Altruism toward community members who are not related to you, with its implications of kindness and generosity, may be intertwined in human history with hostility toward members of other communities. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have used game theory and computer simulations to demonstrate that under the conditions our late Pleistocene and early Holocene human ancestors probably faced, neither agression toward outsiders and generosity toward unrelated people (parochial altruism) are likely to have been viable strategies by themselves, but they could have been successful together. Each strategy is in some sense costly (benefitting others who don’t carry your genes, in the case of parochial altruism, and taking time and energy and risking death in the case of aggression toward outsiders). But if parochial altruism bound a community closely enough together that it was more likely to succeed in its attacks against outsiders, then the two strategies could work hand in hand. You can read more about the research in this press release from Science Daily.
Note that this is talking about the past, and not about conditions today. This dynamic may be alive and well in the human psyche today; to anyone who’s been on the outside of a close-knit community, this link between solidarity and hostility is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. Being in, being “one of us”, is full of benefits, but if in some way you don’t fit the mold, you can in some cases quite easily become “one of them” and be ostracized or worse. But that doesn’t mean we have to live out this dynamic over and over. Not only do we have the power to understand and change our behavior, I think we may also find it imperative to do so in order to survive, in an age of nuclear and biological weapons and global problems that urgently require us to cooperate.
