The Kindness of Strangers
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Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik (Oneworld, £18.99)
Trust: Self-interest and the Common Good
by Marek Kohn (OUP, £10.99)
The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes.
The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.
These observations collide with Kenan Malik’s insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn’t take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.
These are all genetic differences. In fact, if we measure large numbers of genetic markers from populations around the world and then use them to form clusters, we get back groupings that bear a striking resemblance to what have conventionally been recognised as the major racial groups on the planet: Europeans and western Asians, Africans, people from the Americas, eastern Asians, and Australasians.
Biologists confronted with this kind of clustered genetic variability in other species routinely refer to the groupings as variants, types, gentes, races and even sub-species. These are imprecise terms, but they capture the sense that suites of genetic characters or markers vary or cluster in similar ways among populations. Put another way, give me the suites of characters and I can predict at a better than chance level what group or region the sample comes from. There is no reason to exclude humans from this. It is what I was doing with the faces in the tranquil setting of the Great Hall.
Malik knows these facts about our genetics, but wants to insist that, unless “race” corresponds to absolute boundaries, it is a useless and damaging concept. But to deny what everybody knows and to swap the word race for something less politically charged like “group” is just an act of self-denial and certainly no more accurate than the dreaded “r” word. It is also patronising—I would like to think we are all grown up enough to accept the facts and ready ourselves for the deluge to come. I say deluge because the more we measure, the more genetic differences we find among populations; and no kinds of difference can be absolutely ruled out (to be clear, there is no reason to expect Caucasians will do well out of this). We may in future need a language, and maybe even a new ethics, to discuss the new genetics. But that is another story.
Why go on about these differences? Because they tell us something startling about our species, with an important bearing on the predicament we find ourselves in and which Malik writes about—how to live in a multicultural world.
We are a very young species. At about 100,000 to 150,000 years old, maybe less, we have just flickered into an existence that could go on—if we are an average species—for 8-10m years. We are not yet out of our nappies. Without going into the details, there are only two ways we could have amassed the genetic differences we have while still in this toddlerhood. One is that different races have been good at keeping to themselves since we spread around the world after walking out of Africa 70,000 years ago. Physical separation would have allowed many random differences to accumulate between groups. But this could only have occurred if inter-group migration were very low. It could also reflect active avoidance, something suggested by the growing sense among anthropologists that human history can best be understood as constant attempts by different group to annihilate each other.
The second way humanity could have achieved its genetic variation would be if natural selection has acted strongly on human populations, promoting different traits in different groups. I say “strongly” because the differences have been produced in a short time, and natural selection has had to work against the homogenising influences of migration and interbreeding. This is why we can be sure that when we see so-called “adaptive” differences, they tell us we are staring at people who have been selected to be very good at some challenge their environment throws at them, be it conserving heat, protecting the eyes from wind-blown sand, fighting off malaria or being able to digest milk proteins. These are not accidental differences.
Moreover, even after the ravages brought by the waves of expanding agriculturalists beginning about 10,000 years ago, followed more recently by the great imperial conquests of the last 800 to 900 years, humans still speak about 7,000 distinct languages. You don’t get that by hanging out with each other.
So we are a species with a short but intense history of living in relatively isolated groups. We are also a species that invented a new and powerful way of life—called co-operation. Or, more to the point, it is what evolutionary biologists call “indirect reciprocity”: the ability to behave co-operatively towards people unrelated to you and with no expectation of immediate “repayment.” We help people in distress, we return items of value, we may even put our wellbeing or lives at risk for others, and we have a sense of fairness that we and others ought to behave this way. Our co-operation allows us to have a division of labour and exchange—someone mends the fishing nets while another collects coconuts—and the specialisation this allows is almost certainly responsible for our rapid spread around the world.
No other species does anything like this. The co-operative hunting seen among male chimpanzees is largely done among bands of (genetic) brothers. Ants co-operate, and they are capable of raising sophisticated armies, and of deploying them in complex ways against other ant armies. But ants are effectively genetic clones of each other and so don’t mind giving aid or even their lives to help the collective.
Co-operation among unrelated humans is a different matter. If you help someone and they don’t help you back, you lose. Co-operative societies can soar to great heights, but they can cost you dearly, as when cheats take the spoils of co-operation without returning the benefits. This means that humans have evolved sensitive mechanisms to discriminate between people likely to share their co-operative values from those that do not.
Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn’s book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don’t feel shame or engage in honour killings.
This view of what makes humans tick also helps us to understand the awkwardness of the public debate about multiculturalism. Malik asserts that there is a tendency for what he calls the liberal left to “resurrect racial concepts” in framing their views on multiculturalism. Thus we grant authenticity, and equal but separate status, to the different desires and practices of some groups on the basis of their deep cultural heritage: consider the recent uproar over sharia law. Malik doesn’t suggest these liberals are racist, just that the language they use—of ethnicity, authenticity and identity—is laden with racial baggage and reminiscent of that used by the old racists when justifying their exclusionary views.
So how is it that race and ethnicity find their way so easily, even if inadvertently, into discussions of multiculturalism? The answer has nothing to do with racism and a lot to do with statistics. Humans, as I have described, evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to seek people of common values. Like it or not, common culture (common practices, expectations, and beliefs) correlates, even if imperfectly, with common biological ancestry. This means that markers of race and ethnicity come to be taken as markers of common values.
So does this mean that, deep down, we are all racists? No: we are too clever and self-interested for that. The very social feature that makes us unique—our ability to co-operate with unrelated others—makes us, uniquely among animals, capable of moving beyond the politics of race and ethnicity. Were we as mindless as apes and ants, this would be impossible. Their behaviour is based almost exclusively on common genetic ancestry. Ours is not.
We humans will get along with anyone who wishes to play the co-operative game with us—and that part of our nature will always trump guesswork based on markers of ethnicity or other features. The key is to provide or create stronger signs of trust and common values than are provided by the statistically useful but imprecise markers of ethnicity. Looking around the Great Hall, I couldn’t help but feel that this was already happening among the good students of Reading University.
(Posted on June 16, 2008)
Comments
“our ability to co-operate with unrelated others”
I made a good friend in the bar business who was a Vietnam veteran. After a sufficient time getting to know him and coaxing him with a few bourbons I asked him about it. He told me the incident he remembered most clearly after thirty years because it was fresh off the plane. They had just disembarked and an in country drill sergeant type gathered them around. He told them to take out their pamplet on how the Viet Cong think and fight. One my buddy had read over and over believing it could save his life. Then, holding up his own copy the sergeant announced, “Bad news fellas. The Viet Cong… they never read the book!” My point being that co-operation is not only determined by your intentions but also by those of the “un-related others” that you have to deal with.
Posted by Tim Mc Hugh at 7:31 PM on June 16
“It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed.”
He should make it clear in his writing that this is his opinion.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 7:52 PM on June 16
Sailer at v-dare has a good rejoinder to Malik. Only a white lib could come up with this, because it seems that non-whites know in exact detail which race is which.
Posted by Simmons at 9:03 PM on June 16
“As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour.”
Multiculturalists must work together in the effort of a common goal. They must cooperate in their efforts to keep the white man down, and make sure he’s to blame for societies failings, or any individuals failings. White men should all just leave the UK and then we could watch what happens.
Posted by LHathaway at 9:57 PM on June 16
This is a great step forward for the ‘mainstream’ media. They’ve stopped saying embarrassingly ridiculous things like there’s no such thing as race, and have admitted genetic variations between the races.
This author stumbles when he says that cooperation is mutually beneficial and therefore transcends race. He’s wrong in a few ways.
1) The other races do not wish to cooperate. They are at war with us and are not contributing anything to our welfare. In fact they hate us and have made multiple calls to wipe us out.
2) The other races, even if they wanted to, cannot cooperate as equals. They lack the intelligence and the self-control to make major advancements or contributions to society. In the end, even if they mean the best, whites and asians must do everything on earth.
3) Life is a zero sum game. The earth can only support so many people, there is no way cooperation can therefore be beneficial to both sides. Every time you give a non-white a job, have a non-white’s child, or give foreign aid to a non-white, that’s one less white that the world can now support that could’ve been had instead.
4) Our current ‘cooperation’ has watched the percentage of the world’s white population drop from 40% in 1900 to 10% today. How much more ‘mutual benefit’ can we take? The fact is we are too small a minority to think about race mixing or immigration anymore, this is a luxury that you can afford only with a STABLE BASE that is not threatened with itself being destroyed. A white homeland that exports additional whites who then race mix or settle into diverse areas is acceptable, every single white country on earth being invaded by foreigners is not.
If this man were serious, we could propose each race getting a continent of their own that will never be touched by another race, and the rest of the world could be left to diverse mixes of cooperation. However, no ‘benefits’ can accrue to an extinct group even if the payoff is 10 jillion percent.
Posted by at 10:09 PM on June 16
All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general.
This is simply wrong. There are extensive empirical studies that demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that there exist major racial differences in IQ and cognitive ability. Any discussion which begins by denying this, is not worth reading or taking seriously. The IQ debate regarding racial differences is over. We all know the results although it clearly remains politically incorrect to admit them. This reminds me of the period during which the heliocentric view of the sun and planets was an open debate. Eventually it was settled by empirical observation but there were still those who refused to give up the view that the earth was the center of the universe. Anyone seriously arguing that there are no significant racial differences in IQ is similar to those who could not or would not let go of the geocentric view of the sun and planets. Yes, there were what were considered “good” reasons to deny the heliocentric theory, but they had to do with theology and man’s place in the universe, and had nothing to do with scientific truth. Is it not absurd for the modern PC rationalist to reject reason in order to maintain what is essentially an emotional orthodoxy? They are in exactly the same situation as those who denied the heliocentric theory—-they rejected it in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence because they could not bring themselves to accept its implications. In fact they are much worse than the theological opponents of the heliocentric view because unlike them they claim to believe in reason and empirical science.
Posted by at 10:42 PM on June 16
Ah, the newly(ie. post genome-discovery) established, “okay, we really DO have racial differences…but none that are important, or could in any way be construed to create a superior/inferior pradigm between racial groups” canard! How convenient. Now we can acknowledge is what is so obvious - so long as we don’t acknowledge SOME things that are just as obvious…to some of us at least.
If the effort to acknowledge, understand and reconcile racial-reality were half that of the efforts to simply deny the critical aspects of racial differences, we as a species might actually move beyond the Dark Ages…I’m not holding my breath, however.
Posted by Hank at 11:06 PM on June 16
Even tiny genetic variations can make a big difference. Look at various breeds of dogs. If you were to study them genetically, they would almost be identical. I say almost because tiny variations or mutations make a big difference. German shepherds,cocker spaniels and greyhounds not only look different but have different behavioral characteristics and abilities. This is why you never see police dogs that are cocker spaniels or greyhounds guarding the junkyard. People will routinely talk about the differences among dogs so why is it so hard to admit that the same difference you see among different breeds of dogs also apply to different races as a whole.
Posted by at 7:35 AM on June 17
See there is a problem Mr.Malik. You seem to think that the rest of the world and other races and cultures think the same way as you, a white leftist, when it comes to race. However, the rest of the world very much sees and knows race exists. That is why blacks, right down to the tribe, see themselves as a group seperate from others, so do asians, hispanics and everyone else. Only naive people like Mr.Malik try to pretend that race does not exist. Non-whites KNOW races exists and put their own first.
Posted by at 8:21 AM on June 17
“We all benefit…”
This is a glittering nonsense phrase that makes no attempt whatsoever to explain how we “all” benefit.
I defy anyone to explain to me how the race to replace the populations of developed nations with fecund Fourth World hordes, to be subsidized at our expense “benefits” those of us on the receiving end of this genocidal pogrom.
Did a graduate student in New York “benefit” when Robert Williams raped her, slashed her up, forced her to swallow a liver-damaging does of Ibuprophin, tried to blind her with bleach and boiling water and then set her on fire?
How did Channon Christian, Christopher Newsome or their respective familes benefit from their exposure to the Fourth World?
I don’t believe for one minute that incidents like these are an accidental side-effect of living in a society that possesses a morally and intellectually bimodal population distribution. It is deliberate, as our elites are unified in their determination to admit more predators to victimize us, while forcing us to pay for it.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 9:28 AM on June 17
“…we can all happily and successfully interbreed.”
This is anecdotal but last fall, a white college kid who works in the stock room got his Korean girlfriend pregnant.
The baby ended up being so deformed that the doctors recommend an abortion which was performed.
I don’t know what the racial factor was but I thought it was odd that two college age kids would produced a genetic abomination at such a young, healthy, and vibrant age that had to be aborted. I have since wondered if there is research out there showing that inter-racial couplings have higher rates of genetic defects or spontaneous abortions.
This might be eye opening research.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 11:06 AM on June 17
I hate wading through modern evolution to learn science and think it would be spectacular if they simply edited out the macro neo-darwinian hypothesis from all science publications except for those dedicated to the theory. Honestly, it’s all so redundant.
Posted by Unemployed WASP at 5:07 PM on June 17
He is a writer at a prestigious magazine, and probably the holder of advanced degrees from prestigious universities. But he is an idiot.
“And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general.”
No evidence. None at all. Really? There is so much evidence only someone truly stupid or determined to mislead the public could write such a thing.
Imagine this. No difference in IQ at all. 100% totally equal. Not one 1/100th of a point difference. Exactly precisely the same down to a million decimal points. And this happened among peoples who were completely seperated on different continents for tens of thousands of years. Long enough for enormous physical changes, but not one smidgen of IQ change. Can anyone but an “Intellectual” be so stupid?
Look at the bind the left is in. It has to make this stupid argument, because to agree that even a fraction of a point of IQ differs among races is to open the whole issue to debate.
Posted by Victor Gerhard at 7:53 PM on June 18
“I don’t know what the racial factor was but I thought it was odd that two college age kids would produced a genetic abomination at such a young, healthy, and vibrant age that had to be aborted. I have since wondered if there is research out there showing that inter-racial couplings have higher rates of genetic defects or spontaneous abortions”
I don’t know but sometimes, no matter how young and healthy one is, genetics can go horribly wrong.
Posted by at 9:37 PM on June 18