Denying vs Affirming Interdependence
Hakan Altinay calls for us to revisit global traditions in which homo economicus is replaced with long held notions of humanity's interdependence and interconnectedness.
There is a noxious framework, frequently described by the term Homo Economicus or the economic man. This framework assumes human beings to be atomistic units. These units should be and in fact are narrowly rational, and proudly selfish. Their rationality is based on a simple calculator model, and a cost and benefit accounting where the only metric is bodily pain and pleasure. Since the units in this framework are as firmly delineated and impenetrable as billiard balls, and have as such no meaningful ties to the external world, there is no room for any other metric than bodily pain and pleasure.
Despite the - hopefully obvious - poverty of this framework, it has been the dominant one for the last few centuries in the most powerful parts of the world, and continues to be a zombie meme even today. There have been, to be sure, palliative attempts to amend this framework by recognizing our ties to our natural and social habitat. Yet, these correctives arrive too late in the story arc, and fail to correct or reverse vital baked-in features. Pivots by the OECD to include human flourishing is a recent example of these timid correctives.
It should have been obvious that the fact that we are deeply and constitutionally relational beings cannot be an afterthought but should be the opening line of any sensible account of the human condition. And if the noxious story was not so loud and obnoxious, we would have noticed long ago that every other paradigm - save for Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Milton Friedman - throughout human history acknowledged our relational nature, and proceeded swiftly to cultivate various temperaments to live our interrelated and interdependent lives well. After all, recognizing our interrelated constitution was not difficult, but living that interdependence well is what required particular temperament and thoughtful effort.
This cultivated temperament had different names in different parts of the world, including bildung in the German speaking Europe, ubuntu in Southern Africa, ren in East Asia, dharma in South Asia, adap and irfan in West Asia. To this day, the word for literature in Arabic, Persian and Turkish is adabiyat, which is an iteration of adap. Literature was there to serve as a path for decency and discovering our humanity, not that different from Maimonides’ aspiration for law to serve not maintenance of order but as cultivation of better human beings. It may also be useful to recall that several contemporary scholars prefer to translate ren as co-humanity in order to elucidate its interactive, iterative nature. How we live well and thrive together has been the question for most of us for most of our histories.
Taking a moment to familiarize ourselves with other memes and questions of these gems would be the least we can do for a Homo Economicus detox. Let’s start with where we all came from, Africa: John Mbiti of Kenya had pointed to “I am because we are” already in 1970 as the central understanding and formulation of wholesome personhood. Later, Desmond Tutu of South Africa popularized “I am because you are” as the antithesis of “I think therefore I am”. Kwasi Wiredu of Ghana educated all of us on the centrality of this temperament for the continent. Generosity, solidarity, magnanimity, empathy, and understanding have been argued as the requisite temperaments for this African world view. The notion of tawhid, most notably in Ibn Arabi, across North Africa also centers around the deep connectivity and oneness of all being.
East Asia and South Asia are two other major parts of the world where interdependence - and not atomistic individualism - has been the default assumption for several thousands of years. In the wise words of Tu WeiMing, no act is ever done alone and all is relational. George Nisbett documented the manifestations of this paradigm convincingly in his 2003 book, Geography of Thought. Asian imagination is indeed replete with rich accounts of this central creed: Kabir of 15th century India, to take one example, used the metaphor of the river and the ocean being one, and proceeded to note ‘many know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop’ in a seminal and still pertinent challenge.
Indigenous philosophies of the Americas have similar echoes; Chief Seattle is said to have argued:
“We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
The notion that "we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children" is a natural manifestation of this framework. Of course, the interesting as well as necessary follow-up is how best to be that steward. Yet when we cannot get the first order diagnosis right, the vital follow-up remains mute and buried.
In a luminous phrasing which deserves reverence and quiet ponder, Mayas in Central America greet each other by saying “In Lak’ech Ala K’in” or “I am another you”. Seemingly motivated by a similar outlook, followers of the 13th century sage Rumi from Anatolia are known not to open their gates if the person at the door replied “It is me” when asked who is at the door. The conscientious answer worthy of admission would need to be “It is you”, a response which ensures that the newcomer is cognizant of basic truth, and therefore worthy of company. Kabir is also still remembered by his answer to the existential question of why we are here: to become ourselves in and through each other. The work of two eminent 20th century scientists, David Suzuki and Joachim Schellnhuber, have shown that with each breath we take in atoms from the breadths of everyone who had lived before us. Chief Seattle was indeed right: We all are literally made of each other.
If we are constitutively and somatically related and irreversibly intertwined, taijitu or more widely known yin&yang become natural, even inevitable. Rumi’s call of waiting where there is no right doing and wrong doing feels a little wiser and less naïve. Indignation becomes less compulsory, and curiosity more inviting. Yet, the question, once again, is where in a world organized according the Homo Economics precepts we are to find any space to taste and explore the yin and yang, and whose responsibility it is to build and sustain such spaces.
Other interesting issues start emerging after we recognized the constitutive interrelatedness of being. If others are not foes or rivals but another you, how are we to relate to them? Rumi’s answer was with love, which he described as the bridge between us and everything else. Irish poet, John Odonohue, similarly described love as the only light capable of letting us to see the other. Love has been defined as the quality of the attention we pay to others, and listening has been called an act of love. In the homo economicus world, we have an abundance of negotiation classes offered to extract maximum gain from the other. Have you, on the other hand, come across any offering to tone your listening muscle?
Then there is the tension between our reach vs our grasp. If you had seen the movie Oppenheimer, you may recall the ‘minor’ issue of atmospheric ignition. The movie chooses to make a brief mention of the possibility that the Trinity test in 1945 might have ionized Earth’s atmosphere and killed all living things. As we now know, the test did go ahead and life on Earth survived. We are not privy to the discussions surrounding the movie’s script, but one cannot help wondering how one could depict that momentous decision. Can anyone legitimately deliberate the odds of ending all life on Earth? How can we continue in earnest after discovering that some members of humanity apparently felt -and may still feel- capable of making such a decision? If you are inclined to consider the maddening audacity of Oppenheimer and company a fluke, you may want to know that a recent - and to date largest - survey of AI scholars found that half of them saw at least 10% chance of human extinction due to AI. This is so dramatic that you cannot be faulted for needing to read these sentences multiple times.
Homo economicus profoundly misunderstood and misconceived the human condition. Under its spell, we wasted important decades and centuries to develop our adap, bildung, dharma, ren, and ubuntu. As we end the first quarter of the 21st century, we may, rather than fireworks, opt for a day of silence to renew our internal conversation. In that silence, we may also hear what many wisdom traditions have tried to tell us. We have spent too long in the adolescent foolishness of homo economicus. The question now is whether we have the sense and the courage to grow up.
Hakan Altinay is the Director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul, and a professor of the Practice at Tufts University in Boston.
Photo by Pixabay
