Destroy My Enemy by Making him My Friend

When Homo sapiens evolved tens of thousands of years ago, we acquired the powerful skill of cooperation within our group. But a side effect was the belief that our group was special. We were The People (a common translation of group’s names for themselves all across the globe).  Other groups were The Other, and, by definition, less than/and or a threat to The People.  As a result we demonized all other groups and fought them when necessary. Over the millennia we have gotten extremely sophisticated in the arts of demonizing The Other as The Enemy. In addition we believe that our survival and, often, the future of the human race, depends on our vanquishing The Enemy.

As a modern example, what is the purpose of the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen if not to eliminate every single member of Al Qaeda?

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our wisest president, had an enlightened view on the idea of “enemy.” Dr. Scott Atran, an anthropologist who wrote a book called Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists in 2010, told this story to Krista Tippett on her show “On Being”:

You know, Abraham Lincoln is making a speech during the latter stages of the Civil War where he's describing the Southern rebels as human beings like anyone else.

An elderly woman, a staunch Unionist, abrades him for speaking kindly of his enemies when he should only be thinking of destroying them. Lincoln says to the woman, "Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" If you think about it, wars are truly won only in two ways. You either exterminate your enemy or you make them your friends. I think that we have not thought very deeply about the latter alternative, especially when I see how we're reacting to these young [potential Islamic terrorists] around the world.

Dr. Atran went on to discuss the transformative power of the Internet; how it is breaking down those ancient barriers of group and forging a new global identity.

I see the vast possibilities of this world, of a social brain. Just think about the networking possibilities of knowledge and access to knowledge that people have now. I mean, again, people now in New Guinea can link up with what people in New York are doing and work together with their different experiences and come up with new possibilities for human life. And this is happening at an incredibly fast rate and it's something that I don't think our traditional political establishments are at all capable of dealing with and I think there will be huge upheavals as a result, economic and social.

My favorite example of this transformation: watching a cat video on YouTube and realizing the language being spoken isn’t English…the Iranians and Japanese play with their cats just like we do. We are all members of one family, the human family.

[Krista Tippett, "On Being," “Demonstrations, Hopes and Dreams,” Feb 10, 2011.]

 

Disasters Reveal Cooperation is Part of Human Nature

Whenever a natural disaster hits, like last week’s Hurricane Sandy, reporters love to find heart-warming stories of people helping strangers to balance out the heartbreak of loss. The reporters always speak as if this is an unusual form of human behavior brought out by special circumstances; the unspoken assumption is that ordinary human behavior is completely selfish.

For centuries now Western societies have believed that humans were basically evil: first the Christian dogma of original sin held sway, and for the last few hundred years philosophers and biologists have argued that the natural order, humans included, is all selfish competition: Nature is “red in tooth and claw” (from an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem).

This gloomy appraisal of nature is now being upended by scientists across a number of specialties. Biologists are discovering that cooperation and symbiotic relationships are common features of the natural order (watch an interview I did with a biologist discovering a symbiotic relationship between spiders and carnivorous pitcher plants).

E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, presents the idea that the reason humans have become the dominant animal on the planet is because we learned to cooperate.

Dr. Wilson is a specialist in ants, and he argues that the creatures who have learned to form cooperative societies are the masters of their ecological niche: “The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps, and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. Among creatures larger than microorganisms and roundworms, eusocial insects are the little things that run the terrestrial world.”

At some point in the evolution of human beings, after we split off from chimpanzees, hominids started cooperating, as I wrote in an earlier post. Unlike ants, humans are not genetically identical within a colony. This means we have two opposing tendencies in our nature: selfish competition to ensure our genes survive combined with altruistic cooperation to ensure our group survives. The tension between these two tendencies creates what we call “human nature.” Dr. Wilson writes, “Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and better angels of our nature.” But this conflict is what has made us so successful in our evolution.

Dr. Wilson cites research by Michael Tomasello (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) that points out “that the primary difference between human cognition and that of other animal species, including our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, is the ability to collaborate for the purpose of achieving shared goals and intentions. The human specialty is intentionality, fashioned from an extremely large working memory.” We not only express our own intentions, we can read other’s intentions relatively easily. “From infancy we are predisposed to read the intention of others, and quick to cooperate if there is even a trace of shared interest. In one revealing experiment, children were shown how to open the door to a container. When adults tried to open the door but pretended not to know how, the children stopped what they were doing and crossed the room to help. Chimpanzees put in the same circumstance, but far less advanced in cooperative awareness, made no such effort.”

Dr. Tomasello concludes in this essay on his book Why We Cooperate, “It seems that Rousseau, not Hobbes, was right in the first place: humans are born helpful, or at least they become so very early in development before much active socialization and teaching has taken place.”

American culture is built on the idea of the self-sufficient individual—the pioneer family making it on their own, the cowboy riding the range alone. What would our culture look like if we celebrated our cooperative nature as much as our competitive nature? I found an essay online that spoke very well to this idea:

We don't talk about a desire to do a thing well for its own sake.  We don't talk about the incentives of achievement.  For example, would a manufacturer work to make a better product if there were public awards for such craftsmanship?  Would there be an incentive if the competition were non-destructive. . . if the goal were to make the best and be recognized rather than to make the better and kill the competitor's business?  We don't talk about how well the public can be served by unified objectives, where all work toward a common goal and divide labor in a sane manner.  Within companies, teams are brought together with planning to get to a single goal, and this works very well.  Why can't this happen between businesses?  It worked well for the Apollo project. 

Humans learned to overcome the deeply embedded instinct of selfishness over a hundred thousand years ago. I think we are up to the challenge of changing our culture today.

Humans Are All Members of the Same Tribe

Why does morality exist? Is this evidence of a metaphysical realm, or can it be explained as an evolutionary adaptation? Recently I’ve read a couple of books that argue that morality is a product of natural selection.

The Science of Good and Evil (2004) is by Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine. He begins by providing an evolutionary explanation for morality, which I found very plausible. Shermer claims that all moral attributes can be explained by natural selection over the millions of years of human evolution: groups in which members cooperated and could trust each other did better than groups that had a lot of infighting and deceit.

In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011), author Alex Rosenberg’s discussion of the evolution of morality parallels The Science of Good and Evil.

In particular, Rosenberg identifies a core morality, which includes cooperation, fairness/equality, and trustworthiness, which is recognized by all human societies. He has an interesting discussion about how different societies interpret this core morality differently due to their different beliefs. For example, all societies think caring for your children is moral, but some Islamic cultures believe that includes genital mutilation of their girls: if you didn’t do this no man would marry her. This doesn’t mean they don’t share the core moral value that caring for children is good, they just filter that through beliefs that we in the West would call mistaken.

American culture has been under the sway of Social Darwinism for over a hundred years now. We mistakenly believe Darwin’s theory of natural selection means competition is the natural way to behave and thrive. Our version of capitalism is dependent on ruthless cutthroat competition. Supposedly capitalism works so well because it is the system that most closely follows the natural law of selfishness.

But now biologists and anthropologists say that that interpretation of Darwin's theory is incomplete. Natural selection works through both competition and cooperation. Humans survived as a species because we learned to cooperate. This is the adaptation that allowed us to become the dominant animal on the planet.

Rosenberg imagines two early hominids (creatures that predated Homo sapiens) on the savannah coming across a half-eaten gazelle. At this point hominids were quite a bit lower on the food chain than we are today. If both the hominids ate at the same time, maybe the animal that killed the gazelle would return, or a pack of jackals would ambush them, and they both would be killed. But if they cooperated, if one watched while the other grabbed food for both of them and then they shared it in a safer location, they would increase their chances of survival.

One of the ways we can tell that evolution has programmed us to cooperate is to study babies. How do they behave before they have had time to learn about social interactions? Chimpanzees almost never help another and never share information. But Rosenberg writes, modern “human babies do all these things, and with strangers, well before they can do much more than crawl. They help, they share food, they even convey information before they have language and certainly without knowing anything about norms or niceness. That means that human babies have both an ability conveniently called theory of mind and an inclination to cooperate; both are hardwired or quickly and easily learned with very little experience at a very early age.”

What’s important to realize is that hominids learned to cooperate with the members of their group. Prehistoric groups fought with other hominid groups for possession of resources and territory. Shermer debunks the noble savage myth, which he says is still very strong in our culture, in particular in terms of violence. Many people seem to believe that violence is a recent development: a product of civilization, or patriarchy, or other relatively recent development. Shermer cites the numerous examples of anthropological sites dating back tens of thousands of years that show humans suffering violent deaths from such things as a hatchet blow to the head.

In addition, these early human groups believed they were special and better than people outside their group. Shermer uses an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomamo people, as a window into the thinking of people unaffected by modern civilization. They “consider themselves to be the ultimate chosen people—in their language their name represents humanity, with all other peoples as something less than human.” He quotes Aldous Huxley: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set is human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation.” [From The Olive Tree, 1937]

Early human social evolution was the story of small tribes cooperating within the group and fighting other groups. For most of humanity’s time on this planet, tribes numbered no more than 150 people. But in the last ten thousand years, the size of our social groups has mushroomed. Shermer includes a chart illustrating this remarkably rapid social evolution of humans:

100,000 – 10,000 years ago                  Bands                        10s – 100s of individuals

10,000 – 5,000 years ago                      Tribes                        100s – 1000s of individuals

5,000 – 3,000 years ago                        Chiefdoms                 1,000s – 10,000s of individuals

3,000 – 1,000 years ago                        States                        10,000s – 100,000s of individuals

1,000 – present                                      Empires                    100,000s – 1,000,000s of individuals

In other words, 10,000 years ago all of humankind lived in small groups made up of extended families. Imagine living in a group made up of your aunts, uncles, cousins, second-cousins, etc. Maybe you wouldn’t be related to everyone in your group, but everyone would be very much like you.

Today people live in groups made up of millions of people. I live in the United States, part of a 300-million-member group. Most Americans identify as a member of this group and cheer on its victories (most medals in the Olympics) and bemoan its defeats and threats (9/11, China's rise, Islamic terrorism, etc). We are capable of feeling a kinship with hundreds of millions of people, many of whom are very different from ourselves. Most of us never give this a moment’s thought, but being able to feel a membership in this large and diverse a group is an incredibly significant advance in consciousness.

I talked about these ideas with a friend, and he seemed to dismiss the idea that human social organization is improving. Finally I asked him, “Do you think human culture evolves?” He replied, “I don’t think evolution necessarily means things get better.” Very true—evolution just means a change that renders an organism better adapted to its environment. However, it is our ability to work together that has allowed us to prosper in every environment on this planet—from the poles to the Equator.

From what my friend said he seems to think humans’ ability to interact socially has gotten worse over the last ten thousand years. It occurred to me that there are a lot of new-age/liberals out there who probably feel the same way about this; they romanticize those small hunter-gatherer tribes.

I have a very different spin. Once upon a time, each tribe of 150 or so considered their members the only true humans. Now we can feel a common identity with 300 million people. Soon we’ll be capable of perceiving that every person on the planet is a member of our tribe—the human tribe—and the amount of creative energy that will be released by no longer having to fight each other will be astronomical.

Liberation Movements a Reflection of Evolving Consciousness

What a wonderful year it has been so far in terms of human freedom—the Middle East is alive with the dream of liberty.

Human history for me is the story of the evolution of consciousness. This story has been told in a number of books, including Ken Wilber's Up From Eden. For example, Wilber asserts that a major advance in human consciousness happened beginning around 500 B.C.E. (lasting for some centuries). This was a time of momentous change: the enlightened saints Buddha and Jesus mark the shift of consciousness, which to the masses of humanity brought a new concept of the individual, among many other changes. But Wilber's book doesn't bring the story up to modern times.

I think what’s happening in the Middle East is a continuation of another advance in consciousness, the beginning of which could perhaps be dated to the Renaissance. This shift in awareness brought about a new concept of freedom of thought, and brought democracy to the United States and revolution to France in 1789. We think of that as so long ago, but in the sweep of history it is just yesterday.

Perhaps that first wave of freedom in the 18th century was small and only washed over a few countries, but it slowly gathered force and size—it widened in this country to embrace people of all color and women by the middle of the 20th century, then it widened beyond the U.S. and Europe in the second half as countries around the world threw off colonial governments, and by the end of the century peoples in the Soviet empire and blacks in South Africa peacefully transitioned to more democratic governments.

Now the people of the Arab Middle East, that part of the world that seemed destined to stay feudal forever, ruled by sheiks and kings and petty tyrants, are engaging in mostly peaceful revolutions. The wave of consciousness is really strong now; its force has grown so that it seems unstoppable. Even in Libya, where Gaddafi seems to think he can still hold on, it has been amazing to see how many high level officials have resigned quickly.

Of course the wave still has a long way to go before we live in a world in which the people truly have power over their destiny. Looking at my country I am disheartened by the extent to which it is a plutocracy, but the wave can only be slowed. It can't be stopped.