Peripheral Visions

choose as models. For some, wealth shared with others loses its savor, and want becomes doubly bitter. They act, even in the classroom, as if every ounce of understanding could become someone’s property. Instructors reinforce this approach to learning by their methods of grading, and medical schools virtually require it of their applicants.
    The opposite of a zero-sum game is one in which the prize is not fixed. Instead, it grows if the players agree to share it, and may even disappear if they do not. Those who are preoccupied with competition, with doing better than others, are the least likely to thrive in such a climate.
    Cultures often seem to allow for opposites in one form or another, however, especially in complex societies, and themes of cooperation coexist with themes of competition. Side by side with the most competitive of premeds, there are students who recognize the world of knowledge as a place with room for all. The most fruitful innovation in education may prove to be a new emphasis on collaborative learning at every level. Knowledge, however much we try to assess and protect it, is potentially at the opposite extreme from land: too narrowly preserved, it may be lost, like many secrets of medieval craftsmen; widely shared and debated, it is likely to grow. Science is not only a method of discovery and verification, it is a pattern of sharing knowledge.
    Modern thinking about evolution has made it clear that survival is not a simple zero-sum game; the new inference is that unless we share the planet with other species we imperil our own survival. Competition has its uses but often failures of cooperation lead to mutual loss: a factory that goes out of business because no compromise is found to end a strike, putting all the workers on the street, or nations that are incapacitated by mutually destructive warfare. The belief in limited good may lead a man to sabotage a neighbor out of the intuition that the neighbor’s success will somehow be his loss, and simplistic interpretations of the survival of the fittest will lead him to watch his neighbor’s failure without concern and without empathy. But the recognition of a common good may lead to preventing a neighbor’s failure, in the belief that the entire community will benefit. In international politics, if warfare is the cost of error, then diplomacy is not finally a zero-sum game. Even in free-enterprise systems, government must occasionally rescue failing industries, as in the Chrysler bailout.
    Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.
    Noncompetitive strategies are more likely to be adopted when people know one another. But “knowing one another” can take many forms, and alliances come into being for many reasons: alums of the same college, even if they have never met. Members of the same regiment. Homeboys. Trust and cooperation are created symbolically and affirmed by such mechanisms as Israel’s Law of Return, which asserts that every Jew has a right to come home to Israel. In many settings where people do not really know one another, they act as if they did. The enmities or affinities that become the basis for cooperation or competition are socially constructed. The famous distinction between a house and a home acknowledges that home is an idea, a belief, a context for sharing that may be as large as a nation or a planet, yet in some traditions cooperation thrives only against a background of enmity, as in the often quoted Arabic proverb “My brother and I will fight my cousin; my cousin and I will fight the stranger.”
    The logic of twelve thousand years of agriculture is now obsolete as a model for social life in developed countries, where fewer and fewer work or live on the land and food production is no longer labor-intensive. The problem we face is not the limitation on the supply of land but the lack of jobs; yet jobs can be created, as they have been over the past century, absorbing a vast outflow of labor from agriculture. New jobs depend on the imagination and prosperity of the community. Money and credit are both artifacts of