One of the more dissapointing aspects of social and cultural events in past years has been the mechanical view of human society - the steam age, heavy metal, cybernetic interpretation of the world. With every real world event we see a rash of articles claiming that this event supports their steam age views. Here's one.

I'm almost a disruption-fetishist myself (even if I'm at risk) just because of how they shake-up human relations, just because they make visible so many invisible relationships, flows and issues. And I agree with you collective action and commons-sharing is always fascinating to watch, and even more amazing to experience first hand. NYers talk a lot about this post September 11th, i.e. how they met neighbours for the first time; how they still have block-parties as a result of this powerful community-forming event. As you note, it's sad when this is an anomaly versus the norm. American society didn't used to be this way; it's pro-social aspects were what made outsiders like Tocqueville admire the country so. One hypothesis about these events: I think they showcase, more acutely than ever, the existence of much deeper relatively untapped reservoirs of human potential, which seem to gush forth like water through a hole in a dam. This glimpse of collective human potential contrasts sharply to the more tepid flow (or lack thereof) defining day-to-day social and civic arrangements. It's a striking reminder of just how shallowly our current institutions, both in the private and public sectors (curiously the big ones), tap into these deeper wellsprings of collective feeling and action. I suppose some people think this is a good thing. Better to keep the masses quiescent, the cynical power-brokers might quietly say to themselves. And sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Social movements do spiral in unpredictable directions, namely, the massive collective action that happens during revolutions often results in some pretty horrific things. Most people would also qualify and bracket this state of cooperation, these bursts of pro-social behaviour, as a temporary phenomenon— as something that's exceptional as opposed to the norm. Hundreds of years of political theory and cultural assumptions about human nature tended to reinforce this view quite definitively, almost to the point where it's hard to imagine anything else. Many people even assume that this view of human nature is tantamount to a law of nature, immutable and unchangeable. But this is logically and empirically not true. Neither of these assumptions are a given. Shift the context, the tools, the underlying organizing values and frameworks, and we might get a different collective versus individual equilibria.

The mistake here is in interpreting prosocial behavior among individuals as collective behavior. It is not. It is the opposite. The reason it manifests so clearly when institutions are overwhelmed by events is that institutional, collective behavior drives out prosocial behavior. People don't look to one another for support, they look to the power at the center. They don't stoop to pick up a piece of trash since that is someone else's job. They don't assist their neighbors, or even know their neighbors, since they don't depend on one another. Collectives destroy communities by displacing prosocial behavior as the foundation of human relations, substituting institutional action for individual action. The larger the collective, the larger the institution, the less prosociality.

In times of stress, danger and need people become disconnected from the collective and once again become individuals, humans rather than cogs in a social machine. They can't so easily ignore the suffering of others since the institution can't be relied on to take care of human need. They shed their hardened collectivist shells, cease being a mob, a mass, and become thinking, feeling humans again. You can see it in their eyes which lose that far away stare and focus on their surroundings. You see real smiles as well as real tears.

What Tocqueville saw was America before it destroyed its communities by state displacement of local prosocial institutions and neighborliness. America is still much less institutionalized than most other nations and is by comparison much more prosocial, but that's nothing to be proud of. Progress has been made in recent years to restore communities by reducing the oppressive effects of state institutions, but it is still at a low level. Worse, those who don't understand human behavior work against the conditions required for prosocial behavior by seeking to reduce the independence of mind required for humans to be humans rather than members of a collective. Independent humans don't look to some authority to deal with present need, they take action themselves without prompting, reacting to the situation without hesitation or second thoughts. They behave responsibly since they believe themselves to be responsible, and deal with others as they would be dealt with themselves.

Mutual aid isn't just a natural human behavior, it is a near universal behavior among all animals, which prompts many to see it as an ancient, evolved behavior central to survival. A useful early expression of this idea can be found in Petr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Drawing on Darwin and Wallace Prince Pete combined his own natural history observations of many species, including humans, to formulate his views. Many have written since then about the evolved basis of altruism, cooperation and prosociality. Both biological and cultural evolution have been considered and much recent progress has been made using game theoretic methods to demonstrate the evolutionarily stable nature of prosociality.

It seems that collectivists get confused about defectors - cheats who betray their communities and free ride on the sociality of others. Though prosociality is dominant and stable it isn't universal. It is in the pursuit of perfection, the elimination of cheats, that collectivists go wrong and end up destroying all prosociality. They don't understand that prosociality is voluntary - must be voluntary - and the existence of a minority of cheats is necessary to stability. They don't understand that punishing cheats - personally - is one of the foundations of prosocial behavior.

The mechanical world view of old fashioned cybernetic thinkers - Fordists who think in terms of mobilized masses, mobs goose stepping to the tune piped by some power, following a leader - is slowly fading as the mass production phase of human civilization passes. Old timers and reactionaries resist but the socio-economic forces that created them are waning, making it ever more clear that they were deluded about human behavior, mistaking a temporary cultural overlay for something more basic, and failing to see that cultural overlays do not change human nature.

The world Tocqueville saw was largely pre-industrial since the world was in the early phases of that era when he wrote. His subject was a nation of dissidents who had escaped or been driven from regimented old societies in which humans had long been oppressed by military domination and monarchy. Modern collectivists still labor under a kind of monist world view that seeks to subsume independence and pluralism, to eliminate the messy individuality of free humans, to turn society into a machine that obeys command. They have retreated a bit from their purely mechanical metaphors and now prefer ant colonies to clocks as their guiding metaphor for domesticated human society, but it is still a cybernetic view seeking to simplify and control humanity. At a very deep level they are anti-humanist and anti-natural, revolted by the muck and mystery of life. We can feel sorry for them as they have been damaged by experience, but we do need to oppose their attempts to damage humanity.