The Wager

Okay, full confession.  I checked out a whole stack of books from the local public library right around the holidays, and I am just now getting through them all.  Most of the ones that I checked out were released a while ago, and there were multiple copies available to check-out.  In other words, I don't feel too bad that I had checked out library books sitting unread waiting for me, though there's still a small degree of guilt that someone else could have been waiting for them too.  Oh well.

One book that I read quickly, because I knew it was popular, was the new book The Wager by the author David Grann.  I've read a few books by Grann in the past (for example, The Lost City of Z, which was made into a movie that I thought was very good).  He is an absolutely outstanding writer!  I keep waiting to see the movie "Killers of the Flower Moon" until I've read the book!  I've read great reviews about The Wager, and all I can say is that they were right - the book is amazing!  Grann tells the true story of the HMS Wager, a 28-gun square-rigged ship in the British Navy that sank off the coast of Chile in 1741.  The ship was part of Commodore George Anson's famous expedition around the world during the War of Jenkins' Ear (yes, that was the name!) with Spain in the 1740's.  The Wager wrecked off the coast of present-day Chile following a difficult passage around Cape Horn.  The crew was stranded on a desert island, which they named Wager Island.  During a prolonged stay, the crew split off into factions, leading to murder and mutiny, which is really the subject of the Grann's book.  I don't want to spoil the book for you, but I couldn't help think about similar stories that I have read, including the famous "Mutiny on the Bounty", the Robbers Cave experiment in psychology (which I've mentioned previously in a post entitled "Robbers Cave"), William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, Sea Venture (a great book by Kieran Doherty that links the original Jamestown colony, the discovery of the island of Bermuda, and William Shakespeare's play The Tempest), and of course, Joan Druett's superb book, Island of the Lost, a tale of two different ships - the Grafton and the Invercauld - who wrecked on the remote Auckland Island with two completely different outcomes (see my post, "A Tale of Two Leaders").

Joel Achenbach wrote a story for The Washington Post ("Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized") and referenced work by the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis (I've mentioned his research before - see my posts "Peer Pressure" and "2024 Leadership Reverie Reading List"), who wrote a book called Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society about an area of research called the "evolution of cooperation" (see my post, "Tit for Tat" for more on this field).  Our ancestors lived in a world of limited resources in which their survival depended upon cooperation.  We evolved to form tightly knit groups, and group survival often required competition with other groups. 

Christakis states, "The evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred, which is really sad." The simple fact is that we are prone to form groups.  And study after study (see in particular the Robbers Cave experiment, but also the shipwreck cases mentioned above) suggest that we vigorously defend our own groups, often at the expense of those who are not within the group.  Christakis mentions that "children as young as two will prefer other children randomly assigned to the same T-shirt color."  In other words, these tendencies to cluster or sort into different groups is deeply ingrained in our DNA.

There is no doubt that our world has become more polarized.  Whether we are more polarized now than at any other point in our nation's history is debatable.  I am not sure that I fully agree with Achenbach's thesis that today's polarization is a natural extension of in-group versus out-group behavior and the evolution of cooperation.  And admittedly, he does suggest that other factors are also in play.  Regardless, I thought Achenbach's story was interesting, and it is certainly worth a read.