Belonging

"Why should I feel intrusion?
Why be afraid of what we do not understand?
To eliminate exclusion
Cut out the differences to feel like we belong."

Dave Matthews Band From Squirm: Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King

I do a fair amount of reading about evolution and behavior. One of the questions that is often asked by evolutionists for a given characteristic of a species is "What advantage does that characteristic give to that species?"

In the case of religion, for example, why is religion so pervasive across the globe? It has come into existence independently in almost all cultures. Richard Dawkins suggests in 'The God Delusion' that it was a perhaps a function of safety. As children our minds are given to believe whatever our parents tell us without much question. What advantage is this? It keeps us from wandering out into the forest at night, from crossing the street, or from doing any other number of otherwise dangerous things of which we'd be unaware at a young age. This prepares our minds to accept religion as children and, while we stop believing in Santa Clause and the tooth fairy, we are taught the stakes of stopping our belief in God to be much more ominous.

So why is it that we feel a need to belong? A need to find a cause bigger than ourselves? One theory is that as our species became migratory and increasingly became more effective at hunting in groups versus alone, that our ability to communicate and work together evolved alongside. It is an easy extension to imagine that those who cooperated well and contributed the most to the group were valued and tended to survive and thrive. Additionally, as we migrated it was inevitable that we encountered others and classified these groups as 'them'. How can we identify 'them'? We look for differences between our group and theirs. Different became threatening. Different became 'bad'. The corollary is that the similarities became 'good'.

I believe that this persists today. People are no longer necessarily threatening, but we seek in-group identification in evaluating others. We may see ourselves as white or black, upper or middle class, women or men. He's tall, she's fat, those boys are jocks, those kids are geeks. When you meet someone, similarities are focused on. You may have the same hometown, your children may be the same ages, you may have the same favorite band, or the same hobby, or you follow the same sports team. We seek similarities and undervalue or flat out dismiss someone that is different.

In reality, the differences are what adds value to our lives. This sounds cliché but consider, really consider, that there can be no white without black. No tall without those that are short. In evolution, if things didn't change randomly, an environmental change could spell catastrophe for a species. If the peppered moth didn't adapt its color to match soot-covered industrial England, it would have been snatched up by it's predators. The same holds true for the finches on the Galapagos Islands. Threatened by drought and famine, the birds without the tools to survive died out. The total population plunged by 85% and the remaining birds were larger with deeper and longer, basically stronger, beaks. This advantage allowed them to eat less accessible seeds which became their sustenance. Nature selected them to live. Their differences became their survival.

So now our challenge as the human species is to use our wonderfully adaptive brains to realize that our survival depends less on identifying 'us' and 'them' now, but seeing that we are all 'us' and lending our efforts to cooperation and compassion rather than differences and division. We can still seek to belong, but we just need to extend the membership of the in-group to include everyone. We're more similar than we are different anyway and that's what matters. The differences just keep things interesting.