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By Rafe Champion

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, ÔIs Equality PassŽ? Homo reciprocans and the future of egalitarian politicsÕ.Ê

http://www-polisci.mit.edu/BostonReview/BR23.6/bowles.html

In The Republic Plato recruited the unsel-fish sentiment of altruism in defence of collectivism and the communalism of his totalitarian state. He put the case for individualism in the mouth of an unscrupulous political desperado.Ê Ever since, many people have been unwilling to accept that individualists can also care about other people. Just look at those stony-hearted economic rationalists!

In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper demolished PlatoÕs logic, pointing out that the real opposites were not individualism and altruism, but individualism versus collectivism, and selfishness versus altruism. Bowles and Gintis have continued that good work by providing a great body of evidence to back up the simple truth that most people do care about the welfare of others but they also expect able-bodied others to help themselves. They call this attitude Ôstrong reciprocityÕ, that is, the tendency to collaborate and share with others, as long as they play by the rules of the game. They provide survey evidence that current dissatisfaction with the US welfare system is not due to selfishness or lack of desire to help poor people, it is because many welfare programs violate deeply-held notions of fairness. This view is also held by many welfare-recipients who realise that their incentives are distorted by the system.

As to the roots of strong reciprocity, it appears that we have a legacy of 100,000 years of sharing, revealed by evidence from archaeology, history, and fieldwork among contemporary foragers. Sharing is widespread, and not just in the immediate family circle. They could have drawn examples from the animal world such as the beaver that is not only a model of industry but also of mutual support.

The modern welfare state is thus but an example of a ubiquitous social form. Sharing institutions ø from families to extended gift-giving, barn raisings, tithing, or egalitarian division rules for the catch of the hunt ... Strong reciprocity thus allows groups to engage in common practices without the resort to costly and often ineffective hierarchical authority, and thereby vastly increases the repertoire of social experiments capable of diffusing through cultural and genetic competition.

They consider that both genetic and cultural transmission were involved because recognisable humans spent 100,000 years in foraging bands and that allowed plenty of time for the evolution of the combination of norm enforcement and sharing that they labeled strong reciprocity.

This is a really important paper, breaking new ground in the debate on rights and responsibilities with an evolutionary perspective that matches the mature thinking of Popper and Hayek.Ê The authors provide a valuable analysis of recent research on attitudes towards the US welfare system and they offer a fascinating account of simulation experiments to explore human attitudes to giving and taking under various conditions.

Brian Ashbee, ÔA Beginners Guide to Art Bollocks and How to be a CriticÕ, Art Review, April 1999.

Ashbee traces Ôart bollocksÕ back to DuchampÕs urinal of 1919, which he signed ÔR. MuttÕ. According to Ashbee this is not art to be looked at, it is art to be talked about and written about. It is art that generates text. As time has gone by, with one fad succeeding another with monotonous regularity, a particular vacuous type of text has evolved to deal with art that has little to commend it in the way of craft or beauty.

The current vogue of the deconstructionists and post-modernists has helpfully provided fresh convolutions of language to assist those who have made it their business to guide (or is it to misguide?) the perplexed. In fact one could go a long way by selecting from each of the lines in the following lists:

ÔMs ZÕs work (wryly/mockingly/innocently/cunningly/intelligently) (deconstructs/subverts/disrupts/appropriates/undermines) (popular notions/stereotypes/archetypes/conventions/the mythology/strategies) of (gender/representations/style/sexuality/identity) by etcÕ

Contradiction can be deployed to simulate profundity. A typical example would run along the line that XÕs paintings Ôseem at once to embrace and reject the entire sweep of artistic production of their timeÕ.Ê A paradox of that kind creates a kind of verbal smoke screen, which can convince readers who want to be convinced that something very deep and meaningful is being communicated. Another useful type of phrase is ÔMr YÕs paintings operate in a space between a subject and a non-subjectÕ. On other occasions the theme can be reversed with the equally informative suggestion that ÔMr YÕs paintings refuse to situate themselves in the space between a subject and a non-subjectÕ.Ê It is presumably only a matter of time before one reads that ÔMr ZÕs paintings both operate and refuse to operate in the space between a subject and a non-subjectÕ.

Another useful piece of advice that is offered by the author is to write about concepts which are vague and elastic, to divert attention from the concrete (or at least the pigment and canvas) work of art. One concept rapidly leads to another and this can be used to conceal the basic inability to look and see what is actually on the wall, or to appreciate the art or craft of the work. This may be helpful in a perverse kind of way if the work does not actually embody any skill or insight. Sometimes in this situation the artist will anticipate the critic and put up text alongside the work, or in the program, written in the approved Ôart bollocksÕ language, as if to warn off those who look for the traditional skills and attractions of art.

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