JW on van den Berghe on Salter

In May 2005 a generally good review of Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests appeared here. It is by Pierre van den Berghe, the Congolese-born Belgian sociologist who coined the term, ethnic nepotism. I hope that the following reproduction of that review will interest and inform MR readers. It is interspersed with a brief commentary by JW.

This is the kind of book which social scientists should read if they ever hope to become literate about human biology and its implications for our social behaviour. For many, if not most social scientists, human sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology, or behavioural ecology, or ethology, or whatever label you want to give to the biology of behaviour) is simply anathema, on both theoretical and ideological grounds. However, increasing minorities of anthropologists, psychologists, economists, political scientists and sociologists are beginning to absorb the social implications of human evolution and genetics. All ideological trends, by the way, are represented among these ‘revisionists’.

Salter’s book is divided into three parts. First, he expands W. D. Hamilton’s ‘inclusive kinship’ theory to ethnies. Then he draws the policy implications of ethnic nepotism. Finally, he concludes with the ethics thereof. No summary can do justice to a work so rich and novel in content, but let me try.

Of course, appeal to authority is not a logical argument. But it is encouraging that guys like van den Berghe and E.O.Wilson have commented favorably on Salter’s work and have not, for example, compared it to Jack D Ripper ranting about “precious bodily fluids” in the movie Dr. Strangelove

In the first 75 pages, Salter essentially extends Hamiltonian kin selection from family to ethny, as I suggested should be done a quarter of a century ago. But he goes an important step beyond my simple formulation of ethnic nepotism as an extended and attenuated form of family nepotism. Salter persuasively argues that one should not only take into account genes shared by common descent, as in the classical Hamiltonian coefficient of relatedness, but all shared genes, whether by common descent or not, as in R. A. Fisher’s coefficient of kinship. According to H. Harpending’s calculations, the average coefficient of kinship in many ethnies that have practiced a large degree of endogamy for generations (the very definition of an ethny) is about as high as between half-siblings, aunt and nephew, or grand-parent and grand-child. Thus, ethnic nepotism is not a weak form of family nepotism, but virtually a proxy for it. I was even more right than I knew! Furthermore, as we have many more co-ethnics than relatives, the aggregate mass of genes shared with the former dwarfs that shared with the latter.

The liberal, ‘multicultural’ counter to this is that, since all humans share something like 99.9 per cent of their genes with one another, we are all virtually identical twins under the skin, and should extend our fraternal embrace to humanity as a whole. We are also over 98 per cent chimp, by the way. Relatedness is always relative to others with whom we compete for scarce resources. Therefore, it is those extra shared genes within the family or ethny which increase our fitness compared to our less related competitors, and which make us uniquely different from them. Vive la différence is the royal road to inclusive fitness maximisation. Show me a society where parents routinely think their neighbours’ children are 99.9 per cent as good as their own, and allocate their bounty according to this fine principle. A few tried (Hutterites, Kibbutzim) but failed.

This is a wonderfully succinct explanation of the relative nature of genetic interests. Note the word “extra” in “extra shared genes”. Thus, it is not overall similarity and copies of genes that are the issue but the distinctive genetic information, over and above (“extra”) random, common gene sharing. And, equally clear: “Relatedness is always relative to others with whom we compete for scarce resources.” And then there is van den Berghe’s stark challenge: “Show me a society where parents routinely think their neighbours’ children are 99.9 per cent as good as their own, and allocate their bounty according to this fine principle.”

The second and much longer part of the book (some 190 pages) applies this model of ethnic nepotism to policies or strategies of allocation of resources within and between states and ethnies controlling territories with finite carrying capacities. It is impossible to summarise adequately the countless implications of this model to immigration policies, citizenship law, affirmative action, multiculturalism, etc., except to say that Salter sees the universalisation of the genuine nation-state, i.e. the mono-ethnic one, as the best ‘stable evolutionary strategy’ for our species.

Finally, Salter concludes with a shorter section (some 40 pages) on ethics. If we consider it eminently moral for parents to care preferentially for their children so long as they do not harm their neighbours’ offspring, why should we stigmatise preference for our own ethnic kind who are, after all, extended kin? He thus advocates an ethic of ‘adaptive utilitarianism’ in which ‘the ultimate form of liberty is the freedom to defend one’s genetic interests’ (p. 283), restrained only by the equal right of others to do likewise, and a prohibition to harm others.

No doubt, Salter’s position will raise many accusations of fascism or racism, but let me state here that he is not at all the conventional reactionary! He advocates a liberal, democratic nation-state; he is acutely aware of the problem of elite parasitism; he expresses horror at the orgies of genocide and war provoked by nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; he is very critical of globalisation, which he sees as another form of elite parasitism.

Democracy though is a fraud and the easiest and most hypocritical way for parasitic elites to manipulate the masses in a way so that the masses won’t even recognize they are being manipulated. There is nothing magical or special about “liberal democracy”, except for its capacity to induce delusions.

However, his position also coincides with that of the conventional right in opposing open immigration, multiculturalism, affirmative action and other sacred cows of the politically correct left.

As a sociobiologist who is also a political anarchist, I applaud Salter’s extension of inclusive fitness to ethnic nepotism, because it helps us understand so much of human affairs; but I am sceptical of his faith in the liberal ethnic state. Salter, to be sure, is well aware of its openness to elite parasitism, but he is nevertheless overly sanguine about its prospects. First, his assumption that the nation-state has an affinity for liberal democracy is contradicted by much historical evidence. Nation-states have come in all political colours, from genocidal fascism, to ‘Herrenvolk democracy’, to parliamentary, bourgeois democracy, to murderous communism. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Golden Age of nation-states have been graveyards of lethal industrialised warfare and routinised genocides. As for elite parasitism, it is not simply a danger to which ‘liberal democracies’ are exposed: it is the very essence of any state. States are essentially killing machines run by the few to steal from the many. I, for one, do not mourn the current passing of the nation-state, nor the devolution of many of its powers. The track record of the past two centuries does not deserve its eulogy.

How then to reverse the trend? The nation state, with its power, got us into the trouble we are in. Anarchism cannot reverse the trends. We’ll need the collective power of the nation state, I think, to leverage the powers we need to obtain the ethnostate. Haven’t anarchists historically used violence to further their goals as well? Van den Berghe should know better; there is no stateless utopia on the horizen. Those who give up the state will be swallowed up by those who do not; one does not expect the Chinese to adopt stateless “anarchism.”

Finally, there is the question Salter raises early in the book (pp. 7785): do contemporary humans living in urbanised mass societies care about their fitness, and do they continue to behave accordingly? The answer he gives is, I think, correct: yes, but less so than they did when humans lived in their environment of evolutionary adaptation, the savannas of Pleistocene Africa. The real question thus becomes: how much less?

I think van den Berghe is missing the point here: Salter acknowledges that people may behave maladaptively, his work is however prescriptive and not descriptive. In fact, it is the relative lack of interest in fitness amongst whites which is why Salter’s work is necessary to begin with.

I believe our species has recently (in the last century) taken a maladaptive leap by subverting proximate means of fitness maximisation to serve purely hedonistic rather than evolutionary ends. This is blatantly the case with sexual behaviour, which has been almost entirely de-coupled from reproduction. (To be sure, much like Bonobo chimps, we have long been ‘copulatorily redundant’, and exchanged sex for food, protection, investment in offspring, companionship and fun, but not in the rational, fail-safe way made possible by modern technology.) The current epidemics of obesity and drug addictions are other symptoms of this run-away hedonism rooted in biological predispositions that were once adaptive, but have become acutely maladaptive.

How long can this go on? Probably not very long, but who cares, compared to the instant rewards of hedonism? Perhaps we are simply too smart for our own good. Perhaps, as a by-product of our encephalisation which brought acutely painful self-consciousness and modern bio-technology, we no longer want to play our genes’ game of reproducing themselves. In a pique of supreme biological hubris, we proclaim ourselves more important than the sum of our genes. The future demise of our entire species pales by comparison with our own individual demise. Après moi le déluge.

This sums up the David B “who cares; life has no interests” mindset quite nicely, and dovetails with Birch Barlow’s “I’ll mate with Asians if I feel like it” mantra as well. Of course, people and peoples who believe in such a nihilistic fashion will be replaced by those who are more healthily ethnocentric and kinship-oriented.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, April 9, 2007 at 06:43 PM in Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests
Comments (18) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on April 09, 2007, 10:08 PM | #

“How then to reverse the trend? The nation state, with its power, got us into the trouble we are in. Anarchism cannot reverse the trends. We’ll need the collective power of the nation state, I think, to leverage the powers we need to obtain the ethnostate. Haven’t anarchists historically used violence to further their goals as well? Van den Berghe should know better; there is no stateless utopia on the horizen. Those who give up the state will be swallowed up by those who do not; one does not expect the Chinese to adopt stateless ‘anarchism.’ “ (—from the log entry)

I still like Norman Lowell’s idea of “regionalism not nationalism” although I wouldn’t go so far as he in dismantling nationalism. My ideal? Let’s look at Germany as an example: Either of the set-ups prevailing in pre-Bismarck Germany: the Holy Roman Empire, ended by Bonaparte in 1806, or the loose Confederation of German states which replaced it starting with the Congress of Vienna and ending with Bismarck’s Kaiserreich, the latter eventually turning into an absolute disaster for Germany: a thousand years of Germany went up in smoke, taking a big chunk of the rest of the world with it. The old Austria-Hungary dual monarchy, on the other hand, wasn’t ideal because way too multi-ethnic. (The destructive multi-ethnicity of the Austrian Empire was what originally got Hitler fuming mad as he contemplated all sorts of ungerman encroachments on what had for a thousand years been German ethnic/linguistic/cultural hegemony over most of those lands.) Clearly, reforms of the franchise have to also be considered for any polity not to self-destruct, reforms such as GW’s longstanding idea of scrapping one-man-one-vote in favor of giving certain people’s votes more weight for whatever reason (married couple with kids, property owner, member of the place’s traditional race or religion, and so forth). If women are to have the right to enter the voting booth must be community protections and national protections in place in the form of a Bill of Rights which can’t be changed by any procedural mechanism whatsoever — can’t be changed, period, end of story — forbidding things like forced race-replacement and so on whether directly or by subterfuge, otherwise women voters will have the nation destroyed, absolutely pulverized into dust, quicker than you can say Barack-Obama-Teddy-Kennedy. Where political issues touching on communal or national preservation are concerned women are on the level of mental retards: where such issues are concerned, you might as well let mental retards into the voting booth as women.

Posted by Desmond Jones on April 10, 2007, 03:52 AM | #

Democracy though is a fraud and the easiest and most hypocritical way for parasitic elites to manipulate the masses in a way so that the masses won’t even recognize they are being manipulated.

Is this really true though? Did not Napoleon simply announce the emancipation of the Jews because

“It is my wish that the Jews be treated like brothers as if we were all part of Judaism. As an added benefit, I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they would come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than in any other nation.”

Despot, monarch, democrat, what difference does it really make? Is it not simply an evolutionary principle that some will succeed where others do not and will act adaptively, whether through slavery, apartheid, emancipation or mass migration, to enhance their fitness? What prescription will be used to stop elites acting adaptively or forming institutions that will enhance their fitness?

Even the Jewish elites have jettisoned the farmer and the labourer if they did not possess the intellectual capacity to advance the elite group. Charles Murray writes,

Between the 1st and 6th centuries C.E., the number of Jews in the world plummeted from about 4.5 million to 1.5 million or fewer. About 1 million Jews were killed in the revolts against the Romans in Judea and Egypt. There were scattered forced conversions from Judaism to another religion. Some of the reduction may be associated with a general drop in population that accompanied the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But that still leaves a huge number of Jews who just disappeared.

What happened to the millions of Jews who disappeared? It is not necessary to maintain that Jews of low intelligence were run out of town because they could not read the Torah and commentaries fluently. Rather, few people enjoy being in a position where their inadequacies are constantly highlighted. It is human nature to withdraw from such situations. I suggest that the Jews who fell away from Judaism from the 1st to 6th centuries C.E. were heavily concentrated among those who could not learn to read well enough to be good Jews—meaning those from the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Even before the selection pressures arising from urban occupations began to have an effect, I am arguing, the remaining self-identified Jews circa 800 C.E. already had elevated intelligence.

Elites adopt strategies that are adaptive even if it means a reduction in the total size of the ethny.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 08:43 AM | #

“Elites adopt strategies that are adaptive even if it means a reduction in the total size of the ethny.”

It would seem to me rather short-sighted for white elites to boost their narrow, short-term fitness in ways that endangers their entire ethny, thus resulting in a real, substantial loss in long-term fitness.

This goes back to van den Berghe’s comments about maladaptive behaviors as well as Salter’s concerns about “short-term thinking.”

White elites are not acting in a manner you suggest that the ancient Jewish elites did - sacrificing quantity for quality. They are instead following their own selfish interests at the expense of the group. In the case of the Jews, you could argue that the “aim” was to create a “stronger Jewish community.” The aim of white elite globalists - who identify with their elite globalist class and not as whites - is to enrich themselves and empower their trans-racial globalist caste, at the expense of white interests.

One cannot as well equate diaspora strategies with majoritarian strategies. The Jews were never going to approach being a majority in their diaspora host nations, which gives them a different perspective - how to enhance Jewish competitiveness and survival as a diaspora minority - than whites who would wish to retain their control over the homelands.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 08:59 AM | #

More Razib:

“Some of you may know that I’ve been interested in the levels of selection debate: to me the universality of the psychological propensity toward love is a strong argument for the power of within group selection as opposed to between group selection.”

Of course, it is not an argument for anything of the sort. More wishful thinking. Which leads us again to the question unanswered by the “braintrust” here - why is gnxp linked to from MR as a “science” blog?

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 09:51 AM | #

A topic not unrelated to the question of gnxp:

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/04/adopt_our_baby.php

After all, let’s delegitimize the EGI concept, as well as group selection (regardless of what guys like EO Wilson and van den Berghe think of the former, and what even the execrable Diamond must admit about the latter) - how can we better convince the British peoples to accept this expansion of South Asian genetic information into the UK.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 10:54 AM | #

A direct quote from Popper Jr. from a gnxp comments thread:

“vic, my younger sibs are definitely more well versed in that brown shit….”

Very ‘scientific’

Posted by Fred Scrooby on April 10, 2007, 12:43 PM | #

Most of the comments in the thread underneath that Amren article hit the nail squarely on the head.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 01:31 PM | #

I agree Fred, and my favorite is here:

“China has a surplus of males,they are the ones India should be calling on”

Indeed! Why not? Aren’t they all “asian cogntive elitists?” Why shouldn’t surplus South Asian females be used to alleviate the mate shortage for Chinese males?

Fat chance of that happening though, isn’t it?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on April 10, 2007, 03:24 PM | #

Or rather, its utility to said elites.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Golden Age of nation-states have been graveyards of lethal industrialised warfare and routinised genocides.

Not so:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HG04Aa02.html

Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year.

Perhaps we are simply too smart for our own good

I think in many ways, this is the crux of European man’s problem.

Btw, it’s hilarious how far afield from reality the GNXPers have to go to maintain a semblance of consistency: “bah, I’m just looking to fill my belly and get my rocks off.” Yeah that’s great buddy, but what with the reality of selection, your (ostensible) raison d’etre will be pruned from the tree of life. Of course, “ostensible” is the operative word there, and globalist gods willing, there’ll still be rational actors obfuscating in the same way right up until the actual kool-aid drinkers go extinct.

Transparent much?

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 03:47 PM | #

“Of course, “ostensible” is the operative word…”

Gnxp is nothing more or less a vehicle for promoting the genetic interests of its founders. They have been able to leverage their extended phenotypes (i.e., the white participants at that blog) to make headway - and, unfortunately, labeling that blog as a “science” blog is contributing to that mission.

Yann’s blog is a science blog. Even the blog of Hawks, whom I despise, can be reasonably considered a science blog. Gnxp is not.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on April 10, 2007, 04:45 PM | #

I love how they take the rhetorical questions like, “would it be okay with you if India was flooded with Chinamen” and run with them as if that’s anything other than a fig leaf.

The questions are rhetorical, DUMMIES, and their argument is in the asking, not the answering.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 10, 2007, 07:24 PM | #

“I love how they take the rhetorical questions like, “would it be okay with you if India was flooded with Chinamen” and run with them as if that’s anything other than a fig leaf.”

If I’m not mistaken, Jason Soon made similar comments about his ancestral homeland of China…

It’s real easy to state that you are for “X,Y,Z” when you _know_ that X,Y,Z will NEVER happen, and that your ostensible acceptance of X,Y,Z may convince others to accept scenarios that will boost your fitness - and at their expense.

Well, we do admit that Asians are intelligent, so they know how to play that game. Too bad they find so many extended phenotypes who fall for it.

Once again: gnxp is not a science blog, and does not belong linked to as such.

Posted by ben tillman on April 10, 2007, 08:14 PM | #

Some of you may know that I’ve been interested in the levels of selection debate: to me the universality of the psychological propensity toward love is a strong argument for the power of within group selection as opposed to between group selection.

That doesn’t make sense on any level.

No one argues that selection occurs only within or between groups. But the more fundamental insight of Wilson is that “individual” is a meaningless term. If you accept “individual” selection, you necessarily accept group selection—because all “individuals” are groups.

It is proper to speak of organisms and groups of organisms.

As for the gibberish about “a propensity toward love”, I have no idea what to say.

Posted by Sybach on April 10, 2007, 11:05 PM | #

Is ‘putrid stench of GNXP’ JWHolliday? I was wondering what happened to him, as I hadn’t seen him in a while. How come he’s not listed under ‘The Writers’ with Matt, Svigor, et. al? :(

Posted by Guessedworker on April 11, 2007, 03:37 AM | #

A gift of absent Bangladeshi ethnic genetic interest awaits the nasally fastidious one just to the left and a little down from this comment.

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 11, 2007, 06:37 AM | #

“A gift of absent Bangladeshi ethnic genetic interest awaits the nasally fastidious one just to the left and a little down from this comment”

Huh? What are you talking about?

Posted by The putrid stench of gnxp on April 11, 2007, 06:38 AM | #

Oh, you mean the link….

good….

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