Richard Sennett's new book about co-operation shares its title with a much-loved film: Lukas Moodysson's Together, which was made in 2000 but set in a Swedish free-love collective of the 1970s. The film is a warm, nostalgic and slightly fuzzy hymn to the pleasures and pains of co-operative living, complete with Abba soundtrack. Its message is that learning how to live together is not easy: it takes time. Sennett's book says much the same, though with lashings of sociology in place of the sex. But it has an edge that the movie lacked, because of how the world has changed in the last 10 years. The 70s are more remote than ever. Who needs free love in the age of Facebook? Online social networks have given us a thousand and one different ways to make immediate connections with our fellow creatures. This is potentially very bad news for co-operation.
The web might look like a giant co-operative endeavour, but it's not. It's an endless array of communities. Community life is relatively easy. All it takes is finding people who think like you do. Co-operation is hard because it is about learning to live with people who think differently or don't know what they think at all. Sennett wants to remind us that this is a skill, and like any skill it takes patience and practice. Together is the second book in Sennett's homo faber trilogy, about man as a maker of things. The first was The Craftsman, which dealt with the pleasures of doing things with your hands. The third will be about city living. This one explains the joys and pitfalls of making anything happen co-operatively.
The view popularised by Malcolm Gladwell is that to get really good at something requiring skill takes at least 10 000 hours of practice, whether it's football or rocket science. Sennett thinks co-operation is no different, which means that only a few people are ever going to be really good at it. He gives examples of people who have put in the hours drawn from all walks of life, from musical ensembles to social work. To be a good community organiser, for instance, is so difficult precisely because the organiser can't simply become part of the community. He or she has to find ways of connecting the community with the outside world. The easy thing to do when you are trying to help people is to identify with them. Sennett praises those who take the much harder route of maintaining their distance while keeping up their commitment.
He celebrates the woman who works at a centre for the unemployed and has discovered that the best way to help her clients is to treat them with a lightness of touch rather than to feel their pain. This takes years to learn. And Sennett admits with refreshing honesty that he may not have the skills himself. His own attempts to give something back to the working-class Chicago community in which he grew up foundered on his inability to find the right level of involvement. He couldn't balance commitment with distance and ended up drifting away.
The fact is that very few of us are going to have the time or energy to become adept at co-operation; we need short-cuts. This is where the rituals of Sennett's subtitle come in. Over time patterns of behaviour develop that give us all pointers in the right direction. For instance, if you want to know how to co-operate, good manners would be a start. The problem is what happens at times of dramatic social change, when these rituals fall apart.
Sennett has a fascinating discussion of what he calls "the great unsettling" that took place at the Reformation, when the co-operative patterns of the Catholic church were undermined by a new individualism. The old ways of living together started to look hollow and manipulative, but the new patterns of behaviour were crude and disruptive. It took a long time for people to work out how to co-operate with each other again. Something similar happened during the scientific revolution. Laboratories and operating theatres were, to start with, cold and inhuman places, in which genuine co-operation would have seemed impossible: it was all hierarchy and elaborate performance. Now, science and medicine provide some of the most fruitful sites of co-operative activity (most of us can only look on the co-operative spirit of a surgical team with envy).
The information technology revolution means we are currently living through another great unsettling. Workplaces are being hollowed out, jobs are often short-term and connections can be made and lost in the blink of an eye. Employers still like to talk about "working as a team" but as Sennett points out it's hard to know what this means any more. At the same time, the web has yet to generate its own "civilities" to replace the ones we are losing. A lot of net activity appears friendly and collaborative enough blogs, wikis, the twitterverse but look more closely and most of it is still about hierarchy and performance. A recent Private Eye cartoon summed it up. The family sits down to Christmas dinner, each member glued to an iPad, until someone pipes up: "Stephen Fry's just eaten his first sprout!"
Sennett is not pessimistic: he thinks we'll work out how to use this new technology eventually. But because he knows that co-operation is hard work he is pretty unsentimental about it. He certainly doesn't see it as any sort of palliative. For instance, he is scathing about the idea that co-operative activity can be a form of therapy for the depressed or suicidal. Co-operating with other people doesn't make us well; we need to be well in order to do it at all. He is also sceptical about some of the fashionable forms of political co-operation. As he points out, most people are deeply turned off by coalition politics, which is meant to celebrate co-operation but too often looks like a sham of compromise and broken promises. It fuels rather than soothes antagonisms among the voting public. Better squabbling politicians and co-operative citizens than co-operative politicians and squabbling citizens. I'm sure he's right about this.
He is also acute on the subject of the inequalities of co-operation. Because it is hard to co-operate, it is much easier for those people who already have plentiful resources. Far from bridging growing inequalities, the web can enhance them by making genuine co-operation accessible only to a privileged few. Face-to-face activity has become an increasingly scarce resource and yet it is only in face-to-face activity that the most fruitful forms of co-operation are to be found. As Sennett notes of his own experiences, when internet collaborators discover something they really want to do together, they tend to jump on a plane in order to meet up. Great for people who can afford it. Those who can't get stuck with the ersatz version. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that we live in a world in which small, wealthy elites are getting better at co-operating with each other, and every one else is getting worse.
In many ways this is an old-fashioned book, which is part of its charm. Unlike almost everything that is currently being published on social activity, it has very little brain science in it. It is not about the neural wiring that makes us tick and the psychological biases that send us off the rails. It's about the environments we create for ourselves. Its heroes are social reformers and artists, not economists and psychologists. You'll learn here about utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier and community organisers such as Saul Alinsky. There's no freakonomics in sight.
That said, Together is not always an easy read. It is curiously organised and sometimes repetitive (there are three different sections titled "The Workshop"). Sennett says some of this is deliberate: he wanted to produce a "dialogic" rather than "dialectical" book that would turn reading into a co-operative enterprise. I'm not sure this was such a good idea. Old-fashioned, hard-copy books need structure: though it's nice to give the reader room to answer back, the fact that the book can't take these responses on board makes it a frustrating experience. For all its failings and its incivilities, the web is the place to experiment with new kinds of reading, in the pursuit of genuine co-operation between author and reader. It just takes patience and practice.
David Runciman's Political Hypocrisy is published by Princeton.
