Eureka! I think I may have just had an aha moment. Perhaps one of the most important of my life. One of those rare flashes in which a little fog suddenly lifts, and a faint light begins — timidly, almost apologetically — to spread through the darkness of one’s ignorance.
It may turn out to be important because it seems to offer, at least to me, a possible way of making sense of several phenomena that have become increasingly visible in contemporary life and I have been thinking about for a while: the almost sports-like polarization of public debate, now amplified beyond measure by social platforms; the instinctive hostility that often emerges between political factions, scientific camps, artistic tribes, religious communities, nations; and, at the darker end of the spectrum, racism and other forms of hostility towards those perceived as different.
The common thread might be this: in human beings there coexist, in a sort of devilish and unstable equilibrium, an extraordinary capacity to cooperate with our own kind and a powerful, conflictual energy that often is directed against other members of our species.
This thought came to me during an online conversation with some friends who advocate total disarmament as the path towards a condition of permanent peace at planetary level. It is, needless to say, a noble objective. Perhaps one of the noblest. And yet I fear it may be in deep tension with something very intimate in our nature.
Let me take a step back.
I am borrowing here a metaphor used in The Righteous Mind — and echoed in discussions of tribal minds — to describe the relationship between rationality and emotion in the human brain. The rational part is like a rider sitting on top of an elephant, the emotional part. The rider tries to guide the elephant, of course. But the disproportion in size between the two gives us a rather vivid image of which one is usually in charge.
The emotional, instinctive, pre-rational component — the elephant, in the metaphor — is not some embarrassing residue we could simply educate away. It is part of what allowed us to get here at all, while many other species with which we once shared the planet did not make it. Culture matters enormously, of course. Reason matters. Institutions matter. Education matters. But they do not erase our ancestral instincts. Anyone who works in marketing knows this perfectly well.
And perhaps this is where several things begin to connect.
Human beings seem remarkably good at cooperating within the group they perceive as their own. At the same time, we are just as remarkably prone to suspicion, hostility, and aggression towards what we perceive as outside that group. The “tribe” may take many forms: a political party, a nation, a religion, a football team, a professional community, a cultural identity, even a scientific school of thought. The content changes; the underlying mechanism may not.
This, I suspect, is the crucial point that holds much of the picture together.
Not long ago I listened to a talk by professor Walter Quattrociocchi in which he suggested — cautiously, as one should when stepping outside one’s immediate field of research — that the deep mechanism behind social media polarization may ultimately be tribal logic. The platforms do not create tribalism from nothing. Rather, they accelerate, amplify, and monetize tendencies that were already there. They provide the arena, the incentives, and the feedback loops. But the raw material is ours.
That hypothesis strikes me as at least plausible.
It also seems plausible that similar mechanisms may lie beneath conflicts between populations. We appear to be wired, at least as a first reaction, to resist what our brain perceives as different. This does not mean that every human being is condemned to hatred, nor that prejudice is morally acceptable because it may have evolutionary roots. Explanation is not justification. But it does suggest that some forms of hostility towards the out-group may be far less accidental, and far more deeply embedded, than our more optimistic narratives would like to admit.
This may also help explain the apparent contradiction between collaboration and conflict:
We tend to cooperate within what we recognize as our tribe because doing so dramatically increases our chances of survival. The group multiplies the limited capacities of the individual. It protects, supports, organizes, teaches, remembers, punishes, rewards. Alone, the individual is fragile. Within a group, the individual becomes part of something far more resilient.
At the same time, whatever lies outside the group can be classified — sometimes almost automatically, perhaps even biologically — as potentially dangerous. Not necessarily because it truly is dangerous, but because our inherited machinery may be inclined to treat uncertainty as threat before treating it as opportunity. From the point of view of survival, false positives are often cheaper than false negatives. Better to be suspicious too often than naïve once too late.
This is not a flattering portrait of human nature. But it may be a useful one.
It suggests that racism, sectarianism, political fanaticism, and all the little tribal wars of everyday life are not simply failures of education, although education can certainly help. They are not merely the product of ignorance, although ignorance makes them worse. They may be expressions — distorted, dangerous, morally unacceptable expressions — of ancient mechanisms that once helped us survive in small groups and now misfire in complex societies.
The tragedy is that the modern world constantly expands the scale of our interdependence while our instincts remain stubbornly local.
Economically, technologically, ecologically, and politically, we are already planetary. Our supply chains are planetary. Our communication systems are planetary. Our environmental problems are planetary. Our financial crises are planetary. Our pandemics are planetary. And yet emotionally we often remain tribal, attached to small symbolic communities and ready to defend them against rival groups with astonishing intensity.
This is why the dream of universal cooperation is so difficult.
If this reading has even a modest foundation, then achieving truly noble objectives such as total disarmament, permanent peace, or a stable form of global cooperation would require something extraordinary: the construction of a planetary tribe. Humanity would need to perceive itself not as a collection of competing groups, but as a single “us”.
And that, unfortunately, seems to me to be close to the limits of the impossible.
Not absolutely impossible, perhaps. Human culture is not powerless. We have built institutions, laws, moral systems, scientific communities, international organizations, and forms of solidarity that would have been unimaginable in earlier times. We can widen the circle of belonging. We can educate ourselves to distrust our first instincts. We can create rituals, narratives, and structures that reduce conflict rather than inflame it. We can, at the very least, make the planet somewhat less infernal than it often is.
But we should not underestimate the forces we are dealing with.
The idea that peace will emerge simply because it is rationally preferable seems, to me, one of the great illusions of enlightened modernity. Of course peace is preferable. Of course cooperation is better than mutual destruction. Of course a species capable of splitting the atom and mapping the genome should be able to understand that annihilating itself is not a particularly clever strategy.
But the rider knowing the right direction does not mean the elephant will calmly follow.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable lesson: our noblest political and moral aspirations must operate within the limits of the animal that carries them. We can guide it, educate it, restrain it, perhaps even civilize it to some extent. But pretending it is not there is not wisdom. It is merely another form of ignorance.
So yes, we should continue to work for peace, tolerance, cooperation, and a broader sense of human belonging. We should do so precisely because the alternative is so bleak. But we should abandon the comforting fantasy that these goals require only rational persuasion, better arguments, or the removal of a few bad actors.
The problem is deeper.
We are a cooperative species. But we are also a tribal one.
And most of human history may be the story of our attempts — sometimes heroic, sometimes catastrophic — to live with both truths at once.
