A Letter from a Grandfather to his Genes, Part 5 (Conclusion)

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

13. How do you explain the fact that a major football rivalry for Tunisians seems to be with other North Africans, Moroccans, rather than with people more distantly related?

Because Morocco is there. Close by. That’s one answer. But this is a frequent phenomenon in sport and is essentially the same issue as in sibling rivalry. You, a Québécoise girl, compete for mummy’s attention with your sibling because she is there. Some girl in China is not there, so why would you worry at all about her? Suppose, however, that both you and your sister are gymnasts and compete with each other initially, but your sister goes on to the Olympics and beats out a Chinese gymnast. Would you be happy for her? Or would you rather the Chinese won? Well, maybe if the sibling rivalry had been especially severe… But you get the point.

14. What is wrong with interracial marriage?

From your point of view, maybe nothing—provided you can accept the consequences. These can vary enormously depending on circumstances and personalities. But be prepared:

On the plus side, the girl/guy from the other race you are staring at may be incredibly attractive. Think of the sometime attractiveness of black men and white women for each other; or of white men and oriental women.

A modest degree of out-breeding could also be good for one’s kids. Here’s the story, according to standard biology texts: All your genes come in pairs, one allele of each pair from each parent. If a pair contains an allele that is bad for you but also “dominant,” meaning dominant over the other member of the pair, it will cause the person carrying it to die, be sick, or be otherwise unattractive as a mate. So we tend not to worry too much about dominant bad genes in our planning, since they tend quickly to self-destruct. But recessive genes don’t get “expressed” unless matched up with exactly the same allele. Outbreeding reduces the chance of a recessive bad gene you are carrying being matched up with its like, and thus being expressed. On the other hand, you don’t need to go very far afield to be sufficiently “outbred,” and certainly not as far as what we think of as another race or species (the defining feature of species is the inability to successfully interbreed with other species). In outbreeding to another race, your offspring may be picking up some surprises, either unpleasant (e.g., genes that encourage diabetes or sickle cell anemia) or pleasant (e.g., genes for high IQ or some more specialized talent). Ethnic and racial groups undoubtedly vary in “genetic load,” the number of bad recessive genes in their gene pool, although geneticists don’t seem to have a completely clear picture of all that. In any case, in picking a spouse it’s hard to know what you are getting into without at the very least a thorough genetic background check; the more ethnically/racially different a person is, the harder in general it is to vet that person for quality in any trait. There is one speculative aspect you might want to entertain. Racial differences are thought to have originally arisen through natural selection favoring those traits that made a person better adapted to a particular climate and ecology. Black skin was protective in tropical climates, while white skin encouraged penetration of rays from the sun when northern climates made them beneficial. These climatic selection pressures may not be all that strong today where modern technologies can mitigate them (Vit D supplements are extra important for Blacks living far from the equator). But the benefits of such natural selection may one day again be appreciated if the earth undergoes unexpected climate change. Intermarriage would reduce the traits that had once been useful in particular climates.

Here’s an ethical consideration: We are importuned daily to regard other ethnies/races with tolerance and respect. Well, if we really do value another group’s cultural and physical traits, why would we want to do anything that would contribute to the destruction of those traits? If you dislike your own race so much that you want to marry into another, aren’t you implying that other races are justified in negatively “profiling,” or looking down upon, yours? In any case, the destruction of one’s people would happen only one intermarriage at a time, but it would happen. One intermarriage might seem like a drop in the bucket for one’s whole ethny, but overwhelming for one’s immediate family.

The major threats to the success of interracial marriages would have to be (a) the strong chances of cultural incompatibility and (b) the lack of the social cohesion that is normally achieved with the relatively close kinship of a within-ethny marriage. The former is a problem on its own merits but it also can act as a marker for degree of biological relatedness which affects cohesion. Cultural incompatibility doesn’t necessarily show up right away. People’s lives go through stages, each with its own set of customs and expectations that might not be apparent until one reached a particular stage. For instance, whether, where, how, and with whom will we be buried after death? And what sort of lives will the children of such a marriage have to look forward to? There are some horror stories, e.g., the isolation of offspring of Americans (especially blacks) and Vietnamese women as a result of the Vietnam War. (Yes, it does depend on what the kids look like.) And where are children of a Jewish-Arab marriage to live? Palestine? If they can form a larger community of people like themselves, they could mitigate the effects of social exclusion, as did the “mulattoes” of Haiti following the war of independence from France. If not, they remain isolates, neither fish nor fowl, possibly handicapped in finding a mate or a welcoming community and a good job. Wishing it otherwise is no help.

15. How do you decide how much immigration to have?

Easy. “Enough immigration” is when you feel in your heart that there has been enough. The problem is that different people will come up with different estimates. For anyone desperate for more labor, cheap or expensive, there is never enough immigration. For people wanting to live among people like themselves and to maintain their culturally specific ways and political systems, nearly any immigration by other ethnies constitutes a potential threat. “None is too many,” a high-level Canadian government official is reputed to have said when asked how many Jews should be accepted during the 1930s. Canadian Jews are still a tiny minority but they certainly did come to exert considerable political and cultural influence through their lobbying efforts (e.g., the strongly pro-Israel Conservative government of Harper of 2010) and via the media (a major newspaper publishing and broadcasting empire, CanWest, built by Izzy Asper and his sons, stridently and successfully promoted a pro-Israel foreign policy). Members of immigrant groups see the sky as the limit. They argue that they constitute no threat whatsoever to the indigenous ethnies/cultures, so not to worry. They naturally ignore the fact that any human being, once he feels at home, will want to adjust his surroundings to his own taste, which means “taking over,” to whatever degree becomes possible. If your city eventually becomes majority Chinese, expect the cultural norms to become Chinese as well…sooner or later.

So there is no sacred answer. The best that can be done in a democratic society is to put it to a vote. When was the last time anyone voted on whether to increase or decrease the level of immigration? Can’t remember, can you? Anyway, each person’s favored immigration rate will reflect some trade-off between a concern for one’s own culture and people going down the tube and some mix of attractions perceived in out-group immigration, including the above economic factors.

16. How can a small territory, enclave, ghetto, neighborhood) control immigration?

It’s not easy, today, what with laws established, in the interest of minorities, to outlaw “discrimination” in residential housing. Notice that no one is outlawed from discriminating when it comes to marriage (cf. personal ads in newspapers asking to meet, say, a “white heterosexual Catholic female” for friendship and possible marriage, etc.). And few object to exceptionally religious people establishing certain types of social enclave for their own group (a Yeshiva University for Jews or a Bob Jones University for white Christian fundamentalists), since who else would want to go to them? The strongest objectors to the state of Israel discriminating in favor of Jews and against gentiles in immigration are those gentiles whose land was taken to make way for Israel, plus a few sympathizers. So the seeming illegitimacy of discrimination depends entirely on its context, on those doing the discriminating, and whether it involves theft or violence, not on the act of discrimination itself. Today in N. America, discrimination is nearly impossible except against whites.

When multicultural ideologies become fashionable, about the only sure way to favor one’s own (or a culturally compatible) ethny in an enclave would be to form a sovereign state. Meanwhile, one might avoid making public any announcement of housing for sale or rent and, instead, advertise by word of mouth or with the help of a sympathetic real estate agent. Perhaps one could set up a housing association with various covenants, conditions, and restrictions that discourage, if not prevent outright, people coming into a community who would be culturally incompatible.⁴² Then we have “ethnic cleansing”, à la Palestine and the late Yugoslavia , or repatriation – which Abraham Lincoln and many other great Americans favored for American Blacks.

17. What do you mean by group structure?

Humans are not bees. Bees have highly preprogrammed (by genes) brain mechanisms that cause them to work for the whole hive, their “group.” Humans may be a little bit “groupy,” instinctively, but a variety of cultural strategies have had to be devised over millennia for accentuating the willingness of group members to act as cohesive, cooperative group members. Some strategies work better than others; some are more enjoyable to live with. There are rules, such as for distinctive clothing – e.g., the Amish, or Hasidic Jews. But if Hasidic men’s garments are unbearably hot in summer, inspiring major investment in air conditioners, they also serve as a test of group loyalty: Anyone willing to put up with the hot clothing must surely be willing to adhere to the less visible and hopefully internalized rules of the group, and hence must be trustworthy within the group. If the garments were simply functional and comfortable, they wouldn’t constitute a good test of trustworthiness. The same goes for a woman’s more or less uncomfortable hijab in the Middle East. If it’s hot enough, women stay indoors and out of trouble (from their husband’s point of view); but if they do venture out, wearing their hijab suggests trustworthiness. Their husbands can then get on with their work without worrying so much about what their wives are up to.

Rules for helping each other within the group can vary, some seemingly more shortsighted than others. The “bucket of crabs” analogy is cited by North American aboriginals for the case, say, of a person who is awarded a fellowship for educational purposes but who ends up giving away so much of the money, in his in-group’s spirit of sharing, that he never does get the degree which would presumably enable him later to help others get ahead. Put crabs in a bucket and as each one tries to climb out of the bucket, the others in trying to climb out themselves, latch onto him and pull him back down. The relevant rule was adaptive for one set of conditions (hunter-gatherer) but is less so for the modern world. So groups vary in willingness to help their talented maximize the use of their talents (e.g., via scholarships paid for by other members); and those who take advantage of the help vary in their willingness to contribute to the group later on.

There has never been a guarantee that devising rules for one’s own group would lead to an optimal set. (Try inventing a set, yourself, to see how hard it is.) Much mental energy must have been expended by humans in such trial and error. The Biblical “Ten Commandments” are just one such set, created for use within Jewish communities (but, interestingly, not for relations with “gentiles”), and Jewish scholarship has devoted thousands of years to elaborating upon these rules (the Talmud). The longevity of Jewish groups, in the face of massive pressures to assimilate, is testimony to the effectiveness of their group rules and structure.

A challenge for any modern nationalist is to come up with a set of rules for the group that are both effective, attractive, legal, and do not become unbearable to live with. A major dilemma involves finding a balance between sacrifice for the group vs. working for oneself.

18. Should everyone be a nationalist?

Nationalists would love to have all fellow coethnics be nationalistic, but any person’s answer depends on his point of view, and, as we have seen, people often have different psychological interests. However, anyone who criticizes others for their nationalism, rather than simply being uninterested, is likely being either hypocritical or envious.