Among the basically capable, surfers not only respect the person who has been waiting; they often feel obliged to spontaneously form a line. And the point of forming a line, of lining up, is precisely to bring about a fairer distribution of waves. This is particularly good for the unfortunate. For those otherwise coming up short, one can get in the queue for the best waves and wait one’s turn, and, once one holds first position, the wave is one’s own. A small bit of wave justice is served.

  So the surfing lineup is a kind of democratic egalitarianism, albeit of a fluid variety. For even line forming must be relatively adaptable. The reef passes in the South Pacific (for example, Tavarua, Fiji) have a well-defined takeoff area for the best waves, and there you just take a number. At most surf breaks, there isn’t a well-defined takeoff zone because the waves arrive in different places and running a line isn’t feasible. Then the norm is catch as catch can, except among all those in rough striking distance, in which case, sort of take turns.

  In South Africa, the practice among friends is more concertedly communistic. If you’re surfing in roughly the same area, as friends tend to, and one of them has not had a wave since you last did, then for any wave you could both catch, it is seen as your obligation to yield until he or she gets one. You are permitted to take only the waves he or she can’t, and even paddling for a wave he or she might catch is a potential betrayal of civility and friendship. As a Lowers surfer, one becomes accustomed to hustling and double-checking whether the guy who seems in position really is. Pretty often, people miss waves, or the wave rolls beneath them, and if you’ve double-checked, keeping an open option to catch it and ride, the wave is yours. I’ve gotten used to this, and on one occasion it became a bone of contention in South Africa, while surfing the famous Jeffreys Bay with my South African friends Graeme Bird and “Flame.”*21 Being an American, a Lowers capitalist no less, I thought it ridiculous to let good waves go to waste for the sake of communism among friends. So when the better waves were approaching and I wasn’t first in line, I made sure they were going and went myself if not. But my South African friends, having become accustomed to the comfort of knowing that the next wave is yours without getting hassled by a “Lowers hustler” (as Graeme calls me), complained of my zeal. I should just wait until they go and it is definitely my turn. I deferred to local South African custom but insisted that we debate the limitations of communism as a way of distributing waves. (South Africans tend to be game for vigorous argument.)

  “Communism doesn’t work” is the familiar critique. That wasn’t my point. In some cases, it does, or can, work, among friends or in an especially well-defined lineup such as Tavarua, where wave turns can be effectively counted and shared. In those cases, I agree one is morally obliged to respect a line if it has already formed and initiate formation of a line if not. Yet in many other cases, maybe at most breaks the world over, including the usual day at Lowers, a rigid line-forming practice maybe could work, but only at a high opportunity cost in waves lost. Is strict line forming always required? Must any two surfers form a line, and any third get behind? I don’t think so. We’d have to have decided to sit close together and to wait for and ride only certain types of waves, taking turns only on those waves. The other waves coming in, however easily caught, would have to go unridden. It’s a nice sentiment, all for one and one for all, but my own disposition would be to just not sign up. I’d leave the line area to the others and go chase waves by my own exercise of skill and luck.*22

  There is such a thing as being a capitalist pig, however, or one who takes much too much from a common resource. One could do wrong by not “leaving enough and as good for others,” in John Locke’s phrase, without taking way too much. Even if one is being a pig, or a pig across many areas of life, one might not be moved by any sense of entitlement, and so not be an asshole. One can simply be greedy or impulsive, as in grabbing way too many cookies on a picnic table in a moment of weakness. Even in the good ole U. S. of A., but away from supercompetitive Lowers, I have been politely asked to please stop catching so many waves so that others might get more of them. I decided that, yes, I guess I was in fact being a pig.*23 At a picnic, there’s such a thing as taking too much from the buffet, even if there’s no line, and even if it takes great skill to pile sushi rolls high on a single plate. Surfing’s rule of right-of-way only concerns a given wave helping, so it doesn’t guard against over-appropriation of a shared resource. And even when a well-defined line for wave sharing won’t work at a given break, courtesy still requires giving a few away when you’ve had plenty. Not from charity, but as a matter of fair sharing. Even if you’d win the larger share, fair and square, if this were a wave-catching contest and not an easy session, you can’t just make what’s now an easy session into a contest area by changing the tone with aggro paddling, in order to be able to take that greater share. You’d irritate the others, and for good reason. For this to be permissible, you’d need a shared sense that a more competitive footing was required by the lack of waves or increase in surfers. Without that, you’re not a pig taking to excess but a boorish and greedy asshole who is merely degrading the easy session for personal advantage.

  So surfers have a fluid wave-sharing practice, which they adapt to changing wave circumstances. It’s comparable, but still more fluid, than pedestrian practice on a busy city sidewalk. In walking along, we each adjust our walking pace and side steps to accommodate the others, giving way or speeding up, each doing our parts, moment by moment, in a scheme by which each goes his or her own way in a hum of togetherness. Each has rights, to be somewhere, to go somewhere else, to have others watch and coordinate smooth passage as they are approaching. (Only an asshole just walks straight through, in a “No, you move” posture.) Much as in the waves, your right over this or that particular location is fluid and ever changing. The spot or trajectory that’s definitely now yours here is someone else’s only moments later. We thus “surf” the crowd in sidewalk traffic.

  We each surf the crowd, but not the street, which isn’t constantly changing. The surfing lineup is adaptive in that regard as well. Surfers attune to each other, and together attune to their changing wave environment. They fluidly adapt cooperative expectations to conditions of relative wave abundance and scarcity. In this respect, as I explain presently, the surfing lineup is akin to international relations in a changing global environment.

  Attuning Capitalism

  Surfers do spontaneously what nations have only begun to do: together adapt their cooperation for their changing global environment. In the “anarchical society” that is international relations, nations do cooperate, more or less, by international law and practice, policy coordination, and diplomacy. But on a planet whose common resources are now shifting from abundance to scarcity, they’ve been slow to adapt to changing conditions. According to scientific consensus, the atmosphere can only absorb so much of the emissions of economic activity without raising average temperatures in a way that imperils our prosperity, our leisure, and the very future of humanity. If the cause is our old style of capitalism, with its fossil fuels and heat-trapping gases, then the question for all nations is a matter of surfer know-how, of how to attunedly adapt capitalism to the new human condition of ecological scarcity.

  What works among a pod of surfers won’t necessarily work for anything so large as the basic structure of a whole society, let alone two hundred or so different nations, each with millions of vote-wielding residents. Yet in the big picture, surfer society and international relations are not so different. The surfing lineup, the state, and international law and practice are all forums for the governance of common affairs. And governance is always a matter of historical experimentation with changing circumstances.

  Conjectural futurology is a tough business, so it’s understandable that Hobbes didn’t guess how civilization and prosperity would spread under the rise of democracy. In Leviathan, the choice is between a sovereign’s awesome rule and a disordered anarchy. But that dichotomy turned out to be facile even by the book’s date of publication. The modern state system, which began at the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (just before Leviathan’s 1651 publication), ended the very wars that led Hobbes to describe international relations as an anarchical war of kings and princes. Europe was pacified, and not by a superstate sovereign of Europe capable of overawing all of them. Peace came by a truce for mutual benefit and a practice of mutual forbearance. Even without centralized government, the practice stuck and eventually brought peace to the whole globe.

  Eventually, at least—because, yes, that whole imperial expansion of the state system didn’t exactly go swimmingly. But if you can squint and fast-forward through a centuries-long interlude of colonial conquest, mass slaughter, untold horrors, two world wars that were by far the bloodiest in human history—not exactly growing pains—it’s still true that Kant’s dream of peace became a reality.*24 Eventually, yes indeed, we got the “long peace” of the postwar era. Which is certainly much better than continued or rising violence. Democratic governments tend not to go to war.*25 But the backstory of modern order and postwar peace begins way back with the early system of states and the Peace of Westphalia. Industrial capitalism finally emerged, and with increasing globalization and the rise of democracy working people could finally climb from poverty and ask by vote and protest not to have to work so much. By the mid-twentieth century, with a new forty-hour workweek, leisure culture flowered. In the blooming culmination of modernity, the leisure revolution began, giving capitalism a new surfer styling.

  When Karl Marx predicted the end of capitalism, he imagined people working a few hours in the morning, making adjustments to the labor-saving machines, and then spending the afternoon doing various excellent activities, like fishing, or reading, or spending time with the kids. Capitalism is still very much with us, and Marx was wrong in thinking that it had to end for us to be somewhat freed from constant toil. We now take the forty-hour workweek for granted, which means we all agree that a capitalist system must afford the human person time to rest, relax, and recreate, with weekends off, some semblance of a vacation, and retirement before death.

  —

  Only the purest, most hard-core capitalism leaves all matters of time and labor to the market. When social insurance was first established in the 1880s in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, the hope was to improve upon the measly Poor Laws of England by adopting health insurance, pensions, and workers’ compensation in order to prove that a system of private property and markets could work for the common good without converting to socialism (Bismarck even banished socialist leaders and banned socialist meetings and mailings).*26

  And so capitalism was adapted according to its presumed point. Why augment the wealth of nations? Why, to relieve poverty, so that one can become secure and prosperous and relax! But by the rising “wealth of nations,” Adam Smith officially meant only the annual produce, or the aggregate we now call GDP. Why strive to make that number larger? To most people, this will not sound all that important unless one is actually getting a piece of the growing pie. If Bill Gates walks up to a picnic, the picnic GDP goes way up, but the other picnickers don’t get any richer for his mere attendance. And if many people only get the barest “opportunity” to get richer, with slim prospects of getting ahead, despite all the risks and vulnerabilities of being ruled and dominated by ravenous capitalists, then it’s fair to say that capitalism will have failed to deliver on its world-historical promise.

  The rising wealth of nations is supposed to bring widely shared prosperity. And not just by allowing a worker to exchange longer hours in work for a bit more money. This quickly runs into limits, given the number of hours in a day. For without a goodly measure of “leisure time”—defined by economists as time away from work in the labor market (which may, however, include unpaid household work, child rearing, and work-like activities)—when exactly will you enjoy the fruits of your labors? With a forty-hour workweek, vacations, proper retirement, and other benefits, people have a better balance of money for time—more money earned through less time at work, with permission to take meaningful leisure.*27 And even if the leisure revolution has stalled for at least three decades—Americans, for example, work longer hours to make up for stagnating wages—the grand adaptive experiment can still continue. What’s needed is a twenty-first-century attunement of capitalism’s market/state balance.

  In the mid-1940s, Hayek warned of the road to serfdom under socialism. But for all of his insights about social order and the power of markets,*28 his stark choice between “central planning” and “free markets” was always unimaginative as philosophy.*29 In fact, the postwar economies were on the road to surfdom, even where markets were heavily regulated, as in the United States. Prosperity came to mixed economies, each with its own market/state mix, adapted to its particular circumstances.*30 Talk of “capitalism” and “socialism” can sound philosophically deep. In practice, there is no bright line between them and only varying adaptations in changing conditions, which might be more or less “socialistic” in different governance areas, depending on the mix.*31 The United States didn’t become a socialist country when it adopted the forty-hour workweek, or when it made national parks or the coastal beaches public property, or when it set up public fire departments, or when it started sending out disability or retirement checks, or when it moved toward nearly universal health insurance. It merely became more mixed. Indeed, the United States entered its golden era of broad-based growth, with low inequality and a widely shared leisure culture, after it started making just such attunements.

  Will the future be like the past? Maybe not. Modern governance has always been a trial-and-error project. It wouldn’t be wise to name any development “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama famously did, even with liberal capitalist democracy vanquishing its communist foes.*32 The idea of “liberal capitalist democracy” is itself tremendously broad and endlessly flexible and so open for further attunements. The question is simply what governance mix is most attuned to a now quickly changing human condition.

  Can We Adapt the Game?

  “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Marx thus lamented rather than praised the adaptability of capitalism. Nothing is so sacred—not religion, not even surfing—that it can’t be monetized for profit.

  Unless, that is, we ourselves refuse to let capitalism adapt. Which we might do, in the following all-too-realistic doomsday scenario. Suppose we will invariably compete for status. But the status game is already set—as the game of working for ever more money, to pay for ever more consumption-heavy leisure. And yet suppose that unless we can work less on average, spending more time in less ecologically disruptive leisure (among other equally or more urgent measures), we won’t curb grave risks of ecological cataclysm. In that case, humanity is hosed. We won’t ever ease off the emissions throttle. Short of our getting extremely lucky in the climate casino, disaster will ensue.

  Is this a realistic scenario? It may seem a simple matter of human nature. To Hobbes, we have no way of just being, without competing for status; man invariably strives for “vain-glory” in “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”*33 Rousseau thought our natures are more flexible and that we willingly cooperate if we feel seen as an equal. Then we can each cease our strivings for relative status (“amour propre”) and love ourselves contentedly, without comparison (“amour de soi-meme”). Yet for Rousseau the problems of recognition only get worse in affluence.*34 The troubles around the village campfire were manageable. But the rising wealth of nations brings the rise of property, inequality, and power. Our inflamed feelings of envy, jealousy, and resentment cast a whole society into that hellish contest for recognition that Sartre dramatized so fiendishly.

  Rousseau’s insight isn’t just sour conjecture. In the villages behind Lagundri Bay, on Nias Island (back in Sumatra), the communities regularly interrupt their same-as-it-ever-was poverty, which leaves them without such luxuries as toilets, for a game of fútbol/soccer. The ragtag, mismatched, multicolored uniforms leave no discernible difference between the two teams, as families gather, laughing and cheering over sounds of the roaring ocean beneath the nearby cliffs. I assume someone is sort of keeping score. The competing villages do seem to know each other well enough to know roughly who is going in what direction. The players are definitely trying to score into the rickety stick goalposts. It all seems rather unorganized and “inefficient” to a visitor like me from an advanced country. Yet they plainly don’t suffer from the advanced worlder’s confusion about whether scoring and winning are different and more important than the moment of community, of being all together, smiling and chatting, on an easy golden afternoon.

  In “advanced” America on any Saturday morning, on the other hand, after much hoopla and boasting about how, come the weekend, team Arrow Lightning is going to totally school the wayward Brown Pandas, the Pandas are forced to dig deep to avoid shameless defeat and salvage the honor of their whole city block and their own esteem and stature. The angst and consternation won’t allow people to feel “it’s just a game,” which is what the losers say to cope in humiliating defeat. It can’t just be a game, not in the culture of competitive society, where relative fates are set by contest and winners take most. The game can’t just be played for its own sake, in easy sporting, not given the high stakes. As for the conflictual struggle for recognition, that persistent source of untold personal misery and social ills, it’s game on, whether in sports, paychecks, houses, cars, vacations, smarts, degrees, fame, good looks, and/or social media followers and “likes.”