The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read Online Free Page A

have a ‘sociobiological’ function as extended kinship groups, practising a diffuse kind of nepotism that stems from our innate desire to reproduce our genes not only directly through sex but also indirectly by protecting our cousins and other relatives. Human beings do seem predisposed to trust members of their own race as traditionally defined (in terms of skin colour, hair type and physiognomy) more than members of other races – though how far this can be explained inevolutionary terms and how far in terms of inculcated cultural prejudice is clearly open to question. Taken together, these factors may help to explain why races seem to be dissolving rather slowly, despite the unprecedented mobility and interaction of the modern era. Recent work on ‘microsatellite markers’ has challenged the view that in strictly biological terms races do not really exist, showing that American ethnic groups identifying themselves as, variously, white, African-American, East Asian and Hispanic
are
in some respects genetically distinguishable. The key point to grasp is the fundamental tension between our inherent capacity for interbreeding and the persistence of discernible genetic differences. Racial differences may be genetically few, but human beings seem to be designed to attach importance to them.
    It may be objected that the historian, especially the modern historian, has no business dabbling in evolutionary biology. Is not his proper concern the activity of civilized man, not primitive man? ‘Civilization’ is, of course, the name we give to forms of human organization superior to the hunter-gathering tribe. With the advent of systematic agriculture between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, people became less mobile; at the same time, more reliable supplies of food meant that their tribes could become much larger. Divisions of labour developed between cultivators, warriors, priests and rulers. Yet civilized settlements were always vulnerable to raids by unreconstructed tribes, who were hardly likely to leave undisturbed such concentrations of the nutritious and the nubile. And even when – as happened gradually over time – most human beings opted for the pleasures of the settled life, there was no guarantee that settled societies would coexist peacefully. Civilizations geographically distant from one another might trade amicably with one another, allowing the gradual emergence of an international division of labour. But it was just as possible for one civilization to make war on another, for the same base motives that had actuated man in prehistoric times: to expropriate nutritional and reproductive resources. Historians, it is true, can study only those human organizations sophisticated enough to keep enduring records. But no matter how complex the administrative structure we study, we should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilized men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and againafter 1900. They were a large part of what made the Second World War so ferocious.
DIASPORAS AND PALES
    ‘Two peoples never meet,’ the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits once wrote, ‘but they mingle their blood.’ Mingling, however, is only one of a range of options when two diverse human populations meet. The minority group may remain distinct for breeding purposes but become integrated into the majority group in all or some other respects (language, religious belief, dress, lifestyle). Alternatively, interbreeding can go on, at least for a time, but one or both of the two groups may nevertheless preserve or even adopt distinct cultural or ethnic identities. Here is an important distinction. Whereas ‘race’ is a matter of inherited physical characteristics, transmitted from parents to children in DNA, ‘ethnicity’ is a combination of language, custom and ritual, inculcated in the home, the school and the temple. It is perfectly possible for a genetically intermixed population to split