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…The ultimate individual form of human deceit is self-deceit. Since we have developed very subtle ways of detecting lying and cheating in fellow humans. lying itself is a difficult art. It follows. then, that the most effective way of telling a lie, especially a self-serving one, is to be convinced that you are, in fact, telling the truth. The ultimate forms of collective self-deceit developed by our species are religion and ideology. Religion is the denial of mortality. Ideology is a sophisticated belief system the purpose of which is to facilitate the transmission of credible, self-serving lies…
…Ethnocentrism is one such rudimentary ideology, and so are sexism and “ageism.” Men use rudimentary ideologies to control women, and adults to control children….
…In stateless societies, collectively organized violence has a long history. Hominids early became both predator and prey to their own species. Beyond killing and eating each other, early hominids perhaps began to steal each others’ women as well….
… Indeed, the very essence of the state is the centralization of power in the hands of the few in order to extract surplus production from the many, within the same society. Police, courts, taxation, forced labor and slavery are so many coercive institutions that thrive together with the development of states…
…Culture is our species’ `way of evolving and adapting much faster than would be possible by genetic selection alone…
…No doubt, in the long run, our species is as doomed as dodos and dinosaurs. It is only a matter of time before all life forms become unsustainable…
…Bodies are, in Dawkins’ words, mere mortal and expendable “survival machines” for potentially immortal genes. Such genes, therefore, as predispose their carrying organisms to behave nepotistically will be selected for, because, by favoring nepotism, they enhance their own replication. …
…great mental and emotional strain on the human brain to “ know” more than a few hundred individuals. We can recognize by sight many thousands, but our ability to associate complex personalities with faces and to make reliable enough predictions about people’s behavior to render interaction sufficiently unstrained is quite limited. Urban life constantly strains these physiological limits, and when we must constantly interact with a larger and rapidly changing cast of characters the very nature of the interaction changes drastically…
…The prototypical ethny is thus a descent group bounded socially by inbreeding and spatially by territory. Until the last few thousand years, such groups were of limited size as witnessed by many surviving “primitive” societies. The natural ethny in which hominids evolved for several thousand millenia probably did not exceed a couple of hundred individuals at the most…
…Since females invest much more in the reproductive process than males, they maximize their fitness by being choosy about their mating partners. They seek to pick the best possible mates in terms of genetic qualities and resources they have to offer. The male, on the other hand , maximizes his fitness by being promiscuous and by outcompeting his rivals in access to reproductive females….
…Men jealously “protect” “their” women from men of other groups. deeply resenting ethnic exogamy on the part of women, while at the same time seeking access to women from other groups. In ethnically stratified societies, this double standard takes the form of polygamy of the dominant-group men, with subordinate-group women becoming secondary wives and concubines. Where several ethnies live side by side in an unstratified system, the groups constantly raid each other for women. This sexual asymmetry of endogamy has, of course, one important consequence-namely that no ethny is a completely closed breeding system…
..Between ethnies, men use power and violence to secure access to women from other groups, and this reduces the level of inbreeding. When the ethnies in presence are equally matched. male competition for foreign women takes the form of interethnic raids. After an ethnic hierarchy has been established, subordinate-group men loose all or part of their control of “their” women and their reproductive success is curtailed, while upper-group men are polygynous and incorporate subordinate-group women. An ethnic hierarchy, therefore, generally results in a reduced fitness for subordinate-group males. The classical scenario for conquest is to rape the women and kill, castrate or enslave the men….
…Asymmetry of reproductive strategies for males and females has another important corollary for ethnic relations. In a situation of ethnic hierarchy, ethnic solidarity between men and women is undermined. The men of the subordinate group are always the losers and therefore have a reproductive interest in overthrowing the system. The women of the subordinate group, however, frequently have the option of being reproductively successful with dominant-group males. Indeed, even where forced into relationships with dominant males, they must cooperate in the interest of their children…
van den Berghe’s definition of race/racism:
…What is meant by “race” here is a social label attributed to groups of people in particular societies at particular times, on the basis of inherited phenotypical characteristics. If phenotypic criteria are socially used to categorize groups (usually, if not always, invidiously), then races are said to exist in that society, and the ideology supporting that classification and its social consequences is called racism…Where relatively inbred subgroups of the human species are meant, we will speak of “ populations” in the genetic sense.
What can be used as ethnic markers:
- a genetically transmitted phenotype, such as skin pigmentation, stature (as with the Tuzi of Rwanda and Burundi), hair texture,
- man-made ethnic uniform. Members of one’s group are identified by bodily mutilations and/or adornments carried as visible badges of group belonging. These markers range from clothing and headgear to body painting, tatooing, circumcision, tooth filing and sundry mutilations of the lips, nose and earlobes.
- behavioral. Ethnicity is determined by speech, demeanor, manners, esoteric lore
…One can therefore expect racism to appear only where long-distance immigration has suddenly put in presence substantial numbers of people whose physical appearance is different enough as to make genetic phenotype a reliable basis for distinguishing between groups. People must migrate across genetic gradients before their physical appearance can be used as a reliable basis of inferring group membership…
…miscegenation, which typically accompanies conquest and slavery, often blurs racial distinctions within two or three generations…If racism is to continue over several generations, it must be buttressed by severe barriers against miscegenation, a rare situation found in only a few countries such as South Africa and the United States …For these reasons, racism, as the primary basis for group distinctions, has been the exception rather than the rule.
…Ethnic (and racial) sentiments often seem irrational because they have an underlying driving force of their own, which is ultimately the blunt, purposeless natural selection of genes that are reproductively successful. Genes favoring nepotistic behavior have a selective advantage. It does not matter whether their carrying organisms are aware of being nepotistic or even that they consciously know their relatives…
Four stages of ethnic relations: (1) autarchy, (2) trade, (3) symbiosis and (4) parasitism.
On cannibalism amongst the Maori of New Zealand:
It was largely restricted to fighting men and to what is technically called “exocannibalism” (eating people of outside groups), but it was consciously thought of as the most convenient solution to the logistical problem of feeding the troops in the field. Slain enemies of all ages and both sexes were often eaten on the spot. Surplus meat was carried in baskets by war prisoners, who, as the supply dwindled, were themselves in constant danger of being slaughtered and eaten. Even slaves of long-standing were often killed and eaten (Vayda, 1 960, pp. 67-72 ) . In fact, humans were the only large land animals that constituted a regular part of the Maori male diet.
On tourism (When wealthy and nosy eccentrics like Alexander von Humboldt were few, their travels in search of the exotic were called “explorations”, rather than
“tourism.” ):
Exoticism becomes a marketable resource: “authenticity,” or a reasonable facsimile thereof, is the ultimate commodity. In exchange for putting himself on show. the native receives material considerations: a shilling for a photo, a dollar for a song or a peso for a dive. If necessary, the exoticism is carefully cultured and stage-managed to satisfy tourist demand. The situation is clearly a transient one; the tourist is, by definition, a short-timer with a tenuous, peripheral and indeed very special status. He is at once a privileged guest and a ridiculed, unknowledgeable outsider; a pampered recipient of mercenary deference and an impersonally exploited resource. The very type of ethnic contact created by tourism militates against that ultimate goal of the tourist experience: authenticity. But, when the tourist is tired of being given that very special treatment reserved for his breed, he goes home and becomes a native again. Each ethny is a resource for the other, simply by being different. Each specializes in being itself, in cultivating its uniqueness for the amusement of the other.
…The human capacity for conscious deceit (through ideology, inter alia) further enhances our species’ capacity for group inequality beyond anything known in other species. Human systems of group inequality, especially the ones perpetuated by all large, centralized states, are almost invariably bolstered by an ideology that disguises the parasitism of the ruling class as either kin selection or reciprocity. Subjects are told that they are ruled (i.e. exploited) in their own best interests, either by a benevolent despot who claims some kind of fatherly interest in them and who supposedly saves them from their own greed and ineptitude, or through a supposedly freely entered social contract wherein the rulers are held to be chosen representatives and servants of the people entrusted with promoting the common good and arbitrating and regulating individual conflicts of interest…The second and more recent justification for tyranny and exploitation-often misnamed “democracy,” either of the liberal or of the socialist “ people’s” variety-is characteristic of industrial societies since the French Revolution…
Some definitions:
A state is a collectivity headed by a group of people who exercise power over others (who are neither kinsmen nor spouses), in order to extract surplus production for their own individual and collective benefit.
A nation is a politically conscious ethny, that is, an ethny that claims the right to statehood by virtue of being an ethny. Such a ideology is called nationalism.
A nation-state is a state made up almost exclusively of a single nation. (Swaziland is used as an example)
A multinational state is a state made up of two or more nations. (Rwanda is used as an example)
A multiethnic state is a state made up of two or more ethnies that do not claim statehood.
Imperialism is the domination of one or more ethnies over others.
Colonialism is long-distance imperialism, usually over noncontiguous territory and over culturally unrelated ethnies.
…Clearly, multiethnic states face a problem of legitimacy that is incommensurable with that of nation-states. It is true that the larger, the more bureaucratized, the more centralized and the more exploitative a nation-state becomes, the thinner the fiction of common kinship wears, and, thus, the more problematic legitimacy becomes. Still. common nationhood, so long as the fiction of common descent retains the appearance of plausibility, remains a powerful rationale for state power. Being plucked by people who speak your language, share your customs and values, and are, however vaguely and remotely “your people” is more tolerable than being exploited by foreign conquerors.
Perhaps the soundest reason why foreign conquest and domination are so deeply resented is that they almost invariably represent a direct threat to the biological fitness of the conquered. The very reproductive success and, hence, biological survival of the conquered group is at stake. It is no accident that military conquest is so often accompanied by the killing, enslavement and castration of males, and the raping and capturing of females for purposes of enhancing the fitness of the conquerors.
Even when conquest is relatively mild and not openly genocidal, the subordinate group in an ethnic hierarchy almost invariably “loses” more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa. Hypergamy (mating upward for women) is a fitness-enhancing strategy for women, and, therefore, subordinate-group women do not always resist being “ taken over” by dominant-group men. But subordinate-group men lose fitness by loosing potential mates from their group without any hope of access to dominantgroup females. It is not accidental that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines; nor is the asymmetry of the resentment surprising. No group is concerned about gaining women; every group resents losing women…..
Since colonialism is usually imposed on ethnies that are very different both physically and culturally from the conquerors, the social gulf between rulers and ruled is all the greater and the more unbreachable, and the restraints on exploitation are practically nonexistent…colonial regimes are maximally coercive and exploitative…
…Conquered populations can either be assimilated to the conquering group, selectively at the elite level or in toto, through persuasion or coercion, gradually or brutally: or ethnic separation can be tolerated , encouraged or maintained by force, and conquered groups can be administered through a system of indirect rule. Native institutions are modified to suit the conqueror, but otherwise left as undisturbed as possible; religious, linguistic and cultural diversity is tolerated; and the local elite is allowed to keep some of its privileges in exchange for becoming auxiliaries of the imperial regime…
Much discussion of middlemen (MM) who interpose themselves between a ruling class and the mass of the population by performing roles that the upper class does not want to perform and for which the lower class lack special skills, capital or other advantages. Those roles are often, but not always, mercantile. They frequently involve providing, distributing and marketing goods and services in a preindustrial economy with an expanding market and monetary system…Classical MM occupations are the import-export trade, retail and wholesale shopkeeping, money lending, buying and reselling of cash crops, specialized craft production in owner-operated cottage industries, specialized laborintensive services such as restaurants and laundries and the provision of transport facilities (mule trains, buses and trucks). Most of these forms of entrepreneurship are started with little capital and are initially very labor intensive. An example of MM would be asian indians in British Africa.
Population numbers in British East Africa:
This thinly scattered European minority, numbered barely 90,000 out of a total East African population of some 25.1 million in 1 962, i.e. just before (fur Kenya) or after (for Tanzania and Uganda) independence. More than half of them (56,000) lived in Kenya, mostly in and around the capital of Nairobi, center of the “White Highlands,” but, even there, they were outnumbered by Africans at least 20 to one. Europeans lived in a gilded ghetto of their own making. In every city of any size, they reserved for themselves segregated residential areas where they built large, comfortable villas and were served by African domestics. They send their children to all-white schools, staffed by white teachers. They imposed racial segregation in hotels, restaurants, bars, public transport, cinemas, theaters-in every conceivable facility, public or private. Indeed, social apartheid, at least in Kenya, was as rigid as in South Africa. Europeans also had a privileged legal status, and the entire governmental and legal apparatus buttressed the racial supremacy of the whites, whether colonial officials or private settlers…Economically, the standard of living of Europeans was so vastly greater than that of the Africans that there was virtually no overlap in their income or wealth distributions…Naturally, the European community was almost totally endogamous, although white bachelors often took black mistresses. The latter were completely excluded from European society, however, as were their mulatto children. These liaisons were socially frowned upon and were tolerated only for bachelors. Most Europeans came to East Africa with their wives and children, especially in Kenya where the highland climate was considered ideal for European settlement…Leisure-time activities were also entirely segregated by race. The whites attended their tea parties at Government House, their Sunday afternoon horse races, their polo, cricket and bowling matches, their classical music concerts, their steeple chases and so on, among themselves, although always served by a numerous staff of African domestics. In Nairobi and environs, the British minority even managed to stamp out local vegetation and introduce a tropical version of the English countryside-fake Tudor manors, manicured lawns and all… At the bottom of the social pyramid of East African colonial society were, of course, the Africans. They made up about 98% of the region’s 25 million inhabitants in 1962, and over 90% of them were either pastoralists moving across vast stretches of semiarid savannah with their flocks of cattle and goats, or poor subsistence farmers eking out a meager livelihood from small plots cultivated by swidden agriculture. Additional reading concerning the British in East Africa.
..Overpopulation grew worse and worse throughout the colonial period, as some groups, especially the Kikuyu, were dispossessed by the white farmers, and as European preventive medicine caused a population explosion…
…the ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves. Therefore, a dominant group, like South African whites, can be expected to sacrifice a great deal of economic efficiency if it perceives that alternative policies threaten its survival.
Jefferson on slavery: nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [ i.e. blacks) are to be free” is frequently cited. But after a semicolon, he continues, “Nor is it less certain, that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinions have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them”…One solution, strongly advocated by many 18th century abolitionists, including Jefferson, was deportation to West Africa. The American Colonization Society, strongly supported by Jefferson, was founded for the purpose of settling free blacks in Africa, and later the American quasicolony of Liberia in West Africa was established to implement that purpose.
Lincoln (the Great Emancipator): “…there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”
On Affirmative action:
It has heightened racial consciousness and thus partially reversed the trend to deracialization of American society. In order to enforce school busing, affirmative action in hiring, preferential admission of blacks to universities and so on, it became increasingly necessary to classify people by race and to reverse the previous trend toward the deletion of all racial information on all application forms and official records. Affirmative action, whatever its intent, gives the stamp of official approval on the recognition of racial and ethnic differences and on the legitimacy of treating people as members of groups rather than on the basis of individual merit. It, therefore, contains a profound internal contradiction because it necessarily entrenches what it purports to eliminate: racial distinctions. Affirmative action also legitimizes the dubious concept of collective guilt for past actions, since the rationale for reverse discrimination is that one group is to be advantaged compared to another to compensate for past discrimination.
Affirmative action has raised serious problems of equity and aroused a considerable white backlash against what is seen as unjust racial discrimination against whites, or more specifically as anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism. Poor, educationally disadvantaged whites legitimately have asked why they, too, should not be the beneficiaries of affirmative action and they have begun to organize politically, often against blacks…
Affirmative action increases the class gulf between the black middle class and the ghetto subproletariat. It clearly benefits some of the former, but does l ittle or nothing to alleviate the very serious and worsening problems of the latter
Affirmative action demeans the groups it is supposed to help since the rationale for it implies inferiority. Its philosophy is clearly paternalist, and it often creates a quasicolonial structure for blacks (in the form of “offices of minority affairs,” “black studies programs,” racially labeled scholarships, awards and positions, and the like).
The more blacks (and other minorities) are given preferential treatment, the more questionable the qualifications of all blacks become. Affirmative action is therefore resented by many qualified, competent blacks as not only an insult to them, but an impediment to their careers. Another aspect of this problem is the perpetuation of white stereotypes of black inferiority…
…Consociationalism is a special form of elite domination based on ethnic proportionality. It can work if it is based on ethnicity (or some special feature of it, such as language or religion), but not if it is based on race; race is intrinsically invidious and, therefore, cannot become a principle of egalitarian group association…
Consociationalism analyzed in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada - arguably the 3 best cases where it may survive, but nonetheless the author argues persistence is unlikely.
The high birth rate of French Canadians in Quebec is referred to as “la ravanche des berceaux” - the revenge of the cradle.
A term used to describe Quebecois: les negres blanc d’Amerique - in aligment with the US civil rights movement.
Concerning black ethnic revival of the 60’s:
…Blacks lack a separate and distinct cultural tradition, a contiguous territory and the necessary resource base to make nationalism work. What blacks do have, however, is an ability to frighten whites. The spectacle of the urban riots in Watts in 1965, in Newark and Detroit in 1967 and in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1 968 led many whites to irrational panic. This panic was privately translated into an acceleration of the flight to the suburbs and of the consequent deterioration of the central cities and their public school systems. Publicly, panic was converted into a massive change of policy. Whereas the thrust of the civil rights movement in the 1 940s, 1 950s and early 1960s had been the elimination of all considerations of race, now all kinds of government agencies competed with each other to compel school authorities, employees and others to pay great attention to race, to allocate resources on the basis of racial quotas, to bus school children according to their skin pigmentation,t to overlook seniority rules to atone for past racial guilt and so on…
…We have not been genetically selected to use phenotype as an ethnic marker, because, until quite recently, such a test would have been an extremely inaccurate one. Racism is thus a cultural invention, a simple one to be sure, that is readily invented when the circumstances of long-distance migration across a wide phenotypic gradient make “race” a good test of kinship; there is no evidence that racism is in-born, but there is considerable evidence that ethnocentrism is…
 | Numerous other examples of the manipulation of ethnic identity for gain have been generated by the policy of "affirmative action" in the United States... All kinds of people suddenly rediscovered American Indian roots. --The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981) Pierre L. Van Den Berghe |
 | A different context in which ethnicity is consciously manipulated for individual gain is in the fierce competition for access to positions of power and hence to the public purse with its vast potential for graft, corruption and embezzlement, which is evident in many "new nations" of the Third World. In the African context, Andreski (1968) has aptly called the new multiethnic ruling class of these countries "kleptocracies," --The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981) Pierre L. Van Den Berghe (Web master's note: this was written in 1981. Today we know it also applies to the U.S.) |