More than 200 million people were killed in the 20th century due to war and acts of genocide. Many of these conflicts were rooted in ethnic, national, religious, political, or other forms of identity-group conflict. The 21st century is already filled with similar horrors. For many scholars and much of the public, this pattern of between-group conflict emerges directly from humanity’s deep, evolved sense of “us” vs. “them.” To state it simply, human nature is “tribal.” It’s how we built cities, nations, empires. It’s also how each one of those things has crumbled.
But this is not true.
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While humans do not come with a ready-made way to create divisions of humanity, we have the capacity to classify and develop mental shortcuts to use classifications once we have created (or learned) them. Most importantly, categories like “us” and “them” are not set in stone; they are flexible and do not necessarily set up a conflictual relationship.
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Hundreds of thousands of years ago, human groups were reaching out to one another, exchanging knowledge and customs, and making social bonds at least as much, if not more, than they were fighting one another. There is evidence that stones and minerals, knowledge about the use of fire and other cultural behaviors, as well as genes, spread between many communities across our histories. Other work on earlier humans demonstrates that an amazing capacity for compassion and prosocial relations is as central between groups as it is within groups.
