What Should We Be Worried About?

COMMUNITIES OF FATE

MARGARET LEVI

Political scientist, Bacharach Professor of International Studies, University of Washington; author, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism

We all live in communities of fate; our fates are entwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Our individual and group actions often have consequences, sometimes unforeseen, that affect others in significant ways. Moreover, there are those, beyond our families with whom we feel entangled, whose interests and welfare we perceive as tied to our own. In the lingo of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Who is included in the “one” and who in the “all” differs among us, and therein lies the rub.

How we understand our community of fate matters for the perils the world faces today and into the future. That so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a limited set of others and define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying, because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enables them to deny complex and cross-cutting interdependencies—local, national, and international—and ignore their own role in creating threats to their own and others’ well-being. Climate change and religious zealotry are among the well-documented examples of individual and group actions that have significant spillover effects. Perhaps most alarming is our collective failure to incorporate future generations into our communities of fate. The implications for almost all public policies are enormous.

But there is hope. It is possible to expand the community of fate well beyond the network of those we personally know. We continually make decisions that have consequences for others; there is now evidence that if we understood those consequences and expanded our community of fate, we might make different choices. For example, we buy cheap goods without acknowledging that they may entail labor that is badly paid or treated. As research by Michael Hiscox and Jens Hainmueller details, more information and a different framing can transform the consumption patterns of at least some buyers.

Jaron Lanier, in Edge, has argued that the “new moral question” is whether our decisions are self-interested or take others into account. Whom an individual includes in her community of fate (what Lanier labels “circle of empathy”) is a moral question, yes, but it is also an empirical question. Organizational and institutional factors can explain variation and transformation in the community of fate. They can enable individuals to revise their understanding of the consequences of their actions and change the boundaries of their communities of fate. Of critical importance are the group’s governance arrangements and the procedures for enforcing them. All groups have rules and norms defining membership and appropriate behavior; membership organizations, including government, codify those rules and norms into formal institutions. How the community of fate—and not just membership—is defined requires leaders committed to principles they are willing to uphold in unforeseen circumstances, punishment of violations (to make these commitments credible), and provision of services, security, and other benefits members expect.

But the community can be narrow or broad. To expand the community of fate beyond the actual members of an organization depends on the desire and ability of leaders to convince members that their welfare is tied up with a larger set of others, often unknown others. Success further requires providing new information, in a context of strong or potential challenge to its veracity. Organizations most effective in expanding the community of fate are those allowing members to question what they’re being told and seek additional information if need be. In practice, this implies some form of participatory governance or bottom-up democracy.

The broadening of the community with whom individuals feel mutual dependence is generally the result of factors promoting collective action: incentives, punishments, monitoring over time. But with a push from the behavioral economists, we now recognize the equal importance of appeals to fairness and the creation of emotional attachments. At least some people, some of the time, will make individual sacrifices in order to combat unfairness. What Elisabeth Wood labels “the pleasure of agency” can motivate actions that serve a larger whole. As Ernst Fehr, Samuel Bowles, and others find, implicit and emotional incentives can lead to complementarities rather than substitution of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

So the good news is that communities of fate can be expanded to include strangers and future generations. But there is a problem here—and two additional sources of worry. First, we are far from figuring out how to use our scientific knowledge about our interdependencies to make more people aware of their shared welfare. How do we extend what we have learned from the lab and case studies to a larger set of institutions and organizations? Second, and even more troubling, the mechanisms that draw people out of their narrow self-serving behavior can be used for good or ill. Terrorists and other zealots of the religious, nationalist, or political kind believe they are serving a larger collective good, at least for those within their definition of the collective to be served, and many sacrifice for their cause. How do we inhibit these groups and promote the governments and organizations that serve a wider public? That is, indeed, a problem worth worrying about.