There’s a lot of things I like about the “Gleichschaltung” (for lack of a positive term to describe this phenomenon) of culture in the West. It makes peoples less afraid of each other and the world becomes a much nicer place. Before we got the Euro and open borders, people were afraid of it (losing identity and being dragged down to the bad foreign countries were the main arguments). Today this idea seems almost completely gone and we just laugh at the British.

So while I like the idea of having the freedom to chose a culture that fits me better, I hope we don’t get city states until people are tolerant enough towards different peoples that it doesn’t cause hate anymore.

Your blog post reminded me of a TED talk I watched a few months ago, although it (most of the time) reaches opposite conclusions to your own. I highly recommend you watch it:

Paul Romer’s radical idea: Charter cities
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSHBma0Ithk

I do not this is not a good idea. Humans are very prone to xenophobia, in-group vs. out-of-group mentality. Humans are quick to support people they see as part of their group at the expense of people outside of their group. This, I should add, is also the case with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, and all in all is very common with social species. I think one of the key factors in the increased stability and happiness in human society throughout history is increasing the size of what we consider to be “our group”. We have gone from small hunter-gatherer parties to villages to cities to city-states to serfdoms to progressively larger and larger countries and now to multi-country regional groups like the EU. The larger our groups, the fewer our enemies and the more difficult and costly the conflicts between groups become.

I think what you are suggesting would move in the opposite direction, shrinking the size of the groups and increasing inter-group hostility. Your example of the Ancient Greeks is a very good one. The Greek city-states were constantly at war with each other, it was only when they were threatened by a common enemy that was outside of the “Greek” group, such as the Persians, that they stopped bickering and worked together. They then went right back at fighting each other once the threat was suppressed.

During the cold war we could see an extreme version of this, with the world having two main groups in many ways, the western block and the eastern block. Most countries, whether they wanted to or not, were part of one group or the other. Although there was lots of posturing and a few localized conflicts, there was never a full-scale battle between the two groups because it would simply be too costly in terms of resources and lives to make it worthwhile. With the collapse of the soviet union the previous groups no longer had something to define as the opposition group, so the old inter-group rivalries re-established themselves and we are seeing the results of that now.

I understand this is a very simplistic view of human society and human history. But the truth is that it is well-established in studies that humans are much more willing to help members of their own group than members of other groups, much quicker to assign negative traits and motives to members of other groups, and much less concerned for the well-being of members of other groups. Other social animals behave similarly. I think we need to take into account human psychology and instincts when assessing these sorts of situations.

I think the best solution to help society prosper is to make our groups larger not smaller, to downplay our differences rather than emphasize them, to make everyone on the planet feel as though they are a part of a single, inter-dependent society rather than a group of competing cities, countries, religions, regions, ethnicities, political parties, or whatever other grouping system a person chooses to focus on.