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Hope for the future

 Luckily, tribalism can be overwritten by ethics. Indeed, ethical education became a part of human cultural evolution in order to overwrite tribalism, when the agricultural revolution changed humans from tribal hunter-gatherers to farmers living in larger and more heterogeneous settled communities.

The social and political groups of the modern world are larger still, and are often multiracial and multiethnic. There are a number of large countries that are remarkable for their diversity, for example India, China, Brazil, and the United States. Nevertheless it has been possible to establish social cohesion and group identity within each of these enormous nations.

One gains hope for the future by observing how it has been possible to produce both internal peace and social cohesion over very large areas of the globe – areas that contain extremely diverse populations. The difference between making large, ethnically diverse countries function as coherent sociopolitical units and making the entire world function as a unit is not very great.

It is not an impossible goal to think of enlarging the already-large groups of the modern world to include all of humanity. On our small but beautiful earth, made small by technology, made beautiful by nature, there is room for one group only: the all-inclusive family of humankind.

I hope that the stories of some lives that have been devoted to the peace movement will give us inspiration, as we join hands across the globe and work together to save the future for our children and grandchildren.

Read the entire book above or download it here.

We thank John Scales Avery, a renowned intellectual, EACPE board member, and theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen, for giving us permission to reproduce his latest book for EACPE.