The limitations of non-racist imperialism

Thanks to $10 Penguin Classics, I've just finished reading Niall Ferguson's controversial book Empire: How Britain made the modern world.

This work was regarded as controversial when it came out in 2003, because of Ferguson's positive assessment of British imperialism, which he believes had a beneficial impact on the countries that Britain colonised.

Unfortunately, he overlooks (or ignores) the point that the success of British imperialism depended on an assumption of racial superiority on the part of the British soldiers and officials who administrated the Empire.

This issue was picked up by Jared Taylor in an excellent review on the VDare site.

As Taylor points out, it simply isn't possible to run an empire without the ruling class believing it's racially superior to the people being ruled over. Hence when egalitarian ideology prevailed after WWII, the British quickly lost the will to keep their Empire together.

Admittedly, even if the British still had the will to keep the Empire together after the war, they would have struggled to do so. Following the Japanese defeats of British forces in South East Asia, British prestige was in tatters, and most of the populace in that part of the world no longer bought into the myth of white racial superiority.

Success in Burma later in the war couldn't make up for the calamitous defeats of European forces in Malaya and Indonesia.

African troops serving in the defeated French armed forces also came to the conclusion that Europeans weren't quite as competent and imposing as they appeared back in Africa.

Perhaps the closest thing to a viable form of non-racist imperialism was the mercantile imperialism adopted by northern European powers in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

In the 18th Century Britain, France and Holland didn't try to conquer large swaves of territory or impose their cultures on the locals, as they would go on to do in the 19th Century.
Instead, they established carefully located trading settlements such as Batavia and Cape Town, from which they could trade with the hinterland and exchange ideas and technology.

This wasn't practical in North America though, where the settlers had already established large colonies on their own initiative, and British attempts to discourage them from moving West of the Appalachian mountains ended in defeat for Britain in the War of Independence.

It would be an interesting to speculate what would have happened if the European powers had continued with the 18th Century model of pragmatic, piece-meal colonisation into the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Certainly the white position in South Africa would be a lot different. Instead of a few million marginalised whites inhabiting a large country populated mostly by Black natives and immigrants, the whites would probably be concentrated in small white majority states around the main trading ports like Capetown and Durban - arguably a more sustainable situation than the present one.

Another of my rants about PC science

When it comes to writing popular science about human behaviour, it's amazing the dodgy arguments you can get away if you write from a politically correct perspective.

Take for example, David Berreby's 2005 book Us and Them: Understanding your tribal mind.

Starting with the reasonable assumption that people have a psychological disposition to want to belong to groups, which Berreby describes as "human kinds," he then makes a huge leap of logic and claims real-world, long-standing groups can easily be replaced by newly invented groups, as long as they satisfy our tribalistic urge to bond with others that we perceive to be similar to ourselves.

Thus identification on racial, religious or national lines could just as easily be replaced with other possible sources of identification such as left-handedness or temperament.

While many sources of identification do change over time, some sources of identification, such as being a Muslim or a Jew appear to be much more durable than others, yet Berreby fails to explain why such sources of identification are so persistent, and he continually attacks the idea that traditional forms of identification, such as race, religion or gender, are any more significant than potential sources of identification like left-handedness.

Nor does Berreby suggest any logical reason why adopting other sources of identification would be more rational than those we currently have - would a society of left-handers for example be more prosperous and cohesive, or less corrupt than a society composed of say, Irish Catholics or ethnic Japanese?

Are far as races are concerned, Berreby adamantly states that they don't exist as a significant biological concept and they only account for a few minor characteristics such as hair type or skin colour.

The logic behind this claim is that there are few, if any, genes unique to particular races.
However, race realist scientists already concede this and focus there investigations on the frequency of particular genes within races, and given how new this gene science is, wouldn't it be unwise to make categorical statements about whether races do or don't exist, based on preliminary findings from studying the human genome?

Berreby also pulls out the tiresome "fuzzy boundaries" argument to refute the validity of different races.

This argument is based on the idea that because there are people on the margins of continents who have no clear racial identity, race can't be a valid biological category.

But if you follow the logic of the fuzzy boundaries argument, then any human condition that exists along a continuum, such as depression or being overweight, can't be biologically valid either. Only in the politically sensitive area of race or gender relations could an intellectual get away with making the claim that because something is difficult to define at the margins, it therefore can't exist.

Berreby's ignorance of scientific research into racial issues appears to be highlighted by his claim that race realists like Philip Rushton argue that a smaller brain equals less intelligence, and that Blacks are less intelligent than White and East Asians because they have a smaller average skull size.

"...The evidence for a connection between brain size and intelligence is not there. Women's heads are generally smaller than men's, but women do not score lower on intelligence tests."

Now I'm certainly no scientific expert in intelligence research, but I think the claim is that a smaller brain relative to body size tends to correlate with less intelligence.

Hence the common sense observation that women, although smaller, have about the same intelligence as men, and nerds with relatively big heads and weedy bodies tend to be smarter than smaller-headed muscular jocks.

For a leading science journalist to misinterpret or deliberately misrepresent this argument is a sad indictment on the current state of academic discourse.

America's "Dirty Laundry"

Some time last year I came across an interesting news article from 2000 about an information archive covering the race riots that flared up in America from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s.

Sociologist Dan Myers of the University of Notre Dame, who unearthed the extensive archive of newspaper articles, says it was previously believed that there were about a "couple of hundred" race riots during this period. However, the archives indicate that at least 3,500 riots of one size or another took place.

According to Myers, interest in the riots was high at the time, and the Lemberg Centre for the study of violence, which assembled the archive, also paid for a Roper Poll about the riots which included responses from some 6,000 people. By 1973 however, interest in the riots had begun to wane and the centre was closed down.

Taking his inspiration from the discovery of this collection, conservative writer Adrian Cerny has written a provocative history of the riots in a book entitled America's Dirty Laundry.

Making liberal use of newspaper article summaries and photographs from some of the major riots between 1965 and 1973, as well as statements from prominent politicians at the time, Mr Cerny has produced an eye-opening account of this tumultuous period in recent American history.

Cerny takes issue with the conventional view that the riots didn't really accomplish anything, and that they undermined some of the gains made through the peaceful civil rights protests of the late 50s and early 60s.

In Cerny's view, the riots played a major role in encouraging white flight from U.S inner cities and the subsequent political takeover of many civic governments by Black politicians.

Certainly the massive scale of the riots put a considerable strain on America's army and police services at a time when a high percentage of troops were serving in Vietnam.

Furthermore, there were few soldiers or policeman at the time who were trained in modern riot control methods, which often lead to escalating the level of violence between the authorities and the rioters.

For example, during the unrest in the city of Detroit during June 1967, over 2,000 firearms were stolen by rioters and the Mayor was forced to call in 900 inexperienced National Guardsmen to try and restore order. However, this only served to escalate tensions as the outnumbered and heavy-handed guardsmen came under heavy sniper fire from the rioters.
Eventually President Johnson was forced to intervene by calling in over 4,000 paratroopers to restore order. By the end of the rioting, 43 people were killed and over 1300 buildings were burnt or looted.

Without the manpower to guarantee law and order Cerny says, the Johnson administration decided to pursue a policy of appeasing the rioters by passing "second wave"affirmative action legislation such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which was deeply unpopular with many white voters.

As well as covering the riots of the civil rights era, Mr Cerny's book also documents the infamous LA riots of 1992 and the lesser known (at least outside the U.S) Cincinnati race riots of 2001. He has also written another book on the same theme - Terrorism and the Civil Rights Movement - a History.

While the book is written in a polemic rather than scholarly style, and could have done with more referencing it's an entertaining read which also contains a lot of eye-opening information about an important but under-explored chapter in U.S History.

Diffusing New Zealand’s looming race bomb.

In a feature article in last month’s Press (“steady as she goes,” September 15, D3, not online) Helen Clarke is quoted as saying National have “policies which dare not speak their name.”

Clarke does not elaborate on what sort of policies she is referring to, but her cryptic comment suggests these “policies” include National’s approach to race issues.

In 2004 National leader Don Brash tried to start a serious debate on current race relations between Maori and European New Zealanders when he argued in his Orewa speech that it was unsustainable for European and Asian New Zealanders to continue to subsidise a growing Maori population.

However, following National’s loss in the 2005 election, and the replacement of Brash with the Cameronesque PR man John Key, race was quickly swept back under the carpet.

Although Brash deserves some recognition for mentioning a difficult and important issue, the right liberal policies he prescribes are probably a maladaptive solution to the problem.

The main issue with race in New Zealand is arguably not poor race relations or race-based policies, as Brash claims, but a pervasive inability to acknowledge demographic imbalances.As the current ethic strife countries such as Lebanon, Israel, South Africa and France illustrate, different rates of demographic growth between races and cultures often lead to serious conflict.

Over the last hundred years, the Maori population has been growing at a faster rate than the European population, yet has been consuming a disproportionate percentage of taxes.

Despite, efforts to address historical grievances over land confiscations and the marginalisation of Maori culture, Maori still lag behind in terms of income, health outcomes, unemployment rates and education levels, as well having higher imprisonment rates. Added to this is the fact that the country’s growing Polynesian population also consumes a disproportionate share of health and welfare spending.

The response of both Labour and National over the past 17 years has been to increase immigration of educated workers from Europe, India and East Asia to expand the overburdened tax base.

Unfortunately, increased immigration has been a double-sword. Higher housing costs have meant fewer Maori and Polynesians have been able to afford to homes, thus increasing their dependency of welfare, and more European New Zealanders have left overseas, in part, because wage rates have failed to keep up with the increased cost of housing and education.

While Australia, Canada, and the United States also have problems with economically under-performing indigenous populations, their indigenous peoples form a much smaller percentage of their populations, so they are less of an economic burden.

With an aging white population increasingly dependent on the state for health and pension spending, there is likely to be increasing pressure on the government to reduce spending on low-income families at a time when Maori politicians are making increasing demands on the government to increase such spending and reduce immigration.

This situation puts the limited immigration supporting New Zealand First Party in a difficult position. Although rising commodity prices are making immigration restrictionism more economically justifiable, the country’s multi-cultural divisions appear to be acting as a significant break on productivity.

Money that previously went into long-term infrastructure development and research and development programmes is now going into such things as increased spending on law and order to manage an increasingly diverse population which is unable to manage itself.

At the global level, the majority of countries with high productivity rates, such as Korea and Japan, tend to be either culturally homogenous or, like the United States, are large enough to compete on economies on scale - New Zealand can’t compete under either criteria.

In the long run, the only solution out of this bind may be political union with Australia. In a combined Australian/New Zealand state, the Maori population would be less of a demographic threat to a European population of over 20 million, while New Zealand would not need to worry so much about skilled workers moving across the Tasman. Similarly, there would be less of an economic argument in favour of increasing immigration in order to expand the tax base.

Sadly though, it’s unlikely there is going to be any serious debate about this issue until the baby boomer generation starts retiring in about 5 years - by which time the government will be in a more fiscally desperate situation.

Double speak on race?

I’ve just been reading a popular book on evolutionary psychology, Mean Genes by Terry Burkham and Jay Phelan, which typifies the contradictory way in which a number of books on this topic deal with the issue of race and evolution.

The authors state that “Race is about as useful a distinction genetically as height” and that the assessment of race from a genetic perspective “is fraught with problems at every level”.

However, this contradicts other statements they made about particular racial groups in relation to various genetically derived traits.For example, on the topic of happiness Burkham and Phelan state: “Mood is substantially a function of personality, some people are just blessed with a positive outlook” . They also conclude that financial status is not an important factor in human happiness, stating instead that: “Happiness is a tool that our genes use to induce us towards behaviours that benefit them”.

But the author’s then point out: “African –Americans who are poorer overall, commit suicide at significantly lower rates than other Americans”.

Hence, Burkham and Phelan appear to believe that happiness is largely determined by genetics, and that African Americans are happier people than non-African Americans, yet they are unwilling to admit that race is a useful factor in explaining differences in human temperament.

Race is certainly a very controversial issue and it is understandable that Burkham and Phelan wish to be cautious about making controversial statements about racial differences. However, in that case the author’s should say something like:

“At this stage the verdict is still out on whether there are significant differences between races in areas like temperament, some studies suggest their may be important differences, but more studies need to done”.

Instead, they seem to be officially denying that race is significant, while privating thinking that it is important. It the authors were more honest and objective about race then I would be less likely to question their integrity. However, I am now left thinking that these guys have something to hide about race.

More Thoughts on Ghasson Hage's "White Nation"

In White Nation sociologist Ghassen Hage describes limited immigration advocates as "worriers" who are irrationally trying to control something over which they have little influence.
While Hage's definition of traditional conservatives and white nationalists as worriers may have some validity, it also highlights the Marxist mind-set of pro-immigration leftists like Hage.

Since Marxists believe that all ethnic groups are the same, and that natural resource limits have no serious impact on human wellbeing, they have no reason to fear unrestricted immigration.

In contrast, traditional conservatives don't believe that all groups of people are the same and accept that it is often difficult for different groups of people to get along. Conservatives also accept that many natural resources are finite and that different ethnic groups exploit resources in different ways, with varying levels of success, and often compete for control of resources.

Conservatives may well worry a lot about immigration, but they have good reason to. The conservative pessimist-realist world- view is one strongly correlates with what actually happens in the world, as opposed to what may happen in the future.

History shows that differences between ethic groups are not easy to reconcile . History also shows that much of time, people mismanage physical resources and that multicultural societies, with authoritarian governments (such as the Soviet Union) have the worst track records in this respect.

The Marxist view is an optimistic view, which argues the future will be better than the past and that differences between ethnic groups are superficial and in any case will be overcome through collective action.

For Marxists, worry isn't an issue, since sooner or later all things will turn out for the best. In response to leftists like Hage, conservatives could make a counter-claim that Maxists, and other rational cornucopians, are actually worriers of a more profoud type since they unconcouisly hide their worry behind a positivist secular religion.

Interestingly, the portrayal of conservatives as being more neurotic than left-liberals conflicts with findings from psychological studies into the behaviour profiles of liberal and conservatives - such research suggests that liberals in fact have the highest rates of neuroticism.

In reflecting on my reasons for writing posts on topics such as immigration, I will admit that concern for the future is a significant motivating factor. However, a far bigger factor is concern for intellectual honesty and a distaste for political correctness. Part of this comes from a working/lower midle class contempt for cultural self-loathing and intellectual dishonesty.

Genetics and Health

Last weekends’ Press has a large feature article, "The Health Gap", which addreses the topic of Maori health statistics. The article outlines numerous instances in which Maori health outcomes are significantly worse than those for European New Zealanders.

However, nowhere in the several thousand-word article is the word genetics mentioned. For example, it is stated that “half of all Maori are smokers compared with one in five non-Maori”, yet no reference is made to recent studies that suggest Maori may have a genetic predisposition to smoking.

High Maori smoking statistics are put down to the “stresses” of poverty and “lifestyle choices”.

In the case of smoking, there is a good argument that central government should be doing more to help Maori overcome smoking addictions. Smokers pay heavy compensatory taxes to the rest of society and low income Maori would be better off medically and financially if they weren’t spending so much on cigarettes.

The author also states that Maori children are twice as likely to be obese as Caucasian children. There is a lot of evidence that people of Polynesian origin tend to have heavier builds and slower metabolisms, which strongly predisposes them to obesity. A predisposition to obesity also means that Maori are more prone to obesity related illnesses like diabetes and heart attacks -so why isn’t this mentioned in the article?

It is also pointed out that Maori have higher rates of certain types of cancer, such as gall bladder cancer.

The problem with glossing over genetic factors in health statistics is that it tends to increase political divisions without improving health outcomes. From a right-liberal perspective it appears that Maori are choosing to be overweight, smokers who have a blasé attitude to cancer. Conversely, from a left-liberal perspective Maori appear to be victims of a prejudiced health system.

The media message seems to be that Maori health problems are mainly due to bad lifestyle choices and that in any case Maori are unlikely to receive optimum care because the medical system is riddled with institutional racism.

Consequently, it is hardly surprising that many Maori have a chip on their shoulder about visiting a doctor – nobody likes to receive a morale sermon from somebody they don’t think is competent or doesn't care about their patients.

Certainly educational/intelligence levels also play a part in health care. People who are more persistent, more compliant and more knowledgeable are likely to get better value from public health systems.

Given that there are relatively few Maori doctors and that Maori have less confidence in western science than Caucasians and Asians, Maori people are less likely to receive optimum care in some situations.

However, if both doctors and patients are made aware of genetic differences in medicine, then doctors will be able to provide more focused care and patients from minority backgrounds will have a better idea about their specific health needs.

Brash, Peters and Assimilation

Don Brash’s new 'anti-Maori' stance is setting up a showdown with New Zealand First over how to deal with the increasing problems posed by multiculturalism.

Brash calls for the abolition of all racial preferences for Maori including television and radio quotas and Maori political seats. Peter’s has responded by saying that such policies are tantamount to racial nihilism and will trigger unnecessary conflict.

I suspect that Brash thinks that if Maori continue to have special preferences then other minorities will start to campaign for special privileges and the country will descend into a full-blown ethnic spoils system.

National’s new, harder line on assimilation may be a good idea for screening prospective immigrants but is a questionable policy for dealing with Maori.

As indigenous people, the Maori did not have a choice about whether or not to accept western values. White westerners came in numbers and they had to adapt to a largely western way of life. In contrast, prospective immigrants are free to stay at home if they don’t agree with New Zealand’s predominantly western culture.

If all special accommodations for Maori are cut they will be even more detached from their native culture – arguably, this could well make social problems such as crime and educational underachievement even worse. Furthermore, even if Brash is right, Maori are too large a group to be totally assimilated into White culture so there will always be a large number of dissenters who will seek to undermine such an approach.

While New Zealander First has a slightly softer line on Maori assimilation, it has a harder line on immigration. New Zealand First is the only party with an explicit commitment to limited immigration, so it doesn’t need to ‘make an example’ of Maori to maintain social cohesion. Conversely, National has a more expansive immigration policy and is therefore compelled to pursue an aggressive policy towards assimilating Maori.

While it is good to see Brash talking candidly about Maori problems like domestic violence and obesity, he fails to consider the possibility that expansive immigration policies may have contributed to some of these problems.

Even though Maori unemployment has gone down, wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living. Property prices have soared in the major cities and in the competition for housing, relatively wealthy East Asian immigrants have out bid Maori families who are increasingly unable to get a toehold on the property ladder. Like it or not, this trend is only going to add to the Maori grievance culture.

There has also been a hollowing out of Maori communities as many hard working Maori have left the country to seek higher wages in Australia. Restless young men in these communities now have few role models to look to for help and guidance.

Where there is clear evidence that affirmative action policies are failing then there may be a good case for removing them or replacing them with something better. If there aren’t enough Maori applicants to fill university quotas then perhaps the government would be better off providing polytech scholarships instead.

In general, it appears New Zealand First aims to help Maori by maintaining support for Maori culture and moderating inequality. At the same time it is aware that continuing transfers of resources from Whites to Maori is creating a strong White backlash.

Brash’s policy of attacking Maori culture appears to be undermining support for New Zealand First, but come election time it may drive moderate voters into the hands of Labour. This could create an even stronger Labour government that is free from any restraining influence from New Zealand First.

A Slack Effort From Slack

Despite its controversial cover, David Slack’s- Civil War and other Predictions is a disappointing effort that provides few novel insights into New Zealand’s major social, economic and environmental issues.

In the first section of the book Slack canvasses relations between Whites and Maori over the Waitangi Treaty settlement process. He argues that Whites have slowly come round to accepting the Maori point of view and that Maori claims are eminently reasonable. However, as with most discussions of redistribution issues between Maori and non-Maori racial categories and demography are not addressed. Many Whites that oppose redistributing resources back to Maori privately cite racial ambiguity as a primary reason. The Maori population is heavily interbreed with the European population hence the common refrain, ‘why does that guy deserve a treaty handout, he’s Whiter than I am’. Similarly, due to intermarriage, it is very difficult to assess just how large the Maori population actually is and census numbers fluctuate appreciably. Although the Treaty settlement process involves tribes rather than Maori per se, many non-Maori primarily see it as an issue about racial preference.

On the very important topic of immigration Slack glosses over most of the big issues. He seems to dismiss the debate over immigration as ‘cheap political capital’ that occurs ‘every couple of years’ with each immigration wave. However, what matters is who comes and how many. New Zealand is a relatively equalitarian society in large part because of an abundance of land relative to labour, which is maintained by immigration restrictions. Furthermore, despite all the recent economic reforms, the nation still mainly lives off the land through farming, fishing and tourism. Large numbers of immigrants may water down how much of the ‘resource pie’ each person gets. Even worse, if large numbers of unskilled immigrants arrive we may also lose the option of trying to compensate for physical resource depletion by developing hi-tech industries.

Since the 1970s the number of non-western immigrants arriving in N.Z hasn’t been that large so there has not been that much serious disruption. However, what will happen, for example, to New Zealand’s largely Western culture if the country losses its European majority? In Western Countries such as the United States and France where the White majority is now under threat political divisions and ethnic tensions are becoming very serious, as seen in the French street riots and ‘White Flight’ from Southern California.

The issue of immigration is also conspicuously absent from Slack’s coverage of environmental issues. He puts forward some reasonably sensible arguments from Green politician Jeannette Fitzsimons about issues such as peak oil and consumerism but never mentions immigration and population growth. Environmental pollution is essentially caused by two factors- industrialisation and population growth. Hence, if you don’t address population growth (which in New Zealand largely comes from immigration) you are effectively trying to deal with the pollution problem with one hand tied behind your back.

The last section of the books deals with cultural tolerance and political correctness. Slack largely dismisses political correctness as a knee-jerk response to relatively trivial issues. However, he overlooks an important issue that is saturated with political correctness- the treatment of children and adolescents in today’s society. Many people are put off teaching and parenting by the behaviour of children and increasingly ambiguous norms regarding how children can be disciplined. Can teachers shout at children, physically expel them from a classroom? Can parents slap children on the leg, hand e.t.c if them deem it appropriate? What can and can’t I do if I catch a teenager vandalising my car?

On the topic of homosexuality Slack argues that the majority is now in favour of gay rights and people have overcome their bad old ‘1950s attitudes’ thanks to progressive politics. He doesn’t mention though, that changing attitudes to homosexuality may be related to such factors as the relatively small size of the gay population, the containment of the aids problem in N.Z, the development of modern condoms, the end of military conscription and the importance of gays in the modern service economy.

Despite all my criticisms of Slack’s book I will acknowledge that it does cover some issues quite well and there are some intelligent points on legal topics and economic policy. However, when I see a controversial title like ‘Civil War’ I except some really brave, incisive commentary and in this respect Slack fails to deliver.