🚀 go-pugleaf

jbs@yktvmv.watson.ibm.com wrote:

> 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.

Simple dislike of one person by another isn't necessarily xenophobia.
Xenophobia is fear/hatred of people who are different (often "racially")
from oneself, and refusal to cooperate with them. An employee who
refused to work with another person because of their race, creed etc.
could not be tolerated.

A xenophobia which is "mild" enough, or controlled enough,
not to result in unacceptable behavior would be tolerated, this
is true. It would bother only the person who felt it.

>          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.

Most people change jobs out here every 2 or 3 years. Shearer apparently
works at IBM and I work at HP. Employees at these companies tend to
stay in the same company for their whole careers. There are many reasons
for this, but think I xenophobia against competitors is not really high on the
list.
People often do go to competitors. There is of course sometimes a sense of
rivalry, and this is encouraged for obvious reasons. But I've also worked with
IBM people in cases where HP and IBM had some common goal. I've found
that (surprise, surprise) IBMers are just like HP engineers. It wouldn' t be
unthinkable for me to work there, by any means. [That one is *definitely*
"not my employer's opinion"  ;-)]

>          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.
>

I agree. I 'm not suggesting that xenophobia is vanishing; I'm suggesting
that it is no longer optimal for our situation.

>          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

Obviously we are not so ill-suited to the modern world as to prevent it
from being here.  That wasn't my point.  My point was that human nature
was not *optimized* for modern conditions. This is understandable in terms
of natural selection. It is a mystery in terms of benevolent  Design.

--
Alan McGowen