"We" and "They"

A lot of human prejudice, persecution, and even war seems to be the result of an innate or very deeply ingrained tendency of us humans to divide up all the other humans that we experience into "we" and "they." Group membership can be based on skin color, nationality, ethnicity, clan, tribe, religion, language, neighborhood, caste, college attended, even sports team supported—anything that can be a source of a person's identity.

Group members often stick to their own kind. It's not difficult to think of ethnic groups in America which are very cohesive--I'm sure I need not name any--and immigrants to America have frequently settled among others of their own group. (Of course there are practical advantages to this, such as facilitated communication if you haven't learned English.)

But just look at how prejudice dehumanizes the "other." Southern US slaveholders firmly asserted that Blacks were an inferior group and not totally human. German propaganda of the Nazi era asserted false racial doctrines that Jews (and in fact every "non-Aryan" group) were inferior. And the US did this, too, in its wartime propaganda and elsewhere. When the United States was in the process of seizing control of Hawaii from its native government under Queen Liliuokalani, US newspaper cartoonists depicted Liliuokalani as an ape-like creature who didn't deserve to be governing the American planters and missionaries living in Hawaii.

During World War II, US wartime propaganda depicted the Japanese enemy as having brutal, animal-like features—not to mention that in wartime it's often implied that the soldiers of the enemy, if they had the chance, would rape your wife and daughter. A very sad instance of this is that thousands of Okinawans killed themselves when, during World War II, it became obvious that American forces were going to capture their island, because they had been led by Japanese propaganda to believe that a successful incursion of Americans spelled automatic rape of all their women, and other atrocities.

It's also interesting to note that very many peoples call themselves by a name that means, in their own language, something like "the people" or "humans"; thus all others are not human. (Or, possibly--to give some homage to a counter argument--their name for themselves may date back to a time when they had no awareness of the existence of any other people.)

Is there some innate feature of our brains that predisposes us to decide whether every new human encountered is "one of us" or not? I'm not aware of any studies that used brain scans to try to see whether the activity of the brain differs during perception of a face as "one of us" or "non-us." Certainly that would be a very interesting question to study.

Or is it cultural, albeit with origins very far back in the history of our species? Here is my suggestion: Anthropologists use the term exogamy to denote the custom of tribes seeking their brides outside their own tribe. There are also endogamous tribes, whose customs demand marriage within the group--but many bands of humans may have discovered the genetic disadvantages of inbreeding, and thus exogamy evolved.

Well, how do you get brides from that "other" tribe, just the other side of the hill or across the stream? Bridal raiding parties! We all know the stereotyped image of the caveman, club in hand, carrying off his bride, dragging her by the hair. Bearing in mind that "cavemen" were the ancestors of modern Europeans, and that there are many other ancestral lines of peoples in the world, parties of warriors organized to capture brides for the tribe's young men existed widely.

This might be one explanation of why you find this paradigm so very widespread in the world: just over the horizon or beyond some natural barrier is a kindred people, with a cognate language, so that an objective onlooker might consider them brothers or at least cousins—and yet they hate one another.

Often there is an excuse. Think of the terrible and violent animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland—the product of history and religious differences. (In this case and in others, grievances are remembered that date back hundreds of years.) But I wager that, on the street, you can't tell who is which. So we can still hate even if folks don't look any different from us.

Update, October 27, 2011
I have to mention another cause of war, other than making war for the purpose of capturing brides. At the time in human history when agriculture and pastoralism were beginning, the idea of boundaries also arose: each tribe asserted a claim to the land it was using for its farms and its flocks; so it's easy to see that conflicts over a tribe's boundaries might arise.

Update, August 18, 2013
I showed above that during World War II it was not only the Germans who engaged in propoganda. Now I have to correct the possible impression that wartime propoganda started with World War II. It did not: before the US entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson set up the "Committee for Public Information," which was nothing more nor less than a propoganda machine intended to sell the American public on a war by such means as developing anti-German posters much like those that were used in the Second World War.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein