I’m pretty grateful to be living in a relatively peaceful time and place. Violence, as Steven Pinker argued at length in his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, has declined considerably over the centuries and decades. Admittedly, this progress has been unsteady and uneven, and there’s still a lot of strife in the world. Also, as Pinker cautions, there’s no guarantee we won’t slide back into periods of increased violent conflict, which could be catastrophic given the phenomenal destructive power of modern weaponry.
Given how high the stakes are, then, it’s worth trying to understand why conflict persists, and what we might feasibly do about it. In a thought-provoking book review in The Atlantic entitled “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” author Robert Wright tackles the issue. His diagnosis: We have evolved to cooperate fairly well with members of what we see as our own group, but not so well with members of other groups, whom it at one time made evolutionary sense to view with suspicion. In a word, we are tribal.
What keeps us from getting along with the members of other tribes? Is it the fact that we have fundamentally different values? Do we need to resolve our ethical differences once and for all before we can get along?
Without entirely dismissing the importance of different values, Wright argues that much conflict is rooted in our self-serving biases. Think about how fans of opposing sports teams, say the Red Sox and the Cardinals, can watch the same game and both come away thinking that the umpires were favouring the other side. Then there’s the study in which Israelis and Arabs viewed the same media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre, and the two groups both considered it biased, but in opposite directions.
“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error,” said double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (Chemistry and Peace). Easier said than done, of course, especially when it comes to those others who are members of other tribes. But less of a challenge than coming to perfect agreement on every last moral issue, and if it will promote peace, a challenge well worth meeting.
What keeps us from getting along with the members of other tribes? Is it the fact that we have fundamentally different values? Do we need to resolve our ethical differences once and for all before we can get along?
Without entirely dismissing the importance of different values, Wright argues that much conflict is rooted in our self-serving biases. Think about how fans of opposing sports teams, say the Red Sox and the Cardinals, can watch the same game and both come away thinking that the umpires were favouring the other side. Then there’s the study in which Israelis and Arabs viewed the same media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre, and the two groups both considered it biased, but in opposite directions.
“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error,” said double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (Chemistry and Peace). Easier said than done, of course, especially when it comes to those others who are members of other tribes. But less of a challenge than coming to perfect agreement on every last moral issue, and if it will promote peace, a challenge well worth meeting.
