🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <37E97654.DE6DC1FD@cup.hp.com>,
 on Wed, 22 Sep 1999 17:37:41 -0700,
 Alan McGowen <amcgowen@cup.hp.com> writes:
         <deletions>
>This is increasingly unlikely to be the standard mode of life, given the
>demographic
>changes afoot on Earth.  I live and work in Silicon Valley. I am the only
>native speaker
>of English in the building I live in. At many times in my carreer I have been
>the only
>"American" in my work group.  The world I live in is completely "multicultural"
>
>(except that we are mostly engineers.) Xenophobia would be catastrophic under
>such conditions, and could not be tolerated in any form by any employer. In
>short,
>it's a feeling from a dead world.

         This is exaggerated.  There are no perfect employees.
Employers will tolerate all sorts of undesirable behavior from
employees as long as it is counterbalanced by sufficient desirable
behavior.  Mild forms of xenophobia can and will be tolerated by
employers without catastrophe.  Most workplaces contain pairs of
people who don't particularly like each other (for whatever reason)
and work gets done anyway.
         Also some forms of xenophobia are not undesirable from an
employer's point of view.  For example if xenophobia makes it harder
for employees to form unions or to look for other employment employers
(even Silicon Valley employers) will not consider this a catastrophe.
         More generally while humans are undoubtedly not designed
for modern society, you can design (or attempt to design) modern
society to function satisfactorily with humans as they are (with
their stone age heritage).  I think this makes more sense then
declaring some human traits obsolete and pretending this will
cause them to vanish.
         Humans as they are, are not necessarily so ill-suited to
the modern world as you might think.  Humans have the capacity to
cooperate as this was adaptive in stone age society as it is today.
Also stone age society was not so simple with different behaviors
being appropriate for different circumstances.  So humans have
evolved a capacity to select from a variety of behaviors.  Society
can be set up to encourage the selection of desirable behaviors
and discourage the selection of undesirable behaviors.
                        James B. Shearer