Whether it is a lack of interracial marriage, an anti-foreign bias in politics or a nativist desire to keep out immigrants, it's clear people naturally prefer people who are like them. Even Switzerland, usually seen as a bastion of tolerance, recently passed a Constitutional referendum banning the construction of Muslim minarets on mosques (the picture on the left is fear mongering propaganda from the campaign). I'm also not exempt from this trend. Most of my friends are white, twenty something, upper middle class, and college educated. I work hard to ensure my bias doesn't reach the classroom, but I think it is important to understand why these preferences exist. I believe the solution is the main point where my religious beliefs and economics background converge, human selfishness.I believe people are totally depraved and rationally self-interested (or maybe this justifies our inherent extra selfishness). The Bible and other faiths say we should love or neighbor as a ourselves, assuming loving ourselves is the default. You don't have to teach children to be selfish, though sadly we do. So if we are our number one, then number two must be people who are like us. This is true racially, geographically (neighborhood, city, state, nation) and even within our social class. Not only is it easier to put ourselves in someone else's shoes who is like us, it is also more likely to be us in the future. My bet is that people from Boston were more sympathetic to 9/11 victims in New York or that people from Miami better understood the pain felt by Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. There is even evidence we are nicer to the siblings that look like us. The good news is as the world becomes more connected we see how similar humans are all over the world, the less prejudice we there will be.
This reminds me of a quote I like: "we find comfort among those who agree with us, growth among those who don't."
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that we have a tendency to hang out with/be attracted to those who are more similar to us, and I think this is a "bias" that we should work to overcome. But I think it is a leap to say people have this tendency because they are inherently sinful or selfish. In fact, I think there are good evolutionary reasons to explain this tendency in that it helps our survival probability. So I would put this less in the selfish category and more in the biologically-conditioned-to-ensure-survival category.
Does racism ensure the survival of human civilizations? Not sure if the American Indians would agree. Or do you mean that prejudice is a negative result of loyalty to your own people.
ReplyDeleteWhich I guess begs the question, can you be truly loyal to your people and not dislike other people?
Evolution does not work to the benefit of the entire species, but to the individual. I imagine that our long-ago ancestors lived in tribes that, yes, were prejudiced against those outside of the tribe. This prejudice served the individuals who needed to acquire and hold onto resources against competing individuals. So from that understanding, the prejudice against individuals like us makes sense, too, but of course it is no longer a good thing to have now that we have moved away from warring tribes and into free-market capitalism. But these things change slowly.
ReplyDeleteSo to your last question, I think yes we can eventually be both loyal to our people and not dislike others, but it will take time.