Surrendering is about being at peace with the things we cannot change. . . . that sad but easeful core of peace that is the reward when all is renounced. [Maestro Benjamin Zander commenting on the solo cello statement near the end of the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony] Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. [Brian…
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Value for Monday of Week 23 in the season of Growth
Mutuality – Reciprocity – Cooperation
Low-level interpersonal relationships are essentially transactional.
- Without the sense of collaborating with like-minded beings in the pursuit of the ever unattainable in art and scientific research, my life would have been empty. [Albert Einstein]
- To make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner. [Nelson Mandela]
- . . . Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. [Martin Luther King, Jr.]
Mere reciprocity, or cooperation, does not imply any good feeling toward others. People who do not otherwise get along can cooperate to achieve a common end or purpose.
Early experiments in game theory, particularly in the prisoner’s dilemma, revealed that repeated interactions between members of a community, of as few as two people, were essential in establishing the mechanical foundations of cooperation. Homo sapiens would not have become a social species but for the advantages of repeated interactions within community. These dynamics are solely transactional.
Like tolerance, reciprocity is a good starting point toward high-level ethics and spirituality. Reciprocity appears to be “a basic psychological mechanism” that is rooted in evolution. It is present as one element in romantic relationships: “A person can reap psychological benefits when sharing their accomplishments or capitalizing with a partner. These benefits often depend on whether a partner responds with enthusiasm . . .” “the concept of reciprocity is a useful analytical tool that enhances understanding of midwife–woman relationships and the emotion work that these may generate.” Simple though it may seem, reciprocity is a somewhat amorphous concept, with many definitions, and “four dimensions of transfers: Balanced (e.g., Balanced reciprocity), Reputation-based (e.g., Generalized reciprocity), Debt-based (e.g., Calculated reciprocity), and Unconditional (e.g., Negative reciprocity).”
Cooperation is a more popular and more widely studied phenomenon. “Cooperation is vital for the survival of many species . . .” “Early research was focused on altruism in the social insects, where the problem of cooperation was easy to see. In more recent years, research into cooperation has expanded across the entire tree of life, and has been revolutionised by advances in genetic, microbiological, and analytical techniques.” Like reciprocity, cooperation is essentially mechanistic. It appears to have played an important role in primate sociality. It is of benefit in innovation activities, and in many other ways.
These observations lay bare a deficiency in the Golden Rule, as stated. Merely looking within self to decide how others wish to be treated can turn the Golden Rule into an instrument of control and injury. Spirituality transcends mere reciprocity.
Real
True Narratives
Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012). “A look at the relationship between the prime minister and the president.”
From the dark side:
- Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC – 1492 AD (HarperCollins Publishers, 2014): when reciprocity fails. “It was only when the Christians and Muslims turned on the Jews, singling them out for humiliation and, in the case of the Christians, grotesque insult and slaughter, that Jews began to withdraw or be pushed into their own separate spheres.”
- Jeff Shesol, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021): “. . . Shesol’s story raises inescapable questions about whether space exploration is quite what its enthusiasts have often claimed.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
In the 1940s, a new discipline called game theory emerged within the social sciences. This discipline, which has advanced rapidly in the decades since its inception, studies the character of interactions between human beings and other organisms in dynamic environments in the context of competition and limited resources. I place this essential discipline under this heading not to suggest that mutuality and cooperation are in any sense inevitable, or even likely in general terms, but only to point out that game theory tells us how we can structure interactions to promote cooperative behaviors that lead to socially desirable outcomes. This grouping reflects a desideratum, not a scientific principle. Of necessity, the game theory is the study of conflict as well as the potential paths toward sustainable outcomes such as often arise from cooperation.
Game theory’s main foundation is the evolutionary principle, because the emergence of new behaviors under varied circumstances is what game theory is centrally about. We will get to cooperation as an element of spirituality later. For now, an understanding of the practical dynamics that ease the path to that development is our focus. This topic belongs in the pantheon of ethical considerations, because it explores the nuts-and-bolts dynamics of ethics and its antagonists.
- John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944): the seminal work that gave birth to the discipline.
- William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb (Doubleday, 1992).
- Harold W. Kuhn, Classics in Game Theory (Princeton University Press, 1997).
- Michael Maschler, Eilon Solan and Shmuel Zamir, Game Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- Luca Lambertini, Game Theory in the Social Sciences: A Reader-Friendly Guide (Routledge, 2011).
- Roger B. Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1991).
- Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, Game Theory (MIT Press, 1991).
- Steven J. Brams, Theory of Moves (MIT Press, 1993).
- Steven J. Brams, Game Theory and Politics (Dover Publications, 2011).
- Joel Watson, Strategy: An Introduction To Game Theory (W.W. Norton, 2007).
- James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Andrés Perea, Epistemic Game Theory: Reasoning and Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton University Press, 2013).
- Here is a link to a site listing academic journals on game theory, and a link to the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Here are some leading works on using game theory to produce fair and just outcomes:
- Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984).
- Robert Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (Princeton University Press, 1997).
- Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor, Fair Division: From cake-cutting to dispute resolution (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor, The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody (W.W. Norton, 1999).
- Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (Random House, 2016): “‘Connectography’ represents Khanna’s latest effort to arbitrage his personal networking skills into a theory of geopolitics. He is interested in how connectivity and geography will affect the future of global affairs . . . ”
The roots of cooperation among humans are biological/genetic, and so are the roots of selfishness. In A Natural History of Human Morality, Michael Tomasello fleshes out the two-edged nature of human ethical inclinations. The belief that humans are hard-wired to treat each other decently has some basis in fact but so does the belief that we are hard-wired for self-interest. In an earlier work, A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello argues that our unique ways of thinking are grounded in the fact that “humans participate in shared intentionality in a way that their nearest primate relatives do not”.
- Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard University Press, 2016).
- Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014).
- John F. McNamara and Olof Leimar, Game Theory in Biology: Concepts and Frontiers (Oxford University Press, 2020): “. . . it is not just the abiotic environment that matters to organisms, but often equally or more the characteristics of other organisms. The Fitness of one individual . . . depends on the strategies of others.”.
- Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Holt, 2020): “The book revolves around his visits with three scientists studying animals in the field: sperm whales in the Caribbean, chimpanzees in Uganda and macaws in the Amazon of Peru. Along the way, he repeatedly emphasizes that the profundity of what he’s seeing is that each species has a culture. Members learn from one another, pass down traditions — a navigation route, a toolmaking skill, even a parrot’s dialect — in a way that was once thought to be fundamentally human.”
From the dark side: deceit: Deceit is antithetical to cooperation. A form of dishonesty, it is as hard-wired into us, and other species, as is cooperation.
- Martin Stevens, Cheats and Deceits: How Animals and Plants Exploit and Mislead (Oxford University Press, 2016).
- Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others (Allen Lane, 2011).
- John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2015).
- Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (University of California Press, 2002).
- Margaret Peacock, Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East (University of California Press, 2025).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth (1929), about a failure of mutual purpose in a marriage.
- Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter: A Novel (Soho, 2021): “Snow was a cop once, but pervasive racism meant he could never be fully part of the brotherhood. He can, however, try to protect his nearest and dearest, and when the tables turn and Snow is in dire need of aid, they can look out for him as well.”
Poetry
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartets, Op. 18 (6) (1801) (approx. 140-170’) (list of recorded performances): in his first set of string quartets, Beethoven uses the four instrumental voices to highlight the rich textural palette of the string quartet. As a start, a cooperative effort among the players is necessary to achieve a good effect. Top recorded performances are by Budapest String Quartet in 1952; Quartetto Italiano in 1972; The Lindsays in 1979 (Nos. 1-2; Nos. 3-4; Nos. 5-6); Takács Quartet in 2004; Quatuor Mosaïques in 2005 (Nos. 1 & 4; Nos. 2 & 3; Nos. 5 & 6); and Dover Quartet in 2020. Individually, the quartets are:
- No. 1 in F major (approx. 21-27’)
- No. 2 in G major (approx. 22-26’)
- No. 3 in D major (approx. 20-23’)
- Quartet No. 4 in C minor (approx. 21-25’)
- No. 5 in A major (approx. 27-29’)
- No. 6 in B-flat major (approx. 24-27’)
Conductor Ferenc Fricsay was known for his collaboration and partnership with the orchestra. Here are links to his playlists, and to videos of him conducting.
- Lord Berners, “The Lord Berners Collection” album (2016) (156’)
- William Walton, Duets for Children (1940) (approx. 11’)
Miles Davis and John Coltrane made an iconic jazz pair, though each was a premier soloist and leader. Live recordings include those at Olympia Theatre, Paris, March 21, 1960 (86’); at Tivoli Konserthal, Copenhagen, March 24, 1960 (44’); at Kongresshaus, Zürich, April 8, 1960 (59’); and at Kurhaus, Sheveningen, April 9, 1960 (46’). Their recorded releases include:
- The Complete Columbia Recordings (1955-1961) (384’)
- In Stockholm 1960 (221’)
- “Miles & Coltrane” (1955) (47’)
Other works:
- Raag Puriya Kalyan is a late afternoon raag, “a fine blend of Raag Yaman in Uttarang and Raag Puriya or Raag Puriya Dhanashri in Poorvang”. Performances are by Ali Akbar Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Jasraj, and Prasad Bhandarkar.
- Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 12 in C Minor, D. 703, “Quartettsatz” (1820) (approx. 9-10’) (list of recorded performances): Schubert passes a musical idea back and forth among the players. The work “. . . is not telling a story; it is showing a posture towards the world . . .”
- Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni, Duos Concertants for violin & viola (approx. 69’)
- Elliott Carter, String Quartet No. 2 (1959) (approx. 23’): the quartet combines instrumental independence with cooperation. Carter wrote: “In it the four instruments are individualized, each being given its own character embodied in a special set of melodic and harmonic intervals and of rhythms that result in four different patterns of slow and fast tempi with associated types of expression. Thus, four different strands of musical material of contrasting character are developed simultaneously throughout the work. It is out of the interactions, combinations, cooperations, and oppositions of these that the details of musical discourse as well as the large sections are built.”
- Robert Lach, Neun Lyrische Stücke (9 lyric pieces), Op. 23 for viola d’amore and piano (1920) (approx. 38’)
- Franz Schmidt, Quintet in A Major for Piano left-hand, Clarinet & String Trio (1926) (approx. 38’)
- C.P.E. Bach, Chamber Quartets: Wq 93, H 537 (1788) (approx. 15’); Wq 94, H. 538 (1788) (approx. 14’); Wq 95, H. 539 (1788) (approx. 17’)
- Franz Berwald, Quartet in E-flat Major for Piano & Winds, Op. 1 (1819) (approx. 23’)
- Berwald, Grand Septet in B-flat Major (1828) (approx. 23’): “. . . his handling of the wind instruments, which he generally treats as a group, is particularly fine”.
- Evan Ziporyn, Piano Trio - Typical Music (2000) (approx. 30’) is “a three-movement suite for piano, violin and cello.”
- Adolphus Hailstork, Symphony No. 1 (1988) (approx. 23’)
- Gordon Jacob, Oboe Quartet (1938) (approx. 22-23’)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata for Piano 4 Hands in F Major, K. 497 (1786) (approx. 25-37’) (list of recorded performances)
- Mozart, Sonata for Piano 4 Hands in C Major, K. 521 (1787) (approx. 23-29’) (list of recorded performances)
Albums:
- David Feldman, “Horizonte” (2016) (59’)
- David Friesen Circle 3 Trio, “Interaction” (2019) (113’): “Thriving on selfless awareness and their uncanny compatibility, the trio’s joyful interactions offer surprise, beauty, and depth at every turn. “…a fabulous musical fabric with rippling and sometimes broodingly percussive, tumbling grooves upon which foundation he creates a unique sonic architecture.”
- Ehud Asherie Trio, “Wild Man Blues” (2019) (47’): “. . . swing is the essence here, and Asherie is ably accompanied by two masters of timekeeping: bassist Peter Washington—who serves as the ballast in Charlap’s trio—and drummer Rodney Green. Though they take some solos of their own, they exist primarily in this group to accentuate Asherie’s sensitive musings.”
- Geoff Eales, “Synergy” (2004) (66’)
- The Gary Smulyan and Frank Basile Quintet, “Boss Baritones” (2024) (71’): “This pairing of New York’s finest baritone saxophone exponents brings a feast of swinging, straight-ahead and joyful jazz in the hard bop tradition.”
- Hamid Motebassem & George Crotty Trio, “Nishabourak” (2025) (39’): “Deeply contemplative, the atmosphere of this recording is hypnotic and immensely restful. The cello and delicate percussion of Jani are perfect accompaniments, drawing a link between Iranian traditional music and the ragas of India.”
- Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Katrine Polwart, “Looking for the Thread” (2025) (48’): “. . . Carpenter was looking for something new and reached out to Fowlis and Polwart, two highly acclaimed Scottish singer-songwriters whose work she had long admired. Prompted by admiration and respect for each other’s work, the trio quickly came up with a plan and, once able, met in Northern Scotland for an extended writing retreat to see what magic could be made.” “. . . the tenderly rendered music feels like waves lapping gently on the shore.”
- Omar Rios Melendez & Alex Wilson, “The Art of Deep Connection” (2026) (54') “is very sunny, angled firmly towards a very strong Nicaraguan focus. There isn’t too much jazz soloing and it sits in its own space. But there is a strong jazz touch however sublimated thanks mostly to Wilson who plays brilliantly and shows his versatility again.” “Here are duets that flow seamlessly, almost telepathically, and improvised solos - and two solo tracks - that beguile and dazzle, as befitting two maestros with collaborative smarts and a lifetime's worth of immersion in their craft.”
- Walter Smith III, “Twio Vol. 2” (2026) (51:00) is a cooperative venture among the leading saxophone, the supporting bass, and the energy of the drums. “While there’s plenty of melodic and harmonic radiance here, perhaps what’s most staggering is the collective temperament and feel for texture, the way the group’s volume and intensity are held in perfect balance throughout every interaction.” “This is not a blowing session per se, or a saxophonist unleashing a series of lengthy Sonny-Rollins-like solos, but rather an exploration of harmonic ideas and some of the better conversational tenor saxophone -upright bass-drum dialogues on record . . . there’s no shortage of ideas exchanged among these players.”
- Cocanha, Los Sara Fontán, & Tarta Relena, "4132314" (2026) (37'): “4132314 was born from the desire to musically recreate the memory of the female workers of the former Barcelona textile factory Fabra i Coats. . . . The album is the result of a collective creative process, bridging textile history and sound experimentation.” “The varied traditions of Mediterranean folk music are reimagined through a modern, experimental lens in 4132314, an epic collaborative project from the acclaimed Catalan vocal duo Tarta Relena, the genius compositional partners Los Sara Fontan, and the percussion and vocal Occitan duo Cocanha.”
Sometimes people acting together for a common cause can try to outdo each other in performance. So it was with these artists whose competitive spirit led to a creative tension that enhanced the music.
- Albert Collins, Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland, “Showdown!” (1984) (49’)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Santana, “Give and Take” (lyrics)
- Supertramp, “Give a Little Bit” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Marc Chagall, Musicians on a Green Background (1964)
- Wassily Kandinsky, Reciprocal Accord (1942)
- Paul Klee, Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (1903-05)
- Edgar Degas, Musicians in the Orchestra (1872)
- John Ruskin, Zermatt (1844)
- Prince Grigory Gagarin, The Alexander Column in Scaffolding (1832-33)
- Adriaen van Ostade, Village Musicians (1655)
Film and Stage
- African Queen, a story about two wildly different people learningto work together for a common purpose.
- Atanarjuat(The Fast Runner), a rare film about the Inuit people, their customs and beliefs: “The film is about romantic tensions that lead to tragedy within a small, closely knit community of people who depend on one another for survival, surrounded by a landscape of ice and snow. It shows how people either learn to get along under those circumstances, or pay a terrible price.”
- Day for Night, in which the characters are not in cohesion
- Dodsworth, in which a married couple are not unified in intent
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly(Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo): The good one isn’t any better than the other two but he is smarter and he understands basic game theory.
