Page 511 - Cultures and Organizations

476 IMPLICATIONS

activities such as shopping and browsing are similar to gathering. Factory
workers, teachers, and functionaries can be likened to farmers who toil in
predictable lives, using social ritual besides their work to make their lives
bearable. One can also apply this kind of thinking to social organization. In
big multinationals, for instance, the top of the organization leads a lifestyle
closer to hunting or herding, while the employees lead an agriculturalist
life. These descriptions are of course prototypical and no doubt wrong in
many cases, but they are useful for showing how the social organization of
our past could affect our present.
Human groups today live in a split. We have more or less global mar-
ketplaces, but as was argued in Chapter 11, we do not live in a global village.
Among groups there is connection of inventions but separation of loyalties.
Today we are so well connected that humanity as a whole can progress by
adopting any innovation in technology provided it is invented just once on
the planet. In this newly gained ease of communication, our environment
resembles the ocean in which marine cetaceans (dolphins and whales) live.
Some of the larger species have been found to use sound to communicate
with one another across vast distances. To them, the ocean is indeed akin
to a global village; they are all in the same bath, so to speak. Has this fact
been important during their evolution? Cetaceans are remarkably peace-
ful and socially intelligent. They are descendents of land mammals that
returned to the sea more than twenty million years ago. It is likely that
their preexisting brain capacity and social structure, combined with envi-
ronmental factors and with the potential for long-distance communication
in the ocean, have led to evolutionary pressures to increase their powers of
peaceful coexistence. Sperm whales, for instance, are the largest hunting
animals in the world, with the largest brains of any animal. They make the
loudest clicking noises of all animals—and they need them: for instance,

for echolocating the giant squid that they hunt at a depth of several kilo-
meters. Sperm whales have been found to have at least four nested levels
of social organization, which include up to thousands of individuals across
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a thousand kilometers. Their social organization may even be wider in
scope, but for obvious reasons that is hard to assess.
For us humans, at least for many of us, the world has become even
smaller than the ocean is for whales. News and innovations can travel the
world in days, if not seconds. We can pity victims of calamities at the other
side of the globe and try to help, but feelings of group loyalty still hold
sway. Culture evolved to enable group coordination, and keeping group