Samizdata

Dale’s posts certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons on the issue of racism. In the comments section, the delighfully named ‘Godless Capitalist’ from the blog Gene Expression has put forward several views that I must take issue with.

Intermarriage amongst races requires no ‘campaign’, it is a spontaneous social fact. The streets of London suggest that anyone who thinks a ‘campaign’ to encourage it is required is not just wrong but profoundly so. Miscegenation is a natural consequence of close proximity unless institutional racism prevents it.

Many years living in the USA (about 1/3^rd of my life) proved to me that significant sections of US society tend to be profoundly racist in ways that have to be experienced by an outsider to be believed. The number of times a black male acquaintance of mine who was attending University in New Jersey was insulted and even assaulted because his girlfriend was white showed me an aspect to US society not many US bloggers like to contemplate.

I do not doubt the factual veracity of the crime figures that Gene Expressions loves to bandy about: I have lived and worked in urban America enough to know the reality. But whilst crime figures prove there are serious problems in Black America, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the causes of those problem. Why look for genetic excuses for what is so obviously a man-made social problem? The historical legacy of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by decades of American socialist ¹ and right-statist distortion of American society, all in ways that could not have been better crafted to produce an unassimilated underclass if they had actually set out to ruin as many people as possible, does not ‘prove’ anything at all about African or Afro-European genes.

I am sure if genetic science existed in immediate aftermath of the Imperial Roman withdrawal from Briton, Roman scientists would have shook their heads and written off the ancient Britons as just genetically inferior to the Romans at sight of social chaos, decaying roads and aqueducts falling into disrepair.

Mexico and Brazil are held up as examples of the fallacy of expecting miscegenation to improve racist attitudes, yet that actually proves nothing universal about anything. A ‘white’ ruling class clinging to the top of a social pyramid, presiding over societies structured to maximize class differences proves… that the people at the top like to stay on the top. This is not exactly a stunning revelation. That attitudes towards race, a visible characteristic, would conflate with the socioeconomic ‘markers’ of a power elite who have a vested interest in differentiation tell us even less about some imagined genetic predisposition of the have-nots.

¹= I refuse to use the term ‘liberal’ regardless of its popularity in the United States, when the actual meaning of the word indicates ‘illiberal’.

It’s time to take the gloves off. Libertarians do not give a damn about “groups” in whatever guise they come or for whatever reason they are posited. I will later join the academic debate on races as defined by clusters of genetic features and the drift of those clusters over time… but not right now. I think it is more important to establish the political and philosophical stand which we as libertarians take.

Individuals matter. Groups do not. Group politics in whatever form it appears is the Tranzi philosophy. If you could absolutely and scientifically prove one group genetically inferior to another you would accomplish nothing except establish that group for eternal victimhood under their philosophy. You succeed in making entire “racial” groups into “the genetically challenged” who then “obviously” must be protected and helped by – you guessed it – government!

The libertarian sees a person, not a member of a group, however scientific that grouping is purported to be. If that individual is a good person and successful at life and acts morally and ethically, then they are praiseworthy. If they do evil things and throw their life away, we don’t excuse them for their past, their origin, race, religion, sex or genetic makeup. Perhaps genetic feature clustering gives an individual a propensity for some particular behavior. Genes are not destiny however, as I’m sure Dr. Richard Dawkins would say.

Personally I find “genetic feature cluster” a much better term than the ill-defined “race”. Race in modern usage is synonymous with skin-colour, which is quite an inaccurate biological definition. Skin colour is merely an outward sign of the expression – or suppression – of one particular set of genes. The classical definition is probably truer to reality. I live amidst the Celtic Race for example. Celts have a unique history and certainly have identifiable genetic differences from the Rus for example. I personally am somewhat mixed but predominately Celt. Not a white (a rather useless term): a Celt.

Someday there will be enough genetic data from sequencing to calculate the true clusterings in gene space. We may at that time find humanity is broken into separate point clouds (races) or is a continuum in which there is no particular boundary, merely a space filling random fuzz. The fact that some features such as skin colour are apparent to our visual apparatus is not of great utility in actually defining the reality of human subspecies.

I believe we will one day find there are indeed definable feature clusters, but in an intermediate between the two extremes; they will be denser knots which either interconnect at their fuzzy outer boundaries or are bridged by weak cluster lines. If we were to find a cluster that is completely isolated, I would consider that strong evidence for a lineage on the way to speciating. Since all humans are mobile and interfertile, I do not believe we will find such a case.

Feature clusters (“races”) are not fixed. They drift, mix, merge and mutate over time. They are not necessarily tied to external features such as skin colour. One cannot possibly declare an Australian Aborigine and a Masai to be of the same race. They are possibly more genetically distant from each other than the Masai is from the Celt. If one wishes to look at genetic diversity within the human gene pool, the largest part of it is in Africa, so it stands to reason a scientific measure of race will find more races on that continent than on all the others put together.

The rates of interracial marriage in America, if extended over a reasonable time frame, say a thousand years, will lead to a unique “American race”. It will not sit at any of the current points in gene space of any of the current “races” It will reside at a unique new spot in that genetic n-space. All now living americans will find some of their genes in that future American gene pool; however some alleles will have outcompeted others and will be dominant. Due to climate, one would expect light skin to have a competitive advantage; other genes from other races will win the top spot for other features.

Of course if we do get a severe climate change, then the dark skin adaptation will win and a completely different set of winning alleles will define the new race.

Please recognize this is a thought experiment. It assumes a stable population more or less cut off from the outside. I believe there will be more, not less, movement of individuals over the next thousand years. I am a technological optimist. I expect us to continue the upwards trend in knowledge and the consequent upward trend in human welfare, income and mobility.

If I were to bet on any long term trend, it is that in ten thousand years the ease of travel will have made earth’s gene pool rather homogeneous and the far colonies in the Oort Cloud will be not only racially different but well down the road to full speciation.

David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky responds briefly to my unbrief piece about John Gray.

As Brian Micklethwait suggests, John Gray is an incorrigible pessimist. That I can understand but it’s no reason to give up the fight for liberty.

First, I don’t suggest that John Gray is a pessimist, I bloody well say it in seventeen foot high flaming capital letters. There’s no suggesting about it.

And second, to repeat the point being made in those seventeen foot high letters, Gray’s pessimism applies to whatever is the dominant optimism. And that’s now us. We used to be pessimistic about Marxism and he agreed with us about that. But he never agreed with us about the wonders of liberty, because he doesn’t believe in the wonders of anything. He’s not giving up the fight for liberty, because he never fought for it in the first place. He merely fought with us, against Marxism. Now, there’s no need for that, because that fight is over. Now we are the enemy, with our absurd enthusiasm for the wonderful things that liberty might do, in a possible wonderful libertarian future. He is, I repeat, being completely consistent.