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while wolf or bee societies are very similar, human societies are very different from one another

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even when living in the same environment, human societies have different imagined orders and different social hierarchies

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what happened when these societies encountered each other?

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various kinds of interactions

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war

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trade

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immigration

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religious missionaries

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do interactions between societies have an overall pattern or direction, i.e. does human history have a clear direction or not?

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the answer is yes. And the direction is: global unity.

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throughout history smaller cultures have combined to form larger and more complex civilizations

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over time, the earth contains fewer and fewer cultures and these cultures are becoming larger and more complex

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this is true only at the macro level of history

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if you look at history at the level of only a few centuries, it's hard to say if the world is moving toward unity or not

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for all the cultures that have combined into larger ones, there are larger cultures which have broken up

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in 13th century, the Mongol empire expanded, consolidated and combined huge parts of the European and Asian continents, but then shattered into smaller pieces

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Christianity converted and thus united millions of people, but then splintered into numerous different sects

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the Latin language, the language of the Roman Empire, spread over much of Western and Central Europe and more and more people began to speak the same language, but over time it split into different dialects, Spanish, Portuguese, French and so forth

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if you look at history at a macro level, global unification is more obvious

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seen from the macro level, the collapse of the Mongol Empire and the splintering of Christianity are only speed bumps on the highway of history which is leading mankind inexorably toward global unity

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you can see this by looking at any point in history and counting the number of separate worlds that existed

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today we think of the planet earth as a single connected unit, but for most of history this was not the case

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for most of history, earth was a kind of galaxy of many isolated human worlds

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2000 years ago, there were no connections between humans in America, humans in Europe and humans in Australia

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as far as the Australian aborigines were concerned, for example, the Roman Empire and Christianity might as well have been happening on Mars

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as history progressed, the number of societal worlds became smaller and smaller

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around 10,000 BC when the agricultural revolution began, our earth contained many thousands of different human worlds which had almost no connection between them

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by 2,000 BC the number of separate worlds had dwindled to hundreds

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by 1492 it still had a number of separated words in remote jungles and islands, but at that point already 90% of humans already lived in a single megaworld, the world of Afro-Eurasia.

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90% Afro-Eurasia World

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if you were a Muslim who made the journey to Mecca, you could have met pilgrims from all over Afro-Eurasia

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10% was separated from Afro-Eurasia but concentrated in four worlds

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1. Mesoamerican World (Mexico, Central American, North America)

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2. Andean World (Western South America)

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3. Australian World

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4. Pacific-Oceanic World

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rest: small, separated worlds in various remote islands and jungles

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then in 1492, the people from the Afro-Eurasia world began to spread around the rest of the world, conquering and merging into all the other smaller worlds

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this created the single world which we today live

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today in our global world, people in all countries are influenced by the actions of people from other countries, they are no longer separate worlds

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a political conflict in the Middle east may cause oil prices to rise in China and unemployment in Mexico

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countries are beginning to share more and more the same basic understanding of politics, economics and the natural world

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politics

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all countries share the basic political model that of the sovereign nation-state, every person in the world lives in one of the roughly 200 nation-states that exist in the world

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most countries believe that power should come from the general populations, most have elections if not completely free

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economics

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most are capitalist system with social programs

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stock exchanges, banks, limited liability companies, money

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natural world

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a hospital in Tehran or New York will look basically the same, use the same theories, medicines and treatments

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we still talk about authentic cultures, but if we mean by this cultures with no influence from other cultures, then there are no authentic cultures left

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ethnic cuisine

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There is hardly anything more Italian in Italian food than the tomato, yet this plant is not native to Italy, it's a native plant from Mexico which arrived in Italy only three or four hundred years ago. Columbus came from Genoa and never ate a tomato in his life. It you were to go to Switzerland in the Middle Ages, you would not find even a single chocolate bar. Chocolate is made of cocoa, and cocoa, just like tomatoes, originated in Central America. Cuisine in Poland and Ireland is based on potatoes, but before Columbus, you would not have found one person eating a potato in either of these countries, since at that time the only potatoes were in South America. And what is Indian cuisine without chili peppers? Yet in pre-Columbus days there were not chili peppers anywhere in Asia. Nobody in India ate chili before the Europeans brought this plant back from America. Conversely, if you went to Argentina in 1491, you could look everywhere but you would not be able to obtain any steak except llama steak. Cattle arrived to America with the Europeans.

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our conceptions of ethnic cuisines often actually reflect the globalization of the last few centuries

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many local traditions are recent

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we usually relate the globalization of the world with European imperialism

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but this was only the climax of what began working much earlier

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when Columbus was born, most of world was already unified into the giant world of Afro-Asia, the result of a process which began thousands of years previously

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the vision of globalization goes back to the first millennium BC

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a strange idea when you think about it from a biological or evolutionary perspective

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no social animal, as far as we know, thinks about the interests or the identity of the entire species to which it belongs

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social animals have an us-them approach to other animals, either they are in your group or they are not, e.g. "the people in the next valley"

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despite what you see in Hollywood films, no lion was ever the king of all lions, they only become the alpha male of a particular pride of lions

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bees are biologically set up to help the bees in their hive survive, but they are not concerned about other bees in other hives

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humans, as a result of the agricultural revolution, came into contact more and more with people they didn't know who they imagined to be their friends and fellow humans

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nevertheless, this growing brotherhood between people was not universal

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Menes (3100–3050 BC)

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accredited with the unification of Egypt

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it was clear to the Egyptians that beyond the borders there were other humans who were considered Barbarians

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most religions ignored a large part of humankind

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in the first millennium BC this changed when three potentially universal orders

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people who believed in these orders, for the first time started to imagine the whole human race as a single unit which at least potentially may be governed by a single set of laws

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according to this vision, everybody in the world was "us" and, at least potentially, there was no "them"

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1. monetary order

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the belief in money

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2. imperial order

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the vision of a single empire governing the whole world

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3. religious order

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the idea that a religion is not connected to a certain people but can be universal

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e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam

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aim was to include all of humankind as their members, as believers

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so merchants, conquerors, and prophets were the first people in history to begin transcending our binary sense of division which separates people into "us" and "them" and to foresee the potential unity of the whole of humankind

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the amazing thing about money is that it succeeded in doing something that no king, no conqueror, and no God ever managed to do: even people who don't believe in the same God or king, have almost always had little problem believing in and using the same money, even people who hate each other and don't agree about anything, money is the one belief that they usually share. It may be that the most fundamental basis of the unification of humankind is money.