A colleague told me my column last week wasn't very clear and I have to agree with him.
I was trying to get to a point and didn't quite make it there. This was due in part to the breadth of ideas I was trying to weave into one column.
So, I thought I would be a little more succinct. I apologize if I offend anyone's religious or cultural sensitivities.
First of all, human beings all have a common origin. Doesn't really matter if you follow the Abrahamic religions or evolutionary science, we are all descended from common ancestors. Race is a fictitious notion as we are a single species - as evidenced by the ability of any two humans to generate offspring.
We have made great advances in civilization - digital watches, air travel, nuclear weapons - but our underlying genetic make-up remains pretty much the same as our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago. Consequently, we have pretty much the same instinctual behaviours.
These include forming groups - tribes, families, cults, villages - which provide for individual safety through communal actions, a hierarchical societal structure with dominant and submissive individuals (type A, B, C, D personalities), and an instinctual desire to procreate - to carry on our genes.
In this context, we form close groups of individuals with whom we identify. Malcolm Gladwell has argued these groups, by necessity, are typically less than 150 individuals we know. They can be as small as a few close friends or your family.
And we have a strong drive to protect our particular group. This can be from physical assault which is the basis of war (even chimpanzees have wars) but in can also be from the loss of habitat, food supplies, land, or any of the hundreds of other necessities required to live.
We have strong feelings about people who commit crimes even though they might not be committing them against us because these people threaten the security structure of our tribe or group. They are disruptive to our society.
If you are still with me, what has this to do with globalization? Or any other modern problem? For the longest time, tribal behaviour wasn't an issue. We did not come into contact with other tribes. We were spatially isolated and therefore only had to deal with internal conflicts in our own groups.
About 6,000 years ago, when humanity had finally mastered agricultural practices and we shifted away from a nomadic lifestyle, our population began to increase. Cities were founded. Land was claimed. City states and governments started to emerge. And we have been at war with one another ever since.
Historians tell us out of the last 3,400 years of human history, only 268 years have not had a recorded war. There could have been wars going on in those years but they did not make it into the historical record!
This clash of tribes or countries or ethnic groups or religious followers or socio-economic demographics has simply been exacerbated by globalization. Some people are still trying to win.
The landscape has shifted, though, as some people are trying to win not with dead bodies but with economic dominance.
One could make the argument Western civilization has enslaved the rest of the world to satisfy its demands for material goods and services.
After all, factories in Haiti making t-shirts or shoe manufacturers in Vietnam are not making products for local consumption. The costs are too high for the workers themselves to afford the items they manufacture. Instead, manufactured goods are shipped to countries wealthy enough to pay.
But the same thing is true internally within wealthy countries.
The reason Donald Trump has been so successful is he has tapped into this emotional response to protect the tribe. He is saying to the American people, "We are the American people. We are a group. We need to protect ourselves from all of these others."
Many workers are suffering from the collapse of the American economy over the past decade and are looking for someone to blame. Some other group. Someone who is "other".
Trump has been very successful at framing the blame for the failure of the American economic system on the foreigner. On the others who are not part of the tribe of the United States. And people are responding to that message because it sounds right.
What does this mean for globalization? He has simply tapped into the existing zeitgeist which goes well beyond the United States.
I would suggest we are starting to head in the opposite direction. Like a wave crashing onto a beach, we have reached a crest in globalization and are now slowing receding to our common past.
Attacks, such as the tragedies in Nice, Paris, New York, Syria, and Turkey, will go on. If anything, they will intensify as we fight for those we hold as "ours."
