Judaism
Religious Origins: Sociality and Xenophobia in Human Evolution
Abstract
Religious Origins 2
© Dr M D Magee
Saturday, 8 August 2009
Selfishness or Co-operation
Americans think of themselves as tough minded and realistic, taking it for granted that human beings are essentially selfish. Most of them think they would be savage or even bestial if it were not for God giving them morality, though this same God created them, and evidently, US Christians think, made them savage and bestial. These same people think that “the law of the jungle”, “survival of the fittest” is the natural instinct of human beings, yet they disparage Darwin who invented the theory of the survival of the fittest to explain how evolution worked in Nature.
For these utterly unreasonable and inconsistent people, survival of the fittest is wrong applied to beasts but is how human society is. It is their way of allaying their consciences for their inhuman and savage philosophy of life, one that betrays their own God’s teaching and that of most other mature religions. It excuses their own ruthless and selfish behaviour as normal!
Yet it is this very ruthlessness and selfishness that is savage and bestial, for human beings are among the animals that are social. We are obliged to work co-operatively with other human beings or just become another raptor like the coyote or the hyena, or the Tyrranosaurus rex, no terrestrial raptor ever being bigger or more ferocious, yet the beast is extinct! Humanity has survived by banding together and helping each other, not by being ruthlessly selfish or savage to each other.
It is easy to see the special pleading of US Christians in claiming that survival of the fittest means only selfishness and ruthlessness by considering animals for which fitness to survive is something else entirely. Ants and bees survive by social co-operation, as do such vertebrates as wild dogs, wolves, mole rats, meercats, and even lions, as well as our closer relatives the baboons and chimpanzees. Deer and horses survive by being fast runners but it does not suit the redneck mentality to think in terms of running away. Rabbits and rats survive by being fast breeders, but, though many a redneck likes to think of himself as a stud, they do not like an association with rodents. Many insects, slugs, earthworms, moles, and snakes survive by hiding effectively or seeming insignificant, or by camouflage, but reactionaries like their hunter raptor self image and the notion of hiding or camouflage does not suit them as seeming cowardly. Humans have developed intelligence to a fine art to survive, but redneck Americans will have none of that!
From the warning cry of primitive man to the latest scientific monograph or radio newsflash, language is social. Cultural and intellectual co-operation is the great principle of human life.S I Hayakawa
In contrast with this, the reactionary always makes out that competition is the great principle of human life. It cannot be true for society could never have formed at all, if it were. Did God lift the principle of competition to let society develop, then reimpose it? Survival of the fittest is not synonymous with being ruthless, savage or selfish, but could be any of a wide range of complex strategies that organisms have evolved to survive, but it suits brutal and selfish people to think in those terms to justify their own social strategies for getting an economic advantage over other people in society. Their success in doing it is a sign that human society is beginning to fail.
Society depends on co-operation and anyone who subscribes to the philosophy of perpetual human competition ignore the preponderance of co-operation just taken for granted by everyone throughout society, without which society would cease to function. Society is a vast internet of co-operation at every level, though some privileged classes pretend otherwise to maintain their own privilege. Think of how many people need to co-operate to build a motor car, a house or a jet airliner, put a meal on the table or a program on the TV screen, elect a federal administration or fight a war.
Why does the reactionary object to striking if competition is the rule? If we are not slaves and can only get a fair wage by strike action, then that is using competition to assert a fair balance of profit and remuneration. The reactionary promotes competition, but the competition is between corporations, large numbers of co-operating people. The plugger of competition actually will not let people withhold their co-operation. Paradoxically, what the redneck does not like is that it proves that co-operation is needed for society to work. Withdrawal of labour is withdrawal of co-operation, and that is when society grinds to a halt.
While people in society cannot be equal, their access to equity and justice must be equal for society to be fair and to succeed in doing what it is supposed to do—allow us to feel secure. The human survival strategy differs from that of most animals in being social. Helping others, not treading them underfoot, is what makes us human, and we urge it consciously, via religion and morals, not just instinctively, because we know it is to our mutual benefit. Reactionaries have forgotten it, if they ever knew it, and, by their attitude are pushing society to the brink of destruction.
The co-operative effort is negotiated using language. So, without language there is no society, no co-operation, and we must return to pure individualistic competition. That’s just what the Republican redneck wants, isn’t it?
Co-operation and Civilization
Society is a vast network of contracts and covenants—mutual agreements—between its members. The central teaching of all religions—we have been taught for half a century by The Reader’s Digest if we had not noticed in our own religion—is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, or alternatively, not to do unto others what we would not have them do unto us. It is the Golden Rule, the foundation of social living, and, although many modern Christians cannot see it, it requires them to do something. They have to act in a way acceptable to society. Responsible people do not murder others because they do not want others to murder them. The same is true of other wrongs and slights that are not acceptable to civilized society. Equally, we like others to help us when we are distressed or in need, so we do the same to them when they are. It is the simple Christian interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, but modern Rambo “Christians” think it is namby pamby.
No supernatural agency is needed for these precepts to make good sense to us as social animals. People who want the security and benefits of living co-operatively in a community, rather than fending for themselves outside of it, will gladly accept the loss of the freedom to kill and rob their neighbours. Those who refuse will lose their freedom, and many of the benefits society offers. It is a contract, one of many necessary for society to work.
Without this basic teaching of mutual regard, empathy and tolerance, always called religious, there could be no such thing as society. Essentially, we enter society with a promise to adhere to its network of agreements, expressed explicitly as laws and implicitly as morals, and one such agreement is that any dissatisfaction with an agreement is resolved by fair negotiation.
A promise is itself an agreement to do something. Sticking to our promises makes co-operation possible, and it is co-operation that makes us human. If we lived solitary lives, not willing to make any such promises, and not trusting others to stick to theirs, we could never have done what human beings have done. We would be running scared, skulking in caves, and hiding from danger in trees, terrified of every sound and shadow. Society depends on the promises to each other that ancient religions reinforced by their rituals of social cohesion and bonding, and even modern religions still preserve them—often explicitly—because religion evolved from those ancient ceremonies.
Nowadays, social dissidents cannot leave society. US rednecks claim the right to carry guns to kill others, allegedly in defence, but killing others is not social and is rightly forbidden in civilized society. Forbidding dangerous weapons is a way of ensuring people are not tempted to use them then find excuses for having killed someone. But those who want to kill others and carry dangerous weapons cannot leave society and act like the savage predators they think they are. Society has to curb them. If they will not stick to the promises society requires, or use the means of renegotiation at their disposal—democracy, lobbying, pamphleteering, the law courts—then society has to deal with them in other ways, usually by keeping them confined so that they are no threat to those who keep their promises.
The whole point about moral education is to prevent the need for sanctions like imprisonment, but the opportunities for renegotiation such as democracy and appeals to the courts must be fair. Religion was the source of moral education of old, but today, in pluralistic societies, it has to be the schools for morality to be evenly taught. Moral teaching is bringing children up to understand the patterns of behaviour required for social cohesion in civilization.
The typical reactionary, meaning in the US most conviction Republicans, decries the idea of anyone “getting something for nothing”. Yet even the most convinced Republican has had most of what makes them human for nothing, namely the shared benefits of civilization. We who live in human societies inherit all of the wisdom and discoveries of our predecessors—language, literature, art, science, culture, music, education, medicine, economics, democracy, and so on, and even our religions and morals, free, gratis and for nothing just by living in society, except when shysters have grabbed them as their own and started to charge the rest of us for them. Reactionaries have made communism and socialism into dirty words, but not one of them wants to leave their communities or society to live alone, or only with their wife as a companion, in a cave or on a desert island.
Communists and socialists are people who see the central, indeed vital, importance of community for humanity, and defend society against people who want it to be a source of slaves and free lunches. What these people want is a caste ridden society in which they are the top, privileged caste, so socialistic and communistic ideas that warn of the danger to society of elitism, injustice and privilege have to be suppressed as a threat to reactionary ambitions.
Unfortunately many ordinary voters are not critical or analytical enough to see that they are being conned by clever tricksters using religion and patriotism as tools of control. The reactionaries fool the poor voters into supporting them contrary to their own best interests. Yet we have seen all too clearly what happens when capitalist greed is allowed unfettered license—the grifters and tricksters bleed the country dry, and the poor are squeezed to pay for corporate and bankster avarice. When it is necessary to land the bill on the doormat of Mr Joe Doe, suddenly socialization of the financial system becomes attractive even to capitalists—but only as a temporary measure until the rich are bailed out and pick up their grifting where they left off.
Some Republicans, thinking this trickery was too transparent and gave the game away, urged the administration to let the banks collapse, knowing full well that no administration could let it happen. Without functioning banks, the whole capitalist system collapses, and out of it can only grow undisguised fascism to replace the present disguised fascism. The real option would have been proper socialism, but that is not an option in the US because of the intensity of American antisocialist propaganda in the twentieth century. Even Marx never envisaged communism as the only outcome of the collapse of capitalism. He foresaw the possible destruction of the mutually contending classes—in other words, the destruction of society.
Republicans want a degree of freedom to do as they like that no society can permit without imploding. All societies need laws and regulations, even capitalist societies—especially capitalists whose morality is all too often only a hair’s breadth from criminality. Capitalism is an economic system that history has shown repeatedly needs careful regulation if it is not to disappear into the black hole of its own greedy motivation.
Now the point of this apparent digression is that society has to be united to survive, and cannot be united without certain procedures, rules, and contracts agreed between us all. The need for social cohesion was felt even in ancient societies, perhaps as far back as human groups extend, and religion was the core of it.
Language
Most important of all in separating us from brute animals is that humans talk to each other. Other animals might communicate in a rudimentary way, but none of them talk. In day to day life, by talking we can negotiate to avoid conflict and make agreements to co-operate to our mutual advantage. It means we can educate our young, and so can pass to the next generation what this and previous generations have discovered. We can progress! That is what is being human.
When a golfer shouts “fore”, he is shouting a warning to those ahead they are in danger of being hit by a small round missile. Someone might shout “watch out below” if they accidentally dropped a TV from a fourth floor window. Many social mammals have the ability to shout warnings to others, but only humans have developed it into symbolic language. A warning cry by another animal in your group means you have the benefit of that animal watching out for you. Indeed, you have as many pairs of eyes on the lookout as their are animals in the band, but extending a few simple cries into language vastly extends the mutual assistance we can be to each other, and the more animals co-operating in the group, the more eyes and hands the group has to help each other.
With language, we can also combine our entire nervous systems, and especially our brains, but it means we are obliged to do for others what they are doing for us. We have to do for others what we want them to do for us. We combine our abilities by being social, helping us, originally a fairly vulnerable ape, to survive. Being social means we combine the experience of each one of us in the group, and communicate it by language:
If a person is worried about ethics, he is not limited to the advice of the pastor of Elm Street Baptist Church, he may go to Confucius, Aristotle, Jesus, Spinoza, and many others whose reflexions on ethics are on record. If a person is worried about love, he can get advice not only from his mother or best friend but from Sappho, Ovid, Propertius, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, or any of a thousand others who know something about it, and wrote down what they knew.…S I Hayakawa
So, we are superior to a solitary human, not merely because we have a gang to help us, but because the gang has exchanged information with each other so that we know socially more than the solitary person knows.
In any literate culture of a few centuries’ standing, human beings accumulate vast stores of knowledge—far more than any individual in that culture can read in his lifetime, let alone remember.S I Hayakawa
Such astonishing co-operation is co-operation from generation to generation, effectively co-operation across history, co-operation across time. It has nothing in common with ruthlessness and selfishness, and clearly shows diachronically what is true of human society synchronically. Human culture is the accumulation of human accomplishments. Weaving, painting, sculpture, building, science, cookery, writing, sports, transportation, etc, even warfare, are our “free gifts from the dead” as Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action, 1952) put it, and no one has done anything to earn any of it. We receive them simply because we are born human, and perhaps in a particular society that has honed some skill in its culture that another might not have. The redneck might be an aggressively patriotic American but that is a function of the lottery of birth, and not anything he has done. Being American is getting something for nothing!
We all take for granted our ability to talk, for talking is what lets us co-operate so amazingly that we have built remarkable civilizations. This ability to co-operate so successfully on a large scale is the key to our survival. Conversely, lack of co-operation and a refusal to negotiate causes wars, and sometimes the downfall of civilizations. The remedy human beings have for disagreement is talking. By talking we negotiate conflict away, and by refusing to do it, we are being irresponsible and even inhuman. It is a wilful neglect of the ability we have to avoid fighting each other. “Survival of the fittest” for humanity is using our unique combination of abilities, talking and co-operation, to prevent mutual destruction and work out ways of living amicably together. Only superpowers abandon negotiation because they back their sheer might in conflict with weaker nations. The US is typical of this with their invasion of Iraq on a pretext, rather than bringing Osama Bin Laden to trial, and their refusal to negotiate with Iran. There are more ways than one of co-operating, and negotiation requires some yielding on both sides to reach a compromise. Each side must listen honestly and fairly to the other’s point of view. A boorish refusal to move on some “policy” is the antithesis of negotiation.
Primeval Human Society
The idea of society is the soul of religion.Emile Durkheim
Primeval people, those who were making the transition from apes to conscious thinking human beings, began like children are now with a sense of wonder at almost everything they came across. The whole world was mysterious to them, but they had no concept of the supernatural. Everything to them was natural. They could explain nothing, and like children, they had to build up concepts of everything they experienced. It was a long slow process.
Everything had to be identified first—given a name. Then events, sequences of happenings, had to be experienced and described. Then from the words they had, and the experiences they could crudely describe using their limited vocabulary, they had to build up more complex notions. They experienced their own movements from this identified place to that one, then to another, and got a sense of space. Then they realized they had visited them in a certain order, and got from their sense of space a sense of time. Thus they built up a set of descriptions of basic concepts, and these then were used metaphorically to explain more complex ones.
Every idea we have is built up, like it was for those primeval people, from our most basic movements and needs as infants, and the subsequent experience we have of the world. Mother holds you tightly to her breast, so you get to understand closeness. Mother is warm, so you understand that too. Later in life you make a friend, and the metaphor you use to show your friendship is that it was close, or warm. Perhaps you have noticed that a rock is hard to break—it is strong—so you say your friendship is strong, and your friend a rock. And so it goes on, everything is metaphorical, everything, whether it is what we would call natural or supernatural.
Even in the primeval prehistory of humanity—in prehumanity—people were born and raised in a social group. A society is not just a group of people, it is also the complex of interactions between people that comprise the group—its culture—language, labour, recreation, science, art, laws, customs, values and morality, traditions, religions, crafts and objects. Without a society, law, morality and religion would be superfluous. They are all social matters.
When anyone is born into a society, it is born into a culture that already exists. It conditions every such person throughout their childhood and into adult life, giving them a world view that stays with them for the rest of their lives. Their language, habits and their own self concept came from society. In the remarkable cases of feral children that have been deprived of human contact for two long, they are permanently damaged, and can never recover their humanity. Rituals of self discipline, rites of passage, morals, laws, social welfare are part of a society’s culture, and have to be taught to children together with the mythology that justifies them. Some type of educational system is needed even by a primitive society to perpetuate its traditions, and therefore itself.
The original point of social living was sharing. No one owned anything, except what they might have picked up from anywhere, for as we passed from ape to human, there was not much to own. Private property was unknown in primeval, and even the succeeding primitive, societies. Tools were stones and staves picked up as needed, and food and security were communal affairs. Karl Marx called this stage of social evolution “primitive communism”, and it lasted for most of human existence—the very long hunter gatherer phase, which only began to end about 10,000 years ago, and still exists in some parts of the world. Gathering alone provided an adequate living but, topped up with some first class protein from sufficiently regular kills, it was a good living. Hunter gatherers needed to be social to effect both their main methods of getting food, and having done so they had plenty of leisure time on their hands, and plenty of friends to share the fun with.
Part of the fun was teaching others. When people learnt to make tools out of stone, bone and wood, obviously some could do it better than others, but human sociability meant the good toolmaker would show others what he was doing. When others learnt the skill they would show others, in turn, until everyone knew how to do it. Even then, not everyone could do it as well as the best, but everyone had learnt the method. This inclination and patience at teaching others and the young ones is largely what gave human beings an advantage. A particular way of doing something was one of the characteristics of the tribe. It was the beginning of what we call culture. The story is told that a monkey in a band of them learnt how to wash sweet potatoes buried for them in the sand, then taught the others the trick until they all knew how to do it. Early humans shared their skills in the same way.
Before long people would have had their own tools, but their commitment to the tribe was unaltered. They still needed security and the tribe gave them it, but specialization must have started to happen. Women and children always mainly gathered while the men hunted. Women discovered how to make containers to carry roots and berries out of gourds, then learnt how to weave baskets, while men made stone axes, knives and scrapers for cutting and preparing carcases, spears and bone fish hooks. Older men and injured ones will have remained at the base camp with the women and kids, teaching the kids and perhaps making tools for the able bodied men to use.
It all ended when humans began to settle down to gardening and then to agriculture, a change brought on by the gradual loss of game and increased competition for what remained. Even as hunter gatherers the tribe had built villages on patches of land it temporarily laid claim to, and the concept of private property arose through the marking off of areas and objects as being sacred—of special meaning to the whole of the tribe, and not to be treated as ordinary or profane. Whatever was ordinary or profane could be treated just as anyone wanted, but not the sacred items and places. They were to be used by the whole community, on special occasions only. For what purpose? Very probably for fun! So, the distinction that arose early in human development was between sacred things, reserved for the special social purposes of the whole band, and profane things—almost everything else done privately or in small subgroups.
But following the settlement, or colonization, of the land, the leaders eventually took ownership of it as kings. Society became more explicitly class divided, and once it had divided on class lines, social conflict began in earnest. Class division meant society had started to crack open, and more than ever it had to be held together. Religion became vitally important in doing so. It became the tool by which class society was maintained, and god the supernatural agent in whose name it was done. What had stood for all society now served the ruling elite class. God had once embodied social norms, but now embodied the norms of the rulers, and expressed their laws.
“I” and “You”
Ludwig Feuerbach thought consciousness was a function of the relationships between people. “I” does not, cannot, exist by itself. It signifies the subject and means nothing unless there is an object. “I” cannot exist without a corresponding “you”. From the viewpoint of “you”, the former “I” is “you”, and the former “you” is “I”. No “I”, the subject of cognition, can be formed unless there is a “you”, another person in respect of whom it means something. A minimum of two people are needed for “I” and “you” to have meaning, and in fact, they get their meaning from the sociality of the human species. Humans exist in many “I” and “you” relationships.
Feuerbach considered whether the objective world would suffice for the “you”, allowing the “I” to form in a solitary animal, but he concluded that the “I” necessarily distinguishes two people. Something else will not serve as a neutral object to “I”. A neutral object is not a “you”. The “you” implies a like consciousness to the “I”. “You” is necessarily a visible and palpable “I”—another human. This is an absolutely crucial concept, for it implies that the abstract philosophizing of an isolated subject, in the manner of Descartes and Kant, is an unrealistic exercise, merely a mental game. It cannot relate to the real evolution of consciousness. Any being considered in true isolation is in a mental vacuum.
Perhaps language illustrates the point better. Language cannot evolve unless there are at least two people, the speaker and the hearer, the informant and the informed, and, of course, they interchange. Some neuroscientists think language is essential to the evolution of thought, and so, in like manner to language, thinking requires two people, and this is reflected in the general idea of needing someone “to bounce ideas off”, and the extended idea of “brainstorming”. It means that consciousness is a social matter. Human psychology is concerned not with one brain, but two or more. When Freud saw the father and mother as major factors in the personal psychology of anyone, he was simply accepting that consciousness is social. Consciousness is handed down. We see and recognize ourselves, our “I”, in others, in their “you”.
Verbs are conjugated in three persons not two, we, you and they, and some languages, like the Semitic ones, decline nouns in three persons too—our, your and their. Some languages do not have a singular, so the plural forms are used here for generality. This too suggests that humans are necessarily social animals, and have grown their consciousness as social beings, so that the plural forms are more instinctive to us. We incline to think of ourselves as a group, the reason obviously being that we have always lived in groups, in extended families or clans, and then in tribes. Solitary animals never live in groups bigger than a family, often just a mother and some offspring who eventually leave home, and thereafter are treated as strangers.
Feral Children
In the 18th century, Carolus Linnaeus, who first classified humans as animals (Homo sapiens), also classified a species of men as the “wild man” (Homo ferus). His examples were children brought up by wild animals. A few cases were known in the Middle Ages, but there were more by Linnaeus’s lifetime, some being recent and authentic. He concluded that “wild men” moved about on all fours, could not speak and were not conscious like a normal human.
In the thirty or more cases that have been reasonably documented, the infants had been abducted by wild animals, mostly wolves, and occasionally bears and once a leopard. The animals were carnivores or omnivores but never herbivores. Why? It is simply that the predators took the infant as prey, but then adopted them instead of eating them, doubtless because the “parent”, a female, had lost a litter and its maternal instincts transferred to the infant. Most cases are reported from India. Indian women traditionally left their children at the edge of the forest when doing field work. So, the wild mother could adopt the human infant, but more important still is that they fed their young with meat when suckling ended. A human child can live on this, but could not live on uncooked plants, even if regurgitated.
Because of its human intelligence, the feral child learned the cries and actions to stimulate the feeding instinct of the mother animal, and to continue to do it over a period of years—though no instance has been recorded of the feral child reaching adulthood, as Tarzan is supposed to have, indeed there are no cases of human children being brought up by apes—yet they managed to keep their mother’s maternal instinct at work for them even though several generations of the mother’s natural offspring were born, raised and left home. They probably stuck to moving about on all four limbs because they had no example of adults walking upright, or encouragement to do it, but plenty of examples of their peers walking quadrupedally. Though they survived, they scarcely looked human when found.
In the Cachar mountains in India, villagers killed two cubs in the den of a leopard. Two days later the she leopard bore away a two year old boy from their village. Three years passed. In 1923, hunters killed the she leopard and found in her lair, beside its young, a five year old boy. He moved about on all fours and proved quite at home in the jungle. The skin on the palms of his hands and knees had thickened, while his toes were almost at right angles to the soles. His body was covered with scars and scratches. He pounced upon a hen, tore it to pieces and devoured it in extraordinary haste. Gradually, he grew accustomed to the human environment and stopped biting. In three years the boy learned to walk upright but still preferred to move about on his fours. He learned to eat vegetable food, but some incurable eye disease, culminating in blindness, hindered his humanization. He died shortly after.
A boy, believed to have lived six or seven years in a wolf pack, was discovered in the Indian jungle in 1956. Although nine years old, he was mentally a nine months old baby. Lucknow Ramu, as he was named, began walking upright and showed signs of regaining command of his wrists and ankles after four years in hospital under constant medical care. Gradually, he accustomed himself to dealing with humans and a human diet, giving up eating raw meat.
A well publicized case is that of two girls discovered among a litter of wolf cubs in a wolf’s lair in India in 1920. One girl was seven or eight, the other about two years old. Sent to an orphanage, they moved about like quadrupeds, and only at night. During the day they slept in a corner, cuddling against each other like cubs, and preferred the company of dog cubs to that of human playmates. At night they howled like wolves, and made several attempts to flee to the jungle. Teachers endeavoured to humanize them, but the younger girl, called Amala, died a year later. The elder one, Kamala, lived another nine years.
It took almost five years to teach her to walk upright, but she slowly learned to understand human speech and to speak herself. At seventeen her mental development was that of a four year old, showing that acculturization from birth is essential to our becoming human. Her brain connections had been made, and could not be fully unmade and remade. The human brain might be more complex than, and anatomically superior to, that of any animal, but all it has is the potential for the typically human abilities like speech and thought. The actual potential is only realized through tuition, through acculturation to human habits. Once human potential is realized, it cannot be undone, except by disease or decay. Once someone has grown up in a human culture, and become accustomed to human social intercourse and habits, they have their humanity as part of their very being.
Criminals hiding from justice, lepers isolated from society, shipwrecked voyagers, lost travellers, prisoners in dungeons do not become savage, as some people imagine. For millennia, tyrants have thrown rivals, revolutionaries, malcontents, and traitors into dungeons for long terms of strict isolation, perhaps life, but, when they have emerged, none of them have been utterly dehumanized—incapable of speech, hairy, and quite animal like—though they were often dirty, bearded, lank, emaciated, diseased and sometimes demented. The opposite, though, is true, they have emerged from their long incarceration with exalted thoughts and feelings, their human compassion apparently enhanced.
“We” and “They”
The social group thinks of itself as the unit of being, and that arises because every group was in contact with other groups, groups of strangers who could not be trusted. Without knowing other groups of humans, no one in a group could be aware of it because, if they had no idea that other groups existed, they had no basis for realizing theirs was a group. Only when another group appeared could they know theirs was not unique, and they had a basis for distinguishing themselves from the others.
The group then became a “we” and the strangers became a “they”, not a “you” because direct contact was avoided, and so was rare. “We” were aware that “they” were nearby, but “we” avoided “them”, and “they” avoided us. References to them were as “they”, “them” and “theirs” in contrast with “we”, “us” and “ours”, but the “they”, “them” and “theirs” had to precede the “we” because the strange group was necessary for the “we” and “us” group to distinguish themselves from it. “We” are “not them”.
This is the source of human xenophobia. People brought up together trust each other, but human children have an innate distrust of strangers, as well meaning people can find when they ask to hold someone’s baby. The infant is likely to bawl, and hold its arms out to someone it knows. “They” could cause misery by raiding “our” camp, “they” had unspeakable habits whereas “we” had sensible devotions to our totems which favoured “us” and hated “them”. “they” spoke in a barbaric language quite incomprehensible to “us”, and “they” were quite incapable of understanding “our” refined ways of speaking. In short, “we” were proper human beings, but “they” fell short of humanity in some way.
In the early days of humanity spreading over the earth, the tribes were widely spread, and rarely came into contact. Such contact as there was was from behind, so to speak—the human groups following the pioneers. So, the pioneers were being pushed to move on, and keep a safe distance from “them”, the groups pushing up behind them. Eventually, as the density of population increased tribes were forced closer together, so that each tribe came into contact with more than one other. Then the “we” changed to distinguish “us” from everyone else who were not us. So, the “we” arose in reaction to the “they”, and much of the difficulties between nations is based on the same instinctive fear of others, an adaptation that could mean the end of us all, if we do not overcome it. What is true now, and ought to be clear, is that there is no “they” in the world. We are all one large tribe of human beings, and it is time we began to think like it.
Fear and Loathing
The original human communities were most likely people of a common origin—a family group, the offspring of which stuck around with mum and their brothers and sisters when they ought to have moved on. Naturally, it led to tension within the community, but the individuals were better off as a group than as solitary hunters or scavengers, and slowly the habit spread through natural selection. However, primitive tribes are not usually blood relatives, though they often claim they are as descendants of a founding father or some animal, their totem. Several clans must have agreed to come together to further some project that was impossible for each clan alone, perhaps to see off a threat, or for an annual hunt. They merged to co-operate with each other. But they would also adopt someone who had been expelled from their own tribe, and so acceptance rituals began. The reject would tentatively approach a tribe for acceptance, and, if accepted, after suitable preparation and ritual, they became a reincarnation or personification of some dead tribesperson.
Adjacent tribes most likely spoke the same language, albeit in different dialects, showing occasional contact must have been unavoidable, but intelligibility diminished as the groups got more distant from each other. Language was one of the cultural features that people used to distinguish themselves from “them”—strangers. Culture is a conservative tendency, a way to socialize the young, to preserve stability and security, the way of life inherited from older generations and the nature of work in the environment of the tribe. It consists of customs, habits, traditions, tastes, language, prejudices, art, music and religion. One’s own were recognizable by their speech, and thus easily distinguishable from the strangers. from the outset, families, tribes and other groupings gave themselves an identity that distinguished them from others. Clothing, facial decorations and tattoos also served this purpose. Culture marked the boundaries between human groups. The opposition between “us” and “them” consolidated communities.
The reaction to becoming aware of another group, “they”, in ancient times, was to keep as great a distance from them as possible. It is possibly what drove early men to spread across the world. They advanced into virgin territory as the tribes behind them pressed nearer. The further back archaeologists look, the further apart are human settlements. Early humans would cut through forests, travel down rivers, cross deserts, seek routes through icecaps, float logs across oceans of unknown width, and generally take terrible risks and lose many lives to move onward, and for what reason? B Porshnev (Social Psychology and History) thinks it was mutual repulsion, and perhaps fear. The expansion of the tribes just to the rear kept the pioneering tribes advancing, but none never, or hardly ever, advanced so quickly that they left the following tribe out of touch. No pioneering tribe seems to have lost complete touch with its nearest neighbours, barring odd accidents, but the original relationship between neighbouring human groups was revulsion.
Studies of Australian aboriginals show the prevalence of fear and loathing between communities. Sickness and death is always ascribed to sorcery, but the sorcerer is a member of another tribe if not the whole of an alien tribe. Regarding the Arnhem Land tribes, Baldwin Spencer wrote that they…
…are always most frightened of the magic of another tribe or a distant part.
James Chambers said that the natives of southern New Guinea thought every member of another tribe, and every stranger imperilled their lives. A slight rustle, the fall of a dry twig, the scamper of a wild pig, and the flight of a bird sent them into paroxisms of fear and trembling. Alfred William Howitt said of the Australian Kurnai tribe that they lived a life of horror, being in constant fear of everything visible and invisible. Other tribes, according to E M Curr, after a funeral, would send a corps of warriors 50 miles to find some tribe, any tribe, that they could ambush by night and massacre in their sleep in revenge for their own dead man.
Papuans of the Mafulu tribe never feared their own witchdoctor, but feared and blamed for disease and death the witchdoctors of other tribes. Karl von den Steinem found in Brazil that the Bacaïri tribe believed all the evil sorcerers lived in other villages, and their word for evil (kurapa) actually means “not ours” or “alien”. The Indian Todas think their neighbours, the Kurumba, are powerful magicians, but the Kurumba think the same of the Todas. It all confirms that fact that humans beings have irrational and utterly unfounded fears of other humans whom they consider as strangers.
Membership of a human group gave security and stability, but between themselves, the groups had a relationship of fear and loathing. Human groups were not isolated, but their intercourse was limited by avoidance. Humans are both social and antisocial. Modern politicians use this duality of human nature for propaganda. They like to create a “they” that “we” can all hate, then the media build up the hate of the “they” as a unifying influence on “us”. For years the propaganda enemy, the “they”, were communists and socialists in the US, then with the collapse of communism, the “they” became terrorists, mainly Moslem ones. Now US Republicans like to speak about “terrorist nations”, a group of which the US is undoubtedly not a member though it has terrorized much of the world for over a century. People never seem to learn about this political trickery, and it is probably because it works on a deep seated xenophobia in the human psyche. It is a phobia we have to overcome, if human civilization is to continue long into the future.
Another poweful influence of the “we” and “they” dichotomy is in cultural matter like sports. Whether team sports or individual ones, the backing of the crowd is proven to be most important for success. The athletes feel the encouragement of the crowd because they associate with them and all together become a “we” competing against a “they”, the opposing team or athletes.
A similar effect is found in religion. Members of a congregation can feel all the exultation, power, spiritual influence and fanaticism they feel together, because in a crowd they have a strong sense of the “we” that is obviously absent when they are alone, and alone, few people get these religious feelings. Thomas Strehlow, who lived for years among the Australian Aranda tribe studying their native rites and myths, concluded that religious tradition frustrated all creative impulses and the imagination. The elders, the custodians of the tradition had formed it into a tyranny which resulted in apathy and mental somnolence. Sacred myths were transmitted word for word from generation to generation. No new myths could be created, and the rites associated with them remained unchanged. Nothing in the tribal culture encouraged any broadening of mental scope.
“We” feelings of fanaticism, patriotism, exclusivity, and sectarian bigotry are exploited by people with their own agenda that the participants often cannot see, because they distinguish themselves as being righteous in some respect contrary to the others, the “they”, whom they consider evil or enemies. It does not differ from primitive tribesmen fearing the sorcerers of the next tribe. The Nazis exploited the same human characteristic by using religious techniques for nationalistic purposes that led to awful atrocities when the Jews were painted as the “they” whom all righteous Germans (the “we”) should want destroyed. Patriotic sects, religious cults, and political parties, as well as other communities in the modern world identify themselves as a “we” even though most of them do not know most of the others. Such a community is built around some common purpose or person. They are the in group opposed to the rest, the “they”, who are the out group, and then atavistic human instincts take over as a social contagion.
Speech, Thinking, Learning
Thinking is closely associated with speech, and once the human has learnt how to speak, it can certainly think, however badly. The association is proven. Anyone thinking of some problem, turns it over in their mind by speaking the questions and possible answers mentally. The mental patterns of speech are activated, and so too are the physical organs concerned with speaking, the larynx, palate, tongue, lips and breathing. Often, though, a solution cannot be found, but then springs to mind perhaps the next day, so the unconscious brain has solved it, and there is no need to imagine that such unconscious thought requires speech. It is thinking consciously that does.
Echolalia is the automatic repetition of something someone has said rather than responding appropriately to it. It is important in the way infants learn how to speak, but is also important in the evolution of sociality and culture. Take the repetition for generations of tribal legends and myths. It is hard for us, who have little need to remember anything precisely, to understand how long strings of names of ancestors or of tales about campaigns and migrations, sometimes taking hours to recount, can be accurately repeated in such a way that the myths remain stable over countless lifetimes. Poetry is one aide memoire, but echolalia provides the “people’s memory”, their orally transmitted epic legends.
Thus Polynesians, as Thor Heyerdahl discovered, had remarkably exact knowledge of their remote past. It was remembered because the people recited precisely, without the slightest change in words, ancient tales of their earlier existence, literally bypassing thought by echolalia from generation to generation. Echolalia was similarly used to transmit news across long distances in the days before the telegraph and wireless—the “long ear”. Information had to be relayed from mouth to mouth, yet normally reached the remotest address in its original form. Nowadays, the echolalia of old has weakened and everyone renders the message in their own words, so that “Send reinforcements, we are going to advance,” can disastrously metamorphose into “Send three and fourpence, we are going to a dance.”.
The higher the level of human society the more critical man is of the forces inducing him “instinctively” to perform certain actions. Every person belongs at once to many communities, to many “we” groups. None can therefore monopolise his mind to the total exclusion of the others. He is continuously deciding which “we” group will for the moment determine his behaviour and feelings. Something must persuade him what is for the moment his best interest. People do not usually, these days, just act without consideration, but when it corresponds with their convictions, they will yield to the relevant “we” group. Others in the group have the same interest which can be thought of as a community virus. The virus of mutual excitement at a football match is a good example.
Watching another animal stimulates certain neurones in its brain which induce the same action, laughing and yawning in humans being typical, but the imitation goes much further. The biological usefulness and adaptive impact of this mechanism are great and evident, it being a source of compassion in many mammals besides ourselves. It also helps the preservation of progeny and is stronger in younger than adult animals of many species. The complex of behaviours brought on by this instinct of imitation is called the “gregarious instinct” or sociality, and so is necessarily strong in social animals.
As humans, we do not notice that elements of imitation are present in ordinary intercourse. They are the basis of culture. The pattern of our daily routine is largely based on imitation—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the homes we live in and the utensils we use, are all imitated. Unconsciously people adopt the manners and habits of others, this being more intensive in children. Education is partially based on imitation—repeating the teacher’s explanation, imitating other pupils, following good examples. Learning to speak and learning a foreign language is imitation. Learning a trade, art and sport is based mostly on demonstration, the tyro being shown what to do, and invited to copy it.
Suggestion
Speech is meant to convey a meaning, however trivial, to suggest something, though meanings and suggestions thus conveyed do not have to be accepted. Usually an opposing psychological activity also is operating—critical appraisal and comparison with something else. Unquestioning trust is tantamount to accepting any absurdity. Tertullian said, “Certum est quia imposibile est”. “It must be so because it is impossible.” Absurdity is the response to faith, and faith is absolute trust in some “we” group. Members of such groups are somnabulists, feigning consciousness. Anyone awake constantly counters the suggestions of others with a degree of distrust. Each person has some suspicion that anything suggested to them might be from a member of a “they” group, and have a sense that they must verify the reliability of the source.
Suggestion is the psychological mechanism of authoritarianism, a mechanism of prohibition and command to suppress opposition. But one can only suggest to people what corresponds to their needs and interests, their convictions and will. Authority originates in a group or community. A leader, the authority, is in a sense a slave of the group. Changing the group contagion once it is well established is not easy, even for the greatest leaders and the most authoritarian. Chiefs of primitive communities were worshipped as gods, but were slaves of ritual, their personal freedom reduced almost to nil. They had to fulfil the obligatory rites, and it remains the same still, as observers of the Republicans can see for themselves. A dictator is an authority that cannot be removed, whose will is obligatory, permanent and immutable. The members of the group he controls are slaves, and he is their master. If his removal or replacement is conceivable, then his psychological power is shaken. Democracy implies permanent removability, but the elected leader is even more the slave of the group that elected him, and he often ends up merely responding to the whims of his group, or particularly the press who pretend to represent a group’s interests, when they are actually a different group with their own interests.
Conscious action necessitates decisions which require understanding and criticism. People who are totally spontaneous are acting unconsciously. The social lives of social animals and early humans must have been spontaneous, for society was built on instinct and emotion, not consciously and therefore not rationally. John Rawls invites us to think rationally about what system of Justice would be fairest for everyone in society irrespective of their position in it, but he is fully aware that such a convention never happened in reality. The reason is that society evolved unconsciously, yet it evolved in just such conditions as Rawls invites us to consider. No one could know how the group they were forming would treat them, or what their position would be in it. If society was unfair, the ones at a disadvantage would leave, or, if they were able, they would expel the over dominant members. The outcome was fairness to all within narrow boundaries, such as the general acceptance that someone would lead, and would deserve special respect for that responsibility, as long as they did not take advantage of it. The mechanisms of social psychology evolved spontaneously, involuntarily and unwittingly by a system of multiple interactions between the members.
Levy Bruhl showed in a special article that in primitive societies the notion of individual could not be dissociated from his possessions, trappings, utensils, dwelling, clothes, landed property and domestic animals. Similarly, he could not be separated from his geographical environment, his relatives, or his name. To harm some part of his environment was to inflict a wound on his body. In other words, the “I” was so extensive as to be almost nonexistent. Moreover, anyone passing from one age or tribal group to another had to change their name. The old personality disappeared and a new one took its place.
The separation of things into pairs consisting of polar opposites seems to be a distinction made early in the growth of human thought. But what triggered the notion. Before being tied to its opposite, some pole must have made an initial impression. The criterion of beauty and morality always implies invisible censure and negation of the tasteless, ugly, and immoral, and these negatives are associated with fear of the alien, the other, the stranger, “them”, the “they”. These are more distinctly drawn than their beauty and morality, in short what “we” prefer! The positives, associated with “us”, the “we” group, take form through the negation of “they” groups. Hatred and love reflect the same duality of “alien” and “own”.
Lessons of Social History
The social history of the human race amounts to “we” against “they”. At the distant beginnings of human history, small human groups feared others like them. They were “they”. Throughout subsequent history, human consciousness has been formed by the antithesis between our civilisation and their savagery, between our humanity and their inhumanity, by our good taste and their philistinism, by our morality and their depravity. Our disgust and loathing was most aroused by our neighbours, the ape like creatures that we are ourselves. We looked at ourselves and found the sight loathsome, but never realized it was self loathing.
Robert Oppenheimer, a giant of 20th century science, said that in the most primitive societies the principal function of ritual, religion, and culture is to stop change, to provide an equilibrium and stability, to keep things as they have always been in response to convulsions in the world around. Today culture has a different intellectual and social purpose—to accommodate change. The main cultural change bringing it about is science.
Many tribes and peoples remained out of the reach of even such conquerors as Cyrus, Alexander the Great and the Romans, but the stoics already yearned for unity or unification of mankind. The Christians followed them, reading the sayings of Jesus, which were not universal but applied only to Jews, as universal truths applicable to the whole of mankind.
Today, the unity of mankind is implicit in the philosophy of science. No science is conceivable without human mind, intellect and consciousness being common to all peoples and persons irrespective of culture and history. For science is what is objective—commonly accepted by everyone, because everyone can test it for themselves and find it is true. Without it truth cannot be truth. It cannot be agreed by all and therefore is not binding on all and is not universal. The concept of humanity as one race is a precondition of science. Scientific objectivity requires humanity to be one whole.
