The American Conservative website now has my entire review of Francis Fukuyama's new magnum opus. Here's another excerpt:
In Fukuyama’s telling, The Origins of Political Order is a landmark work of political science because this book finally recognizes that -- although he deplores nepotism as leading to “political decay" -- it is human nature to favor your kin.
Fukuyama cites evolutionary theorist William D. Hamilton’s famous 1964 papers quantifying “kin selection.” Back in the 1950s, biologist J.B.S. Haldane had quipped that while he wouldn’t give up his life for his brother, he would for more than two brothers or eight first cousins. That joke is funny because each of us shares about half of our variable genes with our siblings and an eighth with our first cousins. Hamilton formalized this insight, offering a revolutionary gene-centric explanation for altruism toward relatives. According to Hamilton’s logic, the ultimate reason you nepotistically gave a job to that useless young nephew of yours was because it might help him thrive and pass on some of your gene variants, one quarter of which you share with him.
Fukuyama’s recent gig trying to foster state building in Melanesia has reminded him that the human norm is politics without much political philosophy. In preliterate times, what mattered instead were kin relations. When the Westminster parliamentary system was transplanted to Papua New Guinea, Fukuyama explains, “the result was chaos. The reason was that most voters in Melanesia do not vote for political programs; rather, they support their Big Man and their wantok.” (Wantok is pidgin for “one talk,” or ethnic group sharing one language.) “If the Big Man … can get elected to parliament, the new MP will use his or her influence to direct government resources back to the wantok.”
Yet how functionally different are these Papuan politicians from my own congressman, Howard Berman (D-Calif.)? Berman’s 28-year career in the House has revolved around kinship, too. His primary concern as the former chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee was empowering the ethnocentrism of his Hollywood Hills constituents in the Middle East conflict. And in the great crisis of his career after the 2000 census showed that the San Fernando Valley was due a Latino seat, thus making likely a strong Democratic primary challenge by a Mexican-American, Berman hired his brother, who craftily redistricted all of California, ensuring his political survival by selecting a new people for him. Who else could he trust?
Unfortunately, Fukuyama never gets around to wrestling with the obvious question that has been central to the study of ethnic nepotism since Hamilton made explicit the genetic basis of tribal altruism in a 1975 paper: Who, exactly, are your kin? Where do your relatives end? The answer is: It depends. You grapple with this same question in your daily life, where the answers turn out to depend upon circumstance. You might send a Christmas card to a third cousin whom you wouldn’t invite to Thanksgiving dinner. Similarly, Rep. Berman clearly trusts his brother more than he trusts voters. Yet he also trusts Jewish constituents more than Hispanic ones because he fears the latter will vote for a hermano instead of him.
When you stop to think about it (which Fukuyama doesn’t), your relations with your relatives are, unsurprisingly, relativistic.
Read the whole thing there.
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13 comments:
Another problem with Fukuyama's new book is that he deliberately downgrades the amazing and unique political creativity and fecundity of the West. While Chinese and other rulers struggled in an eternal cycle against nepotism, Western civ since the Greeks was launching itself on a path a innovative political development. Fukuyama has joined the cosmopolitan-multicultural effort to downplay and denigrate the achievements of the West.
By the way, Fukuyama does not mention the uniquely Western institution of monogamy, which may also have something to do with the unusual political path of the West.
isn't this what i posted a few weeks ago? that only europeans display great sophistication in political thought, and routinely go after each other, even when directly genetically related, on strictly abstract grounds. they're willing to argue, resist, fight, and even kill each other over ideals and philosophies. one group of europeans is very willing to smash and destroy another group on simple political grounds, even if it's bad for all europeans in the long run.
examples of this behavior among non-europeans is rare. most of their conflict is one disparate group versus another. if they do openly fight their own group then it's almost always over resources, not political ideas. when exposed to advanced political thought, non-europeans simply co-opt the parts of the ideology which can improve their chances of consolidating power for themselves and their group. that a political system needs to be "fair" appears to be an entirely european idea, and even europeans only started to think along those lines within the last 200 years.
one of the most prevalent displays of this behavior, abstract division into non-racial groups based simply on schools of thought, is how millions of conservative europeans in the US despise europe itself and bash it regularly on political grounds. "Screw europe, socialist scum" is a sentiment i hear often. many of them have a reflexive dislike for anything that comes from europe (provided they readily recognize something as european, that is) and put up some resistance to using it or adopting it.
"most voters in Melanesia do not vote for political programs; rather, they support their Big Man and their wantok. If the Big Man … can get elected to parliament, the new MP will use his or her influence to direct government resources back to the wantok.”"
This is even more plain in western inner cities at a micro level where there's a different clannish ethnic group clustered on each block. Every group has a Big Man and the concept of the common good doesn't exist.
You still get a few well-meaning white community activist types who try and get everyone to do something for everyone's benefit but they mostly get bemused looks.
i personally have never seen or heard such behavior from a non-european. i'm not saying it never happens but i've never heard, in person, a non-european go on and on about how much their nation of origin sucks and how much better the US is. in rare instances i see it typed out on the internet, by somebody who is highly cognizant of their situation and thankful for the alternative that america offers them, but never outside of a political site like vdare. on any non-political site, it's a steady stream of "Country X is so great because I'm from there, let me tell you about the great things from country X". and then on liberal political sites of course, both the US and europe are bashed, for obvious reasons. nothing is good about majority european nations, lol.
behavior which is the exact opposite of how euro-americans behave is by far the norm for post 1965 immigrants. indeed, the less there is to be proud about, the more pride in their origin nation they demonstrate. permanent identity attachment, praise, and even occassional chest thumping, is easily the standard. i think only the japanese, who are extremely modest, and maybe, the cubans, are the exceptions here.
this issue is at the root of american politics and steve regularly addresses this in his articles on "The Sailer Strategy". presently euro-americans divide themselves politically into democrats and republicans. how much longer can the average european in the US afford to vote democrat though? soon, only the very wealthy europeans can actually afford to put their money where their mouth is and vote democrat, as almost all democrat policies at the state and national level are aimed directly at smashing european americans and only wealth will allow them to avoid the brunt of that attack. even blue collar joe six pack with his IQ of 100 will, eventually, grasp that the democrat party of 2020 is not the democrat party of 1970. they aren't looking out for the interests of the little guy. they're looking to destroy the little guy, if he's joe six pack.
Sharing a last name with father’s relatives makes me more attached to the goings on of that side of the family, because there is potential reflected kudos if one of them should be publicly successful and conversely if there is some shaming incident to the wider family.
Moreso as I have an unusual surname, should it be publicised for whatever reason.
great article! right up my alley. (~_^)
i left a comment over there. here's what i had to say:
fukuyama said: "Since virtually all human societies organized themselves tribally at one point, many people are tempted to believe that this is somehow a natural state of affairs or biologically driven."
no, being tribal is not necessarily the natural state of affairs, but it IS biologically driven. as is being non-tribal.
europeans used to be tribal, but that's because they used to marry their cousins, too, just like the afghanis or iraqis or saudis or libyans of today. the church put an end to all that and then some -- it also put an end to all sorts of endogamous practices like polygamy and marrying your dead brother's wife. first- and second-cousin marriage was banned in 506 a.d., and by the 11th century the church had banned marriage up to SIXTH cousins.
this forced exogamy resulted in, as steve describes it, "broad but shallow regional blood ties." almost all of european (and western) history hinges on these loose genetic ties. the whole evolution of european societies from tribes to city-states (think of the venices and the hamburgs of europe) to the nationalistic movements -- this was made possible because extended family ties were continually loosened over centuries of european history (from the fall of rome onwards). the broadening of political structures (tribe, city-state, national-state) mirrors the underlying broadening of the genetic ties.
the church put an end to all that and then some
The fact that the Catholic Church seems to be the only institution in the history of mankind to successfully attack and destroy cousin marriage (except for politically powerful families such as the Hapsburgs, for political reasons) suggests a divine influence in itself, if you ask me.
That's a nice article, although it was more about your own views than it was a review of Fukuyama's book. These days it is de rigueur in the West to think that solidarity at the level of millions of people in nation states is, while highly successful, much too parochial and that it is necessary to further extend solidarity to encompass the entire humanity. Unfortunately for this project, it may be that only whites really believe in it, and probably not even most whites.
"And in the great crisis of his career after the 2000 census showed that the San Fernando Valley was due a Latino seat, thus making likely a strong Democratic primary challenge by a Mexican-American, Berman hired his brother, who craftily redistricted all of California, ensuring his political survival by selecting a new people for him. "
Sounds like Chicago politics!
"Van den Berghe, a mordant anarchist sociologist, implied that Marx’s fixation on class as the engine of exploitation was parochially biased by the ethnic homogeneity of 19th-century European nation-states."
In his suicide note Mitchell Heisman argued that what Marx thought was class conflict in England was really repressed ethnic conflict between a Norman aristocracy and Anglo-Saxon underclass. Is this totally nuts or is there something to it?
"i personally have never seen or heard such behavior from a non-european."
Q. Jody; what do these two quotes have in common?
"Screw europe, socialist scum"
""Country X is so great because I'm from there, let me tell you about the great things from country X".
Yeah, I guess I'm going to have to read that Mitchell Heisman thing one of these days.
jody, et alia. Try the theory that the American (or more fully, the Anglospheric colonial enterprise) was a distillation of that European idea of joining around abstract ideas. Yes we should give them credit - but they remain much more tribal than we are, and perhaps our disapproval comes from that. The EU has the specific idea to do what the Americans did in order to compete with us. Unfortunately for them, they still live next door to tribes the hate and can't move to the frontier, as we did.
I personally suspect that even a large nation-state is beyond the reach of we primitive humans in terms of loyalty, so we fragment that pretty quickly. Even the best of us barely make it. Pretending to love all mankind just means we send the tribalism to less-visible, but hardly less deadly, prejudices.
Yet I think one can go deeper still. hbd and corvinus point to the Christian, especially RC, cultural change of forbidding (er, discouraging) cousin marriage, but also providing a philosophical framework - that replaces the tribe with another, the Church itself. People might favor their relatives and their village, but they were constantly reminded and drawn into some fellow-feeling at a larger level.
Uncomfortable fact for moderns: Jesus's words actually seem to advocate bonding to a new tribe, not all of mankind. This new tribe was to be founded on belief instead of ethnic heritage, but the obligations seem to be to that new group, not everyone. Matthew 25:40 adelphon, for example. (And no, Luke 10 is not a contradiction of this. Listen louder.)
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