Tuesday, August 25, 2009

On Racism

First off racism is bad. (I believe God commands me to treat all men as brothers, racism clearly violates that command, from a more secular point of view it is also bad – if you are civilized)
I think this slate post on racism has misunderstood what racism is and what fuels it. It supposes that racism is about genetic differences and if genetic differences relating to IQ (among others) can be proven to exist then racism logically should follow.
I say: bullcrap. Racism has and never will be about genetic differences. Racism is pure and simply tribalism. Tribalism is the banding together of humans who define members of their group as being in the law (or tradition) and everyone else outside it as being prey and enemies. You are required to help and cooperate with the in-members but can do what you will to outsiders.
The Saletan theory accepts what racists say, namely that the other group is inferior because of ­­­­­­______ (IQ or whatever attribute is considered important at the time)
My theory explains what they do. For example, a Nazi party member would always have been valued over a Jew even if that Jew had demonstrably higher IQ, or usefulness to the state, solidarity or whatever attributes the party is claiming justifies persecution of Jews regardless of what they have done.
In other words, it ain’t IQ which is motivating racists – it is the instinct of humans to form groups in order to benefit themselves in competition with other similar groups. Before civilization, neighboring tribes would usually be genetically and culturally indistinguishable from each other – yet they would fight and paint the other group as cannibalistic demons and so forth. This benefitted the group who were in competition with neighboring tribes for resources.
Civilization was the realization that by cooperating on a larger scale, every one of various tribes could be benefitted. (First by trouncing the non allied tribes, then later trade and specialization and such.) Of course this first took place with tribes that were already culturally and genetically similar. For this to work, however new systems of preventing free-loaders had to be devised as the old ones would not work with the larger numbers of people involved. Under the new system tribalism had to be checked, controlled and punished just as individualism had been under the tribal system. (Individualism being defined in this use as the pursuit of self interest heedless of cost to others).
That being the case we would expect racist groups, like all tribal groups to be suppressed by various means by the society at large as they are overtly tribalistic.
Tribalism is of course a universal human instinct. Some people suppress it, other channel it into less rigid forms of tribalism; as an example partisanship. You can detect it whenever somebody is automatically assumed to be stupid, avaricious or immoral because of his group regardless of individual attributes and actions. Consider the hatred often directed toward southerners/the south/the redneck. (It never ceases to amaze me how people can condemn racism and then turn around and condemn southerners en masse as being stupid, ignorant and worthy of hate. The human tribal mind is subtle and very very ingrained.)
Take That Patrick Thomas.