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(Immigration and Religion, pt. 1) |
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(a grab-bag of short articles) |
Thoughts on coalitional psychology and racism
borrowed from Pascal Boyer's book,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
ISBN 0-465-00696-5 (paper)
commentary by Peter A. Taylor
Last modified August 27, 2024
I'm frustrated by the poor quality of the discussion of "racism" (or "white supremacism", which is used nearly synonymously) that I encounter both on the internet and at my Unitarian Universalist church. The subject of racism has been highly politicized; George Orwell's observations in Politics and the English Language on the corrupting effects of politics on language are quite on the nose. Some of the poor quality of the discussion of racism is confusion due to the nebulous nature of the subject, but I also believe that much of the confusion is due to insincerity on the parts of people playing word games with their definitions. Some years ago, I read a couple of papers* by a civil rights activist and sociologist, Tom Pettigrew, in which he described the "white supremacist social norms" he encountered growing up in the American South in the 1950s. Pettigrew was not playing word games. I may not be able to define "white supremacism" precisely, but Pettigrew's use of the term was nothing like the typical modern usage.
*See
Pascal Boyer's book, Religion Explained, is about religion and cognitive science, not racism. As the back cover explains, "Pascal Boyer is Luce Professor of Collective Memory and Individual Memory at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri." Much of the book is concerned with how the workings of human memory affect people's ability to transmit ideas. Other parts of the book explain how various "inferencing systems" in the human brain work, and the consequences of their limitations. This may seem an unlikely place to find wisdom on racism. However, in several places in the book, he discusses coalitional psychology, and he mentions racism in that context. At the slight risk of putting words in his mouth, I think he proposes an implicit definition of "racism" that would be a good starting point for an honest discussion of racism.
The first section where Boyer discusses coalitional psychology is on pp. 125-128. On p. 126, Boyer offers an unordered list of "conditions that must obtain in a coalition". For ease of reference, I reproduce his list here as an ordered list:
"You behave in such as way as to enhance the benefits gained by other members of the group but not those of nonmembers."
"This behavior towards other members does not require that you receive a particular benefit for helping them."
"You expect similar dispositions and behavior toward you from other members (and of course not from nonmembers)."
"As a result, whether it is a good thing for you to be in the group is computed by comparing the benefits with the costs incurred in interaction with all other members, not with each of them. (For instance, in a particular association, you may be constantly helping X and receiving help from Y; if this is a coalition you will balance the two and disregard the fact that you are in some sense exploiting Y and exploited by X.)"
"You represent the behavior of members of other groups as being in some sense the whole group's behavior. (If you are a Tory and a Labour militant attacks you, you think of that as an attack from Labour, not just from that person.)"
"Your reactions to how a member of another group behaves are directed to the group, not specifically to the individual in question. If the Labour militant has attacked you, it makes sense for you to retaliate by attacking another Labour member."
"You represent the various groups as 'big agents.' For instance, you think what is happening in the political arena is that 'Labour is trying to do this...' or 'the Tory party is doing that...' although parties cannot literally be trying to do anything, as they are not persons."
"You are extremely concerned with other members' loyalty. That is, whether the others in your group are reliably loyal to the group or not (regardless of how this affects you directly) is a matter of great emotional effects. This is manifest in several different ways. You feel a desire to punish those people who have defected from the coalition; you may also want to punish those who failed to punish the defectors; you may want to screen people by subjecting them to various ordeals in which they have to incur substantial costs to demonstrate their loyalty."
Interestingly, on pp. 245-246, Boyer explains male coming of age rituals in terms of building trust in coalitions. You know that other members have already borne costs in order to join the group.
On p. 286, Boyer begins a discussion of "essentialism", which is critical for what follows.
Signals of group membership, especially of ethnic group membership...are nonetheless construed as nothing more than symptoms or indices of an underlying set of qualities. People say that they all share the bones of their ancestors, that they have common blood, etc. All these metaphors express what psychologists would call an essentialist assumption. That is, one assumes that there must be something in common between all of the individuals concerned, though one may have only vague or metaphorical understandings of what that thing actually consists of.
Humans are wired to expect that all members of a species of animal will have certain things in common. For example, if I tell a small child that a duck laid eggs in my flowerbed, even if he has never seen a duck, then the child will infer that all ducks reproduce by laying eggs. This is intuitive, and doesn't depend on any knowledge of DNA. Furthermore, social categories are often understood in a similar way. Boyer continues on pp. 287-8,
In many places in Africa and Asia craftsmen are members of endogamous castes that are thought to be inferior, polluting and dangerous. These groups are explicitly construed as based on natural qualities—the people in question are thought to be essentially different from the rest, by virtue of some inherited, internal quality. Blacksmiths in West Africa are recognizable, they are all descended from blacksmiths—you cannot become a member of that category—and they only marry blacksmiths. Once a social category is construed in this way, it should probably activate, in a decoupled manner, the essentialist inference system....
One of the most solid and famous findings of social psychology is that it is trivially easy to create strong feelings of group membership and solidarity between arbitrarily chosen group members. All it takes is to divide a set of participants and assign them to, say, the Blue group and the Red group. Once membership is clearly established, get them to perform some trivial task (any task will do) with members of their team. In a very short time, people are better disposed towards members of their group than toward the others. They also begin to perceive a difference, naturally in their group's favor, in terms of attractiveness, honesty, or intelligence. They are far more willing to cheat or indeed inflict violence on members of the other group. Even when all participants are fully aware that the division is arbitrary, even when that is demonstrated to them, it seems difficult for them not to develop such feelings, together with the notion that there is some essential feature underlying group membership....
I think artificial laboratory conditions and actual social behavior converge here in a way that suggests why essence-based understandings become salient and emotionally important: They are the concepts we spontaneously use to describe intuitions that are in fact not about categories but about coalitions.
In the environment in which humans evolved, people mostly lived with kin groups, and cooperated mostly with kin. Ancestry and coalition membership are easily conflated. Boyer emphasizes that people generally have realistic intuitions about coalitions. The problem is that people too often try to articulate these intuitions in terms of "essences" (genetically determined properties).
So here is a candidate operational definition of "racism":
1. Racism is confusion between genetics and coalition membership.
I think this is a good starting point for talking about racism. Point 8 in Boyer's list of "conditions that must obtain" dovetails with Pettigrew's description especially well. On the other hand, this definition doesn't seem to capture the level of hostility that Tom Pettigrew described. This definition may work better if we also stipulate that the stakes are high enough that coalition membership is potentially a matter of life and death (e.g. in a modern American men's prison).
There is interesting stuff about essentialism on pp. 287-291. Specifically, on p. 290, Boyer discusses the work of sociologists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto.
But then Sidanius and Pratto marshal an impressive amount of evidence to suggest that there is more to dominance than stereotyping, and that the latter is a consequence rather than a cause. In fact, they demonstrate that many dominant group behaviors not only represent a desire to stay with one's group, to favor one's clan, but also to favor one's group in an insidious way that maintains the other group's lower status. Racial stereotypes are among the representations that people create to interpret their own intuition that members of other groups represent a real danger and threaten their own coalitional advantages. Obviously, one possible reason for this blindness to coalitional structures is that they often conflict with our moral standards. This may well explain why many people prefer to consider racism a consequence of sadly misguided concepts rather than a consequence of highly efficient economic strategies.
This suggests a second operational definition of "racism":
2. Racism is a group economic strategy.
This second definition isn't really compatible with the first definition because the first frames racism as an honest mistake, where the second frames it in terms of morally problematic but "highly efficient" (rational) self-interest (or at least group interest). This second definition seems less helpful to me, because I think people who are accused of "racism", as commonly understood, are being accused of being irrational. For example, the claims made of "red-lining" (banks refusing to make otherwise promising loans for purchasing houses in black neighborhoods) allege that the bankers are leaving money laying on the table (with no compelling, rationally perceived group advantage that would motivate such a self-sacrifice). That is, as the word is commonly used, "racism" implies bearing an unnecessary financial cost for psychological reasons, not making extra profits by nefarious means.
On p. 188, Boyer has a helpful discussion of the difficuly of figuring out who is a "likely cooperator".
What children need to acquire is a better sense of who should be treated as a likely cooperator and who should not. Such information is not that easy to pick up because it is entirely context-dependent. You cannot adjust your behavior unless you have lived through enough different situations. We blame children for refusing to share their toys with a visiting cousin. But children also observe that we do not offer all our possessions to perfect strangers. So children must learn to recognize and classify different situations of social interaction in their particular social milieu.
This suggests a third definition of "racism", similar to the first, but weaker:
3. Racism is the use of race as a proxy or preliminary indicator of being a likely cooperator, regardless of any ideas about genetics ("essences").
A likely cooperator is not necessarily a coalition member, but needs to be at least somewhat trustworthy. This third definition, like the first, raises the question of whether we are talking about an honest mistake (or perhaps even a correct inference) or a moral failing. What does moral philosophy say about trust? Under what circumstances am I morally obligated to trust someone? I don't recall this topic ever having come up at the Virginia Tech Philosophy Club.
Suppose that I'm a Tutsi who has aquired some wealth, and I'm thinking of hiring a bodyguard. If a Hutu applies for the job, am I morally obligated to trust that he will risk his life for me?
What if I correctly believe that someone has been inundated with race-based propaganda that blames me for things that I didn't do (e.g. Dolchstoßlegende or witchcraft accusations)?
As with the first definition, one could define "racism" this way, but it seems like pretty weak tea compared to what Tom Pettigrew was complaining about.
The topics of race and racism have also come up several time on the "Bridges of Meaning" ecumenical Discord server. On February 19th, 2023, the pseudonymous "Jean Cavalier" offered the following definition in the politics-dumpsterfire, ethnic conflicts thread:
4. "Believing in the existence and importance of race. Identification with and seeing race as a salient category. More broadly being concerned about roots, ancestry and again, identifying with those things."
I should clarify that I think Cavalier is using Steve Sailer's definition of "race", or something very similar to it: "a large, slightly inbred extended family". My only quibble with Sailer here is that I would emphasize "large".
My reply to Cavalier:
"I am groping around in the dark here, but in my view, 'racism' is something like a combination of
using genetics as a proxy for coalition membership or being a 'likely cooperator'
having unreasonably bad ideas about statistics or failure to take available information about things other than genetics into reasonable account (e.g. not having an intuitive sense of what Bayes' formula is about)
being mean-spirited about it, such as being too quick to engage in hostilities or too slow to make peace. I wouldn't call Jared Taylor racist because he doesn't seem mean-spirited. There is a line somewhere between competition with good sportsmanship and competition with bad sportsmanship, but some competition is a given. I also don't know what to say about self-fulfilling prophecies about ethnic conflict.
If there isn't an element of bad sportsmanship about it, I don't want to call it 'racism'."
In retrospect, I might call it "racism" if someone misjudges a group of people's capabilities badly enough, bad sportsmanship or not (e.g. the US Navy for much of WWII not believing that the Japanese could build torpedos as good as the Mk. 93 "Long Lance").
My mention of self-fulfilling prophecies probably calls for an explanation. Sometimes conflict, and a perception of high stakes, can result from self-fulfilling prophecies. Group A thinks group B is likely to start a war, so group A tries to sabotage group B's military capability. Group B finds out about the sabotage, and concludes that group A is planning to start a war, so group B starts preparing for war. Group A interprets group B's preparations as further evidence of group B's aggressive intentions.... At what point does being caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy become a moral failing?
I've tried to avoid partisan language in this essay in order to make it easier for progressives (i.e. most of the people I go to church with) to keep an open mind while reading it. But my intended audience is actually mainly conservatives (e.g. Carl Benjamin) who use the word, "racism", in a casual manner, as if it had a clear, generally agreed-upon meaning. It does not. I'm thinking of a line from Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If":
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools....
There are two particular traps that people of good will need to be careful to avoid. One of these is the fallacy of ambiguity*, in which a word changes meaning in mid argument. For example, one of my Facebook friends described "racism" as something that all white people are born into, essentially an accident of birth, which was explicitly stated to be nothing to be ashamed about. (I think she was following the example of Robin D'Angelo, but I could be mistaken.) But this was in a context in which "racism" was being presented as a grievous moral failing. The challenge here for people of good will is not so much to avoid committing fallacies of ambiguity themselves, but rather to avoid playing into the hands of knaves. I'm trying to make the same point that George Orwell made regarding "fascism":
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
Lacking a satisfactory definition, a "certain amount of circumspection" is also in order when people of good will use the word, "racism". It needs to be tied back to something like the social norms in the American South in the 1950s.
*See also "motte and bailey".
The second trap to avoid is allowing knaves to change the meanings of words that were spoken by other people. The most spectacular example of this that I can think of is getting into an argument with an Objectivist over the word, "selfish". If you use a word whose meaning is under dispute without adequately pinning it down, sophists will deduce that you are bad, evil, and wrong for conveying a meaning that you did not at all intend to convey. Again, the best you can do is to use words like "racism" with circumspection. If you can't define it, at least tie it back to something like the American South in the 1950s.
You can't stop knaves from being knaves, but would you at least try to make them work for it a little bit?
Thank you.
|
(Immigration and Religion, pt. 1) |
|
(a grab-bag of short articles) |