The Human Reality

All human activity is based on the zoological and social realities of the human being. Everything I discuss in this book can be connected to these underlying factors. This chapter explores these realities.

Many intellectuals live in, and believe in, an international multicultural world of open borders with shared values. This is not an imagined environment. It is the one they live in. They travel to international conferences to meet similar colleagues. Such conferences occur in several places in the world every week of the year. They include, for example, United Nation conferences, global climate change conferences like the one recently held in Paris, the World Economic Forum held in Davos each year, academic conferences, European conferences, the Asian-Pacific Cooperation Conference, business conferences, and so on. At such conferences these intellectuals meet similarly highly educated people from all different cultures who share their concerns and are indeed colleagues. They feel strongly that the global community is as one and that we all share the same objectives. I used to be part of that global elite flying around the world and visiting various operations and customers. What the global elite forget is that the great, great majority of people live and die within fifty miles of where they were born. Let's call these people the local folks, in comparison to the global elite. The local folks are the product of their environment, and even if they are limited in their worldview, they vote and are entitled to their opinion. The local folks are strongly tribal. As humans we have deep needs to identify with and belong to a tribe. I am suspicious of the idea of a shared global culture. It is the variety of cultures in the world that create a diversity of ideas and, consequently, progress. The local folks find the idea of an imposed global culture invasive and offensive. I side with the local folks.

This book attempts to define some of the challenges we face today. They are many. If I were to bring it down to a single issue, then that would be values. Of all the values on offer, I would choose the values of the Judeo-Christian Western civilization. The struggle for day-to-day material well-being in the West is essentially over. The struggle to live by the right values is ongoing. When it comes to values, there are real differences between Islam and Christianity. As it stands today, Islam provides very strong guidance when it comes to family values but has not delivered material well-being to most of its adherents. Christianity is the opposite. Christianity has delivered very high levels of wealth, but the cost of this has been destructive. Many people have little sense of right and wrong and their personal and family lives lack direction. We need to build civil societies worth living in. At the end of the day the enduring problem is that Christians are willing to treat all other religions as equals and to abide by an independent judiciary that is predictable, transparent and fairly consistent. Many Muslims grow up in societies where other religions are discriminated against or banned and the judiciary system is Islamic i.e.Sharia. Many Muslims are taught to have a negative opinion of and not to seek close relationships with non-believers. In the next one hundred years we will find out whether Muslims and Christians can peacefully coexist or not.

The Beast within Us

When the sun comes up on the Serengeti Plains, the rhythm of another day starts. The gazelles and the zebras start to move to take on water or to graze. They move in herds. They keep an eye open for the leopards in trees and for prides of lions relaxing in the shade. The lions, meanwhile, observe while their cubs play. Although everything seems peaceful, everyone is keeping an eye on the others and trying to maintain safe spacing. The herds grazing on the plains want to be left alone. The lions and leopard want to kill and eat one of the grazing animals. They have to in order to survive. That is nature.

The kill comes suddenly and quickly. The stalking lions see a calf that has lingered a little and that just for a moment becomes a bit separated from the herd. The lions suddenly break into a sprint. The herd moves. The young calf desperately tries to rejoin the herd and thereby regain the safety that the herd provides. It is too late. One lion springs on the calf's back, and within seconds four more lions arrive, tearing at the calf as its heart still beats. The end is quick. That is nature.

Within each of us is the instinct of fight or flight, the instinct to survive when faced with danger. We, like an animal, are wary, particularly in a strange environment. We understand that if we are at the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be hurt, robbed, raped, or even killed. It happens every day throughout the world. Some of us grow up in environments where such risks are very common. Others live in environments where they are rarely or never exposed to such threats. However, within each of us are the instincts of fight or flight, which are embedded within us from our ancestors and waiting to be activated by circumstance. The circumstance could be confronting a grizzly bear in the woods, being caught by a riptide when swimming, or a fight with strangers in a bar. These situations have a biological response, which is the triggering of a surge of adrenalin that allows us to fight harder, run faster, or do whatever is possible in an effort to try to survive the situation. This is an instinct that we share with the gazelle and the lion.

We see ourselves as civilized. We are civilized, but the veneer of civilization is fragile. Individuals and groups of individuals commit horrendous uncivilized acts on an ongoing basis. There are spontaneous acts and institutionalized acts. Spontaneous acts are triggered by some event that triggers the beast within a group. In such a case, some person gets badly beaten or killed. Institutionalized acts occur when someone in authority orders others to kill. Examples of this are as follows:

• Adolf Hitler and the Jews from 1940 to 1945. In the Holocaust, an estimated six million Jews were killed, which was about 80 percent of the European population ofJews. If you include others who were killed, such as Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, POWs, Freemasons, homosexuals, and others, then the total killed rises to fifteen million to twenty million."

• The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975, led by Pol Pot, killed or worked to death about three million Cambodians."

• The Yugoslav Wars following the death of Josip Tito and the breakup of Yugoslavia led the Serbs to kill Muslim Bosnians from 1992 to 1995 and to systematically rape women in the Muslim Albanian minority in the tens of thousands."

• The killing of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994 yielded between five hundred thousand and one million deaths in one...