Atomic Nerds

This is not how I arrived at the subject to begin with, but the more I thought about the tribal nature of humans and the way we form, bond with, and defend our tribes, the more it stood out to me that humans are completely insane, by ape standards.

We hear a great deal about the violence in human nature, and how it is connected to our heritage as social primates, but we seem to hear very little about how, as compared to the vast majority of other primates including and perhaps especially our nearest ape relatives, we are astonishingly sweet-tempered, peacemaking, and gregarious. Even people who are from emphatically different social backgrounds, who are strangers to each other, and who may in fact pointedly dislike some other social groups that they interact with, can far more often than not be trusted to tolerate each other in close quarters- in city crowds, at the market, perhaps most markedly on public transportation where their movement is restricted in addition to being obligated to tolerate the Other. It does happen that violence breaks out, but we consider it an individual (or cultural, or sub-cultural, however fairly or unfairly) aberration when it breaks out, and it is indeed aberrational enough that mass transit and other mass conglomerations of humans who are strangers to one another go smoothly and without so much as a shove for billions of people around the globe, daily.

Were you to attempt to do the same thing with chimps, dismemberment (and for that matter castration, eye-gouging, and face-mauling) would be a daily hazard of life. Chimps and other troop-living social primates are violently xenophobic; at the most peaceful end of the stick are bonobos, who put on a shrieking agonistic display when they encounter strange groups. (Bonobos are almost never found alone. Chimps who are found alone by strangers are often lucky to escape alive.) At the other end are chimps, who sometimes deliberately and methodically exterminate entire neighboring communities for no apparent provocation.

While humans do have their history of violence and occasional outright attempts to exterminate “other” groups, we prefer to kill people we know well enough to have constructed a reason for the grievance- indeed, we generally need a grievance, whether real or manufactured, to kill at all, and we require some quite extensive conditioning (which is a large part of the point of military training) to be willing to kill strangers that have not, personally, done anything to us. Even then a large part of that needs to be powerful ideas bound in defense rather than simple aggression- otherwise veterans actually WOULD be psychopathic killers the way some like to make them out to be*.

If you remain unconvinced that humans stand at odds with their primate brethren in regards to our attitude toward strangers, consider that is a popular hobby for our species to deliberately cross into the territory of strangers with the express purpose of observing and meeting them, and it’s an industry that accounts for billions of dollars a year. Even the most conquest-minded human cultures generally like to meet a strange group on peaceful terms before going about their business- if only to scout them accurately. This tactic only works as often as it did throughout history because nonviolent meetings between two groups who are strangers to one another are far more the norm than not- and was something completely novel to some of the cultures that encountered it shortly before a steep decline.

Not only do we tolerate strangers readily as long as they’re not presenting a direct threat, we help them- we build cultural edifices to reinforce and codify an impulse already apparent in even very young children to respond to someone else’s distress with concern and attempts to help. Suffice to say, a civilization of chimps or langurs probably would not feature a Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or respond to giant natural disasters in even disliked foreign nations with massive outpourings of physical and financial aid. Even when we criticize the aid-giving impulse when it is unthinking and is exercised more to make the giver feel better than to actually effect useful help, it’s a telling feature of human psychology that the idea of helping a stranger who needs help is soothing and makes us feel good about ourselves. Yes, a great deal of this is culturally created and reinforced, but features that are truly unnatural to us do not become such common cultural constructs.

Humans are tribal creatures and tribal bonds are central to our existence, but we are vastly more flexible than our troop-living brethren when it comes to what we can define as our tribe and make our home, and what kinds of tribes we form. Other primates have single-sex dispersal patterns in which inbreeding is prevented by one sex or the other staying in its birth troop all its life while the other finds a new one to slowly court and eventually join; human cultures across the globe have customs relating to one or the other or both leaving and joining new groups or households, with no set pattern other than that leaving home and setting up a new one always has at least *some* suite of custom to help everyone know how to handle the transitions gracefully. More than that, and more crucially to our eventual capabilities, we don’t seem to have a mental size limit on “tribe”; a group of about one hundred and fifty people seems to be about as big as our oldest ancestral communities were (and maybe not even as big as that, when Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared and began spreading it was apparently at low population numbers and low density**), we’re completely mentally capable of defining groups as big as several billion at a time as “us”.

Once the world becomes bigger than just 150 or so faces with a still-countable and memorizable list of rarely encountered neighboring faces, we tend to break our worlds down further into tribes just because that’s the way our worlds work. Nations have regional and ethnic cultures and sub-cultures and tribes; someone born and raised in the United States will almost definitely identify him or herself as a member of the American tribe, and also potentially a member of the New York tribe, Texan tribe, hillbilly tribe, hispanic tribe, Unitarian tribe, hipster tribe, geek tribe, corporate tribe, soldier tribe, guys tribe, old lady tribe, surfer tribe, hacker tribe, or any number of other things, often all at the same time with no cognitive dissonance except in the cases of two tribes who perceive each other to be members of larger meta-tribes that do not like one another. (For example, a keen athlete in the hacker tribe may have a bit of a sense of conflict between the larger Nerd and Jock tribes- but probably not a very disturbing one.)

What makes this system of identities and allegiances far more helpful to our ability to have a global civilization than affiliation to a single troop would is that multiple tribal identifications give us multiple potential instant alliances with strangers, even strangers who may belong to tribes some of our tribes aren’t very friendly with. Pop culture may not be the world’s deepest hobby, but its eddies and pools can create shared references that transcend age, race, and class. So can the brotherhood of soldiers or law enforcement or medicine, or political bugaboos, or parenting, or any other common interest or experience that cuts across lines of inborn affiliations and creates new shared identities. If anything one of the greatest boons of the internet has been turbo-accelerating this process, as anyone who shares a language and an interest can now find others like them and form newer, larger tribes that cut across even more lines than ever historically possible before.

The productive point of diversity as a virtue isn’t to have as many different kinds of outlooks, languages, musics, and foods as possible, though those things can be nice. The point is to reduce intertribal conflict by creating more options for affiliation- something we as a species are naturally gifted at. We may lament our wars and how pointless they may often seem, but given our starting point we are specialists in making friends and new families for ourselves.

*There is an argument to be made that the customs of warfare are essentially an evolving set of terms on how well we may know one another, and how we must treat each other, when we intend to kill as many of each other as possible. We like our violence familiar and at least somewhat predictable, no matter how hideous the prediction.

**Perhaps this belongs somewhere other and longer than a footnote, but density and type of terrain seem to be a huge factor in whether the groups of humans we still call the “band and tribe” level are aggressive and warfare-oriented or peaceful and open-handed. In low densities over low-resource environments with unpredictable concentrations of resources, it pays to give generously to neighboring communities in hopes they’ll have better fortunes than you when famine strikes, and vice versa. In higher densities over rich areas with defensible points of resources, it pays more to be more aggressive. Sea coasts and bays are fantastic static, defensible resources, and it is probably not a coincidence that many of the world’s most dedicated and skillful conqueror cultures originated from islands or areas of rich coastline. Specializing in warfare and raiding your well-off farming and fishing neighbors is another highly successful model that requires concentrations of resources to work well. Likewise, no matter how much or little warfare in their history, the cultures with the most rigid hospitality customs tend to be desert-dwellers.

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