The problem, for those of us inclined towards universal humanitarianism, is that ethnocentrism works, evolutionarily speaking:
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
This is a very tough problem.
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
This is a very tough problem.
Probably we all can think of a lot of instinctive behaviours that are a bad idea in what, now, are our normal contexts and that we avoid in a daily basis.
Intelligence, unlike evolution, is not blind (or, at least, no so blind).
Ethnocentrism certainly provides some meaning and purpose, but it's a shitty purpose of 'my interests at the expense of those other horrible people' and almost invariably ends in atrocities.
Globalism is simply a function of technological advancement, which is not going to go into reverse. We are not giving up instantaneous communications, or high-efficiency containerized shipping, or air travel, or GPS, or any of that other good stuff, despite the urgings of people like Aleksander Dugin.
You can have both a globalized society and meaning and purpose: there's a whole cosmos out there waiting to be explored, and the idea that there's more meaning to be had in militarizing the marginal differences between different ethnic groups is bizarre to me.
That's not to say that nature and natures way can't inform ethics, or to commit to any particular ethical outlook.
I don't think that's true. Of course you can come up with ethical systems which transcend nature but the ones that actually get adopted are simply sets and heuristics which make the group benefit the most from "just how it is."
Considering that moral attitudes are partially heritable, on a long enough time-scale, ethics that are truly separate from nature are bound to disappear or be relegated to marginal groups of people.
Almost certainly. But they transfer much more permanently genetically.
"Group" is a slippery thing, though. There is always a tendency for individuals and sub-groups to cheat on whatever wider group ethics might exist.
It's a more complex phenomena than most people give it credit for.
The problem is kind of like the species level of version of the tragedy of the commons. These different tribes/breeds/races all preferring the short term preference of saving their territory/mate/child/self versus saving the lives (and infinite potential) of their stranger neighbors.
The evolution of life shows us the grand benefit of higher and higher levels of organization. Scaling rules. It forces the previously multi-use smaller pieces to over specialize, but the gain are unimaginable as the voyager space probe is to a amoeba.
Multicellular life did not arise from cells being universalist. It arose from cells banding together with their mitotic offspring against other groups of cells. Similarly, the Voyager probe only happened because of us-vs-them competition in the cold war.
I guess I'm just partial one side of the coin, when both must be present for it to spin.
Still, it's a shame to waste all that potential... even if recent research into General Adversarial Networks hints to us that us/them is a lever buried deep.
BZZT Post hoc fallacy.
Voyager could have happened regardless.
We can't predict what would have happened, but the specific chain of events starting from agriculture (like ants and wasps and termites do) and ending with a little bit of magical metal leaving the solar system is... unique. Unless you wanna talk a sufi like constant explosion of super positioned universes. But that's silly.
Can we counteract the effect (making long-term strategies more favorable) by politics, or by changing the way the economy works?
It also shows us that complex systems are especially prone to catastrophic systems collapse. Scaling is not a better strategy, it's just a different strategy.