I think people are generally rather good to people who fit into their tribe, however that tribe is defined. We’re potentially pretty awful to non-tribe members though.
I think we were evolutionarily equipped to practice altruism in a reciprocal, one-to-one fashion. Not only is it difficult to scale this up, but in fact altruism at scale can look a lot like nationalism which then binds together to fight some other nation which is not in the tribe.
I assume evolutionary psychologists and such have articulated all of this much better than I can.
But I do think, with certain extremely important qualifications, ‘benevolence’ is a powerful human habit. There’s actually enormous pressure to just be nice in many situations.
The person who created this and the people who spread this are not generally good people, not to their tribe or anyone else. Even a white males have white women in their so-called tribe, or it’s a dysfunctional soon to be extinct tribe.
Very possibly the only literary thing I ever read in school I’ve come to deeply appreciate is a line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I don’t disagree with your general assertion; I’d just argue that the stack of “unpleasant complications” is generally higher than the stack of “nicem pretty” ones. Gordon sums it up better, perhaps than I can do, but also with more hope than I manage :)
I think people have been racist through most of history, though. What we have seen in the past 200 years in American society is a convulsion as several races have been thrown together and the concept of a ‘nation’ has been decoupled from a concept of a race. (In some empires this has happened before, I suppose; e.g. Ottoman, British India, or maybe periods of Ancient Egypt; and you have edge cases at the borders of diverse cultures like the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, etc. – but I don’t think it has been too common in history.) Most cultures were homogenous enough that it never became an issue. I don’t think the average Athenian would have known what to make of a Bantu, for instance. Certainly the Athenian state, a wellspring of magnificent humanistic and scientific and ethical ideals, was deeply xenophobic and classist and sexist. To therefore simply say they were ‘not good people’ IMO is a radically reductionist way to look at it.
The key point I am trying to get at is the trigger that allows us to dehumanize others. It can be race based, it can be economically/class based, it can be based on pure labeling. I can’t tell the difference between a Hutu or a Tutsi, but it sure mattered a lot to some folks.
If the “dehumanize” trigger is off, behavior I think tends to be more benevolent than not. Obviously there are exceptions. There are always assholes, psychos, jerks, etc.
Yeah, actually, I was thinking of Rome too. I know a number of non-Italians rose to become Emperor, which in itself is remarkable, and the military-as-meritocracy must have had a powerful effect on social mobility. Could there have been an Egyptian or a Syrian emperor, had circumstances permitted it? Why not, I suppose?
I’m quite curious as to how far the concept of ‘race’ as we know it even existed then. Peoples were often intensely tribalistic but I don’t know that it had much to do with skin color. The Greeks might have had no different opinions of Italians or Chinese except that both were non-Greek and therefore inferior…
You need to go visit the other thread. It’s not satire nor should we ever accept it to be satire. That assistance police chief has been let go from his position and his Facebook is riddled with racism. Don’t give these assholes a pass or the benefit of the doubt.
I generally agree with this, but the catch there is that “good, stable” part. We’re approaching the point where providing jobs isn’t enough any more. Wage growth is so limited, and corporate profit-taking for the executives and share-holders is so high, that simply finding work isn’t good enough. This is one reason it’s so annoying every month when there’s a big announcement about how many jobs were created and what the unemployment rate is, without context in the larger picture of whether those people are actually getting enough value from their work to make it worthwhile. And any time someone tries to put forth a way to protect the worker’s value, it’s immediately labeled a “job-killer” and shredded in the media.
There’s been some good writing on this subject in the wake of an InfoWars fuckstain criticizing the BBC for showing a multicultural Roman legion in the ancient UK. I am loathe to link to Tweet-storms because holy FUCK Tweet-storms, but I’m about to head to lunch and couldn’t google better resources:
In short, Rome was astonishingly multicultural, but was not unique amongst ancient empires in that respect (Egypt, for instance, included a sizable black population at points in its history), and a lot of the hangups around race are relatively recent constructs in the grand scheme of things (not that ancient peoples didn’t routinely butcher people who looked different than them, but it had as much to do with their religion, imperial affiliation, or settlement on fertile land as it did with the color of their skin).
Gunpowder Age empires tended to not care about race, because their monarchies only vaguely ethnically related to the people they governed anyway, and they wanted land and money, not ethnically pure peasants. Ancient Empires tended to feel the same way. (Ancient Egypt is also much more African than modern commentators seem to understand - i mean it was African; look at the tomb paintings of African savannah animals and lifeways, for ex., or the similarities between Nubian and Egyptian cultural elements).
OTOH it’s probably wrong to see this as involving mass migration in the way people see things today. For one if an empire like Rome actually was that diverse everyone would look like everyone else, and that’s clearly not the case. Populations remained mostly settled and were only displaced under duress. The other was that ethnic-linguistic history shows the limits to cultural assimilation. If you look at the Fayum Mummy Portraits they show a people that look very much like Egyptian people look today, if perhaps with perhaps a shade more of a Mediterranean cast. And when Rome declined the whole area reverted back to Greek pretty quickly, and even further reverted to local languages beyond that (Coptic, Syrian, ect).
Devil’s advocate… Rome was a multicultural empire for what, 450 years or so? It’s been 400 years since the first Africans in the U.S., 170 since acquisition of swaths of Mexican land, 150 since emancipation, 120 since second-wave immigration, yet we still look quite diverse here. How long would it take for the melting pot to completely melt?
Surely there are micro cultural and economic factors that strongly affect the degree of interbreeding even within a large political unit and heterogeneous urban centers?
Yea, time is a big factor. Had the Empire survived for a thousand years, there would probably be a “Roman” ethnicity today. You know i actually forgot about the Domition reforms that tied laborers to their cities and jobs, so Rome only had about three centuries of relatively free migration before migration was locked down tight… so maybe not.
Invasion is another - it’s a bit tricky to look at modern populations as being reflective of Roman populations, as almost all the former Empire suffered massive population upheavals from outside invaders that occupied the lands and displaced/assimilated/killed off (directly or indirectly) probably a more significant portion of the existing Romanized population than certain modern historians, more sanguine about population migration today, would care to admit.
I think it’s really a function of mobility, not policy. It’s not that these places (certain Ancient Empires, Rome) had many barriers to moving (in Rome’s case, at least pre-Dominate reforms), but that moving was hard. For people who were educated, involved in government (civil or military) or who were involved in trade, Rome was probably a one big country. For the majority of lower class citizens who lacked the skills, education or resources to traipse about, it was probably much harder. That’s what makes today’s global migrations different - it’s easier to move literally around the world than ever before, and with the vast majority of jobs being urban and service, skills, land ownership or in some cases even language present fewer barriers than ever. And because the “Rest of the World” is so huge, it doesn’t take a large percentage of migrants from any one region to represent in sum a much larger number when all the regions are totaled.
I’m really not. I was giving art and satire the benefit of the doubt. That perfect, 50’s, Family Circus housewife plus the word “negro” and the art style all anchor the scene in the past so it’s not a huge leap to read it as a satirical comment on the racial climate of the times. Dave Chappelle or Key & Peele could have done a variation of this. Just add their reaction shots.
HOWEVER, you’re right. Context and intent are everything. As hate speech it’s just clumsy and gross and badly in need of a proofreader.
