Chapter 2 takes up the relation of competition and cooperation. They are related in complex ways which I'll try to plumb anthropologically. Chapter 3 provides one particular framework for how cooperation has been shaped historically. How to cooperate became a question at the dawn of the modern era, as science began to separate from religion, and in Europe religion itself divided.

        The second part of the book, on how cooperation can be weakened, is sociological in character, and zeroes in on the present. Here I engage with the critical viewpoint of Sen and Nussbaum. To do so, Chapter 4 probes how the inequalities children experience affect their cooperative experience. Chapter 5 explores the erosion of cooperation in adult work; here I pay particular attention to the diminished relations, on the job, of cooperation, authority and trust. Chapter 6 contemplates a new character type emerging in modern society, an uncooperative self, ill-disposed for dealing with complexity and difference. All social critique risks the dangers of drawing a cartoon; mindful of this, I've tried to give as nuanced an account as I can of these social ills.

        Part Three considers ways in which cooperation might be strengthened, and my focus throughout is on the skills which could make it so. In the Preface I invoke rather casually the phrase 'cooperation as a craft'. Now I dig deeper into it, trying to show in Chapter 7 what can be learned about social life from the craft of making and repairing physical things. Chapter 8 proceeds to one application in what I'll dub 'everyday diplomacy', the craft of working with people we disagree with, perhaps don't like, or don't understand; the techniques for doing this relate to performance practices. Part Three concludes in Chapter 9 with an exploration of commitment. Responsiveness to others, cooperation with them, obviously requires some kind of commitment, but commitment comes in many forms: which should we choose?

        This is how I've sought to see cooperation in the round, from many different angles. The world I've come to inhabit as a sociologist is infested with policy wonks, people who make a career of telling other people how to behave. At the book's end, I can't offer the wisdom of policy-wonkery. Instead, I've sought to relate this journey to the most dialogical of all writers, the essayist Michel de Montaigne."

35. Chapter 1. 'The Social Question' : Reformers in Paris Explore a Puzzle

Paris Universal Exposition in 1900, within it, 'La Question sociale'. On display, Charles Booth's maps of poverty in London, 'the class relations of the city outlined, street by street, in bright washes of wealth and dark masses of poverty.'. Ferdinand Lassalle's Gerneral German Workers Association, including both skilled and semi-skilled workers). The French displayed pamphlets on social policy, government reports, testimony from various voluntary associations.W.E.B. Dubois fate of African-Americans in the state of Georgia since the end of slavery. Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes training for ex-slaves.

37. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) "...did not stew in this estranged state. He thought it to be the condition of modern man, and believed it contained a certain promise."

'Geselligkeit', the pleasure of people sharing another's company.

38. Simmel. "...bodies tamps down 'Geselligkeit', he thought, their presence can also deepen social awareness; the arrival of a stranger can make others think about values they take for granted."

40. "In the course of the twentieth century, the two versions of solidarity came to mark off what could be called the political Left from the social Left."

42. The Paris Commune of 1871. "...existed for a period of months after the fall of the empire of Napoleon III when the city was surrounded by the German army. During this siege, Parisians, with a shifting and weak cast of leaders, argued and voted about every aspect of daily life. Reports from within the siege speak of everyday acts of mutual help and support, as when the citizens peacefully shared out the animals in the Paris zoo for food; imprpovised acts of cooperation were no strategy for survival, however, and the German army, cheered on by the provincial bourgeoisie, soon brought an end to it. The Commune thereafter haunted the imagination of the European Left: its individual acts of generosity, its spontaneous mutual support, but also its inevitable doom."

Lack of education, management of family life, housing or isolation of newcomers to cities. "Community and labour organizers on the social Left believed that dealing with these conditions meant change built from the ground up. In this, they drew upon a long-standing nineteenth-century movement called 'associationism', the origins of modern grass-roots organizing. This movement emphasized the sheer act of cooperation with others as an end in itself rather than as a strategic tool." "...associationism justified, in France, the revival of 'confreries', old guilds made new as charitable bodies; in nineteenth-century France, consumer cooperatives were formed as adjuncts to 'confreries'; in Britain, building societies provided workers with loans for homes. Association as an end in itself was invoked by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who believed unions should function like communities rather than become the base for political parties, a view of unionism that held sway in places as widely separated as Barcelona, Moscow and the American Northwest."

43. Divide between social and political Left. "...is sometimes drawn as a contrast between Europe and America, European radicals focusing top-down on the state, Americans bottom-up on civil society. As the instances cited above make clear, this stark contrast won't do. Moreover, after the Civil War, as the social analyst Theda Skocpol has shown, America developed the rudiments of a welfare state, and by 1900 a good deal of political activity on the American Left was devoted to strengthening it. Rather than nationality, the difference between the political and social Left lay in the contrast between national and local solidarities."

The Settlement House Movement. "The star exhibit in Paris for solidarity built from the ground up was the settlement house. In form the settlement house was a voluntary association, located in a poor urban community, where poorly skilled workers could receive education, get advice on everyday problems or simply find a warm, clean place to hang out. The providers of services were mostly middle-class women, usually working for nothing; middle class donors bought or underwrote the buildings, though in some settlement houses the poor contributed what they could by cleaning, repairs and cooking for the community. Settlement houses were small, usually one or two full-time workers supplmented by a dozen or so part-time visitors serving a community of 600-800 people who came to the settlement houses at night (infant care was minimal, and older children usually had to go out to work during the day). The settlement-house movement gathered steam in the later decades of the nineteenth century, spreading in Europe from the East End of London to Moscow, where worker-houses were founded by Alexander Zelenko; they reached across the Atlantic to shelters in New York and to the Hull House settlement founded by Jane Addams in Chicago."

44. Robert Owen. "Born 1771 to a moderately prosperous Welsh family, Owen had already in his teens proved an adept manager of new industrial enterprises springing up in Britain. But he was also an unhappy manager. The workplaces he knew and hated first-hand were British textile mills spinning cloth out of cotton from the colonies, and industrialized mines. These were both scenes of the blind, soulless division of labour. In their stead he imagined cooperative communities which would create a 'new moral world' leading ultimately to socialist society. An idealist? Certainly, though one of the workshop communities he founded, New Harmony, Indiana, did survive in modified form for a long time.

        More important for the social Left were Owen's differences from Marx. In 1844 Owen formulated a set of precepts, the Rochdale Principles, which have served as a beacon to Leftists of a less combative stripe than Marx's followers. Six in number, these principles are: workshops open to anyone (equality of employment); one person one vote (democracy in the workplace); distribution of surplus in relation to trade (profit-sharing); cash trading (he hated 'abstract debt' and would have eschewed the modern credit card); political and religious neutrality (and so, toleration of differences at work); and promotion of education (job training tied to employment). In the 'Gotha Programme' Marx bitterly attacked principle five: there is no such thing as political neutrality, and religion, that 'opiate of the masses', should be demystified. Still, Owen's version of socialism built from the ground up in a workshop became a founding text for social democracy; when we think about the rights of labour today, we generally revert to one or more of these principles."

45. "...the divide is as much about practice as temperament. Men like Lassale, Gompers and Coulson spoke in the name of tough-minded realism. They shared the memory of the Commune; some, like Samuel Gompers, thought the settlement houses did little to improve the material lot of the poor; Owen's workshops seemed to many of these realists a dream seducing people from more immediate and urgent problems. Yet equally, the realists rejected the fratricidal militancy of Marx's sort. The political Left wanted to become stronger through forging coalitions, yet found that practising cooperation could compromise them - this lesson, too, is part of their legacy."

Coalitions. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. 1880s his government created insurance plans for the sick and aged. 1890s he improved German schools to educate the poor. His aim was to crush the Left politically by colonising its social programme.

46. the 'Realschule'. "...these six-year secondary schools provided thorough training in a craft, in writing a business letter, in understanding accounting; a pupil who passed through the 'Realschule' was fully prepared to serve as an apprentice in a shop or an office; during Germany's imperial age government began also to sooth the transition from education to employment. In the Paris Exposition, the fruits of that system were put up on the walls: photographs showed spotlessly clean classrooms or children proudly holding up machines they'd made in shop class; copies were displayed of concise letters written to prospective employers."

"The more the Left cooperated in reform, the more it risked losing its own distinct identity, because these negotiations behind the scenes involved bureaucratic complexities never explained to the public. Increasingly, the political Left was sucked into the opaque machinery of the state; reform became increasingly difficult to distinguish from mco-optation."

47. Face-saving. "Coalitions arise in the first place only because each party is too weak to alone get its own way; 'face' means acknowledging the value of a partner, and particularly a junior or weaker partner; seeking to bully them into submission too often proves counter-productive. Coalitions of all sorts often stand or fall due to seemingly small matters of face-etiquette. Did you call your junior partner before going in front of the press? What exact words did you use to address weaker colleagues at the table? Even, what was the seating plan at the meeting? Failing to honour face-codes can pull an alliance down, even though it might be in the interests of all parties to stay together.

        Face-saving is a ritual of cooperation. The anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart believes that all societies form such rituals so that the strong and the weak can participate in a common code of honour.[9] In politics, however, these codes of honour can prove weak. The Labour Party in Britain failed to practice face-saving rituals in its 2010, post-election dealings with the Liberal Democrats: Labour, with the larger share of votes, treated the smaller party with scant respect, lecturing them about what they could and could not expect as the minor party, and so driving them into Conservative arms, where they were treated with respect. Compromised in public, the Liberal Democrats were honoured in the back-room.

        The problem of face-rituals in politics, then, is that they are not transparent to people who are not in the room. Inclusive within, invisible without - or worse, the camaraderie and smiles evident when people emerge from meetings seem signs of sell-out to people who were not there."

48. Politics and journalism. "The alliance between politics and journalism became more professionalized in the nineteenth century as printing costss came down, literacy among workers went up and the habit of newspaper reading became truly widespread; now the radical journalist could reach a mass audience. Explicitly opinionated journalism began to appear in very large newspapers in their 'feuilleton' sections - the origins of today's ipinion pages. The professional commentator became a public figure."

49. 'Ressentiment' "The elite seems on the side of the oppressed, but ot on the side of the ordinary."

50. Community. "Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was probably the most effective American community organizer of the last century (my family knew him well, so perhaps I'm biased). Based in Chicago, Alinsky fought for the rights of local African-Americans against the 'Daley machine', the Chicago mayor's political organization which enacted rigid segregation in that city; he also helped local whites and blacks combat the sometimes oppressive grip of national labour organizations. His 'method' of organizing was to learn the streets of a community, gossip with people, get them together, and hope for the best; he never told people what to do, instead encouraging the shy to speak up, himself providing information in a neutral manner whenever it was requested. Funny as well as feisty - 'booze', he once told my mother, 'is the organizer's most important tool' - he cast a spell over young followers, who have included Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both of whom later strayed from the master's path."

51. "By getting together people who have never really talked, providing them with facts they did not know and suggesting further contacts the Alinsky-style community organizer hopes to sustain dialogical talk."

52. "Addams [Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago] responded to the problems of difference and participation in a stunningly simple way: she focused on everyday experience - parenting, schooling, shopping. Ordinary experience, not policy formulas, is what counts, she thought, in social relations. In this, she foreshadowed Saul Alinsky; the test of joint action should be its concrete effect on daily life, not an eventual effect such as policy promises. What role should cooperation face to face play in shaping everyday experience? Addam's answer here was equally a mother to Alinsky's: Hull House emphasized loose rather than rigid exchanges, and made a virtue of informality."

54. "Working-class struggle, as the community organizers have understood, is first and foremost the matter of nurturing the tissues of community. This social foundation might or might not lead to a larger movement; the emphasis of community organizing is simply and clearly that the base comes first.

        For all this, informality always risks disorganization. And even if it does rouse people inside its hallways and rooms, the settlement house risks becoming just a good experience they have occasionally, rather than a guide to life outside. That may be true more largely of communal cooperation: it offers good experiences but is not a way of life."

Manuel Castells. "...today's leading expert on community organizing, faults Saul Alinsky and his school precisely for these reasons. The results of bonding in the community have to lead somewhere; action needs a structure, it has to become sustainable."

55. The Workshop. "Booker T. Washington, conceived a project in which African-Americans recovering from slavery should leave home, go to train at two model institutions, the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, then return to their home communities. During this temporary relocation, he hoped, cooperation would be reenerated, forged by direct experience and daily contact with others as equals. Like the settlement houses, Washington's project emphasized a local institution, but sought to make a lasting impact on the lives of those it housed by shaping their technical skills."

56. "Both institutions taught students animal husbandry, horticulture, carpentry and metal working; to graduate, the students had also to learn how to teach, so they could spread these technical skills when they returned home."

"The workshop has been since ancient times a model for sustained cooperation. In the ancient world - in both China and Greece - the workshop appeared as the most important institution anchoring civic life, and as a productive site practised the division of labour to a far greater degree than farming. The complications of craft labour were joined to the family value of continuity across generations; sons worked alongside their fathers as potters, daughters alongside mothers as weavers. The workshop spawned an idea of justice, that the things people make cannot be seized from them arbitarily, and it enjoyed a kind of political autonomy, at least in Greece, since artisans were allowed to make their own decisions about how best to practice their craft.

        As a cultural site, workshops from ancient times onwards developed elaborate social rituals. These were honour-code rituals, but, rather than being practised behind the scenes as in political coalitions, these rituals publicly marked the mutual obligations between unequal partners - between masters, journeymen and apprentices within each workshop. The Chinese master, for instance, swore an elaborate oath to the parents of a new apprentice to protect the child 'in loco parentis'. Annual ceremonial feasts in ancient Athens bound masters in the same trade to support one another during famines or in times of war.

        Given this ritual solidarity, both Confucius and Plato believed that craftsmen made good citizens.[22] The artisan's understanding of society was rooted in direct, concrete experience of other people rather than in rhetoric, or floating abstractions, or temporary passions. The idea of the craftsman-citizen flew in the face of ancient fact; many artisans in ancient Athens, and most artisans in ancient Rome, were slaves, or near-slaves, and did not enjoy full citizen rights. Nor has the history of European workshops been a story of perpetual stability; no productive activity is ever fixed. Still, the idea of the craftsman-citizen persisted, appearing in medieval guilds in Paris, Florence and London. In the mid-eighteenth century, Diderot's 'Encyclopedia' celebrated the craftsman's skills as equal to those of warriors and statesmen and more necessary for the health of society; Thomas Jefferson imagined craftsmen to make good solid citizens for the same reasons Plato did.[23]

        Nearer to Washington's own time, the workshop became an icon of reform. As industrial capitalism began to bite, the artisanal workshop appeared as a rebuke to the factory, more humane in its operations. But it was also doomed, since the factory appeared inevitably destined to crush this better way of life. It is sometimes said that the craft communities founded by Robert Owen in Scotland and in America, and by John Ruskin and William Morris in England, were self-conscious exercises in nostalgia for the pre-industrial era. If so, Booker T. Washington differed, because the ex-slave had little to regret about the past. Moreover, he did not treat Owen as a backward-looking critic."

58. Robert Owen "...championed a 'putting out system' in which a large distributor parcels out work to small workshops; in modern terms, this is networked production, flexible in its staffing with people moving from one workshop or another as required; Owen's idea differs from out-sourcing in that profit-sharing rules the whole network." Modern example is Britain's John Lewis Partnership."

"Owen's idea of the workshop is of an institution which combines long-term mutual benefit and loyalty with short-term flexibility and openness."

59. "Owen envisaged what could be called mobile solidarity, cutting the workshop free from roots in just one community. Just as the network of production meant that labour moved around, and that the content of labour evolved, transformed by experiment, so too cooperation in the workshop should be flexible, and portable. Cooperative skills were meant to be built up in the worker's self, transferable from place to place. This is an itinerant-musician sort of cooperation in which performers become able to work with a shifting cast of characters in different venues. It was Washington's idea too. The experience of learning to cooperate well as a free man or woman would take form in specialized Institutes far away, and then be brought home.

        Washington's rigidity as the creator and the supreme boss of the Institutes - so at odds with how he hoped his proteges would behave with one another - came from another source. This was Charles Fourier's version of the workshop at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fourier dubbed his workshops 'phalansteries' or 'grand hotels', giant buildings which provided housing, labour and education according to an elaborate plan; they are the origins of the modern company town. He envisioned face-to-face cooperation occuring in 'phalanxes', the wings and floors of the hotel.

        Fourier subscribed to the eighteenth-century Utilitarian belief in the greatest good for the greatest number; he aimed to erase poverty for the masses, but not erase it for every one of them. He crowded the 'deserving poor' in his hotel onto the top floors, and the Jews, whom he hated, were confined to the ground floor, doing the dirtiest labour. But Fourier wasn't a completely malicious nut-case. He sought to work out just how the division of labour in a factory could be made more thoroughly interactive (the suggestion-box was one of his bright ideas). And he tried to figure out how work itself could become more playful and inventive, as in huge toy-boxes full of tools provided by the phalanstery so that workers could experiment with different ways of doing a particular job. Still, this was top-down planning with a vengeance, the workshop designed 'in toto' before it existed, ruled over by an 'omniarch' who chose the tools in the toy-box and decided which rooms the most deserving of the deserving poor should live in. Much of early Soviet industrial planning derived explicitly from Fourier, the omniarch in Moscow designing factories and setting out production targets, like Fourier, with little or no hands-on experience; state socialism omitted, however, the freedom Fourier wanted to give workers within the shop."

60. Frances Johnson. photographed the people at the institutes and thier homes before and after; photoed people working with the tools. Most famous photo is 6 men constructing a staircase.

66. painting of Eden by Edward Hicks.

John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667). "...portrays Adam and Eve in Book Four as husband and wife having natural sexual relations; their union, in the words of one modern interpreter, is one of 'mutual dependence, not a relation of domination or hierarchy'.[2] Eve destroys this domestic harmony, and all of Eden, by her reasoning, by thinking for herself; independent reason turns her into a competitor with God; she seeks to convince Adam of the value of her own understanding, and she succeeds; in Milton's famous words, 'The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'[3]

69. Natural Unstable Cooperation. "If individual incompleteness grounds the lives of social insects, still [expressed by Bert Holldobler and Edward Wilson] 'environmental domination by ants and other social insects is the result of cooperative group behavior', How can the incomplete brain and social control be reconciled?"

Communication skills / pattern behavior as an answer. . . :/

"It might seem that genetically patterned behaviour is the source of balance between cooperation and competition... Julien Offay de la Mettrie (1709-51) imagined nature balanced like a machine; like Voltaire, he derived this conviction from a rather peculiar reading of Isaac Newton. The mechanistic idea was applied by the philosopher and salonnier Baron d'Holbach (1723-89) to the social lives of animals and men. How, other than by balancing competition and cooperation, d'Holbach asked, could animal species perpetuate themselves side by side in the environment generation after generation, feasting off one another but not so gluttonous as to destroy their source of food? Surely they cooperated after a fashion to ensure their mutual survival? The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) took another tack in developing the concept of the ecological niche, each species with its special place and role in the divine machine. Linnaeus was a careful naturalist; he documented in detail ways in which species did not overstep their natural territories, a respect for mutual boundaries which he saw as mutually cooperative."

70. Lamarck (1744-1829) thought a creature could change its programmed behaviour within one generation. Gregor Mendel (1822-84) proved why this could not be so.

71. Michael Tomasello found chimpanzees switch roles suddenly, "from helping out to competing against one another, when faced with an uncertain environmental challenge.

Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan "...capuchin monkeys, can also take different and unstable forms; these monkeys are unreliable investors in and respecters of one another.[13] The quiver of behaviours helps these primates deal with a shifting, complex environment. It used to be thought that efficient reproduction furnished a secure bedrock of cooperation in higher social animals, but reproduction now seems insufficient to explain their social bonds. Primates often bond more to individuals of a similar rank than to their kind (primate groups have a class structure), or bond along same-sex lines, as in grooming behavior.[14] Cooperative hunting among chimpanzees is similarly hard to explain solely in terms of efficient reproduction. [15] The external challenges of survival which species face, the disruptions with which they have to deal, such as changing hunting and feeding grounds, are just too complex to be met by family structure alone.[16]

        Natural cooperation, then, begins with the fact that we can't survive alone. The division of labour helps us multiply our insufficient powers, but this division works best when it is supple, because the environment itself is in a constant process of change. Changes in the environment run ahead of genetically patterned behaviour; among social animals, no single institution, like the family, can guarantee stability. Given all this, how then are balances between cooperation and struck? The answer lies in the spectrum of exchanges ants, apes, and humans experience."

72.

5 types of exchanges

* Altruistic exchange: self-sacrifice

* Win-win exchange: both parties benefit

* Differentiating exchange: the partners become aware of their differences

* Zero-sum exchange:  one party prevails at the expense of another

* Winner-takes-all exchange: one party wipes out the other

"In animal terms, this spectrum runs from the worker ant which offers up its body as food for other ants, to the wolf whose exchanges with sheep are invariably lethal; in humans terms, the spectrum runs from Joan of Arc to genocide.

        The balance between cooperation and competition is best and most clearly struck in the middle of this spectrum. In win-win exchanges, competition can produce mutual benefits, as in the market exchanges imagined by Adam Smith, or in political coalitions which aim to balance mutual competition and cooperation. Differentiating exchanges, whether occuring simply through physical contact, or in primates like ourselves, via discussion and debate, can define borders and boundaries; an in animal territories, so in urban communities groups may contend and conflict in order to establish turf which they thereafter respect."

73. Behavioral psychologists Natalie and Joseph Henrich, 'an individual incurs a cost to provide a benefit for another person or people'.

"Higher primates, moreover, often think in ways too complicated to be rendered neatly as losses and gains; they probe reality rather than price it."

"Altruism proper focuses on gift-giving. The French sociologist Marcel Mauss was a pioneer in the study of gift-giving, and he was a politically engaged pioneer. He contrasted the strong bonds created by gift-giving in aboriginal societies with the weak social tissues of competitive capitalism. This may seem a cartoon-like contrast, or just the difference between charity and selfishness. Gift-giving is certainly not charity in the abstract, as the historian of early modern Europe Natalie Zemon Davis has shown; the donation of time to projects in local communities had the practical benefit of tempering religious hostilities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Still, no law obliged them to go this extra miles; it was their choice to give."

74. Richard Titmus  studied the role of altruism of blood donars. Good blood is free because it is given with the hope it helps others; bad blood is paid, because paid donors do not care of the quality of thier blood.

"The secular verso of this biblical observation is that altruism is performed for a 'shadow self', a shadow companion with whom one conducts a conversation about how to behave. The secular shadow self is more a witness than a divine judge. In studying authority in labour relations, I found, for instance, that workers motivated to help others freely over a period of months rather than just in the moment hold a sustained conversation with this inner companion; the result is that altruistic behaviour shaped their sense of personal agency. Though cooperation with other people, in itself, is not the point of altruism, the altruist is motivated by this internalized dialogue."

75. "One centuries-old version of altruism has appeared in monastery gardening. In principle, monastery gardens are a return to the original Garden of Eden. In practice, monastery gardening followed two forms. Saint Gall in Switzerland (the earliest monastery for which good horticultural records exist) divided its herbs, fountains, shrubs and pathways into logical divisions, asking of monks that they specialize and so collaborate rationally; the monks on Mount Athos (from what fragmentary records reveal) let its monastery gardens run wild; the monks sought to discover what they could eat or make into medicine from nature's sheer untamed monastery gardens, in either form, contested the idea of farming portrayed in Virgil's 'Georgics': Virgil's farmer struggles alone against nature, while the monks of Saint Gall and Mount Athos worked in nature together. Cooperative labour in the garden aimed to strip away aggression and striving, returning the labouring monks to a gentler self.

        Though these religious gardens entailed withdrawal from the world, there's a parallel with the secular shop floor. Normally people need and enjoy praise for good deeds; altruism proper begins when they would do the deed even if they didn't receive recognition from others, exposing their behaviour instead to that shadow self. In this, altruism retains the quality of a sheltered act - just the quality we recognize in the everyday observation that altruistic people seem strongly motivated from within."

75. Win-win. "Pattern behaviour is crucial in such [shared nest building] win-win exchanges; it is the genetic prompt which guides animals in knowing what part others in a group can and should do to benefit all members. 'Behaviour sinks' consist of those occasions when animals cannot or refuse to play their part; when in a scientist's laboratory rats are prevented from building shared nests, for example, the rat pack disintegrates into aggressive, violent ferocity, and a war of each-against-all ensues. "

76. "The balance between competition and cooperation does not happen naturally, in the sense of inevitably, without will and effort, in business dealings or in other walks of life. Negotiating skills have to fine-tune the balance, and these skills constitute a craft of their own. The good negotiator, for example, learns how to deflect confrontation when things are getting so hot that one of the participants threatens to drop out; he or she puts unpalatable home truths indirectly so that an antagnoist more readily can face up to them. Both are hard-nosed versions of 'sensitivity' to others, which means that a master of win-win negotiating skills has usually become adept at dealing with ambiguity."

78. Differentiating exchange. "In her studies of chimpanzees, Jane Goodall has described the exchange - meetings, if you like - of chimpanzees at these edges which result in each group laying down scent markers; the markers are then readjusted through further encounters; having agreed which group will occupy which space of the forest, the chimps then withdraw.[28] The idea of exchanges is to minimize aggressive competition for territory.

        Edges are fraught zones in natural geographies because they shift constantly. Inanimate forces like climate change can force communities of living things to readjust their internal edges; as water temperatures rise in the Antarctic, for instance, penguins and gulls are altering the ways they share space."

"Edges come in two sorts: boundaries and borders. A boundary is a relatively inert edge; population thins out at this sort of edge and there's little exchange among creatures. A border is a more active edge, as at the shoreline dividing ocean and land; this is a zone of intense biological activity, a feeding ground for animals, a nutrient zone for plants. In human ecology, the eight-lane highway isolating parts of the city from each other is a boundary, whereas a mixed use street at the edge between two communities can be more of a boarder." Two strangers in a bar having discussion. Dinner parties.

79. "The differentiating exchange is the province of dialogics. Our eighteenth-century ancestors sought to organize this exchange through the ways their cafes, coffee houses and pubs were set up to encourage strangers to talk. Money motivated the proprietors; customers spent more if they lingered. The customers sat at long tables of twelve to sixteen people; the small round table meant for just one person or a couple appeared only during the nineteenth century, and first in Parisian cafes. The theatre was an addiction for all classes in London, Paris and other large cities; facing one another across these tables, people used forms of address, turns of phrase and gestures modelled on what they heard and saw on stage.[29] Yet the pattern-behaviour of speech people imbibed from the threatre, providing strangers with a shared verbal code, was enriched in the coffee house by another Enlightenment value, that of speaking openly and directly to others without embarrassment; 'coffee-house speech', Addison and Steele observed early on, enabled people to speak 'freely and without reserve upon general topics of conversation'.[30] Were they modern philosophers, Addison and Steele might have called coffee houses scenes in which dialogic exchanges were at once formal and free.

        Practical reasons prompted strangers to talk at once dramatically and forthrightly. The eighteenth century was the dawn of Europe's big expansion in urban growth. London and PAris, especially from the 1760s onwards, filled up with strangers who needed not only to share information but to interpret and judge its value - which is why insurance companies like Lloyd's began as coffee houses. To do so they needed to communicate expressively; the cafe, Diderot remarked, 'is a theatre in which being believed is the prize'.[31] It sufficed to be believed for the moment; in that era, few people sought to make intimate friends from encounters with strangers in cafes or coffee houses; they were perhaps more comfortable with meetings in these social borderlands than we are today, with our insistent demand for intimacy.

        In the nineteenth century, public life shifted from verbal to visual encounter. By 1848, it was taken for granted in Paris that strangers would not speak to one another freely in the street or the cafe, unless expressly invited to do so. Leaving others alone and being left alone forged a new kind of protection, and strangers who remained silent in each other's presence formed a kind of compact not to violate the other's privacy. The eye took the place of the voice; a 'flaneur' in the city looked around him ('flaneurs were mostly men), was stimulated by what he saw, and took these impressions, as it were, home with him. The same shift occured as the eighteenth-century traveller became the nineteenth-century tourist. The traveller felt free to knock at doors and then to chat with the owner of a house or farm; the tourist looked around, often quite carefully, Baedeker or other tourist guide in hand, but felt more reserve in engaging the natives in talk. "

81. "The great guide to this shift, in my mind, was the poet Charles Baudelaire as 'flaneur'; Baudelaire liked to venture out at dusk, wandering the streets of Paris, returning home at night to write; these stimulating journeys he took silently, observing closely without trying to speak to the strangers who aroused his muse. Photographing the city in his mind, he experienced differentiating exchanges visually.[32] As did Georg Simmel, who, as we have seen, made these moments of visual stimulation into a social theory of subjectivity. "

82. "'Different' need not mean better or inferior; the sense of being different need not invite invidious comparison. Affirming this principle animated the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes and, I think, represented their great glory. The Institutes ended each day with prayers, during which the achievements of individuals were named; every individual was named as having achieved something, even if what they had accomplished would seem trivial to the sophisticated outsider, as in the formula, 'let us celebrate our sister Mary, who has this day shelved ten pounds of cheese.' In the history of workshops, kindred rituals have long addressed differences of ability; something similar to this prayer ended the working day of every craft in every medieval guild. The rites offered up at the end of each day singled out a distinctive contribution each person had made to the community for the common good.

        By emphasizing that each person had something different to offer, Booker T. Washington hoped to overcome the 'acid saying of better or worse', that acid of personalized competition which is invidious comparison. Cooperation strengthened as a result; the rituals of recognizing that each and every one of the people in the Institutes had something special to offer contributed to the sheer productivity and quality of what the Institutes made; outsiders noted and took these results seriously, as they did the kindred work in Robert Owen's New Harmony, because emphasizing distinctiveness had a practical value.

        These, then, are the complex facets of the differentiating encounter. In animal nature, it marks off territories; the edges of these territories can be inert boundaries or active borders; so too in the human habitat, a contrast we can make between highways and streets. Border encounters can happen inside as well as outside, as in eighteenth-century coffee houses and cafes. These patterned but open occasions for speech contrasted to the visual encounters the nineteenth-century 'flaneur' had with the city; silent, spisodic and inward, these experiences were more stimulations than exchanges; they frame puzzles about how uch looking at others engages us with them, and about how important subjective arousal proves for everyday behaviour. But the differentiating, dialogic exchange has a practical value in the form in which Washington and Owen organized it; ritualized moments which celebrate the differences between members of a community which affirm the distinctive value of each person, can diminish the acid of invidious comparison and promote cooperation."

83. Zero-sum. "The military strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779-1869) picked up on this ballet, basing his own military campaigns during the Napoleonic wars on observation of wolves, copying their coordinated circling behaviour.[33]

        Between opponents, the zero-sum exchange also entails a certain kind of cooperation. This consist of setting the ground rules for a contest; these rules are set before individuals or groups compete. In lower social animals, rules of engagement seem to be set by genetic imprinting: even before genetic knowledge appeared, naturalists like Lamarck notes that contending animals 'instinctively agreed' on the shape and size of a field for battle. In higher mammals, negotiation comes into play. As described in the Introduction, children around the age of five become skilled in setting ground rules for games. More than sheer agreement is involved; kids learn that rules can be made up, and that rules can be changed."

84. "An element of fantasy also can bond winners and losers. Something like Aristotle's idea about the 'willing suspension of disbelief' in the theatre appears in economic contests: often, the willingness to take risks depends on players believing that they will somehow be exempt from losing, no matter how great the odds that are stacked against them. Shared fantasy also plays a part, as we've seen, in win-win exchanges, in defining the value of the prizes, eighteenth-century investors agreeing that tulips and mica were, somehow, immensely valuable goods. Competition mayy in itself inflate the value of the prize: if you are struggling so hard to get it, you think the prize must be important. This theme looms large in American literature, since the country worships success; the novels of James Fenimore Cooper in the nineteenth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald in the twentieth and Jonathan Franzen today portray people who have sacrificed their lives to winning, to success, only to find that the prizes once gained are less important than they had imagined. The sociologist Herbert Blumer (1900-1987) lumped these fantasies together as 'fictions of play'. This did not mean they were insubstantial; after all, people devote their lives to winning, or to nursing the consequences of losing. A young man during the Great Depression, Blumer knew all about economic necessity, but he saw something more at work in zero-sum games. He spent a lot of time early in his career studying the movies, and showed in his first writing ways in which people model their own behaviour on Hollywood screen fantasies. This capacity for fantasizing modulates into 'the fictions of play'. Conventions for behaviour are negotiated, both between players and in the heads of individuals; they become, he said, 'symbolic interactions'. [34]"

85. "Blumers insights are important in dispelling the tough-guy idea that win-lose exchanges are the meat of social life, more generous forms of exchange being just a cultural or ethical garnish. Tough-guy realism, indeed, entails a kind of blindness: blind to the demoralizing consequences in classrooms where zero-sum tests rule, or to the erosion of productivity in offices when competition for promotion becomes an obsession. No less than cooperation, competition is symbolic in character and in gestation. More, it is framed by cooperation: the participants need to cooperate at the beginning of competition in agreeing its rules. Winners have to accept that they leave the losers something, if competition is to continue; total selfishness will abort new game."

85. Winner-takes-all. "We meet, we compete, I take everything, you are destroyed. Pure Hobbes. In natural ecologies the apex predator is master of this encounter, in which there is no reciprocity. Wolves are apex predators, as are alligators; at the top of the food chain, they have no equal competitors; they can take whatever they like whenever they like - so long as human being do not enter the picture. In human societies, winner-takes-all exchange is the logic of total war and genocide. In business, winner-takes-all is the logic of monopoly; the idea is to eliminate all competitors. About this state of affairs, let's be as succinct as Hobbes: it should be put an end to as soon as possible."

86. Conclusion in regard to exchange. "Cooperation and competition are most balanced in the middle of the spectrum of exchange. The win-win exchange occurs in both nature and culture, but in both the balance is fragile. Dialogic exchanges which differentiate individuals and groups can also balance cooperation and competition. Establishing territory through marking out borders and boundaries is pervasive in natural communities, but becomes more specialized and subtle in human culture. At the extremes of exchange, altruism is an involuntary force in natural societies and an internalized experience among humans; reciprocity of a tangible sort need not figure in it. At the other end of the spectrum, competition prevails over cooperation in zero-sum exchanges, though it requires cooperation to begin; as much as cooperation, human competition is organized symbolically. In winner-takes-all exchanges all connections between the two are cut; the apex predator rules.

        Since symbols, symbol-making and symbolic exchanges are so important in the middle zones, we need to know more about how they are structured. Rituals are one way to structuring symbolic exchanges; rituals establish powerful social bonds, and have proved tools which most human societies use to balance cooperation and competition."

86. Power of Ritual.

88. "Anthropologists now emphasize this adaptive process; rather than static, ritual is continually evolving from within. Clifford Geertz gave just this inner history to certain Balinese ceremonies that anthropologists before him had frozen in amber.[38] The European historians Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson have described in the same vein the 'invention of tradition' in national or local values, inventions of the past which mutate as conditions in the present shift.[39] It's true that, as in natural evolution, the pace of change is slow; most ritual patterns evolve in small steps over years or generations, people making changes without being aware of doing so. In time the act comes to seem immemorial. But there's more to the invention of tradition." Shaking hands was invented by the Geeks to show the hands held no weapons.

89. Three building blocks of ritual. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Viewed ritual as acting out of myth. During WWI "...trying to deduce, for instance, what the rituals of giving and receiving Kula necklaces... revealed of the Trobrianders' beliefs about the cosmos.[40]" "He of course considered the setting, objects and participants in these rituals, but the point of these concrete facts was, to him, the cosmic myths they represented."

"A great shift occurred later in the twentieth century as anthropologists began to explore rituals more as self-standing, apart from representing the cosmos. Clifford Geertz helped bring about this shift, as did Victor Turner, who believed that rituals inevitably morphed into theatrical performances in which the props, costumes, skills of the performer and relation to the audience took on a meaning of their own.[41] This shift went hand in hand with anthropological unease about the idea of engaging with pristine civilizations untouched by the West; by the late twentieth century there were few of these - and the idea itself seemed to smack of celebrating the noble savage."

90. "I can see three ways in which rituals can be built as self-standing practices.

        The first is a bit of a paradox. Rituals depend on repetition for their intensity. We usually equate reptition with routine, going over something again and again seeming to dull our senses. As the rehearsal process discussed in the Introduction shows, however, repetition can take another course. Playing a passage again and again can make us concentrate ever more on its specifics, and the value of the sounds, words or bodily movements becomes deeply ingrained. In rituals the same ingraining occurs. This is what religious rituals intend, as in a rite like th eEucharist; perform it a thousand times you will have ingrained it in your life. Its power will be a thousandfold greater than doing it just once. This is also true of secular rituals; the ritual of shaking hands after a test means more if it happens again and again; it establishes a pattern of experience.

        Of course, reptition can go stale. As the rehearsal process makes clear, reptitions have to follow a certain course in order to stay fresh. Refreshment occurs by ingraining a habit, then examining and enlarging it consciously, then ingraining it again as unconscious behaviour. In my grandson's school the teachers first told the children to shake hands, then the kids discussed why they were doing it, then they practised it again and again without further discussion. The end-of-the-day ritual at the Hampton Institute began as a cammand issued by Booker T. Washington in 1870; there came a moment - hard to date exactly, though it appears to have arrived after about a year - when the artisans began to discuss why they had been issued this command and the form of words they might use to acknowledge the value of each person's contribution; thereafter they practised this daily work ritual without more mutual soul-searching. Rituals go stale if they remain stuck in the first stage of learning, that of a habit; if they go through the full rhythm of practice, they self-renew. "

91. Rituals transform object. Such as the handshake or bread and wine of the Eucharist.

"Since Plato, philosophy has struggled with the relation between symbols as representations and as evocations. The semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-80) believed that if we think hard enough, every stop-sign becomes a handful of dust; [in regard to Eliot's 'The Waste Land'] that is, the seeming forthrightness of representation dissolves into a miasma of evocations.[43]

        Ritual draws on both kinds of symbols, but sorts them out through the rhythm of practice. Directions are first given us, which we ingrain as habit; these directions dissolve into evocations we try to pursue more consciously; the pursuit is not endless; we recover our sense of direction in an enriched habit, re-ingrained as tacit behaviour. In rituals, objects and bodily gestures, no less than language, pass through this transforming process, becoming dense in meaning. But we knowhow to use the Kula necklace or the Seder goblet; the saturated symbols guide us.

        The third building block of ritual concerns expression, specifically dramatic expression." Such as walking down the aisle in a marriage cerimony. A very different feeling than walking down the street.

92. "There's a sociological nicety involved in focusing on content rather than on yourself. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) launched the study of the role of drama in everyday life, coining the phrase 'the presentation of self' to evoke the roles people play in behaving like the characters in a play, understandable and credible to others as the sort of person a mental patient, his or her doctor, a prisoner, his or her guard, is supposed to be; in theatrical terms, Goffman explored 'typecasting'. Invaluable as Goffman's work was, there is something missing from it. In a ceremony, people are relieved of portraying the kind of person they are, of speaking on behalf of themselves; the participants enter a larger, shared, expressive domain. This is why the historian Keith Thomas (and I) deploy the term 'enactments', rather than 'presentations of self', to describe the outward turn in rituals.[45]"

96. Chapter 3. The 'Great Unsettling': How the Reformation Transformed Cooperation

1533. Hans Holbein finished the painting, 'The Ambassadors'.

97. Up to about 1500, Latin was the language of European diplomacy with French to replace it.

99. Bread and wine. "The ritual of Communion was a long-term work in progress. Up to the sixth century, bread and wine were shared in the communal meal of the Eucharist, recalling the fellowship of the first Christians; so far as is known, these were easy, informal occasions, prayers and blessings being offered spontaneously during the course of the meal. In the sixth century the formal rite of the Latin Mass began to replace this sacred supper party.[5] Still, up to about AD 900, both bread and wine came from offerings brought to the church by the congregants themselves; by the eleventh century, these offerings were replaced by products from specialized, priestly hands in the monasteries. The rite grew farther away in space from congregants in the church through the evolution of Romanesque into Gothic church architecture, the Romanesque church conducting services close to the congregants, the Gothic pushing them further away with the creation of the altar rail and rood screen.

        The sensate experience of win and bread also became removed from the realm of the everyday. The cup of wine had in early times passed from the lips of congregant to congregant; by the tenth century it was often imbibed through a straw; in the twelfth century, the priest frequently drank the wine alone, on behalf of the congregants. Up to the ninth century the actual bread used in the Mass was leavened and eaten in chunks; this daily bread, usually confected from rye and spelt, was gradually replaced by special unleavened, thin white wafers made purely of wheat; only this special bread, the 'oble', could be altered into Christ's body during the Mass."

100. The rival of cities in AD 900, defined as 'medieval'. This was not only a geographic and economic revival; the revived city spawned rituals like parades of the Host or other sacred relics through the streets before the celebration of Mass. Like gifts of bread, early religious parades in Paris had been simple affairs in which people made their own costumes, carried home-made crosses, wandered rather erratically through the streets towards parish churches. Regulation then imposed its heavy bureaucratic weight on these events. In 1311, under the aegis of Pope Clement V, the Corpus Christi parade became an officially sanctioned 'ex cathedra' part of the ceremony. By the fifteenth century costumes had become the product of specialist weavers, the ceremonial crosses precious objects encrusted with costly stones, parade routes laid out carefully by ecclesiastical authority.[6]"

"The historian Henry Kamen observes that 'in medieval times the pulpit had been the chief moderator of public opinion', yet medieval priests were poor at public speaking. In one parish in Cambridge, a local adage ran, 'when the vicar goeth into the pulpit, then the multitude of the parish goeth straight out of the church, home to drink.'[8] The education of the clergy in the dark arts of rhetoric, recovering the power of the spoken sermon, aimed to attract parishioners back to active engagement with their faith. The power-logic was that control derives from formality, and formality entails theatricality of the sort separating celebrant and spectator."

109. The Workshop. "The traces of workshops from six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia show that shared labour had become rooted to one place. Like farming, the artisanal workshop terminated the wandering way of life; while nomadic tribes scavenged, workshops produced their own sustenance.[24] Chinese written records from the second millennium BC predicted that such settled labour would become ever more skil[l]ful than the work of nomads, the urban potter a better craftsman than his wandering counterpart. Part of the reason for this belief lay in the artisan's tools, which became ever bigger, heavier and more complicated, and so more difficult to transport. An example is the city potter's wheel, which replaced the itinerant potter's upturned gourd.

        If we make a big jump in time up to the medieval period, the articulated skills of the urban craftsman had found a bureaucratic base in guilds. As cities renewed in Europe from the eleventh century on, they transformed the monastic workshop. The economic life of the city depende don producing more than the producers themselves needed. Each city sold the surplus on to people in other cities, inter-city trade becoming ever more important than intra-city commerce. Individual workshops produced the surplus; guilds orchestrated how these goods were fed into the system of trade.

        The workshops had to practice efficient internal coordination if they were to provide for more than local needs. That was in large part a matter of organizing men's time. The monastery day had mixed labour, whether in the garden or in sheltered workshops, with long periods of shared prayer and solitary contemplation, but producing a surplus of things for the trading economy required more sheer hours surplus of things for the trading economy required more sheer hours at the bench. Moreover, innovation of a sort was required in the work itself. The urban workshop developed greater skill in the practice of old crafts. Goldsmithing in the twelfth century and glass-making in the fourteenth evolved new skills, thanks to the appearance of complicated tools. Pottery-making, the most ancient of all crafts, required the same sorts of implements in 1300 as the great potters of antiquity had wielded, but potters now experimented with different sorts of clay. Urban workshops emphasized efficiency, necessary to produce surplus, a subject for which the Old Testament provided no guidance. Still, the spiritual equation did not disappear in the medieval market economy. Labour remained God-sanctioned in principle, the Church remained an authority presiding over economic power. But the monastic refuge ceased to provide an adequate everyday model for social relations in the urban workshop.

        Guilds managed conflict between competing workshops, and issued guarantees that goods were genuinely what the makers claimed them to be. Most important, they enforced labour rights protecting workers, especially young workers, from some of the physical abuse and exploitation which occurred in slave or serf communities. Each workshop contained three levels of worker, who all lived on the premises: apprentices whose contracts ran usually for seven years, journeymen whose contracts ran for three, and masters who permanently owned the operation.[25]

        These dry elements of structure came to life through the rituals which guilds evolved. In the city's parades and feasts, apprentices carried the guild's flags; all guild members were entitled to wear distinctive, often elaborate clothes. Within each workshop, ritual paid a special kind of tribute to skill. The apprentice presented at the end of his training a piece of work call the 'chef d'aeuvre' was sometimes then exhibited in the guild hall, to be commented upon by anyone in the city; up the workshop ladder, the journeyman presented a more advanced 'chef d'aeuvre' to a community composed only of masters."

111. "We might imagine, the rituals would prove socially divisive because the judges could decide the work wasn't good enough. But in fact these were win-win exchanges. Most objects made by apprentices and journeymen usually passed the test - in the metal working trades 'c'. AD 1200 nearly 90 per cent did (these cna be only very rough numbers). The makers of things judged not sufficiently 'lively' had a second, and more rarely a third, chance to try again the year following. The pass rate may seem to render test-day a fraud. Not at all. The event exemplifies the classic rite-of-passage ritual: a young person is taken outside himself, exposed to danger, then reconfirmed as a valued member of the community. In medieval craftsmanship, the maker's things took this journey for him."

112. "This system changed between the fourteenth and the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Individuation evolved into innovation; that is, making a particular chalice or cup, distinctive in character, full of life, began to suggest the making of whole new classes of objects; in tableware, for instance, the fork appeared in workshops which had first confected a few miniature, two-pronged knives as a novelty item. From about the middle of the sixteenth century the suggestive process accelerated, but not in any predictable fashion. A signal fact about all the navigation equipment on Holbein's table is that people didn't know at first what to make of the new classes of things. In one way, this is a general law in the history of technology: tools are invented before people understand fully how to use them. In the seventeenth century this general law had a special and social application.

        This was an age in which scientifi experiment lodged itself in workshops, making some of them places of research, research with no practical end immediately in view. The workshops that produced the first sextant were an eample; their creators were not sure what they were making, and not too concerned about the sextant's practical value, though they knew it had one; applicaation was for others - navigators - to work out.

        The idea that laboratories have distinctive rituals all their own has become by now a commonplace, and an entire branch of sociology is devoted to studying codes of deference and assertion, cooperation and competition, in the lab.[26] At the time it came into being, the experimental workshop seemed to disrupt the sorts of rituals with which workers were familiar. Technical discoveries could disrupt established hierarchical relations between masters and assistants, if the apprentice made a discovery which dethroned the master's expertise. This occurred, for instance, in the invention of improved polishing cloths used for the glass in instruments like the double-sextant on Holbein's table; these polishing cloths were created by adolescent assistants, as the result of an accident occurring in a lens workshop in Antwerp in 1496. Their masters tried to suppress the innovation, the adolescents then 'betrayed' the workshop by striking off on their own.[27]"

113. Blend of industry. "In medieval London there were separate workshops and guilds for cloth-weavers and cloth-dyers. By 1600, new dyeing techniques vouchsafed changes in the way cloth might be woven; the work of dyeing and weaving now had to be amalgamated, each trade exploring what the other knew. "

"The historian Steven Shapin thinks there was a binding ritual for the amateur experimenters who drifted into early laboratory-workshops; theirs was a gentlemen's pursuit, they observed the gentlemen's code of disinterested enquiry rather than sought personal advantage for themselves.[28]"

"The two boys in Antwerp, having made their discoveyr, struck out on their own but didn't know, as we would say, how to bring technology to market; another firm put their discovery to profitable use; the two apprentices ended up in poverty."

114. Printing. "The multiplication of skill was embodied in printing. The printing process was originally Chinese, then reinvented in Europe in the 1450s. Before its appearance, scribes worked alone, but printing was a collaborative activity, requiring different skills among diverse workers. Paper had been manufactured in Europe since the thirteenth century; to print on it, craftsmen like Aldus Manutius and Johannes Gutenberg applied three innovations: movable metal type, oil-based ink and fixed-frame wooden hand-press. Printing begat editing. Whereas the scribe's job was to make a faithful copy of words, the printer began to format texts visually with different typefaces, with title pages, tables of contents and various bindings; the handwritten words of an author were changed by the printer. The reason for this is that the printer had become a direct retail seller as well; his work was oriented to attracting a public. 'The advent of printing', the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein says, 'led to the creation of a new kind of shop structure. . . which entailed closer contacts among diversely skilled workers and encouraged new forms of cross-cultural exchange.'[29] Guild hierarchy was replaced by a flatter shop structure of separate but equal skills.

        For workers, one important consequence of printing was that technical knowledge became delocalized. Ways of making things began to be written down in how-to books, for application anywhere; the novice no longer depended solely on face-to-face instruction; communication about something new or strange ceased to be solely by word of mouth. An early, printed 'international letter' circulating among glass-blowers (in 1593), for instance, communicates exciting news about how to heat sand. The excitement is that sand can be heated to higher temperatures than people ever expected before; the international letter explains how to do this. As a result, the technical worker could more easily think of himself as belonging to a general trade than confined to a local workshop.

        All of which brings us back o the instruments on Holbein's table. The navigaion equipment was handmade, but the tools used to make the sextant involved precision metal-cutters and mechanical wood-etchers. New technical crafts made both possible, and he ateliers in which metal-cutting and wood-etching were pracised resembled print shops more than carpenters' shops; lots of people were involved, innovating forms and not quite knowing how the products would be used. Information, distributed by international letters, came into local shops from all over Europe. In the allied trade of lens-grinding, craftsmen were engaged in a similar open-ended, dialogic process, in Holbein's time toying with the idea of how the telescope lens might be inverted to become a microscope.[30] No hierachical ritual instructed them how to proceed."

115. Birth of scientific method. "Experiment invites the dialogic conversation, the open-ended discussion with others about hypotheses, procedures and results. The science emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed positively the dialogic, open-ended conversation, while Christianity feared it; Catholicism feared that it would undermine Church authority, Protestants feared that free thinking discussion could lead to the sin of self-confidence - just the fear Milton expressed in his version of Eve's discussions with the Serpent and with Adam in the Garden. The dialogic conversation, Mikhail Bakhtin writes, 'affirms Man's faith in his own experience. For creative understanding. . . it is immensely important for the person to be located outside the object of his or her understanding'.[31]

116. "There was thus an ethcs to the open conversation and to disinterestedness. Even if the participants were driven by the need to convert discoveries into cash, scientific cooperation could flourish only if conducted in a 'civilized' way. What did this mean?"

"The sixteenth century saw a shift in emphasis from chivalry to civility as codes for conduct among the upper classes. Eventually this shift would shape the modern understanding of cooperation."

"Chivalry's home was the castle, which like the monastery was a place of refuge in early medieval times. As a military fortress, the castle housed huge piles of 'materiel' - bows, armour, battering rams - as well as horses. The castle served mostly for military drill, and in the castle's overcrowded space soldiers slept, shat, ate and drnak on the stairs, in all the rooms save the chapel, or out in the open. In the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance the architecture of the castle was transformed. Its military functions diminished; soldiers were pushed to the nether regions or removed entirely, to the ever-larger barracks which appeared in French and Italian towns during the course of the fifteenth century. Changes in warfare made this shift possible; armies spent much more time permanently in the field, with the result that the castle became more and more a ceremonial and social space."

Chivalry. "It sought to dignify Eros, as in the medieval chivalric epic the 'Roman de la Rose', an epic full of subtlety and tact in the knight's expression of desire. Medieval civilization regarded physical fighting and violent oaths as a normal part of everyday life on the streets, in workshops, even inside churches. The sexual restraints of chivalry sought to put up one barrier against such violence among the elite."

"...knights were, in Peter Burke's words, 'hyper-sensitive to reflections on their reputation', that is, quick to take offence.[32] Good Christian that he was, if insulted the knight did not turn the other cheek; he burned with revenge to restore his honour. Revenge fell on him as a moral obligation, since, as in most honour-cultures, it was an insult felt to his family as well as himself; blood feuds marked chivalry as much as sexual self-restraint.

117. Codes of courtesy "...marked a break from chivalry by expanding restraint into other realms of experience. An early evocation of courtesy appeared in Baldassare Castiglione's 'Book of the Courtier (1528), which focused on how to behave less aggressively in conversation and so give more pleasure. Successors like Giovanni della Casa's 'Galateo' (1558) sought to codify the rules for performing courtesy among people, at court, whom one knows well; later, seventeenth-century courtesy books stressed behaving well towards people one does not know, and towards people from other courts or from foreign places; more, they explained to people who were below the elite social stratum how to practice the same behaviour, such as how to listen attentively or how to speak clearly, without referring to persons or places a stranger may not know."

'Sprezzatura', from 'The Book of the Courtier', a word meaning to taking the self lightly.  "In Castligione's view, lightness mad epople more 'companionable', that is, more cooperative in conversation. Less self, more sociable."

118. Castligione often mentions bragging, a practice among male aristocrats of his time. "He wanted his courtiers to veil the good opinion they may have had of themselves; boasting can make other people feel small. His successor della Casa elaborated a set of rules, applicable to social life outside courts, about how to avoid pomposity.[35] The 'gentleman' is one such Anglo-Saxon application: the gentleman is modestly polite to his servants or tenants as well as to his own kind. Certainly no thought of equality is implied by such behaviour; the historian Jorge Arditi believes it only made social privilege and control more subtle. But transactions between gentlemen and their supposed inferiors became less confrontational.[36]

Sociologist Norbert Elias in the book, 'The Civilizing Process', argues courtesy as a shift in European civilization.[37] "Elias was convinced that social behaviour in the courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries laid the foundations for what we today call 'courtesy', behaviour which became the model in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the bourgeoisie. The key to this change lay in bodily self-control; in the early modern period courtiers ceased farting in public whenever they felt the urge; they became more restrained in their eating habits, using forks rather than stabbing food with hunting knives or grabbing morsels with their hands; courtiers ceased to spit in public; the bedroom  became a private space in which only spouses, lovers or servants saw the courtier naked. So too in speech, people became more restrained; the new courtly code eschewed swearing in public, or the operatic venting of anger. Civilities of these sorts came at a great psychic price."

119. "Elias showed similarly why embarrassmen and shame become cousins; embarrassment reflect the fear of exposing oneself, and so being found wanting. The fear of behaving naturally and spontaneously, the shame over lack of self-control and the embarrassment of being exposed all combine. People exile themselves from Eden and call that exile 'civilized behaviour'."

120. Professional civility. "Sixteenth-century Venice, an international trading power, a city dealing constantly with foreigners, led the way in stimulating professional diplomacy, a model which was imitated as other European powers expanded their dealings to the limits of the Continent and beyond.

        Renaissance diplomats came in two colours. The first were special envoys who travelled to a foreign court or city to do a specific task and then came home; the second were resident ambassadors who remained away for some years.[39] Most Renaissance envoys differed little from their ancient ancestors. Envoys travelled to celebrate the marriage or birth of an important personage, to negotiate a treaty of war or peace, to give an official speech or to deal with a dynastic mess. Holbein's young diplomats were such envoys, coming to London to broker a marriage.

        Resident ambassadors served more like a sponge, absorbing information to then be conveyed home. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, Sir Heny Wotton was resident ambassador from England to Venice, Francesco Guicciardini served as the papal ambassador to Aragon, Eustace Chapuys was the Holy Roman Empire's ambassador to England. Bureaucracy followed in the wake of these top men abroad: the consul, who handled commercial affairs abroad, the secretary charged with the special task of encrypting information be sent home."

126. The salon. 1659. Francois de La Rochefoucauld, 'Maxims' "These take the distilled, polished form of paradox, such as 'austerity is a sort of adornment these women add to their beauty', or 'the mind is always deceived by the heart'. Each alone seems self-contained, but spoken in the salon these civilities had a social effect: a person capable of creating verbal irony which he or she applies to him- or herself is the sort of person who earns trust."

129. "Our social arrangements for cooperation need a Reformation. Modern capitalism has unbalanced competition and cooperation, and so made cooperation itself less open, less dialogic."

133. Chapter 4. Inequality: Imposed and Absorbed in Childhood

"Capitalism today is in some ways a different, in some ways the same animal as a century ago. Different, because services play a bigger role in the economy than a century ago. Industrial production once lay at the heart of the advanced economies; today manufacturing has been moved offshore and exported, its place filled by technical and human services. A century ago, three countries furnished the bulk of the world's investment capital: America, Britain and Germany; today, global capital comes from everywhere. A century ago, mass consumption, fuelled by advertising, was in its infancy; consumers preferred to pay for what they could physically tocuh or weigh in the hand. Today, on the Internet, the imagery of objects dominates consumption.

        Some old ills have become deeper. Most notably, inequality has extended its reach, as the gap between the rich and the middle classes grows ever wider. In the United States, the wealth share of the middle quintile has increased 18 per cent in real dollars during the last fifty years while the wealth share of the top 5 per cent has increased by 293 per cent; today the odds of a student in the middle classes making as much income as his or her parents are 2 to 5; the odds of the top 5 per cent becoming as wealthy as their parents are over 90 per cent.[1] These numbers are signs of zero-sum competition veering toward the winner-takes-all extreme; the capitalist is becoming an apex predator." [or really, surpassed the apex predator]

134. Robert Putnam. "In his view, American and European society has less social coohesion than it had even thirty years ago, less trust in institutions, less trust in leaders." "The sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb takes Putman a step further, saying that we are seeing today the emergence of a 'cynical society' whose denizens are ill-disposed to cooperate.[3]"

135. Chinese 'guanxi'. "So is honour a better name? Guanxi invokes honour as a key ingredient of social relations. Douglas Guthrie, an American student of Chinese 'guanxi', explains that it is akin to the old Western business code, 'My word is my bond.'[7] You can count on other people in the network, especially when the going gets tough; they are honourbound to support you rather than take advantage of your weakness. 'Guanxi' entrails something other than sympathy; people in the network criticize one another and they nag; they may not be nice but they feel obliged to prove helpful.

        'Guanxi' is an example of how a social bond can shape economic life. In essence, this bond is informal in character, establishing a network of support outside a rigid circle of established rules and regulations. The bond is informal in character, establishing a network of support outside a rigid circle of established rules and regulations. The bond is a necessity in the fast-changing, often chaotic conditions of China today, since many of its official rules are dysfunctional; the informal, personal network helps people go around these in order to survive and prosper. The value of informal cohesion has already appeared to us, in dialogic exchanges, whether in a conversation or in the community organizing of Saul Alinsky. We want to establish the scope of these exchanges in our own society: do hey have an equal practical value as they do for the Chinese? There are two reasons why we might want to think like the Chinese about cooperation.

136. "First, if informal, the 'guanxi' network is also meant to be sustainable. Sometime in the future the one who gets help will give it back in a form neither party may now foresee, but knows will occur. 'Guanxi' is a relationship meant to endure from generation to generation. By the standards of a Western contract, there's no reality in such an ill-defined expecation; for the Chinese student, government worker or businessman, the expectation itself is solid, because people in the network punish or shun those who later prove unresponsive. It's a question for us of holding people accountable in the future for their actions in the present.

        Secondly, people in the 'guanxi' network are not ashamed of dependency. You can establish 'guanxi' with someone who needs you or whom you need, beneath or above you in the pecking order. The Chinese family, as traditionally in other societies, has been a site of dependency without shame. As described in Chapter 3, in the writings of Norbert Elias shame has become deeply associated in Western culture with self-control; losing control over your body or your words has become a source of shame. Modern family life and, even more, modern business practice, has extended the idea of self-containment: dependency on others i taken to be a sign of weakness, a failure of character; in raising children or at work, our institutions seek to promote autonomy and self-sufficiency; the autonomous individual appears free. But looked at from the perspective of a different culture, a person who prides him- or herself on not asking for help appears a deeply damaged human being; fear of social embeddedness dominates his or her life."

137. 'Guanxi' breakdown. "...as the country more and more comes to resemble the West in its ways of parenting, working and consuming. If so, we want to know why Western culture has this corrosive effect. The three chapters in Part Two seek to explain this effect, upon ourselves.

        This chapter explores the issue of dependency and inequality. It focuses on the lives of children, exploring how they can become more dependent on the things they consume than on one another. Chapter 5 takes up the issue of honour, in adult work. One strength of Robert Putnam's research lies in connecting attitudes about authority and trust to cooperative behaviour. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how these connections translate into experiences of honour in the workplace. Chapter 6 explores a new character type appearing in modern society, that of the uncooperative self. 'Guanxi' sets the positive standard against which to contrast this character type, which resists the very idea of duty to others."

138. Unicef. "The authors caution against equating a society's raw wealth with the well-being of its children: 'there is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita.'[9] The Czech Republic is, for instance, a better place for children to grow up, according to Unicef's measures, than its richer neighbour Austria. This finding reflects a familiar truth, that riches do not make for happiness, but that old truth is easy to romanticize; malnutrition is certainly no recipe for well-being. Exhibitors in the Paris Exposition [of 1900] like Charles Booth grappled with societies in which many children were starving; in Britain, southern Italy and much of the United States, childhood poverty still looms large. So the old adage should be reframed; once social conditions rise above basic deprivation, increasing affluence does not translate into social benefit. Under these conditions, inequality of a particular sort enters the picture."

139. "On a whole, Unicef's benchmarks for a good-quality childhood now are set by counries along the northern rim of Europe, countries that have relatively low levels of inequality internally. Norway's standard of living equals that of the United States, but its wealth is far more equalized."

"Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett make clear how inequality can lower the motivation of adolescents, when few believe they can get ahead.[10] This is partly a matter of unequal class sizes or access to computer and book resources, but also has a social side. The Unicef report probes the consequences of inequality in terms of behaviour outside the formalities which rule the classroom. At one pole lies bullying by other children, at the opposite pole, studying with them outside school. In its sample countries, the Unicef data show that internally unequal societies evince more bullying behaviour among children, while relatively equalized societies show a greater disposition among children to studying with others. Another study done by the Demos Institute in Britain, homes in on the tie between physical bullying and social class: poor children are twice as exposed to it as rich.[11]"

140. "School bullies may be no more than anti-social kids, yet the sociologist Paul Willis believes that they have an awareness of what their fate will be later in life; his research has shown a consistent attitude of working-class British children to peers who are dong well in school; Willis argues that the violently aggressive children already sense that they are the ones who will be left behind later. Studies of bullying among poor African-American youngsters show a similar foreshadowing.[14]"

142. Invidious comparison. "Even in its teddy-bear form, the commercialization of childhood is a huge worry to adults, though the worry appeared as long ago as the seventeenth century in the Netherlands when children first had access to mass-produced toys. The worry relates to inequality in a particular way. This is the phenomenon of invidious comparison. As a general concept, invidious comparison is the personalizing of inequality. Consumption brings invidious comparison to life: the kid with cool shoes looks down on the kid without them, that is, you are yucky because you wear the wrong clothes. Invidious comparison, as the advertising guru Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) was the first to point out, exploits feelings of inferiority; in his tart phrase, the advertiser needs to convince 'someone who is nobody that he is someone special'. The adman David Ogilvie has called this 'status' advertising, the adman's challenge being to provide consumers with a 'sense of recognition and worth' through buying mass-produced goods. 'I'm better than you' is an obvious sort of invidious comparison; more subtle is the reverse measure, 'You don't see me, I don't count in your eyes because I'm not good enough.' This is what ressentiment, discussed in Chapter 1, is all about, ordinary people feeling that they don't get any recognition, that they have no standing in the eyes of more educated or simply richer people. The status object is meant to salve that feeling."

143. "In studies done by Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan of older teenagers and young adults, heightened materialism was associated with feelings of personal vulnerability.[25]"

157. "Apart from the contrast between wealth and poverty, there was of course one big difference between bankers and factory workers in their respective experiences of time: after the Second World War, the industrial proletariat suffered recurring bouts of traumatic unemployment, while redundancies in the financial services caused by the business cycle were more muted. Still, when work returned to industrial workers, it meant returning to their old plants. This is a striking fact about the three decades that followed the Second World War; within both America and Britain industrial workers tended to stay put, rather than move to look for better work elsewhere.[9] Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the Great Depression this was not so in either country; industrial communities were in flux."

158. "A hist if studies began to chart, in the 1950s, the personal and social consequences of the industrialization of the white-collar classes, notably William Whyte's 'The Organization Man, C. Wright Mills's 'White Collar' and Michel Crozier's 'The Bureaucratic Phenomenon'.[12] For Whyte, long-term service tamped down sudden bursts of ambition and innovation; Mills believed stability led to an increase in conformity; Crozier, whose researches concerned France, where the state loomed larger in business, more emphasized the political consequences of white-collar workers becoming docile. None of these studies attended much to informal relations among workers or between workers and managers; formalized time seemed to possess an overwhelming self-contained power.

        That power began to loosen its grip in the mid-1970s, the financial services industry on Wall Street especially feeling the effect. If one event could be said to speeak that change, it was the breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary agreements during the oil crisis of 1973, a collapse which unleashed huge amounts of gloal capital onto markets which before had been more national and fixed, the flood of cash flowing at first from the Middle East and Japan. Thirteen years later, the 'Big Bang' deregulation of global market; cash appeared in capital flight from South America, from offshore China; in the 1990s markets drew in Russians spiriting away ill-gotten gains from their homeland; at the dawn of the present century, mainland Chinese became important investors in European industries as well as in American government bonds.

        Suddenly, everyone was competing with everyone else. During decades of stability, a mentleman's agreement partitioned the stock and bond territories that Wall Street and City firms controlled; more over, hostile takeovers, like that engineered in 1957 by Siegmund Warburg of Britain's major aluminum company, were deeply frowned on. Collusion, of course, never disappeared; commodity markets and IPOs (initial public offerings of stock from young companies) were, to put the matter plainly, often rigged; were he alive now, Bernard Mandeville could have written a new 'Fable of the Bees' based entirely on Wall Street. But those who now colluded also sought to subvert one another, to break up competitors' firms, especially to wipe out small players. The gentleman's agreement sought stability in the industry, while the new regime was more short-sighted, seeking momentary advantage."

159. "Most of this new money has been, in the words of the economist Bennet Harrison, 'impatient capital', seeking short-term returns on share prices and financial instruments, rather than long-term ownership of the firms in which capital was invested.[13] Shareholder returns focus on the price of shares rather than the health of firms; you can make money by going 'short' on companies whose share price, you bet, will decline, even if the company continues to post profits. This in turn puts pressure on companies to 'make their numbers' quarterly or monthly rather than think long-term. Even pension funds, which should have been most minded to the long term, began in the last generation to play by different time-rules: in 1965, the length of time a stock was held by pension funds averaged 46 months, in 2000, it averaged 8.7 months, in 2008, 4.9 months.

        Wall Street's particular role in the shift became the packaging of vehicles for impatient investment, while the City of London's role, drawing on old imperial connections, focused more on global execution and coordination.[14] Like the City of London, 'Wall Street' now denotes a generic space for finance - and in New York mid-town Manhattan has become as important to finance as Rector Place downtown, just as in London financial work occurs as much in Mayfair as in Moorgate."

160. 'A space of flows'. "More abstractly, the sociologist Manuel Castells has characterized today's political economy as 'a space of flows'.[16] He argues that thanks to new technology the global economy operates in synchronous real time; what happens to stock markets in London or New York instantly registers in Singapore or Johannesburg; computer code written in Bombay can be used for IBM as instantly as code written in the firm's home offices. Castells calls this condition 'timeless time'. The computer screen, which is the great symbol of our era, embodies it, window piled upon window without temporal relation; time is supended. The social consequence is just as Soros puts it: a momentary transaction rather than a sustained relationship.

        Short-term time has restructured the character of work. Today's labour market is a scene of short-term stints rather than of sustained careers. 'No long-term' is well conveyed by an executive for ATT, for instance, who a few years ago declared, 'At ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work-force being contingent . . . jobs are being replaced by projects.'[17] Temporary, often part-time labour is one reflection of this ethos; today, temporary work is the fastest-growing sector of the service economy. Even if employed full-time, the young middle-level university graduate can expect to change employers at least twelve times in the course of a working life, and to change his or her 'skills base' at least three times; the skills he or she must draw on aged forty are not the skills learned in school.[18]"

165. "In the last three recessions, once unemployed, a person's chances of recovering middle-class status have been no better than 60 per cent. For this reason, middle-class workers are beset, the sociologist Katherine Newman writes, by a constant fear of downward mobility.[23] That fear isn't quite so pronounced among the people I talked to at the Wall Street job centre and at a larger centre uptown. Their skills are specialized and in demand among many businesses; while a few were having long-term trouble, most of the people interviewed so far are recovering.

        This doesn't mean that losing a job isn't traumatic. There is a class structure among the unemployed as among the employed which affects how the loss is experienced. At the top, executives have termination agreements providing large cash payments; the elite unemployed also have company-paid access to specialist executive-search firms; above all, they have an extensive network of personal contacts, associates willing to go out to lunch or just to take a call. By contrast, the big problem facing workers lower down the ladder is their much weaker network of contacts. When in work these technicians mostly knew people like themselves, many of whom are now chasing after the same jobs."

166. Weak cooperation. "A study done in 2002 by the American Management Association of executives showed, for instance, that 83 per cent thought silos existed in their businesses, and 97 per cent thought the effects of isolation were negative.[24]" "In a later study, the AMA researchers found that less than half of organizations collected organized feedback from their employees; communication was dominantly top-down. Other studies report, similarly, that management is not taking seriously the views coming to them from below.[25] The silo effect is modern management's version of what community organizers a century ago sought to combat, a structural effect built into top-down organizations on the political Left."

168. Ideal team. "Managerial wisdom about how to organize teams stresses, ideally, the team's small size, usually no more than fifteen or twenty people meeting face to face. Cooperation is thought most effective when the group dwells on a clearly defined immediate problem or project. Teams typically stay together from six months to a year, which reflects the reality of corporations whose business plans and very identities are shifting constantly in the global economy. Long enough to get a job done - but not so long that the members of the team become too attached to one another.[26]"

168. The labour analyst Gideon Kunda has called this kind of cooperative behaviour 'deep acting'.[27] He means that underneath the surface of working cooperatively, team-members are showing off personally, usually to a manager or superior who is judging team performance; teamwork, he says, is 'feigned solidarity'. Short-term time makes a big difference to performances in this theatre of work. Because people are not really engaged with one another, their relationship being a matter of at most a few months, when things go wrong team-spirit suddenly collapses; people seek cover and deniability by shifting blame to other team-members. This weakness contrasts with teamwork in the bakery with the faulty oven; [in Richard Sennet's study of factory workers in the 1970s] cooperation there did not fall apart, because people knew one another well and had formed long-term informal relationships; they thus called on one another, and knew, more precisely, whom they could or couldn't count on."

169. "Short-term teamwork, with its feigned solidarity, its superficial knowledge of others and its squeezing, contrasts dramatically to the Chinese social bond of 'guanxi', the benchmark for a durable social bond discussed at the beginning of Chapter 4. 'Guanxi' is full of criticisms and sharp advice, rather than studied handshakes; people accept the sharp advice, rather than studied handshakes; people accept the sharp advice because they know others mean to help, not display themselves as exemplars. Most of all, 'guanxi' is sustained; it's a relationship which is meant to transcend particular events. And the network develops in time to include more partners, each depending on others in particular ways. Unlike a sports team, the players are involved in many games at once. There is no efficiency savings in a 'guanxi' relationship; instead, the network grows stronger through becoming an ever bigger mosaic."

171. "...Chartered Management Institute of Great Britain: exactly half of its respondents believed they could do a better job than their current manager. This number does more than reflect employee self-esteem, since 47 per cent reported they had left a job because of poor management, and 49 per cent indicated they 'would be prepared to take a pay cut in order to work with a better manager'.[29]"

175. "How big is this new elite? The best current estimates of its size are international in scale. By one reckoning, before the 2008 crash global finance was dominated by five accounting firms, twenty-six law firms, sexteen leading investment banks, six central banks and two credit rating agencies. The top staffing of this constellation in 2007 numbered about 6,000 individuals.[32] Satellites to top players are usually reckoned by who has regular face-to-face contact with the leader; the ratio comes out to about 10 to 1, so that the international 'front office' consists of about 60,000 individuals. Generously assuming that New York houses a quarter of this elite, it consitutes at most 15,000 in a city of 8 million."

179. Chapter 6. The Uncooperative Self: The Psychology of Withdrawal

"We've looked so far at two forces weakening cooperation: structural inequality and new forms of labour. These social forces have psychological consequences. A distinctive character type is emerging in modern society, the person who can't manage demanding, complex forms of social engagement, and so withdraws. He or she loses the desire to cooperate with others. This person becomes an 'uncooperative self'.

        The uncooperative self occupies a middle ground between psyche and society. One way to clarify the middle ground of social psychology lies in making a distinction between personality and character. Let's say you are full of anxiety and fear due to your overbearing parents, your early, repeated rejections in love, ect. ect.; you carry this inner weight inside you whatever you do and wherever you go in adult life; it's your personality. But full of anxiety and fear as you are, if pitched into a fight in the army or at a political demo, you suprise others, and yourself, by acting courageously; you've risen to the occasion, an occasion not of your own making or desiring. You've then displayed character, your psyche rising to difficult occasions. The 'uncooperative self' names a condition in which you withdraw from such challenges."

180. "Mills [in 'Social Character and Social Structure] enlarged upon this condition to frame his own version of the sociologist's jargon-term 'role anxiety', a condition in which people both play their allotted roles and doubt them. Mill's idea of such anxiety contrasts sharply with that of Soren Kierkegaard, who believed that anxiety is bred out of the 'dizziness of freedom'.[2] Mills thought anxiety expressed alertness to, passed judgement on, the roles a person is obliged to perform; anxiety was in these ways character forming."

"Today his [Mills] views remain important in furnishing a yardstick for measuring, by contrast, the diminishment of character. This occurs when anxiety about playing a role disappears. That's the story of the uncooperative self; in this diminished condition, people feel little ambvalence, little inner unease, about behaving uncooperatively."

Signs of anxiety. "Heart palpitations, shortness of breath and nausea are bodily signs; a gene called PLXNA2 has been named a candidate for causing states of physical anxiety. Cognitive dissonance expresses mental anxiety; it occurs when people keep uneasily in their heads contrary views, or when, as in the religious cults studied by the psychologist Leon Festinger, people both believe the world will come to an end on a particular day, and somehow don't believe it; they anxiously hold on to their old beliefs, knowing them false.[3]"

181. Masking. "A Soviet exile once remarked of his behaviour in meetings: 'You can express with your eyes a devoted attention which in reality you are not feeling . . . it is much more difficult to govern the expression of your mouth . . . that is why [I took up] smoking a heavy pipe . . . through the heaviness of the pipe the lips are deformed and cannot react spontaneously.'[5] This remark expresses exactly what Mills meant by doubleness."

"A half-century ago, in his studies of factory life, Reinhard Bendix probed in depth the old idea that the assembly line offers little stimulation; unlike the factories and shops in Boston, the West Coast industrial establishments he studied were huge, foremen ruled in cubicles removed from the assembly line, white-collar employees were further removed into separate buildings, operations were conducted strictly according to time-management principles first laid down by Frederick Taylor for the Ford Motor Company; under these conditions, it was hard for informal social triangles to take shape. Bendix found that workers caught in the vice compensated in their heads by imagining what more stimulating work should be, but kept these thought to themselves, for fear of being labelled or punished as 'troublemakers'. After work, they did share ideas over a beer, but at work they donned the mask; they dwelled in the double state.[6]"

183. Narcissism. "Freud detected the 'mirror state' internally in those patients who instantly associated new events in adulthood with familiar childhood traumas; for these patients, nothing truly new ever seemed to happen in their lives, the present always mirrored the past.

        Freud's work on narcissism was further refined after the Second World War. To the mirror state, Heinz Kohut introduced in psychoanalysis the concept of the 'grandiose self'.'Me' fills all the space of reality. One way such grandiosity is expressed lies in needing to feel constantly in control; in Kohut's words, the emphasis falls on 'the control which [a person] expects over his own body and feelings [rather] than the grown-up's experience of others . . .' People subjected to this grandiosity indeed 'feel oppressed and enslaved' by the need of others.[10] The result, in the view of another psychoanalyst of Kohut's era, Otto Kernberg, is that action itself is devalued; 'What am I doing?' is replaced by 'What am I feeling?'[11]

        A person dwelling in this self-absorbed state is going to feel anxiety when reality intrudes, a threatened loss of self rather than an enrichment of self. Anxiety is reduced by restoring feelings of being in control and so reducing anxiety. When this inner psychological transaction occurs, social consequences follow, the most notable being that social cooperation diminishes.

        Military life shows one way this happens. The sociologist Morris Janowitz has described as 'cowboy warriors' those soldiers who on the battlefield want to cover themselves in glory, in their own eyes, even at the expense of helping other soldiers, their feats of derring-do putting others at risk.[12] Janowitz says the cowboy warrior is performing for himself; the psychoanalyst would say he's made fighting into a mirror state. The narcissist is a dangerous figure on the battleground where, to survive, soldiers need to fous on helping out one another; in the nineteenth century, the German military strategist Karl von Clausewitz, all too familiar with self-serving heroics, advised commanders to punish such 'adventurers' as severely as deserters. Elevated in the chain of command, the cowboy warrior appears in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove (1964) as General Jack D. Ripper, whose real-life counterpart in the Vietnam War was General William Westmoreland; in joseph Heller's novel 'Catch-22' a twist is added: the cowboy warriors in the Second World War are aware of their buddies when showing off, and want to make more prudent soldiers feel small - an invidious comparison. The difference between art and life is that the cowboy warriors in 'Dr Strangelove' and 'Catch-22' are very funny; on the real battlefield, they are just terrifying."

185. Warfare has the most anxiety? "The psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton has pondered that issue in studies of soldiers since the time of the Vietnam War.[13] What he calls 'numbing' enables soldiers to deal with stress. The soldier in the midst of a fight goes numb, suppressing anything that distracts from the fight; it masks his inner feelings. When soldiers return home, the suppression lifts, fears or remorse kick in; post-traumatic stress ensues. In Lifton's research, one group seems relatively immune from this retrospective reckoning: the cowboy warrior. Narcissism provides, he says, so protective a carapace that the cowboy soldier in retrospect sees nothing to regret. This interpretation may seem one dimensional, but it is borne out in those war-crimes trials where a certain kind of soldier can't understand why he is in the dock; he doesn't subscribe emotionally to the just-following-orders defence; what he remembers of war, Lifton says, is its excitement."

Eugene Delacroix's great painting 'Liberty Leading the People' made during the Revolution of 1830.

186. "Warfare has one thing further to reveal about narcissism. At the dawn of the Great Unsettling, the social code of the early modern era began to shift by emphasizing civility in place of chivalry. This emphasis began to shift by emphasizing civility in place of chivalry. This emphasis began to shift by emphasizing civility in place of chivalry. This emphasis fell particularly on replacing the warrior code of chivalry with more peaceable social bonds. To make this shift, a certain kind of character had to come to the fore, self-ironic rather than aggressive, indirect rather than aggressive, preferring the subjective, a character type formed around self-restraint. Civility of this sort was a counter to narcissism. But a kkindred value resides in military honour itself; indeed, survival of the group depends on restraint of the grandiose self.

        Narcissism, then, is one igredient prompting withdrawal from other people. But it is usually mixed with another: complacency about one's position in the world."

186. "Complacency is not outward-looking, nor is it ontological in Giddens's sense [of 'ontological security' : security no matter the ups or downs]. Rather, it is a cousin to narcissism in expecting experience to conform to a pattern alrready familiar to oneself; experience seems to repeat routinely rather than evolve. That difference between security and complacency has been drawn out philosophically by Martin Heidegger; he contrasts being in the world, engaged with its shifts and ruptrues, to a disengaged state of being frozen in time.[16]

187. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) "...first coined the term 'individualism' in its modern sense. The son of conservative country aristocrats, Tocqueville faced a crisis in 1830 when the reactionary regime then ruling France was overthrown for a few months by revolutionaries, in whose wake a more politically moderate, economically minded king came to power. Most of Tocqueville's class retreated to their estates or withdrew from public life, making an 'emigration interieure'; the young Tocqueville chose instead to travel to America in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly to study prison conditions. In fact, Tocqueville was seeking hints in America for what European culture might look like in the future.

        The result was the first volume of 'Democracy in America', published in 1835. It seems to be not at all about individualism, rather about 'equality of condition', by which Tocqueville meant to trace the American consequences of the proposition that all men and women are born equal, consequences for politics mostly, but also in the ways people live. Tocqueville thought the new doctrine was just, because it gave all people freedom, but he worried about the tyranny of the majority, the mass actively oppressing minorities and demanding conformity. The demand for conformity he traced to society rather than to politics; Raymond Aron, Tocqueville's great modern interpreter, thinks that Tocqueville is the prophet of mass culture.[17] Social mores seemed to Tocqueville to become equal in the sense of homogeneous, even as material inequalities might remain or increase; put in today's terms, the janitor and the business executive will share a common culture of consumer desires, of family or community life. To Tocqueville, America appeared a society governed by conformity; he wrote to his friend John Stuart Mill that American society aroused deep anger at people who don't fit in."

188. "When Tocqueville came to publish the second volume of 'Democracy in America', in 1840, he shifted gears. Now he was more concerned about withdrawal from civic participation than about pressures on misfits to conform, or in politics on suppressing minority opinion. Tocqueville coined the word 'individualism' to name the condition of a withdrawn person...

'Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.'

This individualized withdrawal seems the perfect recipe for complacency: you take for granted people like yourself and simply don't care about those who aren't like you; more, whatever their problems are, it's their problem. Individualism and indifference become twins.

        In writing his second volume Tocqueville did not forget the first; he had to connectindividualism and equality. To do so, he developed the idea modern social science now calls 'status anxiety'. Tocqueville's individual suffers from status anxiety whenever he or she becomes uneasy that others do not share his or her tastes, as consumers, in family life or in public behaviour. By being different they seem to be putting on airs, or somehow - you can't explain how - putting you down. You perceive an insult: 'different' becomes translated into better or worse, superior or inferior, a matter of invidious comparison. The celebration of equality, for Tocqueville, is really anxiety about inequality. Now, as then, 'ressentiment' expresses the conversaion of difference into inequality. Though 'ressentiment' knows no national boundaries, there's certainly much of it now in American life, as when people who call themselves ordinary, God-fearing Americans accuse those who beg to differ of being elitists.

        Yet rather than make the effort to stamp them out or suppress them - which is an impulse of the tyrannical majority - individualism drives the person who feels affronted even further within him- or herself, seeking a comfort-zone; he or she seeks to 'hibernate'. Why withdraw rather than repress. Why did Tocqueville write a second volume?

        The answer in his own time had to do with France rather than America. The new regime of Louis-Philippe was not as repressive as the old; everything was allowed in private life so long as a person didn't rock the boat politically; in return, Frenchmen - whom we Anglo-Saxons tend to think so contentious - turned inward, absorbed in their private affairs, more disengaged from public life than noisily disgusted by it. Tocqueville took this as a first sign of individualism in Europe, the individual who 'exists only in himself and for himself alone'."

189. The impulse to withdraw. "For a long time, modern psychology has coupled disengagement and dissociation; psychoanalysts like Kohut represent one line of work, social psychiatrists like Lifton another. Behavioural psychologists have sought to lift the idea of numbing out of Lifton's consulting room and study it in the laboratory. They've probed, for instance, what is called the 'Csikszentmihalyi diagram': this diagram is a pie-shaped picture of the links between anxiety, worry, apathy, boredom, relaxation, control, flow and arousal.[18] Anxiety-reduction occurs through the neutralization of stimulation: apathy, boredom and relaxation can all neutralize arousal."

Boredom "...differs from apathy in being more selective; the apathy of a clinically depressed person is a global, total disengagement, while boredom attaches to particular activities. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi himself thinks, perhaps oddly, of boredom as entailing a certain level of skill; you have to become adept in filtering out disturbances. Rather than depressing, then, as the involuntary boredom of an assembly line is, boredom of this voluntary sort gives the comforting reassurance of low stimulation. Here, then, is a psychological logic consonant with Tocqueville's idea of the individual who may mix among [other people], but . . .  sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them'."

194. Obsession. Max Webers historical facts were a mess. "In a study of Dutch society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 'The Embarrassment of Riches', Simon Schama has shown, for instance, that those hard-working burghers behaved more like sensualists than ascetics, loving the everyday things they could buy; Albert Hirchman found that early capitalists considered their labours a calming and peaceful activity rather than requiring inner struggle; the historian R.H. Tawney cast doubt on the very connection between religion and capitalism.[21] Weber has erred by projecting the 'driven man' of the present onto the past."

"What we now know about obsession, as an emotion, is that it can have three elements. The first is repetition compulsion, the impulse to do something again and again, even though the act gets nowhere; unlike rehearsing music, in which hand-behaviour changes as it is repeated, a repetition compulsion is static. Weber's 'driven man' pursues deals, piles up cash, time after time without feeling he is really achieving anything. That sentiment only makes sense if, secondly, what psychology now calls perfectionism drives the individual. There is an ideal state which is the only reality; halfway measures, partial victories, never feel good enough; what the psychoanalyst Roy Schaeffer once called the 'crystal clear image of who one should be' teases people, an ideal to which the mess of actual lived experience never measures up. Thirdly, 'the driven man' suffers from ontological insecurity. Ontological insecurity is a failure of trust in everyday experience. Ordinary life is experienced as a minefield. Encountering new people, the person suffering ontological insecurity is likely to focus on the threats they pose, the injuries they might inflict, becoming obsessed by their power to hurt."

195. "I recognize that these psychological accounts of obsession can also trivialize the titanic struggle against oneself, the metaphysical anxiety, which gives Weber's essay its enduring power. Perhaps Weber is best met on his own grounds in the last book of the American writer Lionel Trilling, 'Sincerity and Authenticity'.[22] Trilling think of sincertiy as a report made to others about oneself; the report, to be good, has to be precise and clear. Authenticity is not concerned with making oneself precise and clear; instead, it is an inner search to find out what one 'really' feels, and contains a strong narcissistic trace. But this search is elusive; one never arrives at really knowing one's authentic feelings. Authentiicty of the sort Trilling criticizes is perhaps best represented in the social sciences by the 'Maslow paradigm', named after the social psychologist Abraham Maslow, who devoted a lifetime to developing the idea of 'self-actualization'. Trilling's view was that, unhinged from other people, other voices, the search for authenticity becomes self-defeating. This was precisely Max Weber's view of the Protestant Ethic: it turns people inwards in an impossible quest. Other people have no place in the obsessional struggle to prove oneself; at most they count as instruments, as tools to be used. Cooperation with others will ceertainly not salve inner doubts, it will have no value in itself.

Part Two has explored the weakening of cooperation in three realms, those of childhood inequalities, adult labour and the cultural formation of the self. This loss is not fatal, however; it can be repaired. In the next part of this study we explore how to strengthen skilled, complex cooperation."

199. Chapter 7. The Workshop: Making and Repairing

"I will try to show how physical labour can instil dialogical social behaviour."

"Technical skills come in two basic forms: making and repairing things. Making may seem the more creative activity, repair appearing lesser, after-the-fact work. In truth, the differences between the two are not so great. The creative writer usually has to edit, repairing earlier drafts in later ones; an electrician sometimes discovers, in fixing a broken machine, new ideas about what the machine should be.

        Craftsmen who become good at making things develop physical skills which apply to social life. The process happens in the craftsmen's body; social-science jargon makes this link between the physical and the social by using the ugly word 'embodiment'. In this chapter, we will look at three of these embodiments: how the rhythms of physical labour become embodied in ritual; how physical gestures give life to informal social relations; how the artisan's work with physical resistance illuminates the challenge of dealing with social resistances and differences. Counched in the jargon of 'embodiment', these links must seem abstract; I'll try make them concrete.

        The theme of repair has implications outside the workshop, just because modern society is now in urgent need of repair. But repair work is a complicated matter; there are conflicting ways for fixing broken things, and these strategies lead in conflicting social directions. If repair in the workshop is to serve as any sort of guide to change, we need, again, to delve into the concrete work repairmen do."

201. "The rhythm of building up skill can take a long time to produce results. By one measure, about 10,000 hours are required to develop mastery in playing a sport, performing music or making cabinets; this works out at roughly four hours a day of practice for five or six years. This was the time required for an apprentice in a medieval guild to learn his trade (10,000 hours is too neat a number, but roughly accurate). Just putting in the hours will not ensure that you become a competent soccer player or musician, but if you do have innate talent to begin with, the long-term work builds up the security of your practice. Sometimes you might get a procedure just right the very first time you do it, but the happy accident may not occur the next time. Moreover, you can command a quiverful of skills when you first begin; that too takes time to develop.

        The quiver can sometimes be too full, provisioning too many possibilities, too much complexity. In the 1920s the composer Igor Stravinsky subscribed to the doctrine 'simplify, eliminate, clarify', a doctrine rephrased a half century later by Arvo Part as 'make it new by making it simple'. Albert Einstein's reply to this impulse was, 'Everything should be made as simple as possible - but not simpler.'[2] Achieving simplicity in art is a highly sophisticated event. There's nothing naively innocent about Stravinsky's 'Pulcinella', for instance; it's full of comment and irony about simplicity may be art's greatest illusion."

202. Design or 'type-form'. "In more prosaic forms of craft-work, 'type-forms', address this problem. The craftsman starts with the model, the type-form, of what cutting out a tumour or making a cabinet should be or look like; the type-form provides a simple point of reference. The barber-surgeon or carpenter then draws on the quiver of skills to give the operation or cabinet a distinctive character in smaller details - the way the surgeon ties sutures, the varnishes used by the cabinet-maker - stamping something of him- or herself on the procedure or object. In dealing with complexity this way, the artisan's technical command also produces individuality.

        The rhythm of skill-development becomes a ritual, if practised again and again. Faced with a new problem or challenge, the technician will ingrain a response, then think about it, then re-ingrain the product of that thinking; varied responses will follow the same path, filling the technician's quiver; in time, the technician will learn how to impress his or her individual character within a guiding type-form. Many craftsmen speak casually about the 'rituals of the shop', and these rhythms, I think, stand behind that casual phrase."

202. Ritual. "Do they share anything in common, say, with religious rituals? Religious rituals certainly have to be learned, and the practitioners of nay religious ritual have to become fluent in its words and gestures. But it might seem that the self-aware phase of craft skill would be absent in a religious ritual, that self-consciousness impeding belief. During the Reformation, conscious consideration of established rites, and self-consciousness about performing them, intruded. The result of reflection could indeed diminish formal ritual, as among Quakers, but not always; other Protestant sects re-formatted rather than abandoned baptism.

        During the Great Unsettling in the sixteenth century, the issue of skill in performing a ritual became contentious. The High Middle Ages had refined religious ritual so that only the most skilled professionals were truly in command of it, as in the evolution of the ritual of the Eucharist. Luther rejected ritual based on special skill, which is why he translated the Bible into the language parishioners spoke and simplified hyms so that anyone could sing them. To this great reformer, faith is not a craft.

        It might be simple to connect workshop ritual to secular social practices. Certainly this link applied to the practices within diplomacy during the sixteenth century; as the profession of diplomacy progressed, young diplomats were schooled in resident embassies to behave fluently in public, employing both formal speech and informal talk in dealing with foreigners; both formalized speech and informal diplomatic chit-chat took on the character of rituals, recognized by others as established and quite specialized forms of behaviour. Resident ambassadors tutored their young proteges in how to perform theses rituals well; behind closed doors, the performers were subject to scrutiny. The two young envoys in Holbein's painting, sent to deal with the crisis over Henry VIII's divorce, were not particularly skilful; the retinue attached permanently to the resident ambassador were more so, though not even these pros were a match for Henry's voracious sexual desires."

203. The social 'role'. "The sociologist Erving Goffman explored how people usually learn roles at home and work, as well as in the special settings of mental institutions or prisons.[4] The 'presentation of self in everyday life', as Goffman calls it, is in fact a work in progress. It begins when people's adjustments to one another become ingrained habits. Social actors can then suffer from 'role dissonance' if circumstances change and old roles prove inadequate. Role dissonance arises, for instance, between parents and children in the wake of a divorce; single parents are now under the gun to contrive new, easy ways of playing with, educating and talking to children. To adapt, they have to think explicitly about their examination of behaviour; the aim, though, is to alter or expand roles so that they can be practised fluently and unselfconsciously again. If they achieve this, Goffman says, people become more 'expert' in everyday life; more, they have organized bits of behaviour into a ritualized form."

204. Flexability of ritual. Michel de Certeau and his colleagues in Lyons, particularly research done in the Croix-Rousse neighbourhood. "...because the community is so unstable, de Certeau found that people are obliged continually to re-format their shared behaviour."

207. "[Charles] Le Brun [1698] asserted that gestures are made rather than found.[7]" "Modern anthropology takes Le Brun's side, showing that culture makes a big difference in shaping those gestures Darwin believed to be involuntary reflexes. Andaman islanders strickly regulate when to start or stop crying; professional mourners in Korea used to wear a particular species of weed on their heads, carrying just the right foods placed on a special small table, when they cried on behalf of amilies.[8] So, too, culture makes a difference in smiling; Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, historian-anthropologists of smiles, observe that eighteenth-century Maoris smiled at news of a death, while we Westerners, even if aerning that distant Aunt Cecil's death has left us rich, have learned to frown; Courtine and Haroche believe, indeed, that the lips are the most culturally flexible features of the body.[9]"

"Do-it-yourself instructions inevitably prove maddening when they fail to show the gesture required to take each step; we need to see the bodily gesture to understand the act. In learning, 'show rather than tell' is seldom entirely voiceless, since the person shown a gesture is likely to ask questions, but showing comes before explaining."

"Gestures, finally, are the means by which we experience the sensation of informality. In part, the very gap between showing and telling can make a gesture seem informal: the physical act we see cannot be wrapped up neatly in words, it's ot so tightly bound. Informality has an easy visceral character, opposed to the tensed stomach muscles or tight breathing produced by anxiety. Even speech can be infused with that visceral feeling, as in open conversations, more relaxed, more pleasurable, more sensate in their flow than competitive arguments. Yet the sensation of informality is also deceiving, if we imagine 'informal' to be the same as 'shapeless'. The settlement-house workers knew this not to be true when they gave a shape to informal language classes and dramatic performances; we know also in our bodies that informality is shaped, when we gesture appropriately to our circumstances and gesture well."

208. "The informal social triangle is a social relationship we make; gesturing is one way to enact the relationship; the gestures which bond are learned behaviour ratheer than involuntary reflexes; the better we get at gesture, the more visceral and expressive informality becomes."

208. 'Working with Resistance'. "The third emobodiment relates the artisan's encounters with physical resistance to difficult social encounters. The artisan knows one big thing about dealing with resistance: not to fight against it, as though making war on knots in wood or heavy stone; the more effective way is to employ minimum force."

209. Anatomy prints by Vesalius in the sixteenth century.

"Johanes Kepler (1571-1630) confronted this issue [of unknown moons, stars, and galaxies] is 1604 when a supernova (a gigantic gaseous ball) suddenly became visible in the skies; astrologers using magical formulas explained why it should exist, but not its puzzling lines of movement, which Kepler observed through the telescope."

"In fighting against resistance we will become more focused on getting rid of the problem than on understanding what it is; by contrast, when working with resistance we want to supend frustration at being blocked, and instead engage with the problem in its own right. This general precept came to life in the London luthiers' shop just at those moments when an instrument-maker began banging a block of wood against the bench, suspecting there was a knot within. She'd then hold the block in different ways, trying to locate by different banging sounds just where the knot was; once she started cutting, she didn't seek to gouge out the knot, rather to shape instrument-plates by cutting around the knot's contours, feeling the presence of the knot's edge in slight resistances to her own hand when pushing the block, a delicate sort of cutting in which the as-yet-unseen knot guided her. She thus worked with the resistance."

210. "A Zen rule says that the skilled archer should stop struggling to hit the target and instead study the target itself; accuracy of aim will eventually ensure."

212. "...when Castiglione sought a word for civility, he recurred to 'sprezzatura', an old word meaning originally in Italian just 'springy'. Pleasure of that sort comes to us socially in lightening up."

"Anxiety-reduction aims to diminish outside stimulation; it does so by individual withddrawal. Whereas in deploying minimum force, both physically and socially, we can become more sensitive to, more connected with, more engaged by the environment. The things or people that resist our will, the experiences which resist our instant understanding, can come to matter in themselves."

'Repair'. "There are three ways to perform a repair: making a damaged object seem just like new, improving its operation, or altering it altogether; in technical jargon, these three strategies consist of restoration, remediation or reconfiguration. The first is governed by the object's original state; the second substitutes better parts or materials while preseving an old form; the third re-imagines the form and use of the object in the course of fixing it. All repair strategies depend on an initial judgement that what's broken can indeed be fixed. An object beyond recovery, like a shattered wineglass, is deemed technically a 'hermetic object', admitting no further work. Cooperation is not like a hermetic object, once damaged beyond recovery; as we have seen, its sources - both genetic and in early human development - are instead enduring they admit repair."

213. "Remediation preserves an existing form while substituting old parts for new and improved ones. Today's violin restorers, for instance, sometimes use different woods for pegs and sounding posts than the materials employed in Stradivarius's day."

217. Neues Museum restoration design by David Chipperfield.

226. Job reduction. "The labour market in both Europe and North America is becoming transformed structurally. It' a commonplace that, from the beginning of the 1980s ever fewer workers in Europe and North America have been engaged in mass manufacturing; that shrinkage has extended today - as in computer porgramming and engineering - to skilled professional work which can be done elsewhere in the world more cheaply.[3] It's a fantasy, in my judgement, to think that new creative or green economies can do much to offset the massive drift in jobs away from the West. The trend within white-collar work is for more lower-level service work, as in retail sales and in care-work for the aged, service labour subject to the short-term time frame explored in Chapter 5. Of course, some face-to-face professional services will not shrink - you won't want a lawyer in India to handle your divorce by email - but Western economies face the paradox of high productivity without full employment. We face the prospect that it will seem 'normal' for 15 to 18 per cent of the labour force to be without full-time work for more than two years; among young people in their twenties, these percentages will rise to 20-25 per cent.[4]"

228. Negotiation. "...first developed by Duc de Joinvile in the nineteenth century for diplomats and has been used to great effect by American labour negotiators like the late Theodore Kheel.[8] The technique draws on the formula 'in other words, you are saying that. . .', but does not in fact just repeat back; the negotiator embeds some of the concerns or interests of the opposing party into the rephrasing, thus establishing a common ground for negotiation."  

233. "In his late philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein's rule was that you keep silent about thing that lie beyond clear and precise language. In practising social civility, you keep silent about things you know clearly but which you should not and do not say."

234. "Were they structured like a laboratory-workshop, they would proceed openly yet produce a tangible result, steering between the Scylla of the fixed agenda and the Charybdis of aimless rambling."

235. "On Holbein's table, Peter Apian's book 'On Mercantile Calculations' asked its readers to think about accounting procedures. Then, as now, people sought the reassurance that something was a hard fact if it could be represented by a number. Apian, one of the first methodical accountants, knew otherwise; numbers are representations which need to be discussed. The historian Mary Poovey has argued, indeed that the rising of double-entry book-keeping and of literary criticism were intertwined in the early modern era, as both numbers and words seemed equally in need of critique.[15] Thus the rigidly formal business meeting began to prove counter-productive.

        The more open meeting derived also from new forms of power. Due to its colonizing reach during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European buiness became ever more complex, and complexity spawned the need to meet. At its origin, for instance, Britain's East India Company had a rudimentary structure and few formal meetings; as the company grew globally, its departments met more frequently to sort out turf battles and allocate the colonial spoils; the more powerful the Company became, the more it intersected with government, requiring yet more meetings. Bureaucracy sought to push back against this imperative for open communication; against the open meeting it sought defence in the written report, the report which achieves the bureaucratic sanctity of an official document defeating open discussion. The official document is bureaucracy's formal version of the silos discussed in Chapter 5; conflict between the official document and the need for free discussion appeared in the early modern period in diplomacy as in business, the diplomat's back-channels and vernacular speech set against the formalities of negotiation in official documents. By the eighteenth century, when Frederick the Great reformed the Prussian civil service, he was pulled between these forces: he wanted the state apparatus formally fixed in documents yet understood that departments work poorly if they rely for coordination solely on paper reports."

236. "A third side of the open meeting's history was bigger and less dry, one of the consequences of the weakening of inherited position. In medieval armies, the son of a regimental commander could look forward to inheriting his father's regiment (a situation which lasted in Britain up to th enineteenth century); so too could sons of government officials. Birth was authority enough, the idea of earned authority was weak. Inherited office began to be challenged in the early modern period; the shocking thought was that, instead, the holders of office should earn their jobs by actually being good at them. Ability should rule, rather than birth or seniority."

"...diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)... a master of meetings, disputig the formal dictates of his superiors without putting their backs up, getting warring department to sit down and alk, disputing and discussing the financial numbers given to the Admiralty by the Crown's financial masters... These discusive talents provided a different forum for civility from the salon; mutual pleasure was not the point. Nor was Pepys a split-the-difference appeaser; in meetings he fought his corner but without making other participants feel cornered."

238. 'The liminal zone'. "Professional displomats have a bible for negotiating this borderline condition. It is Sir Ernest Satow's 'Satow's Diplomatic Practice', originally published in 1917, now in its sixth edition..."

239. "When I worked with UNESCO, the United Nations Heritage Sites were floated as 'demarches'; diplomats took no personal ownership over any particular recommendation in order that each could be considered freely and impersonally. The ritual of the 'demarche' differs from the 'bout de papier' in eschewing agency, rather than enacting deference, and is useful to weak as well as the strong.

        These diplomatic practices are alternatives to split-the-difference appeasing, since they can put strongly held positions on the table, but not as self-interested declarations. By stepping back, the parties can then work towards accepting or rejecting another view without necessarily having to compromise their own. The exchange is liminal in the sense that it creates ambiguity, yet it would be wrong to scorn this kind of diplomacy as ineffective; the 'bout de papier' and the 'demarche' seek to make the meeting between the strong and the weak a win-win exchange. In everyday life, both practices translate as what we have called deployment of the subjunctive mood."

243. "As the historian Carlo Ginzburg has shown, during the black mass hooded celebrants signalled that they had left the realm of human feeling."

246. "The neutral, impersonal mask is one way to turn the actor outward, and so create a common space with the audience; complex cooperation needs to take that outward turn, to create a common space; everyday diplomacy is a crafting of expressive social distance. Concrete political consequences follow from this abstract precept."

250. Robert Nisbit (1913-96) 'The Quest for Community'. a bible for the 'new conservatives' of the 1950s."

"Nisbit and his colleague Russel Kirk were 'new' conservatives in the 1950s because they actually cared about the social lives of the poor, whereas small-government advocates in the Great Depression of the 1930s had dwelled just on taxes, free enterprise and property rights."

"These new conservatives were also 'old' because the belief that poor people can fulfil themselves in local life traces back to the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke."

"What is called in Britain today 'modern conservatism' dwells n the virtues of local life, the poor in communities being supported by volunteers rather than by welfare-state bureaucrats; this localism the Prime Minister David Cameron calls the 'Big Society', by which he means big in heart, though short of state funding. In America, some elements of today's Tea Party movement are communal conservatives who share the same vision; rather than merely selfish individualism, these conservatives want neighbours to help each other out."

251. "Nisbet'ss view was that small communities can be self-supporting, while the social Left doubt that such communities can sustain themselves economically. The social Right believes capitalism will provide for local life, the social Left thinks not.

        Left and Right are talking about two different kinds of small communities. The social Right's model is the village or the town, with locally owned shops and banks; even if small-town life was never in fact self-sufficient, the social Right want to make it so now. The social Left's engagement with small communities has occured in big cities, cities filled with chain stores, giant corporations and globally oriented, locally insulated bankers. Of course the capitalist monster has to be resisted, but the realistic Leftist knows it will not be slain at the corner store."

252. "...the urbanist Saskia Sassen argues, that local retail economies now function as colonial natural-resource economies once did, generating wealth that is extracted and exported.[5]"

"...as Sassen describes it: the local community, like the colony, is stripped of wealth, then told to make up for that lack by its own efforts."

261. "Judaism, Islam and Catholicism all provide life-designs external to the self; Protestantism of Luther's sort provides less of a design and stresses more the self."

280. "...the word 'individualism' names, I believe, a social absense as well as a personal impulse: ritual is absent. Rituals role in all human cultures is to relieve and resolve human anxiety, by turning people outward in shared, symbolic acts; modern society has weakened those ritual ties. Secular rituals, particularly rituals whose point is cooperation itself, have proved too feeble to provide that support."