Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders:
- remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance)
- considering them sub-humans and acting maliciously or merely neglecting them
- evangelizing and assimilating them
By "outsider" I mean "people whose behavior is perceived to differ in morally important ways". Those morally important ways are often things like what moral authority you follow, supernatural or otherwise; what you eat; sexual practices; and boundaries of socially sanctioned violence.
You can be
perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things,
whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.
We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.
a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.
This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.
| Name of strategy | Ignorance | Sub-humans | Evangelize |
| Interaction | Trade, at most* | Living with |
| Underlying strategy | (no strategy) | Degrade | Assimilate |
This could be called either the
triune theory of moral resolution, or
ISE (sounds like "ice" - for
Ignorance,
Sub-humans, and
Evangelism.) They are as follows.
1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through
trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.
2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might
appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)
Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.
We also sometimes categorize people in our
own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're
immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.
Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g.,
shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)
In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to
want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.
As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the
Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.
3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.
If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the
conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.
There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)
Can There Be Any Solution?
The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.
But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned
sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In
some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us
do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and
increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
You might object that a transactional relationship is not a full one, and you would be correct. Here we can take advantage of the millions of people who we live among in the modern age - you don't have to interact with every single member of your society, and the ones you choose to interact with, you choose at what level you do.
In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly
voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (
see also here.)
*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be
warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec
Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in
Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.
