Page 30 - Cultures and Organizations

The Rules of the Social Game 15

National Ballet, with Surinamese origins, who had performed in Vienna.
But the lady continued to be out of her wits with fear—xenophobia, in
a literal sense. She could not get beyond the idea that when the dancer
and Gert Jan talked music, they must mean African tam-tam. Luckily, the
dancer was well traveled and did not take offense. The three arrived in
Amsterdam safely after some polite chitchatting in English.
Humans whose ancestors came from different parts of the world look
different. Some of our genetic differences are visible from the outside, even
though our genetic variation as a species is small—smaller, for instance,
than that of chimpanzees. Biologists call the human genome well mixed.
We certainly are one single species, and it is becoming morally preferable
12
to say that we are one human race. Still, biologically speaking, there

are races in our species that can be identified through visual and genetic
means. However, genetic differences are not the main basis for group
boundaries. There is continuity in our genomes, but there is discontinuity

in our group affiliations. Millions of migrants live in other continents than
their ancestors. It takes an expert observer to guess both ethnic origin
and adoptive nationality just by looking at somebody. And yet recognizing
group identity matters a lot. Religion, language, and other symbolic group
boundaries are important to humans, and we spend much of our time estab-
lishing, negotiating, and changing them. People can unite or fight over just

about any symbolic matter, from good-old family feuds to territorial fi ghts,
defense of honor in response to an insult, or the meaning of a book.
The historical expansion of human societies to millions of individuals
has changed the nature of relatedness. Today, many people feel related to
people with whom they share a symbolic group membership, not neces-

sarily a genetic one. We fight and die for our country, sometimes even for
our soccer team. We form ecstatic crowds of millions that feel united in
admiration of a pop star, a gripping politician, or a charismatic preacher.

We are active on computer-mediated social networks with people all across
the world, and these relationships can be meaningful even with people
whom we have never met face-to-face. We have laws that allocate rights
and duties to people regardless of family ties, except in special cases such
as birth and inheritance. Family loyalty is still important and will no doubt
continue to be so, but it is part of a larger societal framework. We live in
societies that are so large that blood ties cannot be the only, or even the
most important, way to determine moral rights and duties. That said, there
is no doubt that blood is still thicker than water, and this is more so in some
societies than in others, as we shall see in Chapter 4.