Why There Are Different Societies, and Why Their Meetings Go Badly

Two questions that are usually asked separately turn out to have one answer. Why are there different societies at all, rather than one humanity with one language and one set of customs? And why, when two of them meet, does it so reliably end in conquest or war rather than in trade and mutual curiosity?

Why There Are Many

The first question has a dull answer, and the dullness is the point: geography.

People lived where they could feed themselves, and between the places where they could feed themselves there were mountains, deserts, lakes, forests, and oceans. Crossing those took effort that nobody had a reason to spend. So communities grew up in isolation from one another for very long stretches, and anything that varies at random between isolated groups diverged: the sounds used for words, the gods, the rules about marriage and food and dress, the stories about where the group came from.

None of this required anyone to decide to be different. Language drifts in a few generations of separation, and everything built on language drifts with it. The variety of human societies is not a design and not a choice. It is what you get when a single species is scattered over a planet with obstacles on it.

This matters for the second question, because it means the differences between societies carry no information about which is better. They are mostly accidents of where the mountains were.

What Happens When Two Meet

Now bring two of these groups into contact, as trade routes, population growth, and better boats eventually did. There are three cases.

One side is much stronger. Larger, better armed, further along in whatever technology matters for the encounter. For the stronger side the question is simply what to do with the weaker, and the profitable answers are to enslave it, to annex its land, or to take its goods by force. Trade is available too, but trade requires paying for what you could take. This is not a moral observation about the stronger side; it is a description of the payoffs, and the historical record is what you would expect from those payoffs. Nearly every meeting between a strong society and a weak one ended with the weak one absorbed, displaced, or gone.

Neither side has an edge. You might expect this case to be peaceful, since neither can profitably conquer the other. Often it was not, and the reason is the accumulated drift from the first section. Two groups that cannot understand each other's speech, that hold each other's gods to be demons and each other's customs to be filth, cannot easily establish the repeated, trusting exchange that makes cooperation pay. The game-theoretic conditions for cooperation, which I have discussed elsewhere, need the players to recognise one another as players. Ethnocentrism, which was the default condition of nearly every culture we know of, makes the other side not a player but a hazard.

Somebody profits from the fight regardless. This is the case that explains why even avoidable wars were fought. A war with the neighbours is a gift to whoever leads the group. It silences internal quarrels, directs every grievance outward, and makes the leader indispensable for as long as it lasts. A leader who is losing his grip has an interest in finding an enemy, and the strangers over the mountain are the obvious candidate. So wars happen not only where they pay the society but where they pay its head, and those are different sets.

The Common Thread

In all three cases, the trouble comes from the same source: the societies are separate units, each with its own leadership and its own interests, and their meeting is a meeting between units rather than between people.

Individuals from two societies, put in a room, mostly manage. They trade, they marry, they learn each other's words. It is the collective level, where the payoffs are calculated for the group and the decisions are taken by its leaders, that turns the meeting into a contest. I have argued that organisations defect where individuals cooperate; a society meeting another society is that argument at its largest scale.

What Follows

If the differences between societies are accidents of geography, they are not worth dying for. If the violence at their meeting comes from the payoffs facing their leaders rather than from the people, then the remedy is in the structure of leadership and not in the hearts of the people.

That is not a comforting conclusion, because hearts are easier to preach at than structures are to change. But it is the correct one, and it at least tells you where to look. The strangers over the mountain were never the problem. The mountain made them strangers, and the leadership made them enemies.