My wife and I are currently working our way through all five seasons of Babylon 5. It’s one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction shows ever produced for television, so not having watched it was seriously hurting my street cred as an sci-fi geek. Anyway, in one of the first season episodes, The Geometry of Shadows, the command crew of the station is presented with an odd problem.

Members of one the minor races, the Drazi, have begun fighting one another for no apparent reason, and the escalating level of violence is threatening the security of the station, so the newly promoted Commander Ivanova needs to find a solution to the problem. To do that, she needs to find out why they are fighting. As it turns out, every once in a while, the Drazis put a number of sashes in a gigantic barrel, one for each Drazi. Half of the sashes are dyed purple, the other half green, so whichever colour of sash a Drazi draws out of the barrel determines which group he belongs in. As the Drazis explain, “Where there was one Drazi people, now there are two. The two fight until there are one.”

Totally crazy, right? Or maybe not, because it turns out that humans aren’t that different. Since the 1970s, psychologist Henri Tajfel has worked on a phenomenon he calls in-group bias. This is a cognitive bias in humans which causes us to have positive views of others that we perceive to belong to the same group as we do and give them preferential treatment. Others who we perceive not to be in our group are, as expected, treated less favorably.

Nothing surprising here, except for the fact that the criteria for determining who belongs in what group can be completely arbitrary. Examples include identifying with each other for sharing the same birthday or being assigned to the same flip of the coin. You can read more about this on the Wikipedia entry for social identity. Basically, humans intuitively form groups and adjust our behaviors and dealings depending on whether or not we perceive them to belong in our group, regardless of our personal judgment on their individual merits and flaws. We tend to think in terms of groups and miss seeing them as individuals. This is a known cognitive bias that we need to consciously overcome.

I’m raising this issue now because of the idea that has taken root among some people in Malaysia that the country needs to forge a unified national identity, a so-called “Bangsa Malaysia” to avoid open and full blown conflict between the various racial groups in the country. One of the ways that this can be supposedly achieved is by creating a unified, national, educational system and doing away with the vernacular schools. I’ve argued before that vernacular schools shouldn’t be seen as the main reason why divisions exist between the racial groups in Malaysia, so I won’t repeat those arguments.

What I’d like to point out here is that trying to eliminate these divisions by attacking the differences between the racial groups will never work. The idea seems to be that if people speak different languages, then make them all speak the same language. If they go to different types of schools, then make them all go to one single type of school. One commentator on this article even invoked a horror scenario of segregated restaurants and cinemas. As I’ve argued before there will always, always be differences between the various groups. You seriously cannot expect the Chinese to listen to Malay music and watch Malay movies, just as you cannot expect the Malays to enjoy Chinese food.

Even when you do have a single racial group or religion in a society, people will still form racial sub-groups and religious sub-groups, because that’s just what humans do, and then the hatred and divisiveness will start all over again. Remember that Protestants and Catholics have been killing each other for centuries before Islam came along and reminded them that they nominally believed in the same God. The list of criteria that people will use to discriminate and exclude others with is infinitely long. For another example from science-fiction, the short story Throwing a Wobbly by Stan Nicholls describes a future in which nearly everyone and everything is fat and the thin are discriminated against, with deadly venom.

What does need to happen is for humanity to consciously rise above a cognitive bias that we know is a relic of our evolutionary past, to stop thinking of people in terms of groups, but in terms of individuals. Differences are to be tolerated at worst and celebrated if at all possible. There is nothing wrong with being different. The only thing that is wrong is the inability to accept that someone is different.

And yes, before Babylon 5 fans point it out to me, I do realize that Ivanova solved the Drazis’ problems by dyeing all of their sashes the same colour. That just goes to show that you can only stretch an analogy from science-fiction so far. If the episode had been true to reality, the Drazi should probably have started fighting amongst themselves based on how wrinkled their heads are or something.