Understanding Society
An Aversion to the Unfamiliar
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Familiarity exerts its pull before language begins: babies respond differently to unfamiliar faces, smells, languages, and accents. Rather than treating that preference as mature prejudice, Doug uses Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History to ask what happens when an ancient bias meets anonymous cities and relentless reports about dangerous strangers. The mismatch, he suggests, can turn ordinary caution into pervasive suspicion.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“Even before we learn to speak, we seem to have an aversion to the unfamiliar. Researchers at the Baby Lab have done dozens of experiments with furthermore show that babies don’t like unfamiliar faces, unknown smells, foreign languages, or strange accents. It’s as if we’re all born xenophobes.
Could this be a symptom of our fatal mismatch? Could our instinctive preference for what we know have been no big deal for most of human existence, only to become a problem with the rise of civilization? For more than 95% of our history, after all, we were nomadic foragers. Any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat ant that person was a stranger no more.
Nowadays, things are very different. We live in anonymous cities, some of us among millions of strangers. Most of what we know about other people comes from the media and from journalists, who tend to zoom in on the bad apples. Is it any wonder we’ve become so suspicious of strangers? Could our innate aversion to the unfamiliar be a ticking time bomb?