Protecting people "like us" from people "like them"

And like most instincts, this was a survival trait in our past. Until the invention of the technology of agriculture, there was no surplus food. In bountiful years it was simply difficult to store with Paleolithic technology (nomads with no wheels or draft animals could not take very much of it with them and if they left it behind the scavengers would get it), and in dry years people would starve. So the survival of the tribe required keeping other tribes from encroaching on their hunting and gathering territory most of the time. Anthropologists tell us that in the summer or fall when there was a tiny food surplus--and enough grains to brew beer--they might have festivals, and this is where they swapped a few adolescent children, helping to keep the gene pool chlorinated. But the rest of the time they stayed out of each other's way.

The Neolithic Revolution made this instinct not only unnecessary, but downright problematic. Agriculture created the world's first food surplus so people didn't need to kill each other to avoid starving. But moreover, an efficient, productive farming village needs to be quite a bit larger than the few dozen extended-family members that comprised the average tribe of hunter-gatherers, limited by the size of the territory they could hunt and gather from on foot.

Humans actually needed to congregate in larger communities in order for economies of scale and division of labor to maximize the yield of their cultivating and herding efforts. I reasonably assume that the cusp of the Neolithic Revolution was a time of tremendous social upheaval, as a few visionaries saw the need for making peace with their neighbors, while the people who were comfortable with the old ways and let their Inner Caveman dominate their life ran back into the forest, or fought off the intruders, or were exiled or even executed in the interest of a better life for the survivors. This is why all the futurists including yours truly identify the Agricultural Revolution as the first Paradigm Shift: a transitional era when humans made major changes in external nature (growing food crops outside their door, domesticating animals, building houses as shelter from the weather, etc.) to make a qualitative improvement in their survivability and security (finally getting past the first two steps in Maslow's Hierarchy)--while at the same time they were forced to find a way to make corresponding major changes in their internal nature (becoming content to sleep in the same place every night, giving up the excitement of the hunt, acquiring "tribe-mates" with whom they didn't share the comfortable lifelong intimacy of family members, yielding to the demands of a complex schedule of tilling the soil, feeding the livestock, maintaining the integrity of the roof, etc.) to match the new external nature they had created for themselves.

How many people do you know who are uncomfortable with the internet, or even computers in general? (The Electronic Revolution is the sixth Paradigm Shift in my model; Toffler calls it the third.) Imagine how people like that would have reacted to the change from a hunter-gatherer culture to a farmer-herder culture!

Just as the Neolithic Revolution started us down this path, by requiring us to accept as tribe-mates people who were not family members, each subsequent Paradigm Shift took us further. The Dawn of Civilization required us to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with complete strangers, in cities! The Bronze Age and the Iron Age (I won't go into the important differences between them here) saw the merging of cities into empires; we had to accept the "virtual kinship" of tribe-mates we would never meet. The Industrial Revolution severed our ties with the land: more than 99% of the human race had always been doomed to "careers" of long days in food production and distribution; today in the developed world the figure is about 3% and most of them work 40-hour weeks.

The Electronic Revolution, which began in 1833 with the first telegraph, took us beyond that. We now have transnational hegemonies like the EU, in which people who were killing each other a mere hundred years ago have torn down their borders and are loaning each other huge sums of money. A large segment of the population regards as "tribe-mates" people on the other side of the planet who are not just strangers, but mere abstractions. But the internet has taken this further. Americans wept over the real-time videos of Neda Agha Soltan dying in the street in Tehran--a country we are constantly told that we don't really like. These people are no longer anonymous strangers: we know their names and we have watched them grieve and go through life's other daily activities, courtesy of the cameras in our cellphones.

I submit that to cry over someone's unjust death is to regard her as a tribe-mate!

Our government can get away with making war on the Afghanis because theirs is a low-tech country and they don't have the technology to become our tribe mates. (Although there was one on SciForums for a while last year!) But if they ever go so far out of control that they want to make war on Iran--Neda's people, people we shared tears with!--they will learn the power of the "virtual tribe" the hard way.

I don't know. You're the biologist! It happened with dogs in 24,000 generations. Or less, if people began to keep them from breeding in every heat as one member suggested--a scenario I doubt since there are many communities that don't even do that today. But it's a difficult comparison, since dogs have both a richer genetic code and much more variance in their DNA than we do--probably the result of not having gone through at least two recent genetic bottlenecks like our species did.

Jung would call it a change in the collective unconscious. He died before genetics became a major science, but in today's language we would say that archetypes--the beliefs, rituals, images, legends, etc. that are found in nearly every culture and nearly every era--are programmed into our synapses by DNA. Yet mutations obviously occur. The reason religion is so ubiquitous is that even people who were not raised with it find that it resonates with something inside them, and they are easily converted. Yet in my family, we were all raised without religion for three generations (I didn't even know what the word meant until I was seven), yet none of us has ever succumbed to the lure of a loving god and a blissful afterlife. Our synapses are obviously not wired in the conventional way.

In this case it is an expansion of the pack-social instinct that forms the bonds among pack-hunting predators like humans, wolves and dolphins. It's obvious in dogs. As I noted earlier, the average wolf pack has fewer than ten members; any more and at least two would be fighting for leadership. Feral dog packs are enormous! The first dogs accepted humans as pack-mates (and pack leaders), but over the millennia they have extended that to include virtually every species we've brought home that's large enough to not be automatically regarded as a snack--and even a few of those.

Dogs have very nearly made the transition from pack-social to herd-social. (And I have apologized before for not knowing the proper zoological terms for these traits, and have expressed my amazement that in all these years I have never even come across a biologist who discussed them.) Most dogs will treat a stranger (human or canine, and often even feline) with wary collegiality, and even run off and play with them. Our children do that, and at least where I live most adults do too, although with a little more wariness and some prejudgement based on standard social signals such as type of clothing, extent of hygiene, and number of weapons.

Obviously it is at least that. Our uniquely massive forebrain gives us the ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. This is why our inner caveman sits there most of the time, mollified with air conditioning, convenience food, internal combustion and television, and simply stifles his natural instinct to kill anyone who's not a close relative. He can see that the benefits of civilization are so wonderful that they're worth forgoing a daily orgy of slaughter.

Nonetheless, it's reasonable to hypothesize that there has been an actual shift in our instincts over the past six hundred generations. Maybe most of the humans who could not keep their inner caveman under control were unable to find mates, or were executed for their crimes, or simply volunteered to be on the front lines of every war, while the rest of us quietly continued to mutate and become more herd-social than pack-social.

In addition to losing the god gene, I also seem to have misplaced my tribe gene. I was never that close to my immediate family and today I feel closer to all of you--whose faces I have never seen and whose voices I have never heard--than I do to my various family members with whom my communication is limited to Christmas cards.

Behavior. Dogs congregate in vastly larger groups, and their groups include multiple species. They tolerate proximity to strangers and are open to their social overtures. As to "why," the first wolf-dogs self-selected (I think their number was less than twenty); they were the ones who were already more inquisitive and gregarious than the ones who stayed in the forest. Surely selective breeding continued, as pups who didn't share their parents enthusiasm for the easy life of a garbage collector simply wandered off and eventually found a wolf pack that desperately needed a replacement for a lost comrade. Finally humans took control of the breeding and culled the ones whose instincts they didn't like out of the herd. If you notice, they were much more assiduous about that with the large breeds than the smaller ones.

Our Lhasa Apsos are notorious for being aloof, wary of strangers, headstrong, and not very playful. In a 15-20 pound dog with an underbite and 20-1000 vision that's just cute. And they fill an important niche market among women who live alone and A) need a dog who's content to sit on the sofa by himself all day listening for burglars and B) are happy to have a roommate with an uncanny ability to decide whether the person knocking on the door should be invited inside or sprayed with Mace. Nobody really wants that kind of attitude and behavior in a Great Dane, so it has been bred out of them.

Uh... isn't that your own definition of the Jews, almost verbatim??? The more devout among them are certainly ethnocentric, and although excommunication is rare, it is extremely difficult for an outsider to join that tribe. We don't actually observe much of that behavior in the world's largest Jewish community here in America, but it's because the indifference-based tolerance that has made them so successful has also dulled their children's desire to perpetrate it. It's as though without antisemitism there would be no Jews; as if they define themselves by other people's hatred. History bears that out in China. The tribe who found their way to that country in the Diaspora assimilated and vanished within a couple of centuries.

In the Paleolithic Era there was merely "us" and "everybody else." We only cared about our tribe. The way others behaved was of no importance, except in their interaction with us.

That was certainly true in the Middle Ages. Only men fought wars and there were many more old women than old men. With their extra years they acquired great wisdom, and people naturally sought them out to share it. This was a big problem for the phallocratic priests, so they invented the image of the evil witch--which, if you look carefully, is nothing more than a stylized very old woman with stringy hair, wrinkled skin, a hunched back and missing teeth.

It's a survival instinct. A human tribe who comes to steal your food during a famine is no different from bears or jackals trying to do the same thing.

I guess the Jews still don't count.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

We're certainly well on our way. A mere hundred years ago Europeans were slaughtering each other; today they've torn down their borders and are lending each other enormous amounts of money. Latin American nations haven't fought among themselves for just about that long as well. Transnational hegemonies are forming all over the planet.

The next step is the final merging into a single nation, and the internet is helping us with that. The U.S. government keeps telling us that we hate Iran and may have to go to war with them, and as long as Iranians were abstractions on the other side of the planet that might have worked.

Now everyone in the developed world has a cellphone with a camera, and we found ourselves watching real-time videos of Neda Agha-Soltan being murdered in a street in Tehran. We cried with them! Iranians have names, families, friends, jobs, schools, pets, hobbies, hopes, dreams, just like we do. Suddenly they are no longer abstractions. They are real people.

Internet forums like this one are a great boon to internationalization too. Would you sit by quietly if your government was preparing to start a war against a country where somebody you know lives?

This is how the "one-world-state" begins. I doubt that it will truly be a "utopia" because our inner caveman still breaks loose occasionally and commits antisocial acts against people who are not members of his immediate family. But we won't have so many instances (maybe none at all in a few generations) of the inner cavemen of all the people in an entire region rising up and committing antisocial acts against people in another entire region.

Maybe not a utopia, but still a pretty nice place to live. Unfortunately it probably won't happen soon enough for me to see it, but maybe some of you younger people will.

 

A few years ago when anthropologists began using the same forensic technology that police detectives and coroners use, they started re-examining human remains from the late Paleolithic Era. I saw an article (unfortunately I didn't save it) in which an anthropologist said it appeared that the majority of the deaths of adult humans at that time were caused by violence. In other words, more people were killed by other people than by all other causes combined.

I don't know if this conclusion has withstood peer review, especially since it conflicts with other evidence that our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors appear to have exchanged ideas and technologies with other tribes, which implies a somewhat less warlike relationship among them. Nonetheless, in the millions of years before the invention of agriculture created the first food surplus, it's hardly remarkable that tribes of humans would have regarded other tribes as hated competitors for scarce resources, especially in lean years, just as other species of pack-social predators do.

Even if this statistic turns out to be vastly overstated, it still reminds us that as we progressed from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic to Civilization to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution and now to the Electronic Age, we have become less violent toward outsiders. Not monotonically, unfortunately but steadily. WWII killed 2% of the human race during my lifetime, but that's nothing compared to 50%.

Men do not have close relationships with their daughters in all cultures.