Maybe it's a sign of creeping old age to have lived long enough to see the better part of a century lurch from one racist extreme to another. Don't get me wrong: it's always been obvious that you can identify human genetic groups with striking differences in their averages according to an impressive variety of measurements, from height to intelligence to resistance to different diseases. Racism is something different: an insistence that race, however defined, is a reliable basis for assessing human worth and a proper basis for rigid social and political ringwalls around individuals regardless of their actual traits and behavior. As a shorthand, I think of it as dreaming up of reasons why Jews can't be admitted to good universities or hired by good law firms. You have to be an incipient geezer like myself even to remember when excluding Jews didn't make most people scratch their heads in bewilderment--but the same people who've forgotten the treatment of the Jews in the not-all-that-distant past often have little difficulty swallowing an explanation for why universities and law firms must now employ similar practices to enforce quotas against whites or Asians. (I leave aside for the moment the resurgence of bare-faced Jew-hatred.)
Decades ago I read and enjoyed "Guns, Germs and Steel." That was near the beginning of the online discussion age, so I was unprepared for the bizarre debate that broke out in the Amazon review section. Back then, as I recall, the fury was provoked by Jared Diamond's undervaluing the virtue of superior cultures, which led him to use environmental determinism to explain variances in success among ancient genetic/geographical groups. Certainly his analysis was flawed in many ways, but not in its basic curiosity about the impact of the regional availability of suitable crops and animals for domestication, or suitable East-West migration routes for expansion without encountering radically different growing conditions.
It's amusing now to discover that a new crop of critics detests Diamond for his failure to acknowledge that the only acceptable alternative to the racial superiority explanation is racial oppression. Diamond is no more a racial supremacist than he is blind to horrifying clashes between genetic groups, but he has sinned against his culture by opting to consider any other factors at all. For the most part we appear nearly incapable of imagining that a lot of things can be going on in a clash between cultures, from bigotry to luck to disparities in cultural competence--and that none of these factors proves a moral superiority in either the culture or the individual hearts of the victors or the vanquished.
The recently-deceased Charles Mills argued in his late work that racism was inescapable, and thus we should simply embrace racial identities and work to attain a sort of equality between them. I hope he's wrong about the unavoidability of embracing racism.
ReplyDeletePreferences for genetic allies may be inescapable, and rules of thumb about groups where we don't have time to examine individuals may be inescapable, but there's nothing inescapable about social and political rules that treat people as though they possessed particular qualities when simple observation demonstrates they possess others. Give them a shot, see what they do, and then judge their performance. No need to decide ahead of time what we're certain their performance will be.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't mean we can't rely on proxies to avoid wasting our time considering me, for instance, for a starting role on a basketball team. The idea is just to consider facts instead of convenient myths. We do incredible mischief refusing to let facts come into our heads because our rules of thumb won't easily accommodate them. As someone said, most of the scientific advances in history happened because someone said, "Hmm, that's odd."
I'll echo Tex's comment.
ReplyDeleteRacism as we generally define it is just a nasty form of tribalism but tribalism is endemic to humans. Our goal should not be to either erase tribalism or, worse yet, use it as an organizing principle. We should seek to use it when it's impact is benign or to sublimate disruptive tribal associations into a larger tribal association.
I don't at all dislike tribalism in the form of extra warmth toward one's own home or society. It's supposed to work that way. We can always guard ourselves against the natural corollary of instinctive coldness toward anyone else and strive for at least a just neutrality.
ReplyDeleteWhat I despise is projection of an immutable belief about a group's characteristics on a real human being about whom we have more reliable information--just as I despise any desperate clinging to a belief contradicted by facts under our own noses. Our first duty is to truth. God gave us eyes and ears so we could use them.
Greg Cochran reviewed Diamond a second time after years of consideration, new information, and a re-reading. https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guns-germs-and-steel-revisited/
ReplyDeleteWhen I learned that a significant percentage of the population literally cannot work through a multi variable abstract logic problem (forgive me if that's improper terminology), the fact that people seek simple answers to complex problems (even if erroneous) made a lot more sense to me.
ReplyDelete