Miles wrote:
Call me an optimist, but I think it's possible to
> extend this same pattern of interaction and expectation
> to other domains of social life. The example of the
> family clearly shows that people are capable of doing
> stuff without incentives; it's more or less a
> social engineering problem to instill in people the same
> spirit about other facets of social life that they
> take for granted in their family relations. (There's
> no bogeyman "human nature" getting in the way of
> cooperative interactions here;
Unfortunately, there is, and you can't wish it away. There have been many attempts to solve the social engineering problem you describe above. None have succeeded. We can't love countless numbers of people any more than a dog can serve a thousand masters. But fortunately we're capable of cooperating with people we don't much care about.
-- Luke
^^^^^
CB: Well, actually,no there is _not_ a human _nature_ problem here. Those who have claimed there is were the one's wishfully thinking and using poor "research" methods. With the advent of more cogent and scientific methods of discerning human nature, we can say that humans' biological inclinations not only pose no barrier to building society based on cooperation and communism, but that human natural inclinations ,when compared with other species ( other "natures"), are very much fit for cooperation. It is the unnatural traditions,customs and ideas, such as the idea of the "naturalness" of superior classes, that post the barrier to a cooperative society. The change we need is not so much in our nature as in nurture. The way to remove selfishness is not through wishing but through social revolution.
As far as success at cooperation and communistically organized society, most of human existence has been as communists, which is quite a record of success, in the economic sense. This is demonstrated by science and real evidence; it refutes the Western philosophers' pipe dreams of a predominatly selfish human nature.