Embracing a Global Identity — Key to solving worlds biggest problems?
Millions of light years of deserted Space surround our Planet Earth. Despite our sheer loneliness as species in this Universe, we engaged ourselves, over the course of history, in countless conflicts, wars and at some points — unthinkable atrocities. Why did we let this happen? What is to blame?
Defining the problem
The question captured my imaginations for years. I am no historian or anthropologist, but as a layman, I always tried to get as close to the answer as possible. I believe one part of the answer is blind tribalism, a term I’ve first stumbled upon on Tim Urban’s “Wait But Why”.
Blind tribalism is a behavioural bias that makes individuals to be excessively loyal to narrow social groups (“tribes”), without being able to justify their affiliation to that group, while suppressing their individual self. The concept of “tribalism” is clearly as old as homo sapiens itself — we always expressed a propensity for group belonging, this is embedded human nature. It’s not all bad with being “tribal”. Indeed, a sense of group identification generally triggers a greater life satisfaction and a great incentive to achieve goals.
The problem starts when people put their tribal affiliation on top of anything else. Ethnic, religious and nationalistic tribalism is many times at the core our history’s grandest scale atrocities — the Crusades, the Rwandan Civil War, the Holocaust, the World Wars, and more recently the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. I see blind tribalism as a trademark trait of all kind of extremist religious organizations, ethnic hate groups, or extreme-right or -left groups — entities that project prejudice, bigotry, discrimination and violence.
Fortunately, over time, especially in the last few decades, nations became more collaborative and tolerant towards each other and hence, less tribal. This resulted in tremendous benefits to the human race. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the more recent advancements in technology, international relations, trade and life standards are all marks of a diminishing influence of blind tribalism.
Promoting global identity — key to fighting blind tribalism
Addressing blind tribalism means building a more peaceful and prosperous world. So how do we fight with it? I believe the key solution is to make humans of various sorts of creeds, nations, political views, relate to each other as one species; in order words, to embrace a global identity.
Yuval Noah Harari, a renowned historian and author, argues that “all the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation.” One sure way we can build a more effective global cooperation and global governance is to help people create this new global identity for themselves. But keep in mind, this doesn’t mean replacing or abolishing local identity — they would come in a single package.
I’ll suggest below actions in 3 areas that’ll help us move closer to a global identity: (1) global governance, (2) education and (3) parenting. But don’t get too many hopes, some of them are highly unlikely and even utopian at this point.
- Global governance
The majority of nations around the world (150 out of 192), still cannot be referred to as developed ones. There are yet so many countries ruled by despotic rulers that ravage their own citizens with violence, incompetence and corruption. And it is becoming clearer that nation states need to be subject to more accountability. Rana Dasgupta, a British-Indian author says it well: “National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations”.
Then there’s the concept of citizenship — it needs to be reviewed. Close to 97% of citizenship around the world is inherited, which means that most people’s standards of life are determined at birth. Here’s Rana Dasgupta again: “Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property […] If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility — as a Finn — is also very different. But in a world system — rather than a system of nations — there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility”.
How about voting on a global level? Imagine American or Chinese politicians trying to take into account what people in Moldova or France care about. Global warming for instance — an existential problem that will affect the entire humanity — what if I, as a Moldovan/Romanian citizen, would be able to vote in American, Indian or Chinese elections (as the 3 of the most polluting countries in Earth) on matters that relate to global warming? Perhaps Trump would have thought twice before withdrawing from Paris Agreement. Perhaps…
There is also an easier twitch that could be done. Take the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals — as comprehensive and ambitious as they are, SDGs require, in my humble opinion, one more SDG — “Fostering a global identity among humans”. This should encourage people around the world recognize their identity as members of the human race. This is not to say that UN should undermine their identities as citizens of a country, or members of a creed or ethnicity, but rather shall increase the importance the human race identity. By making this a Sustainable Development Goal, we will be able to provide a political mandate and a policy framework among UN member states. The Goal could include policy interventions both at national and international level in education, foreign affairs and communication campaigns.
Last but not least, I would argue for ditching the veto right for the 5 nations in the UN Security Council (two of which are dictatorships)— USA, UK, France, Russia, China. There’s nothing democratic in keeping the entire world hostage to the national interests of either of these 5.
2. Rethinking public education
School curricula around the world should place more emphasis on planet wide topics, such Earth’s place in the Universe, global issues or climate change, at least to the same extent that they tackle national, local, ethnic or religious themes. Clearly, redefining our schools requires strong political commitment of sovereign states, but once this will happen, we will be able to educate independent thinking individuals able to question dogmas and assumptions underlined by their “tribes” and group affiliations . This will create conditions for them to embrace their global identity.
Alas, the whole process of education itself is broken. Even though we live in the 21st century, most of the schools in the world use a 19th century approach to educate our children, where a group of about 30 students of roughly the same age are taught by one teacher in an 75 sq .m. classroom. This system instills children to obey, behave, comply and fit — values that were much needed in the industrialized 19th and 20th centuries dominated by factories. It’s not the case today anymore — industries, economies and socio-political paradigms are reinventing themselves every couple of decades.
In reality, schools need to foster children’s boundless curiosity by encouraging them to build their own understanding and beliefs. Teachers cannot tell children that “the solution to this problem is x because everyone said this before”. Instead, they have to help them build their reasoning from the ground up. In other words, if one sees brain as a software, we have to encourage children to create their own “software components” and “write their own codes”. The bottom line is, as Elon Musk said, a teacher’s task is not to tell children what is right or wrong, but to engage them into discovering themselves the truth via ‘chained whys’ — we have to let the children ask the “why’s” until they reach their “aha” moment. Therefore, the basic questions in education should become HOW and WHY, rather than WHAT and WHEN.
3. Reframing parenting
Humans are not born racist, nationalistic or xenophobic. Some of them become like that because of environment, education system or their parents’ behavior. One thing we need to accept is that parents might be a source of hate and xenophobia, because they were surrounded by it when they were children. Many parents, even to a larger degree than teachers, educate their children in the spirit of obeying — “I’m an adult so I know much more about this than you, it’s not up to debate, don’t argue, just obey” they would say, thus abruptly blocking the chained “whys” children keep asking. This damages the child’s efforts to build her/his own reasoning and understanding of the world.
Apparently we don’t do much about breaking this vicious cycle. Although it is the most important “job” in the world — parenting is not taught in schools nor universities. This has to change. Introducing a parenting course in all universities and high-schools is paramount for breaking the curse of nationalism and extremism.
Conclusion
I dream of the day when people would say “I’m proud to be a human ” at least as often as they say, for instance “I’m proud to be Moldovan” (replace “Moldovan” with any nation, group, religion or ethnicity). How often do we hear people saying that they are proud to be members of the human race? Almost never. Countries and leaders are masters in propagating a national identity, but it is time for them to make the same effort into promoting a global identity.
It is true that fostering a global identity is not an urgent goal for billions of our citizens in developing countries who deal with poverty, famine, shortages of drinking water and who struggle to meet basic needs. In these impoverished regions, the global community has to work so much more on the socio-economic issues. But the industrialized countries should take the lead in developing a global identity — this will not only benefit their own societies, but will also generate much more political support for providing aid to poorer countries and towards more efforts in solving global issues.
Some might argue that it is too early to bring up global identity. I disagree. As humanity’s progress accelerates, we cannot expect a medieval approach based on excessive sovereignty and dominance of national interests to move us forward. Nations and people need a new paradigm on how to deal with each other and how to better understand the world — a world that is ready to embark in technological and scientific progresses at unprecedented scale, such as artificial intelligence or nano-biology, but also a world that faces existential threats such as climate change. Talking about global identity is about what we, as humanity, wish to accomplish in the next centuries. Let us work together on a global identity that will enable us to see the future farther and brighter.
