Racism and Religion

Belief in God and the afterlife is precisely as immoral, and precisely as offensive, as racist belief, and for precisely the same reasons.

This sounds like a rather offensive and bizarre statement, doesn't it? How the heck can a good Christian or other religious believer, just for being a believer, be lumped together with Nazis and racists and other evil jerks of that stripe?

To explain what I mean by my opening sentence, I will have to explore a couple of fundamental questions about Racism. Why is racism morally wrong? And is it morally wrong to hold racist beliefs even if one does not act on them? In other words, is it evil to hold racist beliefs even if one is not actually personally shoving Jews into gas chambers, lynching black people, or refusing to hire people with Hispanic surnames?

Racism is wrong because the underlying theory is factually incorrect, to the best of our scientific knowledge as a species. Contrary to what racists believe, people do not fundamentally differ in matters of intelligence, moral fiber, laziness, or worth as human beings in any significant or systematic way related to race. We differ far more individually from other members of our respective races than our race differs on average from other races. This is according to the best of our scientific knowledge in areas such as genetics, biology, neuroscience, and so forth.

The same goes for most other forms of discrimination. Skin color does matter when applying pancake makeup. It does not matter when applying for a job. Gender matters when making babies, but not when making bond trades or dinner. Ethnic origins matter when deciding whether or not to get tested for Sickle Cell Anemia, but should not be used as a test of fitness for political office.

Racism is treating race and ethnicity as if it matters in subject areas where, to the best of our scientific knowledge, race does not matter. Racism is morally wrong because it is factually wrong. If Nazis had been correct in thinking that Jews were disease-ridden subhuman vermin bent on destroying human society and profiting off of its destruction, then they would have been perfectly morally justified in marching Jews into gas chambers, simply as a form of self-defense. If Confederate plantation owners had been right in believing that blacks were subhuman creatures without the natural intelligence or moral judgment to be fit for anything other than life as a slave, then they would have been perfectly morally justified in enslaving them. If present-day racists are right in believing that all Hispanics are lazy, uneducated wetbacks without the qualifications, ability, or work ethic to make good employees, then they would be perfectly justified in refusing to hire them.

But because those theories about the biological nature of racial groups were and are factually incorrect, those beliefs, and the actions based on those beliefs, were and are morally repugnant. Jews are people just like the rest of us. Blacks are no more or less deserving of freedom than anyone else. Hispanics have amongst their number the usual mix of good and bad employees. Racial distinctions are meaningless, except in a tiny handful of very narrow scientific matters directly related to the minuscule differences of DNA that give rise to the visible phenotypic differences that are used to define race. In gross physical appearance, and a handful of obscure medical details, race and ethnicity matter...but in all political, moral, and economic spheres, race is a meaningless distinction. Gender is somewhat more meaningful, but still, outside of a handful of narrow contexts directly related to the physical and genetic differences between them, men and women are pretty much alike. None of those differences have the slightest bearing on any political, moral, or economic question.

Treating racial and ethnic differences as if they matter outside of those narrow contexts is the only workable definition of racism. The various political, moral, theological, and pseudo-scientific theories that claim otherwise are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly wrong. Demonstrably and provably wrong. Refusal to accept this fact is what makes racism and related beliefs morally wrong, it is a form of intellectual dishonesty, quite apart from any violent or economically exploitative side-effects that flow from trying to put those flawed theories into practice. Even if those beliefs are not acted on, those beliefs themselves, because they are still factually wrong, are morally wrong to hold in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If it's morally right to kill someone based on a true belief of the danger they pose, and morally wrong to kill them based on a false belief of a danger they pose, then it is not the killing that is wrong, it is the factually incorrect belief that is the true moral outrage.

So racist beliefs are morally wrong to hold, even if one does not act on them. It is wrong to think blacks are inferior, whether or not you are actually hanging them from trees. It is wrong to think of Jews as subhuman vermin, even if you aren't actually marching them off to Auschwitz. It is wrong to think of Hispanics as inferior, even if you are not actually refusing to hire people with a Z at the end of their last name. It is the factually unsupportable belief that is the problem, and the moral wrong, not the actions which logically follow from such beliefs. If the belief is justified, so is the action. If the belief is not justified, neither is the action.

So now we apply this reasoning to religious beliefs. To the best of our scientific knowledge, there is no God. There is no possibility of an afterlife. The universe in general, and earth and life on it in particular, arose through completely natural processes with no divine inteverention whatsoever. Miracles do not happen, the laws of physics always apply. To believe otherwise flies in the face of quite literally everything we know about science, history, and the way the universe works. For one proof of this, see my previous posting on this blog.

Just like racism, religion's flawed theories have historically led to violence, oppression, and economic exploitation when someone tries to put them into practice. Specific religious beliefs, such as the inerrancy of Christian or Muslim scripture, the infallibility of the Catholic Pope, the status of the Jews as God's Chosen People, the sanctity of the Hindu caste system, and the innate sinfulness of women, have in the past led (with sad logical inevitability) to acts of horrifying violence and injustice. Practically every organized religion has amongst its official doctrines and scriptures at least some concepts that justify or encourage such acts of violence, even if those aspects of scriptures or doctrine are not generally adhered to in the present day.

So religion faces the same problems as racism: it is an unsupportable belief under the current state of scientific knowledge, and it has historically shown a tendency to lead to violence when these factually incorrect beliefs are applied to the real world.

But surely, you may object, religion has also led to the creation of great art, the commission of great works of charity, the building of hospitals, and so forth? Well, the Nazis built the Autobahn, southern plantation mansions were quite beautiful buildings, and I for one actually like the architecture of Albert Speer and the music of Richard Wagner. Racists and have created great works of art. That still doesn't justify their continuing to hold demonstrably false beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence.

And racism has even had a few positive social effects. The creation of a racist social order in the early American colonies was fundamental to the creation of a social order in which poor whites were granted the same sort of social privileges as rich whites, something which had not been possible in the previous class-based social order back in Europe. And it was this racism-catalyzed breaking down of social barriers within the white community that made possible the wide acceptance of the ideal that all (white) men were created equal, the omission of that unspoken but widely-understood parenthetical interpolation thus being the foundation of the later extension of such rights and privileges to the non-white and eventually the non-male population. And that's ignoring the positive aspects of Racism's retarded love child, Nationalism, which has contributed to many positive political and social changes, alongside the obvious negative influences it has also had. These positive social effects, however, still do not justify the fundamentally incorrect beliefs at the core of Racism, Nationalism, Sexism, and other unjustly discriminatory belief systems, a wrongness that render them immoral to hold in the face of contrary evidence, regardless of whatever few positive social aspects they may contain.

Of course, one could also counter that the oft-claimed bad effects of religion, the crusades and inquisitions, the jihads and witch-burnings, were not really caused by religion, but rather, were cases of religion being cynically misused as justification for naked acts of theft, conquest, and economic exploitation. And there's a monumental grain of truth behind that claim. The problem is, the exact same thing can, of course, be applied to the examples of Racism's bad effects listed above. Southern slave owners in the antebellum south benefited enormously from the socioeconomic effects of slavery, and it was their fear that an emerging abolitionist majority in the North might threaten that socioeconomic order that led to the Civil War...just as their ancestors' economic interest in finding a source of cheap labor to grow cash crops in the colonies had been the impetus behind the creation of the slave system in the first place. Formal racist theories can be said to have arisen to justify economic exploitation, not the other way around. The Nazis were quite open about the fact that they wanted to conquer, enslave, and economically exploit the “lesser” races of the world, and their theories about the evil machinations of the Jews can be thought of as mere propaganda, justifying Nazi exploitation of the Jews by claiming prior Jewish exploitation of the German people. And of course, that hypothetical racist business manager refusing to hire Hispanics thus faces less competition and opposition when he tries to hire his (presumably white) friends and relatives instead. Because racist and religious atrocities both equally can be excused as mere window-dressing for baser economic and political motives, the fact that the Crusaders were motivated by greed for lands and money as well as by the desire to earn forgiveness for their sins by liberating Jerusalem from the rule of Infidels cannot be used to differentiate between the bad outcomes of religious theories from the bad outcomes of racist theories.

Yes, both racism and religion have been used to falsely justify selfish acts of conquest, theft, and exploitation. One may argue that those tendencies in human psychology that lead to such selfish acts will always be with us, and thus eliminating religious or racist beliefs will not end, or even significantly reduce, the occurrence of such acts. And, sadly, this may be true. But surely removing a common justification for such acts will, at the very least, reduce the number of people who can thus be easily duped into fighting, killing, and dying to further some cynical leader's economic or political gain. The poor whites who bled on the battlefield on behalf of the Confederacy's slave owners were not acting in their own economic interests, but their flawed racist thinking led them to incorrectly think they were. The same goes for the poor Nazi foot soldiers in World War Two. And the same goes for those poor peasants who went off on Crusade, most of them dying in the process, supposedly for the good of their own souls, but really for the good of the Kings and Nobles who hoped to gain loot, new lands, and new feudal fiefdoms. Without that nice-sounding religious propaganda, how many of them would have gone along with such a mad scheme? Eliminating racism and religion will remove two powerful propaganda weapons from the arsenal of the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous, two sadly effective means of fooling their subordinates into dying on their behalf.

So if religious belief is exactly as unsupportable, exactly as incorrect, and thus exactly as dangerous, as racism, how should we treat religious ideals, and the people who hold them? Exactly as we treat racists. When someone says, “God bless you,” react the same as if they had said, “Heil Hitler,” in shock and outrage. When someone says they just got back from Mass, or the Mosque, or Temple, react as if they had said they just got back from a KKK cross-burning, in shock and outrage. Accord religious leaders and clergymen the same social cold-shoulder you would to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, or a member of the White Aryan Resistance. Refuse to vote for politicians who ostentatiously flaunt their religious beliefs, just as you would refuse to vote for a segregationist or Nazi. If someone wants to say Grace before eating dinner, get up and walk out of the room, the same as you would if they just uttered the N-word. Treat an invitation to a Bible Study class or any other religious ceremony as you would an invitation to a Nazi party rally or a cross-burning.

For in all these cases, what that person is doing is just as rude, just as immoral, just as evil, and precisely as wrong as if they actually were a Klansman, a Nazi, or any other form of racial bigot. Recall that, to the extent that racism has been ended in America, it was largely ended not by killing or imprisoning racists, but by non-racists in society refusing to politely ignore racist behavior, speech, and ideals; by non-racists calling racists out when they uttered racial slurs, or spouted racist beliefs, and by non-racists refusing to vote for candidates that pandered to the racist demographic.

This is not to say that government should censor religious speech or suppress religious beliefs. I do believe in freedom of thought, and that government has no role in suppressing ideals or ideologies, no matter how offensive or unsupported by facts, so long as those beliefs are not actually put into practice in a way that harms others. That is not government's job. Government should not censor racist speech, religious speech, or political speech, because government must remain neutral on such questions. Government must be the government of everyone, including the idiots and the assholes. On a more optimistic note, we NEED stubborn, pig-headed people who refuse to accept the current consensus of scientific truth, because it is those who refuse to accept the conventional wisdom who, at least theoretically, are able to generate new knowledge and correct past mistakes, by looking for better answers than the ones already found. And a handful of important scientific and historical truths were indeed first discovered by individuals seeking (usually unsuccessfully) to find scientific support for a religious or racist belief.

What I am saying, however, is that people who care about intellectual honesty and scientific truth should cease being “polite” when they hear or see religious speech or behavior. They should not fear to be “rude” when it comes to speaking out about just how ludicrous and factually incorrect religious beliefs are. They should shun the ostentatiously religious whenever possible, refuse to take part in religious ceremonies, refuse to swear religious oaths, refuse to pander to the stupidly religious around them.

Here in America, people who care about intellectual honesty and scientific truth are, depressingly, in the minority. We are in the situation faced by the Freedom Riders, spreading the word of non-racism across the Jim Crow south. We are likely to face harassment, persecution, and in extreme cases, personal violence. Of course, we shouldn't be quite so rude that we get burnt at the stake, or even slapped. But, whenever possible, whenever we can get away with it without being subject to personal violence, we should treat the religious exactly as they deserve: like the deluded, dishonest, disreputable and despicable people they are.

Evolutionary Psychology and Racism

The mental process that led to my thinking about the Placebo Effect and its evolutionary origins stemmed in part from some thinking I have been doing about the origins of racism and genocide. After all, what could be the evolutionary benefit to a species that regularly killed itself off in large numbers via genocide, or which oppressed and impoverished large numbers of its own members?

Evolutionary scientists studying how new species are created talk a lot about the environmental mechanisms that can isolate a breeding population. New mountain ranges, new rivers, new islands are all ways that one group of individuals in a species can be isolated from the rest of their species. Then new mutations arising in that isolated group can build up as the group adapts to a slightly different environment from that which is faced by the remainder of the original species. As time goes by, those mutations can build up to the point that, if the two groups are once more brought together, they may no longer be capable of interbreeding.

As modern humans spread out over the world from africa tens of thousands of years ago, the difficulties of long-distance travel in a pre-technological world led to enough isolation that some adaptations to different environments could arise and not spread beyond those localized environments. For example, the dark melanin-rich skins of humans who stayed in Africa are an adaptation to reduce the amount of sunburn and skin cancer in people who spend a lot of time out in the tropical sun in an environment too hot for heavy clothing. The pale melanin-poor skins of humans who moved to Scandinavia are an adaptation to have more efficient production of Vitamin D in the skin using sunlight in an environment with less sunlight, and in which the climate was cold enough that most skin was usually covered up with clothing. When there's less risk of sunburn and skin cancer, it's more important to be able to make Vitamin D even with very little skin exposed to sunlight. When there's more risk of sunburn and skin cancer, and most skin is usually exposed, it's more important to avoid skin cancer and even an inefficient Vitamin D production system can still produce more than enough for survival.

However, this distance-based isolation was never quite complete enough, and didn't last long enough, for the various human sub-groups to become incapable of interbreeding. Each local sub-group did enough interbreeding with their immediate neighbors for there to be a rough continuity all the way from Siberia and Scandinavia down to the southern tip of Africa, and thus a fairly smooth progression of, for example, skin tones from dark Africans through medium-toned Mideastern, Mediterranean, and Indian peoples, to pale Scandinavians and yellow-skinned Siberians. Even with the relatively isolated inhabitants of the Americas, there was some contact between the Eskimos/Inuits of Alaska and the similar aboriginal cultures of Siberia, enabling some interbreeding between the old and new worlds even before Columbus. So the human "races" are not separate species, just localized variations in the frequencies of certain genes within a larger common genome.

But distance and geographical barriers are not the only ways to reproductively isolate a population. In the animal world, behavioral adaptations like different mating seasons, mating calls, and other mate-selection mechanisms can serve to isolate emerging sub-species from conducting much interbreeding even before mutations build up to the point that interbreeding is physically impossible. And within the human species, behavioral and cultural barriers to interbreeding between racial and ethnic groups did arise.

Early humans, as I mentioned before, tended to live in small bands of individuals who were mostly related by blood. When the groups were small enough, they may have literally been a single extended family of at least distant cousins. But even larger tribes tended to have semi-mythological common ancestors. The Book of Genesis is, in large part, a chronicle of the mythological common ancestors of the Israelite people and their neighboring tribes.

The best-known such tale is probably that of Issac and Ishmael. The Israelites claimed descent from Abraham through his son Issac, which he had with his wife Sarah. The Arabs claim descent from him through his first-born son Ishmael, which he had through his wife Sarah's handmade Haggiah. Although the story as laid out in the Bible probably didn't actually happen quite that way in reality, two important concepts are on display here. The first is that, rightly or wrongly, ancient peoples often claimed descent from a common ancestor as a way of saying, "we in this tribe are really all one big family". The second is that, to justify later political differences between tribes, they would often concoct common-ancestor myths about their neighbors to explain just why an enemy tribe are quite literally bastards.

Another well-known Biblical common-ancestor myth is the story of Lot and his daughters. After the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah and the death of his wife, Lot took his two daughters and went to live in a cave above the Dead Sea. With no nearby tribemates to marry, and no lands or property to serve as a dowry, the daughters despaired of ever finding husbands. Desperate for sons to carry on their lineage, the daughters got their father drunk and had sex with him while in this inebriated state. They became pregnant and had sons. The Bible goes on to list those sons as the founding common-ancestors of two neighboring tribes, the Moabites and Amalekites, whom the Israelites were in a near-perpetual state of war with centuries later when this story was actually written down. To justify later wars with culturally-similar peoples, the Israelites thus concocted a founding-ancestor myth to call their enemies bastard products of an incestuous relationship, a rather effective form of propaganda.

So ancient peoples very consciously thought of themselves as genetically-related extended family groups. This thinking persisted through the centuries, even as tribes became nations and the population of such groups grew too large to realistically be considered single extended families.

When two such groups lived in close proximity but did not interbreed much due to cultural or traditional barriers, racism and genocide became likely. This is because of another consequence of the sort of evolutionary instincts I mentioned in the previous post about Placebo Effect, the sort of instincts best exemplified by a mother cat defending her kittens.

In evolutionary terms, it is the genes that matter, not the individuals. A parent will fight and die to protect their offspring, like that iconic mother cat and her kittens. Siblings will fight and die to defend each other, like ants or bees fighting to defend the hive. And friends will fight and die to protect each other, because your friends are potential relatives. If I die to defend you today, and your son marries my daughter later, someday you may go on to defend your grandchildren who are also MY grandchildren, and thus by defending you, I'm defending my own offspring.

Within the same breeding pool, individuals may compete in a fairly vicious manner for access to mates and resources. But every rival is also a potential ally. I don't mind so much if you get rich if I think someday my grandkids might marry your grandkids and thus stand a chance to inherit your fortune. If our two sons are likely to become business partners, your wealth and resources may also benefit my offspring.

But if two separate breeding pools of humans exist in close proximity without significant interbreeding, the instincts which lead us to help and defend our relatives and potential relatives turn ugly. If two individuals do not share a common ancestor and thus have different genes, and furthermore they are unlikely to ever share common descendants, then what benefits one bloodline will never benefit the other.

For one example, look at pre-Revolutionary France. The nobllity of the 1700's very consciously considered themselves descdended from a narrow group of common ancestors in the medieval nobility. The commoners could not claim descent from the same group of common ancestors. The nobility and commoners rarely intermarried or interbred. Oh, a nobleman may have bastard children by a common mistress, but the offspring either are shunned and remain commoners, or are acknowledged and enter the nobility (and likely subsequently abandon their commoner relatives out of embarassment over their origins). Thus, such offspring effectively simply switch allegiance rather than forming a bridge between the two groups. Nobles drew their wealth from owning land, while commoners got wages for labor, and so the two groups effectively worked in different industries, and so being business partners was rare. When the nobility got richer, the commoners could not comfort themselves with the belief that someday their grandkids would marry into the nobility and inherit that wealth. When commoners grew wealthy, they became rivals for political power and may even try to marry into the nobility, thus competing for mating partners. What benefited one group would not benefit the other. And so when things came to a head in 1789 and after, the nobility was sent to the guillotine or chased out of the country, their assets seized by force. Effectively, it was genocide and ethnic cleansing of one breeding population upon another.

For a second example, take Christians and Jews in pre-WW2 Germany. Religion, Culture, and Tradition together conspired to make interbreeding between the two groups rare. When intermarriage did occur, one or the other spouse usually converted, and thus effectively switched allegiance instead of becoming a bridge between the two groups. Traditions based on previous legal barriers to Jews or Christians working in certain industries also made business partnerships rare: Jews were bankers and jewelers and had once been banned from owning land or working in certain occupations. Christians had once been banned from lending money at interest. So if Jews got rich as economic conditions changed, Christians were unlikely to marry into the Jewish community and stand a chance at inheriting this wealth. When Christians got rich, Jews were unlikely to marry into that community and inherit their wealth. The two groups became rivals for political power and economic resources. And so when things came to a head, either in medieval pogroms or in the Holocaust of the 1940's, the result was genocide.

For a final example, look at blacks and whites in pre-Civil Rights-era America. Legal barriers and tradition made intermarriage rare. Slavery and Jim Crow laws ensured that blacks and whites did not become business partners. And when interbreeding did occur, the "one drop of blood" tradition ensured that the offspring were considered black, not both black and white, and thus could not form a true bridge between groups. What benefitted one group did not benefit the other. And so when competition came to a head, the result was oppression, slavery, race riots, and other similar problems.

Racism and genocide are the result of a twisting of the ancient evolutionary instincts to protect and defend your relatives and potential relatives, and to bloodily compete with rivals that cannot and never will become allies or relatives. The propaganda of racist groups like the KKK is full of references to blood and ancestors, and fear of miscegenation leading to one group being out-bred by the other and their genes disappearing. Whether we're talking of medieval noblemen refusing to let their blood be "tainted" by intermarriage with mere commoners, or modern racists worried about the fact that "only a white woman can have white children", or Pat Buchanan wringing his hands over higher birthrates among immigrants, racist groups use language that shows that what they really fear is their genes disappearing from the gene pool. They are worried about evolutionary processes.

Thus the real solution to racism is to dissolve the barriers between races. More intermarriage, more interbreeding, more business partnerships between individuals from disparate groups are what will kill racism and end genocide. What doesn't help are things like affirmative action, racial set-asides in government purchasing, and rhetoric like Malcolm X's infamous statement that "before we can have black-white unity, we need black unity". Black Pride and White Pride are both counter-productive as far as the goal of ending racism is concerned. What do work are programs like the integration of the armed forces, striking down laws against miscegenation, and encouraging intermarriage and business partnerships.

Anything that emphasizes the differences and encourages separate traditions between racial and ethnic groups is counter-productive. We don't need separate Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hannukkah holidays. We need to strip Christmas of its purely Christian connotations and make it a pan-cultural holiday celebrated by all groups. We don't need to encourage more "black-owned businesses" with government set-aside contracts, we need to encourage existing companies to accept minorities into their management, and encourage blacks and whites to go into partnership together to form companies that are neither black nor white. We need to encourage (so much as is possible) interbreeding between racial groups, and more importantly, we need to acknowledge that the children of such unions are members of both groups, not some separate "mixed-breed" grouping or shoehorning them into one group or the other.

And we need to emphasize our common cultural ancestors. Although these days he's seen as just one more dead white European male, Columbus was one of the original multicultural heroes. As an Italian, he was an alternative to English heroes in a young United States that had just broken away from Britain and was trying to redefine itself as something other than an exclusively Anglo-Saxon nation. When we speak of Western Civilization, we are claiming cultural descent from Greece and Rome, even if our actual genetic ancestors are from Scandinavia or Iberia or the Slavic lands. We need to emphasize cultural ancestors like the ancient Greeks, because it makes an excellent substitute for the mythological common ancestors of the Biblical age, and can be used to turn those vicious evolutionary instincts away from genocide and towards including a wider spectrum of people in our mental map of our tribe, our relatives and potential relatives. Just as anyone can come to the United States and become an American citizen regardless of their racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural background, anyone can adopt Western ways and become just as much an heir of Socrates and Cicero and Petrarch as someone who grew up steeped in the Western tradition.

And the West needs to broaden its concept of its cultural ancestry. We in the West are also the heirs of Saladin and Alhazen, of Confucius and Lao-Tzu, of Shaka and Ibn Battuta, of Montezuma and Atahualpa, not just the heirs of Columbus and Caesar and Custer. Western Civilization has the chance to become the first truly global civilization in every sense of the term. Immigrant societies like America and Australia and Canada and Argentina, and like many European nations are finally becoming, can claim cultural ancestors from every ancient tradition. And they should. The alternative is yet further rounds of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and strife.