Wheat Googling #4

What makes for a successful society?

Hello!

I hope you’ve had a nice couple of weeks.

Today, I’m thinking about what makes for a happy society. In the game I’m writing, cohesive, happy communities have more ability to influence the magic in the world than anything else, so leaders are much more incentivised to create them. People are still people - they’re no nicer than people in our world - but the magic ensures that even the most privileged can’t isolate themselves from the effects of an unhappy community anything like as effectively as they can in our world, so they do more to mitigate that unhappiness.

What do successful societies have in common?

For this one, I looked at Nicholas Christakis’s book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. He did lots of research into different societies across history, ranging from a ‘society’ of about 19 people who survived a shipwreck, to large ancient civilisations. I think the book has limitations (in my opinion, he picks and chooses what counts as ‘successful' and what counts as ‘a society’ for example), but it is a very interesting starting point.

He decides that all successful societies share eight characteristics, which he calls the ‘social suite’, and that these are based on eight human capacities so fundamental to us that any society that doesn’t allow their expression is doomed to fail. Here they are.

1. The capacity to have and recognise individual identity
2. The capacity to love our partners and children
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Co-operation
6. In-group bias
7. Mild hierarchy
8. Social learning and teaching

I think given the massively subjective nature of the question, the social suite is about as good a starting point as we are going to get, so I’m going to use it. But this list is about ‘success’, which is more about a society’s ability to endure over time than it is about how happy its members are, at least directly. So I need to know about happiness.

What do the happiest societies have in common?

Well, thanks to data from the World Happiness Report, we do basically know the answer to this now. Or at least, we know the six factors that account for three quarters of the variability in happiness between countries. Here they are:

• Having someone to count on
• GDP per capita
• Healthy life expectancy
• Freedom to make life choices
• Generosity
• Freedom from corruption

The report acknowledges that it has limitations (for example, they can’t include unemployment as an option because they don’t have comparable data from all the countries they collect from). They are also really clear that these factors are correlative, not necessarily causative.

Still, I think these two lists between them can create quite a coherent picture of a basically stable society that at least meets the necessary conditions for happiness. Here’s my attempt to combine them:

A successful, happy society has…

1. …wealth (GDP per capita)
2. …a robust welfare state (I am taking a leap here, but it’s hard to imagine a nation with high healthy life expectancy that hadn’t dealt with the major causes of early death/poor health: poverty, adequate housing, nutrition, and access to healthcare)
3. …a clear in-group whose people take care of one another (‘generosity’, ‘having someone to count on’, ‘social networks’, ‘co-operation’, ‘in-group bias’).
4. …meaningful choice of work, and the chance to pass on your skills (‘capacity to have and recognise individual identity;’ ‘freedom to make life choices;’ ‘social learning and teaching’).
5. …highly accountable leadership (this is ‘freedom from corruption’, obviously, but I think also ‘weak hierarchy’ because a leadership that is accountable to its people and faces real consequences for breaking their trust is necessarily un-autocratic).
6. …adequate leisure time (I’m counting this as part of ‘freedom to make life choices’, ‘capacity to have and recognise individual identity’, but also it’s ‘capacity to love partners and children’, and ‘friendship’: these things require time for them to happen in).

What shall I do?

My game is set on a warship, and its crew is the society I’m working with.

Some of these criteria are really easy to meet. Wealth, for example. The nation I have invented for this navy is already wealthy. Similarly, this is a ship of war. They definitely already have a clear in-group, and sailors are famously protective of their shipmates.

The others require more thought:

A robust welfare state. This one is, obviously, going to involve a pretty hefty deviation from the historical ships of the period. My sailors will be paid a decent wage, be housed in much better conditions, and have access to a much more varied diet (I will go into this in a later newsletter when I tell you all about the food they brought for a three year trip on the Discovery in 1901!). They will also need to upgrade from the standard ‘barber-surgeon’ to an actual physician.

Meaningful choice of work. Actually this one is probably OK if I make the navy ‘volunteer’ only, and give them plenty of chances to leave if they want to. That way, I can assume that everyone on the crew has chosen to been there.

Highly accountable leadership is a lot more difficult, because of the promise of the premise. I think when you read an Age of Sail book, you’re sort of expecting rows with short-sighted admirals, and protagonists being placed in difficult situations by ignorant superior officers. This sort of thing is also a really good way of generating plot, and I am loathe to do without it. So I think I’m going to fudge it a bit. I can’t turn my fictional nation into a democracy without losing a great deal of the flavour of the setting and an inconvenient amount of the plot. But I can have a system in which sailors can vote with their feet and simply refuse to serve with a particular officer again. In a situation where you just can’t sail the ship without a certain number of crew, and you can’t press them into sailing, this would essentially make leaders accountable at least for keeping their crew happy. I think I will also allow a crew (if they have a majority) to insist on a court martial of a superior officer.

Adequate leisure time. Well, if you saw my giant chart in Wheat Googling #2, you’ll know I’ve already got them adequate leisure time. But what are they going to do with it? A friend of mine who worked in the merchant navy for many years told me that, without enough to do, too much leisure time is a hindrance. This is a big question, so I’ll save it for another letter. For now I’ll just say that although the navy in my game can make a special effort to keep partners and friends together, getting to see your children is going to have to be a shore-leave only thing. Maybe they get their transport costs home from port covered.

All of this has precedent to some extent. Pirate ships and even the American Navy (which was entirely crewed by volunteers) were a lot more democratic than the British Royal Navy. Sailors in the British Navy had a bunch of hobbies they fitted into their very limited leisure time: they could all sew, and a lot of them could do complex embroidery, and play instruments, and dance. There was loads of teaching and learning amongst the ordinary crew and the midshipmen (the teens).

But obviously what I’m proposing has the potential to feel qualitatively different. Every time I deviate from my source material in a big way, I feel frightened that I will lose something fundamental to the promise of the premise. But if I fail to do so, I will certainly lose narrative coherency. Time to choose the lesser of two weevils.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

Grace xx

PS: What do you think you would need in order to be happy on a naval frigate?

Next time

Having looked at the conditions for happiness on a society-wide level, I want to look at what we know about what makes people happy on an individual level.

This week’s interesting link

This year’s World Happiness Report.

Each year, they pick a different theme. This year they have focused on social media use.