Multi-cultural dancers

                 (credit: Lance Cpl. Jackeline Perez Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sociodiversity

A concept that has been drifting around the borders of my thinking for years now is the concept of sociodiversity. A nation is sociodiverse if there are several different clearly identifiable sub-groups within its borders that have sets of morés and customs largely alien or unrecognizable to other sub-groups within its population. Innu hunter/trappers in Canada can meet, interact with, and pass among, Hutterite farmers, Quebecois truck drivers, Russian-Canadian laborers, Mexican-Canadian farm workers, and Scottish-Canadian welders. Any of these groups can have children who mingle, and form relationships with, any of the others. Immigrants from Somalia come to Canada as farm workers, stay as landed immigrants, apply for, and obtain, citizenship, and see their children graduate from universities with degrees in English Literature.

My belief is that Canada, and for that matter, any other nation, is stronger and more resilient when it is composed in this way. The stresses of blending cultures are documented often in newspapers, magazines, ezines, and t.v. news reports. Maybe some Cuban restaurant workers don’t understand and don’t like the way that policemen in a Canadian city come to tell them that their party has to shut down. The guests are violating the noise bylaws. Yes, your father has been allowed to leave Cuba, and come to Canada. Yes, he arrived today, and that is a good thing. A happy thing. No, you can’t celebrate and keep your apartment building’s residents awake till 3 in the morning. We all have to live together. But those Cuban workers may very well come around and apologize to several people in the building the next day. In Spanish. To neighbors that immigrated to Canada from El Salvador. The neighbors may then translate the apology into English and pass it on to twenty or more other residents in the building. The Cubans accept that we all need sleep. Some human expectations are universal.  

It is very important to note here that there are enormous strengths to this design for a society. The Mexican farm workers may have among their numbers a man who trained for a short while to be a bullfighter. If a bull somehow gets released into a field where many people from many cultures are working, the bullfighter apprentice may save two Scots teens, a Russian musician, a Somali cartoonist, and an Innu cook from injury or death on the horns of an angry bull.

The concept of sociodiversity extends much further as well.

When a town contains a homosexual couple who create a moving company with 17 employees on the payroll, the whole community is enriched by that venture. When a 19 year old computer programmer writes, develops, and markets a computer game, she may create dozens or even hundreds of jobs for her town. She may also have just provided kids from many of the town’s diverse households with a way to share their leisure time. Build community spirit. Our team is going to the world finals this year in Seoul! There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

Then a Scottish-Somali-Canadian boy finds a cure for sickle cell anemia. Some Mexican workers buy their own farms and breed a variety of corn with nearly twice the yields of the corn B.C. farmers used to grow. And so on.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to mingle many sub-cultures and still keep the peace of the whole nation. But compared to the benefits of the mingling, these drawbacks do not matter. Or at least, to be accurate, they don’t matter nearly as much as the benefits of the intermingling for the whole nation.

By a simple extrapolation, we can see that sociodiversity is an asset for any society. It’s just useful and survival oriented over the long haul to have a lot of different kinds of people interacting and exchanging ideas in your nation all the time. The future always contains unforeseeable challenges for any nation or individual. The nation has better chances of meeting every challenge, pandemic, famine, and even war if it contains a wide variety of people with a wide variety of knowledge sets and talents. 

Biodiversity makes an ecosystem strong. Resilient. But humans don't evolve by that genetically-driven means any more. We evolve and adapt through changes to our cultures. We don't get 99% wiped out by a pandemic anymore as other species do. We find vaccines. Biodiversity is good for an ecosystem; in an analogous way, sociodiversity is good for a human nation. 

There are a lot of bulls out in the world. They leave evidence of their existences all over. We need a lot of different kinds of bullfighters.

How much sociodiversity can a society stand before it begins to break into mutually hostile sub-cultures? We have no idea. We have now built in several different parts of the world societies based on the ideas of tolerance and respect. Even mutual support. Democracies are built around this vision. Mutual respect. Diversity. Pluralism. The experiment is still in progress, and we are it. 

Therefore, love your neighbor. The very "ways" that he practices and that strike you as strange ...may one day save your life. 

I believe, very deeply, that this is the direction in which our species must go if we are to survive at all. We can do this. The evidence says we can. 

                 NAEM (National Association for Environmental Management) team  

                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

       Ernest Hemingway (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Patriotism

A quote from Ernest Hemingway (from A Farewell To Arms):

           “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”

And another (from Selected Letters):

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends.”

And another (from Notes On The Next War):

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

These quotes from Hemingway capture a lot of how I feel about patriotism. I know that Hemingway is a very controversial writer in these times. He was very left-leaning for many years in world politics, especially in Castro’s takeover of Cuba. As a writer, he seemed uninterested in, and even hostile toward, his female characters. Today, he has more detractors than followers. But he did succinctly express the thoughts on war of a man who had been there.

                                 American children pledging allegiance to the flag 

                                (credit: Staff Sgt. Bernardo Fuller, Public Domain) 

                                         Chinese children in PRC saluting flag

                                                     (credit: chinadaily.com)

So why am I picking on the human mindset called “patriotism”? Can’t it be an asset or, at least, harmless if it is controlled carefully? I don’t think so.

I don’t think it can be controlled in the long haul. Deep in the chemistry of the human psyche, it turns into militarism in the end, under the pressures of real politics in a world full of nations in which there are a lot of patriotic people. The nations are bound to have disputes. The citizens’ patriotism will gradually draw them more and more into inflating these disputes, for the protection of their economies, rights of minorities, or just plain “face”.

Patriotism does not openly drive tolerance out of the individual human heart, but the two have many difficult times in living together. And as their clashes get more and more heated, the owner of that heart gets weary with trying to resolve their disputes. Then, she or he gradually tends to lean more and more to one of the two sides, the patriotic or the tolerant. ("But these immigrants are taking Canadian jobs!") Reduce cognitive dissonance. Rah-rah patriotism gets a person more friends faster than quiet expressions of tolerance ever will.

The idea that maybe the whole human race is going to have to give up patriotism is abstract and counterintuitive for most people in every country today. It is so contrary to what they absorbed as kids from their culture, i.e. their parents, teachers, entertainment media, etc. The Fatherland. Mother Russia. America, Land of the Free. Rule Britannia. Vive la France. Viva Mexico. O Canada. The East is Red. All of these nations have fought wars with several of the others at different times in their histories.  My land, Canada, is a kind country. But Canada has made too many bad mistakes for me to ever give her some kind of unconditional loyalty.

Like we could learn to treat all other humans with respect, regardless of their skin color, ethnicity, accent, gender preference, etc., we could learn to let go of patriotism. I base that claim on the fact that there have been so many folk in the past century who have done it. Given up an old patriotism for a new one, or in some cases, for no patriotic feelings at all. Russians who became devoted Americans after being accepted as U.S. citizens. Korean-Americans. Indo-Britons. Turko-Germans. Ukrainian-Canadians. Afro-Mexicanos.

                                        Pan American Health Organization Interns

                                                            (credit: paho.org) 

So I’ll state my thesis today plainly: patriotism must fade out of the psyches of the citizens of the future if we are going to survive. Its day is over. You are a human being. Your identity may contain implicit loyalties to several groups and causes. But not to a nation. The feelings of rivalry and jealousy that belonging to a nation stir up are just too risky. It’s you as a person that I look at as I decide whether you are deserving of my respect and, maybe even, brotherly love.

We can reprogram ourselves and, even better, the kids, to take pride in being good swimmers or knowledgeable movie fans or software engineers or writers or dancers or even loyal sons or daughters or pediatricians or any of thousands of other forms of identity. But rah-rah patriotism? “My country right or wrong”? Either that way of thinking is obsolete, or we are.

 

                                                        Hand symbol for peace 

                                                    (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Choosing Peace

Some serious insights that suggest strategies for avoiding war are contained in a text that I found online a few days ago. It’s called The Origin of War, and it was written by a socio-biologist named Johan van der Dennen.

In this book, the author proposes that war developed and became a widespread pattern of behavior among tribes of our earliest ancestors because it works. Or at least it did for them. Males in some troops of early hominids (our ancestors of 7 million years ago) first acquired some precursor traits that proved useful in the survival game: language (for quick communication); group cooperation (so several males could move smoothly as a coordinated team); an easy way of identifying group members (so there would be no confusion in battle as to which combatants were “your guys”); and weapons. Then, a few smart males in a troop of hominids put this combination together. Their beginning to practice lethal raiding on other troops in their area then became pretty much inevitable.

Why? Because the aggressive males, by conducting successful raids on other troops, got more females. Then, the warmongers did more breeding, produced more offspring, and taught this pattern of behavior to their sons. War was a vigorously self-perpetuating trait. It made greater numbers of troop members in a few generations for troops that contained lots of war-loving males.

There are interesting corollaries to the main thesis in the book too; I'll omit them. I think that far more important is the fact that van der Dennen’s main thesis misses a big point: humans can reason.

He and many of the researchers he quotes acknowledge the power of conceptual thinking in our survival struggle. For example, hominids capable of conceptual thinking were better at anticipating the movements of an enemy, better at improving weapons, and more likely to come out on top in their clashes than were their duller adversaries. But van der Dennen does not go into detail about how much of a warlike set of behaviors is programmed into its carriers via their genes and how much depends on their social imprinting. Do we today come into the world already programmed to do the dirty deed of large scale murder or do we learn from our elders to attack and kill “enemies”?

It seems to me that either way, by genetic engineering or by education, we ought to be trying to reprogram our species to be less aggressive than our forebears were. But the second view – of war as a learned behavior – offers so much more hope for our species. If war is learned behavior, not factory-installed, then we can unlearn it. Change our deep responses to “others”. In us and in the kids.

And let’s just remind ourselves why we want to make our kids less violent and aggressive: we have the weapons now to kill three quarters of the humans on earth in an afternoon, with almost all the rest likely dying of radiation poisoning, famine, and disease in the next few months. We must not do this.

                                                       Trident submarine 

             (capable of fighting WW3 by itself; about three football fields long) 

Getting people to go along with government-run, controlled breeding would be impossible. Too many people all over see their child-nurturing roles as sacred. We could never get meaningful numbers of people to accept such a program.

But if war is more learned during childhood than it is hard-wired into us from birth, then we could re-educate the kids via our schools and the media to favor peace-building as a way of life: peaceful resolution to disputes of all kinds as their way of life. War could become like picking one’s nose while speaking at a formal gathering: a thing to be avoided; a thing just “not done”.  

We could learn alternate behaviors to express aggressive drives. For example, sport is a substitute for war. A kind of ritualized form of aggression. Sport could become a keenly enjoyed activity for large numbers all over the world. As it is becoming now. And everyone – fans, player, officials – goes home safe.

Van der Dennen admits many species have evolved into ritualized aggression. Males in many species have evolved to engage in “songs” and “dances” to prove their fitness to females. The quick conclusion we can draw here is that species which learn mating “rituals” that redirect aggression do so because they are caught in environmental circumstances that make males killing males counter-productive for the species. Sometimes, war does not favor greater odds of long term survival of the species. Perhaps predators are all about. The group needs its males. Or a pandemic makes cooperation from every group member vital for survival. Or for any of hundreds of arrays of other possible reasons.

                                                          Sarus crane duet 

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                             Tango dancers 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Such species, over generations, evolve into ways of competing that exhibit male fitness, but avoid violence; males in these species “dance” or “sing” to prove they’re fit to breed. Females, most often, watch and listen. If in humans, the evidence shows that we can reprogram ourselves consciously and deliberately to change behaviors we consciously don’t want to see expressed in our societies, we could do so. We could learn to ritualize our aggression into non-destructive behavior patterns. Sport. Dance competitions. Writing contests.

But really? Yes, really. War is at least in part tough to educate out of us because it is so easy to do. And it can appear to justify itself. “We can’t give up. If we do, that will mean that Jim died for nothing!” No. I can love Jim’s memory and still decide that the war is, and always was, stupid.  

The evidence says that we can change. With other behaviors, we already have.

We can learn as adults to eat with chopsticks or cutlery and engage in one behavior in some situations and the other in different situations. Learn to wear both saris and jeans, then wear whichever we choose for the situation in which we find ourselves. Speak English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu and use the language that fits current circumstances. Play piano and rugby both in the same afternoon. Leave a stressful job in business and become a welder. Confer in Tokyo, Berlin, and London.

We are programmable. We aren’t apes. We don’t need generations to change behavior as genetically-driven species do. We don’t have that kind of time. But we can learn.

We are humans. We can choose to change. Education and re-education. We just need to come to global consensus on the undesirability of war and choose something saner and more strategic for our own survival. 

We can teach the kids peace.

(Here's a link to the book "The Origin of War") 

http://rint.rechten.rug.nl/rth/dennen/dennen6.htm