Social Kinship, Key to Survival of the Species : Technology: The source of wealth is now knowledge and know-how. The world has reason, room and resources to stop waging war.

It is humbling to face the fact that virtually none of the crucial events of recent decades--the Nazi-Soviet pact, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s rise to economic leadership, the advent of glasnost , perestroika and the unraveling of communist hegemony in Central-Eastern Europe, to name several--were anticipated. Accordingly, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that what we can most confidently expect is the unexpected.

If we recognize and accept the reality that we cannot reliably predict future events, should ordinary people be expected to sacrifice their lives and liberties in pursuit of certain ends that are likely to prove unattainable? Halina Bortnowska, a lay Catholic who has advocated the causes of Polish steelworkers, is unequivocal: “We’re not laboratory rats here, and really, we’ve had enough of grand experiments. Truly, one mustn’t experiment with the lives of people who have only one life to live.”

Oliver Cromwell said essentially the same thing to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on Aug, 3, 1650: “My brethren, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Much more so than in Cromwell’s time, it behooves us to think of the possibility of being mistaken--to guard against any dogma or set of beliefs that we have elevated above reappraisal. In a world changing infinitely more rapidly than Cromwell’s, dogma must give way to working hypotheses.

One such hypothesis centers on the widely and loudly acclaimed “people power.” This power was dramatically manifested in 1989 with the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the toppling of communist rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia--and the clamorous assertiveness of subject nationalities, including Hungarians in Romania, Romanians in Soviet Moldavia, Germans in Poland and Ukrainians and Muslim Central Asians in the Soviet Union. People power also overthrew the shah in Iran, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines and fueled popular movements against apartheid in South Africa and against communist gerontocracy in China.

We are witnessing, then, a participatory impulse on a global scale and not only in politics but in all aspects of life, whether in the family, in the classroom, in gender relations, in the workplace or in environmental affairs.

This participatory impulse, it should be noted, is discernible throughout history, or at least since the appearance of the state, with its division of rulers and ruled. Since then, the most influential society of each historical period has been the one that reduced the gap between top and bottom by raising the level of mass participation. In so doing, these pioneering societies attained a qualitatively superior social cohesion and dynamism, enabling them to prevail over all other contemporary societies and to stamp their imprint on their times.

In our time, we have developed the technological capacity to build a new world but have failed to evolve the social capacity for making it a world worth living in. We now face the formidable task of taming our creation--technology. In his later years, Bertrand Russell was skeptical that humans were up to such a task. He viewed the antics of his fellow humans as comparable to those of “apes playing with matches on a petrol dump.”

Russell’s apprehension may prove justified. Yet a historical perspective that encompasses millions of years of prehistory and millennia of history adds three basic and positive factors to the equation: the “non-zero-sum effect,” the “guillotine effect” and the “Paleolithic heritage.”

The “non-zero-sum effect” refers to new social relationships made available, for the first time, by technology. All previous civilizations have been zero-sum civilizations, that is, only finite pies of natural wealth were available. Contenders, both within nations (class wars) and between nations (state wars), claimed and fought over the pieces. The Roman Empire was typical, requiring 80% of the population to work the land to feed 100%. Roman cities seem to have been always about three weeks from starvation. This was a zero-sum situation: Someone could get more only if others got less.

Today, the situation is precisely the opposite because the main source of wealth is not natural resources but scientific knowledge and technological know-how. The available pie is potentially no longer finite. As such, we would no longer be trapped in a contest in which someone’s gain is not another’s loss.

War and conquest are hardly the road to riches any more, as the Germans and the Japanese discovered during and after World War II. The problem we now face is not a finite pie that leads to struggle for the largest slice. Thanks to labor-replacing technology, it is a large and growing pie resulting in a global glut.

The reality of the glut is reflected in chronic overproduction, chronic unused capacity and the multitude of overt and covert trade restrictions designed to keep out the flood of foreign goods seeking markets. Although the Germans and the Japanese were defeated in World War II, they emerged as economic victors because of their technological comeback. After this experience, it is unlikely that future Germans or Japanese leaders will use the Lebensraum argument for war, as Hitler and Tojo did in the 1930s.

Not only is there no longer an economic incentive to wage war, but there is also a powerful disincentive not to wage war because of the “guillotine effect.” There is an old French saying that the guillotine “powerfully focuses the mind.” When the threat of nuclear winter hangs overhead vividly and literally, the guillotine effect is very much a reality. It was evident when Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) explained why President Ronald Reagan, who for so long had excoriated the Soviet Union, changed his position and signed a treaty with Moscow banning medium-range missiles.

“As he (President Reagan) and all of us get older, we realize the threat of nuclear weapons to our survival. And the President has reached the conclusion that he has to do something about this.” In an address at Camp David on April 14, 1982, Reagan expressed this “no war” conclusion forcefully: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was equally emphatic in a Moscow address Feb. 15, 1987: “The stockpiling and sophistication of nuclear armaments means the human race has lost its immortality. It can be regained only by destroying nuclear weapons . . . . A nuclear war would leave no problems, and there would be no one left to sit at the negotiating table, let alone the negotiating tree stump or stone.”

Which brings us to our “Paleolithic heritage.” Recent anthropological research has debunked the once-popular theory that our early ancestors used their superior brains and tools to prey on other animals, thereby acquiring a taste for flesh and becoming carnivores. Over the millennia, according to this school of thought, Homo sapiens became genetically programmed for aggressive behavior. Hence, the increasingly bloody conflicts throughout history, culminating in the two world wars and the holocausts of the 20th Century.

By contrast, the overwhelming majority of contemporary scientists agree that humans, like other animals, formed cooperative kinship societies during the Paleolithic millennia precisely because these were so well-suited to their survival. Human young are wholly dependent--not for one year like monkeys or three to four years like apes, but for six to eight years. The survival of the human young during their years of dependency was best secured by a system of cooperative base camps that assured the necessary food and protection.

Because communal kinship society met the basic survival needs of our prehistoric ancestors, it persisted through the Paleolithic era, which encompasses more than 95% of the history of our species. If human societies were for so long nonaggressive, scientists reason that the idea of genetically determined human aggressiveness is a myth. They consider the violence so prominent in modern times to be the product of aggression-promoting conditions within society.

Human nature, then, is neither pacific nor violent, neither cooperative nor predatory. It is largely determined by “society” or “culture.” But society and culture are made by humans and can be changed by humans. It follows that future societies and future humans will not be determined by genes programmed for acquisitiveness or aggression--as our recent historical experience sometimes appears to suggest--but by people who have the potential to live up to their proud and beneficent Paleolithic heritage.

It may be argued that we have little chance of redeeming this heritage because our prehistoric ancestors had access to the never-depleted granary of the surrounding wilderness. Hence, there was no need for those Paleolithic food-gatherers to fight each other for survival. But with the advent of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, the ever-full and ever-accessible wilderness granary was supplanted by cultivated fields owned by a few landlords and worked by landless peasants. This argument persuasively explains the unending social conflicts and wars of modern times, but it needs to be carried further to take into account modern high technology and its non-zero-sum effect.

Today, for the first time in 10,000 years, the ever-accessible wilderness granary theoretically can be restored and once more made accessible to all. Our Paleolithic heritage now is within reach. Whether we reclaim it depends on our ability to make the adaptations necessitated by rampant technology.

Innumerable species have disappeared simply because they were incapable of adapting to changing environments. But we humans are responsible for environmental changes. So our problem is not one of adapting to an environment beyond our control, but one of adapting our human-made environment to our human needs. This would appear to be a relatively easy task for self-styled Homo sapiens or thinking persons.

While recent experiences warn us to expect the unexpected, as a thinking species we do have the option of being the creators rather than the creatures of our destiny--of recharging our history rather than ending it, like Russell’s apes playing on the petrol dump.