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Jack Miles:
As the editor who sponsored The Parable of the Tribes at the University of California Press in the early 1980s, I find it stimulating to engage the parable again at the distance of so many years. Confirmations of it, once one has understood it, are not only easy to find, they are hard to avoid. You mention Japan's being compelled by Western industrialization to industrialize in self-defense. A Japanese memoir that I recently read noted that Japan saw the creation of its imperialist "Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere" as no more than the creation of its own Western-style colonial empire. The West surely had no moral grounds to object to such imitation. How could it have any? What was sauce for the Western goose might surely be sauce for the Eastern gander as Japan led the backward East forward into the industrialized, imperially organized future. The result, of course, was a broadening of the theater of war among the imperial tribes to a geographical scale greater than any yet seen.
Today, North Korea has or almost has nuclear weapons pointed at the United States, and the Americans are alarmed at this violation of the Pax Americana. But that peace has always featured American nuclear weapons pointed at North Korea (and everybody else). Why should they mind? Our only goal, we Americans maintain, is self-defense. But from their side, as they observe that the threat of American nuclear retaliation has made America virtually invulnerable to invasion, a different conclusion becomes inescapable. If North Korea is to enjoy the same invulnerability, it must arm in the same way, confirming the parable once again. (At this juncture, I must say, I find myself thinking about the concept of "mimetic desire" in the work of Rene' Girard, but to introduce his thought would be to digress too far.)
If I may now go on a bit, reading installments ##4 and 5 in the spirit of the current project, I do find some further reflections coming to mind. One arises from Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Once the human species had fire as a tool, it had the capacity to break down inedible plants and animals through heat into component parts that were edible. This development--part of what we might call the conquest of nature as distinct from the subjugation of one tribe by another--enabled the spread of hominins around the entire globe long before the agricultural revolution of 10,000 and the start of civilization in the sense that the Parable of the Tribes usually has in mind. Chimps and gorillas are still confined to where they can eat raw the very limited menu of foods that they do eat. We humans can turn a huge assortment of plants and animals into food, and as a result we have gone everywhere on land, under the sea, and in the air.
In several of his works, Jared Diamond has characterized warfare as continual among the "uncivilized" hunter-gatherer tribes of New Guinea. The parable applies there, it seems to me, because that tropical island does seem to me to have been a stable, "other things equal" setting until quite recently. The parable is confirmed to the extent that no peaceful tribe has been observed in that closed world. Diamond admires much about what I would call the "domestic" culture of the tribes he has worked with, but he concedes that "internationally" (within the only world they know) they live amid a war of all against all in which the average tribesman will have a few murders behind him.
To the situation of tribes held for centuries of time in an ecological stable state, we might contrast the situation of very early African tribes moving out, under "parabolic" pressure, from their fruitful but ecologically shrinking original jungle habitat into the savannah where the greater social organization that big-game hunting calls for seems to have developed alongside physical adaptations like hairlessness, erect posture, and the opposed thumb. Here, then, was a set of adaptations other than that of militarism that fostered both reproductive success and cultural complexification. Over time, of course, the parable could begin to work again as tribes growing and flourishing in this new setting came into competition with others doing the same.
It's very much worth noting, I think, that reproductive success forces the quest for greater resources. In this sense, human intelligence itself, as that which most powerfully enables reproductive success in our species, is our "original sin." The consequences of unlimited human reproduction, as demographers have pondered them, have given birth to the notion of the "population bomb" and then to various movements to limit population growth. China's one-child policy is proving a demographic/economic disaster. Indira Gandhi's program of forced sterilization is remembered in India with horror. And yet the thought that a nation--or the species as a whole if world government should ever become possible--ought to have a population policy is by no means a disaster or a horror in principle. And there are examples of societies that have regulated their own fertility in order not to exhaust their environment's carrying capacity. You use the idea of wolves and sheep in a sustainable ecology. Aldo Leopold, in a famous essay entitled "Thinking Like a Mountain," took an actual episode of reckless wolf slaughter leading to deer proliferation and then to deforestation that killed off even the deer and made that episode paradigmatic of the need for us humans to use our intelligence to achieve in our own, species-specific way the balance that comes naturally in a wolf-and-deer mountain ecology.
Is there any model for such collective restraint exercised for the collective good? You rightly make much of the fact that societies are "compelled to interact with each other with no order to regulate those interactions." "But no order strikes me as an overstatement. To the extent that our world has a regulatory order, it is the "Westphalian System" of sovereign nation states that came into existence through the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that brought the Christian Wars of Religion to an end. The signatory states agreed that none would attempt to impose its form of Christianity upon another, though each was free to impose its preferred form within its own territory. Richard Falk, agreeing with you to a point, notes in his massive 1975 A Study of Future Worlds that the governments that imposed this agreement upon themselves were--and in the diplomatic order that stemmed from the agreement still are--"sovereign and equal by juridical fiat rather than by virtue of some higher authority within the world order system. " In such circumstances, 'law and order' rests upon the volition of governments and upon their perception of common interests." The weakness of the Westphalian System is clear enough in its failure to prevent the horrendous wars of the 20th century, not to speak of gargantuan atrocities within state borders. And yet the agreement did bring to an end the wars that prompted it in the first place, and diplomacy since then certainly can point to some signal successes. So, as I would see it, the question facing you is how your better human story can foster a better consensus that could bring into existence a regulatory order superior to the Westphalian System. That system now defines the international community far beyond the European states that brought the system into existence to the extent that anything does, but clearly we need something better and the sooner the better.
At the start and then again at the end of Installment #5, you argue that humans are not necessarily aggressive or warlike by nature, only made so by the impossible situation that their evolution has placed them in. The line that sprang to mind as I read this portion of your argument was W.H. Auden's famous "we must love one another or die." (I understand that he eventually turned against that much-quoted line, perhaps because of how often and how casually it had been used.) My fear is that though we yearn for love, the primeval breakthrough to self-conscious intelligence that made us human is married in us to an ingrained assumption that enough is never enough. Intelligence fostered reproductive success, as I argued above, but reproductive success in turn required further resources, and this cycle has gone on now for hundreds of thousands of years. The instinct to seek more ad infinitum may now be ineradicable.
When I was a boy, we didn't have a car until I was about ten, we didn't have a television until I was seven, we rarely traveled outside Chicago (and never outside the immediate Midwest), and we never ate in restaurants. This is by no means to say that we had nothing. We had healthy food, heat in winter (though no air-conditioning in summer), good schools, free libraries, parks, medical care, and so forth and so on. And I might add that we enjoyed reproductive success: five children (and one bathroom among the seven of us). But much that I never had then is deemed culturally necessary or at least strongly expected in the culture to which I now belong. And that culture has become progressively not just the American but the global ideal. Worse, it has become so in a planet of limited resources that we cannot escape in time to any more fertile, unexplored territory. We may be stuck here, doomed to die of our desires. I ask myself: do I really want to be a grandfather, knowing what lies ahead?
A recent report from the University of California contains the following quote:
If the carbon footprint of the entire 7 billion became comparable to that of the top 1 billion, global CO2 emissions would increase from the current 38 billion to 150 billion tons every year and we would add a trillion tons every seven years, in turn adding 0.75 degrees Celsius warming every seven years.
A UN report out in just the past week says that "we" (that demon word) have only until 2020--2020!--to take the drastic action needed to prevent irreversible change. Can we possibly make it? I am doing what I can to help those who are trying, and California is close to the epicenter of the effort. But it's hard to be optimistic.
So, Andy, I am more than eager to be told that "we" can be better than this if only we can shake off the sense that our aggressiveness is innate and can embrace a new sense of loving human possibility rooted in a more self-conscious narrative appropriation of our own evolution. Perhaps the yearning in so many of us here in the top billion for a simpler world, a world with less of everything except peace, can be mobilized in time. Perhaps that new religion, a new revelation, a Big Deal indeed, can be preached. I look forward to Installment #6.
Andy Schmookler:
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