by Geoffrey Sampson
Sussex
University Professor
’Racism’ is certainly a horrible word. Words ending with
-ism are normally formed from adjective roots: nationalism, specialism,
communism. The correct word is ‘racialism’, and this was the usual term
until the shorter word came in quite recently, at a time when standards
of education had decayed sufficiently for people to have lost touch
with the patterns of English vocabulary.
But objecting to ‘racism’ as an emotion, rather than
objecting to the word, is just silly.
Normal people strive to advance their children’s interests,
bringing them up as well as they know how, often spending large sums on
their education, leaving their property after death to their own
children rather than to someone else’s, and so on. Everyone recognizes
this tendency to favour one’s own children over other people’s as
natural, and it makes sense in evolutionary terms. One’s offspring
share a relatively high proportion of one’s own genes. By advancing
their interests one increases their chances of replicating their genes,
and hence indirectly of replicating one’s own. Leaving your money to
your children has nothing to do with taking direct copies of the DNA
sequences within your own body. But, if having funds makes it easier to
found a family and bring them up to adulthood (which has surely been so
for most of mankind’s history, and in many parts of the world still is
so), then it does mean that more copies of those sequences are likely
to exist in future.
Co-operating in daily life with fellow members of a social
community helps them to flourish, and hence increases the chances of
copies of their genes multiplying. So, naturally, we are disposed to
co-operate actively with communities of people who appear to be
genetically similar to ourselves. If we can tell by looking at some
people that they share fewer of our genes, we will be at least somewhat
less enthusiastic about active co-operation with them; we will to some
extent see them as unwelcome competitors for resources. In a word, we
are racialists.
People sometimes point out, correctly, that the proportion
of mankind’s entire genetic code which differs between the different
races of Man is tiny, as if that destroys the logic of the argument.
But biology plays the percentages. If people’s appearance implies that
they share fewer of our genes, that is enough for them to be
disfavoured — even if they do share a lot. After all, even distant
species — say horses, or even worms — apparently have a surprisingly
high proportion of their DNA sequences in common with Homo sapiens; but
very few people query the tendency to favour fellow human beings over
other animals, when their interests clash. Another confusion within
much discussion of racialism is that people suppose that racial
feelings spring from mistaken beliefs that other races differ from
one’s own in terms of concrete features or behaviour patterns which are
really the same across the species. A hundred years ago, there used to
be absurd ideas, for instance about black people not feeling pain, or
suchlike. People often criticize racial attitudes now by saying things
like ‘In all the important respects, people of all races are alike: so
it is foolish and ignorant to prefer one’s own race to others’.
Well, in the first place, even if all races certainly do
feel pain, it isn’t quite true that no socially-significant biological
differences exist. The case widely discussed is intelligence (IQ).
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that races differ to some
extent in their average intelligence levels — yellow-skinned Orientals
tend to be rather brighter than whites, Negroes tend to be rather less
bright (though this is a statistical pattern only — plenty of
individual blacks are more intelligent than plenty of individual
Orientals). There was a storm of controversy in 1994 when Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray discussed this in their book The Bell
Curve, but the findings were already long-established by then. The
suggestion that these differences could merely be statistical errors
created by factors such as cultural bias in IQ tests was analysed and
refuted in detail by Peter Urbach in 1974 (British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 25, pp. 99-135 and 235-59). For Urbach, the
attempts to ‘explain away’ the IQ findings were like the doomed
attempts by the 17th-century Catholic Church to explain away the
evidence that the Earth goes round the Sun, by postulating ever more
cumbersome special assumptions.
But this really misses the point. We don’t prefer people who
share more of our genes over people who share fewer because the latter
have particular outward features that we dislike. We prefer the former
because they share more of our genes, and we all want our own genes to
become numerous. Biology forces us to want that, which is why it forces
us to want to get our bodies entangled with the opposite sex. If some
politically-correct person announces ‘I have no racial feelings at all,
myself’, the appropriate response is ‘Oh, so does that mean you are
asexual, too?’ That might wipe the sanctimonious smirk off his or her
face.
All this does not, obviously, mean that it is all right to
act oppressively to members of other races — any more than it is right
for a man to have his way with any woman who takes his fancy. Racial
and sexual feelings are natural and healthy, but there have to be
social mechanisms controlling how they are manifested in terms of
concrete behaviour.
Until very recently, we had in Europe an excellent
mechanism: the nation state. When I was a child, England and other
European nations were racially very homogeneous. Virtually everyone
living in England was related to everyone else — I don’t know the
maths, but two inhabitants of England chosen at random in 1950 must on
average have had numerous common ancestors only a few centuries
earlier. Interaction with members of distant races was mainly a matter
of international trade, where it doesn’t matter what individuals’
attitudes to one another are because they are swapping goods
anonymously to achieve mutual advantage.
Over the last half century, the situation has been
transformed through massive immigration flows, so that now England is
less like an extended family, more like a hotel. It is now very easy to
find pairs of English residents who share no common ancestors for tens
of thousands of years past, perhaps longer — and who know this as soon
as they see each other. Our governors, by permitting large-scale
immigration, have destroyed the mechanism which previously guarded
against adverse consequences of natural racial feelings. But, while
destroying one mechanism, with mulish stupidity they have refused to
recognize the problem which that mechanism solved. No British
government in my lifetime has ever said ‘We are going to change the
racial make-up of the population, and here is how we are going to solve
the resulting problem of racial animosities ...’ Instead, they have
introduced a series of laws and social policies whose intention seems
to be to root out natural racial feelings from people’s minds.
That is like someone being given charge of a well-organized
armoury, where gunpowder, and metal tools that could make sparks, are
stored in separate rooms, naked lights are held behind sealed glass
partitions, and so forth, and saying ‘We’ll sweep away all these
artificial barriers to efficient working’ — and then, when people say
that will be dangerous, announcing that the tools will be given stiff
lectures about the immorality of striking sparks. You simply cannot
change basic biological nature by law. Of course, racial
diversification is only one of the issues created by large-scale
immigration. Also very significant is cultural diversification: people
from distant lands bring alien assumptions, attitudes, and ways of life
which are in no sense biologically innate, but result simply from
distant societies having happened to develop independent and very
different cultures.
In turn-of-the-millennium Britain, one hears voices
advocating ‘multi-culturalism’, meaning that all cultures should be
regarded as equally worthy. In one particular respect a variety of
cuisine — most of us would agree that immigration has brought a real
benefit to this country. But, as an Italian has said,
‘Multi-culturalism is not couscous, it is the stoning of adulterers’
(quoted by Theodore Dalrymple, Spectator 27 Oct 2001). The fact that
Britain is so attractive to migrants that they are risking death night
after night trying to get in by clinging to trains heading through the
Channel Tunnel is an outcome of the particular cultural assumptions
which have guided the development of British life down recent
centuries. If ‘multi-culturalism’ implies no longer accepting those
assumptions, it is just wicked madness. Cultures can be adapted, and it
is obvious that anyone who wishes to enjoy the benefits of living in
Britain ought to accept a corresponding duty to adapt to British
culture. Race isn’t like that. People cannot change their racial
make-up. In that sense, it is understandable and in a way admirable
that many people urge the elimination of racial feelings. One can
sympathize with someone who says ‘Wouldn’t it be better if people saw
mankind as just one human race without distinctions?’
Perhaps that would be better. But it is like asking
‘Wouldn’t it be better if water flowed uphill as well as down?’
Possibly it would, but there is not much point discussing it. It isn’t
going to happen.
If I am told I am a ‘racist’, I don’t sputter indignant
denials. I borrow the response of Hove residents asked if they live in
Brighton, and just say ‘Racialist, actually’.
[Geoffrey
Sampson is a Sussex University professor, and an elected Conservative
councillor for East Sussex, Britian]
