Boyd Cooper Quotes

Sir Barry Domvile sensed the chill as soon as he arrived in Nuremberg for the 1937 Reichsparteitag. 'Thought the SS more truculent than usual,' he observed ... And he was further disappointed when the Führer passed by him at the reception without a word. Indeed as Hitler walked along the line of British guests, he remained stiff and expressionless until introduced to Francis Yeats-Brown when he burst into smiles. Yeats-Brown's autobiography, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930), had been made into a Hollywood movie (starring Gary Cooper) that had become a great favourite of Hitler's. He thought the film such a valuable demonstration of how Aryans should deal with an inferior race that he had made it compulsory viewing for the SS.

Boyd’s review of the literature on these approaches led him to the following impressions. It is advantageous to possess a variety of responses that can be applied rapidly to gain sustenance, avoid danger, and diminish an adversary’s capacity for independent action. Organisms must cooperate or, better yet, harmonize their activities in their endeavors to survive in an organic synthesis. To shape and adapt to change, one cannot be passive; indeed, one must take the initiative. The combination of variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative—particularly their interaction—seems to be the key that permits one to shape and adapt to an ever-changing environment. These qualities aid in getting inside an adversary’s OODA loop. With these insights in mind, Boyd began his historical review of conflict, theorists, and practitioners of the art of war.

When I was in the seventh grade, in a health class, the teacher read an article. A mother learned that the neighbor children had chicken pox. She faced the probability that her children would have it as well, perhaps one at a time. She determined to get it all over with at once. So she sent her children to the neighbor’s to play with their children to let them be exposed, and then she would be done with it. Imagine her horror when the doctor finally came and announced that it was not chicken pox the children had; it was smallpox. The best thing to do then and what we must do now is to avoid places where there is danger of physical or spiritual contagion. We have little concern that our grandchildren will get the measles. They have been immunized and can move freely without fear of that. While in much of the world measles has virtually been eradicated, it is still the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children. From money generously donated by Latter-day Saints, the Church recently donated a million dollars to a cooperative effort to immunize the children of Africa against measles. For one dollar, one child can be protected.

Higher commands must shape the ‘decision space’ of subordinate commanders. They must trust and coach. They must encourage cooperation and consultation among lower levels. They must accept bad news and be open for suggestions, lower-level initiatives and critique. It is thus more a question of leadership and appreciation of what is going on and comparing this to what is expected.

As long as most individuals trust that existing institutions are reasonably legitimate and that any felt needs for reform are achievable by means of ordinary political activities, there is considerable scope for large scale collective social action. However, legitimate institutions, and trust of them, are the result of an evolutionary history and are neither easy to manage nor engineer. […] Without trust in institutions, conflict replaces cooperation along fault lines where trust breaks down. Empirically, the limits of the trusting community define the universe of easy cooperation […] At worst, trust does not extend outside family […] and potential for cooperation on a larger scale is almost entirely foregone.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

We believe that the human capacity to live in larger scale forms of tribal social organization evolved through a coevolutionary ratchet generated by the interaction of genes and culture. Rudimentary cooperative institutions favored genotypes that were better able to live in more cooperative groups. Those individuals best able to avoid punishment and acquire the locally-relevant norms were more likely to survive. At first, such populations would have been only slightly more cooperative than typical nonhuman primates. However, genetic changes, leading to moral emotions like shame, and a capacity to learn and internalize local practices, would allow the cultural evolution of more sophisticated institutions that in turn enlarged the scale of cooperation. These successive rounds of coevolutionary change continued until eventually people were equipped with capacities for cooperation with distantly related people, emotional attachments to symbolically marked groups, and a willingness to punish others for transgression of group rules.

Is there an evolutionary consequence to this distinctive quality of story? Researchers have imagined so. We prevailed, in large part, because we are an intensely social species. We are able to live and work in groups. Not in perfect harmony, but with sufficient cooperation to thoroughly upend the calculus of survival. It is not just safety in numbers. It is innovate, participate, delegate, and collaborate in numbers. And essential to such successful group living are the very insights into the variety of human experience we’ve absorbed through story. As psychologist Jerome Bruner noted, “We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative,”37 leading him to doubt that “such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in narrative form.”38 Through narrative we explore the range of human behavior, from societal expectation to heinous transgression. We witness the breadth of human motivation, from lofty ambition to reprehensible brutality. We encounter the scope of human disposition from triumphant victory to heartrending loss. As literary scholar Brian Boyd has emphasized, narratives thus make “the social landscape more navigable, more expansive, more open with possibilities,” instilling in us a “craving for understanding our world not only in terms of our own direct experience, but through the experiences of others—and not only real others.”39 Whether told through myths, stories, fables, or even embellished accounts of daily events, narratives are the key to our social nature. With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.