Is Racism a Natural Response?
Some say racism is learned. Some say racism is an innate defense mechanism.
It seems natural for us to prefer that which is like us.
Is racism natural?
It seems natural for us to prefer that which is like us.
Is racism natural?
Comments (199)
anyone who doesnt want more handouts for weak people is labeled a racist
if your not nice enough to gays, or black, or women, or any other weak group then you must be a racist.
It's not only a label. It's a perception. You can be racist whether or not you're called racist. If you're racist it probably has nothing to do with gays or women and everything to do with race. It's normal to be drawn to that which is like you. But it's very stigmatized to express that now.
Bias is natural.
Prejudice is learned (socialized).
Racism is instituted (enforced).
It's boring, rather. Discovering what is different from you can be loads of fun
When a positron (+) meets its opposite an electron (-), what ensues is annihilation of both - Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). When one race encounters another, the instinct is, for safety purposes I suppose, to interpret differences as opposites and alarm bells instantly go off - each race will perceive the other as an existential threat. That explains mutual distrust/animosity between races. Racism takes it one step further - one race begins to believe itself to be superior to other races. So far I've been unable to figure out how hostility takes us to supremacy. My best guess is the former boils down to some kind of battle - of raw strength and/or wits - which means there'll (usually) be a clear winner and a loser. A sense of being better (brains/brawn department), synonymous with superiority/supremacy is born out of this. I ain't sure though. Just a wild theory.
Racism seems natural. Certitude, questionable. A pinch of sodium chloride recommended.
As far as I can tell, it's pretty much entirely a white person thing, and pretty much entirely directed toward ethnicities who originally hadn't heard of Jesus and couldn't defend themselves against the massive armies of people who had.
But scumbag fathers teach scumbag sons... It'll be around a while yet (viz. the Euro final this weekend gone).
Could you elaborate a little more please. How exactly did money (capitalism) lead to racism?
Between elves and orcs maybe, but humans interbred with literally different races and evolution favors diversity, so its inaccurate on two accounts.
Correction: *species
Some of these Republicans make me question everything. :meh:
Well people believing in pedophiles coming from space or that Trump is going to get reinstated some time this year is so far off from anything based in reality that I wonder how a human being could come around to believe this.
It's not as if we're in the desert 2000 years ago when everything could be discussed in terms of miracles.
I read "race" is a human thing, and so I agree. But, while dogs are all the same species (canis lupus) and can interbreed, I think the many different breeds are akin to race. Funny how I don't see dogs discriminating against each other based on breed. Dogs will pack up, fight, fuck, party, any old way. I've never seen two of one breed look sideways at another dog of another breed. Must be a human thing.
:100:
Intolerance is cultural survival mechanism where there's a lot of competition. Cultures that lack intolerance will be subsumed.
Racism is a particularly materialistic manifestation of intolerance, and becomes problematic where the "inferior" race has genetically dominant genes. It's a recipe for a holocaust.
You'd have to dumb that down for me. I'm not understanding what you mean. Particularly the "subsumed" aspect. A cultural analogy would be, has European Pagan practice been subsumed by Christianity, or has it found a way to live on? Or, like the Paul Rever and the Raiders song "Though I wear a shirt and tie I'm still part redman deep inside."
I don't think we know enough about "higher animals" to be conclusive on this. Obviously not based on race, but there are cases in which families of mammals leave one of there own out by themselves. It's not clear if it's something to do with the excluded one being too weak or something like that, but yes, people take this to just a whole other dimension.
Some people, likely many, like to feel they are better than someone else for X factor. Usually x factor is quite arbitrary, but complex systems get created out of these tendencies.
German Czechs were subsumed. German Jews weren't.
Does subsumed mean disapeared? Became totally Czech and no longer have a German identity?
They lost their Czech identity.
Oh. When you said "German Czechs" I was thinking of Germans in Czechoslovakia, like German Americans, not Czech Germans. Either way, that sounds like a loss of cultural identity, not racial identity. Surely their "blood" or any physical characters continue?
I'll put in another plug for this "60 Minutes" story about how moral judgement develops in very young children. It has a lot to say about your question. Thirteen minutes long. I've watched it three or four times and it amazes me every time. There are some ads.
https://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/msGw1iFHLOXlVdeZtfO9KBW9Kffq3VUl/born-good-babies-help-unlock-the-origins-of-morality/
Reminds me of the old Bedouin proverb: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger.”
I guess things were peaceful enough under Egyptian, Roman, Aztek, Chinese, Assyrian, Persian and Mongul rule. It's true, slavery was based on being conquered rather than skin color, but as long as you paid your taxes to the Emperor/Pharaoh/King, and your religious practices were accepted in the empire, it was all good.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah, because prior to Christianity, everyone in the Middle East got along swell. Jews, Samaritans, Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians never had any cause to fight each other. Those damn white Christians, like Jesus and Paul, messed everything up /s.
You're still talking about recent humans, a few thousand years at most. You know we've been around a lot longer than that, right? I mean, a _lot_!
Quoting Marchesk
And here I was talking about _now_ wherein most racism one encounters is by white people, targeted against black people, middle eastern people, Jews, etc. Not a lot of Samaritan-on-Assyrian hate these days, you notice. Also, I know you're straw-man--building, and really badly, so this is largely pointless but I'm pretty sure Jesus and Paul didn't try to colonise Africa. Reading all the words helps.
Yeah or check out how population genetics show Bantu's spread across Africa and how they kept pygmies around as a slave population probably for a couple of millennia.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The written record doesn't go back much further does it? How would we know whether they were prone to racisme or not?
I do, and I'm aware that tribes had warriors and conflicts as well, although I'm sure it all depends on the tribe, time and region. I've also heard there's evidence civilization likely goes back thousands of years further than has been generally recognized.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No, but the Middle East still has its issues, you may have noticed.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In white predominant countries, notably America and other former British colonies, and historically, Western Europe. I'm guessing things are a little different in other parts of the world.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So where do you want to draw the line on Christianity, Constantine?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No, I just don't agree with your post summarizing historical conflict as largely Western European. That's very recent history.
Because similar groups of people survive to this day, and are a matter of record. Generally traditional societies aren't just tolerant of but cooperate with other groups, and only become warlike once they encounter other warlike groups. The whole intolerant, tribal natural human notion is just rubbish.
Quoting Marchesk
Context clues, dude. When did big armies of Christians go abroad and kill a ton of people? Was it Jesus?
Quoting Marchesk
Now that really is straw-man--building. My patience for patently BS arguments runs about as far as the benefit of doubt dictates. You're out of yard.
:100: :up: "Vanity of vanities" of small differences.
Then what was all this about?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Looks to me like you're saying our ancestors were mostly peaceful until the white people with their Christianity went colonizing. Which skips over all the history of known civilization (at least) until the crusades.
I've heard you make that claim before, in your thread about delayed gratification, but I'm unsure about it. While we are certainly very cooperative as a species, current opinion among palaeontologists for example seems to be more that we are also very aggressive compared to other species closest to us. So you know, I'm certainly willing to reconsider this, but I'm not sure why or how you've come to that conclusion.
'Only become warlike once they encounter other warlike groups' could mean warlike most of the time.... we sure had a lot of war in the part of history that is documented.
Literally as written. For most of our existence we haven't had racial conflict. Race hate is largely a white man thing. Which races do white men hate? The ones our crusading ancestors shat all over.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
From anthropology, pretty much exclusively, wherein the consensus is that small, immediate return HG social groups -- which is how we spent most of our existence -- are pretty uniformly peaceful and cooperative until they have to defend themselves against warlike groups. I didn't think the paleontologist view you mention (axe wounds in skulls sort of thing?) was even still held today. I'll look into that.
check this. https://www.britannica.com/topic/kin-selection (Kin Selection).
https://www.livescience.com/640-peace-war-early-humans-behaved.html
My impression had been that the violent savage theory had been recognised as too hasty and probably not unrelated to the fact that it was devised by backwards honkies who, let's face it, have never been great with representation.
And it rightly points out that violence was still a factor, even if we mostly got along well. There's always going to be some antisocial element to contend with.
EDIT: Ah! Second hit was: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/
Yeah I'm no expert by any means, it's always hard to discuss these things if we get into the weeds, but from what I've gathered it's more of a general picture emerging from the paleontological record in combination with the new insights from population genetics. There are a whole bunch of quasi total population displacement and replacement events in our history, as well as patterns in Y-chromosme lineages that seem to indicate Mongol-style of ravaging in our pre-history.
Our genetics indicates we have around twice as many female ancestors as male. That points to prehistoric war as the norm. There could be other reasons, but "uniformly peaceful and cooperative" is unlikely.
Because racial categories as such didn't exist until the Atlantic slave trade. And it wasn't Eastern Europeans or the Irish doing it. It was several Western European countries, and their colonies.
But there were ethnic conflicts prior to racism. Like between the Scotts, Irish and English. Mainly because of the English. But before them was the Norse and Saxons and Romans.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/new-study-of-prehistoric-skeletons-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/
Basically it comes across to me that there's a certain political aspect to the way early human groups are portrayed, like there's a need for a certain kind of person to find some natural justification for their own personality traits. The view of early man as violent was forged largely by quite privileged white men between two world wars: paleontology and archeology were gentlemanly pursuits practiced by the kinds of people who today you would expect to vote Republican ;)
The actual fossil evidence and studies of the groups most similar to our prehistoric ancestors suggests the polar opposite to this handy "I can't help being a shit" theory. But it'll stick around no doubt.
Quoting frank
You'll have to explain that. Are you talking human ancestors?
I tend to think there's no one attribute that explains all our behaviour. I think we have both tendencies, we like cute things and have capacity for love, friendship and cooperation etc, but we can also flip out like disproportional maniacs when the things we value are threatened. And you know both makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because the environment that we adapted too also isn't one monolithic fixed set of circumstances.
I was watching some documentary on Yellowstone, and one group of adult wolves were chased out of their den by another more aggressive group, who proceeded to starve the first group's pups and claim their territory.
And yet we made friends with wolves and domesticated them. House cats did the same to us.
I can certainly buy that there's a political bias to the way things have been explained historically, and I'll even buy that our war-like nature has been seriously overblown, but I do find it hard to believe that violence is only the result of ideology. But sure that's ultimately just a guess I suppose.
It's not for animals, anyway. Ideology is more a justification for being violent. I once asked someone who was knowledgeable about Viking culture and history why they pillaged. And they told me because other people had stuff they wanted! How often was that the case for some King or Pope or explorer looking to get rich?
Sure, it does seem ideology is often used merely as a justification... be we do get socialized into a culture too. Part of our nature is that we need to get an education wherein values are transmitted among other things. That's part of the problem of trying to find a 'natural state' of humans, you never find them in an uncultured state. Vikings had their cultural roots too. Also kings might not be all that representative for the species as a whole, but maybe the fact that we tend to follow them is... I dunno, it think it's a mixed bag, humans that is :-).
Homo Sapiens.
Maybe. Doesn't mean they weren't violent.
:rofl: :up:
The archeological record shows that there was a fair amount of violent death prehistorically. Human genetics provides a puzzle that could be explained via ongoing prehistoric war. So the available evidence leaves the possibility squarely on the table.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That there is a higher lower limit of the number of females who can have contributed to the human genome to date isn't a mystery in search of a solution, and certainly
Quoting frank
is not justified.
I know there was lot's of warfare between different tribes but I don't know if it was race-based. I think there was so much capture, slavery and breeding going on that it probably was not based on skin color. I'd like to see an example from today that we could point to and say: "There, that way!" But maybe it is on America to lead the world on this. That arc of justice is really bending slow. I'd laugh but I don't think it's funny.
Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, Basque country, Spain (emulated in the US at Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi (of all places!))
Okay, well I asked for it. Now I have to follow up and look into it. Thanks.
Fear of the unknown is natural. Racism is an irrational mental construct and product of an irrational surrender to this natural drive. Our intellect and intelligence are the shields against this irrational construct since we can understand that it is irrational and fight the urge to surrender to it.
The weak and weak-minded cannot live without surrendering their intellect to the laziest interpretation of our natural drives. Is racism natural? No, the fear of the unknown is. "Racism" is a construct invented by weak-minded people in order to explain that fear.
Sounds about right.
Archeology contradicts the thesis that prehistoric people were peaceful.
I can't cut and paste the info about genetic indications of prehistoric war because it was in a book that's now gone to the used book store.
The point is: I'm looking at archeology and genetics, you're looking at prejudice that I think goes back to Hobbes. My justifications kick your justification's asses.
:100: I did a quick overview with my buddy Wiki (on both Mondragon and Jackson). The only thing I see that would make race less of an issue in those communities is the pureness of the democracy/ownership.
Anything less than true democracy allows "representation" and the insinuation of personal agendas, creeping in via layers of people. Some of those agendas use race as a wedge. Pure democracy puts everything on the table and there is less room for palace intrigue, conspiracy, politics and conniving, or the use of the tools (race) that further those shenanigans.
I'm still up in the air on the economics. Pure capitalism (i.e. no cost externalization) would likewise not give a shit about race. It would be all supply and demand and all about the money; who cares what you look like.
I like the coop idea, and I don't like the cut-throat of capitalism, but, while not a race issue, I fear the former would have less tolerance for loners, misanthropes and others who don't want to participate. The scariest thing in the world to me is the idea that the community is going to show up at my door and make me come to the shindig, smile, dance and hang out with them.
You're looking at outdated interpretation of incomplete archeological evidence as far as I can tell. Can't even reach my justification's ass to kiss it. :rofl:
Disingenuous.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Your justification is morbidly obese.
In terms of models, it's difficult to say because we colonised pretty much everywhere that didn't itself colonise. The US melting pot probably is the nearest we have, God help us.
Demonstrated (read the links).
Quoting frank
Your archeology will never get a girlfriend.
That's the way I see it. Encroachment on "my" hunting grounds, tit for tat, blood feuds, etc. Some was just dick-measuring raids/warfare. It's a real bummer to my fantasy world. I can handle wolves, bears, snakes, spiders and all the other things you'd have to look out for. But I hate the idea of having to look out for people too. They are just too sneaky and you need your own tribe for adequate defense and situational awareness.
If you could be bothered to read your own links, you see that you pointed to an article on chimpanzees. We aren't descended from chimpanzees. Nobody in the science of human origin looks to that species to understand our own.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Your response to old fashioned ideas has autism.
So in the simplest forms when someone say racism we yhink of a redneck white guy calling an african american guy 'niggaaa niggaaa' or something like that..more or less the idea is the same.Lets zoom in on it.Speaking of facts (not being racist) the dominant race in this time are the whites.Now we got two inportant words in this sentence 'dominan' and 'white'. It isnt an uncommon belief that many people found themselves racist beacause because 'evolutionarily we humans think dark colours as the signs of dangers or scarceness of light and thats where our ancestors got eaten... And light... The bright place is where good things happen.. So people often familiarize this with that.. Not gonna lie the frame is wayy bigger than that.Lets just dive into some real stuff. Human. Beings have been livin this world for thousands of years.But the racism is in here for only a couple hundred years.Being more precise... It has started from the age of exploration back in the 1400 and stuff. Questions rise.. Why isnt it the other ways around?This is where the main stuff comes up the so called 'dominants' or the whites are mainly from the land of Europe and Eurasia but just before the age of explortiion when they all signed a trety and stopped fighting among themselves they realize they opt for more resources than they need.Do they went out to the americas and africa and asia.Now lets go back to that old racist scenerio.. We all thought about an african ameriacn guy..but why not an asian guy who has just got some small field of csis ?(JK)...Well for that... Asians were the same as europians.. Fighting among themselves for territory and glory..but not for resources..as asia was the richest when it cam.e to the resources of the world.Now lets dive into wee bit of geology..what do we mean by resources? A nd why were they conce trated in asia and africa?Why did asians an d africans fought amongs themselves but africans just reamined humane and lived comperatively peacefully? Well for starters it was the middle ages and people didnt judge resources by ores or oils then yet.What did theyjudge it with? Fertility.You need food to strt a town.You need food to build a nation and eventually an army.But europe is comparatively closer to the northern winds from arctic and didnt had another europe to shield them from it as it did for africa or a siberia when it comes to asia.And it hugely disrupted the growing of foods,thus resources...even today people outside america and europe doesnt even have to think about creating a greenhouse to produce foods i the winter.So, it came down to this.People living in africa.Doesnt have to think about resources.Just sitti ng their in their village..cuz they didnt even had to go to industrialisation to keep up their resources with their population.Africa was vast rich land full of jungles,animals a n d resources.But why?For tartes they were closer to the equator of the earth. Matter of fact, the equator just goes through Africa itself.being the closest to equator means being the closest to sun,which means more sunlight for trees and plant to grow more greener and better,which means more nim.als and more bio-diversity..and which means more reaources..But there was one simple thing, people living in africa evolutionarily developed more melanin in their epidermis(skin,upper skin) thn the europians which meant..evolutionrily these richer dude began to look darker as melanin makes your skin go darker to fight UV rays related diseases(thanks to evolution baby!)So,how did those rich dude(Blacky blackies) found themselves opressed by the whole world?Now,think of two scenerios, parallel universes.two kids.one a son two a rich billionaire nd the second a parentless kid who grew up fighting in the steets.And now tell me.. Which one was smarter or lets sy more cunning?? The second kid.. Cuz he has seen more things than the rich kid who has just been in one environment living the Life never having to care about anything more than what a luxury he lives Take it or not (Not being racist day :16383) the europians when they encountered the africans.. The same tuing happened.Andolon believe it or not if you are a white guy and go ti afric even today an find yourself an isolated civilization..you will UNDOUBTEDLY outamart them or even become their king or smoething(not joking at all... I am an anthropologist I ve travelled)So as the age of exeplorations begun the europeans who were in short of resources than they opted for found people who were living in this resources aka luxury and hardly hve mived feom the place their ancestors have been living for the hundrede of years!As any sane man would do they took the chance and you know the rest as they outsmarted the simple people(comperatively simpler) in Asia or Africa they dominated them and situated colonies.And thus the age of racism begun. So now you know the history, why's and why nots of racism.Now lets come down to why racism is badWhern it comes to phylosphyEverything is ambiguous. We can just say a thing is bad cuz we feel its bad we have to establiah a statement right? Like being a rich dude from the mid 1700 youd just say you are racist cuz you are better than those african 'idiots' you have ships,money,exepensive drinks everything.. You are even more powerful than them..so thinking you are better than them couldnt be proven wrong then.Like we still mny say we are the greatest life form there is.. WE ARE HUMANS..WE HAVE BUILT THESE.. THESE..WE HVE ACCOMPLISHED THESE THESE....no one calls them racists right?But what if we diacovered that other dolphines have buildings underwater(just take it for instance) and they have eccomplished similar things just like human race and now after a couplle of years a dolphine is sitting next to you in the subway...What if you say huma race is the best then? Thennits racist.CUZ YOU ARE WRONG. Same hapoens n ow.Aafrican people arent still slaves, native americans are not illiterate...even just to say these things makes one a racist...Like if some one went to a seminar and said, 'Under the rule of (insert political party name) there in zero pernt of african americns who are illiterat,but when n.... ' the person couldnt even finish his speech than ks to the shoes and tomatoes already flying towards him.So this what racism is now and why its wrong..Many of you didnt think of it like this way. But as now we do... it would be eve n easier for many people about the depths of human thoughts and how these develop over time.Maybe I'll talk about those useless crap some other day.Thank you.
Sorry for the bad typos bruv..I accidentally cut injured three of my fingers in an accident.Hope you will understand
Actually, it is precisely our intellect and intelligence that is behind what we call racism. If the problem were simple irrationality it would be a it easier to solve it. But when people do their best to act as ‘rationally’ as possible and still end up behaving in ways that others call racist it should teach us that the cause of racism isnt irrationality, it is the limits that are imposed on intelligence in any given era.
No. Your stats are just shit. https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Exactly. As evidenced by this thread. Five citations indicating a natural tendency toward morality-based coexistence vs. a whole slew of "I don't reckon that can be right because I've just got this gut feeling about it, I'm sure I read somewhere..."
And this is not a question that it is possible, to have a neutral, dispassionate default position on. We start to raise nearly 400,000 new children every day, they're either monsters who need taming or angels who need protecting from corruption (or, of course, some point in between). Whatever we pick we will be doing so in the light of evidence which is sketchy at best, either way.
@frank, I don't think the archaeological evidence proves anything, it may fail to disprove positions, it may open discussions about positions, it cannot under any circumstances prove those positions, the data provided is simply too small a sample with too high a possibility of selection bias ranging over extreme events of an unknown frequency. Ethnological data is much the same, but for different reasons (translation problems, biased exposure, cultural barriers...).
Yep.
I said that due to genetic and archeological evidence, the possibility that violence was prevalent among early humans is a consideration that's on the table. I didn't say anything had been proven.
Your ability to read and comprehend other people's posts has body odor.
No, you said.
Quoting frank
It doesn't.
There is one sense in which "innate defense mechanism" might be plausible. The human mind likes to think of itself as important and valuable. When everything in it's world says otherwise it might cling to irrational reasons to ascribe value and importance to itself as an innate ego defense mechanism. If I'm better than XYZ then I must be valuable. Any other context looking for rational racism is just another iteration of the white genocide conspiracy BS that has been poisoning society for hundreds of years.
Ok. That's fine. l did say earlier about "on the table."
It's mainly about humans, as are the other two. Literally every man in the village has shagged your ability to read.
My ability to read is a nymphomaniac.
Encroachment was only an issue in hard times. I mentioned on another thread, when the Quebec government stepped in to protect the resources of the Cree people from white trappers who were trapping animals to extinction, the govt thought they had to establish boundaries for each Cree group because that's what Europeans do. Cree leaders were tasked with reporting any white trappers or Cree hunters from neighbouring areas and keep a tally of what was hunted. It didn't work for the Cree as they were used to hunting wherever they pleased, so they just made the numbers up and didn't report the "encroachments".
As far as I can tell, this is basically standard among immediate return groups: unless the shit hits the fan, go where you will in peace.
It's only difficult to wrap our heads around now because we've become absolute bastards since.
Quoting frank
Yeah it cannot derive pleasure from sex.
Nymphomaniaca don't derive pleasure from sex? That's weird.
I know you guys are talking generalities and eschewing anecdote (as well you should) but whenever I dream about roaming the continent hunting, and minding my own business, I think of Kennewick Man (arrowhead, 9k ya) and other signs of crushed skulls and broken bones. Like that slaughter house they found in North Africa a few years ago. A whole village wiped out. 10k ya. And, while we were fucking the occasional Neandertal (or vice versa) I have a feeling (I know, that's not evidence) that we weren't all chummy with them.
Edit: found it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35370374
Yeah, I see that. Really so long as overt comments about proof and disproof are avoided, it's all on the table. So the question is why anyone would favour an 'original sin' narrative. Given we have the option to assume things like violence and racism are remediable, by removing the conditions that give rise to them, I can't think why anyone would prefer to think we're all brutal thugs who need constant taming. You can see why it's tempting to consider such positions as excuses (either for personal failings or for white colonialism), they seem to have so little else going for them.
There are two equally viable options. Hunter gatherers were largely peaceable and egalitarian, or hunter gatherers were violent brutes. Given that hunter gatherers are the very people we tended to violently slaughter to steal their land for our empires, is it really too far of a leap to posit guilt as a reason for preferring the latter?
I know, right? It's actually really sad. Every time I think about your ability to read it gets me down tbh.
Quoting James Riley
In Libya? That was really recent though. I'm talking about tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I had amended my post after finding it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35370374
It was about 10k ya and involved hunter-gathers. Kennewick man was about 9k and same.
Guilt and that sort of contempt that unacknowledged guilt fosters. But even beyond that, it's difficult to imagine humans as peaceable. It's the WYSIATI again: history is a list of wars punctuated by discoveries; the news is conflict punctuated by sexual assault stories. From a limited viewpoint, we do seem inherently cruel.
Reading anthropology and, before that, evolutionary biology really surprised me. I was a Pinker-esque optimist, still am quite an optimist, who pooh-poohed golden age laments. But everything does point to humans in their natural environments actually being admirably and enviably much groovier than we are.
Let's agree that it's an open question. Otherwise I'll have to believe what everybody says about your ability to research a topic: that she's a crack whore.
This is covered in one of the articles Kenosha linked to. Advocates of prehistoric war aren't motivated by this sentiment. It's based in the evidence they've seen.
Your thinking is awfully reductive. Either violence is a product of genes or of socially imposed forms. That doesn’t seem to be any room in your thinking for an interpretive interaction between person and world.
That makes your thinking violent , and not because of a one-way imposition from nature or nurture. It’s violent to the extent that it gives you no way to understand others’ thinking from their vantage in an empathetic way, only as a potentially malevolent arbitrary shaping , to which you will find you have no choice but to respond to with hostility.
You’re welcome to do so here. What do you mean by ‘natural’ when you say violence is natural and define us by species name?
I thought you might be over my head (maybe you are) but my brain shut down reading your post. All I can say is homo sapiens is an animal and we share intraspecific traits with most animals I know. And, while mere anecdote, I've personally seen a lot of violence that was not sex/mating-related or, if it was, it went way beyond what was called for just to get laid or to take out another male's offspring. Some of it haunts me. After all, I thought Bambi was cool.
While it might be over-stating the case to say nature is nothing but red in tooth and claw, it is also overstating the case to say we are naturally a kumbha ya critter. In fact, I think our legal systems are largely designed just to exhaust the financial and emotional resources of the parties to the point where they give up on the idea of self-help and just bow their heads and crawl back in their caves. Otherwise, shit would be getting real, all the time.
:up:
This may be (a) bias against the different and (b) bias against the unknown.
If so, then racism is possibly an extreme form of it, depending on how it is defined?
But I am a bit dubious about the claim that "evolution favors diversity" (@Cheshire).
Diversity may play a prominent role in the animal kingdom in general, but less so within a particular species.
For example, there seems to be no great diversity among elephants, lions, or wolves.
Also, it seems that more successful species, like humans, tend to wipe out less successful ones.
So, I could be wrong, but something doesn't seem right somewhere ....
What's the alternative? (I'm asking). Isn't psychology also imposing forms?
Whites are becoming minorities in many places.
Yes, this is an excellent example of an
Quoting Cheshire
Excellent contribution.
It's a fact. The white genocide conspiracy BS doesn't take away from that.
It gives it false meaning.
How so?
I think that it's worth saying so as not to erase the truth behind the hyperbole. There's a reason many white young men feel disenfranchised as they do. There is racism toward whites. And white populations are shrinking from the majority.
It implies a threat which speaks to the emotions in order to propagate the BS that normally precedes it. See Above.
If this is the case, it's not caused by anti-white exploitation-discrimination, ethnic cleansing or genocide of whites by non-whites at any time anywhere on the planet. To the extent many whites suffer or are aggrieved in North America or the EU where whites control well over 90% of governments, militaries, police, organized crime and industries, they do so because of elite / establishment whites. Can you handle the inescapable truth? Do you think this fact of the matter portends "racism" against whites by whites (insofar as non-whites control next to nothing that exploits the lives and livelihoods of themselves or, especially, whites)? :brow:
Why then is it okay to discriminate against - often minority - Whites?
True, but it always strikes me as a bit odd that people don't include any self-reflection in that. Or maybe they do and society is even more of a train wreck than I thought. But really...when people are thinking that humans naturally just bash in the head of anyone they dislike and rape anything in a deer-hide skirt, do they think to themselves "Yep, that's what I'd do if it wasn't for all this damned enlightenment etiquette I've been brainwashed with"? What we really get from the WYSIATI is that the word around us seems to be full of rapists and murderer except us and our community of friends and family who all seem perfectly nice and unlikely to do either. I'm curious as to why that second half of the image doesn't figure into default assumptions about human nature.
An interesting guess at an answer to this comes from Peter Gray. Unlike hunter gatherers, we are controlled almost every inch of our lives as children. We never get a chance to see what we would do without parental control. This creates a gap in the narrative, in our story of ourselves, which is both frightening and perpetually as dumping ground for every dark impulse we can't handle the existence of in our new shiny adult self-narrative. We don't see ourselves as the product of our own motives, but rather as having been 'built' from this mysterious 'state of nature'.
Quoting frank
What evidence? I'd wager almost no-one has seen the evidence bar a few archaeologists and authors. The overwhelming majority will read the theories of those who've seen the evidence. They'll pick up, for example, Pinker's book (The Better Angels of our Nature), read the blurb and think "that's for me". I picked up Pinker's book, read the blurb and thought "apologist bullshit". Unfortunately I then had to read it for work, so the point was moot, but otherwise I would have just put it straight back on the shelf. It's different if you keep stumbling across evidence in favour of one theory in the course of your general reading, but that's simply not the case for most ordinary people. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those people who did pick it up thinking "that's for me", I'm saying it's a choice, people are not bombarded with evidence which they have to sort through, they're bombarded with adverts, and shit about celebrities. evidence is something they have to actively seek out, it's a motive driven exercise.
Caveat: Prejudice alone is not racism; however, racism is enforced prejudice.
War, almost by definition, presupposes complex organisation, specialisation and societal structure etc... It shouldn't come as a surprise, I think, that we see little of it in small tribal groups because they just didn't and don't have any of the things that would even enable warfare as a possibility.
You can interpretate it either way it seems to me i.e. they only started with warfare under certain conditions, or as soon as the condition were right they started warfare.... and so I don't see how it showes anything regarding human nature.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_nationalism
Racism is larger organised ethnic groups dominating other ethnic minorities.
If you literally mean 'is the same' then I don't agree.
OK, so what would you call one organised ethnic group dominating ethnic minorities, but without a supporting ideology? What is it you're imagining constitutes this domination at an individual level, random chance, one group actually being better than the other ("it's not racism, it's just a fact")? I'm struggling to see how you could separate the two. If one organised group are dominating another on ethnic grounds, that is de facto racism, no?
I understand what you're saying. One datum looking for interpretation is, as I mentioned earlier, that we appear to have more female ancestors than male. During some phases our our prehistoric ancestry the ratio was around 2:1. One suggestion for explaining that is prehistoric war.
I'm a little surprised that people bring up biases about what early humans were like. That stuff just isn't on my radar, though maybe it should be. To approach the question with a strong reaction against those views, which I read Kenosha as doing, isnt the best way to get to the truth.
I don't think so. If say a big group conquers a previously relatvily unknown separate small group that happens to be another etnicity and stays to dominate them, the ideology would follow the conquest and domination, and not be the cause of it. The reason for conquering or dominating need not be difference in etnicity, but could simply be that they were separate political units.
And Isaac, even within one country or political unit all separation between groups need not be caused only by racism. People seem to tend to stick to their cultural and ethnic roots and band together with other people with the same background. Racism can play a reinforcing role therein, but surely it's not the only cause of separation?
:100:
My "even if" argument is that, were there to actually be some "woe is me" whites getting put-upon, they should understand the natural phenomena called "push back". People have to expect the the longer they burn someone, the higher the price they (or their children, and their children's children) will have to pay when the burning finally stops. Sons may very well have to pay for the sins of their fathers. Especially if those fathers handed down some ill-gotten gains to their sons.
The lesson to be learned here is either 1. Stop burning, and the sooner the better; or 2. Never stop burning. Liberals = #1; conservatives = #2.
:fire:
At the risk of arguing for a "true Scotsman", equality is a conservative value.
I don't know what a "true Scotsman" is. I've seen the reference twice today and have yet to look it up. Anyway, a conservative value is one that seeks to keep things the way the are. If equality is the way things are, then I reckon you're correct.
And let's not forget all the micro aggressions we (accidentally) perpetuate having grown up white in a Western, white society. Tends to not matter much what your political inclination is in that case.
We all have a propensity to use "liberal" and "conservative" to denominate a person as opposed to a position. I just did it. But again, where racism and inequality exist, the conservative position would be to maintain it. To the extent a "principled conservative" favors equality and anti-racism, he would then be taking a liberal position. Or maybe he is really a liberal. But yes, having just read the definition of a True Scotsman, then the word "principled" as applied to a conservative in this instance, would indeed be the No True Scotsman fallacy.
It is definitely not intelligent to reach a racist conclusion. I said "weak-minded", which means that the person arriving at a racist conclusion is weak-minded, stupid, not using the intellect or rationality correctly. Plenty of people think they are rational and that they use rational deduction to reach conclusions but instead have biases and fallacies in their line of thinking. It's why we have biases and fallacies as concepts used in a deduction in order to arrive at logical conclusions that aren't influenced by our stupidity. There's no logic to racism, not even in the context the "fear of the unkown" originally formed from. Racism is an invented concept by individuals and society in order to cope with the "fear of the unknown", but through biased and fallacy-heavy reasoning aimed it at different looking people. It's the Dunning-Kruger process of intellect that formed it, not intelligence or intellect when used properly.
It is uncontroversial in the context of pure data which this is not. This is a lame attempt at skating through a subtext of implications. It is pleasant to watch racist positions have to attempt to sneak through the cracks where at one time it walked through the door. Ethically, I can't imagine much darker a goal than to take advantage of the lost by teaching them to hate their neighbors for one's own misguided need for narcissistic fulfillment.
Notice you're using "darker" to mean bad.
Notice it's a metaphor in a context that doesn't imply relative melanin.
No shit.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
1.Background selection on the Y chromosome can influence levels of NRY diversity in human populations.
2. Sample sizes are very small with high variables so the conclusion itself has to be treated tentatively.
3. We're talking about possibly as few as 60 breeding pairs of early humans skewing the matriarchal and patriarchal lines, it's not something which needs perpertuating throughout human history.
4. The effect is missing from East Asia. So at the very least we can't extend it to a 'human nature' effect.
5. Polygamy.
It's not so much a datum looking for interpretation as a datum with six or seven interpretations laid out for you to choose from. The question is, why choose the one which makes white enlightened westerners come out looking best?
Quoting frank
Speaking for myself, who also reacts strongly to these views, my main motivation is that hunter gatherer tribes are clinging on to their existence by their fingernails as it is. It takes every ounce of pressure that groups like Survival International can bring to bear just to halt the genocide. The last thing they need is the image of brutal savages being re-invigorated for no good reason.
The other reason is that I think, even if it's not your motivation, perpetuating theories of 'original sin', leads to social welfare issues like oppressive child-rearing practices and "they get what they deserve" kinds of attitude towards violent crime and delinquency.
Until about 150 years ago many, if not most, philosophers and scientists in Europe and the U.S. accepted as fact what we would now label as racist ideas. Was it because they were weak-minded, stupid and not rational? Or was it because ideas about many aspects of human nature evolve over long periods of time?
It's the second part I'm having trouble reconciling. How is 'staying to dominate them' not racism? We still seem to have this picture of a large powerful ethnic group dominating a less powerful ethnic group, but we're wanting to not call that racism for some reason. It seems to tick all the boxes.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Maybe, but you introduced 'domination', not just separation.
I think maybe you may be just working with a different definition of racism to me and it causing crossed wires here.
All that data means is that prehistoric humans may have been extremely violent. If you have a hard time accepting that possibility, you need to look at how your own personal issues are effecting your outlook.
So you're not worth talking to. :up:
Who said anything about not accepting the possibility? I'm talking about one's choice when presented with a range of such possibilities. I could hardly be making such a point if I were simultaneously denying that such choice existed, could I?
Do you really not understand or is this just another lazy spitball?
But if that small group being dominated were ethnically the same as the big group you wouldn't call it racism would you, even though it is essentially the same thing?
That's why I wouldn't call it racism in this particular example, because the domination of a group, be it ethnically the same or different, needn't have anything to do with race or ethnicity... . It's only becomes racism, I would say, if an ideology is created based on ethnicity or race to consolidate or strengthen that domination.
Quoting Isaac
Yes I did, I think a lot follows from separation, from groups.
Politics typically organise around groups, and once politically active those groups tend to strive for the best political deal for their particular group... and then you can get one group getting the upper hand politically (especially if they are a majority) and maybe they end up dominating the other.
All of this, this whole process, needn't have anything to do with racism. Groups of the same ethnicity fight for political power all the time. That's why I wouldn't equate the two, I think it blends two distinct phenomena together.
We probably do use a different definition.
The way this discussion started was Kenosha saying anthropology has determined that early man was mostly peaceful. They do that by applying their favored principles.
My point was that archeological and genetic evidence says we have to consider that violence and proto-war may have been part of the prehistoric human world.
Do you're confirming my point
You are projecting. Regardless of what narrative you put to it, it's true.
I see. Then...
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I'm not going to open the whole systemic racism debate again, but that seems to be our difference.
What form does that consideration take? As far as I read it, @Kenosha Kid was suggesting that the balance was in favour of peace, after having considered the possibilities. Responses have been given to the articles and evidence you cited, so the possibility has not been ignored at all, it's been considered. It remains a possibility, but the balance of evidence is in favour of an existence at least as peaceable, if not more peaceable than the one we have in the West.
Again, remember that hunter gatherer tribes still exist. It's possible that you are a psychopath. We'd not have the ground to deny the possibility. Is it not simply human decency to charitably assume you're not until more compelling evidence arrives? Do not existing hunter gatherers deserve the same level of decency?
Fair enough, there's no need to go there in this thread. But yes, a lot of what is included under the term systemic racism is I think caused by poverty and its effects. Which I do think is an issue that needs to be resolved to be clear, but I wouldn't call it racism per se. Some of it is.
I was never arguing that violence didn't occur, I even cited an article about violence along with the other two as an example. What I was arguing against was the characterisation of HG tribes as typically violent toward outsiders when in fact they were typically cooperative.
The archeological evidence to suggest otherwise simply doesn't exist afaik: it shows that sometimes violence occurred but, as per my quote above, these rare cases are elevated to the norm. The consensus within archeology is the same as within anthropology as far as I can tell.
And there's no genetic evidence at all that I know of. Linking the higher diversity of genes to violence between males is assuming the conclusion which we shouldn't do, especially since your conclusion is in prison for touching boys.
My guess is that it was similar to the way native Americans were: some tribes were peaceful to strangers, some tribes were extremely hostile to anyone else. None of them were racist, btw.
My offensiveness is a wimp.
You are test driving racist speaking points under false pretense. IF anything I'm reflecting.
How could they be racist when they didn’t have the biological concept of race?
They eventually learned it from whites. By that time most of them (in the east) were already part white and/or black.
I would also add that it represented the most refined and ‘verified’ thinking among the intellectuals of Europe as recently as two centuries ago, just as homophobia was endorsed by the lab history , medical and legal establishments less than a century ago. If this stems from laziness , flimsy and superficial generalizations , then I would predict that a century from now our most refined and enlightened thinking will also be accused of such terrible things.
As George Kelly said:
“I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.”
How much of that was just establishment conservatives justifying the maintenance of the status quo?
But the way it is worded, it almost comes across as saying "even the damn ivory tower intellectual elite liberals" were on board back then. That wasn't true then and it's not true now.
I look around today and wonder what the future will look back on and cite for stupidity. The thing that comes to mind is the way we treat animals and the earth in general. But the simple fact of the matter is, we, right now, in the present, know better than to do what we are doing, and we've been told. What George Kelly could ad is that: Man, in his open conspiracy to pursue his self-interest, always claims to be doing it "for the children"; and some of those children in future generations will look back and excuse him for "not knowing any better."
quote="James Riley;568708"]5
I would also add that it represented the most refined and ‘verified’ thinking among the intellectuals
— Joshs
How much of that was just establishment conservatives justifying the maintenance of the status quo?
But the way it is worded, it almost comes across as saying "even the damn ivory tower intellectual elite liberals" were on board back then. That wasn't true then and it's not true now.[/quote]
“I It is by now well known that some of the greatest modern philosophers held racist views. John Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-76), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and many others believed that Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European enlightenment.” ( You could add Hannah Arendt to that list).
“Michael Zeuske, a Bonn-based historian and specialist for the history of slavery, on Deutschlandfunk (a German public radio station) on June 13, 2020: “If one seriously intends to enlighten people about racism and the toppling of monuments,” to paraphrase Zeuske, “one must also take such great minds as the philosopher Immanuel Kant […] into account.” Why? Well, because, as Zeuske puts it, Kant’s “anthropological writings helped to establish European racism.”
Quoting James Riley
Kelly, like the phenomenologists , Heidegger and embodied cognitive theorists , rejects the quaint enlightenment notion of self-interest, which implies an atomized , autonomous subject split off from a world. By the way, your view of self-interest would probably be considered racist by critical race theory adherents.
“ A parable called "The Tragedy of the Commons" haunts social research on ethical concerns. The parable describes a situation in which a number of herdsmen graze their herds on a common pasturage. Each herdsman knows that it is in his self-interest to increase the size of his herd because, whereas each additional animal brings profit to him, the cost of grazing the animal and the damage done to the pasturage is shared by all the herdsmen. As a result, each of the herdsmen rationally increases his herd size until the commons is destroyed and, with it, all of the herds that grazed on it. The concern of the social scientist is how one can get a group of rationally self-interested herdsmen to cooperate in maintaining the vanishing commons.
This disarmingly disingenuous metaphor for our world situation embodies a long tradition of modern thought about the self and its relation to others, which may be called the economic view of the mind. The goal of the self is assumed to be profit-getting the most at least cost. The unconstrained economic man, such as Hobbes's despot,continues his acquisitions until there is nothing left for anyone else. Therefore, constraints are needed: overt social force, internalized socialization, subtle psychological mechanisms. A general theory called social exchange theory, widely used in social psychology, decision theory, sociology, economics, and political science, views all of human activity, individually and in groups, in terms of input and output calculations, paying and receiving. We believe that this implicit vision of motivation underlies not only social science but many contemporary people's views of their own action. Even altruism is defined in terms of an individual obtaining (psychological) utility from benefiting another.
Is such a view experientially validated? We believe that the view of the self as an economic man, which is the view the social sciences hold, is quite consonant with the unexamined view of our own motivation that we hold as ordinary, nonmindful people. Let us state that view clearly. The self is seen as a territory with boundaries. The goal of the self is to bring inside the boundaries all of the good things while paying out as few goods as possible and conversely to remove to the outside of the boundaries all of the bad things while letting in as little bad as possible. Since goods are scarce, each autonomous self is in competition with other selves to get them. Since cooperation between individuals and whole societies may be needed to get more goods, uneasy and unstable alliances are formed between autonomous selves. Some selves (altruists) and many selves in some roles (parents, teachers) may get (immaterial) goods by helping other selves, but they will become disappointed (even disillusioned) if those other selves do not reciprocate by being properly helped.
What does the mindfulness/awareness tradition or enactive cognitive science have to contribute to this portrait of self-interest? The mindful, open-ended approach to experience reveals that moment by moment this so-called self occurs only in relation to the other. If I want praise, love, fame, or power, there has to be another (even if only a mental one) to praise, love, know about, or submit to me. If I want to obtain things, they have to be things that I don't already have. Even with respect to the desire for pleasure, the pleasure is something to which I am in a relation. Because self is always codependent with other (even at the gross level we are now discussing), the force of self-interest is always other-directed in the very same respect with which it is self-directed. What, then, are people doing who appear so self-interested as opposed to other-interested? Mindfulness/awareness meditators suggest that those people are struggling, in a confused way, to maintain the sense of a separate self by engaging in self-referential relationships with the other. Whether I gain or lose, there can be a sense of I; if there is nothing to be gained or lost, I am groundless. If Hobbes's despot were actually to succeed in obtaining everything in the universe, he would have to find some other preoccupation quickly, or he would be in a woeful state: he would be unable to maintain his sense of himself. Of course, as we have seen with nihilism, one can always turn that groundlessness into a ground; then one can maintain oneself in relation to it by feeling despair.“
( Francisco Varela, The Embodied Mind)
To the extent the greatest modern philosophers held racist views they were, as I implied, just establishment conservatives justifying the maintenance of the status quo. That would include any that today, looking back, we might view as enlightenment icons. The real question (and the one historians love to dig for and often find) is who was challenging their thinking at the time? What happened to their writings? Maybe they weren't "establishment" and didn't get the time of day? Nevertheless, they are often found in obscure, dark recesses of the stacks; but, if they don't serve today's conservative interest then they don't get any oxygen now either.
In this light, there is no need to enlighten people about racism and the toppling of monuments any more than we need to take a deep dive on sexism to figure out why men should stop beating their wives. What role Kant’s anthropological writings played in establishing European racism might better be assigned to what role they played in maintaining it. But even if they were the genesis, who's interests did they serve then, and who adopted them at the time? And who now cites back to them in an effort to justify their position today?
Quoting Joshs
Hence why I suggested he might add my proposed addendum.
Having studied the tragedy of the commons as historical background for the Taylor Grazing Act, and the real, on-the-ground proofs of it out west (U.S.) on public lands (especially with sheep but also with cattle), one might reconsider it as quaint or qualified for rejection. With the ever-widening, disparate wealth gap (in the U.S. anyway), it seems the parable is not so disingenuous. One need only view the government as the commons upon which the 1% graze their fat faces. It's only when they see things drying up (Covid) that the "enlightenment" flies back into self-interest and we try a little trickle-up for a change (and discover who the essential workers really are). Such is not unlike the ranchers creating grazing associations to divvy up the grass they overgrazed and keep out the riff-raff. When they failed at that, leaving vast tracts in ruin, Uncle Sugar comes in and regulates things. And let's not forget "bobbed ware."
Good luck finding those mysterious hidden ‘liberals’ from past centuries. You won’t find them any more than you’ll find secret discoverers of relativity or genetic theory. That’s because science, technology and social thought evolve together. The previous leading edge of ethical thought is always going to appear backward to contemporary minds.
Thinking that ethical thinking remains static over cultural
history while only science evolves gives you license to demonize those whose thinking isn’t up to your standards It also gives you no way to anticipate how you might help them to see things differently, because you are concentrating on nefarious motives rather than issues of knowledge.
Some have been found. They are usually indigenous people, some of whom did not write but were written down; others penned their thoughts from prison. Again, historians love searching for and finding them. But again, the discoveries often don't find the light of day for obvious and already-explained reasons.
Quoting Joshs
It only appears that way to the vested interests who want to cite them for authority. Conservative is, by definition, that which seeks to maintain or justify the status quo. Then or now. Liberal is, by definition, that which would move or justify the movement forward. Those enlightenment icons who justified racism weren't creating it.
There was a time when the leading edge of science said tobacco was harmless, even beneficial. But guess what? It was not the follow-on, more modern science that refuted that. So no, I'm not living in some romantic understanding of science and knowledge. It was people who, in the 15th and 16th century knew it was shit and bad for you. But they don't get much play, do they? Our bias has us looking to science of the 20th century as the leading edge on tobacco harm, blah blah blah. But the leading edge was contemporary voices that were ignored. Same with alcohol. Same with Audubon's warning about the bison and carrier pigeon, long, long before their demise. Not to mention the Indians and their warnings.
Quoting Joshs
I'm looking at nefarious motives now, but citing contemporaneous warning from then. Your philosophy is just more apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest. "They didn't know any better back then!" "Even the best minds back then thought it was okay!"
LOL! I guess they weren't the best minds now, where they? The best minds were marginalized, ignored and often lost to history. Only to be proven right today.
It all depends on who you listen to, and who you consider "the leading edge".
What if my philosophy were true? How would it change the way you look at people who disappoint your moral standards? Im not just just talking about those from previous eras but your contemporaries who violate your standards of decency. You would look them in the eye and say “you are just trying to further your open conspiracy to look the other way while pursuing your unenlightened self-interest”. And they would belt you in the mouth for impugning their motives. Basically describes today’s polarized political atmosphere , with each side impugning the others’ motives as selfish, greedy, dishonest , etc , etc. It never occurs to either side that the other believes deeply that their approach is unimpeachably ethical.
Which is why I agree with Ken Gergen:
“Cobstructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)
[Edit: Note the change in your original post from "What if it were true?" and your change to "What if my philosophy were true?" I responded to the former]
It doesn't change the way I look at people because it is true and I already look at people that way. Usually they are disappointing their own moral standards, but it's all part of the open conspiracy: "I'll look the other way if you look the other way."
My goal here is simply to remind people to engage in a little introspection when they say they are "doing it all for the kids" and those in the past "didn't know any better." That, and consider the historical record.
That should inform our decision-making and have us pay closer attention to the voices who speak against what we all know in our own little hearts to be true. Our history is not the lies we tell about ourselves, or the statues we put up. Our history is recorded in books and oral traditions and art and dance and the voice of the oppressed. In other words, the leading mind of the day on the issue of slavery back in the 1850s might very well have been a slave. Did anyone bother to ask? No? Why?
Anyone who spouts the white man's burden or racial superiority or what white, Eurocentric philosophers of the 15th, 16th, 17th century might say are the apologist who, in the most generous analysis, failed to listen to countervailing positions of the day.
The leading minds of the day are those who history and hindsight prove to have been correct, regardless of whether the dominant paradigm (white? Eurocentric? Whatever) debated with them. To assume they did not exist because they were marginalized, or not recorded, or because their works were lost, or have not yet been found, is to assume there was no debate at the time. If that were the case, then the dominant paradigm simply failed to ask the leading minds of the day. Such are the forces of conservativism.
Quoting Joshs
So you agree that the leading minds of the day are marginalized by the open conspiracy. I'm glad we got that settled.
Quoting Joshs
Because they don't. Everyone knows it's wrong. It's just the open conspiracy to allow it. There is not "two sides." There is one side. It's just that some folks admit they have a problem and others are in denial. That problem is usually best cured collectively but individuals are called hypocrites for not trying to resolve the problem alone.
You and all the apologist in the world can say "they believe deeply that it's okay to hold a little girl down and cut off her clitoris with a broken coke bottle." BS. You know it, they know it, I know it. And the little girl sure as hell knows it. And guess what? She's the leading edge expert on the subject.
Quoting Joshs
I spend days and countless words spelling out my position on natural law in another thread. I'm not going to reiterate now. Regardless, please, wherever you go with your arguments, please don't tell me what I'm thinking or what the logical conclusion of my point must be. And no hyperbole. Nobody is going to punch me in the mouth for pointing out their BS because I don't go around pointing out our collective or individual agreement to look the other way. I just look the other way. It's part of the conspiracy. But, if we take to heart what I have said, and record history, and listen to the voices of the little girls, it just might inform our decisions and create a culture that our children won't look back on with derision, or who won't feel compelled to make excuses for us based upon a non-existent ignorance.
Yes, it was because the tools of rational thought weren't fully developed by then. No scientist or rational thinker today that's worth a damn would be able to reach a racist conclusion without totally abandoned the wisdom that we've acquired from the enlightenment era to today. Only reason it's still going on is because of generations of people keeping conservative biases alive while the reasonable and rational thinkers view these people as mere morons, incapable of actually doing the proper work needed for up-to-date rational thinking.
Basically, you argue against my point by pointing out that we should dismiss the last 150 years of development in science and philosophical thinking because before that people didn't come to the same conclusions. That's a fundamentally flawed way of giving credit to people who either didn't have any modern tools of deduction or simply dismissed any attempt at rational thought during their times. I would argue that thinking heavily through biases and subjective superstitions or invented concepts that don't have any connection to reality outside of the self... is stupid. It doesn't matter which time in history we are speaking about, history up until now has only developed to lessen the influence of idiots and weak-minded people. We still have them, but we have developed tools to lessen their influence on the world and we are still doing it. Would you agree that we still have idiots in the world today? If the amount of them are higher in power the further back in history we get, based on my reasoning here, that only strengthens the idea that the way we've developed rational thinking today and respect its process, has decreased the number of idiots having influence compared to 150+ years ago.
Just because people had some good ideas back then, doesn't mean they had the tools to always arrive at rational conclusions.
:100: :fire:
Let’s talk about art as an example. Do you notice that prior to the Greeks, renderings of humans in sculpture were rigid, without movement and personality? It has been said that what changed was the discovery of individual personhood and this is depicted not just in Classical art but in literature, poetry and philosophy
of that period. Notice that medieval painting did not understand perspective and a unified light source. This emerged with the renaissance , and reflected not just discoveries in art but larger shifts in thinking about the interconnected basis of the natural and human world. Each innovation in the arts expressed new discoveries about the natural and cultural world., and about human potential and commonality. The point I want to make is twofold. First , individuals learn about who they are from their participation in community. Second, each innovation is made possible by , and builds upon previous innovations. This suggests that it is impossible for an individual to be a true genius in the sense of leapfrogging over his era’s level of cultural and scientific understanding. There is instead a certain range of creativity within any era that amounts to variations on a theme. That’s why labels like renaissance , enlightenment, modernism and postmodern are useful, because they are crude ways of pointing to the contours and limits of thought of a given era.
Isnt there at least one aspect of inter human , psychological understanding that you recognize as evolving from era to era, in parallel with advances in science, literature and the arts ? Piaget wrote about child development as proceeding from greater egocentrism to more and more decentered ways of thinking. By egocentrism he didn’t mean selfishness in the moral sense , but a cognitive limitation that represents an earlier phase in the child’s increasingly differentiated understanding of their world. The child begins with rigid, inflexible black and white categories though which they organize meaning , and progressively diversity and integrate these categories. They become more ‘moral’ citizens as their simplistic , one-dimensional interpretations of others become more relational and empathetic. Piaget argued that cultural development can be likened to child development in this way.
You really think that our ability to get along with and understand others is not something that has evolved era to era in the slightest? You don’t believe that any aspect of what allows us to empathize with others who are different from us , and what allows us to avoid being afraid, hostile , threatened by individuals and cultures who are alien to our ways , builds progressively upon and depends on previous eras of enlightenment?
One need not be a true genius to leapfrog over his era's level of cultural and scientific understanding.
One need only be honest with himself.
Any change I might perceive is not relevant to our discussion here.
There are several relative constants. Two that are important for our discussion here are all the emotions, and the open conspiracy. These constants, and not the aberrations from them, are what kept us where we are today: alive. Not better, but alive. Not extinct. Those constants are not always honest or good. And we know that. But we continue to avail ourselves of our nature, regardless. It is the aberration of humble honesty about these understandings which constitutes a leap, if any there be.
Your post rings of the old "nasty, brutish and short" assessment of our former selves, which also hints of an indictment against indigenous people. Analogizing early childhood development to societal evolution is the same thing. More of that white (?) western (?) justification of the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves to make ourselves feel better about ourselves so we can righteously and indignantly belt others in the mouth with impunity when, in a lapse of judgement, that other might make so bold as to be honest with himself and inquire about the same with he who would belt him.
I hate to use the following as an example because it will be extremely easy for you or someone else to misunderstandthe purpose for which it is offered, and then run with a distinction without a relevant difference, but I'll go ahead and trust you: When reading Plato, I am just astounded with his brilliance and the fact that people could even think like that 2,500 years ago. Especially when I look around and see all the knuckle-dragging people we have today. But then I realize, not only have we not changed all that much in the last 200,000 years, but we really aren't any better or more worthy than the man who sat at the mouth of the cave and chipped a spear point from a rock. He could have been an asshole, or a wonderful person, or some combination in between. But we are no better. Indeed, we are no better than the animal he killed with the spear. That animal is what got us here today, and not simply his killing of it. That which the fittest consumes must itself have been fit or the consumption of it would inure to no one's benefit. Humbly honoring and respecting is what constitutes the leap, the evolution, the advancement of man, and it constitutes what is today an aberration. And today's generation won't be the first one to learn that lesson, if it does. I pray that it does.
[A digression I find interesting: Socrates wasn't a writer. Had Plato not written it down, then I could not be astounded. And yet I think there were many who's lives have not been reduced to writing. And the dominant paradigm might not only have killed them, but then taken concerted efforts to erase all memory and burn all books. But the humble honest leap will have been taken none the less.]
Thank you! While I pretend to be a misanthrope, I confess it's nice to be appreciated, especially by someone who's intellect and philosophy I look up to, and who's reading and analytics far surpass my own.
Piaget’s developmental model was heavily indebted to Marx’s dialectic , and of course Marx was indebted to Hegel. In fact the psychologies of Freud , the American Pragmatists (In particular Dewey, James and Meade) and so many others within the psychological community who embrace a Darwinian evolutionary framework, all are thinking in Hegel’s shadow. In addition , liberal theologies that hark back to Kierkegaard also are ‘after Hegel , I haven’t even mentioned the various strands of wokeness , critical race theory and BLM, all of which can be traced back to the changes in political thinking that Hegel made possible.l, and Wittgenstein’s ideas on language. Within analytic philosophy students of Hegel include Putnam, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Sellars and Rorty. On the far left are the postmodern, post structuralist French philosophers who filter Hegel through Marx and Freud, filter those two through critical neo-marxism(Adorno, Habermas) , and filter critical marxism through Nietzsche.
I’m mentioning this history because of your stated belief that an individual can leapfrog over their era’s worldviews , and that human nature is stable and relatively unchanging:
Quoting James Riley
Quoting James Riley
Quoting James Riley
Such a perspective, it seems to me , is at odds with all that came after Hegel in psychology and the other social sciences , in biology , in politics and philosophy. All of the above writings necessarily becomes targets of your accusations of “ apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest”.
I’m reminded of Andrew Breitbart’s writings. Yes, he was the founder of the alt right publication. I see nothing in your views that indicates you have anything in common with the alt right, except for what you wrote above.
Breitbart recognizes that all of the thinking that I mentioned above can be traced back to, and was made possible by Hegel. So he considers Hegel to represent a crucial dividing line in the cultural wars between left and right. Everything that he considers dangerously relativistic, ungrounded in fixed verities about human nature and morality , he blames on the eras of thought in all the above fields that got their start with Hegelian dialectic.
So it appears that there are at least two strands of thinking that reject Hegelian dialectics and what came in it’s wake. In addition to alt right populism we have MLK styled enlightenment liberalism with its belief in the notion of rational self-interest. The distinction between these two strands has not been lost on intellectuals within the woke community.
They more or less ignore the alt right brigade and heap all their venom on the enlightenment liberals and the ideas that you espouse about the relation between the individual and culture. I think this is because the latter is more threatening to them than Breitbart, being closer in their thinking and also closer geographically.
I certainly could be wrong about where your views stand i realism to the above communities
eply="James Riley;568973"] Quoting James Riley
Piaget’s developmental model was heavily indebted to Marx, and of course Marx was indebted to Hegel. In fact the psychologies of Freud , the American Pragmatists (In particular Dewey, James and Meade) and so many others within the psychological community who embrace a Darwinian evolutionary framework, all are thinking in Hegel’s shadow. In addition , liberal theologies that hark back to Kierkegaard also are ‘after Hegel , I haven’t even mentioned the various strands of wokeness , critical race theory and BLM, all of which can be traced back to the changes in political thinking that Hegel made possible.l, and Wittgenstein’s ideas on language. Within analytic philosophy students of Hegel include Putnam, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Sellars and Rorty. On the far left are the postmodern, post structuralist French philosophers who filter Hegel through Marx and Freud, filter those two through critical neo-marxism(Adorno, Habermas) , and filter critical marxism through Nietzsche.
I’m mentioning this history because of your stated belief that an individual can leapfrog over their era’s worldviews , and that human nature is stable and relatively unchanging:
Quoting James Riley
Quoting James Riley
Quoting James Riley
Such a perspective, it seems to me , is at odds with all that came after Hegel in psychology and the other social sciences , in biology , in politics and philosophy. All of the above writings necessarily becomes targets of your accusations of “ apologetics for man in furtherance of his open conspiracy to look the other way while pursing a not-so-enlightened self-interest”.
I’m reminded of Andrew Breitbart’s writings. Yes, he was the founder of the alt right publication. I see nothing in your views that indicates you have anything in common with the alt right, except for what you wrote above.
Breitbart recognizes that all of the thinking that I mentioned above can be traced back to, and was made possible by Hegel. So he considers Hegel to represent a crucial dividing line in the cultural wars between left and right. Everything that he considers dangerously relativistic, ungrounded in fixed verities about human nature and morality , he blames on the eras of thought in all the above fields that got their start with Hegelian dialectic.
So it appears that there are at least two strands of thinking that reject Hegelian dialectics and what came in it’s wake. In addition to alt right populism we have MLK styled enlightenment liberalism with its belief in the notion of rational self-interest. The distinction between these two strands has not been lost on intellectuals within the woke community.
They more or less ignore the alt right brigade and heap all their venom on the enlightenment liberals and the ideas that you exposure about the relation between the individual and culture. I think this is because the latter is more threatening to them than Breitbart, being closer in their thinking and also closer geographically.
I certainly could be wrong about where your views stand in relation to the above communities. Maybe you could mention a philosopher or two born after 1800 whose thinking you believe is consonant with the views you stated above concerning the individual and cultural history , and the fixity of human nature.
I think that may be the case simply because you are unduly impressed by Hegel, et al, and what might have spilled out over the years hence; alt.right, or MLK, or otherwise (if indeed that spore can be read by a simple tracker like me).
I've been struggling with him for many years and the best I come away with has more to do with my understanding of general and special relativity, quantum physics, infinity, eternity and god. He has confirmed my belief that everything and nothing is happening and not happening, everywhere and nowhere, all at once, now, never and forever. But I'm willing to stipulate that you and these other great minds went down a more informative track with him than I did. To that extent, you may very well be over my head. In which case I bow down to you.
However, I stand steadfastly by my belief that for all their and your work, you have yet to come up with anything that constitutes progress beyond the simple truths understood by the man who launched his spear at that bison priscus, who danced naked by the fire light, fucked his woman, told lies to his friends, and pondered the stars at night; not pretending to know but instead just loving them. He would probably belt Breitbart in the mouth before Breitbart could shuck his AR; then he would hand MLK a priscus horn of fermented berries and water, toast with him, laugh, and say he did it for the children.
Breitbart would then return with his minions, slaughter my man (and MLK), erase all the evidence, tell his crew he did it "for the children" and then create some myths about how advanced he is.
very eloquently put
:up:
Blumenbach makes me think of the concept of "pride," mainly in his distinction between those "of capacity" in any race, and the average joe in that same race.
There is black pride, white pride, etc. But what really is it? I can understand pride in my own accomplishments, or in those of others where I played a hand, but why should I take pride in what other white people do or did? Why should I identify with the Denver Broncos? (I don't, by the way.) I don't live anywhere near Denver and even if I did, I have exactly jack-diddly squat to do with them.
I'm one of the few, the proud, the Marines. And I can understand pride in what I've done to earn that title, but I wasn't at Iwo Jima or wherever. So I can't point to all the Marines who have done this or that and say, "Yeah, that's me!" I once asked a Marine Chaplain about pride being a sin and yet the Marines are all about it. He parsed the hair in some forgotten way. But I raise it again in case somebody wants to school me on the difference.
Modern white conservatives often express pride in our founding fathers. But they were liberals, even radicals, every one. The U.S. has accomplished a lot, but why would some white moron think he had anything to do with it? We beat the Russians to the moon? What do you mean "we" (especially if you don't pay any taxes).
This brings me to the question of push-back. If blacks have been oppressed for so long, but some excel in some area, should other blacks take pride in that? It almost seems understandable in that case. But I don't suppose I should say it's okay here but not there.
Is pride the genesis of the "us vs them" that leads to racism?
I don't understand pride. I'm not saying anything about it, good or bad. I'm looking for insight from others. What good is it? What purpose does it serve? Where did it come from? I have the same concerns about the word "deserve." But that's another thread I reckon.
I think pride in the task itself and in each other, if it was a team effort, is great and normal in moderation. By moderation I mean it should be done graciously without expressing pride at the expense of others, for instance, the enemy or, in sports, the other team. I think there's a tendency to warp pride into it just being about being a member of a group ("USA the greatest", "if you ain't Dutch, you ain't much!"). There's nothing prideful about that. It's not the membership, it's what has been accomplished. And if you had a meaningful role in that, you deserve :wink: to feel proud.
I have more problems with feeling proud about characteristics and have more problem placing them. Is it ok to be proud because you're brave? Seems a bit narcissistic.
Taking pride in someone else work is clearly wrong, it's not your accomplishment.
Admiring someone else's work is fine too, please pay them a compliment. And we should show more admiration for those who naturally had a harder time reaching a goal than others. A rich person getting richer is a statistical likelihood and deserves a yawn, someone bootstrapping himself is an entirely different story.
Showing gratitude for the accomplishments of our forebears is appropriate.
So you can be grateful being American, admire some of your fellow Marines past and present and take pride in your accomplishments - hopefully something that didn't involve killing people.
Yes. There is, I think, a world of difference between gratitude and pride. If our forebears set the table then it should be: "Thank you for setting table!" And "I had a nice table set when I arrived." Not "We set a nice table for ourselves, didn't we? RAH RAH RAH! YEA US."
I think people would do well to teach grace, humility and gratitude instead of pride. Reserve pride for those who "deserve" it.
Anyway, thanks for bringing gratitude into this as an alternative understanding.
Quoting James Riley
:up:
People feel like certain groups, be it nations, sportsteams, parties are part of their identity... that's to say there's no stark difference between them feeling pride in accomplishing something themselves or the group they identify with accomplishing something.
Ok maybe you'd follow this up by asking why one would identify with something other then themselves... at some point the answer will just be because we are that kind of beings, social beings. Individualism is a later ideological invention.
Good luck convincing this group of that. It’s sounding like a religious revival meeting.
:up: Your post brings to mind one of my favorite quotes:
"In itself life is insipid, because it is a simple "being there." So, for man, existing becomes a poetic task, like the playwright's or the novelist's: that of inventing a plot for his existence, giving it a character which will make it both suggestive and appealing. ... ... serious examination should lead us to realize how distasteful existence in the universe must be for a creature - man, for example - who finds it essential to divert himself." J.O. y Gasset.
I wanted to compare it to golf, but since it's such a solo thing you don't see much in the way of pride for what the single person does. I wanted to then extend that thought to all the solo sports in the Olympics, but that has a sovereign flag attached to it. Seems like BS to me, but I often fall right in with the crowd. :yikes: :blush:
A sure sign that you are a philosopher!
And so the static notions inherited from classical physics rear their ugly head. Gasset was a student of Heidegger, but apparently didn’t read him very well. I would prefer to say that life in itself, as ‘being there’ , is incessant change and transformation. We need to invent plots in order to impose some
order on and find patterns in what would otherwise be an overwhelming chaos.
I don't know Heidegger, but perhaps y Gasset read him very well and just disagreed with, and improved upon him. Wouldn't your progressive building upon a past have the student move beyond the teacher? Or is y Gasset just a step back, an aberration, an F student of Heidegger? The invention of incessant change and transformation is the invented plot and order imposed by those who lack the context of eons; those who fear, and try to avoid the honesty of how insipid their life is. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
:fire:
Or things continue to be the same differently. You’re not a fan of Heraclitus or James?
I'm gonna stop right here and say something I have no good reason to say, other than my gut:
You seem like a very well-read, intelligent person with excellent retention. However, I don't see a whole lot of analytics, or thinking on your own two feet.
Here's my point: I don't know who Heideger is, and I put Heraclitus behind me forty years ago. If I want to run a guy up the flag pole, I quote him like I did y Gasset, or I give a summary of the position held as it relates to the subject at hand. But when I see a bunch of names thrown around without any piggin string on the merits, I'm wondering if someone is trying the old "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" ruse. Or, as we used to say in the law: "If the facts aren't on your side, argue the hell out of the law. If the law is not on your side, argue the hell out of the facts."
Like I said, you are probably just smarter than me so I shouldn't call you out. But you might be aware that if you can't make your own case without name dropping, I'm going to be suspect. Just know you are talking to a dummy, not a philosophy professor.
All I meant was , Heraclitus said, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on“ and James said “ Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness’.
See, now that wasn't so hard. :grin:
Anyway, my mom just sent me sermon she got at church (she's a Christian) and it had an analogy from physics about the wave to the particle. I'd read about it years ago, but it was new to her. What was new to me was the context of racism and the drilling down more particularly on the idea that the first thing you notice about someone often dictates what you see, and often to the exclusion of the rest of them; i.e. wave to particle. Sometimes it's best to step back and see the river instead of the molecule going by. Sometimes it's best to see the molecule, or even the sediment carried by the river and the "damage" that it does, taking boulders, in microscopic pieces, to the sea.
But having studied the geology of my own area, I've read there was a ancient rocky mountains here that eroded to the ocean, only to have another set rise up to what we have today. If it repeats on a scale like that, then the wave is going nowhere in the hydrologic cycle. Above, below, and on the Earth, it is a wet and (to me) sacred hoop.
Racism is in humans nature indeed. It comes from Ego. So it's "given" to people since their birth. And of course societies, in the way they are formed, make it even easier for racism to flourish.
All people are racists even if they are too scared to admit it even to themselves. They are just those who are Logical enough as to criticize their own beliefs and thoughts and realize what is wrong and tame their racism.
But the vast majority are just hypocrites. And the ridiculous thing is that those who yell, fight, make all the fuss and blame everyone for racism, those are usually the greatest racists! Just too busy accusing everyone else as to actually realize it.
It's not a false pretense. You brought up a conspiracy theory rooted in a belief of a dominant New World Order orchestrating cultural and racial genocide. I brought up a statistic. To respond in such a way to a statistic, to deny the facts that lead to unrest, and to assume that it is reflective in a conspiratorial belief, is foolish. People have grievances rooted in fact. Not every person who knows that fact believes it comes from a grand conspiracy. Rejecting the fact of the decline of the White population and projecting this conspiracy onto the simple, factual statement is the most reactionary and unhelpful way to respond to truth.
While there’s research indicating that infants demonstrate a preference for caregivers of their own race, any future racial biases and bigotries generally are environmentally acquired. Adult racist sentiments are often cemented by a misguided yet strong sense of entitlement, perhaps also acquired from one’s environment.
One means of proactively preventing this social/societal problem may be by allowing young children to become accustomed to other races in a harmoniously positive manner. The early years are typically the best time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction life skills/traits, like interracial harmonization, into a very young brain. Human infancy is the prime (if not the only) time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction characteristics into a very young mind.
Irrational racist sentiment can be handed down generation to generation. If it’s deliberate, it’s something I strongly feel amounts to a form of child abuse: to rear one’s impressionably very young children in an environment of overt bigotry — especially against other races and/or sub-racial groups (i.e. ethnicities). Not only does it fail to prepare children for the practical reality of an increasingly racially/ethnically diverse and populous society and workplace, it also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or (preferably) harmonious with their multicultural/-racial surroundings.
Children reared into their adolescence and, eventually, young adulthood this way can often be angry yet not fully realize at precisely what. Then they may feel left with little choice but to move to another part of the land, where their race or ethnicity predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so. If not for themselves, parents then should do their young children a big favor and NOT pass down onto their very impressionable offspring racially/ethnically bigoted feelings and perceptions, nor implicit stereotypes and ‘humor’, for that matter. Ironically, such rearing can make life much harder for one’s own children.
With a slight change to "It's optimal to be directed to that which you like, but it's stigmatized to express this."
That just about sums up all of humanity's problems throughout (pre)history. The 'modern' era (ie. last several millennia) has been punctuated by how this is being slowly realised and ignored with a fanatical fastidiousness.
Quoting Lil
Racism: "Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized." (Oxford LEXICO)
On the other hand, not feeling affinity or even feeling repulse for people of another race, is natural, but in the same way as you can also feel for people having certain characteristics or demonstrating certain behavior that repel you. So
I have voted "No", of course, although I believe that the answer to this question is so obvious that it almost has no meaning for me. But of course, I accept the 45% (up to this point) of the people who answered "Yes", since the is a democratic place. I only find it deplorable to feel that racism is natural. But I believe this is because most of them just don't know what racism actually means and don't care to look it up! (People in general rarely do that, esp. for terms that are commonly used.) And then, we have of course the racists themselves, who believe that racism is natural. What else could they believe?
Is being an asshole natural? Or is having the disposition to be an asshole natural?
I think almost everything is learned behaviour.