Invisible Rivals. How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World. By Jonathan R. Goodman. Yale University Press. 2025. xv+236pp.
This is a wide-ranging book. Written in a jargon-free and eminently accessible style, it is basically a work of evolutionary psychology, but it also steps into a number of other fields of knowledge and investigation, for example biology, anthropology, history, politics and economics. Its fundamental themes, as suggested in its title, are cooperation and competition and the part they play in human society.
As the author points out, this has been a hot topic of study for specialists in various fields over many years, and even more so in recent times. For most of these, the old idea of humans as red in tooth and claw, deep-down selfish and wicked and with social interaction dictated by an ethic of everyone for themselves has been superseded by an understanding that homo sapiens is capable of a wide range of behaviours according to the life conditions and experience of each particular individual and social group.
Many recent studies have emphasised that, if circumstances and social environment allow, human beings are likely to behave in generous and empathetic ways towards others, since we are essentially flexible creatures with behaviour shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. It follows from this that, if life takes place under adverse systems and conditions, this can provoke negative reactions in which communities are divided among themselves and people may be inclined to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. Some studies stress the ‘positivity’ element more strongly and see human beings as an instinctively kind and associative species, ‘pro-social’ or ‘super-cooperators’, whose default, whose natural inclination is to share and be cooperative and mutually supportive. In this view, only when conditioned from the earliest years to compete and pursue personal ‘success’ and reward, as in today’s capitalist system, do humans shift away from sharing and towards selfishness and personal gain. But both these positions espouse the idea of humans as eminently flexible and adaptable creatures and often draw on evidence that, for the vast majority of the 300,000 years or more of human existence, we lived in sharing egalitarian societies with no rulers or ruled, no resource domination and relatively little conflict. That was when we were hunter-gatherers, and the argument continues that, only when that lifestyle was replaced by one of settled agriculture starting around 12,000 years ago, (the ‘tiny speck in our history’ referred to in this book) did hierarchies and states come into being and result in struggles for power, development of classes and the existence of rulers and ruled, provoking predatory behaviours and setting people against one another.
All this of course fits in nicely with the socialist advocacy of an egalitarian society, which, via modern technology, could guarantee a more secure level of existence than hunter-gatherer societies and could be based on free and equal access to all goods and services, with no buying and selling, no wages or salaries with cooperative endeavour aimed at satisfying human needs rather than seeking profit. So nothing in ‘human nature’ would prevent this. Indeed, if human beings are either ‘naturally’ cooperative and inclined to share or even sufficiently flexible to welcome such a lifestyle as being in both the collective interest and their own, then surely it will fit them like a glove.
However, the author of this book sees things rather differently. He presents what one commentator has called ‘a highly nuanced account of human competition and cooperation’. According to this, though we are capable of being either selfish or altruistic, the selfish side tends to prevail, something we may not even always be aware of ourselves. In other words, in most of our dealings, the motives we present to others may be different from what they believe and indeed from what we ourselves believe. In this view, a human tendency for self-interested manipulation is seen as fundamentally present. As the author puts it, ‘selfishness and double dealing are basic human traits to be found in everyone, including themselves’ and ‘deception and exploitation are deeply rooted in our natures’. So selfish goals are seen to be hidden under a cloak of apparent altruism or selflessness. Thus the ‘invisible rivalry’ of the book’s title.
But what about humankind’s approximately 290,000 years of apparently egalitarian and conflict-light hunter-gathering? The writer does not neglect this but argues that, in terms of equality and conflict, things were more nuanced and not necessarily as one-sided as presented by many studies of anthropology and palaeontology, pointing rather towards his more ambiguous take on ‘human nature’. His verdict is that, though we commonly share and reciprocate, this does not make us innately cooperative. It just makes us ‘animals capable of cooperation’. Here it is noticeable, however, that, though he draws on a wide range of sources which point in favour of his thesis, other key sources providing widely recognised evidence for the ‘highly flexible’ or ‘ultra-cooperative’ idea, some of which have been reviewed in this journal, are notably missing. There is no mention whatever, for example, of the work of widely recognised experts in this field such as John Gowdy or R. Brian Ferguson. So it is difficult not to see a certain amount of ‘cherry-picking’ in what is presented here.
As for the writer’s take on the current state of humanity and the economic system that dominates it – capitalism -, he clearly does not consider that the equivocal view of humanity he presents prevents change or improvement and he does acknowledge the possibility and importance of cooperation. He states unequivocally in fact that human society could not have survived ‘without intense cooperation, and this is implicit in the support he expresses for what might be called ‘progressive’ social policies and developments, ie, more openness, democracy and equality. He refers to a need for ‘the political will to enact policies that upend the modes of exploitation we have normalized and the cultures of inequality we allow to thrive’ and for this to happen via ’cooperation at the local and global levels’. But he sees any such changes entirely in the context and through the lens of the existing system, thereby avoiding the elephant in the room, ie, that system’s imperative to keep on existing and producing for the profit of the tiny minority. We, on the other hand, would regard any attempt to bring about change or improvement within its framework as tinkering at the edges, a sort of ‘moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’.
Howard Moss
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