Cooperative Difference
Everywhere we look, we see the fruit of cooperative difference masquerading as the product of hierarchy.
Consider the hockey team. The forwards, defensemen, and goalie are different. They complement one another, and form a whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts. Within their roles, they are specialized. Their differences create a whole which thrives on the differences amongst the players. A goalie behaves differently than a forward, differently than a defenseperson, and from that exact difference comes successful game-playing.
It is the case that when certain things are positioned in relation to one another correctly, they create something which is larger than the sum of it’s parts. A hockey team is one example. Another is a movie set. Actors act works written by writers, lit by lighters, and directed by directors. The whole of filmmaking is a collaborative dance of difference.
Human beings are different in proclivities, talents, height, interests, relationships, location and context, opinion. Often, the thought-shapes of the dominant society are inclined to rank these differences into desirable and undesirable, commander and obeyer, above and below. The dominant way of understanding these differences is through the frame of hierarchy, which places the coach of a hockey team or the director of a film as the commander, leader, and punisher of the rest of the team. But if we look more clearly, we can recognize that even where these command relationships exist as agreed-upon specializations in a group, they are not the ultimate source of group success. Cooperative difference is.
An ethic of complementarity is the recognition that these many differences amongst humans are not hierarchally oriented, but oriented instead by difference and context. We advance the ethical argument that human difference is best interpreted as cooperative and generative. Both tall people and short people benefit from living in communities which have diversities in height. Both the able-bodied and people who are disabled benefit from living in a society which supports accessibility for everyone. This is not just a passive ‘force’ of the world, it’s an active human process towards ethical human subjectivity. Cooperative difference is not only a fact of the world, it’s also an opportunity, a potentiality, for human beings to better take advantage of these facts of reality to increase human thriving.
Freedom is a social ecology of cooperative difference.
There are ways to work together while remaining different. This is true both of the truly free future world we want to create, and it is true also of the tools and pathways we have to get there together, which will necessarily involve finding new ways to work together in difference, sometimes closely, and sometimes at arm’s length, towards our universal goals of an ecological, democratic, and fundamentally more humane society.
