On refugees, moving beyond Us vs. Them

They won't be contained any more. The hells they are living in have finally become too much, and they have realized that they simply can leave. They can go elsewhere — places where they are not invited and not allowed. They can just show up and push forward. At least they have the world's attention. The media will be there.

The rivers of migrating humans that fill our TV screens resemble the armies of ants that sometimes invade our kitchens, coming through every available crevice in search of a better life. The ants we can stop. We block up the holes and poison the entryways.

We cannot kill the refugees. They are human beings, after all. Instead, governments try to block off entry points or shuttle them off to other places. The problem, however, is that the other places don't want them either. Thus, they are massing into bottlenecks of desperation that can only explode and break through the gates.

This is, among other things, an ethical problem, one rooted in human biology.

According to Darwin, and supported by contemporary scholars like E.O. Wilson, natural selection operated to favor mental — and moral — traits that gave humans a survival advantage in the competition both with other members of their own species and with members of other species. The human moral sense regulates this competition with certain parameters and restraints. Social cooperation with other members of our group is the basis for morality, and it is rooted in the same regulatory features that govern the behavior of nonhuman social animals, such as ants and bees, and the great apes.

We became programmed genetically to cooperate with those on whom our survival depends, using the combined resources of the community to defeat our enemies. Who are our enemies? The most important ones are members of our species who belong to rival groups. Humans against humans is the rule of nature; it is a biological fact. Natural selection has bred the notion of "us against them" into humans in the same way it got into all the other social species.

Which brings us back to the refugees. The refugees from countries in political and economic upheaval are facing, first of all, borders. We humans have divided up the Earth into marked off territories, and it is not possible to pass casually from one to another. There are checkpoints, armed border police, fences topped with barbed wire, walls of varying heights and thicknesses, all to show that in here is for US and out there is for NOT-US. Those who are not native to one territory will have to petition and pass tests for admittance. Sometimes even natives to a territory become NOT-US depending on the ethnic, political, or religious group that comes to power. And those natives then are kicked out or forced to flee to escape being killed or enslaved. In short, they become refugees.

But what about our grand ideals, like world peace and the Golden Rule? What about the many residents of Germany, Hungary, Austria, and elsewhere who have been showing up at the checkpoints and train depots bearing flowers and food for the refugees? How can their actions be explained if human ethics is entirely an us-against-them phenomenon?

Frans de Waal, one of the world's foremost primatologists and an evolutionary ethicist, has written (in Our Inner Ape), "The big question of human morality is how we moved from interpersonal relations to a system that focuses on the greater good. I'm sure it isn't because we have the good of society foremost in mind. The first interest of every individual isn't the group, but itself and its immediate kin. But with increasing social integration, shared interests rose to the surface, so that the community as a whole became a concern."

And yet de Waal is forced to admit that "the community as a whole," in practice, is never the whole of the human species. In the same paragraph he observes, "Obviously, the most potent force to bring out a community sense is enmity with outsiders." And, "In our own species, nothing is more obvious that that we band together against adversaries. That is why it's often suggested that the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy."

Where is the hope, then, for our high ideals given the lack of any extraterrestrial enemy within view? Most philosophers say the hope lies in human reason exercising influence over our exclusionary tendencies. Darwin himself wrote that human morality was the result of the "intellectual powers," which he firmly believed were evolved via natural selection, working in concert with the social instincts.

Reason can show us that our "basic interests," as the philosopher Peter Singer puts it, are the same for all humans despite the divisions of country, religion, and the like. But for reason to reach this conclusion, it is necessary for the individual to stand back from his or her own immediate interests and be able to judge a situation impartially.

The 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith famously introduced into ethics the idea of an "impartial spectator," referring to another self that can observe the original self disinterestedly. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote: "We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them." This idea is the basis for the Golden Rule, as Smith well understood.

And there lies the rub. This "removal" of ourselves from ourselves, or "disinterestedness," requires evaluating our immediate impulses (put up a wall!) and reconsidering them in the light of reason as well as more noble emotions like magnanimity (one that Aristotle praised).

During his recent trip to the United States, including Philadelphia, Pope Francis called on all members of our species to see the refugees as humans like ourselves — as US, not as THEM. To do this, we will have to call upon parts of ourselves that are both ancient, our instincts to be protective of ourselves and our families, and more modern, our rational ability to be impartial, to stand back from our immediate situations and understand that our families take in everyone.

Caroline Wiseblood Meline teaches philosophy at St. Joseph's University and Curtis Institute of Music. Her essay "From Partiality to Impartiality — a Natural Expansion or a Saltatory Leap?" will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Philosophy in the Contemporary World. carolinem1@verizon.net