Ideas and Issues

In a moment we're going to talk about the two major topic areas where you have made a major contribution: preventing deadly conflict and the problem of youth in the United States. But there are some common themes to both that I want to address first. One is, I sense in reading some of your writings a sensitivity to both the hope and dislocation that progress can create. My sense is that you are working to create pathways that allow us to overcome those dislocations.

Well later, as my career developed, I moved beyond the preoccupation with contemporary issues that characterized my childhood and youth, and became very much interested in evolution and history, and really devoted a lot of time and energy, far more than I ever anticipated. I gave some thought to the long history of our species. And in the course of that, I was struck by the fact that phases of technological advance offered great hope and possibility and opportunity. At the same time, they were typically associated with massive social dislocation. I suppose the industrial revolution is as good an example as any, which on the one hand made it possible for a great many people to live well (indeed, for many to live as the queens and kings some centuries back could not live), and yet also caused powerful dislocations as people came from the countryside into a factory system that was almost like a prison, and urban crowding that exposed them to diseases that they'd never had before. And on, and on, and on.

And indeed, in due course, those massive dislocations were associated with the rise of communism and fascism, so that here you had tremendous opportunity and genuine social advance, and yet deadly conflicts and other side effects that were not anticipated. So that I came to feel that one of the greatest challenges for contemporary humans is the democratic and judicious and humane uses of science and technology.

And as one finds the paths through this quagmire one also finds, and you speak a lot about this in your writings, the atavisms, either in political institutions or in the human organism itself, that prevent us moving on to the next stage. It comes up a lot in your writing.

Well I believe that to some degree we carry dangerous legacies from the past, often patterns of behavior that were very likely adaptive, maybe even highly adaptive, for millennia, perhaps even millions of years. But with the historically rapid transformation -- it's only, for example, two hundred years since the industrial revolution, that's a moment of time, the electronic revolution a matter of decades -- we in very recent times face situations that are so different from those in which we evolved. I believe that to some extent in our genes and to some extent in our customs we carry over dangerous patterns of behavior.

Let me give you just one example, and I think it's a very powerful one. We evolved in small groups, face to face, intimate, groups of familiarity largely through the life span. Our changes were slow and the rules you learned in childhood guided you about what you had to do to adapt. And we have a powerful clinging to our groups, as we should have. What we taught our children for millions of years was, essentially, belong to survive. Belong to survive. You have to be part of the group to have the capacity to deal with the vicissitudes of the environment that you will have to face. Now, that's fine and we still have that sense, and there's much that's positive about it, as I wrote about in Today's Children. On the other hand, it puts us at risk when we go over to hating other groups so easily, as we do. The in-group/out-group distinctions that we make in such a ubiquitous way are very easy to learn, probably having some biological background. But when you say, "My primary group is everything and other groups are to be viewed with suspicion and disdain," in a contemporary world that becomes exceedingly dangerous.

So we have to find ways to maintain identification with the small group that's fundamentally supportive, but also to enlarge our social identifications to encompass what we in fact are: a worldwide, highly interdependent, single species. And psychologically that's very hard. There's hardly anything in our background as a species to prepare for identifying with the whole big wide world.

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