A post from my Religious Thought in World Perspective class:

I used the word syndrome advisedly with regard to Us vs Them - the human tendency to divisiveness and depersonalization - because it refers to a cluster of behaviors and effects and that is how I see this phenomenon. In some cases, it is a simple and seemingly innocent teaching, as when a child is taught which humans belong to her family. In others, such as with religious fundamentalist activism, it can have more violent consequences. This is not a judgment on either of these scenarios, but a statement that it seems to me they represent the same drive.

Regarding your "local Hasidic Jewish community and their endless mission to separate and extricate themselves from the rest of us", I suspect it is indeed the same thing. When I identify with a given structure, physical or conceptual, I invest a bit of myself in it - it becomes a reinforcement for my existence. Thus, protecting it becomes self-defense. In my mind, again, this is the only way I can account for the desperate, sometimes homicidal fervor with which people will defend so many things from personal morality to religious systems to football teams.

It is a sad thought for me that I participate in these behaviors as well. To exclude someone, to create a Them for that excluded person to belong to, requires that I reduce him to a symbol, a nonhuman idea that I can push away. A person discovered in my living room at two in the morning becomes a "home invader", a man targeted in my rifle sights on the battlefield becomes "an enemy", a person who gossips about me is "a troublemaker", a person as seen from my jury box becomes "the accused." The people who yell at my dog are "those sons of biskets" and the people in front of me on my way to work are "Sunday drivers." The world's air is polluted by "careless self-serving corporate rapists" and the people responsible for the abused pets in that horrifying television commercial are simply "monsters."

It's easy to dehumanize someone in order to support judging, excluding and hurting her. It is more difficult to consider that there is a history of influences stretching back in time that led up to the current behavior, which is itself performed by a living human being just like me who is attempting to make sense of life. While this view doesn't invalidate the concept of personal responsibility as applied her, it does cause me to consider it more deeply in relation to my own actions. If I shoot the guy in the living room, for instance, I am not shooting some conceptual target labeled "home invader", but rather I am killing a human being because I have chosen my own safety over his.

I wonder how such a perspective affects the human ability to wage war?

D