By Dee Smith
Does familiarity breed contempt? It certainly can. But it also breeds identity: birds of a feather flock together. Both elements lie at the base of the social and geopolitical convulsions we are now experiencing.
In a recent article in the Financial Times, “Why travel didn’t bring the world together,” Janan Ganesh observes, “Foreign travel has been growing for decades. But so has nationalism.” He argues that this “shouldn’t be true” as it was “fair to expect a general lowering of enmities as people, and peoples, came into contact.”
However:
The hardening of relations between China and the West from around 2012 came after an era of tourist and student traffic from the one place to the other. Brits and Italians are among the most prolific travelers in the world. Both countries have voted for propositions or parties that might be called nationalist over the past decade. In 1995, eight per cent of Americans were planning a foreign trip in the next six months. In 2023, more than a fifth were. In which of those two periods was the US more internationalist?
Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that online contact would “bring the world closer together” has dated laughably. But at least people say so. It feels ruder, almost transgressive, to point out that travel has also flopped as a uniter of the species.
After asking whether travel is a “reminder of the essential oneness of humankind,” he concludes: “If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions.”
A wonderful chronicler of human failings, Ganesh nonetheless does not explore what is arguably a key reason for the trends he documents: the way we are hard-wired by evolution. Humans evolved in small groups, fearful of others. We know how this works from exhaustive studies of “pre-contact” cultures that survived into the 20th century, when there were still quite a number of so-called “tribes” who had had little or no contact with representatives of modern societies.
As every student of anthropology knows, a characteristic immediate response of two individuals from different groups, randomly meeting but knowing nothing about each other, is reciprocal fear and a defensive or aggressive stance. If they speak the same language, the fear is often mediated by mentioning lineage and members of other groups in the hope of finding some mutual connection that would mean they did not have to fight. If that is unsuccessful, the result is often violence that can result in death. Similar behavior has been observed in a wide array of tribal cultures.
The key factor to understand here is that Homo sapiens, a species that has been around for about 300,000 years, has spent roughly only the last 10,000 years in complex societies—from paramount kingships to civilizations—within which one often encounters individuals that one might not know. This is just over three percent of the total. For the other 97 percent of our existence, we lived in something like the conditions described above. Even if we generously trebled this estimate to 30,000 years of complex societies, the figure of sophisticated coexistence would still be ten percent at most. For Homo sapiens, loathing of “the other” is an ancient practice.
One of the conceits of the 18th century European Enlightenment is that reason can overcome our animal natures and that we can therefore think our way to better lives. This has been globally encoded into the DNA of the modern world. It was the basis of the establishment of the United States, despite the fact that it was already becoming clear that the blowback was vicious (see the French Revolution). It is so foundational to the economically informed view of the modern world that US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed astonishment at the “animal spirits” (as economist John Maynard Keynes had dubbed them) causing the 2008 financial crisis. Greenspan revised his rationalist approach to take animal spirits into account.
It is very difficult, when one stands back, to see why the preeminence of non-rational drivers should be surprising at all.
If we hope to survive the present storm in all its manifestations, let alone thrive as a species, we are going to have to come to terms with the nature of who we are, however much we may dislike it.
My company, SIG, is founded on an approach called “zero-based analysis,” which means that we discard what “everyone knows” and what we might want to believe about a subject. Instead, we collect data broadly and objectively, focusing exclusively on what the patterns of that data tell us. We ignore received wisdom and rules of thumb, and analyze impartially. This is not always an easy thing to do if one begins to see things that one really does not want to see.
Given history, and human nature, what does that approach tell you about who and what we are?
The question now, other than surviving the present moment, is whether we can find a system of living — one that endures — that does not reinforce our most aggressive and destructive tendencies. The founders of the recently deceased Liberal International Order believed that they had a solution, as have many other founders of many other orders throughout history. So far, nothing has proved durable. But there are many other possibilities and there is still hope.