Knock knock

You're sitting at home. You're minding your own business. You hear a knock at the door.

What’s your first thought? What's your first emotion?

The answer probably depends on a number of factors. Are you expecting someone? Is this someone you’re happy to see? Or someone you don't want to see? 

If you're not expecting someone, your reaction will probably be different. And it might depend on the sort of people who could be knocking on your door. If you live in a secure neighborhood with friendly people all around, you might welcome the knock. If you live in a sketchy neighborhood with bad neighbors, you might fear the knock.

Suppose you have a security camera over the door. You check the camera and see a stranger. Will you open the door? If your security system allows you to speak to the stranger, what will you say? What question will you ask?

This scenario can be played out further. I'm going to argue here that such encounters are fundamental shapers of human behavior and history. They mark the boundary between friend and foe, between my tribe and enemy tribes. A common, almost universal, reaction to the knock on the door is to wonder whether this person will do me good or do me harm. On the other side of the door might be the love of my life, or my personal grim reaper.

This happens among individuals. It happens among cultures. When the white sails of Columbus's small fleet appeared off the coast of San Salvador, what was the reaction of the Taino people living there? Did they perceive the newcomers as a threat? Or rather as allies against the neighboring Caribs? When Lewis and Clark pushed up the Missouri River, did the tribes they encountered welcome them or fear them?

The answer to the last question is some of each. Which is usually the answer to the general question. If strangers were always threatening, we humans would have learned to kill them all. The government of Japan tried this approach for hundreds of years before the mid-19th century. It didn't work for Japan, which fell behind the modernizing world.

And it doesn't work as a general rule. Which is why the answer historically has been ambivalence. Treat the strangers with caution. They might be dangerous, but they might also have something to offer.

When the German army invaded Ukraine in 1941, the policy of the Soviet Union was to oppose them with full force. But many Ukrainians, having been treated brutally by the government in Moscow, viewed the Nazis as liberators and joined them against the Soviet Red Army. This strategy didn't work out well in the end. Lots of Ukrainians were killed by the Soviets after the Germans were defeated. And the memory gave rise to accusations by the regime of Vladimir Putin that the current Ukrainian government is Nazi at heart, and that the war now underway is an extension of the Great Patriotic War of the 1940s.

Ambivalence marks nearly every country's perception of immigration. Immigrants bring skills and energy, but they also pose a challenge to the status quo. America's policy on immigration has swung back and forth between welcome and distrust.

The knock on the door might not be a strange person. It can be a new technology. Movable type made reading cheap, but it threw scribes and copyists out of work. The automobile freed horses from the drudgery of hauling carriages through cities, but most of the horses wound up in glue factories. Artificial intelligence might amplify our thinking capacity to the same degree that airplanes magnify our traveling capacity, but the bots might decide we're in the way.

What will happen when the knock comes from outer space? Maybe it never will. But if it does, we humans for the first time in our history will make a collective decision. Or at least a decision will be made that will have collective consequences. 

The question has been a staple of science fiction for generations. What will we answer? Will our answer matter? If whoever is knocking can get all the way to our planet from theirs, they can probably do pretty much whatever they want with us. So maybe we should just give in.

Or maybe some of us can join forces with them against some others of us. Cortés and his band of conquistadors did not overthrow the Aztec empire by themselves. Instead they allied with Aztec enemies, the Tlaxcalans, who needed outside help. Of course the Spanish then subjugated the Tlaxcalans. In the end the answer might not have made any difference. 

But we can't help asking the question. We've been asking it for ten thousand generations.

Knock knock.