Divide and unite

That life is full of surprises is something completely out of the question. Every day we get new chances to see how our expectations are summarily trumped by yet another situation where our predictions prove to be useless. And beside our hurt self-esteem, I personally welcome these occasions to revel and wonder in the astounding variety of life.

As a trained programmer, one of the first methods I learned to approach a problem was the "divide and conquer", based on the old saying by Roman emperor Julius Caesar to describe his strategy to take the Gaul: if the enemy is too big to be defeated in a single battle, it is always possible to try to fragment their forces so that each piece provides an easier victory, even if several battles are required throughout the war. In computer science this is the root for algorithms like quick sort: when trying to put a number of elements in order, you pick one at random, put all elements lower than that element in the initial part of the list and all the higher elements in the latter part. This provides then two smaller lists (typically each one would be about half the length of the original one), which can in turn be sorted with much less effort applying the same algorithm repeatedly.

Photo: Michał Kosmulski

In anthropological terms the principle is equally applicable. In fact, most of the societal devices are intrinsically aimed at ensuring the harmonious collaboration of a great number of individuals, so that the survival of the group against rivals can be supported by the numbers: having a large population does not guarantee the success in battle (technological advances can counter that), but bigger numbers almost always improve the odds. Then in modern times, it is well-known that, in any military action, one of the prime set of targets is the communication facilities of the enemy to avoid a coordinated response. However, there are situations where division can be on advantage.

As I mentioned before, I have started to read "The WIERDest people in the world" a few weeks ago and, among many other interesting contents, I ran into two examples where division is, in different ways, helpful. The first case is the tribe of the Matsigenka, who, rather than living in relatively large villages prefer to dwell in hamlets of little more than single family groups. While this makes them very weak from the military point of view the environment they live in does most of the job for them: in the middle of the jungle, and knowing the terrain, it is very easy to make ten people disappear without a trace, what makes them very had to catch. They are not very good at fighting, but they hide so well that they almost never have to confront the enemy.

The second example are the Ilahita in Papua New Guinea: it is a well known fact that going together through difficult circumstances makes for an excellent binding. However, in most societies there is just a very small group of people with whom a person would eventually bind, which effectively results in a limitation to the maximum size a  community can grow before fragmentation. Surprisingly, this tribe has incorporated into their social norm a device that actually forces them to interact with a wider set of people. In this society the norm is that males have to undergo five different rites of passage at different ages.The key aspect is that division rules effectively force them to share these experiences with a different set of young males each time.

The division rules establish the separation of males into two different groups along five different dimensions.The first division splits the population in two halves, let us call them A and B. But then the second division creates groups a and b which do not have a big overlap with the prior A and B groups. As a result of this successive division, there are already four different groups depending on where the individuals landed or each of the divides: Aa, Ab, Ba and Bb. The beauty of this process is that, after five different rituals, there are up to 32 distinct groups. However, even if each individual has shared all their five initiation rites with only 1/32 of the males, there are many more with whom they have shared at least one. The mix-and-match strategy means that, in all likelihood, every grown man has shared some grueling experience with every other man in town, even if it is already a sizeable settlement, out of sheer probability. And the sharing of this kind of experiences is precisely the type of see that can hold a society to father: once you have shared at least one rite, it becomes much easier to the two of you to work together again in the future. That is precisely the reason why this tribe manages to get their towns up to a few thousands of inhabitants as opposed to the couple of hundreds that neighboring tribes manage to gather. Surprisingly, having an effective way to divide the people helps to keep them united.

Looking at this strategy from the print of view of modern day societies I have realized that many team- building exercises rely precisely on that random assignment of partners: you are commanded to form a single file and get numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, so that the one person you know in the group lands unavoidably in a different team (because they were just next to you in the line, they got a different "team" number). In fact I recently heard about an experiment where student representatives in several schools were chosen by a lottery instead of elected by popularity, and it turns out that this got a wider variety of representatives into the governing bodies, particularly people who were incredibly well suited for the task even if they were not popular enough to be elected for the job that they so aptly held. Because, in the end, the talents needed to be a good leader are not necessarily the same as the ones to be elected, so you might be appointed for the seat even if you are utterly incompetent, while another skilled student might have to endure your disappointing period in office just because they do not have the clout to get elected.

The bottom line of my reflection today is that, as is the case in many situations, being forced to pick among a relatively small number of choices can, at times, be a helpful device: limiting the options means that you have to make do with whatever you have, even if it is slightly sub-optimal. But being sub-optimal does not mean, by a long stretch, that it is not good. And in fact having a chance to cooperate with a wild set of partners can be a perfect example of just how productive the cooperation with strangers can be. This does not mean in any way that every stranger has something useful to contribute, but it we insist on limiting ourselves to known co-workers we are definitely missing out on something valuable.

Admittedly, one problem with diversity is that a successful collaboration by different parties might require in fact different environments, so that both of them could work with you profitably, just not with one another. If you are, like me, a person with wide interests, you will probably try to make both contributions possible while keeping the conflicts to a minimum. Because in the end you do not know how well things can go until it you give it a try and get surprised. Have a nice evening.