news.outlookindia.com | 178 Years Later, Bristol Adopts Raja Rammohun Roy

news.outlookindia.com | 178 Years Later, Bristol Adopts Raja Rammohun Roy

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Us vs. Them: Good News From the Ancients! - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Us against them" seems a staple of human psychology as unsinkable as "That's mine!" for a 3-year-old or "I wish they'd quiet down" for a senior citizen surrounded by teenagers.

After the Tucson shootings this month, it took multiple American forms: Republican vs. Democrat, gun-control advocate vs. Second Amendment solutioner, normal person vs. nut case, blood-libel accuser vs. blood-libel defendant, our pundit vs. your pundit.

Looking through a recent New York Times, you couldn't help thinking that the notion merits a separate daily section to organize stories efficiently: North Korean vs. South Korean, North Ivorian vs. South Ivorian (those hard geographical divisions help), e-book reader vs. traditional book lover, New York Giant vs. Dallas Cowboy, boomer vs. Gen X'er, man vs. woman.

Are we just boringly binary? And why, as both Rodney King and distinguished science writer David Berreby asked, for different reasons, can't we all get along?

Back in 2005, Berreby tried to open our eyes on the subject with his noncontentiously titled Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (Little, Brown and Co.). We can't help being tribal thinkers, Berreby explained, because organizing other humans into kinds is "an absolute requirement for being human." It is, he wrote, "the mind's guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions." There is "apparently no people known to history or anthropology that lacks a distinction between 'us' and 'others,' " and particularly others who don't rise to our level.

Our categories for humans, Berreby elaborated, "serve so many different needs, there is no single recipe for making one." Categories for other people "can't be understood objectively." We fashion them in classic pragmatic style to suit our purposes in solving problems, particularly that of generalizing about people we know by only a feature or two. We make these categories—often out of strong emotional need. We don't discover them. American suburbanites need "soccer moms," Southern kids need "Nascar dads," Yemenites need neither.

Sometimes we lose control over our categories. Nineteenth-century linguists applied a Sanskrit word to a family of ancient languages, Berreby reminded us, but the Nazis turned "Aryan" into "a life-and-death human kind" different and better than German Jews. These days, we see the expansion of "red" and "blue" from shorthand tags for states in regard to voting patterns to fundamental categorizations of people. History and science also help us add to what Berreby called the "heap of canceled kinds"—the "phlegmatic" and "nervous" types that formed two separate 19th-century classes for doctors, the "Type-A personality" seen as a scientific category in the 1980s, the cagots of France and the paekchong of Korea, who have long since melted into their national groups, the "races" slowly being undermined by DNA analysis.

"The issue," Berreby observed, "is not what human kinds are in the world, but what they are in the mind—not how we tell Tamils and Seventh-day Adventists and fans of Manchester United from their fellow human beings, but why we want to."

True enough. The problem remains that this habit of hostility to the "Other" seems inescapable, even if it's not hard-wired into us. We've been talking like Tarzan since the ancient Greeks. Me Athenian, you barbarian. Me Roman, you Carthaginian loser. Me Greek, you dumb Egyptian animal worshiper. Me better, you worse.

Again, as with Berreby's study, a book can help us if not save us—a small tool to pry the fetishisms of "Us vs. Them" from our minds.

CBI questions Dayanidhi Maran on 2G Scam | Firstpost

CBI questions Dayanidhi Maran on 2G Scam | Firstpost

Holy War — By Nigel Cliff — Book Review - NYTimes.com

Holy War — By Nigel Cliff — Book Review - NYTimes.com

Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in World | JSTOR

Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in World | JSTOR

Echoes of Elgin Marbles: Turkey asks UK to return ancient sculpture - CNN.com

Echoes of Elgin Marbles: Turkey asks UK to return ancient sculpture - CNN.com