Peripheral Visions

cooperation—they cooperate in noncooperation. The compromise that saves a factory employing many hundreds of workers, the conscientious compliance with regulations to avoid pollution that passes up opportunities for quick profit—these are not regarded as achievements, yet they are examples of an essential kind of heroism. All too many of the achievements we celebrate are won by converting an opportunity for cooperation into an opportunity for competition, won by forcing an increasingly interdependent world into the restrictive mold of conflict.
    We know now that the natural world is not only a world of competition, for the creature that destroys its environment destroys itself, yet we continue to celebrate the autonomous hero who battles with his fellows and with the natural world at everyone else’s expense. He is visible, easy to focus on at the expense of family, community, and natural world; but the welfare of an individual is not bounded by his skin. It is possible, on the one hand, to go up the scale and identify one’s own welfare with that of a community or even with the planet, or, on the other, to go down the scale to study zero-sum gaming at the level of molecules rather than individuals, as sociobiologists do.
    It would be interesting to review a range of celebrated achievements and valued activities, asking which ones consist in competition for a share in a finite pie and which involve enlarging that pie—enriching the earth. The true achievers could be recognized as those who do not primarily compete or deplete but instead add to the store of understanding or beauty, increase environmental diversity or the human capacity for cooperation. Only a handful of statesmen would fit that definition of achievement: the peacemakers and builders of new institutions, like the social security system. Many artists and scientists. Many entrepreneurs who discover new niches of possibility. And all those who as parents or lovers, gardeners or healers, make it possible for others to flourish. Action taken to permit diversity enriches the earth.
    Even truth is not always a zero-sum game, for although some kinds of propositions are mutually exclusive, the many truths of faith and imagination could flourish side by side. “There are no whole truths,” Alfred North Whitehead said. “All truths are half truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
    The planet may be the final test of whether we prefer competition or cooperation, for the earth is a home we share with many species, not an asset to be divided up among the human players alone. From one point of view, the ecosystem is a player to which, if we try to defeat it, we will lose, but with which we can cooperate in sustainable systems. We treat the planet as a rival when we speak of struggling against natural forces, or dominating nature, but we could learn to treat it as a lover or a child. Imagery of cooperation with nature is scarce in the arid regions that gave us our religions and our history of warfare and exclusive truths, but wonder is also a resource. All three traditions value charity and hospitality, all three work with caretaking and stewardship.
    Centuries in which land has been treasured sometimes create landscapes of extraordinary beauty and human skill in caring for them. In mountainous areas in northern Luzon, whole mountain slopes have been terraced for rice paddies, to bring as much land under cultivation as possible; when the paddies are flooded the mountains look like faceted jewels. Parts of this land are so fertile that fence posts sprout into trees, yet the modern history of the Philippines has been a history of the concentration of landownership in the hands of the friars or of an emerging aristocracy, so that most of the population was landless and poor. In Israel, when you walk across the arid landscapes, every hillside is experienced as a text of common history. Hunters in Africa or the Australian outback have studied the land they hunt across and peopled it with legends. But in times of migration or colonization, land conquered first by invasion and then by the plow may finally become an impersonal commodity.
    It is curious that the sins of disobedience against God have been emphasized so much more than the sins of hatred between brothers. The story of Jacob’s household goes on at some length. He eventually has twelve sons, which might be taken to symbolize the first population explosion, accounting