Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
we know from the Neolithic farming towns that at some point people learnt to hold a bigger group together. They developed structures, ways of organising that didn't depend on everyone knowing everyone else, so that a community could go on co-ordinating its efforts while growing beyond the limits of a tribe and spreading beyond a closed group.
Which deflates your suspicion that the hunter/gatherers broke up more due to population pressure than because of the amount of food they could extract from an area. The biggest difference was that the farming communities could support larger groups of people on a comparatively smaller territory.
And those methods of co-ordination are what we call civilisation.
Which is basically the point I was making when I said, "people learning to get along with one another." I think that morality evolves from these mechanisms, gradually changing the way people think. Of course, technology plays a big roll, too. Better technology means more and more people can live together as a community, while demanding a higher level of education of the people in order to utilize the technology.

Is there an upper limit to how many people can form an effective community? I don't know. But I think if we can look past our cultural and (yes, I will say it) religious differences, I think it's possible that the world-wide community might be possible. Better education and better communications will help make that possible, as the Internet is showing us already. When you can chat with someone halfway around the world you quickly learn that he is not the demon you've been told he was. And that leads to tolerance and understanding.