Much current debate about immigration treats movement as an anomaly, but from an anthropological perspective migration has been the human norm. For most of our species’ existence people were mobile hunter-gatherers, following food, trade routes and seasonal changes. By contrast, the idea of a fixed “homeland” — land to which one belongs by birth or identity — is a much more recent product of the agricultural revolution. Agriculture tied communities to specific plots, creating property, irrigation systems, and eventually states. This settled life required myths of territorial belonging to sustain institutions and cooperation.

That “sedentary mindset” was, in a sense, a ladder: a cultural tool that enabled large-scale organization and complex societies. But ladders are meant to be climbed. In a globalized, networked world, the strict attachment to territory may be less useful than it once was.

Even newer than territorial nationalism is modern racism. While pre-modern societies certainly distinguished between insiders and outsiders, status, religion and wealth often mattered more than physical appearance. The notion that humanity is divided into biologically distinct “races” with inherent hierarchies crystallized only between the 15th and 18th centuries, alongside the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Enlightenment thinkers codified race categories to rationalize imperial domination.

We are still living with the residue of those harmful and incorrect ideas. Cultural unlearning moves slowly: centuries of institutional practice and inherited assumptions cannot be dissolved by facts alone. This is analogous to how Europe required nearly a thousand years to shed the more constraining elements of Church doctrine (what Jesus taught is good and universal, but the early church messed it up) and Aristotelian cosmology. By contrast, genuinely new practices can spread very quickly; modern science took root within decades of Francis Bacon’s methodological writings.

If learning can happen in decades but unlearning takes centuries, then accelerating social change requires more than simply debunking old beliefs. Erasure leaves a void; replacement offers continuity. New frameworks, grounded in evidence but animated by emotional resonance, give people something to move toward rather than away from. Successful social shifts pair facts with stories, symbols and rituals that translate new knowledge into lived meaning. In this way, new beliefs gradually crowd out older ones until they lose their hold on common sense.