Although certain intense emotions have acted as agents of change throughout the history of Homo sapiens, philosophers, historians, sociologists and economists in general have underestimated the role of emotions in the processes of social change. This is not the case for Penny Spikyns, from the Department of Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of York, who in 2015 published her work THE GEOGRAPHY OF TRUST AND BETRYAL in the journal Open Quaternary. Her hypothesis was that the rapid conquest of terrestrial space by Homo Sapiens was due precisely to the appearance of social emotions, especially those used to punish.
Spikyns argues that the human diaspora after leaving Africa 100,000 years ago led our species to expand through deserts, mountains, rivers, deltas and straits with an unusual speed, until reaching the limits of the globe, without any apparent ecological motive. This migration of Homo sapiens contrasts sharply with that of previous waves of ancestors emerging from Africa, such as Homo erectus and Homo Egaster, as they all occupied specific ecological niches, settling in savannahs similar to those of African origin, or Homo Heidelbergensis, which migrated during an especially mild climatic period. For their part, the Neanderthals, although they came to colonize areas as cold as the Altai Mountains, emigrated very slowly through gradual adaptations in less extreme climates.
Something happened between the appearance of group hunting of huge animals, 450,000 years ago, and the departure from Africa 100,000 years ago, which was the development of our current socio-emotional baggage, which triggered the appearance of “positive” social emotions such as trust and “punishing” social emotions such as altruistic anger, spite, revenge, hatred and the desire to punish. This alloy of emotions allowed us to increase the sophistication of our group collaboration to a level of mandatory interdependence, which we have enjoyed ever since.
But what was the ultimate reason for Homo sapiens’ rampant race to occupy all of the free land on the planet? It was not the adventurous spirit of our ancestors, nor their positive social emotions, but, on the contrary, the newly released emotions of punishment; the altruistic anger, spite, revenge, hatred and the desire to punish. The loss of trust within hunter-gatherer herds makes coexistence impossible, and the only non-violent alternative was flight and the colonization of new empty spaces. And as in all divorces, the new colonizers tried to put solid geographical barriers, such as rivers, deltas or deserts, between them and their tribes of origin.
Since that departure from Africa, and for the last 12,000 years, as we became sedentary farmers, the most extensive diaspora that has ever occurred has been that of the Jews, for whom, unlike our Pleistocene ancestors, the migrations of the chosen people are well documented. Following an intuition already proposed by Max Weber, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein in their book, THE CHOSEN FEW, the Jewish diaspora arose from a series of opportunist decisions related to the compulsory education of all Jewish males, which were adopted during the struggle for power among the Pharisees, following Rome’s destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. The implementation of this compulsory education presented a cost that farming families could not bear, and this caused a massive abandonment of Judaism, while other Jews sought different livelihoods compatible with the costly new rules of the Jewish faith. These new professions, distinct from agriculture, were only found, both historically and today, in the larger cities, and that is why the Jews voluntarily embarked on the largest diaspora of the Holocene, destined for the cities of the world.
The SOCIAL EMOTIONS that appeared in the Pleistocene have allowed the various cultures of the Holocene to be something like a MOLD for individuals, which tries to perpetuate itself and which is imposed coercively on individual personalities, providing ways of thinking, ideas, channels of expression of feelings, and even means for satisfying physiological needs. And this is so, because we still retain the same Stone Age hunter-gatherer brain, thanks to which we survived our enemies and made it to the present day. That is why Ezra, Simeon ben Shetah, Johanan ben Zakkai and Joshua ben Gamla found it relatively easy to impose the heavy burden of compulsory literacy on their people, according to the explanation of SOCIOLOGISTS WITHOUT BORDERS.
A series of short, and probably opportunist, decisions made over a span of 200 years by the Jewish sages after the destruction of the Second Temple led to the largest documented diaspora of the Holocene, which was not only aware of its collective identity, but was endowed with the social media that allowed it to constantly renew that identity. To this diaspora and its infuriating refusal to be like everyone else, the sciences and arts owe a recognition of milestones as numerous as the stars in the sky.
But neither Ezra, nor Simeon ben Shetah, nor Johanan ben Zakkai, nor Joshua ben Gamla, could assess the costs that their formative requirements to be Jewish were going to have in the future, for the life of the diasporic exiles in the cities of the world, while dedicating their professional lives to occupations compatible with Judaism. The well-documented history of the Jewish diaspora is the history of humanity, which we cannot forget, such as: the massacres of Alexandria in 38 and 66, the pogrom of Antioch in 608, the massacre of Jews in Jerusalem by the Emperor Heraclius in 629, the massacre of the Jews of Fez in 1033, the extermination of the Jewish community of Granada in 1066, the massacres of the Jewish communities of the cities of Rhineland in 1096, the massacre of the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099, the massacres of Jews in Fez and Marrakech by the Almohads in 1146, the massacre of the Jews of York in 1190, the anti-Jewish riots and widespread massacres in the Crown of Aragon and in Castile in 1391, the murder in Blois, France, of 31 Jews who were burned alive in a 1171 blood libel, the massacre of Erfhur, where 3,000 Jews were massacred in 1349, and the burning of 6,000 Jews in Mainz on August 24 In 1349. Isabella and Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, Manuel I of Portugal decreed the forced conversion of the Jews or the expulsion without their children in 1497, the Republic of Venice established the first Ghetto for the Jews in 1516, and thus we arrive at the year 1543, in which Martin Luther wrote the pamphlet ABOUT THE JEWS AND THEIR LIES, which was the beginning of modern anti-Semitism, and the first step towards the Holocaust.
As noted by BIOLOGISTS WITHOUT BORDERS, our current brain still believes that we are in the savannah, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, because that is where we have spent 90% of our evolutionary history. Logically, our socio-emotional baggage is the same as we had in the Stone Age, and this is true not just for ordinary people, but also for Richard Wagner, Konrad Lorenz, Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark, Friedrich Meinecke, or for Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich, or for most of the Nazi leaders who were university graduates. Having returned to their homeland in 1948, Jews in Israel have been surrounded by neighbors whose brains still believed they were in the African savannah, such as those of Ali Hassan Salameh, Samir Kuntar, Yahya Sinwar, Hasan Narsalla or Ali Khamenei. Brains with socio-emotional baggage, which in the hypothesis of obtaining sufficient institutional power would not depart much from Hitler’s projects, probably with support from their populations similar to that which was enjoyed by the Nazi leader. So, we hope that the Start-up Nation, with a strategic vision for the future, will find in DIMONA an unattainable potential for destruction, and for those massacred throughout the greatest diaspora of the Holocene, for those who suffered the Death Marches, blessed be their memory.
Fernando Alvarez Barón
Interesting point of view…