Chapter 26
What retards outbreeding?
I mentioned earlier the study in Norway where they rather expected a lot of cousin marriages because of low population density. Low population density, other things being equal, should reduce outbreeding. Consider the Nile valley. It is only a few miles across with cliffs rising to desert on either side. If you are a lonesome teenager, you might wander the dunes to get away from the reminder that just about nobody else seems lonesome. But the fact is that you are not going to find many your own age either over the water or out on the dunes. Even though Egypt has been densely populated for thousands of years, the effective population density is low. You won’t gain much by paddling to the other side of the Nile. The river tends to run near the cliffs on one side or the other.
Then there are the Eskimo. There are those who consider the word unacceptable because it is not their own word for themselves. Forgive me for going into a canned rant. In the sixth grade I had a friend with flaming red hair from Texas. A few years later I ran into him, and he shook my hand, identifying himself with a five- or six-digit number. It was his student number at the university. He was not happy that his name had been tampered with.
The most flagrant abuse I can think of is the case of the Kalahari Bushmen whose society is so old and stable that one band is genetically as distinct from the nearest other – within walking distance as they walk – as French and Japanese. There was a sweet, sentimental movie which was rather fanciful, “The gods much be crazy,” which showed them in a very sympathetic light. Years later we were told that the proper name was Khoisan, and soon after, the government said that their hunter-gatherer style was “obsolete” and moved them into high-rises, most of us suspecting that the point was to get at minerals in their ancestral home. Before destroying them, changing their name sufficiently dehumanized them so there was little flap at the theft. Any time I see a name tampered with, I think that somebody is losing a bit of their humanity and a bunch of their friends. I like the Eskimo and will use that word. It just means natives of the far north in English, and I regard English as a perfectly normal language. We refer to Germans, even though that is not their word for themselves. I regard Eskimo as having equal rights.
Among our brothers and sisters of the High North, there is an extremely low population density. This has resulted in some societal adaptations we need not recount, but unless intrusive outsiders sufficiently disrupt their communities, those adaptations will continue. They probably live just about the point of repose on the Sibly curve, guarded and nurtured by the fact that anybody else would find it exceedingly hard to live there.
Another protection against outbreeding excess is distance. Before I tumbled to the fact that kinship is so important, I fell in love two or three times with European women, of different countries as it happened. These “were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek …” Driving a thousand miles just to see a woman I was fond of was nothing. Girls I had dated for a while, when they dumped me, would regularly leave the state. It was a message, not an impediment. I’d have crossed the country had need been, but the distance said, “Don’t come.” I’m not sure you’d even call it a hint.
The European ladies, though, may have been a different matter. Crossing the Atlantic is a long, long way. I’ve done it. I’ve done it to visit a woman, but even thinking about the trip is strenuous for the mind.
And of course, I travel more easily than most. I carry a week’s worth of luggage on one finger. Usually, I don’t take a book. The video tape of my mind keeps me content if rather bored. Most people have not the will, know only a language or two, need company and many are not really free to travel. Even if there is no legal limitation, if they are strong enough to travel, they are probably needed at home.
At the other extreme is the city. The most casual observer could hardly fail to think, “Lots of people hereabouts.” It’s not really so simple. Back when I was living in Baltimore, the city was divided by the residents into ethnic neighborhoods, at least a dozen. Any bright native could rattle them all off and generally say where they were. I had a young man who was my assistant, and one day I noticed he was depressed. When I asked why, he said that a house that had belonged to one neighborhood had been sold to somebody who belonged in another. The home was anomalous. Generally, neighborhoods were divided by streets, but on that block the division was not on the corner. The purchaser was indeed of a different ethnicity from the seller, but he was of the ethnicity of the adjacent community.
Time, like distance, puts a lid on extreme outbreeding. You aren’t going to meet anybody born two hundred years before you. At a less absurd scale, you are most likely to meet and fall in love with someone your own age. Men, at least they used to say, mature a bit more slowly than women. You couldn’t prove it by me. But to the extent that is true it means that men might marry younger women. Of course, that whole issue gets muddled by social issues such as a man might take years achieving a social position he is going to keep through his productive life; it only takes a few minutes for a woman to pack her makeup. Obviously, this gets even more complicated now that so many women have careers.
And age is a two-edged sword from a mate/kinship perspective. While marrying somebody in a tight little community at demographic repose might seem like the most natural thing, that cousin of opposite sex and suitable age might not exist. This could force a healthy person to seek outside the optimized community. That would shift the community just a bit to the right along the Sibly curve. If this problem and solution is rare, little harm is done. If it is the nigh invariant rule, then the community moves fast and far along the horizontal axis until extinction becomes inescapable.
I used in youth to take age more seriously than I do now. I felt awkward in high school if a couple were dating and were in different classes. Class has two meanings in the context. There is class meaning a defined as being, with few exceptions, the same age as defined by a yearlong bracket. Then there is class meaning a schoolroom with students and a teacher meeting on a regular basis. For the second meaning, let me use the word schoolroom. So even though a couple might be in the same schoolroom, I felt a bit odd if they were in different classes.
Then there was the day I learned that a senior girl was dating a college boy. “Scandalous,” whirred my noggin, “Not even the same institution.”
It was a different world. In order to get a marriage license in Florida in those days you had to have a blood test. It was to prevent Rh problems, although they didn’t really tell us about that. Then there was a waiting period of three days. We understood why. It was so a romantic couple could not decide to get married and do it on the same weekend. Georgia had no waiting period. At the Georgia line there were big signs saying, “Blood test.” So, forgive my judgmentalism. I grew up in a world of rules.
Most of us know some of our relatives. By and large I regard this as a blessing, although I’m sure for some it is a greater blessing than for others. And relatives can be a mixed group. Say there is a nubile young female who has embraced modern populism and taken it to the point of blatant racism. Then there is old Uncle Analdas, a superannuated hippy, who wears his left-wing politics like a merit badge. Here I speak of the known family, the ones a person has actually met and with whom the line of kinship is known by all; that in in this modern, urbanized world is usually quite different from that group of people who together would constitute a population at the level of repose.
Given that even this smaller, more closely related family will have a spectrum of opinions on any topic, there is also the issue of direction of influence. A person’s choice might be influenced so as to avoid offending another family member. On the other hand, a younger person might be in rebellious mood and make a choice that will deliberately offend another. I have read, and as usual cannot remember where, that peer pressure regularly supersedes family pressure in such cases. I suspect my long-forgotten authority would have come to a different conclusion had that authority extended the net, so to speak. There are no doubt cultures today in which filial duty is a higher calling than in the English-speaking world. If you have an interest in this, the most important decision your progeny will ever make, you might consider going where filial fidelity is the norm or else be most careful to remain near suitable kin, but not too near. Of course, I have mentioned the “Westermark effect,” which predicts that spending childhood with an otherwise excellent choice of mate will almost make it a certainty that such choice will not be made.
Religion is historically a significant part of mating and rearing family. Over the years I have taken an interest in a number of religions. I never did this systematically. Some religions have a scripture or at least something written down so that it can be read. The other two ways of getting a slant on a religion are to listen to the explanation by a true believer or to get involved in a ceremony. I suppose that one should take all three approaches if possible. But my commitment was not great. I just had a mild curiosity about whether I was missing anything. My opinion was that the only thing to be missed by choosing the wrong faith was the King James Version. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Poe are right up there, but then I begin to run out of geniuses.
At the end of the day, religion offers some sort of spiritual life as I have said. But then it seems to me that the whole point of any religion is to be as offensive as possible to any other religion. Christians, despite the gentle nature of the fundamental teachings, have burnt witches and heretics and launched Crusades. The impetus for the initial Crusade was to recover the Holy Land for Christianity. A lot of us wouldn’t kick a person in the shins over the question of whether this bit of land was holier than that. But as strategy goes, it was not so inexcusable. Islam had spread from Atlantic to Pacific and bid fair to swallow the earth. By
starting conflict close to the center of Islam, the crusaders encouraged the Islamic forces to draw resources back to where they were needed, or at least to be a little less aggressive in their advances. Islam had conquered Spain, Asia Minor and much of the Balkan Peninsula before they were stopped – in part – by Dracula … yes that Dracula … in the east and Charles Martel in the west. The long and terribly costly gamble of the crusades had paid off. Of course, if you want to know more, there are more authoritative sources than I. But the crusades were a two-edged sword, or you might say Bowie knife. On one unhappy day, crusaders attacked Constantinople, now Istanbul, and so savaged the great old city that it was later a sitting duck for Islam. And back east, there was the Albigensian Crusade – centered around the town of Albi – which had everything to do with perceived excesses of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and nothing to do parrying any threat from Islam. In the end the slaughter was terrible.
As I said, religions do regrettable things with such regularity one wonders to just how great an extent that is a fundamental driving force.
John Lennon, musical genius, wrote a song called “Imagine.” It sort of reads as a hymn to secular globalism, and I’m sure he would have been most happy to have it taken to heart by everybody in the world. I was not meant to be exclusive.
Indeed, I imagine that many composers would be happy to have their music widely loved, but this seems to me not to be the general case. Think of a kind of music and I recon somebody will hate it. It’s not just nationalistic music. That’s too obvious. I mean music written for the world by noble people. Somebody is going to say, “You keep your noise over there; I’ll keep my music here.” When I was in college, there was a person named John Cage. He announced that music was defined by the fact that people would get together and listen to it. Accordingly, he put together a series of sounds, called them music and gave at least one … concert doesn’t seem like the right word … “event”?
Perhaps there is something to the statement: anything humans do and animals do not do will be coopted as a way to distinguish between populations. Sports are obvious. Years ago, I was always ready to play touch football, baseball variants, tennis, rugby, soccer, volleyball or whatever the gang wanted. But it became big business with lots of money changing hands. A school or a city might take pride in a team and hold other teams to contempt even though a team might not have many athletes who grew up in that city.
I have a friend who took a canal boat ride through France. The motor would chug all night and the next morning, after a bit of exploring by bicycle, they would go to a restaurant and learn how to cook something that was distinctive for the town. Now there is the kind of outreach I could warm up to. Another friend and his wife stayed for a bit in Italy. There would be a dish enjoyed by everybody in the landscape, but each little village had its own way of preparing it. I once, having been to a number of countries, wondered why no local restaurant offered food after the fashion of each and every one of them. But no, all the restaurants thereabouts had their own tradition, their own set of offerings and their own ethnicity. I confess that advancing years have reduced me to typically saying, “Just bring me a hamburger.”
Clothes. Ah, who can describe the glories of the variations in clothes. I used to prefer pull-on boots, jeans, a heavy belt and a red flannel or plaid shirt. I didn’t wear them all that often. It was more commonly, given my professional life, to wear oxfords, dark socks, wash pants, white shirt, tie and lab coat. I was never drawn to wearing my pants far down; I think they call it gangsta style. If anything, I kept my pants too high to be really cool. I’m sure the gangsta folk were quite happy that I did not ape them. After all, it was part of their identity. I sit here in tan shorts and a random t-shirt.
Languages differ. I imagine to this day, and I am sure in my day, there would be a formal language, named after the country, and an informal dialect that people preferred to use when not on best behavior. This produced some ironic moments, when locals would be chatting away happily in dialect; then something unpleasant would come up, and they suddenly went formal. Often, I knew the formal language, so I wound up hearing exactly those things I should not have heard. Not much use trying to use the formal language; anybody who spoke it well also spoke English better than I.
Yes, there is racism out there. People may dislike you and maintain their isolation from you purely on account of your perceived ethnicity. Some of that may be due to bad experiences in the past. But it’s there all the same. I try to treat everybody fairly; I think it’s the best as well as the least I can do. If there is an underlying instinct, it’s not my fault. My only obligation is not to let it harm anyone.
Just at present, we are faced with a global pandemic. Yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s new. But even there, when it arguably is a matter of life and death, there are those whose response is more guided by identity than biology, whatever that turns out to be in the end.
There is a country I call Red China. In the old days, “red” implied Soviet Union, implied communist, implied threat. Nowadays, “red” implies Republican party, implies … well whatever the Republicans stand for. The change was made without my blessing, certainly, but I try to keep up. Among the Republican Party and the Democratic party and a large group of the disillusioned, it is easier to see the mutual hostility than to set out clearly policy differences. As usual, group identity trumps logic. All of these are cases when people are making decisions with parts of their anatomy not involved with cool rational analysis. As for what Red China is up to, I imagine they have global ambitions, but how they express them I know not; they have not confided in me.
We are walking all over the notion of self-determination. The challenge is waiting in the wings: surely if a person takes foot in hand and without coercion, nay at great cost in wealth, effort and risk, makes way for a new and different environment, migrates to a different country, that is a free choice on that person’s part and the person can be expected to find a mate, work, friends and settle down to be a productive member of society under the new rules, new clothes, new food, new sports team and so forth. But nay, nature will get in the way.
I have mentioned before Holy Wrath: Among Criminal Muslims, Nicoli Sennels, Logik Förlag, Helsingborg, Sweden, 2009.35 Sennels worked for most of a year as a psychologist at the biggest institution for the criminally insane in Denmark, the first and possibly the last to hold such a position. He does not write much about the insanity, but he goes on at some length about the motivation or lack thereof of the inmates toward integrating into Danish society. The official position was that they would be immersed in Danish culture and adopt the relevant values and routines. His experience led him to write a book that is most pessimistic on that front. Much as he liked the inmates and much as he tried to help them, it was a frustrating battle.
Throw me into an institution for the criminally insane and I shall protest my innocence, but if I cannot explain what you have done, I shall eventually wonder how I messed up. Bring in a person who says, “Let’s see how we can get you out of here, I’ll listen. If he suggests I make a change in my routines, it would take a pretty awful change for me not to give it a go.
By and large, and again I’d suggest getting the book; it’s not too long, the inmates saw themselves as victims of an unjust system and the violence that so frequently led to their detention was not their fault but the fault of somebody who had irritated them. They saw themselves as victims and did not see the person they had attacked as a victim. This he found to be an extremely hard mental set to combat.
Science offers you much that is interesting and much that is contradictory, but I trust we can accept that there is such a thing as selection. Feel free to say “natural selection,” but since I have not seen it proved to my satisfaction that people have supernatural powers, I leave the redundant word out. So where have people lived in cities longer? - Islamic countries or Denmark. I think the weight of evidence says Islamic cultures. So, it stands to reason that even criminally insane Muslim youths come from cultures that have been under urban selection longer and in the long run, their emotional coloration is the more adaptive. Sorry about that.
This chapter has been about things that reduce outbreeding. On the Sibly curve, these things lie, pretty much, to the right of the point of repose and their effect is, if anything, to keep the population from moving farther, and potentially disastrously, farther away. That’s the biology. And biology doesn’t really care about your opinion or the opinion of the socially mighty in Denmark. You must care about the biology or you are in a more pitiable and dangerous place than Sennel’s patients.