Limbic’s Snap Summary: The keys to successful ethnic / race relations are the reductcion of ethnic competition and weakening of ethnic identification. This needs to be backed up by powerful efforts to promote equality and fight unfair discrimination by raising the costs of racism and discrimination . Bigotry can be fought and beaten, but similarities and unity must be emphasised, not diversity and difference. Anything that promoted racial identikit or separateness worsens tensions and confounds these efforts. Multiculturalism, positive discrimination (affirmative action), group rights, designating special status victims groups and fostering ethnic pride/identity and over-reporting the threat of racism all work against ethnic/racial peace and aggravate xenophobia and racism (two problems that were once very close to being non-issues, but now are large and growing again).
An extract from “Darwinian Politics” by Paul Rubin [amazon.co.uk / amazon.com ]
[ pg 37] “Often it is asserted that humans are by nature xenophobic and hostile to outsiders (e.g., Shaw and Wong 1989; Ghiglieri 1999.) Of course, some has do behave in this way, as discussed later in this chapter. But the level ‘ such hostility is facultative - a behavior that can change in response to different environments, including cultural environments. That is, group identification is responsive to changes in relative prices, where price is defined in broad terms. As racism or xenophobia becomes more expensive or has greater costs, fewer people will adopt such positions, as is true in contemporary America. As racism becomes more accepted, as was true in Nazi Germany, more people will become racist. Kuran (1998) indicates that ethnic identity may have a tipping point as more people in a group become ethnically active. The point is that in fact our group membership selection mechanisms are actually quite flexible, and it would be easy to think of humans as being much more clannish and xenophobic than we are. If this were so, we would live in a very different world but would still be recognizably human.
This flexibility would have had advantages in terms of competition with other groups. Abilities to switch membership from one group to another would have meant that in the event of a war or battle, a member of a losing band would be able to join another group rather than being killed or dying of starvation. Keeley (1996) points out that in primitive warfare, captured men are almost always killed, though females may be incorporated into the victorious group. However, he also indicates that many tribes have been eliminated, with survivors joining other tribes or groups. Thus, individuals with such flexible membership mechanisms would have been more likely to survive and reproduce. Sober and Wilson (1998) also indicate that unsuccessful groups or tribes commonly dissolve and members then join more successful groups. Today, emigration allows humans to leave less successful environments and move to places where they expect to be more successful. The ability to join groups arranged hierarchically would also have been useful in a conflict situation.
[pg 46 - 47] Ethnic conflict seems to be a perennial part of the human condition. Relatively small-scale ethnic conflict is the major form of conflict today and is likely to continue to be so. Because members of the same ethnic group are more closely related genetically than are non-members, it may be that ethnic conflict is an evolved human behavior. That is, it may be that by engaging in conflict that is perceived to benefit one’s ethnic group, an individual is also providing benefits to copies of his genes that reside in members of the group. If so, this would be an example of kin selection. Even if most members of the ethnic group are only distant relatives, there may be so many of them that the net effect on one’s genes of some action that benefits other members of the ethnic group would be beneficial in terms of inclusive fitness. Then ethnic conflict would be a remnant of conflicts in the EEA that had a positive payoff and would be consistent with the argument that struggles and conflicts between groups have been an important part of human evolution. Of course, in the EEA, bands would have been much smaller than the groups that engage in this behavior today. In this sense, such conflict may be the result of a genetic preference that was appropriate in the EEA but is now counterproductive just as eating excess sugar for a fat person who wants to live longer is an error.
But even if this ethnic conflict was rational and provided benefits in the EEA, it does not mean that ethnic conflict actually provides these benefits today. Rather, the taste for ethnic conflict, which might have been useful in the EEA, may now be counterproductive and may not provide net benefits. This is true whether the benefits are viewed as economic or as fitness benefits; under either interpretation, ethnic conflicts in today’s world are harmful and counterproductive to the participants as well as to others. Moreover, they are not inevitable: even if humans have a taste or preference for such conflict, they can be taught that this taste is counterproductive. That is, they can be shown that the relative price of engaging in this preference is too high and that the conflict will provide no net benefits.
The level of ethnic conflict can clearly be reduced. The United States is an example. This is a multiethnic society and, while there is some residual ethnic conflict and some small groups of racists (who sometimes undertake hateful and harmful acts, and who receive a large amount of attention in the media), the level of ethnic conflict is quite small here. The level of such conflict has been greatly been reduced in a remarkably short (perhaps fifty year) time period, as dated from the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. This reduction in conflict has also been responsible for the decreasing racism in immigration policies. Clearly evolution was not involved in this change; learning and perhaps changes in culture and the resulting relative social prices were the driving forces.
Furthermore, ethnic groups in the United States are much more diverse (much less genetically related) than groups in those countries where there is significant ethnic conflict. In Yugoslavia, for example, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are all Slavs, and the differences between them are primarily religious, not ethnic or genetic; Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) classify Yugoslavian as one genetic group. In the Middle East, Jews and Arabs are all Semites; Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) point out that the Israelites (ancestors of modern Jews) were originally one of many Semitic-speaking tribes. They also say that residents of Bangladesh are of the same group as some Indians and Pakistanis and are more closely related to some Indians than are other Indians; the difference between these groups is again religion. On the other hand, the United States has large groups of people of African descent, people of Germanic extraction (from Britain and Scandinavia as well as Germany), Mediterranean peoples (Italians, Greeks), Semites (Jews and Arabs), Asians (Indians, Chinese, Koreans), Slavs, and members of many other ethnic groups as well. This diversity is in part due to the greatly in creased mobility of contemporary humans, as stressed by Goetze (1998). Our current immigration policy is increasing the level of such diversity. If ethnic conflict were aimed at improving one’s genes chances relative to other genes, the United States would be a much more fertile ground for such convict than places where it actually occurs because there are many more unrelated individuals with whom to engage in conflict.
This is an example of a genetic preference responding to prices, or of facultative behavior. In the United States, ignoring ethnic differences is beneficial, and people respond to these benefits. I argue later in this chapter that ignoring the ethnicity of people is almost always beneficial, and the puzzle is that others have not realized these gains.
[pg 54 - 56] The United States is a stronger and richer country because there is relatively little inter-ethnic strife or conflict. Part of the reason for this is because of the large number of ethnic groups here. Most old countries, including European countries, tend to have at least a majority core of individuals from the same ethnic group (Germans, French, Italians). Some countries have two or more ethnic groups (Switzerland, Belgium, the former Yugoslavia), but membership is well defined and geography often separates them. These different ethnic groups can sometimes lead to major conflicts (again the former Yugoslavia.) The United States has the advantage of being composed of many groups, so there is no majority, and whatever geographic isolation exists is largely on a local level. That is, ethnic enclaves may exist within cities but not across states. This means that the United States is very difficult soil for ethnic conflict, and this is a real benefit to our society.
There is, however, some danger that current policies are acting to strengthen ethnic identification, with potentially harmful results. In the United States today, affirmative action is a massive program whose purpose is to change the outcome of decisions in school decisions, hiring, and other social processes. The goal is to achieve a more race-balanced out- : come. But the method involves treating individuals as members of ethnic groups rather than as individuals. This is a very dangerous policy and has commonly led to ethnic polarization wherever it has been adopted (Sowell 1990). While the group identification mechanism is flexible, it is also powerful, and if membership in an ethnic group becomes important for significant purposes, this membership can easily become the basis for strong group identification.
One of the great accomplishments of the United States is the reduction in the importance of race and ethnic background in decision making, both private and public. This has not been easy. At various times, ethnic groups in the United States have been the target of discrimination. Laws and policies have discriminated against the Irish, Jews, Asians, Catholics, Hispanics, blacks, and many other groups, and of course at one time blacks were slaves. Only in 1954, with the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, did we begin a strong national effort to eliminate official race-based discrimination (see Sowell 1983). In a remarkably short time, we have made a major successful effort at accomplishing this goal.
The history of human evolution tells us that group identity and conflict are a common part of human behaviour, a behaviour that is easy for humans to learn. Eliminating many aspects of this behaviour has been a major accomplishment of policy. But the victory has been fragile. Given the evolved nature of human preferences, it is all too easy to establish a system of group identity that is harmful. Affirmative action programs base important life decisions with substantial economic and fitness consequences, such as college admissions and hiring, on race. This policy creates the possibility of renewing grouping and self-identification based largely on race. Beneficiaries identify as members of an ethnic group because they are treated as group members and benefit by being members. Members of the majority feel that :hey are being discriminated against, and so have incentives to act as members of a group to defend themselves.
These decisions deal with important matters that are analogous to issues that would have had fitness implications in the EEA, such as level of incomes or control of resources. Therefore, we can expect those who feel harmed by the decisions to react strongly. This reaction is not due merely to losing in economic or political competition. Rather, it is the result of a belief that the competition was ethnically based and, therefore, unfair. Even those who do not directly lose from these policies may therefore resent them. The real danger from affirmative action is that it can unleash the very ethnic identification and ethnic-based policies that it is aimed at correcting. This could be a very harmful policy to adopt. The importance of ethnic conflict in human history and prehistory tells us that it is a dangerous force to unleash, even if the reasons are of the best sort. Indeed, workplace racist incidents seem to be increasing; this increase may be a result of affirmative action (Siwolop 2000). This same criticism cannot be made of affirmative action policies based on gender, although this should not be taken as an endorsement of such policies.
Summary:
Humans universally distinguish between in-group members and others. Though this distinction is made almost automatically, the nature of groups is very flexible. Humans can identify with almost any group, no matter how ^j arbitrarily defined. Such group identification is based on tribal mechanisms in the EEA, where there was substantial conflict between bands or groups. This may be the basis for the ethnic conflict that we observe around the world. However, the example of the United States and other multiethnic societies indicates that such conflict is not inevitable, but rather can be reduced. This example would be useful for those societies that are currently experiencing such conflict, particularly since such conflict in today’s world is not productive in any sense either in terms of increased fitness or in terms of increased wealth. For example, societies that engaged in anti-Semitic behaviour suffered from this behaviour, as theory would predict. The : United States has the advantage of being composed of citizens from many diverse ethnic groups, and ethnic conflict is relatively limited here. But policies in the United States and other advanced countries that stress race are counterproductive and might well decrease or eliminate the remarkable gains the United States has made in reducing ethnic competition.
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