Us and Them: The Blog

The British, French and Imperial Roman Obama-equivalents ...

... are the subject of my piece, posted yesterday, in Slate. Check, as they say, it out.

I started on this subject with last week's blog post, which argued that the example of minority or ``foreign'' national leaders should remind us not to talk about identity as if it were fixed and unchanging. The new piece speculates a bit about what such leaders have in common.

The Great Blind Spot

He is an implausible candidate to lead his nation. He has a foreign-sounding name, a father who wasn't a Christian, and a cool writer's temperament. Before his political rise, in fact, he was a best-selling author.

Barack Obama? Nope, I'm thinking of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1816 he was a 12-year-old Jewish boy in an anti-Semitic nation; in 1876, after a glittering political career, he was made Earl of Beaconfield by his friend and admirer, Queen Victoria.

Yet this week the New York Times informed us, in this clunker, that no western European nation could elect a minority person, a conspicuous outsider, as its leader. There can't yet be a British, French or German Obama.

Hello? Disraeli may be the closest parallel to Obama, but other European nations have elevated leaders who were neither privileged nor typical.

One French Obama was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born, like our President-Elect, on a far-off island far from the national heartland, and he spoke French the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, with a distinct accent.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger and Disraeli share few other traits besides electoral success as an ``outsider.'' My point isn't that such political events are good, bad or indifferent for a nation -- I'm simply noting that (a) they are not that rare and (b) my journalist colleagues and other professional explainers act as if they are.

All over the world, people have followed leaders who don't look or sound ``like us,'' from Alberto Fujimori in Peru to Sonia Gandhi in India. Non-democracies have done this too. Alexander the Great wasn't Greek. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus was African. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian.

So why do we journalists stupidly tell each other that ethnic, cultural and class boundaries cannot be broken in politics? I think some of the answer points to a real problem with the way we all talk about identity.

Nations, ethnic groups, religious communities and the like are not things. Unlike trees and staplers and rainclouds, an entity made of people is an ongoing activity. It's created by thoughts, conversations and deeds. That means, literally, that the United States today is not exactly the same as it was yesterday.

Of course, much activity stays constant over time, which is why we have nations, ethnicities and social classes in the first place. A country is a great many people thinking, saying and doing the same things every day. But we all exaggerate the stability. We treat yesterday's activities as if they were a fixed object that will still be there tomorrow. So we imagine an unchangeability that is not really there.

Then we try to answer questions like ``Is America racist or not?'' Or ``Is Jane prejudiced or not?'' and go round and round in circles. The truth is that sometimes America is racist and sometimes it is not; sometimes Jane acts prejudiced and sometimes she doesn't.

To get precise about what that means -- to predict which times are which, for example -- we need to stop describing identity and its attendant thoughts and feelings as if they were objects. Historians describe change over time; they can map change over decades and centuries. We need a similar perspective for weeks and days and hours.

This is way, way easier to say than it is to do. The mind, I think, really is strongly biased to see identity as immutable and stable. But until we describe identity as processes that change over time, I think, we're stuck in a rut.

Genes are one thing, race is another

Some very British-looking Britons have recently learned that they have a genetic marker generally found in West Africans. Another reminder that the genetic study of ancestral populations occurs at one level of analysis, while our ideas of race and ethnicity are made at another. Perhaps there is money to be made by selling DNA tests to ``reveal'' your ancestors, but that doesn't mean the practice makes any scientific sense.

``I'm NOT melting! I'm NOT melting!''

The so-called ``melting pot'' is not an inevitable fate for America's immigrant families, this report indicates.

With the rise in immigration to the US in the 1990's, it says, people from Asia and Spanish-speaking nations had a larger pool of candidates for marriage within their traditional categories. And so, for the first time in decades, intermarriage across the widely-used race and ethnic boundaries has been declining.

Ethnicity and gender detecting neurons: Evidence for a dedicated ``human-kind'' detector?

According to this PNAS paper by Minna Ng, Vivian M. Ciaramitaro, Stuart Anstis, Geoffrey M. Boynton and Ione Fine, they have found areas in the brain that are tuned for the placement of faces into ethnic and gender categories -- neurons found in the occipital cortex, fusiform areas, and the cingulate gyrus. Which is notable in part because those regions are not the ones usually cited in experiments where people distinguish faces from photos of other things. It's evidence, in any event, that the mind's ``face processing'' relies on human-kind categories, not just knowledge of the general traits of a face, or of the particular face of one familiar person.

As the U.S. Senate nears a compromise on immigration . . .

Think back to those voices who warned us about ``our'' country being transformed by people who would take jobs and never fit in -- not religiously, not in terms of skin color, and not in terms of language. (Because, of course, they would NEVER learn English.)

One such voice belonged to Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, he sounded a note much like that of Samuel Huntington about Hispanic immigration today. ``Why,'' he wrote,

``should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.’’

That's right: the wrong-color, wrong-customs, wrong-language, never-fit-in crowd that Franklin saw consisted of immigrants from Germany. Even in his lifetime, he had to backpeddle on that one. Plus ca change.

The myth of homogeneity

Is there any nation on earth that consists of a single ethnic group? The question is kind of nonsensical, as the ethnic groups you see depends on the question you asked. For instance, when your attention is on the color line in American history, white Americans are a monolith, and so are black people. On many other measures, the differences between say, Irish-Americans and WASPS are important, and native-born African-Americans have to be distinguished from black immigrants.

Still, you can control for the observer effect. Agree on a single definition of ethnicity, stipulate the shared purpose of the inquiry, then look around at the world's nations. Using your single standard, won't you find that some countries are mono-ethnic?

I doubt it. Here's a news story about yet another supposedly one-ethnicity nation that isn't.

Ilan Halimi

The case of Ilan Halimi, a young Frenchman kidnapped, tortured and killed because he was a Jew, illustrates just why we must stop talking of a ``clash of civilizations,'' and of ``ancient hatreds,'' as if people kill because of where they are born, or what language they learn.

Halimi was kidnapped for money. He was tortured to torment and frighten his family into paying ransom. Those who participated in the plot were Muslim and Christian and non-religious; white, black and brown; of French, Iranian and African parentage. Their anti-Semitism, as Nicolas Sarkozy remarked, was in their belief that all Jews have money and power -- so it was OK to kidnap a Jew, and OK to be indifferent to the suffering of a Jew. They didn't come by that belief because they were Muslims, or Christians, or African, or Gallic. It wasn't their civilization and it wasn't their genes. It was the time and place in which they grew up, and so a kind of monument to contemporary France's hypocrisy and indifference.

Most striking to me: The neighbor who said ``I knew they had someone down there.'' He didn't call the police. Apparently one doesn't turn in kidnappers in his quartier.

He did allow, though, that he would have intervened if he'd known Halimi was being tortured. Rare is the mind without a fine moral sense.

The Evolution Will Be Televised

A couple of quick thoughts on Nicholas Wade's fine article about the likelihood that human evolution is an ongoing process.

The article, a report on this paper in PLOS-Biology by Benjamin F. Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli, Xiaoquan Wen, and Jonathan K. Pritchard, explains how their analysis of genetic variation in four populations found some 700 regions of the human genome that appear to have changed in response to selection pressure within the past 5,000-15,000 years.

My first thought was that this finding is a problem for evolutionary psychology -- at least in its mainstream version, as defined by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and popularized by my Matt Ridley and my former Sciences colleague Robert Wright, to name only two of the ablest advocates of this view.

High Church Ev Psych declares that human behavior was shaped by selfish-gene evolutionary pressures. The need to pass on your own genes and to secure good-quality genes in a mate is supposed to explain, for example, why men want younger women for mates, and why males are more prone to jealousy than females.

So why, you might ask, in some 25 percent of US hetero couples, is the woman the older partner? Or why, if the point of it all is to pass on genes, do society's best and brightest have fewer children than poor peasants?

The standard answer is that we did not evolve to live in today's society -- human behavior was shaped by the ``EEA,'' the ``environment of evolutionary adaptation.'' And that environment was the Pleistocene world of hunter-gatherer groups.

Now, if human evolution is an ongoing process, reflecting, as the PLOS-Biology authors say, possible adaptations for living as farmers rather than hunters, then there is no such thing as the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Or rather, we are living in it right now. So if people aren't doing what the ev-psychologist says they are driven to do, there can be no more saying ``well, you have to understand, people didn't evolve to live in modern London.'' It appears to be possible that they did.

Second thought: Wade favors the idea that our notions of race are based on true biological differences. (I don't quarrel with this, by the way. I just argue that there are many differences among human populations, and many ways that we can see ourselves, and therefore it's wrong to say race is more of a biological reality than other categories, like nation or temperament.) Anyway, Wade writes: ``The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans.''

Sounds like good evidence for important racial differences. But hang on a second. Were the Yorubans compared to other black people? Were the ``Europeans'' in the sample compared to another European population? Not that Wade mentions, and I can't find a reference to such a control in the paper itself. So while we've learned of differences between Europeans and Africans, we haven't been told how that compares to differences within each ``race.''

Which left me wondering: Who defined these races? Not the researchers, apparently. They are part of the ``HapMap Project,'' which studies differences in the variant genes of different populations (such genes travel in clusters called haplotypes; hence ``HapMap''). Haplotypes are associated with populations, not with races.

As Wade explains, ``the four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact.'' (Emphasis added.)

In other words, we can be sure of sharp differences in the genes of these groups (and, I gather, of similarity in the Chinese and Japanese genes). But the idea that these particular populations represent vast races is assumed, and may not be exact.

Ethnic Violence Watch: Australia Riots

Not whites versus aborigines. It's whites versus ``Lebs'' -- short for Lebanese, ie people who look Middle Eastern or Muslim.

Could be a case of rival gangs at a beach town during the hot summer months. But with the world's largest Muslim nation -- Indonesia -- just to the north, this could be a much bigger problem.