How do our instincts determine the way collective identities function?

Estaba haciendo limpia de mis folders y encontre esto. es un trabajillo que hice de proyecto para una clase de teoria de RI que nos daba un aleman philip muller. estaba loco ese wey jajaj muy cool de profe, y cuando lo lean, alomejor pueden ver que por tanto tiempo juntos en el salon de clase, lo loco se pasaba a los alumnos tambien jeje ojala no se me aburran. PD una que otra oracioncilla me la piratie de uno de los libros de amero abajo jeje alli les pongo lonks a cosas que pueda ser que quieran saber que signifiquen. =)

How do our instincts determine the way collective identities function?

The problem of how collective identities work, and how individuals function inside of them has been subject to many attempts of clarification. Over the history of man this question, although not always exactly the same, has had an outmost importance for the study of human beings and their relations to their peers. This is important to the study of international relations because without collective identities the way people and states interact and function would be radically different of what we know now. Collective identities govern our loyalties and shape our perspectives on what to expect form others, as well as dictating the way we negotiate. Given the importance of collective identities for relations, it would be convenient to study the way people, the building blocks of these collectivities, function inside of them. By taking a point of view which has as a basis the undeniable instincts which we as humans all have in common, we can bring new light to this obscure and subjective topic.

When Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 the world changed forever. It was given a great tool to analyze things of an amazing variety and scope, and in a way that had never before been possible. By utilizing the concepts of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and taking them further we can now give great scientificity to theories which before would have been inconceivable, and we now have a greater understanding of subjects which before seemed baffling, or simply too obscure to ever understand. Darwin’s theory is, like quantum physics or molecular biology, a body of scientific theory, but unlike them, it is also a way of analyzing and describing everyday life. This is the way in which I will try to explain and describe the way our genes dictate the way collective identities function.

The theory of evolution is often misunderstood because of it’s relative simplicity. One can see it as a clever adaptation of Adam Smith’s economic principle of the “invisible hand” to the propagation of a species, or one could see it the other way around, Smith’s invisible hand as simply the result of our instinct to reproduce our own genes taken into the context of economy. Either perspective is the same and makes no difference in the final result. It’s logic is basically that there are more animals born than could possibly survive, therefore only a few will make it to have offspring. The slightest advantage an individual has to propagate his genes will, over time, make the trait that gives this advantage a normal characteristic of the species. The most basic of these advantage giving traits is the desire to propagate your own genes. So here is Smith’s invisible hand at work making individuals act unconsciously to spread their genes. It is important to specify that it’s not the individual that chooses the genes, but the genes themselves that choose the individual. Natural selection is not some conscious process in which individuals are selected to give their genes to the next generations. It is simply a statistical feature of nature, advantages will, over time, give more and more advantage if this advantage is passed from the individual to his offspring, making a trait better diffused by each successful mating.

If we view humans as subject to this kind of logic, and as extremely refined and optimized by millions of years of evolution since Australopithecus, then we could say that every action and decision will be made, consciously or unconsciously, in a form that will advance that person’s chances of survival and subsequent generation of offspring. In this way we can infer that these kinds of actions will have a great influence on our everyday activities, and evidently, the reasons why we do things. What we must have in mind is that humans, and their ancestral species developed in a world very different than our own. This world resembles more closely that of a hunter-gatherer society. In other words, we live in cities, drive our cars, watch TV, drink beer and eat pizza, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population.

It is known that we humans are a social species, but the obvious question would be; why? In short, living in groups elevates the chances of survival in the form of protection and group cooperation. Now, being a social species it is natural that collective identities are formed, so “for those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers; whilst those that cared least for their comrades and lived solitary would perish in greater numbers” (Wright 186). This would make the species more and more social with each passing generation. In the hunter-gatherer sense, a group would mean a close-knit community of individuals. This environment is especially fertile ground in which instincts that drive us to have as many things in common with our fellows would certainly sprout, and consolidate themselves with much force, making individuals “take greatest pleasure in society”.

A group like this, in order to work and be effective in protection and cooperation, would have a lot of social, unspoken rules or norms. These norms would regulate behavior and lead to morality and altruism. We developed a conscience that reproves us when we break these norms, and the other members of the group would punish us for our noncompliance. The problem with this is that humans have such a diverse spectrum of points of view on what these norms are. There is a great diversity, from the shame a Muslim woman would feel when exposing her face, to the shame a Hindu would feel by breaking his caste, human definitions of morality are very different. If explained by instinct, why so much variety? Do Arabs, Africans, Asians and Englishmen have different morality genes? The answer is a rotund NO. We are all different races, but not different species, as some thought in the 1800´s. Races are variations of a single species, and therefore differ only slightly in their genetic make up. All humans have things in common in this respect, we all have a deep sensitivity to public opinion, we love approbation by our peers, and abhor having a bad reputation by our moral standards. “The breach of norms can cause a man “agony” and the violation of some trivial bit of etiquette, when recalled even years after, can bring back a burning sense of shame.”(Wright 184) So by this we can say that adherence to the norms has an innate basis, comes in our genes, but the specific contents of the norms we follow are not inborn. Different peoples have different norms because, for their own historical reasons, they judge different norms to be in the interest of the collectivity. The individual who maximizes friendships and minimizes antagonisms will have the evolutionary advantage, and therefore selection would favor those characteristics that promote the optimization of personal relationships. This “optimization” is brought on by following our feelings, not by conscious calculation. In 1971 Robert Trivers published a paper called The Evolution Of Reciprocal Altruism in The Quarterly Review of Biology. In his paper, Trivers said that “friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system”. These feelings take the role of our social logic, like compassion and gratitude. Gratitude can get people to repay favors without giving much thought to the fact that that’s what they’re doing. In the same way compassion is felt more strongly towards some kinds of people, like the ones we’re grateful to, and with little consciousness of the fact, we repay kindness.

The question now is, how do we study this reciprocal altruism? The answer lies in game theory and computers. The problem , one could say, is that game theory lacks a lot in realism. This would be because as humans we don’t really act rationally and calculating all the time like a machine. The good news is that it doesn’t matter here because feelings don’t concern us, only the mechanisms that make these feelings, and we could say that evolution is like a virtual machine, which produced us across thousands of millions of years. Selection does not “think” or “choose”, it just happens… the inevitability of overwhelming statistics. Game theory can, and has, been put to use on this theory to produce very credible and interesting results.

As we know game theory bases the transactions and decisions on a given “currency”, which in this case is total genetic proliferation, or complete fitness to function and propagate in a given environment. The only rules we must follow to study this under game theory are that the goal is genetic proliferation, that this environment is not the one we live in now but a hunter gatherer society, that once an best possible strategy has been identified the work is not done, and lastly that we have to figure out what feelings would lead humans to pursue that strategy. Those feelings will, or should, be part of human nature.

An important objection to this kind of thinking would be the idea of explaining altruism. The idea of a soldier who gives his life for the collectivity would seem to defeat this theory, but there is a good explanation for this kind of behavior: Kin Selection.

Kin selection consists in the idea that since identical copies of genes may be carried in relatives, a gene in one organism that prompts behavior which aids another organism carrying the same gene may become more successful. Kin selection normally requires some type of kin recognition mechanism. This is possible only when Hamilton’s Rule applies.

Hamilton’s rule is : “R * B > C, where R is the genetical relatedness of the recipient to the actor, B is the additional reproductive benefit gained by the recipient of the altruistic act and C is the reproductive cost to the acting individual. This leads to the concept that an individual should sacrifice itself in order to save two siblings, four nephews or eight cousins," since siblings share 50% of an individual's genes, nephews 25% and cousins 12.5%”.

Kin selection occurs every time an individual commits an altruistic act in benefit of some sibling, like say, the death of a male defending his tribe (remember that our instincts were fashioned and developed in a hunter-gatherer-like society). This type of decisions, made by individuals are products of genetic traits which make them feel that the collectivity is greater than oneself. In this way collectivities can develop a kind of “communal conscience” and thus all the observations of mass psychology.

It is important to note the difference in this theory with “biological determinism”. The way collectivities and systems work is not entirely defined by biological factors, as biological determinism thinks, but is instead dictated by three factors; social, environmental, and biological ones.

This problem of analyzing collective identities requires a three pronged approach because of this. One can envision the way collective identities function as a rope. Ropes are not made of a single strand. They are ,in fact, constructed normally of three strands of twisted twine which when together make a strong rope. The strands all serve the same function, but can serve as a rope by themselves. We can imagine each of these strands as one of the influences on how collectivities function. When envisioned in conjunction we can have a great understanding of the phenomenon, but each of them carry in themselves the necessary attributes to form a single explicative discourse. That is why studying this kind of influences is important. Although a biological approach to this phenomenon is not able to explain things in their entirety, it can help us understand better the way collective identities function. I have chosen to propose this biological approach because it is, in my opinion, the one that grants greater certainty to our observations. This is because of the falsifiable quality of the asseverations which can be reached.

This field of study, although very difficult to maneuver in, can have great benefits to the understanding of this complex phenomenon. The problem is that the direction many people have given this kind of study have given a bad name to it, and have obscured our opinions as to it’s usefulness. The directions given before have always limited themselves to describe and not to predict. They have stayed at much lower levels of analysis, such as analyzing individual behaviors in a person, but we can take this one step further into whole collectivities in order to advance our understanding of them. One day, given sufficient investigation and theorizing, we could even get to predict collective actions with a narrow margin of error. So now all that’s left to do is the theorizing…..

Bibliography:

Stephen Jay Gould. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard University Press. 2002

Robert Wright. The Moral Animal. Vintage Books 1995

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. W.W. Norton and Co. 1999

Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species. Random House. 1859

www.wikipedia.com