Finnish Pad Thai tastes delicious, but eating it in a small rental car on a rocking ferry can be difficult. We're on the Merisilta ferry as it churns its 25-minute passage across the shallow channel separating the island of Hailuoto from the mainland city of Oulu, Finland. Hailuoto is emerging from the sea. As glaciers retreat, pressure on the Earth's crust is displaced, causing this island to rise. Three centuries ago, Hailuoto had been three separate islands, Santonen, Hanhinen, and Luoto. But as the land rose, it became obvious that these islands were three peaks of a larger seamount, and there is now only one island, Hailuoto. While the rising sea levels initiated by global warming is an existential crisis for many islands, Hailuoto is growing, gaining land from the sea. In a few hundred years, the ferry won't be needed, as the island is predicted to join the mainland.
Thus, a single mountain, having several peaks of various sizes, may project from the sea. As the waters rise, though, only the major peaks are seen and these appear to form several isolated islands. So with humanity. Under one perspective (or by using a particular algorithm to measure genetic difference), humanity is a single mountain emerging from the ocean. Other species form other island-mountains. Indeed, over 95% of human genetic differences are manifest within communities, not between them. However, by choosing more stringent algorithms that emphasize differences among short DNA sequences that do not encode any protein, the main volume of the mountain is submerged. Only a few peaks rise above the water's surface, those seemingly isolated islands that constitute geographic “races.” Foreignness—the quality of being alien, other—is all about where to draw the background.
Where one draws the background, where one constructs foreignness, can be seen in the lines of cars waiting to board this ferry. The ferry, which leaves on the hour, holds forty cars. If you are car number forty one (or if the ferry fills up with a smaller number of large vans and trailers), you wait for another hour. Continuous quantity becomes separate qualities. Furthermore, Hailuoto residents queue their cars in a separate lane, and these cars enter the ferry first. Even amongst the equality-loving Finns, their queuing system creates foreigners.
The creation of such differences is not necessarily bad. They create the potential for different groups to interact, and this can form a more dynamic, stable, and multi-level unity. This is how bodies are created, for such reciprocal interaction is the basis of embryology. Unity (as in the single cell zygote) becomes multiplicity (the generation of many cells), which becomes diversity (as the cells acquire different potentials generated by their positions). These cells interact to mature one another into the differentiated cell types (muscles, neurons, red blood cells) that create new organs (e.g., eyes, kidneys) that become integrated to become a harmonically coordinated unity (the particular animal or plant).
So it is in this grand body politic. Just as the body's organs have the same zygotic ancestor, so does all humanity; indeed, all life on this planet has the same ancestral origin over four billion years ago. Humans had a common origin, dispersed, and formed different cultures. As early twentieth-century anthropologist Franz Boas had concluded, after having immersed himself in an Inuit community on Baffin Island, there is only one humanity, and it has many cultures.
And just as each organism represents an evolutionary successful means of integrating into an environment, so does each culture. These cultures can now interact to form a new dynamic unity, where each culture retains its identity, while forming a new terrestrial culture. For instance, I'm eating Pad Thai from a Finnish island in the Gulf of Bothnia. This island is known for its herring, smoked salmon, and the sweaters that kept the islanders warm. But in the 1980s, Nokia's electronics projects attracted engineers, computation experts, mathematicians, and builders from all over the world to the remote Ostrobothnian city of Oulu. Its restaurant culture now includes Indian, Mexican, Thai, and Bangladeshi establishments, as well as a Japanese inn that sells reindeer sushi. The cultures of Oulu and Hailuoto changed.
Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere is the theme of the Venice Biennale, the major art and architecture event that gathers people from all over the world, that my wife and I had just seen. After all, Venice is the city of islands, where Marco Polo is said to have brought macaroni from China (While it’s a nice story, macaroni was probably introduced into Italy by the foreigners themselves — by Jewish merchants from Muslim Sicily). The theme of the Biennale is the same as my talks at the Venice conference and my presentation at the Helsinki evolutionary biology meeting: Foreigners are everywhere. And they can interact with the residents to do amazing things.
In both Venice and Helsinki conferences, I discussed the importance of symbiotic microbes for the normal development of the animal body. Animals (and plants and probably fungi) are holobionts. A holobiont is the big organism (often called the host) in interaction with its persistent symbionts. Only about 50% of our bodily cells are derived from divisions of the fertilized egg. The rest are microbes, mostly bacteria, that produce chemicals critical in maintaining the human endocrine system, immune system, digestive system, and nervous systems. Immunology's fundamental concept of the body attacking anything "non-self" is being re-analyzed: the body doesn't always fight what is foreign; it sometimes invites the foreign inside itself. For example…
Remarkably, the cells derived from the fertilized egg and these microbial cells interact to form new organisms. Experiments, primarily in insects and mice, have converged to make an unexpected discovery: Development is a team sport. We do not make ourselves. The microbes in our mother's gut digest her food into compounds that cross the placenta, enter the fetus, and mature the brain neurons responsible for hearing and the pancreatic cells needed for metabolism. A pregnant mother's gut microbiome even helps prevent her placental immune cells from attacking the developing fetus. We also receive a starter set of symbionts as we are born, colonized by our mother's bacteria as we pass through the birth canal. (And if we don't get these bacteria from our mother, we soon get them from friends and family.) We need these bacteria to mature the neurons that direct the muscle contractions that move food from throat to anus. These bacteria also help induce the capillary network that takes nutrients from our gut and delivers them to the rest of the body. Other symbiotic bacteria from our mother are critical in developing the immune system. There are pathogenic microbes, to be sure, but this small minority should not obscure the fact that most microbes are beneficial and that many are crucial to forming our bodies. These beneficial microbes even appear necessary for maturing the brain neurons responsible for social interactions. "Foreigners" are everywhere, and we never were self-made individuals.
And so the corporeal body is also a body politic, full of constituents competing and cooperating in various ways to generate a healthy commonwealth. In both the corporeal body and the larger civic body, foreigners are not merely an add-on to an existing society. Rather, they help create that society. Like the body corporal, a civic body politic is a fusion of chimeras, and purity is an illusion. Symbionts play havoc with the notion of a pure body politic. Our bodies are made of many species, even from different biological kingdoms. If one thinks of animals in the classical sense of being genetically homogeneous, then symbionts are Gastarbeiter, guest workers who have specific jobs but who are not considered citizens. If one thinks of an animal as having porous borders, then the symbionts can be considered "permanent resident aliens," like those holding Green Cards in the United States. However, in the holobiont model of the body politic, where the body is substantially constructed by immigrant populations, the symbionts are full citizens of an evolving and heterogeneous community. The body and the body politic reflect each other's anxieties.
The ferry slows down as we near the harbor pilings. And as we approach the mainland, my newsfeed pings, giving me fresh news of the part-whole relationships of my body politic. My cellphone informs me that the extreme antisemitic "Goyim Defense League" plans to march through Nashville, Tennessee. This march had nothing to do with the war in Gaza, and it was not a protest for Palestinian rights. It was a lesson in hating that which is other. The Jews have been an archetypal foreigner in Western culture. Under kings Saul, David, and Solomon, Jews had formed a nation from which they were exiled by a succession of conquerors. As Christendom came to define Europe, the followers of Jesus, an increasingly gentile body, forgot or ignored their Jewish roots, and they increasingly saw the Jews as others within. The Jewish populations have been the symbionts that interacted with and enlivened the dominant cultures of Europe and America, so much so that some of these creations (e.g. the German brewing industry, the American entertainment industry) have become synecdoche for the host cultures. The Goyim Defense League wants to expel Jews from America. Why? What is the Goyim Defense League defending against? Jews were not taking away jobs from Christians, they were not despoiling Christian virgins or murdering Christian children. The Jews were not even being blamed for Israel's horrific response to the abominable Palestinian terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023. Rather, the existence of Jews as "other" was all that the hate group needed to mount a defensive reaction.
And why should this be? A major possibility is education. As Rogers and Hammerstein professed, "To hate all the people your relatives hate, you have to be carefully taught." Each culture tells its children who is to be trusted and who is to be despised. The reaction against Jews is instructive as to how this happens. The moral principles of Judaism and Christianity are almost identical, but their educational norms differ. The one book that Christian children read and hear (and most Jews don't) is the New Testament. And in addition to being a fountain of wisdom and lovingkindness, those same waters are polluted with hate. Jews are said to be the children of the devil rather than the children of God and they are the ones who recognize their guilt in murdering God. What had been internecine political polemics from Christians as they attempted to separate from their parental and rival religion has become their "gospel truth." The New Testament can become hate literature with a holy imprimatur.
Such conflict is seen in the establishment of bodily symbioses. When a bacterium seeks to become a major symbiont, it secretes poisons specifically against other potential symbionts. Bacteria cannot consciously change their evolution. But we claim that humans are more sentient than bacteria, that cultural evolution has superseded biological evolution, and that we can rationally change our cultural paths. But is this true? While church councils have determined which gospels and pastoral letters are to be believed and which ones are not to be trusted, they have not expunged or mitigated these toxic passages.
It is time for other, newer, councils to expel the poisons from the texts. It is time for all nations and cultures to respectfully and accurately teach their histories as part of an ongoing set of experiments on how to live together.
It is time to relinquish the idea of “the pernicious foreigner” and replace it with that of an agent for creative interaction. For the foreigner is indeed everywhere. Moreover, we must be prepared for massive migrations of people and cultures, as global climate change makes regions of the globe uninhabitable. The foreigner must be expected and accepted. For this, we must recognize some of the lessons of the new biology: that there are hardly any differences between groups of humans and that mutualistic symbiosis—creatively working together—provides the framework for life on Earth. Competition within species may be but a fine-tuning mechanism that works within the confines of grand symbioses. Our bodies are not pure, but are composed of many species functioning together. And similarly, our nations are not pure, but are constantly changing chimeras, sustained by new ideas and peoples being brought together. The holobiont serves as a model.
It really shouldn't be difficult to love the stranger as ourselves. Our bodies do it all the time. Cells, people, and cultures can be different but can work together for a common end. Indeed, historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed, “Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age‐old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” Human history is now a part of the much grander history of planetary life. We should get with the program.
