Moffett - The human swarm: how our societies arise, thrive, and fall

F or as long as human societies have existed, people have found themselves changed, the members of those societies transformed in their minds eye into exalted Human Beings. Yet as powerful as belonging to a society can be in raising the citizens collective self-image, its not their fellow members that they see most differentlythe foreign undergo the more radical, at times dreadful, transformation. In each persons mind, entire groups of outsiders can turn into something less than human, a kind of vermin, even.

That foreigners might be considered contemptible enough to crush underfoot, like insects, is the stuff of history. Think back to the year 1854, Washington Territory. Seattle, chief of the Suquamish Tribe and namesake of the newly founded city, had just heard Isaac Stevens, the territorys recently appointed governor, speak before the tribal elders. Stevens had explained that the Suquamish were to be relocated to a reservation. Standing to respond, Seattle towered over the slight governor. Speaking in his native Duwamish, he bemoaned the abyss between their societies and recognized that the days of the Suquamish were numbered. Yet he was stoical about the news: Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.

As a field biologist I make a living thinking about the order of nature. Ive spent years contemplating the concept we call society while exploring human tribes and nations. I find myself endlessly captivated by the phenomenon of foreignness: the way it turns what objectively are minor differences into gulfs between people that have ramifications reaching into every corner of life, from ecology to politics. The goal of The Human Swarm is to take in as much of this broad sweep as possible by investigating the nature of the societies of Homo sapiens as well as those of other animals. A principle thesis of the book is that, uncomfortable as it may sound, human societies and the societies of insects are more similar than we might like to believe.

For humans, any little thing can signal foreignness, as I have experienced many times. Mortified souls looked on in India when I picked up my food with the incorrect hand. In Iran I tried to nod yes when to the locals a nod meant no. Sitting on moss in the New Guinea highlands, I watched The Muppet Show with an entire village on an ancient television run off a car battery. Knowing I came from America, and that The Muppet Show was American, every man and woman looked at me quizzically when a pig, a species they revere, waltzed on the screen in a dress and high heels. I talked myself past machine guns during the Tamil ethnic uprising in Sri Lanka and sweated as wary Bolivian bureaucrats sorted out who this very strange person was and what I was doingor should be allowed to doin their country. At home I have seen my fellow Americans behave with equal discomfort, bewilderment, and, at times, anger toward outsiders. In a primordial reaction, both sides think how strange that person is despite their profound similarities as human beings with two arms, two legs, and a desire for love, home, and family.

In The Human Swarm I examine society membership as a particular component of our sense of self, which should be considered (as I do in the final chapters especially) in tandem with race and ethnicityidentifications that can exert the same primacy and emotional draw. The elevated significance of our societiesand ethnicities and racescompared with other aspects of our identity can seem preposterous. Nobel-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, for one, struggles to make sense of why people collapse their identities into groups that override everything else. Using the deadly conflicts in Rwanda as a case in point, Sen rues the fact that a Hutu laborer from [the capital city of] Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis, and yet he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer and a human being. These and other sorts of breakdowns are one theme of the chapters ahead. When convictions about what a society stands for or who belongs come into conflict, suspicion mounts and bonding fails.

The word tribalism comes to mind, denoting people drawn together by anything from a love of car racing to the denial of global warming.New Guinea highlander, or of tribalism with respect to our own connections to a society, we have in mind how a lifelong sense of belonging elicits love and loyaltyyet also, expressed in relation to outsiders, how it can promote hatred, devastation, and despair.