The 'us' and 'them' mentality

On a flight from Los Angeles to St. Louis, there was a polite young man in the window seat of row 43. After exchanging a few obligatory comments regarding the mad house that is LAX, I discovered that my fellow passenger was travelling to Missouri to visit family. He was much looking forward to it. I, on the other hand, was heading home to Indiana after a brief sojourn in California and was not much looking forward to it.\nA few weeks previously, he was sitting in the back seat of a Hornet dropping missiles into the heart of Afghanistan.\nIt came up in conversation somewhere over Colorado.\nWe have all seen the fuzzy gray images released by the White House depicting laser-guided missiles hitting military targets. He may well have been responsible for some of that footage.\nMy new acquaintance was intelligent, friendly and open about his work for the U.S. Navy and made for a thoroughly absorbing travelling companion.\nWhile on active duty, he placed himself in a situation that many Americans will, hopefully, never experience in their lives. For him, a successful day was not something as trivial as product output, but the ability to return home safely after completing objectives under extreme conditions. These objectives were, put simply and with just a hint of hyperbole, carnage.\nWhat was fascinating was his apparent apathetic, almost mechanical regard for this fact. This emotional severance is undoubtedly a perquisite for a successful soldier. But it may also be a product of the detached nature of modern warfare itself. I imagine it hard to place a human face to the puffs of dust appearing far below you, regardless of what habitation they represented on the map. You see more graphic depictions of violence during primetime.\nIt was not up to him to reflect on the ethics or morality of his work. That, he said, was up to the politicians. At the time, while perhaps a little simplistic, I thought this a fair argument.\nSince then, I have realized something: If it is difficult to perceive the horrors of combat when actively participating in it, what hope do our leaders have in evaluating the cost of committing to such a course of action when they are so removed from it?\nPhilosophically, it is impossible to justify the taking of human life. But pragmatically, armed conflict in human society is, and will probably always be, inevitable. Then justification is beside the point. The issue is more fundamental -- this inevitability.\nWe are the most social species on Earth and form coalitions readily with like-minded souls. But this is not an idealistic "free love" sociality. It is partly explained by the fact that it is in our genes to look after number one and there is safety in numbers ("it's sociobiology, man").\nThis deep-seated desire to be part of a group, whether based on family ties, nationality, political or religious ideals or something as frivolous as team sport -- the "us" and "them" mentality is engrained in our psyche. This tribalism breeds dissent and this results in conflict.\nUnfortunately, we are also the most violent species on Earth.\nWhat is the solution to our woes? My travelling companion didn't know and neither do I. But the ability to surmount this character flaw may determine the ultimate survival of our kind.