What comes to mind is:
“The problem of humanity has always been assimilation, how to integrate living with strangers and among each other.”
It’s almost too obvious when framed like this.
Migration is the starting point for the tribes. It is like the beginning of any relationship; one is voluntary, the other is a circumstance of desperate necessity. Immigration is about where we go in order to survive. Integration is how we get accepted.
The circumstantial is the extensive encountering with strangers, the others.
Your tribe just won the battle. You have the defeated before you. What do you do?
Or, your tribe has just been defeated and you stand helpless before the victor, the ‘other’. What do you do?
Doesn’t this appear to be a universal experience throughout human evolution?
If we overlay the meetings of the victors and the defeated in an arbitrary, chronological clock in 50 year cycles, we would find a consistent pattern along with the population size and dimension. As a normal life experience would we not expect to see an organic manifestation of conflict in what happens in ‘successful‘ population expansion? Where ‘neighbors’, the ‘others’ are perceived as a threat, whom we threaten to lay at its foundations?
This appears to be the biologically driven paradigm of a natural mechanism of population adjustment. A circumstance of population expansion of one organic unit meeting another. Figuring out the sharing of space and power; control of territory and the resources of provision.
The history of war is a reflection of incidents and circumstances, of survival in other organic dramas of expanding and evolving populations, now meeting in a new dimension in the modern equation of population growth, density.
It would be interesting and informative to estimate the population size, the numbers, at moments of historic population confrontations, just before actual aggression and or rebellion manifested. Then, seek to understand the nature and growth of how ‘empires’ grew, assimilated and integrated.
The problem for humanity in the present is both the quantity, 7.6 billion organic individuals, and their accelerated exposure, communications and interactions, based on the natural demands of provision of each and all.
Immigration and migration is the ‘stuff’ of circumstance in ever expanding numbers, meeting and creating a demand of organic survival of integration. This biological imperative can no longer ‘succeed’ in an arcane process of fighting, in wars and combat, that was demanded and successful in the past. Given the saturated organic conditions and circumstances of both the victors and the defeated, both are unified in living aboard the same sinking ship, called the Earth.
The physics of energy and its dynamics cannot meet survival’s demands because our process of primate winning is now out of balance with natural law.
Questions:
How can the totality of humanity assimilate and integrate?
What is it that must dominate and govern our behavior?
How can this be accomplished?