The uselessness of argument

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, racism, reason, polemic

In the Fourth Century, Aurelius Ambrosius (St. Ambrose) wrote:

It has not pleased God to win men through argument.

In 1771, Jonathan Swift wrote the following to a newly-ordained priest:

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

Nonetheless, we try, try, and try again. There is a bit of hope, however, that life experiences just might produce an "attitude adjustment" in some cases, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanack in the mid-1700's:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.

Note to the modern reader: "dear" used to mean "costly".

With all that in mind, I was quite intrigued as I began to read How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford. I'd really like to know "How To"! But of course, the title is the publisher's equivalent of click bait.

The book is full of good information. In the introduction the author tells us the subjects to be discussed: skin color, ancestral purity, sports, and intelligence. A tall order, very tall. After the reading, I find that the book is indeed full of very good information about these subjects, about what is known of the genetics of each. On one hand, we know a lot; on the other, we know only a tiny percentage of what we need to know.

Skin color is our most visible trait, of course, and humans are extremely visual animals (our visual cortex alone outweighs the entire Chimpanzee brain). It is also an obvious indication that the human species is not at all well-mixed, but more on that anon. We use the terms White and Black as though there were a clear dichotomy. Some, with a tiny bow towards inclusivism, say Nonwhite instead of Black. The author discusses the genetics of skin color, presenting much evidence that there are no fixed boundaries around any "coloration type". That is, there is a continuous spectrum. Certain hereditary groups tend to have a narrow range of skin color, somewhere along that spectrum. 

Or should I say, "spectra", in multiples? There are numerous bits of DNA that affect how much melanin our skin contains, but melanin is not the only pigment. For example, the color of an "olive-skinned Italian" will not match the skin of any person whose ancestry is exclusively a mixture of Scandinavian and Nigerian persons. I remember skin color scales that were used to classify people, in use in schools as late as 1960. The middle colors ranged from a darkish tan to a dark, chocolate brown. Nowhere in that scale will you find a match for the Italian, whose skin must bear another pigment in addition to melanin. This is just one example.

Turning the author's discussion on its head, what is Whiteness? How white must one be to be White? Is the standard to be the peaches-and-cream complexion of certain English aristocrats? How about the icy light pink of a Swede? Forty years ago I worked for a German who was the third-generation product of Germany's eugenic breeding program of the 1920's and onward (a decade or more before the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws). Very tall, very white, very blond, with extremely blue eyes, he was lovely! He had been a Messerschmidt pilot during World War II, but he longed to be a forest ranger. Instead, he was a technical manager of an engineering company. If he is the standard, no more than a million people could qualify. All others, myself included, would be Nonwhite. 

More to the point, would the Italian mentioned above be allowed as a White, say, by a club that requires its members to not have any African ancestry (at least recently)? I think this exposes that racism in the modern world is really anti-Afro bigotry. We don't call antisemitism racism, not usually. I find it hilarious when people speak of the antisemitism of the Iranians or Saudis. According to the original meaning of the term Semite, the Arabs, Persians, and also Chinese, Indians (of India), Japanese, Koreans, and Asians in general are all Semites!

We don't need to dwell longer on that. Let's look at racial purity. Guess what? There is none! The most homogeneous ethnic group on Earth would be the non-Ainu Japanese. They are also the most racist people on earth; here, "racism" means "prejudiced against non-Japanese": someone who has a Korean ancestor, even nine or ten generations back, cannot become a citizen of Japan. They conveniently ignore that modern Japanese who are not Ainu are descended from Koreans and Han Chinese who came to Japan a few thousand years ago.

How pure are White people? A lot less so than Japanese! Euro-Americans are descended from the residents of the Roman Empire. During its heyday, before about 300 AD, the Roman road system and the Mediterranean Sea allowed great amounts of travel, which led to great amounts of admixture among the people. About 10% of Roman citizens were Black (and brown and tan) north Africans. It is thus safe to say that any Euro-American (like myself) has between 5% and 20% African ancestry.

Members of racial purity organizations are some of the biggest users of the Ancestry DNA and 23 and Me genetic services. If someone wants entry to such an organization, he (seldom she) has to show he has no known Jewish or Black ancestors. I don't need genetic testing to know I'd be rejected. I have better family records than average, and I can trace several of my ancestors to English kings of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, and thus to Charlemagne and on back. I also know the national origin of just over 60% of the immigrants to America in my family tree. Among the 75+ persons or families I can trace (from the Mayflower in 1620 to the middle 1800's), I find the following approximate breakdown, adjusted to a total of 100%:

• 27% England
• 22% Ireland
• 4% Scotland
• 3% Wales (so far, 56% from the British Isles)
• 3% German
• 1½% Spanish (1 pirate who sailed with Captain Kidd, most likely a Marrano Jew)

The other almost 40% of my ancestry is probably mostly from the British Isles, but I have a Cherokee great-great grandmother, and her husband was at least half Cherokee, so I am between 4½% and 6% Cherokee.

Let's pull out 6% for the probable Jew and the minimal possible amount of Cherokee. Although my Whiteness is "impure" by this measure, the other 94% "European" ancestry includes between 5% and 19% African. Oh, and I almost forgot. One of my ancestors of unknown provenance, a great-great-grandfather, was probably a quarter Black, but white enough to live as a White man in Missouri! That is another half percent or percent of African in the mix.

The author brings up another interesting concept: The genetic isopoint, also called the Identical Ancestors Point or IAP. It is the number of generations back at which you could expect that every person alive at the time, who has living descendants, is an ancestor of every single one of those living people. An IAP can be derived for the whole human race, and it is between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, depending on assumptions about migration patterns that are not yet well known. For the population that inhabited Europe, from the tip of Spain to the Ural mountains, about 1,500 years ago, every one of their living descendants (including me) is descended from every one of them.

That doesn't mean that the whole bunch of those descendants has identical ancestry; if so we'd all be clones (identical twins)! Let me use another bit of my family tree to illustrate. I have an ancestor named Joseph Macy who was born on Nantucket Island in 1735, and moved to North Carolina 20-odd years later. He was descended from eight of the ten founding families of Nantucket. However, five generations back at the founding, Joe Macy has 32 ancestors. One couple appears twice in his family tree and three of them appear three times each, meaning that Joe was his own cousin or second cousin a few times! Had he stayed on Nantucket, he would have been almost forced to marry a women whose ancestors included the other two families, to avoid marrying a close cousin (maybe that's why he moved away!). The population of Nantucket in the 1750's was small enough that five or six generations marks the IAP. Any of the first or second cousins of his children (every Nantucketer) would have been descended from those ten founding families in different proportions; different ones would have appeared two or three times. But every family would appear in every family tree at least once.

Broadening the view, we find that perhaps not every European of the early Middle Ages had African ancestors, but a good many of them did. Since every European and Euro-American alive today is descended from every person living in Europe some 1,500 years ago, all their African ancestors are our ancestors. This in itself disqualifies every member of those white-purity "clubs" from membership in their club.

I'll skip over athletic ability, except to say that every explanation for the speed, or strength, of Blacks just doesn't have enough of a time basis for either natural selection or unnatural selection to produce them. Go to a mostly Black neighborhood anywhere in America. What do you see on a summer day? Lots of Black kids playing basketball from dawn to dusk. No matter what "genetic endowment", other than height, a Black kid has, that much practice is going to lead to great skills for a goodly number of them.

The BRAIN! Do Jews have better brains? Do Blacks have worse ones? That is the premise of The Bell Curve and a host of other books that attempt to distinguish racial differences in brain power. The author looked at all those books, including some that I rather like, and found them wanting. There is too much cherry-picking of the data in them all. The differences are much more likely to be cultural.

Here I must confess something. I am not racist, but I am culturist. I do believe that some cultures are better than others, at least in the sense that they better prepare their denizens for "real life" in Twenty-first Century America. In the Congo, or the highlands of New Guinea, or deep in the Amazon, we find cultures that are suited to their environments. If you were to drop a suburb-raised Millennial (of any skin color) into one of those environments, he or she would be unable to survive without rapidly adopting the culture of the people around. That's assuming it is possible. The central New Guineans tend to kill strangers on sight, unless they are introduced first, over a long period of time, and are protected for that time by people that are themselves not likely to be killed on sight. In a less extreme scenario, I'd have a hard time getting used to life in Turtle City (Yongtai), China, where we've been invited to visit by a friend who just moved back there after finishing her education at Drexel. She had to unlearn a few things and learn a bunch of others, to get used to life here. 

But there are cultures and subcultures active in America that hold people back. Certain cultures denigrate education, for example. Those who are acculturated to being highly educated will do better. A friend of mine is a PhD from a family of PhD's, and jokes of his uncle the "black sheep", who is the only one of that generation without a PhD. If my friend's children don't get PhD's, I am sure they'll feel they let the family down. 

If the European Jews do have better brains, (they get the most Nobel Prizes), can there be a genetic component? The author of How to Argue thinks it unlikely. I am more on the fence, leaning toward agreement with him. All Jews have this command in their Torah: Deuteronomy 6:6-9 commands the people of Israel to, basically, wallpaper their houses with the words of the Torah, and they are later commanded to read them frequently and meditate upon them. God demanded 100% literacy of His people, starting in about 1,500 BC. Major portions of the world have yet to achieve 50% literacy even today. These commands in Deuteronomy led to the culture of heavy Torah and Talmud study that has gone on for at least 2,500 years. Of course the Jews who kept this command are going to excel academically!

A number of related matters are taken up, but I think this is enough. The data are there. Races don't hold up as a useful concept, because their boundaries are too porous. Was my great-great-grandfather White or Black? He lived in White culture in a racist state, and was considered White. He is buried in a White cemetery, not in the Black cemetery two miles south (I've been to both). Blood isn't everything.

In all this, there really isn't anything telling me "How to argue with a racist". A racist will disregard it all, if he indeed is willing to listen to any of it. From the last chapter I find:

"People fixated on finding biological bases for racial differences appear more interested in the racism than the science. Arguments in online social media seem to involve people for whom demonstrations of genetic or behavioral differences being evidence for racial categories are the absorbing passion of their lives; these are people who are invigorated by animosity." (p. 203)

To put it simply, again in the author's words, "Science should be pure and straightforward, but people are not." (p. 205) When you have that going against you, argument is useless. Better, given the power and the opportunity, to place one's favorite racist in situation after situation that confounds and contradicts racial stereotypes. The smartest man I ever worked with was a scientist from Uganda. He'd been raised there, and had special scars on his forehead that are considered very beautiful in his culture of birth. He is still active, a well respected scientist. He is also much, much blacker than any American Black I know. I don't know if his kindness, generosity, and formidable intelligence would overcome the prejudice of an American White supremacist, but if that person had to work as this scientist's technician for a few years, it might make a dent. No argument could do so.

Whoever reads this, I hope you read this book. You won't actually learn how to argue with a racist, but the argument you have with yourself while reading it may be the only one you need to engage in.