#6 What Divides Us
America Disunited
I had a brief discussion with an American friend over one of her Instagram posts this week. She was venting her frustration at the inconsistent implementation and messaging of the government’s COVID-19 vaccine program. One of her main gripes was how difficult it was to have a genuine discussion around this topic without being dragged into a political loyalty test. By now, America’s rift has been laid bare to the world. This division in the United States was palpable during my visit in 2019. Our road trip took us across states with contrasting histories, culture and political views: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and New York City. During our brief interactions with Americans across the country, it was clear that their approximations of fellow citizens who held different values were distorted and caricatured. People who lived in the liberal cities essentially equated the South with ignorance and racism while our conversations with people from the south revealed that they considered their coastal countrymen fragile, naive and detached from reality. Americans didn’t see each other clearly and they couldn’t be convinced otherwise. Although Trump’s presidency and the pandemic exacerbated the chasm, this state of partisanship existed long before either came along. Even as a schoolboy in the early 2000’s, I remember watching American talk shows and many of the segments featured ‘conservatives’ being asked simple questions and failing to do so at the amusement of the TV audience. At that age, I digested these shows as statements of fact and concluded that conservatives were ignorant and hateful. It was not until I got a chance to visit many cities and towns in conservative states that I comprehended the ridiculousness of my earlier views. This has got me thinking about the cause of these divisions and what we can do about it.
Us and Them
We humans have a predictable tendency to create in and outgroups - An Us and a Them. One hypothesis is that the threat of an outgroup fosters ingroup cohesion and cooperation. By creating a common external enemy, this allows members of the ingroup to overlook their own differences and work together to achieve certain goals. What is more fascinating, although not surprising, is that this trait may not be limited to human beings. This study out of Kyoto University published in February found similar behaviours in chimpanzees. Two groups of chimps were exposed to sound recordings of unfamiliar wild chimps. It was found that after the test chimps heard the threatening hoots from apparent external competition, they demonstrated higher levels of ingroup cohesion and cooperation. The authors write
In sum, we found across several measures, both in the presence and absence of feeding competition, that perceived outgroup threat directly enhances ingroup cohesion and tolerance in captive chimpanzees. This demonstrates that humans’ greater group cohesion in competitive contexts is shared with chimpanzees, and suggests that intergroup competition in human evolution may have selected for our ability to maintain cooperation and tolerant relations in large groups in the presence of a common enemy.
Our View of Others
So perhaps our genetics are partially to blame for our ceaseless prejudice against people we consider outsiders. We don’t see each other clearly because some deeply ingrained parts of us don’t want to. An inevitable consequence of creating an Us and Them is the loss of nuance. Our views get reduced down to false dichotomies: Good & Evil, Right & Wrong, Truth & Lies. It is easy and perhaps justifiable to blame this on the media or intentional propaganda. My personal take is that these binary fallacies emerge due to a combination of ignorance, convenience and genetic predisposition. Sometimes we believe certain things about another group of people purely out of ignorance. During the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1899 - 1901, one of the early tactics used by the Chinese Rebels was to carry long poles with hooks at the end to trip their Caucasian adversaries. It was believed that white people were incapable of bending their knees and once tripped, they would be stuck on the ground like a turtle on its back. We have of course come a long way since those days and our world is far more connected than ever before but modern day examples of cross-cultural misconceptions are still plentiful. It just isn’t possible for everyone to have accurate information or first hand exposure to every other group of people on earth. We primarily live in our own bubbles and rely on various types of secondhand recounts, which are riddled with inaccuracies or agendas that have nothing to do with fairness or fidelity.
I believe we also create false impressions of other people because it is just easier than dealing with infinite layers of grey. Holding superficial absolute beliefs is far less taxing than trying to consider the gradation of everything, even if they have material consequences. The task of seeing other groups of people without obscurity becomes even more difficult when you consider the fact that our genetics most likely reward us for demonising members of outgroups. Doing so helps us forge greater ingroup bonds and incentivises us to contribute to a collective goal. In other words, We are stronger when there is a They.
Along Real or Imagined Lines
We often see categories such as race, gender, culture or class as the foundations of our prejudice. The logic seems to be that if we can eliminate racism, sexism, various -phobic beliefs, then we can eliminate discrimination altogether. I do not share this view and think that we will simply create new arbitrary categories of division. This was demonstrated in Jane Elliott’s 1968 blue/brown eyed experiment. Aggrieved by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Ms. Eliott, a school teacher, decided to teach her third grade students a valuable lesson. She did this by dividing them into two groups based on an arbitrary trait - eye colour. She assigned the blue eyed students with certain characteristics that were considered superior and the browned eyed students with other traits that were considered inferior. Her students quickly aligned themselves into these groups and adjusted their behaviour to make them consistent with their new identities. The roles were then reversed to help the students comprehend the impact of discrimination. In this instance, prejudice was borne out of a trait chosen offhand. I can think of countless other examples of in and outgroups that have nothing to do with the dominant forms of prejudice. Shanghainese people in China are well known for being prideful of their “Shanghainese-ness”. Among old residents of Shanghai, there is a clear distinction between 上海人 Shànghǎi rén（Shanghainese) and 外地人 Wàidì rén（Outsiders). By outsiders, they are not referring to foreigners or even people from other major Chinese cities. Outsiders are an exclusive term reserved for people from smaller cities or towns that surround Shanghai. Common stereotypes of these Outsiders will sound familiar to many of you. They are supposed to be sneaky, untrustworthy, uncivilised and here to take jobs from the Shanghainese. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, there was a story circulating Chinese social media that illustrates this arbitrary prejudice perfectly.
An elderly man walked into a shop and was asked to put his mask on. He angrily replied that he was Shanghainese. When questioned by the attendant what his Shanghainese-ness had to do with putting on a mask, he replied that he was a pure Shanghainese and dirty things such as this virus could never touch him because of his pedigree. He added that this virus would only affect Outsiders. There is no way of verifying this story but it does capture the essence of this particular brand of prejudice. In short, humans will divide and discriminate along any real or imagined line.
It’s Complicated
Personally, I don’t believe that we can eliminate prejudice entirely, not without altering the very core of our being. The reason is that in order to discriminate against a Them, we must have an Us and having that identity is quite often a positive and celebrated force in our society. Without an individual and group identity, it would make it impossible for us to navigate our world. However, it is also a double-edged sword. Consider any kind of prejudice, it always starts with a group of people holding a certain identity that they later compare to other identities and conclude that theirs is superior. An identity can be formed around any belief, behaviour, physical characteristic or shared experience. Although they may start as individual explorations, people who share similar identities inevitably gravitate toward each other. We are told to be proud of our identities - that may be our race, gender, sexual orientation or political beliefs. However, in order to be proud, we have to see our identities as unique and special. No matter what country we are from, we often attribute characteristics such as courage, camaraderie, perseverance and work ethic to our country alone. We may say “we will get through this tough time because we are Australians (or Americans, Chinese etc). Doing so has a clear benefit for the cohesion and cooperation of whatever that identity is. By reiterating the ingroup origin story and shared values, it serves to create stronger bonds among members of that group.
However, the positive effects of identity and ingroup formation simultaneously creates the risk of intergroup division because by defining an ally, you automatically create an adversary. This isn’t so much of a problem when the external environment is one of abundance in terms of resources and opportunities. However, if the environment is one defined by competition and scarcity, group identities will inevitably clash. It is at this point that all the nuance becomes lost and we start mythologising and demonising. Human tribal instincts take over and we quickly fall into opposing teams, even if the values of those teams don’t match seamlessly with our individual beliefs. When the environment is uncertain, we start herding, looking for protection and identity with our ingroup. We do this by signaling our own loyalty through language, behaviour and outward signs of group membership such as clothing. We start believing and articulating that our identity and ingroup is better than another. We may even modify our behaviour and use any means necessary to prove that superiority. These mechanisms of human behaviour is observable in every type of society throughout our history.
What Now?
I don’t know what the antidote to these challenges is. I don’t know if there is a cure-all action we can take. So many of these concepts and human behaviours are not simplistic polarities. You cannot eliminate the negative without diminishing the positive. Facile concepts of good and bad are often tricks of language and context. With that said, my personal strategy is to constantly remind myself that there are good people and assholes wherever you go and although I should be proud of my own choices in this life, I have to check myself before I start drinking my own Kool Aid. It is a delicate balance that requires a lifetime to sustain. Above all, we must keep in sight that different forms of discrimination may be genetic in nature but so too is our desire and ability to overcome them.
