Our long human history of conflict and the persistence of tribal behavior in our world causes many to be skeptical that human nature is primarily cooperative. What some skeptics of a proanthropic view can agree upon, however, is that given our current challenges, humankind cannot continue without achieving a level of cooperation unprecedented in modern society. Accordingly, circumstances will force humans to recognize that the only way to move forward is to lessen the resource gap between the world’s winners and losers, and to move beyond tribalistic considerations.
The premise that if humankind cooperates sufficiently to survive, it would be because of coercion rather than due to its inherent cooperative nature, may appear to disagree with a proanthropic perspective. But actually the “forced to cooperate” view winds up in the same place, albeit by an alternate route. Rather than regarding human’s cooperative nature as primary, the forced to cooperate view sees universal human cooperation as an adaptive response. Ultimately though, both the proanthropic and the forced to cooperate views agree that the survival of the human experience depends on our maximizing our cooperative potential.