US president Obama
warned against "a crude sort of nationalism’ taking root." He, like many other
smart and responsible humans, fails to understand human nature. The tendency to prefer
small groups and to protect boundaries that separate our group from others is
an innate feature of humans and is not going to disappear. Obama stated:“We are
going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism, or ethnic
identity or tribalism that is built around an us and a them, and I will never
apologize for saying that the future of humanity and the future of the world is
doing to be defined by what we have in common, as opposed to those things that
separate us and ultimately lead us into conflict.” The beginning of his big
mistake is the suggestion that ethnic identity and tribalism are recent constructs,
add-ons that can be changed. Ethnic identity and tribalism are innate and
create societies rather than the society creates ethnic identity and tribalism. I review the basic truths in my book Human
Nature:
Selection,
Discrimination
The fantasy of egalitarian democracy is out of step with nature and the
reality of human behavior. We have
recognized that group membership is all important to humans. You recognize
familiar humans who speak and act like yourself as members of your group. In a crowd you notice humans who display small
differences in speech, costume and behavior. Most often these small differences
are the basis for shunning or ignoring the “strange” humans. In the most rigid
groups, everyone wears the same costume, repeats the same polite language, with
the same intonation and behaves in a predictable, ritualistic manner.
We have recognized that racial and ethnic boundaries exist but obvious
boundaries are not required for discrimination. The ideal of an egalitarian
society is to recognize the merit of individuals; to allow social mobility
based on learning and achievement; and to
protect individual expressions by social policy and law, but human nature does not change. Group
preferences and boundaries that separate groups can always be identified.
Every group, large or small, invents selection processes to sort humans by age, gender,
appearance, ancestry, intelligence, aptitudes, skills, accomplishment and other
variables. You can invent rules against sorting, but selection will continue because it is natural and important. In every
human life, every day, a selection
process is at work. Discrimination refers to noticing differences and making
choices based on evaluating differences. One of the trends in neuroscience
involves understanding how decisions are made. You could argue that
detecting and responding to differences is a
universal strategy in animal brains. Humans are good at detecting differences and
make millisecond decisions that have a lasting influence on their subsequent decision-making procedures. The kind and degree
of difference is always in flux and depends on prior learning, context and social status.
Discrimination is a deeply embedded
property of the human mind that is expressed in almost every human behavior we
might consider. However, discrimination as a popular topic is often a
misinterpretation of the normal activity of noticing and acting on differences.
In popular debates, discrimination is treated as an aberration. Terms that end
in “ism” and “ist” are often used to describe discriminating people in a derogatory
manner. Thus anyone with a different
ancestry who disagrees with you becomes a racist. This is not to argue that noticing differences
is always positive. It is to argue that
humans base a lot of their decisions on noticing differences. In a positive
mode, the description “a discriminating shopper” identifies human who notices
differences in design and quality of manufacture, choosing high-quality products rather than cheap ones.
Every creature who is hatched or born on planet earth faces
a series of tough tests to find out if he or she has the right stuff to
survive. Nature is not kind to individuals who do not make the grade. Animal
populations consist of healthy, smart members because everyone else died or was
eaten.
Humans have an
unusual ability to protect their young, sick and disabled members so that
strong, healthy members increasingly devote more of their time, money and
energy helping the less fortunate. This altruistic option in human groups, however, does not
alter the tough and persistent competition among humans for resources, mates,
money, prestige and security. In every aspect of human life, there is a
selection process operating. The selection of members for special status or privilege
involves tests to find out who has the right stuff. Humans are constantly
evaluating each other. Humans quickly notice differences in appearance and behavior, automatically
sorting the people they meet into convenient categories. Humans respond strongly to physical
characteristics and react negatively to others who differ in appearance, size,
shape sex or color.
Humans are built to respond differently to different
characteristics. This discriminatory
tendency is innate, not a matter of choice or learning. The details may be
learned but the tendency is innate and is not going to disappear. There is an
odd discrepancy between the realities of rigorous, persistent selection
processes in nature and the pretense that everyone has the same ability and
should have the same opportunity to succeed at any endeavor they fancy. The
Miss America pageant is not egalitarian and only one young beauty is selected from
thousands of beautiful young woman who enter beauty contests in their own
states. The athletes who compete in Olympic Games are selected from a large
population of athletes in the home countries. These highly selected individuals
from over 200 countries compete to discover who is best in the world. Only one
in each sport will win a gold medal. The selection of one from many is basic to
human society. Many-to-one is the rule of hierarchy and every society generates a hierarchal
distribution of rights and privileges, even societies based on the principle of
equal opportunity for all.
The term Homophily describes the tendency of humans to
associate with others similar to themselves. The preference bias is innate but
its expression is influenced by many variables such as ethnic origins, age,
gender, level of education and by exposures to others with different
backgrounds. Currarinia et al found, for example, that in American high schools:
"Asians exhibit the least preference bias, valuing friendships with other
types as much as friendships with Asians, whereas Blacks and Hispanics value
friendships with other types 55% and 65% as much as same-type friendships,
respectively, and Whites fall in between, valuing other-type friendships 75% as
much as friendships with Whites. Meetings are significantly more biased in
large schools (>1,000 students) than in small schools (<1,000 students),
and biases in preferences exhibit some significant variation with the median
household income levels in the counties surrounding the schools."[i]
An ideal civil society attempts to reduce negative discrimination,
struggling against the innate tendency. The idealists who seek a permanent
solution for discrimination will be disappointed. Racial and ethnic boundaries, at least in the ideal model,
are undesirable and are suppressed by social policy, law and the good will of
citizens. All societal constructs are ephemeral and only change local
circumstances briefly. We would like to believe that in Canada selection
processes employed in business and education are fair and not discriminatory.
There is an important distinction between discrimination before the fact of performance and after the
fact of performance.
If an individual is judged before he or she has a chance to
take the test - that is unfair. If discrimination occurs after the tests based
on performance measurements, then that is fair and necessary for a society to operate.
The third possibility is that the test is unfair. Many
debates arise when the fairness and appropriateness of tests is questioned. Schools generally have
established tests and standards that sort students by intelligence, aptitude and accomplishment. IQ tests sort
student by sampling their mental skills, which means sampling aspects of their
brain function with specific tests of cognitive ability.
Well-educated humans know about the distribution of
qualities, characteristics, goods and privileges in human populations. Biologists understand that the distribution
of observable characteristic follows the
distribution of genes in a population. A "normal distribution” is a bell-shaped
curve, with most scores in the middle range and a few at each end, or "tail,"
of the distribution. A standard deviation is a measure of distance from the mean or
average value; one standard deviation below the mean is at the 16th percentile;
one standard deviation above the mean is at the 84th percentile-- this is a big
difference. Two standard deviations from the mean mark the 2nd and 98th
percentiles (a bigger difference). Three standard deviations from the mean mark
the bottom and top thousandth of a distribution. In medicine, the distribution concept
is valuable and is used in daily practice to evaluate test results and to make
prognostications.
The main idea is that all human characteristics are
distributed and, no matter what human feature you are considering, you will
find some individuals with more and some with less. In medicine, two standard
deviations from the mean on a test result is described as "normal" on
the assumption that 98% of the population cannot be abnormal. This assumption is often reasonable, but may
be misleading if the distribution of a characteristic is skewed in a given
population.
From Human Nature by Stephen Gislason
[i]
Sergio Currarinia, Matthew O. Jackson, and Paolo Pind. Identifying the roles of
race-based choice and chance in high school friendship network formation. PNAS
March 16, 2010 vol. 107 no. 11 4857-4861