Indoctrinabilty, Ideology, and Warfare

After experiencing the mind-bomb of Global Meltdown, an experience I referred to here, one of the first and most personally influential books I read in the immediate aftermath was Indoctrinabilty, Ideology, and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives, edited by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Frank Kemp Salter.

[Salter was later to rock my world again with On Genetic Interests - so good I bought several copies (if anyone reading this would like to make a small donation to the BNP, Steadfast Trust, or something similar in return for an untouched, still sealed copy of the second edition send me an email and we’ll work it out). And incidentally, although it is 11 years old I would still recommend Global Meltdown to readers interested in an honest analysis of the problems caused by globalism, mass migration, the culture wars, and subsequent social breakdown. As I mentioned before it’s an academic work that quotes writers like Taylor, Brimelow and Abernethy respectfully, but it has another virtue: unlike the similarly themed Clash of Civilisations, Coming Anarchy, or New White Nationalism it is not written to persuade Euros and ‘their’ governments to act in ways beneficial to other groups (Jews in Huntington’s and Kaplan’s works, Blacks in Swain’s) but harmful to us.]

Now, back to Indoctrinabilty. Over the next few days I’ll post some of the parts most relevant to a pro-nationalist position. I think most readers of this blog that haven’t yet read Indoctrinability will perceive its quality if I name some of its contributors: Salter, obviously, but also Kevin Macdonald, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, J. Philippe Rushton, Lionel Tiger, and Johan M. G. van der Dennen among others. For now, here’s an extract from the introductory chapter in which the editors set out their stall.

From Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Salter (eds), Indoctrinabilty, Ideology, and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives (New York, Berghahn Books, 1998) pp.1-3:

Arthur Koestler once remarked that it is not an excess of aggression but of loyalty that could ruin us. And indeed it was and is up to the present the identification with values of a community, be they religious, party-political or ethnonationalistic, that have led to the most atrocious bloodshed of our history.

In particular, ethnic nationalism seems to resist attempts at suppression. Our indoctrinability, our group loyalty, and our proneness to collective aggression are phenomena deserving attention. Why this loyalty and feeling of belongingness to a group characterized by shared language, cultural practices, beliefs and other symbols of identity? And why the diversity of cultures -- why so many different ethnicities at all?

From an evolutionary point of view, the why-question aims at an understanding of the selection pressures responsible for a trait, whether a cultural practice or an innate motor pattern or disposition. We thus try to understand the function of a behavior in promoting survival or reproduction. More generally, we want to learn the ways in which phylogeny prepared us to act so as to enhance our fitness on the individual, kin, and even group level. Preparation can take the form of preadaptation, the fortuitous matching of a trait with some new environmental challenge. A case in point is natural selection at the level of groups, a concept now back in vogue after being banished from the realm of the plausible where it had been introduced by Darwin, Keith, and others. Humans’ culturally enhanced ability to discipline group members and detect free-riders can be seen as a preadaptation for group selection, in the manner formalized by Richerson and Boyd (this volume).

Since evolution is a continuing process in a constantly changing world, adaptations lag behind the changes they have to cope with. This is particularly true for the human species, which for most of its history lived in small communities where individuals knew each other personally and in which each community set itself apart from similar others, usually by occupying and defending discrete territories. There could be no sharper contrast between this primordial environment and the technologically advanced civilizations of anonymous millions organized around megacities that we have created for ourselves. This is an environment for which we are less phylogenetically adapted than the intimate hunter-gatherer band. Our attempts to culturally adapt to this new situation include experiments with a diversity of social strategies of leadership, ideologies, and economic systems. Emotionally we are well prepared for a life in small face-to-face communities. The large anonymous society and the impersonality of technical civilization creates problems.

The trial-and-error ‘learning’ by selection acting on variation, which has characterized our biological and much of our cultural evolution, is a painful process. Were we to rely on this process of ‘self organization’ as recommended by nineteenth-century Social Darwinists and the economic liberal van Hayek, the pain would continue for some considerable time. And time is running short. Due to the success of our species we have probably outbred the long-term carrying capacity of our planet, and our descendants will be caught between the anvil of limited resources and the hammer of global pollution. Oil resources appear to have comprised the booty of two recent wars, and there is a disturbingly great potential for destructive international competition over strategic minerals and living space as the developing world flexes its newfound industrial muscles.

Is it possible to imagine societal life without institutionalized dominance? Small face-to-face communities do exist without institutions, but for anonymous mass societies institutionalized dominance seems to be inevitable. In a democratic society the conditions for the application of repressive dominance must be well defined and accepted by the population. One condition is a degree of popular trust in those wielding power, combined with institutional checks and balances, including elections. Citizens expect those to whom they delegate power to use it to maintain the public goods of law and order and the regulation of the profit motive when it would lead to environmental degradation or exploitation. The trend in democratic states is towards a balance of administrative nurturance and authoritarian dominance. The demand for both is due to phylogenetically evolved dispositions, but in the anonymous society nurturance tends to have a lower priority to considerations of personal security and status competition. For those who would construct a nurturant society, special attention must be devoted to preventing the escalation of authoritarian dominance. The history of human social forms can be seen as attempts to strike a tolerable balance between authority and nurturance, a process that continues up to the present time.

Certainly we should not rely on the self-organizing tendency of institutions. Natural selection shows no mercy. If prey is abundant, predators multiply until they overshoot the carrying capacity of their resource, and a joint population collapse ensues, acting as a corrective. This allows for recovery of the prey animals and, with a little delay, of the predators, and so forth in endless tides of suffering. Booms and recessions follow this principle, and it seems as if democracy could finally endanger its existence should laissez faire be allowed to take its course. This risks an escalation of repressive dominance leading to rebellion. Do we want selection to act as a corrective in this way? Certainly not. It would hardly be appropriate for a species capable of reasoning. Surely, we are always under the scrutiny of natural selection. But we can actively seek and select the conditions under which to live, exposing ourselves to a variety of selective forces. We can learn much from nature, but its laws allow great freedom of manoeuvre over long spans of time. Wresting our destiny from the sorrows of natural selection does not avoid a degree of trial and error, but as already said above, we can combine this ability to strive for set goals with the readiness to correct mistakes in time. And this should become our second nature. We also noted that face-saving often blocks our readiness to admit error. But once we recognize this stumbling block of our heritage, we can cope with the situation.

All organisms are in search of a better world, as Karl Popper used to say. That is, all life pushes ahead, exposing itself to new selective conditions as they arise. Our species is no exception, but we have one advantage not enjoyed by any other species: we can deliberate, debate, and plan ahead and thus can set ourselves goals toward which to strive. As long as we avoid dogmatic fixations and are prepared to learn from mistakes and correct our course in time, new paths are opened up to us. We could free our future course from being too erratic and painful, while speeding the process of cultural adaptation. We are not only intellectually but emotionally prepared for such an enterprise; our nurturant dispositions are the basis of our humanitarian concerns.

Humans’ genetic outfit in many ways facilitates cultural adaptation to mass societies, but there are also innate dispositions that in particular situations hamper further development. Pitfalls may reveal themselves in certain situations if we are not aware of them. What were adaptive dispositions in the hunter-gatherer milieu can be destructive in the artificial environment of the modern state. Our striving for repressive dominance is one example. Another is our short-term thinking. All organisms throughout their history, dating back at least 2.5 billion years, have been bred for instant competition. Who won the race right now made it -- or retained options for the future. This has also bred in us a basically opportunistic, exploitative disposition that seriously hampers the development of a long-term survival ethos predicated on the fate of future generations.

In evolutionary terms, individual survival means nothing if it does not contribute to the survival and reproduction of genetically related kin. The resulting patterns of loyalty and competition have traumatized our history. Yet as far back as the historical record allows us to infer, ever since humans first reflected upon the uniqueness of life they became concerned about the sufferings imposed by war, including the sufferings of those not belonging to their own communities. Is there a chance for peace in an overcrowded world? And can a sustainable peace be compatible with the preservation of ethnic diversity? It must if we are to avoid a global repressive regime, since the human tendency to experiment with new ways of group living is pronounced. Life has always tended to diversify -- a tendency that has served as pacemaker of evolution. And after all, only through diversification has life continued and grown in richness on this planet.

Pierre L. van den Berghe: Does race matter?

From Pierre L. van den Berghe, ‘Does race matter?’ : Nations and Nationalism, I: 3 (1995), 359-68

Abstract: This essay contends that behaviour can only be understood within an evolutionary framework that gives equal weight to genes and environment. Our cultural environment itself evolved, in part through natural selection of genes and in part through other mechanisms. Racism, however, involves association of genetically caused differences in physical appearance with characteristics to which they are wholly unrelated. Yet this association has a biological cause: fitness maximisation through nepotism. This association, therefore, has an effect upon the life chances and reproductive success of genetically different groups and, therefore, upon the process of human evolution.

Do social races have any biological underpinning?

At a trivial level, the answer to that question is an obvious 'yes'. A social race is defined as a group sharing physical (as distinguished from cultural) attri­butes. But must there be such a linkage? Do physical differences between groups always lead to social differences? More generally, do physical pheno­types always matter socially? And, if so, why?

My theory, first stated a decade-and-a-half-ago, is very simple. All social organisms are biologically programmed to be nepotistic, i.e. to behave favourably (or 'altruistically') to others in proportion to their real or perceived degree of common ancestry. Social organisms evolved to be nepotistic because altruistic investment in unrelated organisms is biologically wasted and therefore could not evolve, as Darwin clearly saw well over a century ago. The evidence, both human and non-human, for rampant nepotism is over­whelming. The bibliography on humans alone now runs into several hundred titles. Favouring kin among humans is sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, and biologically, it does not matter which. But, consciously or unconsciously, we must be able to discriminate according to degree of biological relationship to ourselves, if our beneficence to others is to increase our inclusive fitness.

For the most fundamental mammalian social tie, the mother-infant one, a simple mechanism is typically present: identification and imprinting shortly after birth by sight, sound, olfaction or a combination of these. Experimental switching of neonates has demonstrated these simple recognition mechan­isms in many mammalian species. But often, and certainly for humans, the situation is much more complex. More than most (perhaps all) other organ­isms, humans recognise and make fine gradations of kinship, and dispense their largesse or their nastiness accordingly.

Being intelligent and opportunistic animals, humans use all possible clues of relatedness, with a preference for the ones that are reliable, quick and cheap. Since it pays, in fitness maximisation terms, to be a fine-tuned dis­criminator of kinship in a wide range of situations involving hundreds or even thousands of relationships, any readily identifiable, unfalsifiable marker of probable common ancestry will be used. Specification of a few simple proper­ties of the marker itself, of the social circumstances of the individual, and of the ecological conditions of the social encounter can lead one to good behavioural predictions. For example, it can be predicted that, among social mammals with heavy biparental investment in offspring, parenthood will be 'tested' by males more than by females, because paternity is exposed to much more uncertainty than maternity. Mothers know their babies are theirs; fathers cannot be so sure, and therefore will look much more for physical resemblance, especially for signature-like rare characteristics such as a mole on the nose. Women concerned with paternal investment in their offspring, on the other hand, can be expected to stress the physical resemblance of their babies to their mates more than to themselves. 'Isn't he his father's spitting image?'

Let us now widen the focus from kinship in the narrow sense, to that form of extended kinship we call race or ethnicity. Both racial and ethnic groups are socially defined by real or putative common descent, and the distinction between the two types of groups is merely in the relative salience of biolo­gical or cultural markers of membership. My contention is that, in both cases, the social concern is with common biological descent, even when the markers are primarily cultural.

There are three main objections to my formulation of ethnocentrism and racism as extended forms of biologically rooted nepotism.

(1) The common descent of ethnic groups is often a myth, not a biological reality. Therefore, my argument is invalid. To which I reply: A myth, to be effective, has to be believed, and a myth of ethnicity will only be believed if members of an ethnic group are sufficiently alike in physical appearance and culture, and have lived together and intermarried for a sufficient period (at a minimum three or four generations) for the myth to have developed a substantial measure of biological truth. The Emperor ofjapan can effectively claim to be the father of the Japanese nation in a way that Queen Victoria could never validate her claim as mother ofIndia. Ethnicity or race cannot be invented or imagined out of nothing. It can be manipulated, used, exploited, stressed, fused or subdivided, but it must correlate With a pre-existing popula­tion bound by preferential endogamy and a common historical experience. Ethnicity is both primordial and instrumental.

(2) If ethnicity and race are both rooted in the biology of nepotism, why is it that most ethnic groups stress cultural markers of membership rather than heritable physical ones? The answer here is quite simple: because most ethnic groups seek to differentiate themselves from their immediate neighbours in situations where some short-distance migration and intermarriage take place. Therefore, most ethnic groups look so much like their neighbours that they must rely on cultural markers of distinction. The proof of the biological pudding is that, where physical, genetic markers do a reliable job of differ­entiating between groups, they are used. In fact, the conditions under which racial groups do emerge are quite predictable: they appear after long-distance migration of sizeable groups across visible genetic clines: slavery, colonialism, indenture, voluntary migration, military conquest are so many examples, especially across large geographical barriers such as oceans or deserts. And racial groups can only survive as long as interbreeding remains relatively infrequent. Three or four generations of 25 per cent or more exogamy typically erode both racial and ethnic boundaries, and lead to the formation of new ethnic groups. Both race and ethnicity are not immutable, but their mutability is a function of exogamy over several generations.

(3) If biological nepotism is extended to large groups, which, under modern conditions, often comprise millions of individuals, has not the con­cept been diluted to the point of meaninglessness, and reduced to a mere analogy?

Of course, the more distant the biological relationship between two individuals, the more diluted the benefits of nepotism become. Indeed, the biological model predicts that the preference is proportional to the degree of relationship. Relatedness is relative. Ego is at the core of a set of concentric circles defining declining degrees of relationship: nuclear family, extended family, lineage, clan, dialect group, sub ethnicity, nation. These levels of relatedness are imbedded into one another. Circumstances and interests will determine the level of solidarity which is activated at any given place and time, in a classical fission-and-fusion scheme such as British anthropologists have described for African segmentary lineage societies. But the principle of nepotism, however diluted, suffuses all levels, and there is no a priori reason why nepotistic discrimination should stop at any particular point, unless it can be displaced by a superior strategy of fitness maximisation. Brothers do murder each other, but not gratuitously and not as easily as strangers. When they do, there is usually a big payoff, such as a throne, an inheritance or a harem. To affirm the operation of nepotism, even in large groups, is not to deny the operation of other principles of cooperative behaviour (such as class solidarity), or fitness maximisation (such as deceit and treachery). The size of the group dilutes the effectiveness of solidary behaviour whatever the base of solidarity, but not more so for ethnic groups than for other social groups such as classes, corporations, clubs or army units, and perhaps even less. Ethnic and racial groups can be politically mobilised, even on a huge scale, with greater ease and rapidity, than other social groups, especially under external threat from an enemy who is himself defined in ethnic or racial terms.

Does the biology of social race explain the etiology of racism in contemporary societies?

Better put, does my theory of the biological genesis of social race predict and explain contemporary racism better than competing theories? The answer, I think, is yes, not because it supplants other theories, but because it comple­ments them at a higher level of theoretical generality. It provides a predictive scheme of when, where and why racism can be expected to wax and wane, on a world-wide basis, without having to invoke any special cultural, psycholo­gical or historical causes.

Racism, defined as discriminatory behaviour based on inherited physical appearance, can be expected to arise whenever variance in inherited physical appearance is greater between groups than within groups. This is a relatively rare event, except when two or more hitherto isolated populations migrate across large geographical obstacles. It is even rarer for intergroup variance to remain greater than intragroup variance for long, because contact generally brings about interbreeding. So, racism will appear after long-distance migra­tion, but will only persist as long as social barriers to exogamy prevent intermixture, and thus the recreation of a more typical situation where intragroup genetic diversity exceeds intergroup differences. Racism cannot be sustained long if racial membership cuts across the microkinship of the family. Precisely because social race is an extension of the principle of nepot­ism, it cannot long survive interbreeding. Even the rare exceptions, such as relations between white and brown Afrikaners in South Africa, confirm the rule: the 'races' only survived the interbreeding of slavery because of the reimposition of an endogamous caste system after slavery.

Having specified the objective conditions which lead to the rise and the decline of racism, does it follow that racism will inevitably accompany these conditions? Unfortunately, I think the answer is, again, affirmative. Why? Because we are not only selfish maximisers, but intelligently opportunistic ones. Sociality is synonymous with discrimination. Only a fool behaves indiscriminately towards all. We must constantly decide when to be nice or nasty, trusting or suspicious. In the last analysis, we have only two bases for doing so: reciprocity and nepotism. Reciprocity is tricky, unstable, open to cheating, and often dependent on costly information or past experience. It only works between individuals who know one another well and who expect to continue interacting in a mutually beneficial way without deceit or coer­cion. For nepotism to yield its genetic reward, the only requirement is correct assessment of relatedness. It works best if the cost of that assessment is minimised, that is, if the assessment is reliable, easy and fast.

These simple principles enable us to predict which markers of group membership will be used under what conditions. Where neighbouring groups look alike physically, cultural markers do a better job of assessing group membership than genetic traits. Not all cultural markers are equally good. The beret may be a symbol of Basque ethnicity, but it is not reliable. Indeed, it has been usurped by millions of Frenchmen, Spaniards and others. Military uniforms are used for ready recognition of friend and foe from a distance, but they too are open to cheating. That is why costume is frequently a symbol of ethnicity, but never a test of it. Facial scarification is much more reliable than dress because it cannot easily be undone. Cultural markers of ethnicity which permanently change physical appearance are common: cir­cumcision, tooth filing, tattoos and so on. Language is also a common marker. Even though it is strictly cultural, it is learned early in life and difficult to 'fake' in adulthood, because few people retain the ability to mimic the phonetics of a language learned after puberty. Until recent migrations, some­one who spoke your dialect without a foreign accent was most likely to be a native fellow ethnic. But the drawback of language as a marker is that, though reliable, it is fairly slow. You have to ask questions before you shoot, and sometimes you cannot afford the delay.

Let us turn to biological markers. They only work between groups that look quite different. Between Zulus and Boers in South Africa, they worked with complete efficacy: you could shoot at 500 metres and never make a mistake. Norwegians and Swedes, on the other hand, could never be racists towards one another, even if they wanted to. They have to listen to one another before they can tell who is who. The Nazis tried to be racists with Jews but their biological markers worked with perhaps 10 to 15 per cent reliability. In practice, they used mostly cultural markers: circumcision, syna­gogue attendance, the Star of David, denunciations, surnames, etc. Nazi racial theory ludicrously outstripped the reality of genetic differences. They actually had a very difficult time picking out Jews from their Gentile neigh­bours, especially in the assimilated Jewry of Western Europe.

Physical markers, in short, only 'work' under the limiting and rare condi­tion of genetic heterozygosity being greater between groups than within. If such a condition is present, however, does it follow that racism is inevitable? Not by a long shot, because most genotypic differences are phenotypically hidden by recessivity or are so cryptic as to be useless for purposes of quick and easy group membership ascription. Blood types, for instance, must be tested by antigens from a blood sample, and the test is slow and costly enough that soldiers in combat are culturally tagged (or, in the case of the SS in Nazi Germany, even tattooed) for their genotype.

In practice, then, only a few inherited phenotypes are culturally utilised to form social races, and they are chosen, not for their behavioural significance, but simply for their visibility. Skin pigmentation is the most widespread because it is the most visible from the greatest distance and subject to only a limited range of environmental variation. (The genetics of skin colour are still poorly understood and are probably under the control of four to six different loci.) Facial features (notably eye, lip and nose shape), hair texture and physical stature are also used where they are diacritic. For example, in Rwanda and Burundi where the Hutu- Tutsi- Twa distinction is marked by large group differences in height, stature is widely used as a criterion. It works better in Rwanda where a rigid caste system hindered interbreeding, than in the more fluid social structure of Burundi, but, in both cases, the physical distinction was used as a quick and dirty basis for sweeping genocidal action (against the Tutsi in Rwanda, against the Hutu in Burundi). A particularly gruesome atrocity against the Tutsi in Rwanda was to amputate them at the knee to cut them down to size.

This double condition of greater inter- than intragroup heterozygosity and high phenotypic visibility predicts when, where and why physical phenotypes get transmuted into social races. The reason why racism became the great pandemic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was simply the sudden acceleration of large-scale, long-distance migration across wide genetic clines. The social consequences were enormous and noxious because racial distinc­tions are peculiarly invidious and immutable, well beyond cultural distinc­tions. All group distinctions between in-group and out-group are designed to exclude potential competitors from competition for scarce resources, but racial distinctions are especially nasty because they are almost totally beyond individual control. You can learn a language, convert to a religion, get circumcised or scarified, adopt a dress style, but you cannot become tall or white.

In practice, social race is always a social stigma for the subordinate group, and all attempts to pretend otherwise have been singularly unsuccessful. Pragmatically, in terms of policy, it means that institutionalisation of racial categories, however innocuous or even benevolent it may appear, is fre­quently noxious in its consequences. I am thinking of such measures as racial questions on censuses, race-based affirmative action and similar measures, which have generally had the effect of reinforcing stigmatised racial distinc­tions.

Conclusion

Let us now close the circle on the relationship between genes and behaviour. I have repeatedly stressed that behaviour, human and non-human alike, can only be understood within an evolutionary framework that gives equal weight to genes and environment acting in concert. For humans, culture is, of course, a large part of the social environment of our species. A genetic effect on behaviour can be direct and result from natural selection, even when it leads to a reduction in fitness (e.g. overeating when food is available, leading to obesity in affluent societies, but providing valuable caloric storage in unstable hunting and gathering economies characterised by cycles of feast and famine; or the craving for drugs which mimic the pleasurable sensations of natural enzymes).

The case of racism, however, is different. The linkage between genes and behaviour is clear, but it did not evolve by natural selection. Racism is conceivably a case of culture 'highjacking' genes which were selected for different ends (e.g. skin pigmentation regulating exposure to sun radiation in different latitudes), and making them serve a totally different social agenda. Yet, that social agenda itself had an underlying biological programme: fitness maximisation through nepotism. Finally, but not less importantly, that social agenda itself had an enormous feedback effect on the life chances of different groups, on their reproductive success, and therefore, in the final analysis, on the course of human evolution itself. We are only in the infancy of understanding the co-evolution of genes and culture, but understand it we must if we are to make sense of our behaviour, especially behaviour, such as racism, which does not seem to make sense.

Revised: Pierre van den Berghe on dominance and hierarchy in ethnic relations

Although published first in 1981, The Ethnic Phenomenon by Pierre L. van den Berghe remains a standard work on ethnic relations and its theory underpins a more recent work popular with nationalists, Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests.

In On Genetic Interests (2007 edition) Salter wrote:

Pierre van den Berghe … implied the existence of ethnic genetic interests in his analysis of family systems. ‘[R]eproduction is almost always a bad economic bargain for parents. Consequently, there must be more in it for them, and that “more” is, of course, fitness.’ In his classic 1981 sociobiological analysis of ethnicity, The Ethnic Phenomenon, van den Berghe argued that ethnic groups constitute extended families, both subjectively in the perception of their members and objectively in the genetic commonality produced by common descent. Since in his view ethnies are large families, van den Berghe’s theory implies that they represent a store of their members’ distinctive genes. [p.40]

It was Salter’s achievement to quantify the individual’s genetic interest in the extended family that is his ethnic group. For example:

Ethnies are indeed super families as van den Berghe argued. Although being more dilute stores of genetic interest than families, ethnies can number in the millions and so are often orders of magnitude more precious. If immigrants replaced one quarter of the English nation of approximately 50 million people, the remainder would suffer a very large loss even if their own relatives were not affected. If 12.5 million Danes and similar peoples moved to England, the genetic loss to the remaining English would be the equivalent of 209,000 children. The corresponding loss due to the same number of immigrants from India would be 2.6 million children, and due to Bantus over 13 million children. [p.67]

Now, back to The Ethnic Phenomenon, specifically chapter 4, ‘Ethnicity and Coercion: The Politics of Hierarchy’ in which van den Berghe describes the normative processes of group hierarchies and ethnicity’s relation to the state. This is interesting because it shows how unprecedented is the situation of today’s Western majorities: numerically dominant but politically powerless and somehow feeling compelled to accept/welcome our dispossession.

By Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (Praeger, New York, 1987)

Chapter 4: ETHNICITY AND COERCION: THE POLITICS OF HIERARCHY

Coercion and its resulting hierarchies are not unique to humans. Many social animals establish what ethologists call “hierarchies,” “dominance orders” or, in birds, “pecking orders.” There is considerable discussion among students of animal behavior about the nature of hierarchy. Some animals establish linear hierarchies; others do not. In some species, there are separate male and female hierarchies; in others, the order of dominance varies depending on the resource competed for; in others yet, an animal’s condition (e.g. oestrus and lactation) changes its relative position. There is much disagreement on how best to measure hierarchy, or on whether hierarchy is a unidimensional concept. Many ethologists measure hierarchy, indeed define hierarchy, as order of access to resources, especially food or, for males, receptive females; yet others focus on rituals of submission and dominance (which, among many primates, frequently take pseudosexual forms such as mounting or presenting the genitalia); some stress “displacement behavior” (i.e. the yielding space to an approaching animal); some insist that, among primates, “attention structure” (who pays attention to whom) is crucial.

Underlying all these interesting disagreements, differences of emphasis and fine points of methodology and measurement, however, students of animal behavior broadly agree that dominance or hierarchy is a concept abstracted from the observation of animals competing for access to resources. In the last analysis, what defines the hierarchy of a group is an order of access to resources. The master paradigm explaining how resources are distributed in a social group is, again, maximization of individual inclusive fitness. The strongest do not always get all; in fact, they seldom do. Animals predisposed to eat their helpless young, for instance, would not reproduce successfully! Yet there clearly is an important element of coercion, or the threat thereof, in the establishment, maintenance and challenge of hierarchies. Outside of the context of kin selection (especially parental care) and reciprocity (especially between mated reproductive adults) animals maximize their fitness by outcompeting others for resources, directly or indirectly. Speed and deceit play a role in that contest, but coercion, i.e. the use of force or the threat thereof, is the main method by which dominance is exerted, maintained and indeed challenged.

Indeed, it is safe to generalize that there is no hierarchy without underlying coercion. Coercion is the use of force or its threat to increase the fitness of the dominant animal at the expense of subordinate ones. The more or less stable result of their multiple contests over resources is what we call the dominance order of a group of social animals.


HUMAN DOMINANCE SYSTEMS: COERCION AND DECEIT


Complex as dominance is among nonhuman animals, it is nothing compared to what hierarchy has become in the human societies of the last few millenia. Human hierarchies are vastly more complex than anything found in other species because of the following:

1) Humans form not only individual dominance hierarchies, as do other animals, but also establish group hierarchies. So far, nothing beyond small, unstable coalitions of two or three individuals has been found in the more intelligent nonhuman mammals such as baboons. Only human societies are organized on the basis of stable group hierarchies and, even in our species, this is a relatively recent development of the last few millenia.


2) Humans have the capacity to magnify, indeed to reverse, through an increasingly lethal technology of violence, biological inequalities of strength or intelligence between individuals. Biological differences of strength based on age and sex still explain human dominance orders within small groups, such as families or gangs, but human group-based hierarchies are explainable almost entirely in terms of social organization of the technology of violence. Socially oppressed groups are not necessarily made up of weaker or dumber individuals. Indeed, typically they are not. Instead, they are composed of individuals who owe their inferior position to technological and/or organizational inferiority in using the means of violence.


3. The human capacity for conscious deceit (through ideology, inter alia) further enhances our species' capacity for group inequality beyond anything known in other species. Human systems of group inequality, especially the ones perpetuated by all large, centralized states, are almost invariably bolstered by an ideology that disguises the parasitism of the ruling class as either kin selection or reciprocity. Subjects are told that they are ruled (i.e. exploited) in their own best interests, either by a benevolent despot who claims some kind of fatherly interest in them and who supposedly saves them from their own greed and ineptitude, or through a supposedly freely entered social contract wherein the rulers are held to be chosen representatives and servants of the people entrusted with promoting the common good and arbitrating and regulating individual conflicts of interest.


The first type of ideology used to legitimize the status quo - paternalism - is the most common one in pre-industrial societies. It has been repeatedly reinvented in countless monarchies of Europe, Asia and Africa, in defense of colonialism and chattel slavery in the Americas and Africa - indeed almost everywhere powerful agrarian states developed. The second and more recent justification for tyranny and exploitation - often misnamed “democracy,” either of the liberal or of the socialist “people’s” variety - is characteristic of industrial societies since the French Revolution.


This is not the place to trace the development and analyze the operation of complex systems of group coercion and exploitation in human societies, as that would take us too far afield. I shall largely confine my remarks to tracing the relationship of group coercion to ethnic relations. Nevertheless a few preliminary observations are in order:


1) Group stratification is a relatively recent phenomenon in human evolution: it accompanied the so-called Neolithic Revolution, that is, the domestication of plants and animals that greatly increased human population density, led to sedentarization into more permanent settlements and made possible the accumulation (and, hence, the appropriation) of surplus production.


2) Group stratification co-evolved with the state. The essence of the state is intraspecific - indeed, intrasocietal parasitism. The state is the coercive apparatus used by the few to exploit the many. The state is, in fact, the ruling class organized to extract surplus production through the use of deceit or violence or the threat thereof. By parasitizing the exploited classes through control of labor and its products (forced labor, slavery, taxation), members of the parasitic class convert, in effect, organized coercion into higher fitness for themselves at the expense of the exploited. Plunder and predation between human societies existed long before the rise of states. With the emergence of the state, however, parasitism was extended within societies.


3) Ideology will be treated as a form of organized, collective deceit whereby parasitism is disguised-usually as either kin selection or reciprocity. To say that ideology reflects class interests is not to say that it is unimportant. Some forms of deceit are successful - successful, that is, in terms of consequences for fitness - and are therefore important.


The reader will readily see that the above formulations on the nature of the state, stratification and ideology, while formulated within the general paradigm of maximization of individual inclusive fitness, is fully congruent with Marxist class analysis and, indeed, owes a great deal to it.


ETHNICITY AND THE STATE


Innumerable authors have stressed the fundamental distinction between nation-states and multinational states. Certainly many of the key words used by social scientists in the analysis of domestic and “international” politics rely implicitly or explicitly on that distinction: state, nation, nation-state, nationality, nationalism, subnationalism, communalism, internationalism, tribe, tribalism, ethnicity, colonialism, imperialism, plural society, multiethnic state, multinational state, ethnic nationalism and so on. Yet the literature on these subjects is so hopelessly muddied by inconsistent and, indeed, blatantly conflicting usages of these terms that the urge to create neologisms is almost irresistible. In an effort to clarify the muddle without introducing new terms, I shall set forth a few straightforward definitions.

A state is a collectivity headed by a group of people who exercise power over others (who are neither kinsmen nor spouses), in order to extract surplus production for their own individual and collective benefit.

A nation is a politically conscious ethny, that is, an ethny that claims the right to statehood by virtue of being an ethny. Such a ideology is called nationalism.

A nation-state is a state made up almost exclusively of a single nation.

A multinational state is a state made up of two or more nations.

A multiethnic state is a state made up of two or more ethnies that do not claim statehood.

Imperialism is the domination of one or more ethnies over others. Colonialism is long-distance imperialism, usually over noncontiguous territory and over culturally unrelated ethnies.

These simple definitions may not solve all problems, but at least they eliminate much of the needless confusion that arose from such careless usage as calling multinational states like Nigeria, Za'ire or India “nation-states.” If “nation-state” is to be used synonymously with “state,” then the term is superfluous. Similarly, “ethnic nationalism,” by our definition, is a redundancy. Terms like “tribe” and “tribalism” become altogether superfluous since they really mean “nation” and “nationalism” and are used mostly invidiously to refer to Africans. (Why should the Hausa or the Zulu be tribes, but not Danes or French Canadians?)


Now let us return to the distinction between state and nation. Why is it important? At the outset, it is obvious that the two are far from being coterminous, despite the pious fictions of international conferences where delegates pretend that all states are “United Nations.” We know better, of course. Only about 10% of the “United Nations’ ” 150-odd states are genuine nations or at least come close to it by the criterion of having 90% or more of their population speaking mutually understandable dialects of the same language. The remaining 90% are multinational or multi ethnic states, some of which may still hope to become nation-states, but many of which do not even try or have long since given up the attempt.


Conversely, many nations are divided between several states and may thus be called multistatal nations: Kurds, Armenians, Germans, Basques, Koreans, Yorubas and Ewes, to mention but a few examples on three continents. The extent to which these multistatal nations are nationalist and irredentist varies enormously - both from place to place and cyclically. Nationalist movements are volatile and highly responsive to historical opportunities such as wars, revolutions and the breakdown of imperial systems.


One thing is clear: the real nation-state is a rare entity. But, rare though it is, it seems to be seductively attractive as a basis of political organization. Much bloodshed has accompanied the efforts to create nation-states. In every age since the recorded history of states, nationalism has inspired masses of people to veritable orgies of emotion and violence. Nationalist conflicts are among the most intractable and unamenable to reason and compromise. The problems of political integration and legitimacy, while present to some extent in all states, are compounded in multinational states. In short, it seems that a great many people care passionately whether they are ruled and exploited by members of their own ethny or by foreigners. Where many grudgingly put up with the former, they lose little opportunity to rebel against the latter. Why?


On the face of it, it should make little difference whether one is fleeced by people who speak one's own language or a foreign tongue. Yet, it clearly does make an important difference - often the difference between passive, reluctant acquiescence and sometimes suicidal rebellion. I have already suggested the answer as to why the nation-state is a more viable political entity than the multinational state. The nation-state is legitimated by kin selection - the most fundamental basis of animal sociality. Conversely, that basis of legitimacy is not available to the multinational state. Queen Victoria could cut a motherly figure in England; she even managed to proclaim her son the Prince of Wales; but she could never hope to become anything except a foreign ruler of India. Similarly, the fiction that the Emperor of Japan is the head of the most senior lineage descended from the common ancestor of all Japanese might convince the Japanese peasant that the Emperor is an exalted cousin of his, but the myth lacks credibility in Korea or Taiwan.

THE NATION-STATE

Before looking at the systems of ethnic domination imposed on multinational states, let us look more closely at the emergence of the nation-state and at the legitimation of rule in the nation-state. There are basically two ways in which primary states are formed: externally through conquest and internally through centralization of power.* That is, an ethny can conquer its neighbors, impose itself as a ruling class over them and thus create a multi ethnic state. Alternatively, within an ethny, an individual or group can gradually assert authority over the rest of the ethny, thus giving rise to a nation-state. Though the two processes are distinct, they are often complementary. Centralization of power within the ethny, as it typically gives rise to a more cohesive political and military organization, often facilitates enlargement by conquest. Conversely, if the fruits of conquest are to be reaped, the conquering group must develop a system of permanent domination, and this fosters the development of centralized power within the conquering group. In practice, then, states are typically seen to emerge out of a double process of external conquest and internal centralization of power.

*Secondary states can be formed from existing states through secession. of course.


When political (and, indeed, other social) scientists think of nation-states, they generally tend to project the European experience since the Renaissance. This is unfortunate since nearly all European states for the last 2000 years or so are secondary formations that fragmented or emerged from previously existing states. Many European states, including some comparatively small ones (e.g. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and Switzerland), are multinational states - not nation-states. As for those European states that come close to being real nations, they were created either through the political and military consolidation of multi-statal nations (e.g. Germany and Italy in the 19th century) or through the disintegration of multinational empires (e.g. The Netherlands in the 16th century, Poland, and Hungary and, briefly, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in the 20th century). In both cases, the nation and the state had coexisted for centuries, but they were not coextensive. Either the nation was split up into a multiplicity of squabbling statelets (as in Germany, Italy and, earlier, France) or a multiplicity of captive nations were ruled by large empires dominated by one or more ethnic groups (such as Austria-Hungary, Russia, Ottoman Turkey and Spain).


Except for Switzerland, a loose confederation that grew from within over the last seven centuries, and a few statelets left over from the Middle Ages like Monaco, Andorra and San Marino, all contemporary European states emerged as complex bureaucratic machines from other complex states. Belgium, for instance, a relatively new state born in 1830 out of the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire and the shambles of the Congress of Vienna, was, from the outset, a full-blown, modern, bureaucratic state (but not a nation), and in barely over half a century, it launched on a vast colonial adventure in the Congo.


Clearly, then, Europe in recent centuries is a poor exemplar of either the nation-state or, much less, of how nation-states first developed out of state¬less societies. Africa, which until recently still had many stateless societies and where a number of states had recently emerged or were emerging at the time of the European conquest, is much more instructive in this respect. States start in agricultural and/or pastoralist societies, usually from modest and inconspicuous beginnings, at the village level. Indeed, the core unit around which state institutions slowly emerge is typically small enough to be a sub-ethny, a single local community within an ethny. Certain basic conditions have to be present before a state can emerge: sedentary villages, agriculture and/or livestock raising, some storable surplus production, and the beginnings of inequality in status and access to resources between adult men.


From these general background conditions characteristic of many tropical horticulturalists, the embryonic state typically develops around village chieftaincy. An individual, because of luck, skill, political acumen, manipulation of religious functions or simply the help of a large group of kinsmen, begins to assert his authority and to claim privileges over villagers other than his wives or junior kinsmen over whom his domestic authority would extend in any case. The germ of chieftaincy is thus the assertion of authority and privilege beyond the domestic sphere of marriage and kinship relations that characterize all human societies, including stateless ones, and which are based principally on sex and seniority. If an individual claims and is granted authority over people who are not related to him by blood or marriage, that group has an embryonic state.


The specific bases of chieftaincy vary somewhat from society to society, but the basic ingredients of it are few and repeatedly found. One is religious charisma, as noted long ago by a number of social scientists. A person acquires power by performing religious functions and by claiming special powers of healing, divination or witchcraft. Theocracies and divine kingships are very common. Indeed, the notion of totally secularized power is quite recent (barely 200 or so years old) and, even today, seldom realized in practice. The king is typically a priest (and magician as well) and his power hinges on the gift of grace and the magical properties (especially fecundity) attributed to him. Monarchical power rests almost invariably on a basis of religious ideology. When that basis of legitimacy is extended from an individual to his kin and is hereditarily transmitted, then a clear transition occurs from incipient chieftaincy to an established monarchy.


Another frequent component of incipient chieftaincy is the principle of seniority inherent in kinship organization. This is especially effective in unilineal descent societies (either patrilineal or matrilineal) in which one line of descent (male or female) is stressed, thereby giving rise to large, cohesive kin groups, known as lineages and clans. In nearly all human societies, authority over kin is allocated on the basis of seniority (often qualified by mental competence). A man has authority over his junior relatives. If a lineage is numerically important in a village, its head obviously has a political advantage over heads of smaller lineages and may use that advantage to extend his authority over them. This extension of authority over nonkin often becomes institutionized through a claim (often mythical) that a particular clan or lineage is collectively senior to other clans and lineages - for example, by representing the descent line of the eldest son of the mythical founding ancestor. When the principle of seniority is extended from individuals to descent groups, the kinsmen of the chief automatically acquire an aura of superiority; they begin to constitute a royal clan on which the power of the king rests and from which his successor will be chosen.


A third common, indeed practically universal, feature of emergent chieftaincy is polygyny. Polygyny is also found, on a limited scale, in stateless societies, but the scope of it is greatly extended in politically centralized societies. One of the very first privileges and benefits accruing from political power is access to reproductive women. This occurs long before marked differences in lifestyle, diet, dress, consumption, housing and so on develop between rulers and ruled. Even in small-scale village-level societies where the chief lives much like everyone else, he already has more wives. Power, in short, is immediately converted into fitness, i.e. reproductive success.


Since political power is predominantly wielded by men, our discussion of it is in the male gender. But it must be noted here that there is a simple biological reason why polygamy is a uniquely male reward of power. A man can greatly increase his fitness by having several wives; a woman does not derive a comparable advantage by being polyandrous.


Polygyny, and thereby reproductive success, is not merely a reward of power. It is also a means of consolidating and perpetuating it. This is done in two ways: first, by producing more kinsmen and thus enlarging the size of one’s kin group and, second, by establishing ties of alliance and reciprocity with other kin groups through marrying off one's daughters to other groups and taking wives from other groups. The king, through matrimonial politics, can thus easily become father-in-law, son-in-law or brother-in-law to many of his subjects and be at the hub of a network of matrimonial alliances. Indeed, fertility is frequently associated with kingship. The king is expected to have many children, and his powers of fertility are, by extension, assumed to be magically related with the well-being of the nation, so that his continued potency is a prequisite to his retention of political office. Regicide of aging kings is a common feature of many monarchies.


Since the setting within which states emerge is typically a sedentary agricultural village, the state originally encompasses a single ethny or, indeed, only a section thereof. Ethnic homogeneity is, of course, one of the facilitating conditions in the emergence of states. To the extent that the ethny or subethny is already conceived of as an extended kin group, chieftaincy itself is seen as a mere extension of the preexisting authority structure within the corporate kin group. The village chief is not yet an exploiter: he is merely a primus inter pares among lineage or family heads - a kind of superfather of a superfamily. At that embryonic level, there is not yet a clear stratification between rulers and ruled, although many such societies already have one variety or other of domestic slavery. There is not yet any systematic exploitation (except of slaves who are generally outsiders), not any taxation, not any appropriation of surplus production by the few, and not any evident signs of wealth, status and hierarchy between free men. The chief is still mainly an influential leader, a mediator and an adviser, rather than a boss, a judge or a policeman. His authority is still bound by custom and relies on consent rather than coercion.


This embryonic state of affairs can last a long time if there are no strong pressures toward further centralization of power (such as endemic warfare sometimes fosters), and if the system of production limits the amount of storable surplus and thus the exploitability of human labor. Where wealth is created in substantial, storable and stealable quantities (which can happen in pastoralist societies and in the more intensive forms of tropical horticulture), states can develop, consolidate and expand quite rapidly. Villages on the road to chieftaincy often have an organizational advantage in warfare and can thus establish hegemony over neighboring communities, giving rise to loose confederations of villages. At this level, we are still typically within the confines of a single ethny. We are witnessing in fact the birth of a nation-¬state.


Loose village confederacies headed by a nominal priest-chief can in turn coalesce into a full-blown statelet headed by a real king with executive powers of life and death, and with a retinue of wives, relatives, courtiers, appointed officials and bodyguards. His powers may still be limited by custom and checked by a council of elders, but he is now a genuine monarch who gives orders, passes judgement, distributes rewards and punishments, accepts and collects tribute. In short, the king now exercizes a definite amount of coercion, derives direct material benefits from his rule and relies on a circle of supporters who constitute the germ of a ruling class and who are the beneficiaries of the king’s favors.


So long as all this takes place within the ethny, the problems of legitimacy are still mitigated by an ideology of extended kin selection. The growth of national consciousness that accompanies this process of political centralization is usually fostered by a myth of common origin in which the king is the living head of the royal clan, which, in turn, is only one branch of the descendants of the common ancestor.


The ideology of kingship is one of extended kinship. The king is a paternal figure, a superfather of a superfamily, tied to his subjects by multiple bonds of blood and marriage. He is, in fact, often looked upon as the living symbol of the nation, the embodiment of its collective spirit, the last incarnation of the common ancestor and the symbolic father of the nation. Kingship is merely the political expression of the nation. With even considerably more justification than Louis XIV, the king can truly say, L’etat c’est moi or, better yet, La nation c’est moi.


Because of its ready-made ideology of extended kinship, the ethny is, one might say, the natural matrix of the nascent state. Political institutions of kingship find a ready justification so long as they grow within the confines of a pre-existing ethny. An embryonic state can extend without much difficulty to the outer boundaries of the ethny and assimilate neighboring groups that speak mutually understandable dialects, share similar traditions and see each other as, somehow, related. However, where conquest crosses an ethnic boundary (that is when the state becomes multinational), a whole new order of problems of legitimacy arises, and a set of important thresholds are crossed. The multi ethnic or multinational state is a qualitatively different entity from the nation-state. It necessarily grows out of external conquest; it lacks prima facie legitimacy; it rests on naked coercion; it results in a sharp group hierarchy; and it leads to visible and resented exploitation by foreigners. While, in the nation-state, coercion and exploitation are both blunted and concealed by the pre-existing ideology of extended kinship that underlies the concept of ethny and nation, the multiethnic state stands naked as the instrument of the ruling group, typically the conquering ethnic group as a whole, or a smaller group drawn overwhelmingly from it.