Cooperative Culture–Energy Characteristics

by Mary Logan

Professor Dave Tilley suggested a review of Richard Sennett’s new book, Together; The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation.  The book was thoughtfully written. Sennett traces the nature and evolution of cooperation in society, and examines the reasons for the lack of cooperation in current society, and how we can reclaim it. He examines the relationship of cooperation to solidarity, competition, and ritual.  Sennett views cooperation realistically; he understands that cooperation is not innately benign, and has its own problems, as people who are bound together can then do harm to others. He discusses the need to rebuild cooperation using the metaphor of repair work embodied in a social workshop, as suggested by the book’s cover painting at right, Making a Staircase by Frances Johnston. He makes a number of fascinating points; for example, he describes the institutionalization of cooperation in the form of solidarity as the Left’s response to the evils of capitalism. Sennett ends the book with a quote from Jacob Burckhardt about modern times as an “age of brutal simplifiers”. Sennett suggests that:

Today, the crossed effect of desires for reassuring solidarity amid economic insecurity is to render social life brutally simple: us-against-them coupled with you-are-on-your-own. But I’d insist that we dwell in the condition of “not yet.” Modernity’s brutal simplifiers may repress and distort our capacity to live together, but do not, cannot, erase this capacity. As social animals we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions . . . . (Sennett, 2012, p. 280).

Sennett is a sociologist; while he does not view the world through an energy lens, he is aware of the unbalanced nature of our competitive society and the need for return to a more civil, cooperative society. He blames our cultural woes on industrial society and capitalism, thus he arrives at some of the same conclusions as those who frame their worldview using an energetic focus. A society based on grossly surplus energy creates extremes of inequity, with weakened social cohesion, psychological withdrawal, and loss of justice.

As I read the book, I found the need to take notes, as a slightly different perspective unfolded than that of the author. As I read, wearing my spectacles made with energy lenses, I saw the give and take of mutualism throughout history as a function in part of societies with surplus energies (high gain) and less surplus energies (low gain). Viewing the world energetically was briefly fashionable in the 1970s for many science specialties, including ecology and anthropology. Ecologists addressed the issues of succession and relative energy availability in systems in structural terms, and cultural Anthropologists wrote about ecological anthropology. But these approaches to energetic gain generally faded in theoretical popularity in the 1980s after the oil shocks diminished, except for notable holdouts such as Tainter and Allen, who have continued to develop theories viewed through an energetic lens, based on environmental determinism. Many science specialties including ecology dispensed with an energetic world view at the same time that western society as a whole dispensed with it.

The review morphed into a summary of potential characteristics of a new culture. So here, below, is an optimistic view of how a society with less surplus energy might develop as we descend, and what some of those changes might look like. This table is a work in progress, garnered from a number of different sources; some are referenced below.

from Odum, 1969; Tainter et al., 1996, 2003; Sennett, 2012, Roszak, 2003