These sort of problems are only the beginning of a downward spiral.
As the US increasingly approaches the likes of Afghanistan in both its diversity and economic condition so too will it approach the tribal social environment of Afghanistan.
I have previously elaborated the scientific perspective on the nature of civil and ethnic conflicts – which are at the root caused by the nature of human sociality as an evolved and biological thing:
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“See I'm a guy who likes to take a scientific approach to anything I can, human behaviour is no exception. So I've been reading and following the scientific literature on ethnic conflict (henceforth I will use this term instead of 'race' because 'racism' clearly extends to between ethnicities as well as what you call 'race') for a while now and here is my summary of it in a sentence - ethnicity is a profoundly biological thing and ethnic diversity is a not only a 'problem' but often a disaster for any society.
Obviously I cannot attempt to give a comprehensive elaboration of that literature here but allow me to give you a small dose of the kind of questions and possible answers folk taking a scientific approach to this problem have been raising, which you will certainly never see in the mainstream culture of the west.
Last year, Cemal Arbatli, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor published a paper entitled "The Nature of Conflict," which can be downloaded in full on google but of which I will quote the abstract (I will quote the abstracts of all citations henceforth):
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"This research establishes that the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrastate conflicts in the modern era reflect the long shadow of prehistory. Exploiting variations across national populations, it demonstrates that genetic diversity, as determined predominantly during the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, has contributed significantly to the frequency, incidence, and onset of both overall and ethnic civil conflict over the last half-century, accounting for a large set of geographical and institutional correlates of conflict, as well as measures of economic development. Furthermore, the analysis establishes the significant contribution of genetic diversity to the intensity of social unrest and to the incidence of intragroup factional conflict. These findings arguably reflect the contribution of genetic diversity to the degree of fractionalization and polarization across ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups in the national population; the adverse influence of genetic diversity on interpersonal trust and cooperation; the contribution of genetic diversity to divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies; and the potential impact of genetic diversity on economic inequality within a society."
If you want me to put that in more common language - in a nutshell, the authors argue that genetic diversity is the ultimate cause of ethnic conflict, of which racism is a form. The implications of their point is that even if the surface cause of 'racism' is something like 'White power,' the ultimate cause, the deepest part of the chain of causality, is none other than genetic diversity itself. Blaming 'White power' for 'racism' is like blaming a headache for the flu - the truth is that the virus itself is genetic diversity coupled with competition for scarce resources.
In 2013 Max Hartshorn, Artem Kaznatcheev and Thomas Shultz published this paper "The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation:"
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"Recent agent-based computer simulations suggest that ethnocentrism, often thought to rely on complex social cognition and learning, may have arisen through biological evolution. From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. Traitorous strategies fare even worse than selfish ones because traitors are exploited by ethnocentrics across group boundaries in the same manner as humanitarians are, via unreciprocated cooperation. By tracking evolution across time, we find individual differences between evolving worlds in terms of early humanitarian competition with ethnocentrism, including early stages of humanitarian dominance. Our evidence indicates that such variation, in terms of differences between humanitarian and ethnocentric agents, is normally distributed and due to early, rather than later, stochastic differences in immigrant strategies."
In plain language the authors used the mathematics of game-theory to simulate a world where people were either selfish, traitorous to their own ethnic group, humanitarian (nice to everyone) and finally ethnocentric (people who favoured their own ethnic group over others) and found that ethnocentric agents always won the evolutionary game of self-propagation over time - suggesting that ethnocentrism is a product of natural selection.
That paper in particular is based on a more theoretical earlier one by Robert Axelrod, arguably the most influential evolutionary game theorist alive today, "The Evolution of Ethnocentrism:"
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"Ethnocentrism is a nearly universal syndrome of attitudes and behaviors, typically including in-group favoritism. Empirical evidence suggests that a predisposition to favor in-groups can be easily triggered by even arbitrary group distinctions and that preferential cooperation within groups occurs even when it is individually costly. The authors study the emergence and robustness of ethnocentric behaviors of in-group favoritism, using an agent-based evolutionary model. They show that such behaviors can become widespread under a broad range of conditions and can support very high levels of cooperation, even in one move prisoner’s dilemma games. When cooperation is especially costly to individuals, the authors show how ethnocentrism itself can be necessary to sustain cooperation."
In simple language again 'ethnocentrism,' or the tendency of human beings to favour their own ethnic groups, appears to be a very strong force behind human group life and cooperation. Axelrod points out that sometimes people help out fellow members of their ethnic group even at a significant cost to themselves - think not only of suicide bombers in the Muslim world but the Tamil tigers in Sri-Lanka who've done the same in that ethnic conflict in that country, or the Japanese kamikaze pilots engaging in suicidal attacks in World War II. This sort of behaviour is very hard to account for in our species without invoking a biological source - in this case ethnocentrism, and as Axelrod points out sometimes ethnicities can be borderline artificial - Muslims claim to shun concern for ethnicity/race but the truth is that the category 'Muslim' itself functions as an ethnicity for them.
Does all of this seem like airy theorizing to you? Well consider studies like this, which link specific hormones to ethnocentric behaviour:
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"Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence."
Think all of this is the ravings of right-wing scientists or something? Let me introduce you to Dr Robert D. Putnam, who's the sort of White liberal professor that would probably sympathize with the BLM movement, but whose honest scientific research into diversity revealed some truths he himself found hard to follow:
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If you want to hear things like this from a guy even further on the left of the political spectrum, read the monumental work of sociologist Pierre Van Den Berghe, who is a Marxist professor, titled "The Ethnic Phenomenon," in which he argues that ethnocentrism is the product of what we call 'kin-selection' in evolutionary biology. In plain language ethnocentrism being an extended form of kin-selection means that we favour our ethnic groups for the same reason we favour our families: just as we share, on average, more genes with family than non-family, we share, on average, more genes (or at least recognizable phenotypic markers) with fellow ethnic members than non-ethnic members, therefore the nature of ethnocentrism is akin to that of family nepotism. Even if modern ethnic groups are far too big and genetic similarities far too diluted, the very fact that kin-selection operated in our hunter-gatherer past where that was not the case implies that ethnocentrism could still be a biological 'by-product' of kin-selection whether it may be or may not be adaptive in the modern world.
What I have described in the foregoing is just a very small part of the ever growing scientific literature on the nature of ethnicity, ethnic conflict and, by extension, 'racism.'
I should conclude by strongly emphasizing that this science describes the way the world IS and says nothing about how human beings should behave morally. Ethnocentrism is in all likelihood a diluted biological form of the human family but that does not automatically imply that it is always a morally desirable thing, if ever.
I leave the moralism to the reader but I hope at the very least that you will consider, in light of all that we have said, that oft-peddled slogans and prescriptions in our society like 'diversity is our strength' may turn out to be childish platitudes at best, and Orwellian newspeak at worst.”
