Alan Shnir, Pd 1, 5/23/2022

What makes a society run? What holds people united under a “nation” or common “culture”? What makes some groups thrive and others decline? These are the questions that determine which nations will continue in the generations to come and which ones will decay into the ink of history books. 

As explored in a previous blog, 50,000 years ago, humans went through a Cognitive Revolution. This is when humans first started to display the attributes of what we call culture. A homo sapien in Anatolia would bury his dead and speak a different language from his brethren in East Asia. Back in these ancient times, customs would differ between every single family, and every clan. In a world of only 1 million people, there were likely tens of thousands of “cultures”. Yet today, in a world of almost 8 billion humans, there are only around 4000 cultures. How did we get to this point? Thousands of times more humans than our ancestors yet a magnitude less in different cultures.

To put it bluntly, survival of the fittest, or in this case, survival of the tribe. Most of human history can be described as survival in one of two forms. First was when one tribe was able to create sharper spears than their neighbors, which caused the former to thrive and the latter to die. Second was when one person in a tribe had more desirable practices, causing his descendants to outnumber those of others in the tribe, which caused those practices to be the ones to prosper in the future.

And so, it is through these two driving forces that human culture and civilization has been able to consolidate over the past 10,000 years since the creation of agriculture. We saw these principles in place with farming, as farmers could have supported more children than Hunter gatherers. Sure, farming people were on average shorter, less fit, and less healthy than their hunting counterparts, however, there were just more farmers. As the generations went by, the farming numbers advantage allowed farmers to create cities and for people to specialize. This meant more people freed up to create stronger, sharper spears and arrows, and more people to field those tools. And with the bigger armies and better technology, the farmers drove the Hunter gatherers out of existence. This was one of the first of many great steps that consolidated cultures. Farming also created cities, and when people live close together, their ideas spread faster, and as a by-product, customs between people in the same city become more similar. From families and tribes, customs consolidated into kingdoms and cities. Then, you had the creation of religions and gods.

These transcended the borders of cities, and spread between peoples hundreds of miles apart. Religion did not always mean gods, but a common belief in either a system of values, or the power of a monarch. This is when we saw the world's first “nations” as we know them. From the Egyptians, Babylonians, to the Qin, customs had now spread past the city walls. Since then, much has of course changed. Religion has morphed into a belief that’s spread beyond just the borders of a single nation. Instead, one of the current dynamics we have today is nationalism, or a belief in the common struggles of a people in a nation. Whether the struggle for Liberty among Americans or of republic for the French. This is the fabric by which most modern successful nations function.

It is through this context that the modern cultures we know today were created. And with these principles, we can see why some people developed the way they did. In America and much of the West, individualism was one of the founding principles of societies. America was colonized by people who were attempting to build new lives in their own individual vision, hence why individualism became our nation’s founding principle. In contrast to this, in East Asia, the society is based around collectivism. In these ancient cultures, rice farming was one of the most important activities to the people who created East Asian culture. Rice farming is extremely labor intensive and requires significant cooperation between groups. Ancient farming groups that had better cohesion were able to out produce neighboring groups that might have been more individualistic. In addition to this, rice farming also yields significantly more calories per acre, which is why East Asian and South Asian nations have such large populations. In comparison, Wheat farming is not as labor intensive as rice farming and can be done without too much cohesion between groups. This is why Europe and much of the Middle East developed into dozens of fragmented nations and kingdoms instead of ever consolidating into one major nation the same way East  Asia did. Also, the lower productivity of wheat farming is why Europe has had such a small population for the majority of history when compared to Asian nations, further explaining the differences in social functions.

These cultural and social differences are exactly what Max Brooks explores in “World War Z”. America’s individualistic nature is what caused it to crumble at first in a zombie apocalypse, due to lack of social trust in a common response. However, the individualistic nature also meant that many pockets of people were well prepared to fight off zombies because of the same lack of trust in a strong government response. Individualism also meant that there was a large variety of ideas that could’ve been used in order to fix the pandemic, and why the US was able to eventually survive the zombies in some form. In China, the extreme trust in government and large population is exactly what caused the country to crumble so quickly as well. Too much trust in an incompetent government response meant that people did not focus too much on their own survival. A large population is also what caused the undead to be able to draw on much larger forces than in other nations.

This pattern was very constant in the exploration of what nations crumbled during the zombie onslaught. However, then Brooks dives into the countries that managed to survive the “apocalypse”. In South Africa, a nation marred by a history of division and separation, a plan of division and sacrifice was exactly what worked and helped the country survive. In Cuba, decades of isolationism and strict government rule is what allowed the nation to emerge from the collapse of the world order as a superpower. In Israel, a nation very well known for scientific discoveries, an early government response to the undead was what allowed for the nation to also survive. And so, the story goes on, as Brooks explores how different societies fought different wars with the zombies.

However, there is one important thing I wish to point out in the writing of this novel. This book was written in 2006, when the world was still coming out of a Cold War order. Today, the world is different, especially due to the advent of social media, and cell technology (as well as some additional experience with battling pandemics). These are all technologies where we are just starting to see how they affect our societies. Nations are different and through Max Brooks’s novel we can see those differences.