Monday, 23 December 2024
Us versus them: between hope and hopelessness
Phenomena such as racism, sexism and ageism become more understandable in light of our strong biological tendency to divide the world into two groups: the one we belong to, and everyone else. In all primates, including humans, the sight of a stranger causes the brain to activate its “danger” pattern in less than a tenth of a second, especially if that stranger’s skin is a different colour from our own. As humans, we can use language to rationalize why any given group is inferior to our own, and we can attack its members in a wide variety of ways, ranging from verbal microaggression to genocide. The opposite is also true. As many studies on intra-group favoritism have shown, if you get into trouble while attending a sporting event and you’re wearing one of the competing team’s jerseys, that team’s fans are the ones most likely to help you.
Writing this post as the holiday season approaches makes me think of the famous Christmas Truce that British and German troops unofficially declared during World War I. Even though their officers wanted them to stay in their trenches and keep shooting at each other, the soldiers on the two opposing sides spent the day singing, praying and partying together. They even exchanged some gifts and played some soccer! Their loyalty to their countries and to their superiors had been superseded by their loyalty to a different group: young people who just wanted to celebrate together as they were used to doing at this time of year. The lesson here is that if we want to diminish prejudice, preaching tolerance may be less effective than understanding the mechanisms of control and the rapid changes in mental categories of which people are capable.
Knowing the best and worst of which our species is capable, we may vacillate between hope and despair. But if there’s one thing of which we should keep reminding ourselves, it’s that the supposed superiority of the economic liberalism that the dominant classes keep proclaiming in the public square (and that keeps making inequalities worse and worse) is actually nothing but a story—a set of verbal justifications for the way things are. Which means that there are other stories, promoting other kinds of societies, that could easily be told instead. As David Graeber, an anthropologist who did not hide his anarchist leanings, put it, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” According to Graeber, when we lose this ability to imagine and experiment with new forms of collective existence, we become resigned to the capitalist liberal economy and convinced that it is humanity’s inevitable end state.
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