We can't save the world with hype and hyperbole -- religious,
ethical, political or otherwise. We can only save the world through
education. Here's why.
PART I
1
That inhumanity will end only when humans acknowledge their behavior toward others to be unethical and immoral is surely true. For this to occur, however, people must perceive their own welfare to depend upon the welfare of all.
Contrary to popular belief, most of us are neither fundamentally savage nor biologically and socially inclined to care deeply about all people and all creatures. Historical, psychological and anthropological evidence tells us that humans instinctively support one another within groups numbering about 150 to 200, but make conscious and more or less rational decisions whether to deal caringly or aggressively with those outside that group. Historical evidence well establishes that people can relinquish aggressive behaviors toward outsiders in favor of negotiation and cooperation when their welfare is enhanced as a result. Psychological evidence demonstrates that people can genuinely change their feelings toward former enemies as a result of behaving differently toward them.
Ongoing psychological research, in particular in the field of Attachment Theory, indicates that all of us possess the unique capacity to willfully become more altruistic. The history of our species is the history of a creature almost bereft of instinct, but driven to discover useful strategies to fill its needs. Though no instinct compelled early humans to love their culturally distant neighbors for example, genetic tools did compel us to recognize environmental patterns impacting our survival -- including patterns indicating that an outsider may pose a threat. We could negotiate and cooperate with adversaries as well as fight or flee from them. The ability to select among coping strategies, rather than to merely react, is a genetically endowed capacity maximally developed among our species. It refined itself when we suffered the consequences of strategies that didn't work well. We grew able to expand our definition of who belonged in our in-group, of who merited compassion, when we learned that our own survival was enhanced by doing so. The ability to create common cause enabled the usually warring Germanic Tribes of the fifth century to overthrow Rome, and in more recent times, allowed Protestant and Catholic immigrants in this country to overcome their differences in order to create a labor movement capable of dealing with exploitative industrial bosses. It also allowed the children of immigrants to adapt to their new surroundings without cutting roots with their parents and older relatives who found assimilation more difficult.
The ability to embrace people outside of our in-groups constitutes an advanced, uniquely human adaptive strategy, engaging us emotionally as well as cognitively. We think, feel and behave differently when we do it. It begins, however, at the cognitive level.
2
It was only predictable, given how natural selection works, that homo sapiens, would possess precisely our capacity for ruthlessness toward outsiders as well as cooperation with in-groupers. Archeology reveals how, like other predators, humans have always been capable of eliminating competition for essential resources as well as capable of cooperating toward that end. Whether tribes or nations, our European ancestors often removed or enslaved weaker competitors, negotiating only when they felt they must. Nevertheless, Neanderthals, and others governed by the primitive parts of their brains, succumbed to homo sapiens in the race for natural selection's brass ring. We beat them out in the evolutionary struggle for dominance largely because of our greater ability to behave altruistically within our in-groups, and to rationally decide whether warfare or cooperation with outsiders constituted the more effective strategy.
3
Anthropologists tell us that if horses, dogs, goats and pigs had existed in the Neolithic Western hemisphere as well as in Eurasia, or if life had been as difficult in Eurasia as it was on most of the planet, global conflict might be far less extreme than at present. Eurasians became immune to the diseases spread by the animals that made them prosperous. Agriculture came easily, and hard metals for weapons were plentiful. Communities quickly over-populated. Horses were plentiful and warfare became a useful strategy for finding new territories to exploit. When Eurasian warrior hordes used up the human and natural resources of a region they simply moved on.
In the Western Hemisphere things were different. Life was hard, and it took great concentration to eke a decent living out of unfertile plains, nutrient-poor jungles, and arid mountains. In Meso-America, conquering tribes often starved to death trying to rebuild what they had destroyed. Aztecs and others did indeed practice horrible cruelties from time to time. However, they also invented methods of city and regional planning, of political coordination, and of social integration far beyond anything witnessed in Europe. They created maize (a major feat of genetic engineering and long before Mendel), transformed the Amazon forests into plentiful gardens and much more. In North America, the constant migration of tribes southward from the Bering Strait created ripe conditions for perpetual warfare. However, a growing literature reveals how among the great Native American confederations, such as the Iroquois, warfare was rare and highly controlled.
If Europeans were fine warriors and poor negotiators, it wasn't their military skills that brought the New World to its knees in the fifteenth century. It was the diseases they brought with them. The many millions thriving in North and South America lacked immunity and their devastation was beyond measure.
But for the diseases, the clash of European and American cultures might have evolved quickly to an entirely new kind of society.
4
If people have the capacity to expand altruism to include the entire global community, but will not embrace this goal until they perceive it to be necessary for survival, then the most critical function of education today can be simply stated: It is to provide people the necessary information to decide whether warfare of any kind is any longer a feasible strategy for enhancing their survival not only in the short run but in the long run. If inter-group aggression, whether tribal or cultural or national is perceived by the human community to be irrational, it may be abandoned. Conceivably, homo sapiens have the capacity to become a true global community.
Part II
1
How does this basic information concerning who we are and might conceivably become apply to what is happening today? Does a world of perpetually clashing civilizations not seem more inevitable now than ever? The Government of the United States, undeniably the world's most powerful apparently assumes this to be the case. They seem to operate under the assumption that in order to survive in a world of civilization size tribes the United States must remain the toughest such entity on Earth. President Jimmy Carter's chief Middle Eastern advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, stated this thesis clearly and concisely. He was soon echoed by his equally prestigious colleague Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations. These works still constitute ideological cornerstones of top U.S. foreign policy makers. They also find widespread acceptance among their critics. Within the United States, and by default everywhere given U.S. military superiority, warfare as in-group strategy appears to be on the rise, not the decline.
Growing evidence suggests that this ideology of aggression has become irrational as well as inhumane. Machiavellian policies can no longer guarantee powerful nations their security. Moral and ethical considerations aside, such policies are so profoundly questionable from any survivalist perspective that only a thorough examination of this questions can determine whether those who persist in them operate rationally enough to be trusted to any degree by those they claim to protect and nurture.
2
In this context, the absence of debate concerning whether our nation's leaders can carry out their larger foreign policy goals should be of the greatest concern. It constitutes the strongest indication of the need for a powerful education initiative. Much of the success of the Civil Rights Movement depended upon replacing common assumptions about the biology of race with facts contradicting those assumptions. The threat of nuclear warfare was nullified worldwide as hard evidence of its devastating consequences became widespread. Predicting the inability of our leaders to prevail is counterintuitive for most people. Our leaders, and those before them have indeed prevailed, for as far back as we can recall. Subjugation of the weak by the strong has been the norm. Powerful evidence tells us that this may well no longer be true. In important ways the world has changed.
Economists tell us that the gross national products of the group of nations most exploited by Western imperialism, the Have-Nots, has grown faster than any other economic sector. Have-Nots increasingly demonstrate resilience, imagination and adaptive skill at dealing with imperial Haves. For decades ranking members of our own State Department and intelligence community have acknowledged Arabic peoples to be highly adept modernizers even as the public is encouraged to view Arabs as backward, religious fanatics. The Islamic Fundamentalist Movement has demonstrated a remarkable ability to manage finances electronically, to create effective combatant units operating like tiny islands connected only to a central command post, and to present well armed and powerful nations with an efficient enemy difficult if not impossible to eliminate. Like tiny-hornets, they fly too fast to be swatted and deliver lethal bites, repeatedly.
History tells us that the world of warfare has always changed. In today's world, conventional warfare is passé; Today's wars are not waged between armies and navies and air forces so much as between the former and small groups of very sophisticated guerilla fighters. No guerilla band can defeat any nation's army or police force, but no nation's army or police force can protect its own citizenry from guerillas. The tiniest, most backward village has access to the Internet, affording people detailed information about how to obtain and use biological and chemical weapons. When "little people" willing to die to deliver such weapons are managed and orchestrated by sophisticated organizations operating as easily from London, Calcutta, Buenos Aires or Los Angeles as from a foxhole in Afghanistan; and when these leaders use small forces to accomplish their goals, not hesitating to sacrifice masses of their own people in order to create chaos among stationary communities surrounded by vast virtually un-policeable borders and avenues of access (our government's claims to the contrary notwithstanding); then attacks by "little people" seem likely to achieve a high degree of success. Powerful nation-states possess vastly superior arms, but the inferior weapons of the scattered riff-raff who oppose them can surely deliver societally devastating havoc.
3
Daily reports from the Middle East reveal how little imagination is required to envision devastating attacks upon random schools, small towns, church picnics and crowded streets. The United States can quickly become a place of fear, depression, and outrage at leaders who add to our torment in order to preserve their control. This is what citizens can rationally anticipate if we fail accurately to assess the rationality, if indeed the sanity, of our leaders.
These include not merely the Incumbency, but the more elusive, shadow group who no longer earn but simply own money. The men who sit on the boards of major corporations, who manage the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who fund the great Neo-liberal/ Neo-conservative think tanks. The men who decide which political candidates citizens will be allowed to select amongst.
Our government proclaims that only they can protect us from ethno-centric enemies bent upon our destruction, but history firmly rejects this argument. In-groups have defined themselves based upon ethnicity, religion and ideology, but they have waged war only when they thought they could win them, or when their backs were so far to the wall they found death preferable to the life they faced. Only the insane pursue warfare likely to produce only chaos. Until this point, somehow sanity has managed to prevail in a world torn by warfare for what hopefully will turn out to be a brief period of human history.
Evidence that our nation has a rich tradition of subjugation, enslavement and the extermination of inconvenient and easily disposed of out-groupers is abundant. However, evidence that those we subjugate constitute threats to our way of life is scarce. Contrary to the propaganda citizens receive, the State Department's own chief advisors since the 1950s have characterized Arabs in particular as people eager to join us at our table of prosperity, not to replace us. They need our expertise and hope we need their labor. Their motivation stems not from hatred of our lifestyle. It stems from optimism that they too can attain the skills of production and marketing and planning that we have achieved. Their history tells us that they are, however, as capable of ruthlessness as we are. Nor are they any less strategically adaptive. Having not occupied the seat of power for centuries, they may be less corrupt and less insane than we. If we will not accept them, they will surely do all possible to change our minds.
4
It seems that an outcome of modernization predictable for nearly a century has now materialized: No matter how well-armed one nation or confederation, international conflict is now a lose-lose proposition. With a high degree of probability, in the twenty-first century any population's survival depends upon the survival of all.
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