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Richard Sennett’s Togetherness
Literary Review, 02 February 2012
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
By Richard Sennett
(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 324pp £25)
Human interactions are not necessarily well served by human inventions. Take the ‘call tree’, the telephone answering device that makes you choose a series of options so that the company ‘may better direct your calls’. People hate these because they detect the exploitation inherent in the transference of a company’s inefficiency to its customers. But there it is, almost daily, making us all miserable. What the machine is doing is simplifying you into a series of attributes which it has been programmed to understand; it is making you ‘machine readable’. Ideally, it would like you to be a machine. Humans are just too infuriatingly complex.
That is my example, but, in its own mundane, consumerist way, it illustrates the thesis of Richard Sennett’s book: that ‘our emotional and cognitive capacities are erratically realized in modern society’. Building on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, he argues that ‘people’s capacities for cooperation are far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be’.
The starting point for any such argument is a refutation of the highly individualistic or atomised view of human nature that dominated economic and social thinking until, approximately, the Eighties and still persists among a few economic fundamentalists. In this, the individual was considered as a snooker ball-like unit simply bouncing off other balls. This was always implausible and, for Sennett, was replaced by the much more coherent view advanced by, among others, the psychologist Erik Erikson, that it is only through interactions with others that individuality emerges. We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.
Thus cooperation is the only way we can be human at all, and the suppression of cooperation – which is what the call tree does so ruthlessly – is the suppression of humanity. Together is a grand tour around the historical and cultural implications of this idea. Sennett starts at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900 and takes us, via evolutionary theory, religion, inequality, the quandaries of the Left and little oddities like his musical adventures with the editor of The Guardian, to his conclusion that ‘we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions’.
This is, you will gather, a somewhat rambling book and Sennett’s prose is far from focused. His conclusion is effectively the same as his introduction, though I don’t condemn him for this because the problem he is addressing is too fundamental to be solved by argument, advice or policy. It involves a reversal of the ‘age of brutal simplifiers’, as Jacob Burckhardt characterised the modern era.
We are very odd snooker balls whose colour and shape change constantly in contact with other balls.
The problem is that we are being ‘de-skilled’ when it comes to cooperation. Such skills are embedded in rituals and forms of discourse. The standard radio or TV debate on a topical issue involves representatives of the two opposing points of view arguing with each other in terms that cannot possibly be resolved. The format pushes them to extremes. Radio phone-ins are worse as their sole purpose seems to be to push each new caller to say something more stupid than the last. This is all entertaining but it is predicated on the idea that cooperation is impossible and, as far as the broadcaster is concerned, undesirable.
For Sennett the way out of this impasse is ‘dialogic cooperation’ which ‘entails a special kind of openness, one which enlists empathy rather than sympathy in its service’. In this form of conversation, listening is as important as speaking, because only by listening can you understand and empathise with the opposing point of view and thereby gain perspective on your own position.
Sennett says ‘dialogic cooperation’ is the ‘Holy Grail’, implying that it is out of reach. This is understandable. Individualism within the context of the free market has, since the Seventies, been the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy with which the Left had to come to terms because, until the crash of 2008, it seemed to be making us richer and to have defeated competing systems. But the Left has failed to respond coherently to the crash and the Right has quietly arranged for the bankers to go back to business as usual, so even that cataclysm has failed to lead us back to the dialogic Grail.
The answer is, as Sennett rightly says, to relocate the concept of the competitive free market within the cooperative human world. Much neo-liberal rhetoric seemed to treat the market as some kind of natural system with which we tamper at our peril. This attitude seems to have been supported by some dubious Darwinian rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. In fact, all markets are very intricate human creations, products of cooperation rather than competition. It is this kind of insight that may inspire new thinking on the Left – though perhaps not in Ed Miliband.
On the Right, anxieties about the impact of unbridled capitalism have tended to circle around the concept of community, an idea which seems to have sprung from Robert Nisbet’s book of 1953, The Quest for Community, and to have filtered all the way down to David Cameron’s Big Society and, in a rather different way, to the Tea Party in America. These are rather specialised and fragile responses to the problems of urbanised and polyglot societies. Of course, we want communities – they are nice things – but, in a big city, a degree of what Erving Goffman called ‘civil inattention’ towards others may be safer.
It is hard to summarise the scope and erudition in these pages, or fully capture the seriousness of Sennett’s intent, which is, essentially, to find a way out of the quandaries – particularly for the Left – of the post-Cold War world. He does not in the end find a way but he does find an image, that of Montaigne’s cat. When the great thinker played with his pet, he wondered if it was not, in reality, playing with him. Others are opaque, cooperation is difficult. But the cat and the man do play because both of them want to and that, in the end, ought to be the benign order of things.
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