Nicholas Wade

So if you ignore that as a politician, then you're going to run into trouble.

If you say, well, all people are alike, all people are equal or should be equal, and what we want is a global society with no national borders and everyone loving each other, that's fine, but our nation won't let us operate a society like that.

We need to

live in smaller, definable systems such as a nation.

We're not ready for one global society because there's no way of organizing it that is written into our genome.

Yes, that's right, pursuant to the fact that our instinct is entirely warlike.

I mean, we have genocide written into our genes, and we in chimpanzees are the only species smart enough to figure out that the way to sort of finally solve the problem of the enemy is to eliminate him.

So we are basically genocidal.

But this is another example, I think, where culture has successfully sort of curbed and restrained our influence.

And it does so on quite a wide scale.

And if you think of the sort of Westphalian peace that ended the religious wars in Europe, and there were sort of schemes that have succeeded in the Pax.

The Congress of Vienna, again, reestablished peace after Napoleon's wars.

You had the Pax Britannica that sort of kept European countries from war.

And after the Second World, since the Second World War, we've essentially had the Pax Americana,

So America doesn't really like playing this role, but it really helps to have someone who polices a sort of world order in which states accept they do not fight each other or invade each other's countries.

So this is a great example of a sort of cultural curb on natural human instincts, and again, it's vastly for the better.

No, we're not.

You're right.

We are basically primates.

But there's a reason for a little more optimism than you suggest.