Cheyfitz

Dickinson

To address inequality and the environmental crisis facing the world today people should pull together rather than compete against each other for individual gain, two Cornell faculty members urged in a Feb. 28 campus lecture, "Beyond the Third Way: Alternate Approaches to Global Crisis."

Janis Dickinson, professor of natural resources and the Arthur A. Allen Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, noted that while cooperation has been an "evolutionary constant" throughout human history, recent research has shown that there is a great deal of diversity in terms of which "moral axes" drive people's decisions. "Our minds co-evolve with cultural practices, and our morality is shaped in the short term by the cultural practices and institutions we grow up with," Dickinson said; we tend to adapt to the norms that prevail in our social groups.

Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters approached the issue of cooperation from the perspective of American Indian and Indigenous studies in which he specializes. "Cooperation is the ethic in theory and practice across the Indigenous world," he explained, "though an ongoing colonialism with its current neoliberal agenda puts obstacles in the way of practice. The operative pronoun in cultures from Native America to Aboriginal Australia is 'we' not 'I.'"

Cheyfitz also noted that from an Indigenous perspective, "the environment is understood as part of one's society and is due the respect and consideration accorded to kin. This respect and consideration is embedded in the ceremonial dynamics of these societies, which ensure that social action is motivated by a deliberative and consensual social vision rooted in an idea of sustainability as balance."

From an evolutionary perspective, neoliberalism "really stresses individual competition and minimizes group cooperation," said Dickinson, adding, "In most animal societies, both competition and cooperation are ubiquitous."

Such cooperation has been detected in evolutionary biology studies in species ranging from bees to wild buffalo. Dickinson argued that what is unusual about humans is our capacity for coordinated cooperation in very large groups of unrelated individuals.

Dickinson hypothesized that the rise of neoliberalism is a response to a world focused on risk, and may have been accelerated by the bombing of the World Trade Center. She said chronic exposure to evidence for climate change may bolster a neoliberal worldview to the extent that it interferes, for example, with people's belief in a just world.

Cheyfitz noted that the two dominant political parties in the U.S. lack the political vocabulary to deal with the issues of sustainability facing the country, chief of which are income inequality and climate change. He lauded social experiments such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the redistributive approaches of South American countries as Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, all of which combine Indigenous perspectives with those of socialism.

Contemporary neoliberal culture reinforces the need for self-interested, competitive and individualistic behavior through increased emphasis on privatization, said Dickinson. She sees hope in Web-based social movements, collaborative games that allow for achievement and epic wins, and greater cross-disciplinary study of how to tap into the cooperative aspects of human nature.

Cheyfitz closed by urging audience members to "think Indian," adopting the respectful and considerate way Indigenous people relate to the world around them.

The discussion was sponsored by Cornell's Polson Institute for Global Development.

Umang Prabhakar '13, a student writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle, contributed to this article.