Suspicion and Collaboration and their Role in the Consolidation and Globalization of Civilization

Hunziker

The history of life on earth has always been marked by varying degrees of competition and cooperation. The earliest animal species, creatures of the most primitive sentience, competed for resources while cooperating in mating rituals and in resisting threats from other species. As creatures evolved to become more intelligent, even self-aware, they also developed more sophisticated feelings associated with their instincts for survival. A Yale study has shown monkeys to have a nuanced proclivity to be suspicious of monkeys outside their own group, even in situations not related to survival, or where there is no significant genetic difference. This prejudice, familiar to all of humanity, and which seems rather superfluous in modern life, has persisted through the millions of years of evolution preceding modern man (1.). The force of suspicion has shaped human communities from the earliest days of our species. Even in our modern age, foreign policy is largely ruled by suspicion, which encourages acts both of isolation and of globalization. Always counterbalancing suspicion is the force of collaboration. Sometimes these conflicting tendencies facilitate each other in a pursuit of unilateral ends; at other times, collaboration undermines suspicion in acts of community. Even as humanity evolves beyond a point where such a conflict should be necessary, some humans labor to make suspicion an inexorable quality of the human condition. Suspicion directs the will of the people, and if the natural direction of human evolution is towards more collaboration, then those seeking to shape the planet in a unilateral vision will embrace suspicion; in their folly they are not so much doomed to repeat history, but determined to repeat it. And the rest of humanity, for better or worse, is destined to relive it, over and over, as the world reshapes itself in small steps.

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Evolution

If mindless competition preceded caution, it is yet unclear at what point the ancient ancestors of humans began to fear not just predators, but their own species. Surely among some of our more omnivorous and carnivorous ancestors, there must have been freak instances of cannibalism. But at some point, the primate mind became so sophisticated that it learned not only to fear imminent or likely attacks, but even the theoretical possibility of an attack. It has been suggested that some early hominid species may have preyed on others in cases where there was significant evolutionary difference between predator and prey. But so too did the different species interbreed (2.). Early hominids collaborated in family units and in tribes. Hominids subsisted in these small hunter-gatherer units for most of their existence, but at some point in the last 50,000 years, humans developed agriculture and began to join into larger communities. Families and tribes began to overcome the inter-family suspicion which still characterizes much of modern ape and monkey culture.

As agricultural communities developed into larger villages, centralized governments formed. Large populations began to consolidate in city-states. As a greater personal distance formed between leaders and their subjects, leaders became despots, suspicious of their people. Cities became walled fortresses, suspicious of other cities. But at no other time had collaboration been so great. Thousands of people gathered within compact areas to build homes and do business with each other, create things, exchange ideas, and wage wars. City-states and early nations, always suspicious of each other, still managed to develop a system of trade.

The new borders of society led to the development of distinct ethnic identities, which made trade useful, but also created endless opportunities for new prejudices to develop. As humanity advanced, human contrivances became more sophisticated, and societies developed notably, or even vastly different cultures. There lie the roots of our modern diversity of culture.

These civilizations continued to collaborate in trade and in alliances. Eventually cities began to be overtaken by larger nations and even empires. A more complex system of subservience developed, which persisted for millennia. Imperial forces encouraged collaboration from the administrators of their conquests, colonies, and subjects. Suspicion of revolution led to oppression of entire ethnic groups. Religious identities developed as a response to repression. As empires became too bloated, they were just as soon deflated by the collaborative efforts of oppressed people, internal conspirators, and sympathetic governments opposed to the empire.

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Still, in the age of empires, intercontinental trade flourished. This trend outlasted many empires. But as Europeans began to move to further corners of the globe, trade led to colonization and another life cycle of empires. Around this time, countries began to solidify in their present forms and modern communication systems began to develop. During the wars of the last few modern centuries, cautious alliances formed between these countries. Just as often, these alliances stagnated and turned into fevered fits of suspicion on both sides, as characterized the Cold War relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. As much as one nation feared the other, suspicions were turned just as hotly within. “Collaborator” became a distasteful occupation, a name for people suspected of committing treason, and for allying themselves with dubious foreign causes. “Collaboration” was thus rebranded as a crime, as an act of conspiracy, while “suspicion” was elevated to the honor rightfully reserved for “skepticism”. Politicians still use such ideological conflicts as means to generate suspicion and thus direct their unwitting constituents.

Race

The earliest humans did not likely encounter many people of different races in their individual lifetimes. As civilizations formed and ethnic identities developed, suspicion was directed at the other developing ethnicities. Then larger nations formed to envelop multiple races, although suspicions persisted. But different races collaborated, through trade and eventually conquest and colonization; colonizers promoted local administrators in a rather awkward relationship for the colonized. Concurrently, new nations were forming around many smaller nations and erasing old tribal boundaries between like races. For example, the numerous European tribes such as the Germanic, Slavic and Celtic tribes began forming into larger countries and the ethnicity homogenized making suspicion harder to focus. Eventually this happened with race to a degree. Modern nations are more racially diverse and in most countries the races are treated equally by law.

But as a nation becomes more unified internally, it risks developing a sense of nationalism wielded externally. Prejudice is redirected outward to the perceived ideals of other nations. The force of nationalism is not sophisticated, though, and the conflict between nationalists is rarely about philosophy so much as a misguided and overzealous us-vs.-them mentality, based primarily on geographic boundaries. This reflects the arbitrary tribal conflicts of some of the earliest humans.

Technology

Now, many old warring nations are strong allies and collaborators in both peaceful missions and in war. But the power of new technologies allows these nations to spy on each other easier than ever before, so even as most nations collaborate with each other, they also compete with each other, and treat each other with suspicion. A wealth of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks proves the often contentious intentions and suspiciousness underlying diplomatic relations. Just as new technologies have facilitated suspicion, so too has suspicion led to the censorship of new technologies. For example, China is notorious for blocking websites facilitating the free flow of information, though they are only one of many such offenders; US cable providers neglect to carry Al Jazeera, for example (3.). In blocking communication channels, the force of suspicion holds back the globalization of culture, even while suspicion furthers the neoliberal globalization of economies through imperialism.

But even while technologies facilitate suspicion through spying, censorship and propaganda, they also facilitate collaboration by allowing people to spread the truth across borders, and to share cultures, where information blockades can be circumvented. Even actual physical revolts, such as those in Egypt and Iran, have been fomented and facilitated by online communication and phones. This suggests that the evolutionary push towards collaboration is stronger than the tendency to be suspicious, and that the current trend of suspicion which has defined western governance post 9/11 is more of an arbitrary construction of our politicians’ making rather than a reflection of our instinctive behavior.

Politics

It is indeed a regressive push by the type of politician who tries to encourage suspicion for the sake of starting false political movements. The world is becoming more collaborative, but Western governments, perhaps stagnating in boredom and in the confusion of living in a country dominated by the convoluted, disconnected language and interests of corporations, are encouraging a culture of suspicion of one’s neighbor and of immigrants. Citizens are asked to collaborate with their governments and spy on their friends. This is the oft-predicted trend towards an Orwellian future, but as it occurs in reality, it seems so arbitrary and such a false movement that one wonders how it persists at all except as a hobby of bored politicians and of provincial voters eager for the next violent headline, living vicariously through other people’s scandals and finding meaning only in conflict. It seems unnatural that this decadent mindset has become so influential in modern politics so suddenly since World War II, and especially in the last decade. One wonders if our natural evolution was on a different course and how we were diverted from this course, and whether we will return to it, or perhaps whether maybe we are still on it; perhaps the rise in suspicion is only a distraction desperately drawing attention to itself and away from our goal. If we keep on the collaborative course and look to the future, perhaps that distraction will starve, and disappear from sight and sound as we pass around the next bend. It would seem that on our natural course, certain paths converge while others peter out in the wilderness; unfortunately, there have always been some of us who insist on following will-o’-the-wisps to our death in the marshes. Our best hope at living in a global civil society is that we resist the temptation to follow the person following the will-o’-the-wisp.

Works Cited

1. (2011, March 17). Human prejudice has ancient evolutionary roots. Retrieved May 14, 2011,

from http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-human-prejudice-ancient-evolutionary- roots.html.

2. Kahn, R. (2010,December 20). Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion. Discover

Magazine. Retrieved May 15, 2011 from http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/not-misunderstanding-the-past-requires-suspicion/

3. Kazmi, M. (2007, January 22). Muslims “get” globalization, but does it get them? YaleGlobal

Online. Retrieved May 15, 2011 from http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/