There’s a sentiment bubbling up in the U.S. and Europe propelled by deep urges to preserve group identity, urges that trace back to the origin of the species. This drive has been actively suppressed in many nations since World War II, and yet Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant party AfD just triumphed in an eastern state election, and in France, Italy and Spain, similar anti-immigrant parties are gaining popularity. Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned that immigration posed a threat to civilization.
Perhaps the best way to understand the roots of these group identity needs — which show up in Nazis and ethnic nationalists, but also teenagers and techies — is to look at songbirds.
All those groups have a deep interest in maintaining collective identity, whether it’s using a particular slang to signal allegiance to a high school clique or a particular string of notes songbirds use to ensure they’re mating with the right bird to preserve an adaptation to a particular ecological niche. In nature, preserving genetic coherence turns out to be essential for ecosystem stability; in high school, using slang to maintain a group identity can be benign or even good. But history shows this impulse can also lead to disaster. For the Trump administration, “civilizational erasure” poses an existential threat — echoing millenniums of ignorant hate with consistently tragic consequences. Under Hitler, the Nazis wanted to maintain the purity of their “master race.”
Among modern societies, however, those that maintain bonds through adherence to ideals and values have proved vastly more successful than those focused on ethnic purity.
Why nature has an interest in preserving group identity can tell us a lot about the origins and stickiness of racism and xenophobia, but — and the Trump administration should take note — a look at successful societies tells us that, at least for humans, overcoming that deep need has been key to progress.
Many years back I heard the celebrated ethologist Peter Marler present his research to the Animal Behavior Society on why some bird songs are hard-wired while other birds learn their song early in life. Marler argued that inheriting a song works for birds that live in stable areas, but noted that vocal learning served to perpetuate particular adaptations to ecological niches when closely related birds were within earshot of each other, and when change and adaptation were occurring more rapidly than genetic mutation could encode. He went on to speculate that something similar fostered the development of dialects during human prehistory as groups split off from each other and adapted to a particular niche.
Across all cultures, groups tend to define themselves by developing an accent, a jargon or some other learned verbal differentiator as an identifier of who’s in and who’s not. Scientists do it, lawyers, tech bros and traders in the markets. None of this is racist, but viewed from this perspective, racism is a metastasized version of a tendency deeply rooted in human nature.
In tension with this xenophobic aspect of human nature are the incentives to look beyond one group’s narrow interests to recognize that all the things that have made humanity successful as a species — scientific discovery, technological progress, greatness in the arts, running a successful economy — are enhanced when a society looks beyond its ethnic prejudices and other cultural blinders, to embrace talent wherever it comes from and whatever it looks like.
Having swung to an extreme and alienated much of the world and many of its own people, Germany emerged from the debacle of World War II with a deep-seated aversion to racial and ethnic politics. German law actively suppressed parties with extremist views. But suppression of primal needs always risks that they will erupt in destructive form. The startling success of the far-right AfD party in recent German elections bears this out. A major factor in popular support for the party has been its argument that a surge in migrants and refugees poses a threat to German identify.
President Trump and his MAGA movement were also propelled by resentments of immigrants, but in the U.S. the tributaries to these resentments are slightly different from what is happening in Germany. The U.S. is experiencing a reaction to the emergence of a meritocracy — a system that advances civilization but also produces resentments because it rewards the top few percent in any field regardless of race or religion, while stripping away privileges enjoyed by people who formerly benefited by virtue of favored ancestry, rather than merit.
Meritocracy is far from the only force eliminating economic opportunities for many Americans. There are also outsourcing, automation and the ubiquitous corporate incentives to cut costs — and then there’s immigration. Unlike the others, it is in many minds connected to that human tendency to fiercely protect family, clan, culture or ethnic group. That atavistic aspect of human nature taps a visceral power that more abstract concepts such as automation and perverse incentives cannot.
It also needs to be said that it’s not unreasonable for people to worry about the loss of cultural or national identity as societies become melting pots. Every culture or nation can look back with pride at the geniuses and heroes who built their heritage. That shouldn’t limit who the heroes of any nation’s next chapter will be.
Perhaps because having pride in national heritage is viewed as a laudable trait, it’s easy not to notice when nationalism slips into white nationalism, and outright racism. Thus, few took notice or umbrage when the Trump administration’s recent National Security Strategy for the United States moved from calling for an unapologetic celebration of European character to warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure in Europe,” mentioning mass migration as one of the factors that threaten to bring about this “erasure” (lest readers think this was a rogue statement, at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeated that “civilizational erasure” was a threat to Europe and America).
There’s not much of a step from such statements to Hitler’s rants about racial mixing leading to racial degeneration and extinction.
Before heading further down the dead end of racial purity, Rubio and Trump’s national security advisors might benefit from taking a look at Marler’s songbirds. In one habitat he studied there were more than 50 species of perching birds within earshot of one another. The young birds in this avian metropolis learned the songs of parents, ensuring the perpetuation of their adaptation to their niche in the larger habitat, but all the species got along, contributing to the vibrant health of the ecosystem. If songbirds can do it, so can we.
Eugene Linden has written widely on nature and society. His most recent book is the novel “Resurrecting Bart.”
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