We Gather Together….

The most important need—drive, instinct—in human beings is not sex, power, love, caretaking: it is membership in a group. Without the group these other considerations cannot operate. No human being—not Robinson Crusoe, not Henry David Thoreau—has ever survived very long alone, as a solitary person. All of us like to be alone from time to time—indeed, respite from human contact is frequently necessary. However stay without human company for too long and we feel lonely. Soon loneliness grows into despair and we wither and die. Saint Francis, we remember, quickly began making friends with the animals around him. The first thing a person lost in the woods will do is not search for food, or build a shelter, but seek other people.

This has always been the case: despite various utopian ideals, human beings have never lived as solitaries. There never was an Adam. Humans evolved as a species from their precursors, generally believed to be earlier primates.

There is good reason for this: a solitary human, even such tough-looking creatures as Australopithecus and homo erectus were not equipped with tooth and claw to take on any of the carnivores contesting the African savannah where humans first appeared. At least one scenario suggests that these early humans lived in the African forest, and were forced onto the plains when the forest began to shrink because of climate changes, where they were easy prey for predators like big cats. Yet in a group, especially after they learned to use sticks and stones for weapons, they could fend off almost any kind of predator. The result was the people who were inclined to stay with other people rather than wandering off to hunt on their own lived to pass on their genetic make-up to their descendants. If this propensity were encoded in the genes of at least some of these people—again for whatever reason—it would, because it had high survival value, tend to spread through the species, in the end producing an “instinct” or drive to stick with the group. We recognize this drive in our impulse to join street gangs, college fraternities, church solidarities, rock groups and so many more. Looked at closely, many of these groups have no reason for existing except to be a group. What other purpose has a college fraternity or coffee club? And yet, if we do not have our own group of people to belong to we are certain sooner or later to be struck by that very unpleasant feeling we call loneliness.

Thus, despite the fact that we no longer are threatened by saber-toothed tigers or mastodons, we need a group of “friends.” It is possible to get along physically with a minimum of physical contact with others—hunt and gather food, build shelters for yourself. As a writer, I work by myself and there have been times when I am working in my isolated farmhouse that I have not spoken to another human for two or three days at a stretch. Yet three days is about as much as I can take, and I have no doubt that most human beings are the same.

However, it is not just people we need; a mateship or a small family are by themselves not enough. We need a group. It is crucial to understand that these groups are not simply random collections of people. All such groups operate according to clearly recognizable precepts or conventions. For one, these groups are always hierarchical, with leaders and followers, captains and able seamen, deciders and lickspittles. If the group is large enough it will contain subgroups with their own status structures, flunkies, courtiers and the rest.

For another, groups are usually antagonistic to other groups. The example most familiar to Americans will be the tribes of Indians who occupied America before the arrival of the Europeans. Those Indians groups fought each other for territory, access to women, wealth of course; but there was always matter of status.

They were tightly bonded; you did not drift easily from one group to the next. Absolutely loyalty was demanded. Anyone who defected was cursed, and marked for death. Conversely, all members were to be protected by the others: he may be a bum, but he’s our bum.

Similarly, groups do not easily allow outsiders in. A stray will be accepted only after he or she has hung around the periphery of the group until he becomes familiar. In formal groups like Kiwanis and Lions clubs, college fraternities, Cub Scouts and the rest there is almost always a system for vetting potential members and an initiation process which might be quite extensive. In college fraternities of my day “pledges” were required to endure often fairly onerous tasks for weeks and then undergo an elaborate initiation ceremony before they came full-fledged members,

For yet another, one of the major concerns of the group was the protection of the women. Men were expendable, and could be sacrificed for the general good; but women could not be sacrificed. It took nine months for a woman to produce a child, and several years of care until the child could stand on his or her own. On the other hand, one man could impregnate many women, and in fact in most groups the dominant males did a disproportionate amount of the breeding. However leaders always had to share whatever valuables there were around, and that included sex. Deny the other males too much and they would revolt. We tend to see dictators like Hitler as strong men ruthlessly running the show; but in fact Hitler had to get support from major figures in and outside government before he could rise into power. When it became clear that Hitler had brought a disaster to Germany, his allies abandoned him and he had little choice but to kill himself before his enemies killed him. In the end, it was not the tyrant who decided, but the group.

A curiosity about groups is that in basic form they tend to be comprised of about forty individuals. When I was at college there were still social fraternities which almost always consisted of somewhere between thirty and fifty people. This is typical: it appears that forty people are about as many as most of us are able to know well and interact with regularly. Readers can check this by counting the names in their address books: how many of these people are good friends—people whose spouses and children you know pretty well, whose careers you have followed, whose family backgrounds you understand. I have about 45 people I would call good friends in these terms, and another eight family members I am close to, along with more distant cousins, in-laws and others.

However, these characteristics are not limited to small groups like college fraternities or the early human tribes who wandered the African savannahs: the same constraints exist in the very large groups we call nation states. Almost all of them strictly limit immigration. In France the conservative politician Marie Le Pen, who has developed a huge following, would allow in only a sharply limited number of immigrants, in order to preserve “the traditional way of life for the people they consider the true French.” In Holland the anti-Islam leader Geert Wilders wants Holland to leave the European Union. He has said, “We can end the mass immigration and stop paying welfare checks to, for instance, the Bulgarians and the Romanians.” A New York Times report says that “Anti-immigration parties in the Netherlands, Austria and Scandinavia are also doing well.” In Switzerland, where business leaders want more immigration as a source of cheap labor, the vote was 50.3 for anti-immigration laws. Writing in the London Times, a conservative paper, columnist Melanie Phillips says that immigration is “the issue that dare not speak its name.” She continues that most of the antis “simply want this liberal society to enforce its own rules: that it welcomes minorities, provided that they sign up to the host culture….If minorities either refuse to play the game or become so numerous that they fragment the host culture, the country will become neither liberal nor a coherent society.”

The story is the same in other large societies. The Chinese, who earlier felt that they were being taken over by Western societies, particularly the British in the l9th century, have put stringent limits on new arrivals. Among other things, they are vigorously supporting North Korea economically in order to keep the North Koreans from flooding into the more prosperous China.

Needless to say, the United States has for a century and a half had strict controls on immigration. In the early days as a nation America encouraged immigration to fill up its huge sparsely settled spaces. (The Indians of course did not think they were sparsely settled.) Yet, particularly after the Civil War, increasingly greater limits were enacted, to the point where by l920 immigration was almost stopped. It was revived again under Kennedy, the first president (since the Founders) who had a fairly recent family history of immigration. It has remained a contentious issue in the United States, as the current debate over legalizing undocumented immigrants makes clear.

What does all of this tell us? For one, in general, the citizens of nation states are strongly opposed to allowing newcomers in. For another, newcomers are far more acceptable if they appear to be culturally and physically similar to the people already there. In the United States the descendants of the original settlers from the British Isles more readily accepted Scandinavians, Germans and Irish who came out of the same Germanic stock and spoke similar languages than they did the Slavs who spoke more distant languages and followed less similar folkways. And they had even greater trouble integrating later comers from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, like Jews, Muslims, and others. And when there are racial differences, we in America are still not an integrated society: huge percentages of Chinese-Americans live in big-city “Chinatowns,” many of them speaking Chinese, celebrating Chinese holidays, and following their own folkways. Blacks are even more isolated: most American blacks live in their own enclaves where they work and play out of the mainstream. Blacks are of course far better integrated into American society than they were fifty years ago; but I have lived in the supposedly very liberal Greenwich Village for many years, and you see very few blacks in the stores, restaurants, bars here; the majority live in black enclaves.

Even so, the United States is generally ahead of most countries on this score. The English have taken in a fair number of people from their former colonies, like the Pakistanis, Jamaicans, and others. Immigrants from France’s former colony Algeria live mainly in the unfashionable outside rim of Paris. As elsewhere, differences in dress, language and deportment make them less acceptable to the old-line French.

Nor is this pattern confined to the West. Even today it is difficult for foreigners to find acceptance in Beijing and Shanghai; western business people, journalists and others tend to live in their own bailiwicks and socialize with each other, although there are, as usual, exceptions. Japan kept its doors closed to the West for millennia. It opened them only when Admiral Perry sailed his gunboats into Tokyo Bay. In time there was significant Japanese immigration into the United States; but the Japanese are hardly as well-integrated into the mainstream as are the children of the European nations.

This, I am aware, is a touchy subject; it is one of the tenets of American democracy that we are all “equal.” That is simply untrue. Americans descended from the older European settlers, especially the English, have always been over-represented in government, the professions, and executive offices of business. The world—and a good many Americans—was shocked when we elected a black president; but in fact Barack Obama had a white mother, barely knew his black father, grew up in an ordinary middle-class milieu, and had a standard education. However, even Obama is an exceptional case; there are apparently no black, Hispanic, or Asian leaders who appear to be presidential possibilities. John F. Kenney was the first and last president who was Catholic. It is simply true that Americans will rise faster if they are of white European descent. European whites do constitute the majority of Americans and it is perhaps not unfair that they should hold a significant proportion of our public offices. Yet in fact nearly all of our presidents have been primarily of English descent: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln,

Tyler, Wilson, Truman, Carter, Clinton, Ford, Bush, to name just a few.

This was reasonable l50 years ago when such people were the majority of Americans. However today, people of largely English—as opposed to European—descent constitute about ten percent of the American population. By far the largest group—if they can be grouped together– are Catholics of Irish, German, Polish, Italian and other nationalities. Of course ethnicity cannot be entirely revealed by surnames; but of our last forty-two presidents, some eighty percent have English names. And if you examine lists of the cabinet members who have served under these presidents, the majority have English names.

This predominance of English names in national offices is less evident in state and city governments, where one or two ethnicities may dominate, as in New York City with its large black and Hispanic constituencies. Nevertheless, New York City has had only one black mayor, and has never had a Hispanic one, despite the fact that blacks and Hispanics constitute the majority of the city’s population. To most Americans, apparently, English names are “standard”– plain vanilla as opposed to more exotic names like Ho, Goldberg, and Santos. (Of course a lot of people with English names are black, among them David Dinkins.)

This situation seems to contradict what I have said about groups tending to be antagonistic to other groups, and it is certainly true that people are likely to vote for one of their own, as blacks did for Obama. Yet if forced to choose between two outsiders—for example a Japanese choosing between Smith and Santos—it is clear enough that they will vote for the candidate with the English name. There has never been a careful study of this phenomenon, so far as I know, but the results are clear enough: in a nation where people of mainly English descent are a distinct minority, we consistently elect people called Carter, Bush and Ford. This may, of course, change; but in view of the fact that our next president will almost certainly be named Clinton, Bush, or Kerry, it is unlikely to change soon. This is simply how groups behave.