Financial Times

Needless to say, cooperative activities are sloppy, inefficient and sordid in societies, where people are easily offended and hurt, where the courage to risk failure is lacking and envy is more common than emulation – in a word, where men have developed “an excessive and touchy sense of individuality, and a fanatic resistance to manipulation by outsiders.”

Yet even where the sense of individuality is wholesome, cooperative activities that are marked by idealism are rare. Some account for this by pointing out that men pitch their vision of the highest too low.

The merging of the ambitions of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to serve the practical ideal of philanthropy, although has caused surprise, as an example of American exceptionalism is provoking less ire than is usual, in the rest of the world.

As reflected in the microcosm of media commentary, the absence of the common run of selfish excesses associated with the rich – from overweening ambition and cockiness to dynasticism – appears to have caused the most surprise about the coming together of Gates and Buffett.

However, philanthropy’s long and fruitful tradition in America is widely acknowledged around the world.

For example, as Britain’s Economist ungrudgingly points out “Rockefeller Foundation raised the quality of training doctors in America and found a vaccine for yellow fever. It also drove the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture that ended famine in much of the world and, by some estimates, saved 1.5 billion lives – exactly the sort of impact that the Gateses hope to achieve.”

The combination of the scale of Mr. Buffett’s gift - which is $37 billion, and the high value he places on efficiency, or the per-dollar-effectiveness – which compelled him to rise above the powerful human impulse for memorialization and choose the Gateses, has made what is already a profound and fecund American tradition even more so.

Admittedly, it is a rare and difficult achievement for people to come together in a mood of mutual aspiration, brotherhood, steadfastness and loyalty – and such cooperative activity is rarer in some places than in others.

The most spiritual form of cooperative activity is witnessed where men are seen cooperating in scientific, scholarly and philosophic endeavours.

The most romantic form of it is witnessed in the self-surrender of young lovers to the task of raising children on a moral and intellectual level of existence higher than their own.

Arguably, the most morally noble cooperative activity is witnessed among men and women in uniform in the waging of wars in defence of liberty.

Meanwhile, the most practical coming together is witnessed in trade, industry, and professional associations. Such cooperative activities are being attempted every day in every society with varying degrees of success; and we must not allow the shining example of genuine cooperation between Gates and Buffett to obscure that.

As any one who has tried to accomplish anything whatsoever knows, nothing much is ever accomplished when men fail to merge their ambitions for a broader purpose.

It is, at least partly, in the measure that a society succeeds in merging men’s ambitions for a broader purpose that it can lay claim to many of the best fruits of the human spirit. Men naturally crave for companionship.

Yet, there are many poverty-stricken societies of hopeless conflicts and squalor, like our own, for whom cooperative activities of any significance are a distant dream.

Consequently, they celebrate what is respectable, and not what is best. Such an attitude might promote cooperative activities with a view to either profit or amusement – but little else.

Still at another level, our estimates of human nature have far-reaching implications – when we estimate that through the discipline of natural tendencies man could become just, fair and merciful, we are apt to embrace the possibility of cooperating with others to serve ideals that are either practical or spiritual.

History has witnessed the emergence of two contrasting visions of cooperative activity. From Western societies, whose organizing principle is liberty, we have “fraternity between distinct individuals.” From the East, where rulers have shown a readiness to be despotic for the good of the whole, we have “solidarity among identical units.”

The Eastern vision of “solidarity among identical units” was something that the former Soviet Union tried consciously to embody in its practices.

According to a historian of Stalin’s Russia, “When Stalin first saw 40,000 gymnasts going through the identical callisthenics in a Moscow stadium, he remarked that it was the most impressive thing he had ever seen.”

For Stalin, as for many in the Left, “The good man surrenders his individuality to the organization, merges his identity in the people, and becomes, as Stalin quoted several times from Chernyshevesky, ‘like the grain in the field, drops in the sea, and stars in the sky’.”

However, the essence of liberty is respect for human personality and the conditions of its development.

In the East, the development of individual character and differences is viewed as amounting to selfishness and pride.

In the West, the feeling of personality is consecrated as “soul”, and the individual differences are celebrated as Nature’s incredible manifoldness.

Each may be right in its own way. But for examples of genuine cooperation, we look to the West, and to American exceptionalism in particular.