A friend told me the other day that one of the secrets to a successful relationship is as follows: When having an argument to never bring up anything from the past, say, more than 6 months ago.

That makes a lot of sense- because if you’re always going to be held accountable for things you did ages ago, then there’s no sense in bothering with anything at all- if you can never seal that crack in the glass, if she’s always going to refer to it rather than accepting it and moving on- seriously, then why bother? You might as well move on and start anew elsewhere.

It occurred to me that this is what me and my girlfriend have always implicitly tried to do- we became conscious of the problem of recursiveness, and we try to agree to skip past the inevitable mess that follows when each person punishes each other. Otherwise, a relationship begins to turn into a Cold War, what John Mayer describes as Heartbreak Warfare. (Once you want it to begin, no one ever really wins…)

That immediately occured to me to be consistent with the abstracted ideas in Axelrod’s Evolution of Co-operation. My friend saw parallels with the Christian idea of grace and forgiveness evolving from Judaism’s eye for an eye (which, fundamentally, is Axelrod’s Tit For Tat.) I enjoyed thinking about how religion, morality and spirituality emerges from individual interactions, how there is a certain philosophical wisdom that’s consistent with what is mathematically verifiable, and how natural selection may have precipitated all that- that the fundamental principles here continue to endure precisely because they enhance survivability. It’s not just a nice-sounding idea- it works, else it wouldn’t still be here.

To put it simply, being a good, moral person makes pragmatic, economic sense. You can have your cake and eat it too. Even in things like business and politics- it makes sense to seek co-operation rather than to punish the errant wrongdoers. Oftentimes nations are “forced” into conflict internationally because of the outdated tribal mentalities of national politics. The idea of one country forgiving another at the global stage seems impossible to bear in a nationalistic world. That’s why Middle East leaders often have to make grand anti-US overtures, and why South Korea and North Korea keep shelling at each other even though it doesn’t make sense- and why border conflicts happen only as long as they remain in public attention.

It’s our own collective immaturity and refusal to forgive others that leads to the sort of politics that’s inhibiting progress on a global scale. So that’s what we have to target, to work at- conventional wisdom. We need to learn to see that we’re all in this together, and that we don’t have to keep punishing each other every time something bad happens. We don’t want to get exploited, of course- so what that necessitates is a lot of serious, honest conversations about our common circumstances. That’s where all of us come in- really, all of us.

• Be nice. Don’t be the first to go on the attack. This demonstrates good will, and avoids provoking others.
• Retaliate. If others attack, retaliate. Not doing so encourages bad behavior and gives niceness a bad reputation.
• Be forgiving. If others defect but then go back to cooperating, accept the opportunity to move back to a cooperative mode.
• Be clear. Others can predict what you’ll do, be certain that their moves will have definite outcomes. “There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player’s cooperation.”