That was my reference. Except, it wasn’t tribes within an ethnic group, but a collision of two different groups.
The Muslim religion may have united Arab tribal groups. But when they expanded to the point of colliding with European ethnic groups, I expect the wars had significant racial components.
I think some of it is that “tribalism” in a modern sense is used whenever a group of people doesn’t recognize our fundamentally shared humanity. I agree that religion today, and historically too, was a conceptual tool that people used to do that.
But the more literal, historical tribalism was opposed by at least some of these religions.
I do think this idea of skin color being associated with tribalism is new though. The racial groups that formed the basis of 20th century racism underlying nazism, for example, were effectively invented after the fact as those groups became christian. Before then, they would not have thought of themselves as “saxons”, let alone “white”. they belonged to whatever chief and family they belonged to.
It’s not. The caste system in India is thousands of years old.
In that post, i was speaking more of western europe.
I don’t know much about the caste system. A quick wikipedia read claims the current version of it heavily depend on the former british occupation, implying a post racial western influence, so if it has a racial component now, it may be new.
I am suspicious that it has historically depended on “race” as we conceive it. It seems to be much more complicated than that. As an analogy, Western europe certainly had classes that depend on bloodlines, but are not racial. But i admit that i don’t know that much about it.
I don’t know if “racial” is the right word, but the higher castes had lighter skin than the lower castes. (I say “had” because it’s no longer an official legal thing, but Indians are certainly still aware of castes even if it no longer affects eligibility for jobs and who you’re legally allowed to marry. The prejudices are often still there… especially for someone “marrying down”.)
This source certainly makes it sound like the race component pre-dates British involvement.
This source says
So no, I don’t think the British introduced the idea of division by skin color to Indians. There’s little doubt they made things worse though… I’m not disputing that part at all.
I think that skin color (or eye shape, or hair color, or any other physical feature) was associated with “these others aren’t as good as us” as soon as the first group with one set of characteristics bumped into another with a different set.
That didn’t happen immediately as humans were too closely interrelated for near tribes to have noticeably different characteristics. Though, there were probably non-sapien hominids around that humans collided with. If they were in the same ecological niche, I expect the sapiens tried to kill them off – not a global genocide, but simply to establish their own local territories.
It took a while for humans to spread out, develop different physical characteristics, then travel enough to collide again. But, that happened many times before modern Europe. I gave you an example in Ireland, I believe that’s typical of all of Europe.
In more recent times, I’ll bet the Mongols looked at all these other people they were conquering and believed their superior “blood” made them the natural rulers of all these lesser people. I think that is a common as human way/conquest. Or, what about the attitudes of Japanese to Koreans?
If we define the word “racism” as a system of beliefs invented by Europeans in the 18th century, then “only Europeans are racist” looks like a tautology. If we define it as any group believing that the physical differences between our side and the other reflect inherited character and capability differences that result in our side being superior, than I think its got a long and broad history.
I agree with most of this. We have finite minds, and stereotyping is a necessary for us to process i formation. Physical appearance will naturally inform that stereotyping.
But i think racism is different. In racism, that one aspect of stereotyping is reified, ie given a reality it doesn’t deserve.
Compare your example of the mongols, or perhaps twig’s example of the aryans invading india: i’m not sure it’s so different from the Normans invading england in 1066, and setting up their own ruling class. I’m sure skin color, etc, will become one, accidental way to identify the ruling class from the subjugated one.
Compare this, though, to galton’s (original, racist, incorrect) regression of the mean, in which every individual’s descendants were biologically doomed to “revert” to their racial mean, with some races inferior to others. Race becomes at the center of it all, meaning it is the justification for why the ruling class rules. I believe it’s different in kind from your example. It’s true racism, as opposed to a stereotype to identify a class that gains its right to rule from many different foundations.
Yep. That goes on automatically in the “fast thinking” part of our brains according to Kahneman. I think we’re all prone to that kind of bias.
If “true racism” is a formal psuedo science, then most people that I’d colloquially call “racists” aren’t true racists. I think most of them simply stereotype. They don’t know a lot of people of the other race personally. They are quick to hasty generalizations. Their genes gave them a deeply seated suspicion of any Others. Physical differences can be so striking we can’t miss them. A few photos on TV of criminals and pretty quickly every black male is a likely felon. Or, in other circumstances, every Asian male is a nerdy tech guy and every Hispanic male is a hard working field hand. And, if I’m Black, I might decide that all white people are racists, especially if my teacher read me a book about white racists when I was four.
But, of course, stereotyping is a Bad Thing whatever the source or however we name it.
I agree with this, with some caveats. I do not think there is firm boundary between what Kahneman calls “fast” and “slow” thinking. And I do not think that “fast thinking” is inherently biased in the ordinary meaning of the word, ie prejudiced. I think it is biased in the technical, statistical sense, meaning it favors bias in the bias-variance tradeoff.
I think the difference between them and, say, our medieval Mongols is that they live in a culture in which is influenced by the more formal concept of racism that I mentioned earlier. So having a “black face” becomes “Black” in a way that it’s not obvious to me could happen with our Mongols. We also have a society that historically was established with power imbalances due to the influence of these formal racist concepts, and arguably structures in that society amplify these stereotypes to continue supporting those imbalances. I do see racism as historically conditioned, in other words as an historical event(s) rather than abstract tendencies that all people have always carried with them.
Probably controversially, I disagree with this statement. I think that stereotyping (in the technical sense of the word, not the ordinary sense) is a strategy for making quick decisions with limited information, as we are often forced to do. We can, and do, create societies in which the use of that strategy is amplified into unjust treatment for people. Then it is the system that is unjust, not the strategy itself.
I think the trap of thinking all stereotyping (in the technical sense) is wrong is that it passes moral judgement on our finitude. The only way to be moral is to have the time and intelligence make some kind of perfect judgment, which in practice none of us do at least most of the time. It has echos of Gnosticism, in which only an intellectual elite are saved from evil matter authored by a corrupt creator god. This is the trap of Kahneman’s fast- and slow-thinking, too. We see this in these claims that we are how somehow morally guilty for our “implicit bias”, meaning our unconscious judgements, instead of how we create systems that allow people to be hurt by those judgements.
Agreed, but stereotyping is not supposed to be the end of the info gathering. Unfortunately, it is for too many people, to the harm of others.
Exactly. The trick is to use stereotyping to decide who to pull over, but you search their car FIRST before arresting them.
Reviewing what stereotypes are again, there are probably some definitions of stereotypes that i’m less comfortable seeing in a neutral light. I do think we will always have to make quick judgements about each other that have “bias” to them, and that is not an inherently immoral thing to do.
You’re correct, my universal statement about stereotyping is wrong. (I should know enough to watch universal statements.) Yep, we make “most likely” guesses very rapidly, about lots of things, and that’s very useful. Kahnamen says that “experts” are people who have so much experience that their fast brains kick out best guesses on questions like “what might be causing these symptoms”. Seems like a good thing.
I think if we could look at cultures that collide with others, and one gains the upper hand, they develop rationalizations and structures to support the power imbalance. The exact details will never be the same, but the “we rule because we are inherently superior” rationalization is always handy. If we got into those cultures, their racism would be “historically conditioned” and supported by by structures that amplify this bias just like ours.
I don’t recall Kahneman making moral judgements on our fast brains. The morality is what you do with your inherent distrust of the others. That’s where the slow brain can, with effort, decide to ignore the quick judgement.
The book sets up a racial judgement. It says racism is “unfair”, “hurts”, and is “not right”, all Bad Things. And, the only people in the book who are racists are white people. So, five year-olds are set up to believe that white people are bad people because they are racist, probably something inherent because that’s how our brains work.
For older kids, you can tell a more complex story. “Some have done …”, but “Others have done …”. At this age, just drop the word “white” and go with treating people differently based on skin color is wrong.
There is nothing new with respect to humanity. Everything that is now has been before. We gradually get better, but we retain some of our base instincts. Our base instincts are simply justifications for selfish pursuits because we think we shouldn’t be selfish. Tribalism is and will always be part of human nature. The only thing that has surprised me the last few years is not the amount of tribal behavior people exhibit, but that people are so surprised by it or that people think it’s some new problem that didn’t exist before.
I agree with this. But I think there are two potential problems with emphasizing this too much as some kind of universal tendency of people.
The first is that it ignores the historically unique aspects to racism, which are potentially important to stopping it. With racism, there isn’t an appeal to karma, or a mandate of heaven, or right of kings, or whatever. There is an appeal to this constructed biological concept of “race”.
The second is that it risks losing the fact that racism was an historical choice the West made. It was an act of will, not just an inevitable consequence of human nature. On the other hand, as you point out, the powerful always look for justification for their power.
At one point, Niebuhr writes about how we are all sinners, but our guilt is not equal. History allows some of us to be more guilty than others. We have to not let the universal tendency of the powerful throughout all societies to sin overpower our ability to understand the historical guilt of racism. On the other hand, the historically unique guilt of racism does not mean the West uniquely sins.
I agree that Kahneman doesn’t make a moral judgement, which I wasn’t clear about in my post. But he does judge. The “slow brain”, and the more sophisticated risk analysis it can do, which presumably some kind of Bayesian decision theory, or utility theory, etc., is held up as the ideal or norm to which we should strive. The “fast thinking” then is fundamentally flawed.
I find Kahneman himself to be delightfully anti-elite. He clearly enjoys declaring that the rich, powerful, and brilliant make the same mistakes as all the rest of us with their “slow” thinking.
However, it is a very small step from identifying the “fast thinking” as being statistically inferior to being morally inferior too.
Alternatively, it is easy for this to turn into the technocratic paternalism shown in a book like “Nudge”, which finds that we need systems to manipulate people into making the “right” decision with their fast thinking. There is some truth in that, but it is easy for it to go too far, in my opinion.
I was not saying that tribalism is new. As you point out, it is very old.
We don’t have any literal tribalism anymore that I know about, at least not in the US (except maybe some native american groups?). We do have in-groups and out-groups, in which we sometimes minimize the humanity of the out groups, and this is called “tribalism” in analogy with the literal, historical tribalism.
What I meant was that what is new (relatively, like since the enlightenment, say) is the creation of the “in-group” and “out-group” based on this construction called “race” that is thought to be based in biology.
Another day in America making it clear that racism coming from white people is a serious that needs to be dealt with and cannot be ignored.
I am sorry if CRT hurts your feelings because it exposes the many lies of your indoctrinated “American Exceptionalism.”
You want to use the word “racism” to apply to only one, unique case. I see a general pattern where many times in history, humans rationalized their mistreatment of genetically different people by claims of superior “blood” or “god’s favor on my ethnic group” or “true religion”, or whatever.
I guess I don’t care about the words. Claims of genetic superiority are Bad Things. I can see why our genes push us in that direction, understand the historic survival advantages of classifying the world into my good group vs. the other dangerous groups, and at the same time know that there are multiple places where our genes push us one way but we will have better lives if we push back against them.
Yes, I think. Saying that genes play an important role in this behavior, and other humans have done it before, doesn’t excuse it. If anything we have better history and wider knowledge and a longer record of moral philosophy so we should be more able to resist the others.
The “Great Replacement” theory sadly has many followers here and in Europe.
I was joking there… I agree with you that we sometimes go too far in trying to overcome our own racism. Some level of racial bias is rational. It may be wrong to act on it, or talk about it, but it’s not worth feeling guilty over a fleeting notion that “black people be like ____”. At that level, racism is not different from other statistics, or intuitions, or gut feelings we make.
The reality could very well be that a cop can increase his chance of catching a criminal by pulling over black people. Of course it is up to him-- and the system-- to not do that.
I do kind of wish our educational system had a good way of talking about how race (and other tribalisms) makes so many people act absolutely nutso.