Customer Reviews

The Ethnic Phenomenon

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Van Den Berghe is a white sociologist born in the old Belgian colony of the Congo. Disgusted by white oppression of Africans, he became a fairly conventional liberal on race relations. But, as he overcame his Eurocentric focus on white crimes, he realized that race-based exploitation and violence are universal human curses. This lead him to sociobiology, and its bedrock finding: the theory of kin selection: The more genes we share with another individual, the more altruistic we are toward him. And the less kind we are toward our more distant kin.

Since there is no fundamental boundary between family, ethnic group, and race, Van Den Berghe coined the brilliant term "ethnic nepotism" to describe the human tendency to favor "our people" at the expense of others.

This is the most significant advance ever in the Marxist analysis of economic exploitation. By substituting kinship for class as the great engine of history, Van Den Berghe has invented a neo-Darwinian Marxism with enormous explanatory power and predictive power. This 1981 book's accuracy was confirmed by the subsequent breakup of the communist world into clashing ethnic groups.

Steve Sailer

Despite having been written nearly 30 years ago this book stands as a landmark in the field of sociobiology. It is an exceptional book and I highly recommend it. The book covers the topic of Kin Selection, which is a hallmark of evolutionary psychology/ sociobiology. While some scientists do disagree as to whether sociobiology is the be-all and end-all for explaining human behavior, it is still interesting and helpful in certain situations. (Edward O. Wilson is the founder. You can learn more by reading Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition or On Human Nature: Revised Edition)
For an introduction to this discussion, or just further reading, I recommend: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Human Nature: Fact And Fiction - Literature, Science And Human Nature or The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition).

Ethnocentrism and Kin Selection
Van den Berghe's central claim is that racism, xenophobia, nationalism and ethnocentrism can be understood as kin-selected nepotism (Hamilton 1964). In the same way evolution favours individuals who sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their kin, because they share genes by common descent, he argues that individuals may also favour their extended kin, namely fellow ethnics.
Before reading the book I was doubtful as to whether the degree of kinship shared among fellow-ethnics would be sufficient to invoke the application of Hamilton's Rule (Brigandt, I. 2001; but see Salter 2004 or On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration). However, contrary to both critics (Brigandt, I. 2001) and others developing similar ideas (Rushton 2005; Salter 2000), van den Berghe is agnostic as to whether ethnocentricism is adaptive in modern societies where the shared kinship of nations or ethnies are largely fictive, and suggests this may be the misfiring of a mechanism that evolved among small kin-based hunter-gatherer groups (p35). He certainly emphasises that ethnic sentiments are vulnerable to manipulation by exploitative elites (e.g. kinship terms such as 'fatherland' and 'brothers-in-arms' encouraging sacrifice during wartime) but concludes "kinship can be manipulated but not manufactured" (p27).
Van den Berghe views race-based discrimination (i.e. discrimination on the basis of heritable physiological phenotypic group differences such as skin colour) as relatively rare historically, because different races rarely came into contact before recent technological advances in transportation (and, when they do, in the absence of strict barriers to exogamy, they typically interbreed and become indistinguishable within a few generations). Therefore, cultural rather than racial markers are adopted to distinguish ethnic groups (e.g. language, clothing, bodily modification). What is innate is not racism but ethnocentrism.
However, where racial differences do exist within a population, these are likely to be especially salient - hence the failure of African-Americans, in contrast to successive waves of more recent European immigrants, to assimilate into the US 'melting pot'. He therefore controversially concludes that "there has never been a successful multiracial democracy" (p189). (However, he acknowledges that racially diverse societies have lived in "relative harmony" in places such as Latin America, where government gives no political recognition to racial groups and where the latter do not organise on racial grounds, such that government is "non-racial" rather than "multiracial".)

Slavery and Other Recurrent Situations.
The analysis in the central section of the book, discussing various historically recurrent situations as slavery, caste and colonialism, is by no means dependent acceptance of the sociobiological basis of ethnocentrism and is worth reading even for readers unconvinced of this thesis - or even sceptical of sociobiological approaches to human behaviour altogether. However, his overall sociobiological model informs his discussions.
For example, in the excellent chapter on slavery, he argues that "an essential condition feature of slave status is being torn out of one's network of kin selection" typically by "forcible removal of the slave from his home group by capture and purchase" (p120). He also notes that paternalism, or the fiction of biological relatedness, was used to disguise the exploitation of slavery as benevolence (p131). However, the imbalance of power between slave and master made the sexual exploitation of female slaves by male masters, from a Darwinian perspective, inevitable. Ironically, therefore, this fictive 'paternalism' gave way to actual paternity of the next generation, as a result of which the exploitation of slaves by slave owners potentially violated the logic of kin selection (p134). (He notes that, of one tenth of the 'negro' population that was free in 1860, "a disproportionate number of them were mulattoes, and, thus, presumably often blood relatives of the master who emancipated them or their ancestors" (p129)). Therefore, he concludes that, unlike other slave systems which relied on the capture or import of new slaves rather than breeding slaves, "western slavery literally contained the genetic seeds of its own distruction" (p134).

Synthesising Marxism and Sociobiology?
Given its potential appeal to nationalists and even to racialists, it is surprising the extent to which van den Berghe draws on Marxism. Sociobiologists themselves have frequently noted the potential compatibility of a Marxist analysis of contemporary society with sociobiology (e.g. Sanderson 2001; van den Berghe 1979: p82n), although van den Berghe remains the only figure to actually successfully synthesise the two forms of analysis to produce novel theory. For example, he argues that the class exploitation inherent in contemporary and historical societies is disguised by an 'ideology' that disguises exploitation as either kin-selected nepotistic altruism (e.g. dictator as 'father' of the nation) or mutually beneficial reciprocity (the 'social contract' under democracy) (p60).
However, contrary to Marxian orthodoxy, van den Berghe sees ethnic feelings as running deeper than class loyalty ("Blood runs thicker than money" p243). Whereas the former is "dependent on a commonality of interests" (p243), the latter is often irrational ("It seems a great many people care passionately whether they are ruled and exploited by members of their own ethny or foreigners" p62). Furthermore, whereas Marxists see the competition to control the `means of production' as underlying societal conflict, Darwinians see the `means of reproduction' as the ultimate source of human conflict (Betzig 1986: 67).
Of course, whereas the claim that exploitation underlies capitalist society chimes with the Darwinian's cynical view of human nature, the Marxist's naïvely utopian view of communist society does not. Curiously, although healthily cynical about exploitation in Soviet-style communist societies (p60), van den Berghe describes himself as an anarchist (van den Berghe 2005). However, anarchism seems even more hopelessly utopian than communism, given human's innate sociality and desire to exploit reproductive competitors. A Hobbesian State of Nature is no utopia.

A Paradox for the Theory of Ethnic Nepotism
Van den Berghe argues that "the subordinate group in an ethnic hierarchy invariably `loses' more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa" (p75) and therefore that, whereas "the men of the subordinate group are always the losers... the women of the subordinate group... frequently have the option of being reproductively successful with dominant-group males" (p27). Although genetic data confirms that historically matings between white men and black women were more frequent than the converse (Lind et al 2007), the situation now appears to be reversed. Despite the continued economic disadvantage of blacks in contemporary America, recent census data suggests that black men are about 2 and a half times as likely to marry white women as black women are to marry white men (Fryer 2007).
This data comes from an atypical society encumbered with evolutionary novelties such as contraception. However, given that, in Darwinian terms, reproduction represents the ultimate resource for which individuals compete, it cannot be brushed aside. Perhaps the beginnings of a solution to this paradox can be sought in van den Berghe's later collaboration with Peter Frost (van den Berghe and Frost 1986). Frost has subsequently argued that ecological conditions in sub-Saharan Africa permit high levels of polygyny and that this has increased the intensity of selection for traits (e.g increased muscularity, masculinity and athleticism) which enhance the ability of African-descended males to compete for mates and increase their attractiveness to females (Frost 2008). (See also Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice.)

Betzig, LL 1986 Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History New York: Aldine

Brigandt, I 2001 "The homeopathy of kin selection: an evaluation of van den Berghe's sociobiological approach to ethnicity." Politics and the Life Sciences 20: 203-215.

Frost, P 2008 "Sexual selection and human geographic variation." Special Issue: Proceedings of the ND Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4), pp. 169-191

Fryer, RG Jr 2007. "Guess Who's Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage over the 20th Century", Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2), pp. 71-90

Hamilton, WD 1964 The genetical evolution of social behaviour Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-52

Lind JM, et al 2007 'Elevated male European and female African contributions to the genomes of African American individuals.' Human Genetics 120(5) 713-722

Rushton, 2005 JP Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory Nations and Nationalism 11(4): 489-507

Salter, F. 2000 "A Defence and Extension of Pierre van den Berghe's Theory of Ethnic Nepotism". In James, P. and Goetze, D. (Eds.) Evolutionary Theory and Ethnic Conflict (Praeger Studies on Ethnic and National Identities in Politics) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Sanderson, SK 2001 The Evolution of Human Sociality Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield

van den Berghe, PL 1979 Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View New York Elsevier

van den Berghe PL 2005 Review of On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in the Age of Mass Migration by Frank Salter Nations and Nationalism 11(1) 161-177

van den Berghe, P. L. & P. Frost. 1986 Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9: 87-113