Biology and War
Many people in right-wing circles believe that racial or ethnic homogeneity is a panacea for the problems of our time. They believe that kin altruism is the basis of society, and thus a racially and ethnically homogeneous society will succeed, while a racially and ethnically mixed society will fail. They believe that genetically similar people will naturally work together to advance their shared genetic interests. Let’s call this view “ethno-altruism”.
The ethno-altruistic view contrasts with humanism. Humanists believe that all humans are essentially the same, that we are naturally altruistic, and that altruism is the basis of society. They believe that conflict is due to ignorant prejudices, such as racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, etc. If we eliminate artificial divisions, all of humanity will live together in peace and harmony. The song Imagine, by John Lennon, describes a humanist utopia.
See Humanism.
Both humanism and ethno-altruism are based on false assumptions about human nature and society. We are not altruistic, and society is not based on altruism.
Take the natural experiment of Easter Island, for example. It is hard to imagine a more genetically and culturally homogeneous population than the Easter Islanders. They were all descended from a few original Polynesian colonists, who were very similar to begin with. The genetic similarity between Easter Islanders would have been extremely high. They had the same cultural traditions. Yet, when the going got tough, they divided into factions and massacred each other.
See Easter Island.
Imagine a parent killing a child from another family, and then feeding that child to his own hungry children. That is what happened, even though the eater and the eaten were almost genetically identical.
In the past, warfare was often between people of the same race and ethnicity. Even today, the bloodiest wars are often between closely related people. Having genes and memes in common does not prevent war.
Society is based on cooperation, not altruism, and cooperation has limits. In some cases, cooperation can increase food production. For example, people could work together to farm the landscape more efficiently. In that case, they might respond to conditions of scarcity by increasing cooperation. But if there is no way to increase food production, and the population is growing, then people must compete for food to survive. Life becomes a zero-sum game. For some to live, others must die. In that situation, people will divide into groups, and fight over resources.
War causes a decrease in food production. It destroys capital, and it prevents people from fully utilizing the landscape. Warring groups are separated by a buffer zone, in which neither side can produce food. The absence of war is a type of cooperation that increases food production. It allows people to extract more energy from the environment. But a population can’t expand forever. When it reaches its natural limit, it will often collapse rapidly, due to the destructive effects of conflict over resources.
We have complex social structures, such as governments and corporations, to create large-scale cooperation. Power structures deliver the incentives, positive and negative, that make selfish individuals cooperate. In times of scarcity, those power structures tend to break down.
The Easter Islanders had a fairly simple power structure, because their society was relatively small — about 15,000 people at the peak. They probably had a hierarchy with a small number of chiefs at the top. The chiefs could negotiate deals for the whole island, and impose cooperation locally. It worked for a while.
When the population grew too big for the island to support, the social order collapsed. The islanders had to compete to survive, because life had become a zero-sum game. So, they split into competing social units (probably two), and fought over the limited resources of the island. They started killing and eating each other.
What happened on Easter Island is explained by the selfish reproducer theory of human nature and the selfish cooperator theory of society. It does not fit either the ethno-altruist theory or the humanist theory. Both would predict a paradise, not a catastrophe.
Easter Island was about as genetically pure as a human population can be. Some white nationalists will say that Polynesians are more violent than whites, and that is why their society collapsed. It is probably true that Polynesians are somewhat more prone to violence than Europeans. Nevertheless, they managed to sustain a functioning, non-violent social order on Easter Island for centuries prior to collapse. So, even if Polynesians are genetically more predisposed to violence, that would not explain what happened.
Another possible response from the white nationalists is that Europeans naturally control their populations, but other races don’t. That simply isn’t true. In recent history, Europeans have lowered their fertility voluntarily, but so have other races, including Polynesians. And Europeans have had population explosions in the past. For example, there was a population explosion in Ireland after the introduction of the potato, which was followed by a population collapse (the Great Famine). Europeans are not magic. The natural state of affairs, for all living beings, is to reproduce to excess until the population is limited by external factors.
The ethno-altruist worldview cannot explain what happened on Easter Island.
The humanist worldview can’t explain what happened either. The collapse wasn’t due to external forces, such as colonialism. It wasn’t caused by irrational hatred. It was caused by a population explosion: humans acting like selfish reproducers.
The Easter Islanders were not able to solve the tragedy of the commons created by individual reproduction. Either they were incapable of understanding the inevitable result of population growth on a small island, or they were unable to prevent it. Either way, their descent into cannibalistic warfare does not fit the humanist conception of human nature as intrinsically altruistic and rational. The tragedy was caused by individual selfishness and collective irrationality.
Humanism and ethno-altruism have a common moral value of altruism, but they define the moral in-group differently. To humanists, the in-group is all of humanity. They believe that we can solve social problems by expanding the in-group. To ethno-altruists, the in-group is one’s race or ethnic group. They believe that we can solve social problems by shrinking the in-group. Both worldviews have a similarly idealistic view of their in-group. To humanists, humans are magic. To ethno-altruists, their race or ethnic group is magic.
Humanists and ethno-altruists both believe that their altruistic ideal is natural, and that their views are supported by science. Both believe that humans evolved to be altruistic to other humans, based on the psychological mechanism of empathy. The only difference is the scope of the empathy, and thus the scope of the altruism. Humanists believe that a very broad form of empathy is part of human nature. Ethno-altruists believe that people are more narrowly empathetic toward their ethnic or racial in-group. They believe that we are innately preferential toward those with shared genes, while humanists view such preferences as due to cultural biases.
Both are wrong. We aren’t altruistic at the level of species, race or ethnicity. We are selfish reproducers. We have the ability to cooperate or compete, depending on the situation. We did evolve empathy, but it has both positive and negative forms (affection and hatred), and it doesn’t make us altruistic. We have in-group preferences based on social identity, but social identity isn’t necessarily ethnic or racial, and in-group preference doesn’t make us altruistic. We can’t eliminate competition by expanding the in-group, nor can we create altruism by shrinking it. To create society, we need to solve problems of cooperation.
See Game Theory and Cooperation.
When life becomes a zero-sum game (or appears to be), people will divide into groups and fight over resources. Each group will create an ideology (a moral myth) that defines the group and justifies violence against the other groups. The ideology is not the underlying cause of the violence. It is just a way to organize into competing groups.
I’m sure that the Easter Islanders created moral justifications for their behavior when they split into factions to fight over dwindling resources. They found some reason why the people on the other side were morally deserving of death.
Of course, dividing into two groups didn’t solve their collective problem: that their population couldn’t grow forever on a finite island. It just created two groups to fight over the resources of the island. If one group annihilated the other, then the new group’s population would grow until scarcity returned, and the cycle would repeat. Or the two groups could persist in a state of endemic warfare, which would prevent their populations from growing. Either way, they would never return to their former state of peace and prosperity.
Altruism couldn’t have solved their problem either. Only population control, imposed on individuals by society, could have sustained their peaceful, prosperous condition. Otherwise, population growth would inevitably lead to famine and war. Those were the choices available to them as a collective. Those are the choices available to us too, in the long run.
Before their big collapse, the Easter Islanders were in a similar situation to our civilization today. They had gotten used to growth and abundance over many generations. They had expanded their food supply to keep up with their growing population many times in the past. They probably expected to do it again, somehow. They probably had moral delusions very similar to ours: that they were essentially good, and that any problem was caused by something other than themselves. Those moral delusions prevented them from facing the truth about themselves and their situation. They didn’t have the collective rationality to control their own population.
They could have chosen a different fate. Instead, they built statues.