Now we must turn to the hubs in our lives, and the peculiar hold they have on us.
CHAPTER FIVE
HEAVEN, HELL AND HUBS
What are hubs and how do we choose them?
The way to get ahead is to join powerful groups. The key to social life is not unfettered competition, nor universal cooperation, but a subtle mix of the two–competing fiercely to join up with the most attractive cooperators.
Paul Seabright27
Hell and heaven, a long time ago
The disciple asks, ‘Buddha, what do heaven and hell look like?’
Buddha smiles, and escorts him to hell. People are seated around a long table laden with mouth-watering delicacies. However, with chopsticks a metre long tied to their hands, nobody can get the food close enough to their mouth to eat. Hungry and frustrated, they tangle and quarrel.
Buddha then takes the disciple to heaven. At first sight the picture is identical–a table groaning with tempting food. But here the people are smiling. They are using the chopsticks to feed each other. In small and large groups, they cooperate to achieve a common purpose.
Happily, by this measure, human life is more heavenly than hellish. From the earliest times our progress has been driven by success in groups–from the hunting party herding prey through a narrow pass where they can be easily taken, to the intricately choreographed team of scientists at CERN, the nuclear research institute near Geneva, smashing atoms to glimpse the fabric of the universe. Hubs are the places where people gather to socialise, collaborate, organise and achieve those works that are unthinkable for the individual. They are where we have our most intense and structured relationships–our strong links.
Hubs are the main places, the main means, for human cooperation. For sure, we can cooperate through weak links: I stop a stranger and ask the way; an acquaintance calls me to ask if I have information about a job she wants. But the deepest and most fruitful forms of cooperation, whether emotional, social or economic, take place in hubs with strong, structured relationships: in families, groups of friends and work groups. These human groups achieve new miracles of cooperation and production daily, extending our scientific and economic achievements well beyond our biological heritage. And this cooperative drive is so ingrained in us that it arises in the most unlikely conditions.
The Western Front, France, 1914–18
In the most horrific fighting known in modern times, the armies of the French and British empires confronted their German counterparts. Both sides were dug into trenches stretching for 475 miles and competed to advance a few thousand feet either way into no man’s land. The cheap and depreciating currency of competition was human life. More soldiers were involved in the war (seventy million), and more people died (twenty million, including civilians; with another twenty million serious casualties), than ever before. On one day alone, 1 July 1916, the British army saw 19,240 of its men killed and suffered more than 38,000 other casualties as the Battle of the Somme began. Most were slaughtered in the first hour of fighting.
Despite the carnage–which was completely unexpected before the war started, and out of all proportion to any war objectives–the generals and politicians on both sides remained resolute in seeking to exterminate the enemy and gain unconditional surrender. Yet, even in this hell, spontaneous cooperation arose between opposing front-line soldiers. Troops from one trench shelled the other with mortars in compliance with their orders, but at precisely predictable times and locations. Enemy soldiers reciprocated. As a result, casualties were sharply reduced. Somehow, without any formal communication, groups of troops on both sides managed to signal a cooperative strategy that brought at least temporary relief.28
Most of us instinctively understand the importance of hubs, particularly the cooperation that happens within them, to our lives. And, unlike weak links, hubs are familiar. Look at the group structures we participate in every day–family, workplace, clubs, and all the other nerve centres of our world. A school is a hub, as is a gang or a church. So, too, is our circle of friends, or, more likely, several largely distinct circles.
At the centre of hubs are the people who run them. Close to the centre, too, are the founders of the hub and, if it is a corporation, its main owners. Then there are the people who spend a substantial part of their life within the hub–employees, volunteers, other participants.
Outside the hub, yet essential for its success, are the people who connect to it–the users of the product or service, its suppliers, the local community. A flourishing hub usually has many more outsiders connected to it than there are people within it. All popular hubs generate an economic, social or psychological surplus. The proof of a hub’s popularity is that more people connect to it than to similar–competing–hubs. Google is far more popular than any other search engine; the Roman Catholic Church has more followers and is much richer than the Church of Scientology.
Since we spend most of our waking hours in hubs it’s not surprising that they are familiar to us. But like many intimate things viewed from a close vantage point, it’s often hard for us to put hubs in perspective. Considering that our usefulness and happiness in life are substantially determined by these hubs–by their quality, how they fit with our aspirations, and our roles within them–this is a little curious. For reasons we’ll explore, we often don’t think consciously or carefully about our hubs. In which hubs do we participate? What do we give them and what do we get out of them? Are we in the right ones? What forces are keeping us there? Should we be in different ones? Apart from our families, we can select which groups we should belong to and our roles within them. Clearly, choice of hubs is crucial to what happens to us in life, but there are good reasons why we make bad choices about them. First, though, we need to probe a little deeper into why hubs are so important to humanity, and why there are so many more to choose from these days.
The key to human progress is that we specialise. Within hubs, individuals perform different tasks so that they concentrate on what they do better than anyone else; and each group specialises in what it does best. When you think about it, specialisation–what economists call the ‘division of labour’–is the pinnacle of cooperation. It rules out individual self-sufficiency, and the more specialised the world becomes, the greater everyone’s dependence on everyone else. We can’t eat shoes, maths lessons, carefully riveted aeroplane wings, or legal opinions. So it follows that when we specialise, we must also trade goods and services. To do so, we must cooperate in a dense web of mutual reciprocation. Our differences bind us together; divisions of function do not divide, but rather unite us.
It seems that humans were the first intelligent beings to specialise and trade. Homo sapiens organised into the very first specialised hubs–the family, with different roles in which men exclusively hunted large animals, while women collected plants, looked after small children, and sometimes hunted small animals. Archaeologists say humans began trading very early, at least forty millennia ago, with some tribes making superior hunting weapons, and others bartering with seashell ornaments hundreds of miles from the sea. So humans specialised both within groups and between them.
Neanderthals, who were around before Homo sapiens and were also contemporaries, were apparently stronger, faster and at least as intelligent as our ancestors. But they did not divide tasks by gender–men, women and children all hunted large beasts. Nor did the Neanderthals have specialist tribes or trade between them. So specialisation was a human innovation, and it is probably the reason why humans survived when the Neanderthals did not.