It’s the second time in less than a decade that Europe is seeing a refugee crisis. In 2015 the refugees came from Syria, in 2022 they are coming from Ukraine. For most people, it has been a joy to see the international community united in solidarity for Ukraine. One potential danger is that the development we saw after 2015, i.e. from welcoming the refugees with enthusiasm to perceiving them as a burden or even a threat, could be repeated.
Why did the sentiment towards Syrian refugees change? In general, people tend to unite when there is an external threat. The USA, which had recently experienced a deep rift through their presidential elections, is much more united in 2022 than it was in 2016 or 2020. However, once the threat has diminished or disappeared, things tend to swing back where they were before.
People have differently evolved values according to their ancestral heritage from foragers, farmers and pastoralists (herder). Below is a graphic that assigns different values to different past subsistence strategies:
Safety and security feature prominently in farmer type values. There are many evolutionary reasons for that. Farmers faced many more threats than nomadic pastoralists or foragers, ranging from natural disasters, hostile attacks and also higher rates of pathogens due to sedentism. Unlike nomadic people, farmers couldn’t easily relocate and leave everything behind.
So, farmer types may initially be highly euphoric in welcoming refugees, but come to see them as a threat themselves once the bigger threat of war has gone.
In his book, Stone Age Economics (1972) Marshall Sahlins, an American cultural anthropologist, identified three main types of reciprocity: generalized, balanced and negative. We can tentatively assign these to foragers/hunter-gatherers (generalized) and food-producers (balanced). Avi Tuschman makes Our Political Nature makes a similar distinction for liberals (reciprocal altruism) vs conservatives (kin-selection altruism). Putting these ideas together we get a more universalist sociality (less in-group based) vs in-group sociality (local community and kinship ties).
What we have seen in regard to the Ukraine this means that forager types were quick to
- spot injustices and untruths (Putin’s alleged help for Russian minorities)
- criticise the war and declare their solidarity with Ukraine
- welcome refugees and even take them into their homes
In my social media feeds it was forager types who cried foul quickly and loudest (check out the graphic above for the values: self-choice, justice and caring). Four of my forager colleagues have already volunteered to take in Ukrainian refugees and one drove all the way to Budapest to pick up refugees to bring them to their host family in Austria.
I was not surprised by these people’s actions, because it was the same people who took in Syrian refugees in 2015, who fought that they could get an education at my school (I was the first teacher to volunteer teaching them) and who fought for their right to remain in Austria once the government started to deport refugees in droves.
I am not claiming that farmer-herder types are heartless. Their aversion to taking foreigners in stems from their fear of their loved ones and communities getting hurt. Their sociality is more in-group based. When Syrian refugees entered Austria rumours of theft and rape started to spread, none of which turned out to be true. If we become aware of our evolutionary bias, there is hope for a more humanitarian world. It shouldn’t take a war for people to unite in solidarity, it should be our standard mode of operation. Anything else is dangerous in a highly globalised world.
For more check out my book Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic
Or
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LSF98WV
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