Chewing Over the Issues

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Gift Economies as the Beginnings of Social Life

From the Wall Street Journal.

Gifts That Keep On Giving

By Lewis Hyde

When we were students, young and poor, a friend of mine would give his family books for Christmas. Library books. He would seek out works well matched to his relatives’ interests, check them out, wrap them up and deposit them beneath the tree, leaving his loved ones the single task of returning them to the library once they had been read.

An Indian giver, some would say, and more correctly so than they might think. Years ago when I first set out to write a book about gift-giving and art, I thought it would be useful to figure out how that phrase came into being. The first recorded use turns out to appear in Thomas Hutchinson’s 1765 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the implication being that something odd had happened when the Puritans first met up with Native generosity. “An Indian gift,” one footnote reads, “is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” Over two centuries later we still use the phrase, its sense now broadened to refer to anyone who gives a gift with the clear expectation that the recipient should not keep it.

The experiences that Hutchinson’s forebears were trying to name turn out to demonstrate a simple ethic well known in all traditional gift-exchange societies: The recipient of a gift is more its custodian or steward than its owner. “The gift must always move” is the old wisdom, meaning that what we have received from others must eventually be passed along again, either the actual gift itself or something of similar value and meaning.

In such commerce lie the beginnings of social life. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once noticed a simple ritual performed in restaurants in the south of France. Two diners, strangers to one another, might be seated at the same table, each with a small carafe of wine. As the meal began, each man would pour his wine into the other’s glass. In an economic sense, nothing happens. And yet, simple community has appeared where previously there was none.

Such is the cardinal mark of gift exchanges: They connect us to one another. If someone’s generosity touches you, especially if you feel gratitude, and most especially if you are so moved as to give something in return, then friendship may arise, and family life, and collectivity. To say the same thing from the opposite perspective, one of the great virtues of a market in commodities is that it usually leaves no enduring connection. You can drive from New York to Los Angeles—eating in restaurants, renting hotel rooms, swiping your credit card at the gas pumps—and never have the least bit of intimate contact with anyone. If that were not the case, if in every small-town diner the cook got you talking about your dreams and desires, responded to them with generosity, poured his wine into your glass… You might never make it to the coast.

A cash economy enables mobility and, for better or worse, it makes it easy for us to live with one another without connection. But gifts bespeak relationship. Not just the simple binary relationship of two men in a cafe, either, nor that of friends and lovers: Gifts do not just move, they move outward into some larger circle.

Probably the most famous example of a capacious cycle of gifts comes from the Trobriand Islands where, early in the last century, Bronisław Malinowski witnessed a gift economy of striking breadth and complexity. In a ceremonial commerce known as Kula, the Massim peoples carried two ritual gifts—armshells and necklaces—from island to island in canoe journeys that covered hundreds of miles and took years to complete. Years, that is, to make the full circuit of the archipelago, for eventually each gift given would return to those who gave it away (though they, in turn, would give it yet again, the Massim being another group of early Indian givers).

Gifts that move in a circle differ markedly from simple two-person exchanges. Once the circle appears, no one will necessarily receive a gift from the same person to whom he or she first gave. Something may come back to the donor, to be sure, but there is no way to guarantee that. When you give to someone from whom you do not receive, it is as if the gift disappears around a corner before anything returns. You must give blindly then and, if something does in fact return, you must feel a kind of blind or generalized gratitude.

Giving anonymously is one good way to open the circle outward. It diminishes the chance that recipients might feel embarrassed or subordinated, and it helps a donor stand aside from praise and blame. Gifts that are passed from one generation to the next also open the circle. If your parents once dedicated themselves to your well-being, you may thank them for that, but when it comes to concrete expressions of gratitude, it will be better to direct them toward the young. We cannot teach our teachers; we must teach those who follow after. In a 12-step program, the gift of recovery goes to the newcomer, not back to the old-timer.

Perhaps the most surprising domain for open-ended gift exchange in recent years has been the Internet. There are thousands who have donated time and expertise to write Wikipedia’s millions of encyclopedia entries. Unpaid contributors from around the world have created open source code for the Linux operating system, and maintain it still. Some years ago, more than 85,000 anonymous and untrained volunteers—so-called “clickworkers”—went online to help NASA classify all of the craters on its maps of Mars. In these and countless other cases, the Internet has revealed that an impulse to give without promise of return is as modern as it is aboriginal.

Poets especially have long been familiar with the economy of gift exchange. The Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz once reflected on the Greek concept of storge, the kind of affection that a parent feels for a child or that teachers might feel toward their students. It is also possible, Milosz wrote, “that storge may be applied to the relationship between a poet and generations of readers to come: Underneath the ambition to perfect one’s art without hope of being rewarded by contemporaries lurks a magnanimity of gift-offering to posterity.”

That magnanimity is hardly the exclusive provenance of poets. At his death, Benjamin Franklin left a bequest to the city of Boston, a sum of money that (with interest) served, two centuries after Franklin’s birth, as the foundational endowment of the Franklin Institute of Technology. Nor was this Franklin’s only gift to his country. He was also the co-founder of the still-existing Pennsylvania Hospital, and the force behind Philadelphia’s first library, “the mother of all the North American…libraries,” as he called it. “These libraries,” he once wrote, “have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” And, of course, they have made it possible for poor students, even today, to circulate the gifts of art and learning, independent of the commodity culture that otherwise dominates so much of our lives.

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

The Prisoner’s Dilemma - The Gandhi Game

From The Ethical Spectacle.

The Ethical Spectacle September 1995 http://www.spectacle.org

The Gandhi Game

Mahatma Gandhi invented a unique variation on the prisoner’s dilemma: a move that was neither cooperation or defection, but which fell in between (we will call it noncooperation).

In an iterated game played with the British, Gandhi and the forces he represented could have chosen violence, which is the ultimate defection. Instead, by choosing noncooperation as his move, Gandhi, over a series of turns, led the British to understand that he was an honorable and reliable adversary: firm enough never to earn the sucker’s payoff, Gandhi could also be trusted not to turn to violence.

A violent defector, such as a terrorist group, compensates for inferior numbers and armaments with surprises and betrayals: ambushes, bombs planted in civilian surroundings, ruses to lure victims. Such groups establish that they can never be trusted, that there is no middle ground of cooperation, since the sole thing they desire is the death of their adversary (maximum payoff for the group, sucker’s payoff for the government they are fighting.) Though, as the PLO has recently shown, it is not completely impossible for a violent terrorist group to evolve a form of cooperation with its adversary, it is a difficult and unlikely evolution, given the group’s willing self-identification as a scorpion.

By contrast, Gandhi’s tactics illustrate that noncooperation shares certain traits with cooperation: it establishes that the noncooperator is consistent, honorable and reliable. Though the noncooperator cannot be trusted ever to comply with the laws he believes to be unjust, he can be trusted to live consistent with his own announced rules, offer no surprises, and to withhold himself and his followers from violence. Thus, noncooperation tends to lead to a high degree of respect between adversaries, which ultimately serves as the basis for a settlement of their disputes. Thus, an “All Cooperate” strategy for both sides is much likelier to evolve from a strategy of noncooperation than from “All Defect”.

It is a significant limitation of noncooperation that it can only succeed if one’s adversary, no matter how harsh, unjust and imperialist, is also somewhat honorable and is reluctant to use or endorse violence. Gandhi was successful with the British who (with a few exceptions such as Amritsar) did not commit massacres; but he would have died on the first day of opposition against the amoral, treacherous and violent Nazis, who would have executed him and all his followers and thrown them in a pit. In other words, there must be something about the adversary that makes it clear that the grounds for cooperation already exist. If the adversary will not stop short of any act of cruelty or murder, noncooperation is not an option and the only available responses are violence or silence.

Gandhi’s strategy of noncooperation had another significant advantage: it more effectively builds mutual confidence among followers than any other strategy of resistance. By definition, a terrorist group, to escape law enforcement and produce surprise, must be small, secret and disassociated from the general population; its supporters, though fervent, may have relatively little idea of who its leaders are, what they stand for or what they will do next. Noncooperation builds a stronger network of mutual links in the population, because it is open, its rules are disclosed, and involvement in its acts, rather than being secret and dangerous, is usually open and considered honorable. While most people in any society will stop short of involvement in violent acts—even when they approve the ends—noncooperation offers a form of action that almost everyone is brave enough to be involved in and may feel good about. While active supporters of terrorist groups—providers of money, cars, weapons—must be extremely secretive about their actions, supporters of noncooperation may wear physical badges (such as black ribbons during the Vietnam war) that enable them to identify each other. The result is a kind of positive reinforcemnt that leads to an upwelling of self-confidence and arouses a desire on the part of more people to get involved.

Gandhi said, “we must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Following him, millions of people, at the same moment that they played the noncooperation card against the British, were playing “All Cooperate” in a game with each other.

Nonviolence is better when the preconditions for it exist.