A Letter from a Grandfather to his Genes

Anthony Hilton

Explanation

These thoughts on “nationalism” were put on paper for the benefit of several young relatives who have misunderstood or been puzzled by my position on certain family and political issues.* Arguing about individual bits of a puzzle without an overall framework has been a waste of time and emotion. So I’ve tried to give, first, a brief overview or “manifesto,” followed by several specific explanations.¹ Perhaps these considerations will help others faced with critics unfamiliar with the biology of human nature.

Here’s a thought: You either like your own people or you don’t. If you don’t, well, too bad, and we’ll get back to you in a minute. But if you do like your own people—that is, your own children, family, extended family, clan, tribe, or ethnic group, hereinafter called your “ethny” or nation (and we’ll get back to these words, in a minute, too)—this memorandum offers some considerations concerning life on this planet that today, oddly, many people and conventional wisdom seem to ignore.² You may also appreciate the fact that our planet contains many other cultures and ethnies/nations, whose continued existence you might also be in favor of in accordance with today’s quasi-ideology of “bio-diversity.” That is, if you claim to love and respect other cultures, races, or ethnies as well as your own, you would do nothing to destroy or unduly change them. You would then be a “universal nationalist.”³

Most people ought to be able to answer quite easily, when asked, "Yes, I would like to see my own people and culture continue to exist, not disappear," or else, “No, my people and culture are not worth saving—I couldn’t care less if they vanished from the face of the earth." To favor the continuation (the non-disappearance) of one's people does not mean that one wouldn't like to see improvements in flawed individuals (and who doesn’t have a few flaws?) or find some way of keeping flawed individuals from sabotaging the cause. One might like to see improvements in certain cultural details or personality traits common in one’s group, or the eugenic elimination of nasty genes wherever feasible. But such improvements would not be intended to remove either the major cultural traits or the vast majority of the characteristic genes that one's people carry around and reproduce each generation.

Now then, if (and only if) you do not want your people to disappear, wouldn’t you necessarily have to favor the following policies?

First, you would favor a protective/defensive "nationalism" in regard to your own extended family and ethny. This need not be to the exclusion of commerce and other valuable reciprocal relationships with other families, other peoples, other ethnies. There is no good reason why your nationalism can’t be thoroughly compatible with other nationalisms and even synergistic with them—at least, or especially, if there is provision for some sort of regulatory-adjudicative body and police force to prevent any one ethny from being unduly predatory and pounding the stuffing out of its neighbors.⁴ Predation was not always irrational, as long as the odds were good that your side would win out and claim all the booty. But predators have to worry about their victims taking revenge (as in “terrorism”). No one likes to be the loser in a war, and in today’s wars often everyone is the loser, not least because wars pollute and interfere with depolluting the planet.  Genocide, the slaughter of an ethny in its entirety, or its complete assimilation into another ethny, is analogous to the extinction of any species of plant or animal.⁵ Just as “biodiversity” is regarded as potentially beneficial across the animal and plant kingdoms, so, arguably, is human diversity in particular. One never knows when or how another culture or ethny may turn out to benefit one’s own, but if they go extinct, they are lost forever. Maybe there are some cultures that you detest, but maybe you should hold your nose and hope that they survive, too—someplace.

Second, you would want at least one territory, including a homeland, for your own people and culture as the easiest, most practical way to protect your ethny from being swamped by other ethnies.⁶ With a territory for every ethny, each is then responsible for not overloading its carrying capacity. The territory need not be large, e.g., a Swiss canton. Most of today’s cities contain micro ethnic enclaves (however vulnerable to invasion) along with areas that are heterogeneous.

Third, you would want at most a very modest amount of immigration into your territory, along with tourism, to provide exposure to alternative and possibly better cultural ways, without being forced to adopt them. Guest workers can provide extra labor when needed. Notice that most people can’t get past an all-or-nothing statement of the issue: You either allow immigration or you don’t; they can’t think in terms of “a little, but not a lot.”

Fourth, at most a very modest amount of intermarriage with other ethnies to counter the genetic effects of too much inbreeding, or to achieve other eugenic goals, e.g., to have smarter kids.

Fifth, you would need some sort of group structure or community (with rules, customs, laws, etc.) designed to help achieve the above goals.

Sixth, group structure and community would, for many people, be handicapped without a full embrace of the spiritual world, which, in essence, seems to be a conscious and unconscious acceptance of and celebration of the “sacred,” i.e., of the extreme importance of certain aspects of our lives, both social and physical, and a devotion to the quest for paradise in this best of all possible worlds. Nowadays, of course, any spiritual or religious dogma that is contrary to the findings of modern science, typified by the antipathy of some Christian and Muslim doctrines to the idea of biological (Darwinian) evolution, will likely alienate the most talented of one’s people. This antipathy has obscured what is surely the most sacred priority imaginable, the survival on this planet of one’s people, however defined: one’s “sacred nation.” What is sacred is essentially what is vitally important. Rituals that are sacred are those that surround important milestones in life (birth, marriage, death, etc.) and that promote successful negotiation through these stages of life.

There are people who are nationalistic without calling themselves “religious,” but to exclude the spiritual is to ignore the enormous fulfillment which a focus on the spiritual can provide for many people in matters of success, love, tragedy, and death, and in encouraging a healthy and cohesive community. A major problem historically has been that so much that characterizes well-known religions seems contrary to common sense, irrational or silly (some concepts of the hereafter), maladaptive  (the “promiscuous” altruismof some Christians), hypocritical (“Onward Christian Soldiers”), unnecessarily hazardous to outsiders (Zionists, Crusaders, Taliban), and therefore unnecessarily alienating.⁷   For many of us, they also originated in foreign lands, in people and cultures that lived in different times, ecologies, and circumstances.  Surely all this can be improved upon.

An incidental note: To say that you favor the above policies doesn't necessarily imply anything about what you are personally prepared to do about them, only that you would necessarily favor them if you want your people to be protected. E.g., you might be too busy, distracted, discouraged, or lazy to do much about them. Maybe you’re so far along in your life that you can only hope others will do the job. Encourage them.

So, in brief, that's all there is to it. However, thanks to a half century or so of massive ideological campaigns against the relevance of biology for human social relations, any defender or critic of nationalism should become familiar with a few essential understandings. Perhaps the following will help.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Addressed in detail are some of the more frequently asked pertinent questions:

1. What is meant by our own people?
2. What is biological kinship all about? Why is it such a strong glue?
3. Why aren’t the nearly 100 percent of our genes that everyone shares more important than those few that vary?
4. Why is kinship “relative”?
5. Doesn’t nationalism promote wars between ethnies?
6. How do we reach reciprocity from “might-makes-right”?
7. Doesn’t nationalism inspire a feeling of superiority that is used to justify dominating other ethnies?
8. What is the relationship between reciprocity and kinship?
9. Why would anyone doubt the relationship of family or extended family to ethnicity and nation?
10. Why aren’t cultural differences the reason for nationalism?
11. Doesn’t the success of multiculturalism show that having the same ancestry is not necessary for a harmonious society as long as people speak a common language?
12. Why isn’t everyone nationalistic?
13. How do you explain the fact that a major football rivalry for Tunisia seems to be with another North African country, Morocco, rather than with countries that are much more distantly related?
14. What’s wrong with interracial marriage?
15. How do you decide how much immigration to have?
16. How can a small territory (enclave, ghetto, neighborhood) control immigration?
17. What do you mean by group structure?
18. Should everyone be a nationalialist?

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1. What is meant by our own people?

This can vary all over the lot. Situations differ in how salient they make certain degrees of closeness among kin. A holiday may focus our minds on immediate family, while a family reunion could bring together a vast collection of people with the same name. A war can make us concerned for our whole ethny or nation (e.g., Irish Catholics or Serbs or Jews) as it is aligned against an enemy nation.⁸ Note that we often belong to associations such as a flying club, or a labor union, or to a management team. But we’re mostly concerned here with groupings that are based on some degree of biological kinship, which seems to be an especially powerful glue for group formation, rather than common economic or other interests. American workers tend to resent their jobs being outsourced to “fellow” workers in Southeast Asia or to illegal immigrants: Where is the worker solidarity there?

2. What is biological kinship all about? Why is it such a strong glue?

Most people around the world understand something about the importance of “blood,” or family, as a primary source of help, backup, love, and social cohesion ,.⁹ a fundamental basis for sociality. Several sharp minds managed to convince many gullible minds to the contrary, during the twentieth century, but fortunately their forces seem now to be in retreat.

Common sense tells us that a first and very natural impulse for most of us (with due allowance for abnormal individuals or situations) is the promotion of our own lives and self-defense. Thanks however to important insights by biologists (see, e.g., Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, for an introduction), it is now clear that we share our genes (the all-important DNA strands that are blueprints for proteins out of which human beings are constructed) with kin.¹⁰ (Note: We are talking about only those distinctive genes [“alleles”] that can vary across humans, not the vast number—well over 90 percent of our genes—that all of us have in common.)  If the recent insights are correct, the ultimate meaning of life, and the raison d’être for any altruism and social cohesion at all, is the promotion of our distinctive genes along with the others. The way DNA gets perpetuated is by building a body that looks and acts in ways that lead to reproduction of those same strands of DNA molecules. No reproduction, no more DNA. Thus one way of promoting this reproduction is by helping our kin as well as ourselves. One sees this dramatically in the ultra-cooperation between identical twins—who share all their genes with each other.¹¹ It can also be seen in the considerable social cohesion exhibited by small, ethnically homogeneous societies such as exist in Iceland. Given their degree of within-island, yet non-incestuous, marriage, the average Icelander has the equivalent of over a thousand siblings in the community, if one considers that she will likely share at least a few of the Icelandically distinctive genes with each of the several hundred thousand people in Iceland. Add them all up—that is, across all the individuals with whom she shares at least one—and it makes perfect sense that Icelanders should be cohesive: helping other Icelanders would be like helping all those virtual siblings.¹² Genetic commonality means a certain amount of commonality of interest. Common interest is a basis for trust, since insofar as people want the same thing for each other, they are unlikely to betray each other.

3. Why aren’t the nearly 100 percent of our genes that everyone shares more important than those few that vary?

Indeed, around 99.9 percent of all the genes that a human being carries can be found in all other humans, and 98 percent in chimpanzees. Similar percentages of shared genes are found in most other animal species.¹³ So obviously it’s the tiny handful of remaining genes (perhaps 30 or so out of 30,000), each of which can have different versions (alleles), that cause people, primates, and other animals to differ from each other. It is those genes that can and do differ which are the basis for an increase in altruism as biological relatedness increases. Perhaps this is the basis for the oft-repeated phrase from Freud, the “narcissism of small differences.”

Suppose that a mutation (a new allele) happens to be useful. It makes sense (from the point of view of the whole package of genes that the mutation is immersed within) that there be some way to keep it from being lost to posterity. How? Well, surely not by worrying solely about the 99.9 percent of genes all humans share. No, you have to give proper attention to that new allele. The person carrying it has to reproduce it by making babies with his or her spouse. And while some animals can just walk away at this point, leaving offspring to their own devices, humans take care of their kids, e.g., that child now carrying the good mutation. That mutation might be one that encourages a parent to take better care of her child—who may, in turn, be carrying the same good mutation. That’s the feedback loop enabling altruism in the first place.

All this requires being able to recognize one’s kids. How? There are many possible ways: Look at whose body they came out of and who had sex with the mother, or physical resemblance, or what people say about the child’s ancestry, etc. Some of these clues are more reliable than others hence the attention to “small differences.” Then the parents have to be motivated to take care of their child—who is carrying half of each parent’s genes (since mammals undergo sexual and not asexual reproduction, or cloning). For all of this to happen reliably, via accurate detection of whose child is whose, plus a desire to take care of one’s own child (rather than any child or any object in the neighborhood), there have to be genes which program us to do the right thing. Notice that if one had a desire to take care of someone else’s child rather than one’s own, that would be the end of one’s own genes—including that lovely mutation. One doesn’t have to know about genes, but one has to have the right genes in order to do the right thing for this object (child) that came out of the mother’s body and the father’s sperm. Other objects come out of our body that we certainly do not take care of (no offense intended). So what’s the difference? Genes. Genes that program the “instincts” which enable us to identify and take care of our children properly (along with what we’ve learned from our parents). And since our children have inherited those genes, 50 percent of them in each child, the genes will be self-perpetuating. Get rid of those genes for “caring-for-own-kids” and the self-perpetuation evaporates.

Now then, if that logic works so well for one’s own children, couldn’t it work, in principle at least, in regard to individuals who didn’t come out of our own bodies but who nevertheless are carrying many of our genes because we have ancestors in common that came out of the same bodies? Providing, that is, that we can identify them and then want to promote their survival and reproductive careers. Apparently we have such propensities. And that must be the basis for whatever extra cohesion we find among extended relatives compared to nonrelatives. How do you feel about your own brothers and sisters? Your nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, cousins? Some people find themselves alienated from even their closest relatives, but that is usually because of something extremely unpleasant that happened (e.g., excessive sibling rivalry). Were it not for that unfortunate matter, surely they would not be so seemingly indifferent to them. Notice what transpires when long lost relatives suddenly find each other after decades of separation due to war, adoption, or exile. Very touching, no? All because they share genes. What alternative is there? Remember, if genes were not running the show, you wouldn’t likely have the same show repeated across every other culture. Rather, just by chance you would expect a few different shows: such as cultures in which people routinely prefer non-kin and foreigners to their own kin, where they routinely prefer to raise other ethnies’ children and give their own away to foreigners (if they have them at all). But think natural selection: Whose kids, on average, are most likely to be best off and most likely to reproduce?

Frank Salter, whose book on nationalism is strongly recommended here (but see footnote 16 regarding a terminological confusion), uses the phrase “genetic interests” in conceptualizing the relationship between genes and their reproduction.¹⁴ He doesn’t mean that genes or most animals carrying genes are capable of imagining their genes’ interests, even if they act as if they could. Genes just program their carriers to act that way. Such interests are more analogous to financial interests a person might have without being aware of them, an educational fund, say, that one day a child will inherit. A rock doesn’t have an interest one way or another in remaining intact or in becoming crushed rock. But that’s because it lacks any semblance of a process dedicated to even self-interest, never mind reproduction.

It’s an empirical question how and if a human being will go about promoting his genetic interests. Just because an Icelander’s genes are heavily represented in other Icelanders and, metaphorically, have an interest in being reproduced, does not mean that they, their carrier, or anyone else will have the necessary psychological motive for, or psychological interest in, reproducing them. He might or he might not. Is there any point in saying to a reluctant Icelander, “Hey, your genes have an interest in getting reproduced, so get busy and do the right thing”? It might be worth bringing up the subject in case he had the right motives but had merely been distracted, or didn’t realize he had so many virtual brothers on the island. (Incidentally, Salter, citing recent DNA data, is confident that Europeans in general are much more closely related to each other than heretofore imagined, thanks to the small size of their early prehistoric breeding pool following initial migrations to Europe. Imagine the thousands of present-day Icelanders growing to a hundred million or so. If additional immigration were restrained, they would find themselves with millions of virtual siblings.)¹⁵ However, if our Icelander friend is not at all interested in those previously unimagined relatives, there may not be any point in haranguing him.  If he were nationalistic, though, the fact that his genes are scattered among other Icelanders would make it all understandable; that is i.e., it would make sense that he had an evolved mechanism for acting as if he knew that they, too, were carriers of his own genes—just as a mother bird acts as if she knew that her eggs carried her genes. Look at a bird for the first time, and for all you know she may be a one-off creature that just came into the world and is unique. But if she has eggs and takes care of them and if you know all about DNA and genes, you say to yourself, Aha! She very likely has some sort of built-in, preprogrammed brain mechanisms for getting her to do all that—sitting on eggs, feeding chicks after they hatch, etc. So now when we see Icelanders or the Irish acting nationalistically, we know about the genes they share, and so it makes sense to us that they should be nationalistic—rather than, say, run off en masse to volunteer to be slaves for Africans. A few Irish are not at all nationalistic, but there are probably a few birds now and then that don’t sit on their eggs properly. No machinery is totally impervious to malfunction. And the many interesting things to do in life and the many wonderful people in other cultures easily distract humans. One could distract a bird from sitting on her eggs.

4. Why is kinship “relative”?

If the above account of kinship is true, it means that whom we consider to be “our people” will normally depend on whom we actually are most closely related to and on our ability to reliably detect who those relatives are. But “most closely” is a relative concept. How close is “close” depends on whom we are comparing, which often means whom we are competing with. Compared to chimpanzees, Africans are “closer” to Icelanders. Compared to Africans, Swedes are closer to Icelanders. Compared to Swedes, other Icelanders are closer. Our identical twin is closer than our ordinary sibling. So there are no absolutes here. But the logic implies obvious priorities. Whom we consider “our people” and ally ourselves with in a crunch will follow that logic, other things being equal. It will depend on context and on whom, if anyone, we find ourselves competing against.¹⁶

As a practical matter, the idea of ethnic relativity may have something to do with the notion of “subsidiarity” discussed frequently by Europeans (especially the British, and especially the British magazine The Economist) in connection with the European Union. This is the idea that all problems in life should be dealt with initially at the lowest possible political level (family, or neighborhood, or municipality, etc.), and that only if insoluble at that level should it be moved to the next higher level, and finally even to Brussels and the European Union—or to the United Nations.  Subsidiarity would seem to follow a general logic of human concern. The first interest of any human is normally his own welfare and future, followed by his family and up through his extended family and ethny, extending eventually to all human beings and finally to the continued existence of life in general on the planet. At the higher levels of subsidiarity, we find a universal nationalist’s respect for ethnic and cultural diversity—in contrast to homogenizing globalization.

5. Doesn’t nationalism promote wars between ethnies?

Of course. Not a problem if you love the excitement and fulfillment of warfare, and the booty.¹⁷ But suppose you aren’t a war lover? Then go for the “reciprocity” mentioned earlier. And yes, there is a biological underpinning to it all. If that draws a blank, here’s a brief intro.¹⁸

Genes can be promoted not only by squashing your competitors but also by mutual aid arrangements—between individuals who don’t necessarily share any genes at all. Think of bees pollinating flowers and getting nectar in return; or the tiny fish that nourish themselves by helpfully cleaning the teeth and gills of very large fish in coastal waters.¹⁹ The only way these mutually beneficial arrangements can work, long term, is by ensuring that it’s a two-way street. It can work between nearly any organisms if their mutual benefit is simultaneous, so that if either one ceases to benefit, the other automatically gets cut off, too, and so neither can exploit the other. But humans are capable of reciprocity over time. You help me today and I will, in return, help you tomorrow, thanks to our big brains that can minimize exploitation. It’s division of labor, the economists’ “law of comparative advantage,” It may account for an enormous amount of human sociality, including warm friendships across ethnic and racial lines as well as more prosaic sorts of trade and commerce.²⁰ Some people’s careers make them exceptionally prone to this type of interethnic relation, e.g., academics, political and professional elites; those involved in trade and the transport of goods and people between countries, etc. 

Much of our emotional make-up (genetically evolved machinery in the brain) is thought to be devoted to monitoring and regulating these reciprocities.²¹ Feelings of friendship, attachment, obligation, or guilt toward nonrelatives exist because they provide emotional incentives that promote beneficial reciprocity. The outrage felt when we are cheated motivates us to stop giving anything to those who don’t reciprocate. Vengeful feelings motivate us to punish those who cheat on us or betray us. Specialized cognitive systems serve us in detecting cheaters.²² Since all humans seem to be prone to self-interested bias, cheating requires constant management. Reciprocity may have originated in relations with relatively close kin, gradually becoming extended to genetically more and more distant humans as natural selection rewarded such commerce.

6. How do we reach reciprocity from “might-makes-right”?

The same way it was done in the Wild West. Try to introduce the “rule of law” (a form of reciprocity insofar as it results from social contract, not imposition) and hire good sheriffs who shoot straight—something never appreciated by the outlaws or by governments of powerful countries that don’t think they will ever have to reciprocate. (“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”)  World War I and then World War II were supposed to mark the end of ethnic holocausts.²³ But these have persisted, albeit on a smaller scale. So the rule of law is certainly very hard to establish. Ever since the League of Nations was proposed as a way of substituting self-determination and peaceful arbitration for interethnic warfare, humans still haven’t gotten their act fully together.²⁴  Hypocrisy seems to be built into nearly everyone (“let he who hath not sinned…”). In which case, while we’re waiting, nationalism is still a rational and absolutely necessary strategy for self-defense. Use it or lose it.

7. Doesn’t nationalism inspire a feeling of superiority that is used to justify dominating other ethnies?

Obviously a nationalist will feel that his own culture is best for himself and not want it to be displaced by another. However, it is common, especially for successful nations, to feel superior to and to want to impose their rule or culture on others (as the U.S. government and Israel are attempting to do in the Middle East, early twenty-first century), but that is not a logically or empirically necessary adjunct to ethnic, in-group favoritism. The Swiss cantons, ethnically and linguistically different, have lived for many happy generations with no serious inclination to take over their neighboring cantons {OK?}, although recently there was a brief cantonal readjustment to better achieve cantonal homogeneity.²⁵

8. What is the relationship between reciprocity and kinship?

They aren’t 100 percent mutually exclusive. There is no reason why we can’t have reciprocal dealings with kin. It’s just that it’s not quite such a disaster if they don’t reciprocate—after all, they are carrying some of our genes. On the other hand, there is often an understanding in families that if the family is to be “always there” for its members, the members ought to always be there for the family. So that if a member is not willing to contribute to the family’s vitality, he shouldn’t expect the family to be forever there to help him out. The so-called honor killings of some societies follow that logic and go a step further in not only withdrawing their help but in actually killing the individualist who has, say, married someone not acceptable to the family. The loss of “honor” comes from that person ruining the family’s reputation for trustworthiness in defense of group interests. Who in that culture would want to marry into that family if it is perceived as careless in making marital alliances? Also, having already invested a great deal in that person, the family would resent seeing all their investment wasted—as they perceive it. Obviously people will disagree about how much they are contributing to or detracting from the common good. But in reciprocal relations there is no getting away from such calculations. The value of cleverness in the context of exchange may have been a major selection pressure behind the evolution of the large human brain. 

One can have kinship-like dealings with non-kin insofar as non-kin are able to simulate kin. But by and large, kin relationships end up being restricted to kin—with due allowance for the flexibility of who are considered “kin.” We are often extremely fond of other animals, not to mention members of completely different ethnies or races. Yet these affections, however powerful, are arguably not quite the same as close family ties, even though people may try to treat them as such. Example: the adopted child who, even though very fond of her foster parents, eventually has an urge to find her birth parents and (re-)establish a real kin relationship. Another example: Compare marriages between cousins with marriages between spouses who are much less closely related. The great worldwide popularity of the former may relate to the fact that cousins have both kinship ties as well as attraction based on reciprocity, while a marriage of non-kin is dependent entirely on reciprocity.

Members of a human group based on kinship can afford to help each other without too much regard for being “paid back,” since as long as their genes are being reproduced by at least someone in the group, who cares very much whose survival and reproductive success are being most advantaged? In a group of unrelated people (e.g., a labor union), however, members have to continually evaluate whether they are receiving their money’s worth from their common endeavors. Hence the extra effectiveness of nationalist groups in struggling for goals which will benefit their members. The efficacy is so great that there may well have been a natural selection for instinctive mechanisms for group loyalty, willingness to sacrifice oneself for the group (e.g., suicide bombers), patriotism, etc.²⁶ Some animals have such instincts, as when a mother doesn’t simply flee from the nest at the sight of a predator but rather acts, at some risk to herself, as a decoy to distract the predator from her young. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find humans preprogrammed to take risks for kin.  Humans are also at times willing to risk their lives for non-kin, it is true. But the willingness tends to be less than for kin and to take place in contexts where a certain amount of reciprocity can be expected—e.g., only in small communities where everyone knows each other and reputations for risk-taking on behalf of others can be acquired. So expect some sacrificial risk-taking in small communities of unrelated humans, but expect even more in ethnically homogeneous communities.

If someone doesn’t reciprocate, words such as “cheating” or “parasitism” come to a biologist’s mind. Social dilemmas can turn on what should, in fact, have been expected. Usury, the charging of interest for a loan, was historically considered illegitimate for Christians and Muslims (for Jews, too, but not when dealing with non-Jews). Perhaps the value of the interest paid by a borrower was perceived as being more than the cost of the loan to the lender and so represented a form of unequal exchange—or cheating. Or, in a small homogeneous community, loans might have been something everyone could be expected to need sooner or later, and thus be reciprocated in kind. Close kin, as in members of a tribe, might not anticipate “interest” on a loan that benefited common genetic interests.             

Consider Christian (or other) ideologies that encourage people to give, charitably, to non-kin without any expectation of getting something in return. Are the people doing the giving being cheated? If it happened enough, they might be severely handicapped relative to competitors. At another level, it might not be cheating if the charity were seen as promoting human biodiversity via a form of reciprocal altruism (insurance), provided iit does not come at too great a cost to one’s own people.

9. Why would anyone doubt the relationship of family or extended family to ethnicity and nation?

First, unconscious psychological processes cannot easily be brought to conscious awareness, where they can be evaluated or seen for what they are. Westerners brought up without material suffering, never having lived through a war or other serious crisis, may simply have no idea how they would behave in severe ethnic conflict. Normally they are ever so tolerant and outgoing to people of other ethnies and races, never imagining that they would ever behave otherwise.  But if suddenly terrorized by a gang from one of those out-groups, they might well find themselves searching desperately for a familiar face, i.e., someone as much like themselves, ethnically, as possible. This will be done instantly and instinctively, without thought for what is politically correct or egalitarian or nice or prejudiced. Remember how quickly “racial profiling” became de rigueur for American security agencies following the demolition of the World Trade Center by Arabs.

Second, nationalism is not an inevitable or automatic phenomenon, however likely it may be by virtue of belonging, objectively, to an ethny. (Why? See the next FAQ, #10.)

A major reason for confusion over the connection of family to ethnicity is that there have been mischievous ideologies that have propagandized over the years against the positive aspects of biological relatedness, or anything biological at all. One has only to think of all the extreme environmentalists (in the nature-nurture debates) and egalitarians who promote not just equal rights but also the idea that humans have equal abilities across groups, if not as individuals, as if biological variation has ceased to apply to humans. Bring up anything biological and they go through the roof. Won’t discuss it. Hysteria reigns. Finally, there is the ready observation that all is not sweetness and light in nearly any family, sibling rivalry being only one example. The Ottoman sultans routinely killed their own brothers. However, this issue seems to have been pretty well laid to rest by those who noticed that if you can hold all other factors constant except for varying degree of kinship, it turns out that one is still clearly better off and safer by being surrounded by kin than by non-kin.²⁷ Other factors are not normally constant, though, so when there is not enough of a resource to go around, or there is a vast amount up for grabs, there is good reason for a bias in favor of all one’s own genes at the expense of even an only slightly smaller set of them present in close relatives, never mind people of a very different ethny or race. So expect competition for resources to take place throughout the relatedness hierarchy whenever competition at a higher level doesn’t take precedence. E.g., expect Jews in Palestine to argue and fight even more with each other than they do now if the Arab-Israeli conflict is ever resolved. That will be subsidiarity at work. However, a healthy family or nation finds ways of balancing the virtues of kin solidarity with rivalries.

Objectively, parents’ biological “interests” are maximally fulfilled if their parental investment is distributed to those offspring with the greatest chance of survival, success, and further reproduction. And so parents sometimes discriminate, whereas no child wants to be discriminated against. Parents can try to treat children equally, especially if their prospects seem comparable, but also in order to minimize counterproductive rivalry and promote cooperation among them. Family unity in Iran is promoted by outlawing unequal inheritance among sons. (To do otherwise, when one’s heirs seem to have very different potentials, would require performing a triage while still alive.)

Similar logic pertains to the group. Helping one’s kin does not necessarily mean helping all of them equally, since some are more valuable to the group than others. There is no point in expecting otherwise. To ask of someone what he cannot give is simply to guarantee disappointment and resentment toward a person who cannot rise to the occasion as one might have liked.

The most “worthy” of group aid are those who appear to carry the best genes and have the best character and talents relevant to the group’s success—much as scholarships are given to the best students in nearly any context. It doesn’t mean that others have to be thrown to the dogs. The least talented did not wish their bad luck. And a nation benefits if all members are encouraged to contribute to their full potential, however meager, and are appreciated for whatever role they can play. Nationalists living together will want a good safety net for their ethny and are typically willing to pay taxes to a communal pot for both common services and communal insurance systems. But in multicultural societies “…it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state....”²⁸ The perceived risks of parasitism become too high and sympathy for other ethnies too low.

A successful nation must appreciate and honor differences in talent in many areas—in political leadership, capacity to recognize danger, expertise in technology or agriculture, courage in warfare, charisma, good health (including good genes), promotion of psychological and social health, noblesse oblige, leadership in community rituals and celebrations.

There will always be some individuals that deliberately, if not out of weakness, sabotage or otherwise work against the interests of the group. These individuals must somehow be neutralized: either placed in a position where their weakness cannot fail the group, or, in extremis, ejected from the group.

10. Why aren’t cultural differences the reason for nationalism?

Well, they are—in a sense. It’s just that they aren’t the fundamental basis of it. Nevertheless, today many think that cultural differences are what cause nationalism. Even people who ought to know better, such as the majority ethny of Québec, the French-speaking Québécois. These days they focus chiefly on protecting the French language, one of the more salient of cultural traits (meaning traits that people learn rather than exhibit instinctively). The result has been that they think that all they have to do to protect their nation is to make sure everyone speaks French, regardless of their ancestry. You can be from China or Haiti, but as long as you speak French, Québec nationalists don’t seem to worry much about your effect on the future of Québec. On the other hand, they have the expression, “Québécois de souche,” which certainly does mean Québécois by virtue of common ancestry—all the way back to the early French immigrants out of St. Mailo—and which betrays an instinctive understanding of the importance of that ancestry. But they return uneasily to language in an effort to appease various other ethnies now living in Québec who would be affronted to think that they weren’t considered full-fledged Quebecers. The latter are confusing citizenship with ethnicity. 

The sociologist Pierre van den Berghe pointed out that cultural differences are very often the best clue people have to their genetic differences, that isi.e., differences in ancestry.  Historically, most competition or warfare has been between groups of people who looked much the same physically. Thus differences in clothing, vocabulary, accent, behavior, tattoos, customs, or personal acquaintance were what they had to go on in deciding whose extended family or tribe they belonged to. Genetically transmitted physical features (the basis of “racial differences”), when they are more common in one group than another, can be especially good “markers” for ancestry.²⁹ Returning to the question at hand, think of a hen: FAQ#10 is like asking whether the reason the hen sits on her eggs is that they carry her genes or, alternatively, because of the environmental aspects of the eggs’ appearance and location in the nest. The question makes little sense, since she must use any available and appropriate markers in order to ensure that the eggs’ role in reproducing genes is carried out.

But nothing is perfect: To the extent that one can fake markers for an ancestry, one will be treated as though one had that ancestry. Teaching a recent immigrant to speak French like a Québécois de souche would be like placing duck eggs in a hen’s nest: Are the markers similar enough? In fact, some hens will still sit on them as though they were their own eggs. Yes, the eggs hatch and the little ducks then imprint on the mother hen and follow her around and she just goes about her own business oblivious to the “error” she has made.³⁰ Apparently natural selection has not prepared that species of hen for such trickery. Similarly,  speaking Quebec French will clearly help the immigrant to Quebec become accepted, as well. But will it be sufficient? See below.

11.  Doesn’t the success of multiculturalism show that having the same ancestry is not necessary for a harmonious society as long as people do speak a common language?

It depends on how much “harmony” you would settle for. To achieve the harmony of an ethnically homogeneous nation, you would need more than just a common language. Immigrants would also have to love, accept, and thoroughly learn the host culture, and then intermarry over and over so that any distinctive physical features receded or blended. And they would probably have to forget their ancestral history, so that they wouldn’t end up with dual loyalties.

It is very true that in such countries as Canada, in contexts that force many different peoples to brush up against each other daily in factories, universities, schools, etc., there are innumerable instances of harmonious interethnic relations. Things are so harmonious, in fact, that these countries are still merrily promoting multiculturalism year after year, and show no sign of desisting in their invitations to people around the world to “come on over.”  Increasingly, however, there are voices to the contrary. The evidence points to a loss of community and mutual trust among citizens as the ethnic homogeneity of a territory is lost.³¹ Special interests in control of immigration policy have, in effect, given away the farm.

There are important things to note about multiculturalism. Particularly fascinating is the fact that Jews have arguably been the most vociferous of its advocates in the West, but are ferociously against it when it comes to their own state of Israel. Wonder why?³² Guess.

Second, multiculturalism has never been the subject of a referendum wherein a majority of the citizens of a country could declare themselves in favor of it—with or without their consent being fully informed as to the possible or likely consequences. Africans were brought to the United States by a small minority of people—e.g., plantation owners—who wanted cheap labor. The result may be good American jazz, but it has also been a long history of miserable racial tension and conflict.

Employers looking for cheap labor are still encouraging more illegal migrants from Mexico.³³ Now “La Raza,” as many Mexican Latinos call themselves, is planning a takeover of the American Southwest. At the present rate of demographic change, they are likely to be a majority in California and several other states before long. They will then have avenged the earlier American takeover of what was once Mexican territory. And their ethny will be dominant.  In anticipation of this, many whites are now moving out of California. Regardless of the legal justification for any of these political moves, it should be evident that not all the human beings involved have the same attitude toward these events; that is because they have different psychological “interests.”  People the world over can have an interest in moving to economically prosperous lands, and they often succeed, because the majority populations in those lands are not organized effectively to control immigration. Some countries of the West have now probably reached the point of no return, of never being able to stop immigration, and thus prevent another “tragedy of the commons”: alien ethnies will now want to promote further immigration of their own people, so that there will be even less chance of avoiding the overexploitation of a territory’s resources.

Meanwhile, in, e.g., Toronto, various immigrant groups vie with the Hell’s Angels for the highest homicide rate. Jamaican blacks argue that they aren’t the only murderers, that homicide certainly is not in their genes, and that they shouldn’t be racially profiled; their detractors don’t really care whether it’s poverty, genes, or culture: They just wish the Jamaicans would go back to Jamaica. They don’t say that publicly, because such political incorrectness can be prosecuted as a “hate crime.” Then there are the twenty-odd years and millions of dollars it is taking Canada to prosecute the allegedly Sikh perpetrators of the 1985 Air India crash, thanks in part to ethnic barriers to collecting evidence.³⁴ Recently Muslim immigrants have demanded the introduction of elements of “sharia” (Muslim law) into the Canadian legal system, while other immigrants screamed that they had just fled sharia. Other Canadians have preferred a more traditional separation of church and state…or full public financing of private Jewish schools…or a Christian imposition of the “right to life” against abortions.

Isn’t multiculturalism wonderful?  Well, it is, if you are one of the immigrants who successfully made it to Canada or the U.S. (either recently or in an earlier era), especially if you fled conflicts in the old homeland. Immigrants are mainly looking for improved living conditions, and are not too concerned with their acceptability to host ethnies beyond avoiding serious hostility. Upon arrival, most seem to coalesce around preceding members of their own ethny. Even the aboriginals, who came in several waves, probably did not ask permission from previous waves—any more than did the much later Europeans. The point, for the moment, is not which ethny was right or wrong, but what happens when they all find themselves under the same roof. Multiculturalism, beyond a modest cultural variety in restaurants and the like, is not attractive to those who fear that their political and other cultural ways will be challenged or, sooner or later, overwhelmed and displaced by incompatible mores.

12. Why isn’t everyone nationalistic?

a. Individualism

b. No nation

c. Attachment to one’s ethny is overridden

d. Fear of offending others

e. Deception

Clarifications:

a) Individualism

The self-sufficient individualist feels that he can achieve happiness on his own; any form of nationalism may seem like a giant, oppressive handicap, given all the anticipated time and effort expended in in-group activities. People vary for constitutional reasons on nearly every imaginable biological trait, including personality and motivational factors. Thus attachment to a group can be expected to vary as well. Demanding role requirements can make it difficult to herd many people into a cohesive ethnic grouping; not all roles are equally attractive to or suitable for every person. Good leadership is rare. Most humans are easily frightened sheep. So if there is a military or paramilitary role to be played, only a few reasonably macho males are likely to volunteer to take the necessary risks. The fighters in the IRA and UDA in Ireland are hardly random samples of their populations. Ironically, such “hard men” are sometimes not even supported by many members of their people who later benefit from their sacrifice, e.g., pacifists terrified of violence, true Christians who invariably favor turning the other cheek, devotees of Gandhi, or people who object (on principle or out of fear of retaliation) to their own nationalists’ theft of land and resources from other groups, and so on.

b) No nation

It might not be clear who one’s people are because of mixed ancestry, so that one is an isolate among other ethnies; or one’s people consists of a mix of equally salient and historically conflicting groups, such as half-Jewish and half-Arab, or half-African and half-British, that lends itself to identity conflicts or ambiguities. The more mixed our perceived ancestry, the more diffuse should be our conception of our people, unless people with the same mixed ancestry can get together to form a new ethny, e.g., the “Métis” of western Canada (a mix of aboriginal and French ancestry), or the growing coalition of half-Jews.³⁵ At one extreme, there are people whose ancestry is so incredibly complex that apart from humanity as a whole, they don’t feel especially close to any single present-day ethny. Ethnicity for such “isolates” ought to be pretty much meaningless—unless, of course, they are somehow discriminated against by people who do belong to a specific ethny and regard them as outsiders. But apart from their immediate family, it ought to be hard for them to form strong bonds to any particular large grouping—compared to, say, the average Croat, whose ancestry is more homogeneous. There are naive idealists, often (erstwhile) communists, who recommend as much mixture of ancestry as possible. They urge this, first, because they see ancestry as unimportant: Marry whomever you like. But often they see vast amounts of intermarriage as an antidote to war or other vicissitudes of ethnic competition, an inadvertent recognition that ethnic homogeneity is indeed meaningful. What would be the result? While one batch of multiculturalists is joyfully mixing their children’s ancestry, other batches will be sticking to the path of homogeneous ethnicity, with all the competitive advantages that accrue to especially cohesive groups.³⁶ The isolated idealists will gradually be squeezed to the margins, perhaps under some form of exploitation or even “slavery” (just think of the millions of unprotected Russian and Eastern European women who are currently being forced into prostitution [“white slavery”]), if not eventually lost to the forces of natural selection. Inter-group relations may not be inevitably competitive, at least to the point of unpleasantness, but they sometimes are—in which case, who is likely to win, or at least to successfully defend themselves?

c) Attachment to one’s ethny overridden

It can be overridden by a lack of pride in one’s people, or by a dislike or hatred resulting from a harrowing family or group life. Nearly any motive can be overridden by other more urgent needs and motives. Not everyone is hungry at suppertime. Hunger is obviously a “biological need,” but can easily be overridden by an exciting television program.

People also vary in how hunger driven they are, some becoming obese, others anorexic. It’s the same for ethnic cohesion. Individualism, the desire to go it alone, love of solitude—all these tendencies may be somewhat heritable (so that if one identical twin were like that, it’s a good bet that the other twin of the pair is similar). Ask them to behave like a hive of Hutterites or Hasidic Jews and they will instantly feel asphyxiated and run for the door.³⁷

Unfortunate family experiences, or the feeling that one’s own people are a bad lot, can prompt a search for another ethny/culture with which to gradually acculturate and eventually assimilate through intermarriage (e.g., Princess Diana’s attraction to the warmth of Egyptian culture).

Serendipitous, wonderful experiences with an out-group can, especially if following upon earlier misery, inspire hope for a new and better life, a feeling of paradise found. This is what many emigrants hope for and, if found, can lead to a desire to change their ethny and assimilate, or else to frustration if the host ethny is not as welcoming as had been hoped.³⁸

Family ties can be overridden by romantic/sexual attractions. But imagine the bind if the respective ethnies are at loggerheads, e.g., a mixed Serbian and Muslim couple in Bosnia during their internecine strife. Imagine their offspring torn in two by pressures from both sides. Such unfortunates must surely feel impelled to just clear out of that part of the world to find solace elsewhere. Hence the effort seen in so many ethnies to prevent their offspring coming in too close contact with out-groups during life stages important for mate choice. Again, think of “honor killings” in which a woman is killed by her father or brother for having contravened the marital choice rules designed to maintain family cohesion where such cohesion is absolutely crucial for success in life. Such people know instinctively that it’s not just a matter of maintaining cultural compatibility but, in addition, has to do with the degree of trust that comes from optimal kinship and from obeying a family’s chief decision maker.  “Optimal” here reflects, also, the fact that one shouldn’t marry someone too closely related, either, since too much inbreeding (as in incest, or the equivalent with small endogamous tribes) courts the hazard of genetic defects. See FAQ #14 re interracial marriages.

d) Fear of offending others

A person with friends in out-groups might sense that professing a nationalism on his own part would conflict with such affections. But need that be the case? After all, a powerful love for one’s own parents needn’t prevent anyone from having friends and lovers outside one’s own family. A reunion that is fundamentally one of family ties on Thanksgiving or Christmas has never prevented families from inviting all manner of friends and acquaintances home for at least some of its celebrations. Having one’s own family as a first priority does not preclude positive relations with any other person, or even other species of animal and plant.

Still don’t think such prioritizing is necessary? Well, think about this: To whom do you turn to in severe difficulty? Do you have the backup of people you can trust? Who will take responsibility for you during severe illness and old age? Or are you all alone to fend off whatever sort of gang you are up against? Whom would you try to save from falling off a cliff when the choice is among individuals varying in kinship to you? Please try your best when doing this mental exercise to equate these individuals on variables other than kinship, such as how nice they are as persons, how healthy they are, their age. Try out different combinations. Your sister vs. your cat; your sister vs. a chimpanzee; your sister vs. your cousin; your father vs. your uncle, a fellow Icelander vs. a Swede; a fellow Icelander vs. a Vietnamese; etc. Which choices are easiest to make? Why?   

e) Deception

The most vehement criticism of nationalism often comes from members of a minority ethny who are cleverly attempting to reduce the competitive power of other, larger ethnies by reducing their cohesion.³⁹ Make nepotism, nationalism, or any kind of in-group appreciation “politically incorrect” enough and an ethny’s nationalism is sabotaged. To override kinship is nothing new. In the past, children have been induced to denounce their parents for not being communist enough or religious enough.⁴⁰ It’s all very ironic if the people doing the criticizing are themselves highly nationalistic. But it’s a neat trick if they can pull it off.

Religious doctrine can override kinship by, in effect, deceiving a person into treating out-group members as if they were kin: “We are all brothers under the skin,” they might say, when of course literally this is patently untrue. Christianity may have succeeded so well in such sleights of hand in part by creating a confusion between an altruistic spirit of reciprocity vs. altruistic sacrifice in which one’s own people are, in effect, handicapped.

13. How do you explain the fact that a major football rivalry for Tunisia seems to be with another North African country, Morocco, rather than with countries that are much more distantly related?

Because Morocco is there. Close by. That’s one answer. But this is a frequent phenomenon in sport and is essentially the same issue as in sibling rivalry. You, a Québécoise girl, compete for mummy’s attention with your sibling because she is there. Some girl in China is not there, so why would you worry at all about her? Suppose, however, that both you and your sister are gymnasts and compete with each other initially, but your sister goes on to the Olympics and beats out a Chinese gymnast. Would you be happy for her? Or would you rather the Chinese won? Well, maybe if the sibling rivalry had been especially severe…  But you get the point.

14. What is wrong with interracial marriage?

From your point of view, maybe nothing—provided you can accept the consequences. These can vary enormously depending on circumstances and personalities. But be prepared:

On the plus side, the girl/guy from the other race you are staring at may be incredibly attractive. Think of the sometime attractiveness of black men and white women for each other; or of white men and oriental women.

A modest degree of out-breeding could also be good for one’s kids. Here’s the story, according to standard biology texts: All your genes come in pairs, one allele of each pair from each parent.  If a pair contains an allele that is bad for you but also “dominant,” meaning dominant over the other member of the pair, it will cause the person carrying it to die, be sick, or be otherwise unattractive as a mate. So we tend not to worry too much about dominant bad genes in our planning, since they tend quickly to self-destruct. But recessive genes don’t get “expressed” unless matched up with exactly the same allele. Outbreeding reduces the chance of a recessive bad gene you are carrying being matched up with its like, and thus being expressed. On the other hand, you don’t need to go very far afield to be sufficiently “outbred,” and certainly not as far as what we think of as another race or species (the defining feature of species is the inability to successfully interbreed with other species. In outbreeding to another race, your offspring may be picking up some surprises, either unpleasant (e.g., genes that encourage diabetes or sickle cell anemia) or pleasant (e.g., genes for high IQ or some more specialized talent). Ethnic and racial groups undoubtedly vary in “genetic load,” the number of bad recessive genes in their gene pool, although geneticists don’t seem to have a completely clear picture of all that. In any case, in picking a spouse it’s hard to know what you are getting into without at the very least a thorough genetic background check; the more ethnically/racially different a person is, the harder in general it is to vet that person for quality in any trait. There is one speculative aspect you might want to entertain. Racial differences are thought to have originally arisen through natural selection favoring those traits that made a person better adapted to a particular climate and ecology. Black skin was protective in tropical climates, while white skin encouraged penetration of rays from the sun when northern climates made them beneficial. These climatic selection pressures may not be all that strong today, at least where modern technologies can mitigate them. But the benefits of such natural selection may one day again be appreciated if the earth undergoes dramatic climate change. Intermarriage would reduce the traits that had once been useful in particular climates. 

Here’s an ethical consideration: We are importuned daily to regard other ethnies/races with tolerance and respect. Well, if we really do value another group’s cultural and physical traits, why would we want to do anything that would contribute to the destruction of those traits? If you dislike your own race so much that you want to marry into another, aren’t you implying that other races are justified in negatively “profiling,” or looking down upon, yours? In any case, destruction of one’s people would happen only one intermarriage at a time, but it would happen. One intermarriage might seem like a drop in the bucket for one’s whole ethny, but overwhelming for one’s immediate family.

The major threats to the success of interracial marriages would have to be (a) the strong chances of cultural incompatibility and (b) the lack of the social cohesion that normally accrues to relatively close kinship. The former is a problem on its own merits but it also can act as a marker for degree of biological relatedness which affects cohesion. Cultural incompatibility doesn’t necessarily show up right away. People’s lives go through stages, each with its own set of customs and expectations that might not be apparent until one reached a particular stage. For instance, whether, where, how, and with whom will we be buried after death? And what sort of lives will the children of such a marriage have to look forward to? There are some horror stories, e.g., the isolation of offspring of Americans (especially blacks) and Vietnamese women as a result of the Vietnam War. (Yes, it does depend on what the kids look like.) And where are children of a Jewish-Arab marriage to live? Palestine? If they can form a larger community of people like themselves, they could mitigate the effects of social exclusion, as did the “mulattoes” of Haiti following the war of independence from France. If not, they remain isolates, neither fish nor fowl, possibly handicapped in finding a mate or a welcoming community and a good job. Wishing it otherwise is no help.

15. How do you decide how much immigration to have?

Easy. “Enough immigration” is when you feel in your heart that there has been enough. The problem is that different people will come up with different estimates. For anyone needing more labor, cheap or expensive, there is never enough immigration.  For people wanting to live among people like themselves and to maintain their culturally specific ways and political systems, nearly any immigration by other ethnies constitutes a potential threat. “None is too many,” a high-level Canadian government official is reputed to have said when asked how many Jews should be accepted during the 1930s.⁴¹ Canadian Jews are still a tiny minority but they certainly did come to exert considerable political and cultural influence through their lobbying efforts and via the media (a major newspaper publishing and broadcasting empire, CanWest, built by Izzy Asper and his sons, has stridently and successfully promoted a pro-Israel foreign policy). Members of immigrant groups see the sky as the limit. They argue that they constitute no threat whatsoever to the indigenous ethnies/cultures, so not to worry. They naturally ignore the fact that any human being, once he feels at home, will want to adjust his surroundings to his own taste, which means “taking over,” to whatever degree becomes possible.  If your city eventually becomes majority Chinese, expect the cultural norms to become Chinese as well…sooner or later.

So there is no sacred answer. The best that can be done in a democratic society is to put it to a vote. When was the last time anyone voted on whether to increase or decrease the level of immigration? Can’t remember, can you? Anyway, each person’s favored immigration rate will reflect some trade-off between a concern for one’s own culture and people going down the tube and some mix of attractions perceived in out-group immigration, including the above economic factors.

16. How can a small territory, enclave, ghetto, neighborhood) control immigration?

It’s not easy, today, what with laws established, in the interest of minorities, to outlaw “discrimination” in residential housing. Notice that no one is outlawed from discriminating when it comes to marriage (cf. personal ads in newspapers asking to meet, say, a “white heterosexual Catholic female” for friendship and possible marriage, etc.). And few object to exceptionally religious people establishing certain types of social enclave for their own group (a Yeshiva University for Jews or a Bob Jones University for white Christian fundamentalists), since who else would want to go to them? The strongest objectors to the state of Israel discriminating in favor of Jews and against gentiles in immigration are those gentiles whose land was taken to make way for Israel, plus a few sympathizers. So the seeming illegitimacy of discrimination depends entirely on its context, on those doing the discriminating, and whether it involves theft or violence, not on the act of discrimination itself.

When multicultural ideologies become dominant, about the only sure way to favor one’s own (or a culturally compatible) ethny in an enclave would be to form a sovereign state.  Meanwhile, one might avoid making public any announcement of housing for sale or rent and, instead, advertise by word of mouth or with the help of a sympathetic real estate agent. Perhaps one could set up a housing association with various covenants, conditions, and restrictions that discourage, if not prevent outright, people coming into a community who would be culturally incompatible.⁴² Then we have “ethnic cleansing”—à la Palestine or the late Yugoslavia.

17. What do you mean by group structure?

Humans are not bees. Bees have highly preprogrammed (by genes) brain mechanisms that cause them to work for the whole hive, their “group.” Humans may be a little bit “groupy,” instinctively, but a variety of cultural strategies have had to be devised over millennia for accentuating the willingness of group members to act as cohesive, cooperative group members. Some strategies work better than others; some are more enjoyable to live with. There are rules, such as for distinctive clothing - e.g., the Amish, or Hasidic Jews. But if Hasidic men’s garments are unbearably hot in summer, inspiring major investment in air conditioners, they also serve as a test of group loyalty: Anyone willing to put up with the hot clothing must surely be willing to adhere to the less visible and hopefully internalized rules of the group, and hence must be trustworthy.  If the garments were simply functional and comfortable, they wouldn’t constitute a good test of trustworthiness. The same goes for a woman’s chador in Iran. If it’s hot enough, women stay indoors and out of trouble (from their husband’s point of view); but if they do venture out, wearing a chador suggests trustworthiness. Their husbands can then get on with their work without worrying so much about what their wives are up to.

Rules for helping each other within the group can vary, some seemingly more shortsighted than others. The “bucket of crabs” analogy is cited by North American aboriginals for the case, say, of a person who is awarded a fellowship for educational purposes but who ends up giving away so much of the money, in his in-group’s spirit of sharing, that he never does get the degree which would enable him later to help others get ahead. Put crabs in a bucket and as each one tries to climb out of the bucket, the others in trying to climb out themselves, to latch onto him and pull him back down. ⁴³  The relevant rule was adaptive for one set of conditions (hunter-gatherer) but is less so for the modern world.  So groups vary in willingness to help their talented maximize the use of their talents (e.g., via scholarships paid for by other members); and those who take advantage of the help vary in their willingness to contribute to the group later on.

There has never been a guarantee that devising rules for one’s own group would lead to an optimal set. (Try inventing a set, yourself, to see how hard it is.)⁴⁴  Much mental energy must have been expended by humans in such trial and error. The Biblical “Ten Commandments” are just one such set, created for use within Jewish communities (but, interestingly, not for relations with “gentiles”), and Jewish scholarship has devoted thousands of years to elaborating upon these rules (the Talmud).⁴⁵  The longevity of Jewish groups, in the face of massive pressures to assimilate, is testimony to the effectiveness of their group rules and structure.

A challenge for any modern nationalist is to come up with a set of rules for the group that are both effective, attractive, legal, and do not become unbearable to live with. A major dilemma involves finding a balance between sacrifice for the group vs. working for oneself.

18. Should everyone be a nationalist?

Nationalists would love to have all fellow coethnics be nationalistic, but any person’s answer depends on his point of view, and, as we have seen, people often have different psychological interests.  However, anyone who criticizes others for their nationalism, rather than simply being uninterested, is likely being either hypocritical or envious.

Anthony Hilton is Associate Professor of Psychology (Ret.) at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

* Apart from proselytizing, little or nothing here is original–see endnotes. Main sources are Pierre van den Berghe’s 1981 classic, The Ethnic Phenomenon, and Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests (2003) (for both books, see endnote 1).

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Endnotes