Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard Feynman
White blood cells in the immune system function as soldiers on patrol. They are constantly scouring the corridors of the body, prowling for intruders. As they move through the veins and capillaries, they encounter billions of friendly cells, and myriad scraps of flotsam and jetsam that belong to the body itself. Should they make a mistake and attack these compatriots, the body would be in severe trouble.
How does the immune system manage to avoid cases of mistaken identity? The cells of the body have the equivalent of a uniform—a chemical combination as unique as a human face or a fingerprint. What’s more, invading viruses also have a distinctive chemical costume. When a white blood cell detects the markings of the virus, it goes on the attack and sends out signals summoning its legion of confederates to the assault.132
Uniforms are necessary on the cellular level. They also prove indispensable to human society. Margaret Mead says every human group makes a simple rule: thou shalt not kill members of our gang, but everyone else is fair game. According to Mead, each group says that all humans are brothers and declares that murdering humans is out of the question. Most groups, however, have very strange means of defining who is human. A tribal member, in most primitive societies, is a full-fledged human being. A citizen of some other tribe, on the other hand, is usually not. Most primitive tribes, says Mead, feel that if you run across one of these subhumans from a rival group in the forest, the most appropriate thing to do is bludgeon him to death.133
Like white blood cells harmlessly passing each other in the body’s corridors but destroying “foreign” intruders, humans of the same tribe recognize each other as parts of the same flesh and avoid hostilities. A body is a collective of cells that have to get along to survive; a society is a collective of individuals that have to do the same.
Humans ranging from the most primitive to the most sophisticated form cozy in-groups that assault outsiders, clumping together as competitive superorganisms.134 This tendency, as we’ve already seen, is not limited to human beings. Lewis Thomas has pointed out that even lethargic-looking sea anemones engage in cold wars. Two seemingly identical patches of anemones on a rock may appear to live in peaceful harmony. In reality, however, the colonies edge against each other, aggressively trying to dislodge the rival community from the rock both call home. Like white blood cells and the denizens of the primitive tribe, the members of each anemone clump know who is one of “us’’ and who is one of “them.”135
According to Harvard’s E. O. Wilson, xenophobia, the fear and hatred of interlopers, is universal in higher animals. Wilson explains that squabbling within a group is minor compared to the snarling, spitting, and raking of claws that occur when group members encounter an outsider.
Much of the animal communication observed by ethologists, in fact, seems to have evolved to help one animal tell his killer companions: “Hey, I’m one of us.” For example, calls allow one bird to tell others he’s a part of their flock.136 Some bird societies have even evolved their own dialects to aid in this purpose.137 Animal markings and specialized scents also help beasts tell who is part of their own pack and who is not.138
Humans, too, need ways of identifying who they’re supposed to take care of and who they’re allowed to oppose. Some of those identifiers include how you hold your fork, what language you speak, what kind of clothes you wear, how close you stand to someone,139 how you say hello, what haircut you choose, and what color you paint your face.
Leaders fashioning new social organisms seem instinctively to recognize the fact that they will have to find ways to differentiate their followers from everyone else. Moses coined a slogan: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” He enjoined his followers to inscribe the sentence on their doorposts, where they would see it every time they went out and came back in, and to tie scraps of parchment marked with the phrase to their arms every morning and every night.140 To make sure that Jews would be marked as separate from the members of any other group, he even gave them a distinctive diet.
Lenin was born into a supremely middle-class family, but he dressed in the unmistakable clothing of a worker, adopted workers’ slang,141 and encouraged his followers to do the same. Then he pointed to an enemy with a radically different style of couture and speech—the well-coiffed bourgeoisie.
Mohammed gave his followers a set of prayers and ritual washings to execute five times a day, then instructed the faithful to signal their identity with the whiskers on their chins—shunning the razor and glorying in the growth of their beards.142
Each leader gave his followers a set of markings to identify them as one of us, and he set up the signals that would make it easy to spot the unbeliever. The quick identification of us and them is necessary because the competition between superorganisms—whether they’re cultures or subcultures—can get very serious indeed. The Israelites Moses had gathered would soon be battling Canaanites. In those campaigns, the Hebrews could easily have been wiped out. Mohammed’s followers were about to take on the superpowers of the entire Western world. To an informed handicapper, the odds of Moslem survival would have seemed astonishingly slim. Lenin’s converts would soon kill the czar, his wife, and his children; exile the aristocrats who had tyrannized Russia for centuries; and wipe out the entrepreneurs and successful farmers who had fueled the country’s rapid economic expansion. Meanwhile, in 1917, counterrevolutionaries would mount a bloody civil war against the Marxists. Had they been able to, these adherents of the old order would have presided over the Bolsheviks’ extermination. The battle between social groups is no mere pantomime. Being mistaken for a member of the wrong team can be fatal.
The battles between groups in a society at peace may be far less bloody, but they are no less persistent. Welfare families want to raise their payments; middle-class folks would like to avoid upping the taxes that provide the welfare checks. Landlords want to raise rents; tenant groups want to lower them. Rockers want to start a club on the corner; the older couples in the neighborhood want to protect their peace and quiet. Conservatives want to seize more power; liberals want to render them powerless. Men want to avoid housework; women want them to do more cleaning and mopping. All are clashes between clusters of humans who feel you’re either with us or against us. They are battles for turf, like the slow struggles between competing clumps of anemones on a rock.
Within the group of those who wear the markings of the correct superorganism, all may be cozy and humane. But if your markings are wrong, watch out! Bertha Krupp, heiress of the German industrial family that armed Hitler’s Third Reich, regularly visited Krupp factory workers who were ill. She generously comforted those in need. Bertha saw herself as warm, compassionate, and giving.143 She had no compunctions, however, about the fact that her son ran slave camps in which people were beaten from the time they got up in the morning until they crawled into a lice-ridden bunk at night, deliberately underfed until they had worked themselves to death. Bertha was not even concerned that her family maintained gas ovens on the factory grounds to eliminate those forced laborers who might prove recalcitrant. In her own eyes, Bertha Krupp was a good and charitable person. Her kindness extended to those she considered human. The Slavs and Jews from whose bones she ground her fortune, on the other hand, were of a distinctly different subspecies. Bertha and other Germans of the time referred to these subservient beings with one simple word: Stücke—“livestock.”144
As Margaret Mead said, killing real people is forbidden; but folks beyond the boundaries of our own superorganism aren’t really people, are they.