Remaking the Space Between Us (eBook)

One

Our Evolutionary Legacy

Never in recent times have our tribal tendencies as a species been more on display than during the COVID-19 pandemic. “What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on 10,000 years of social evolution,” writes Sebastian Junger in Tribe. “Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival.”17 Research conducted by evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello and his colleagues reveals how humans moved early on from rudimentary individual collaboration to more sophisticated group-level cooperation to successfully compete against other groups.18 This means something that often gets overlooked: these two human potentialities—cooperation and competition—emerged hand in hand, the one reinforcing the other.

Much has been written about how we have evolved as a species to both cooperate and compete, to both empathize and fear.19 Clearly the potential for both lies within us. But at least at this stage in our evolution, cooperation and empathy are much more likely to flourish within groups while competition, even hate, is much more likely to break out across groups.20

Why is this? Why has this early evolutionary legacy survived all the way up to today? I believe the most useful answer lies in how you and I define the space between us through our everyday interactions within and across groups. As research on polarization shows, the closer we grow within groups—interacting regularly, believing the same things, tethering our identities to the group—and the more distant groups become from one another—rarely interacting, believing different things, building different identities—the more likely it is that cooperation and empathy will flourish within groups and competition and animosity will break out across groups. 21

In many democracies today, including ours, these opposing tendencies are escalating ever faster, creating greater solidarity within groups and greater polarization across groups. In research on social networks in the U.S., sociologists Byungkyu Lee and Peter Bearman detected a sharp rise in political isolation across groups and political like-mindedness within groups in 2016, a trend that has not abated since then. “We’re segregating physically away from one another into our tribes and virtually in terms of the media that we consume,” says conflict expert Peter T. Coleman. “That’s a major concern because we’ve learned from research for decades that . . . when you have regular everyday contact with people who are different from you, it mitigates the escalation of intergroup conflict.”22 Byungkyu and Bearman’s research shows a similar result: people with larger, more diverse networks have more accurate political knowledge, are more likely to vote, and have greater exposure to ideological diversity.23

Our current trend toward greater cross-group distance is renewably powered by collusion cliques, or in today’s parlance, “echo chambers,” those closed, insular groups that recycle views and rarely dispute them. The rise of digital media since 2000 has turbocharged animosity among these cliques, not by reinforcing their views but by exposing them to conflicting views online without the moderating effects of face-to-face interaction. Turns out, the more cliques are exposed to competing views online, absent face-to-face contact, the more they will cling to their views.24 That, as we see today, is a recipe not only for distorting the truth, but for never learning that we are distorting the truth. That is a big problem, warned political theorist Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . no longer exists.”25

Closing the distance across groups, then, requires us to open up the space within groups, so individual identities can flourish, as can ideas or facts that go against the group’s orthodoxy, making groups less monolithic. That is no easy task, as Peter Coleman knows. “Humans form group preferences quickly, and groups tend toward conformity and extremity. We all tend to favor our in-groups . . . and to disfavor and discriminate against out-groups. Even when groups are based on nothing more than coin tosses or estimates of the number of jelly beans in a jar, we quickly show in-group favoritism.”26 And, as we all know from history, once a group bands together in opposition to groups they hate or fear, our ability to think plummets, leading us to cling ever tighter to those like us and to reject, oppress, even kill those not like us.

How do you and I figure in all of this?

Many of us already know or at least intuit much of this. Yet it is difficult for us to see our own role in creating this reality, just as it was for members of an organization where I once led a change effort. In interviews, everyone agreed that the organization was producing more conflict and turmoil than strategic clarity or impact. But a subsequent survey surfaced a puzzling asymmetry: while most people were aware of what others were doing to create results no one liked, they were largely unaware of what they themselves were doing. The asymmetry was staggering. Seventy-eight percent said they delivered on commitments while only 35 percent of everyone else did; 58 percent said they addressed performance problems directly while only 14 percent of everyone else did; 59 percent said that they learned from disagreements while only 8 percent of everyone else did—and on it went, as Table 1.1 shows.

Table 1.1: Other Survey Results

The statistical impossibility was obvious to everyone: a large percentage of people cannot be doing something they say happens only a small percentage of the time. The implication was equally obvious: people were far more aware of what their colleagues were doing than what they themselves were doing to contribute to the problems they saw. For the first time, groups up, down, and across the hierarchy realized that they were together creating a reality none of them wanted. And for the first time, they saw that changing that reality would require all of them to change, together.

I bet if we conducted a similar survey of U.S. citizens, we would find similar results: Most people would be aware of what others are doing, yet unaware of what they themselves are doing to bring us to where we are today. This unawareness prevents us from seeing those forces in and outside of us that lead us to turn our differences into divides. These forces, summarized below and illustrated in these essays, are the invisible hand structuring the space between us.

As the list below suggests and these essays will show, we did not get to where we are today by any one path, but by many paths converging and moving us all in the same divisive direction. And while these forces affect different groups in different ways and to varying degrees, no group can escape their impact. Even those who call for greater inclusion, justice, and cooperation succumb to their influence. That is why civil rights leader Howard Thurman once asked: “What’s the point of going to the promised land if you become the Pharaoh on your sojourn?”27 and why novelist and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah cautioned: “Beware a group devoted to participatory democracy that is itself harshly autocratic.”28 No one is immune.

Figure 1.1: Forces That Turn Differences into Divides

Together, these forces are driving us closer to people like us and further away from those unlike us, increasing the divisiveness and polarization that is weakening our nation.

What happens when We the People become the problem?

Take a look at the graph below. Since 2000, political polarization in the U.S. has increased over two-fold, significantly more than any other “advanced” democracy. 29

Figure 1.2: Polarization in Advanced Democracies

According to More in Common, 81 percent of Americans believe the resulting divisions pose a greater threat to our future than foreign nations.30 That may be so, but foreign nations are taking full advantage. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee during the Trump Administration concluded that Russian interference in the 2016 election was not so much designed to benefit one or another party as it was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society . . . aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”31

That interference continues. Shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group in Russia, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, bragged, “We have interfered, we are interfering, and we will continue to interfere—carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know...