Beyond policy and experience, an idea for how to to assess presidential candidates

The slate of Democratic presidential candidates is thinning out, but so far with no obvious convergence or any consensus even on what candidate qualities are most important. I have been casting around for a decision-making matrix that gets beyond hometown loyalties, whom I would like to have a beer with, which health care plan I like best, or the unsatisfying fallback of “winnability.” Here’s an idea.

Most of us value guidance from science when it is available. Is it possible that science could tell us anything useful about the electoral decision we are facing? To be sure, reliable science is exceedingly rare in politics and even more so in political philosophy. But it’s worth taking a quick look at anthropology to see the really big picture.

Start with the very basics. How has the human species come to dominate the world with mind-boggling technology and worldwide networks of commerce and information? The answer is our sociality. Other primates sometimes form fragile alliances, but two chimpanzees will never carry a log together. Yet we humans readily trade goods and favors, easily assume specialized roles, and naturally work together for common goals.

Our sociality is hard-wired. Our facility for language is unparalleled. Our mental machinery for recognizing faces is almost as sophisticated. And far from cautiously hiding our emotions and intentions from others, we advertise them — we blush when embarrassed and are the only one of the 200 or so primate species with bright sclera (the white of the eye) that tell everyone where we are looking.

We also carry the software for sociality — a powerful set of cooperative instincts. We feel guilty when we treat someone unfairly, we readily enter what we expect to be reciprocal exchanges, and we get angry when someone doesn’t respond in kind.

Here’s where politics comes in: Sociality changes with the circumstances. People in prosocial circumstances get more cooperative. And vice versa. Politics could be part of a self-reinforcing loop.

In a fascinating project in Binghamton, New York, evolutionary biologist David S. Wilson had his team drop addressed, stamped letters in different neighborhoods and tracked where they got picked up by strangers and mailed. The results matched other indicators of sociality, like the prevalence of holiday decorations and students’ behavior in sociality simulations. And it turned out that money was less important than a social structure that values cooperation and protects cooperators from opportunists.

I’m not thinking of cooperation just between Democrats and Republicans. What really matters is whether all of us as citizens, neighbors, employees, managers, students or teachers make a good faith effort to do a good job, help others, and make the community a better place. Do we try to moderate our primal self-interest?

Who would doubt that a more cooperative society could better address the challenges we face — climate change, gun violence, disparities in resources and opportunities, immigration? As John F. Kennedy put it: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Three of our cooperative instincts developed specifically to guide group activity. These are levers from which political leaders could help spin a self-reinforcing wheel of cooperation.

One is loyalty. One of our finest instincts is the willingness to strive and sacrifice for the good of our group. Soldiers sometimes fall on grenades to save their comrades.

A second powerful instinct is fairness. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savannah would perish if everyone did not pull their own weight, so they internalized social controls for sharing work and resources. Moreover, most of our ape relatives live under the thumb of an alpha male. But equal sharing of power and resources became a more successful strategy for foraging humans that was also embedded into our genes. We don’t tolerate either freeloaders or bullies!

And a third instinct is to follow rules and to enforce consequences for those who don’t. Experiments with children as young as 2 or 3 will find them instructing a cheating puppet to follow the rules.

Just as a leader can play on our darker side, a leader can reinforce these deep instincts for group cooperation. So rather than getting lost in the candidates’ sound bites, and the pundits’ speculations, we might ask three bigger questions:

1. Which candidate can best acknowledge the many shortcomings of our country and still make us feel proud to be members of a group we are willing to sacrifice for? Martin Luther King showed us how to do this — by asking us together to live up to America’s inspiring ideals.
2. Which candidate can best propose mechanisms to make all Americans feel they are valuable participants in a fair system that will equitably share our resources and responsibilities — without creating resentment about people getting something for nothing, or a big brother telling us how to live?
3. Which candidate can we trust to preside over an orderly society in which all people (and businesses and political parties!) are expected to behave like good citizens and are called out when they do not?

Policies matter. Experience matters. But in the end what matters more may be which candidate can best foster the capacity that has made the human race so fantastically successful: our ability to work with each other, help each other, and sacrifice for each other. And I think that person would be elected.

Bruce Peterson is a senior Hennepin County district judge. He teaches a class on Lawyers as Peacemakers at the University of Minnesota Law School. 

WANT TO ADD YOUR VOICE?

If you’re interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, see our Submission Guidelines.)