Struggling With 'isms'

Isms - racism, sexism, religionism, patriotism, nationalism, what's is all about?

Let's start by admitting that we all have some degree of these or other isms; it's who and what we are because we are animals. Advanced animals, hopefully, but animals nonetheless.

So let's look at the other animals for a moment. How do they generally recognize each other? In no particular order, they use sight, sound, and smell. So do we. Animals react to other species in a couple of different ways. If they are typically prey to other animals, they grow wary and afraid when a predator is near. If it's one of their own and it's mating season, their mating instincts kick in, and they start whatever their mating ritual might be. We, like our animal cousins, respond to these same stimuli.

I'm an old white guy. I feel most comfortable talking and interacting with other white guys. I like to believe they think like I do and like the things that I like; we have a "culture" of being old in common. Women do the same thing, so do people of color, people who follow a specific faith, even people who love a particular kind of food. If you love Mexican food and walk into a Mexican restaurant full of people, you feel "at home" because you know all the other people in that restaurant are there for the same reason; you share a love of that food.

But why is this? Why do we feel comfortable "with our own kind" and nervous around strangers? As with the predator and prey animals, there was a time that we needed these instincts to survive in the wild, just like them. When we came down from the trees and started to wander on the ground, we were already in troops or tribes. We had naturally bonded together for protection and for procreation.

We were limited in our range for hunting and gathering by the fact that our only mode of transport was on foot. We weren't the only troop of humans trying to survive by finding our food, there were other troops nearby doing the same thing. If their area was running out of food, they were not averse to borrowing a little food from their neighbors, which posed a threat to our survival.

We all looked a lot alike then, short, hairy, and depending on where you lived, mostly the same color of skin. That was confusing if you wanted to avoid interlopers, so different troops started devising ways to discriminate between their troop and outsiders. That may have taken the form of color and styles of dress, hairstyles, body art, and even language, so we knew who was an outsider because outsiders posed a danger to our troop.

All this may have taken a thousand years, or about 55 generations (assuming shorter generations back then). It may have been less or more, but evolution generally takes some time. We didn't just start or stop discriminating when we made these changes.

​The conventional thinking is that we descended from the trees 6 or 7 million years ago, and we were already using tools to discriminate back then, mostly sight and smell one would imagine. As we continued to evolve as humans, we perfected many of these discriminatory behaviors because we still needed them to survive.

Zip 6 million years ahead and here we are in the twenty-first century with the most sophisticated methods of discrimination of any other animal. We have perfected the art of the ism. 

The threats to our survival that emanated from that old way of life, hunting, gathering, and warding off invaders has pretty much ended, but with several million years of using our discriminatory tools, we have become damned good at our skills. In fact, it is my opinion that our brains are hardwired to do the job for us now; that means we don't have to stop and think about the danger before we take action.

Here we are, this tightly-wound defensive animal ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger, dangers that are mostly extinct in society today. We see someone who looks different or sounds different, or sometimes even smells different, and the red flag goes up in our subconscious, warning us to be careful. But the threat isn't really there, so what should we do.

While we were perfecting this hair-trigger response to outsiders, we were also changing our world in many ways to eliminate most of the old threats. And, our brains were evolving something we call logic and critical thinking, another tool that seems to separate us from the other animals that rely mostly on instinct. We need to use that marvelous brain to overcome the old ways of seeing the world.

When we feel that sense of unease or fear about a stranger, we let our logical brain override that sense because we know we live in a modern world where we buy our food at the store, the wild animals are long gone from our society, and we have police protection from most threats of violence.

Even with the dangers presented by modern outlaw organizations like ISIS or the KKK or Neo-Nazis, we know that they are a minority of the earth population and in most cases are far removed from us. We shouldn't assume that every person from the Middle East is a radical, or that everyone with a southern accent is in the KKK; we know better.

In time, our brains will rewire themselves away from these primal instincts, but if we took a few million years to become expert discriminators, it might take some time to reverse that process. In the meantime, we use that beautiful blob of grey matter sitting behind our eyes to override the fears of our reptile brain.