Generosity Is Not Foolish

Hakan Altinay explores why generosity, goodwill and trust are vital for the functioning of any society.

Significant sections of our world are built on the assumption that generosity is foolish. Transactionalism and the narrow and shallow rationality it represents demand to be accepted as the only option. After all, did Adam Smith not advise all of us to secure our supper by appealing to the self-interest of the grocer and the butcher, and not to their compassion? Nobel laureate Milton Friedman did opine that greed is just fine. Companies look for people with sufficient killer instincts when they need to expand their sales force. Economists categorize generous behavior as lingering shadows from a bygone age leading to big mistakes and maladaptive choices. Celebrity coaches argue that a graceful loser is a loser per se. International relations experts lament the fact that American people do not want raw power and prefer it to be sautéed in moral purpose. If you believe these voices, you would only look for generosity and magnanimity in museums and fairy tales.

Yet, there are dangerous blind spots in the narratives and frameworks which valorize narrow interests and ridicule generosity. One major variable that is overlooked is how central goodwill and trust are for the functioning of any society. Some decades ago, Robert Axelrod, later to become President of the American Political Science Association, set out to explore whether cooperation was possible in a world of egoists and without any central authority. He invited strategists, game theorists and other interested parties to come up with the most successful way to navigate a dilemma where it is wiser to cooperate if you trust your partner, but you also do not want to be a naïve sucker. In the first tournament, the simple strategy of starting with being a decent person and then reciprocating what your counterpart did, won over other more cunning and complicated strategies. We could chalk this up to naivete or inexperience, but Axelrod organized other tournaments where the success of the simple and decent strategy was known to all participants, yet still no amount of cunning could produce higher returns in the long run. This was due to the fact that when enough decent people had rewarding interactions with each other, their patterns of cooperation proved stable, resilient and norm-setting for all.

Axelrod continued to test this staggering result under various scenarios and one of the challenges was noise; that is what if we were decent, but our intentions were simply misunderstood and that misunderstanding triggered a chain of retaliation which left us at a lower level than where we could be? It is there that Axelrod felt the need to introduce generosity, namely that we would be well advised not to take offense easily and give up on our peers prematurely. In other words, it is not foolish but rational to be generous and not narrowly transactional.

Anthropologists, in turn, have identified ubiquitous practices around gift giving as one manner where so many of us signal that what is at work is not a narrowly transactional relationship. We give gifts and may hope to receive gifts in return, but there is no immediacy or guarantees for a return gift, and the gift says we are OK with that because we value long term wellbeing over immediate returns. We encounter similar sensibilities in different parts of the world: When the Chinese sage, Confucius, was asked by his students what three key elements were for a community, his answer included food, security and trust. His inquisitive students then pressed him to give up on two and wonder what he would retain as absolutely vital, and Analects tell us that trust turned out to be the non-negotiable element.

The reasoning seems to be that while the temporary absence of food or security can be remedied and those things can be resupplied in case trust and goodwill exist, if trust is gone then resupply of food or security is impossible, and the community is doomed. Others such as Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and his students have demonstrated the centrality of play as well as its civilizing functions in our history. There is of course competition and contest in all forms of good play, but these are couched in thick fabrics of bonhomie and fair play. In play, there is never doubt that trust and camaraderie can be assumed. 

Recalibrating the current disdain of generosity matters on multiple fronts. For example, we risk misunderstanding our own genealogy. Many would recall the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 as a key turning point in Western history, but how many of us recall that it was accompanied by the Charter of the Forest, which provided the vital framework for the maintenance of our commons and everyone’s access to them? Nordic societies still cherish and abide by allmansratten, which allows everyone the right to roam, enjoy and benefit from fruits of nature and our commons in general.

We would do well by also remembering that we have a Thomas Paine for every Adam Smith, and an Elinor Ostrom, also a Nobel Laureate, for every Milton Friedman. Machiavelli did argue it was better to be feared than to be loved, but Abraham Lincoln’s rule of thumb was to get to know better anyone whom he did not, yet, like. We are more Little House on the Prairie than Dallas, and fortunately so. People such as Robert Putnam and Jon Yates had warned that because we misidentified the sources of our strength, we cannibalized what made us great. There is a risk we dig ourselves in a deeper hole, if we ignored our public minded traits and traditions, and condemn ourselves to narrow and shallow transactionalism.

Rehabilitating generosity matters also when it comes to new skills such as listening. After decades of prioritizing public speeches and killer presentations, there are signs of a nascent interest in listening. This correction has been overdue. Listening well is extraordinarily important for a healthy community, but what precisely constitutes listening well?

Some have called it active listening; other are partial towards deep listening, but I would posit that the appropriate adjective is generous. There is a tremendous difference between listening to someone you consider an adversary when your goal is swift reply, and listening with your heart’s ear where the goal is to fully hear and comprehend your partner, to whom you extend your good faith and the benefit of the doubt. Listening well and a wholesome conversation that it entails are distinct from, say, debate. Debate is conducted by two parties under the assumption that both sides are finished products, and are closed to each other’s benign influence. No serious debater would concede that their adversary may have a good or new point, and yet conversation means, both etymologically and poetically, changing simultaneously. There is no conversation, if at least a theoretical possibility of seeping into each other is not in the cards.

Research shows that people who feel heeded and listened to generously, become generous listeners themselves, which triggers a virtuous cycle, badly needed in an age of rage and shout. When we listen as we should, the other becomes not hell as Sartre once seemed to suggest, but a kindred spirit whom we yearn to hear and understand. Generosity of this kind is generative and we are thirsty for this type of generosity. Late Kemal Dervis was clear on this issue: Pure transactionalism condemns the world to paralysis and mayhem.

As we start this holiday season, we can do worse than contemplate the role of generosity in our own lives. All of us are here because we were beneficiaries of the generosity and care of other people, some of whom we know and many of whom we will never know. Planting trees whose shadow you know you will not sleep under has been treated as a sign of a healthy society in many parts of the world. That may be because we pay our debts not to those whose generosity we basked and thrived under, but we pay it forward in the belief that only such a non-transactional mode will keep this wheel of humanity turning. Most of us are, thankfully, in a position to be generous. All of us are able to listen generously. Generosity is neither foolish nor naive; it is essential and deeply rewarding. Thinking we can do without generosity may be the greater naivete, and we need to be wise and courageous enough to correct this miserable myopia, if we are to retain any chance of overcoming our global challenges.

Hakan Altinay is a professor of the practice at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life, and the Director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul. He has previously served as a world fellow at Yale University, and a senior fellow at the  Brookings Institution. 

Photo by Julia M Cameron