A Letter from a Grandfather to his Genes, Part 3

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

6. How do we reach reciprocity from “might-makes-right”?

The same way it was done in the Wild West. Try to introduce the “rule of law” (a form of reciprocity insofar as it results from social contract, not imposition) and hire good sheriffs who shoot straight—something never appreciated by the outlaws or by governments of powerful countries that don’t think they will ever have to reciprocate. (“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) World War I and then World War II were supposed to mark the end of ethnic holocausts. But these have persisted, albeit on a smaller scale. So the rule of law is certainly very hard to establish. Ever since the League of Nations was proposed as a way of substituting self-determination and peaceful arbitration for interethnic warfare, humans still haven’t gotten their act fully together. Hypocrisy seems to be built into nearly everyone (“let he who hath not sinned…”). In which case, while we’re waiting, nationalism is still a rational and absolutely necessary strategy for self-defense. Use it or lose it.

7. Doesn’t nationalism inspire a feeling of superiority that is used to justify dominating other ethnies?

Obviously a nationalist will feel that his own culture is best for himself and not want it to be displaced by another. However, it is common, especially for successful nations, to feel superior to and to want to impose their rule or culture on others (as the U.S. government and Israel are attempting to do in the Middle East, early twenty-first century), but that is not a logically or empirically necessary adjunct to ethnic, in-group favoritism. The Swiss cantons, ethnically and linguistically different, have lived for many happy generations with no serious inclination to take over their neighboring cantons, although recently there was a brief cantonal readjustment to better achieve cantonal homogeneity.

8. What is the relationship between reciprocity and kinship?

They aren’t 100 percent mutually exclusive. There is no reason why we can’t have reciprocal dealings with kin. It’s just that it’s not quite such a disaster if they don’t reciprocate—after all, they are carrying some of our genes. On the other hand, there is often an understanding in families that if the family is to be “always there” for its members, the members ought to always be there for the family. So that if a member is not willing to contribute to the family’s vitality, he shouldn’t expect the family to be forever there to help him out. The so-called honor killings of some societies follow that logic and go a step further in not only withdrawing their help but in actually killing the individualist who has, say, married someone not acceptable to the family. The loss of “honor” comes from that person ruining the family’s reputation for trustworthiness in defense of group interests. Who in that culture would want to marry into that family if it is perceived as careless in making marital alliances? Also, having already invested a great deal in that person, the family would resent seeing all their investment wasted—as they perceive it. Obviously people will disagree about how much they are contributing to or detracting from the common good. But in reciprocal relations there is no getting away from such calculations. The value of cleverness in the context of exchange may have been a major selection pressure behind the evolution of the large human brain.

One can have kinship-like dealings with non-kin insofar as non-kin are able to simulate kin. But by and large, kin relationships end up being restricted to kin—with due allowance for the flexibility of who are considered “kin.” We are often extremely fond of other animals, not to mention members of completely different ethnies or races. Yet these affections, however powerful, are arguably not quite the same as close family ties, even though people may try to treat them as such. Example: the adopted child who, even though very fond of her foster parents, eventually has an urge to find her birth parents and (re-)establish a real kin relationship. Another example: Compare marriages between cousins with marriages between spouses who are much less closely related. The great worldwide popularity of the former may relate to the fact that cousins have both kinship ties as well as attraction based on reciprocity, while a marriage of non-kin is dependent entirely on reciprocity.

Members of a human group based on kinship can afford to help each other without too much regard for being “paid back,” since as long as their genes are being reproduced by at least someone in the group, who cares very much whose survival and reproductive success are being most advantaged? In a group of unrelated people (e.g., a labor union), however, members have to continually evaluate whether they are receiving their money’s worth from their common endeavors. Hence the extra effectiveness of nationalist groups in struggling for goals which will benefit their members. The efficacy is so great that there may well have been a natural selection for instinctive mechanisms for group loyalty, willingness to sacrifice oneself for the group (e.g., suicide bombers), patriotism, etc. Some animals have such instincts, as when a mother doesn’t simply flee from the nest at the sight of a predator but rather acts, at some risk to herself, as a decoy to distract the predator from her young. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find humans preprogrammed to take risks for kin. Humans are also at times willing to risk their lives for non-kin, it is true. But the willingness tends to be less than for kin and to take place in contexts where a certain amount of reciprocity can be expected—e.g., only in small communities where everyone knows each other and reputations for risk-taking on behalf of others can be acquired. So we might expect some sacrificial risk-taking in small communities of unrelated humans (e.g., an army unit), but expect even more in ethnically homogeneous communities.

If someone doesn’t reciprocate, words such as “cheating” or “parasitism” come to a biologist’s mind. Social dilemmas can turn on what should, in fact, have been expected. Usury, the charging of interest for a loan, was historically considered illegitimate for Christians and Muslims (for Jews, too, but not when dealing with non-Jews). Perhaps the value of the interest paid by a borrower was perceived as being more than the cost of the loan to the lender and so represented a form of unequal exchange—or cheating. Or, in a small homogeneous community, loans might have been something everyone could be expected to need sooner or later, and thus be reciprocated in kind. Close kin, as in members of a tribe, might not anticipate “interest” on a loan that benefited common genetic interests.

Consider Christian (or other) ideologies that encourage people to give, charitably, to non-kin without any expectation of getting something in return. Are the people doing the giving being cheated? If it happened enough, they might be severely handicapped relative to competitors. At another level, it might not be cheating if the charity were seen as promoting human biodiversity via a form of reciprocal altruism (insurance), provided it does not come at too great a cost to one’s own people.

9. Why would anyone doubt the relationship of family or extended family to ethnicity and nation?

First, unconscious psychological processes cannot easily be brought to conscious awareness, where they can be evaluated or seen for what they are. Westerners brought up without material suffering, never having lived through a war or other serious crisis, may simply have no idea how they would behave in severe ethnic conflict. Normally they are ever so tolerant and outgoing to people of other ethnies and races, never imagining that they would ever behave otherwise. But if suddenly terrorized by a gang from one of those out-groups, they might well find themselves searching desperately for a familiar face, i.e., someone as much like themselves, ethnically/racially, as possible. This will be done instantly and instinctively, without thought for what is politically correct or egalitarian or nice or prejudiced. Notice how quickly “racial profiling” became de rigueur for security agencies following the demolition of the World Trade Center by Arabs and subsequent terrorist acts.

Second, nationalism is not an inevitable or automatic phenomenon, however likely it may be by virtue of belonging, objectively, to an ethny. (Why? See the next FAQ, #10.)

A major reason for confusion over the connection of family to ethnicity is that there have been mischievous ideologies that have propagandized over the years against the positive aspects of biological relatedness, or anything biological at all. One has only to think of all the extreme environmentalists (in the nature-nurture debates) and egalitarians who promote not just equal rights but also the idea that humans have equal abilities across groups, if not as individuals, as if biological variation has ceased to apply to humans. Bring up anything biological and they go through the roof. Won’t discuss it. Hysteria reigns.

Finally, there is the ready observation that all is not sweetness and light in nearly any family, sibling rivalry being only one example. The Ottoman sultans routinely killed their own brothers. However, this issue seems to have been pretty well laid to rest by those who noticed that if you can hold all other factors constant except for varying degree of kinship, it turns out that one is still clearly better off and safer by being surrounded by kin than by non-kin. Other factors are not normally constant, though, so when there is not enough of a resource to go around, or there is a vast amount up for grabs, there is good reason for a bias in favor of all one’s own genes at the expense of even an only slightly smaller set of them present in close relatives, never mind people of a very different ethny or race. So expect competition for resources to take place throughout the relatedness hierarchy whenever competition at a higher level doesn’t take precedence. E.g., expect Jews in Occupied Palestine to argue and fight even more with each other than they do now if the Arab-Israeli conflict is ever resolved. That will be “subsidiarity” at work. However, a healthy family or nation finds ways of balancing the virtues of kin solidarity with rivalries.

Objectively, parents’ biological “interests” are maximally fulfilled if their parental investment is distributed to those offspring with the greatest chance of survival, success, and further reproduction. And so parents sometimes discriminate, whereas no child wants to be discriminated against. Parents can try to treat children equally, especially if their prospects seem comparable, but also in order to minimize counterproductive rivalry and promote cooperation among them. Family unity in Iran is promoted by outlawing unequal inheritance among sons. (To get around this, when one’s heirs seem to have very different potentials, would require performing a triage while still alive.)

Similar logic pertains to the larger ethnic group. Helping one’s kin does not necessarily mean helping all of them equally, since some are more valuable to the group than others. There is no point in expecting otherwise. To ask of someone what he cannot give is simply to guarantee disappointment and resentment toward a person who cannot rise to the occasion as one might have liked.

Thus the most “worthy” of the group’s aid are those who appear to carry the best genes and have the best character and talents relevant to the group’s success—much as scholarships are normally given to the best students. It doesn’t mean that others have to be thrown to the dogs. The least talented did not wish their bad luck. And a nation benefits if all members are encouraged to contribute to their full potential, however meager, and are appreciated for whatever role they can play. Nationalists living together will want a good safety net for their ethny and are typically willing to pay taxes to a communal pot for both common services and communal insurance systems. But in multicultural societies “…it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state…” The perceived risks of parasitism become too high and sympathy for other ethnies too low – as in the reticence of many Americans to support Obama’s Health Care proposals.

A successful nation must appreciate and honor differences in talent in many areas—in political leadership, capacity to recognize danger, expertise in technology or agriculture, courage in warfare, charisma, good health (including good genes), promotion of psychological and social health, noblesse oblige, leadership in community rituals and celebrations.

There will always be some individuals that deliberately, if not out of weakness, sabotage or otherwise work against the interests of the group. These individuals must somehow be neutralized: either placed in a position where their weakness cannot fail the group, or, in extremis, ejected from the group.

10. Why aren’t cultural differences the reason for nationalism?

Well, they are—in a sense. It’s just that they aren’t the fundamental basis of it. Nevertheless, today many think that cultural differences are what cause nationalism. Even people who ought to know better, such as the majority ethny of Québec, the French-speaking Québécois. These days they focus chiefly on protecting the French language, one of the more salient of cultural traits (meaning traits that people learn rather than exhibit instinctively). The result has been that they think that all they have to do to protect their nation is to make sure everyone speaks French, regardless of their ancestry. You can be from China or Haiti, but as long as you speak French, Québec nationalists don’t seem to worry much about your effect on the future of Québec. On the other hand, they have the expression, “Québécois de souche,” which certainly does mean Québécois by virtue of common ancestry—all the way back to the early French immigrants out of St. Mâlo—and which betrays an instinctive understanding of the importance of that ancestry. But they return uneasily to language in an effort to appease various other ethnies now living in Québec who would be affronted to think that they weren’t considered full-fledged “Quebecers”. They are confusing citizenship with ethnicity.

The sociologist Pierre van den Berghe pointed out that cultural differences are very often the best clue people have to their genetic differences, that is, differences in ancestry. Historically, most competition or warfare has been between groups of people who looked much the same physically. Thus differences in clothing, vocabulary, accent, behavior, tattoos, customs, or personal acquaintance were what they had to go on in deciding whose extended family or tribe they belonged to. Genetically transmitted physical features (the basis of “racial differences”), when they are more common in one group than another, can be especially good “markers” for ancestry. Returning to the question at hand, think of a hen: FAQ#10 is like asking whether the reason the hen sits on her eggs is that they carry her genes or, alternatively, because of the environmental aspects of the eggs’ appearance and location in the nest. The question makes little sense, since she must use any available and appropriate markers, such as appearance or location, in order to ensure that the eggs’ role in reproducing genes is carried out.

But nothing is perfect: To the extent that one can fake markers for an ancestry, one will be treated as though one had that ancestry. Teaching a recent immigrant to speak French like a Québécois de souche would be like placing duck eggs in a hen’s nest: Are the markers similar enough? In fact, some hens will still sit on them as though they were their own eggs. Yes, the eggs hatch and the little ducks then imprint on the mother hen and follow her around and she just goes about her own business oblivious to the “error” she has made. Apparently natural selection has not prepared that species of hen for such trickery. Similarly, speaking Quebec style French will clearly help the immigrant to Quebec become accepted, as well. But will it be sufficient? See below.

To be continued . . .