We dare not look too deeply into ourselves

Simon Jenkins

A Planet Earth-style view of the human race will reveal the cauldron of antagonisms beneath the patina of diversity.

TELEVISION IS fine for gorillas and glaciers, but can it really do human beings? This week's news that Bob Geldof and the BBC are combining to produce a Planet Earth on Homo sapiens sounds like a good idea forged over a cappuccino. I fear it may end in disaster. We humans dare not look too deeply into ourselves. As the poet said, humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Today's most phoney slogan is "save the planet." The planet can and will look after itself just fine, as it has for aeons. What the slogan really means is "keep the planet safe for me in the style to which I am accustomed."

That is quite different. I am all for species-ism when it is my species we are saving, but let us call it what it is. Meanwhile, film-makers roam the Earth showing jackals interminably chasing gazelles, snow leopards chasing antelopes, and poisonous frogs swallowing moths with astonishing speed. A sonorous voice, usually David Attenborough's, wails that this animal cruelty is at risk because of some original sin on the part of mankind.

Geldof's project is undeniably radical. It is for "a Domesday Book for humanity" or, as a BBC release puts it, "a digital catalogue of all human existence and an enormous resource for the exchange of ideas and information." The intention is to "record every single culture that exists," along with the "mechanisms that man has invented in order to survive in whichever environment he has found himself."

The project is not to be the usual pop television anthropology of tribes in rainforests. This is despite the idea apparently coming to Geldof when "sitting on a tree stump in Niger." Geldof assures us: "It isn't going to be just lost tribe stuff; it's about the Upper East Side as well."

Explosive science

Anthropology is the most explosive of sciences, which is why it keeps most of its gunpowder hidden. It has more skeletons in its closet, more unmentionables in its past, more hypersensitivity and political delicacy than any other realm of learning. The mere mention of ethnic diversity has academics plugging their ears and slamming paper bags over their heads. The story of group differentiation is so fraught as to render it no-go territory for intellectual research. The species "Homo sapiens" has enough trouble pretending to be homogeneous without television recording the many ways in which it is not.

This is why traditional anthropology averts its eyes from the Upper East Side and buries itself in rainforests and deserts where lost tribes can be treated like other threatened species, under assault from Nestle, McDonald's and that dreaded predator referred to as "us." But outside these isolated locations, we cannot collect peoples as we might chimpanzees.

The differentiation of these groups yields much of the creativity, stimulus and humour of human intercourse. As Henry Higgins pointed out in Shaw's anthropological satire, Pygmalion: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him." If Geldof really is to examine the different "survival mechanisms" of all the people in the world, he must surely examine differences in cultural advancement and in educational and physical performance. He must ascribe ethnic characteristics.

Scrape the surface of human diversity and you find not a cool toolkit of survival mechanism but a cauldron of sensitivity and antagonism.

Geldof's cameras may delight in Andaman bowmen, Bedouin tribes, and Swiss dirndls. But talk of preparing an ethnic Domesday implies a map and a list of dates — and maps are the first step to war. Besides, who is an aboriginal, who a tribe, who a native and who a settler? The question is even now tearing apart "native America," as tribes fight over casino revenues. Unlike nature, mankind is both a single species that revels in its unity, and one that stresses its diversity at every turn, usually to support some claim to superiority or preferential treatment.

Dangerous alliance

Anthropology is already in fascinating and dangerous alliance with archaeology. The mapping of molecular genetics shows traces of earliest man settled in waves across Europe, despite centuries of migration and miscegenation. The archaeology of language is throwing up related groupings.

The Basques, speaking Europe's last pre-Indo-European tongue, have a markedly higher frequency of rhesus-negative blood, so much so that some Basques have suggested blood tests to qualify to vote in local elections.

American democracy, constitutionally rooted in territory, has found it impossible to disengage from the politics of ethnicity. Genetic and linguistic mapping may yet find "original" inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of Na-Denes and Eskimo-Aleuts from Siberia. It is conceivable that traces of European DNA from ancient Vikings may emerge in Canadian tribes, as traces of extinct Tasmanians are emerging in some Australians. What might this mean for land-claim litigation?

I find the origins and differences of peoples ceaselessly intriguing. They paint humanity in ever richer hues. But the ferocity of the animal kingdom depicted in Planet Earth is nothing to the competition inbred in the single species of mankind. That is why references to group differences are so sensitive, and why group defence mechanisms are often so explosive. That, in turn, is why one definition of civilisation is the courtesy of not drawing unnecessary attention to what divides members of the human race. To do so is playing with fire. Geldof is in dangerous country.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007