Economic Anxiety and Racism: It's not Either/Or
For those of you engaging in the racism vs economic anxiety debate, let's take a minute and consider the human animal and it's behavior from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. We know, from observation, that human beings are highly social, cooperative, and tribal. This means that human beings survive by cooperating but also compete for resources with other human beings by forming teams, aka tribes. This is all instinctive, pre-intellectual, animal behavior. Racism, unfortunately, is just one way that the tribal instinct plays itself out. People find all kinds of dumb, arbitrary distinctions for deciding who is "in" or "out" of their group, all of which is driven by the basic tribal instinct. "Us" vs "them" is hardwired. It's the same reason y'all get so into your dumb sportsball teams.
So, really, the problem we're dealing with currently is our biologically driven behavior is rooted in an environmental situation that is no longer relevant. As we've scaled up from small tribes of hunter-gatherers to a full blown, global technological civilization, we've drug our prehistoric biology along with us. Our fates are all co-mingled and interdependent, but we don't behave as though they are, because that just isn't how we evolved. Nature has also granted us a thin veneer of reason that can provide a rational override to an instinctual behavior if it's counterproductive, but reason is slow, weak, and requires way more mental effort than just behaving instinctually, so that's what most of us do most of the time. There is no model for understanding mass human behavior that involves humans behaving consistently in their rational self-interest--at least no model that's remotely accurate.
So, how does economic anxiety fit into this? Well, think about why we have a tribal instinct in the first place. It's to help us team up with our buds in our own tribe to compete for resources--maybe a nice piece of farmland, or the game in a particular region. If you have 100 people and enough food for 50, the tribe that is the most cohesive and cooperative internally *and* the most ruthless to outsiders, is going to be the one that wins that competition. That's what we evolved from. Economic anxiety, in our current situation, doesn't stem from *actual* resource scarcity, but from artificial scarcity produced by capitalism--there's more than enough for everybody, but vast disparities in wealth mean that many people still go without. Perhaps more importantly, people who come from previously comfortable backgrounds are finding it harder to maintain their former levels of comfort, or are having a hard time seeing they'll be able to going forward. So they have a scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is going to activate the tribal instinct. People who are afraid they aren't going to have enough are going to tend to construct a narrower definition of "us" than they might if they feel there is more than enough to go around and they are empowered to procure what they need.
Which is all to say, you can't address racism without also addressing wealth inequality and capitalism. I mean, you can try, Nancy, but it won't work. Because people in a mindset of scarcity aren't going to expand the boundaries of their tribe. It's not one or the other. It's both.
Also, as we continue to degrade an environment that 7 billion+ people depend on for survival, scarcity is going to move from the "artificial" column to the "actual" column. If you thought the wars of the 20th century were bad, wait for the wars people will have over fresh drinking water. So, you know, we might want to stop burning fossil fuels sooner than later. Just saying.
So, really, the problem we're dealing with currently is our biologically driven behavior is rooted in an environmental situation that is no longer relevant. As we've scaled up from small tribes of hunter-gatherers to a full blown, global technological civilization, we've drug our prehistoric biology along with us. Our fates are all co-mingled and interdependent, but we don't behave as though they are, because that just isn't how we evolved. Nature has also granted us a thin veneer of reason that can provide a rational override to an instinctual behavior if it's counterproductive, but reason is slow, weak, and requires way more mental effort than just behaving instinctually, so that's what most of us do most of the time. There is no model for understanding mass human behavior that involves humans behaving consistently in their rational self-interest--at least no model that's remotely accurate.
So, how does economic anxiety fit into this? Well, think about why we have a tribal instinct in the first place. It's to help us team up with our buds in our own tribe to compete for resources--maybe a nice piece of farmland, or the game in a particular region. If you have 100 people and enough food for 50, the tribe that is the most cohesive and cooperative internally *and* the most ruthless to outsiders, is going to be the one that wins that competition. That's what we evolved from. Economic anxiety, in our current situation, doesn't stem from *actual* resource scarcity, but from artificial scarcity produced by capitalism--there's more than enough for everybody, but vast disparities in wealth mean that many people still go without. Perhaps more importantly, people who come from previously comfortable backgrounds are finding it harder to maintain their former levels of comfort, or are having a hard time seeing they'll be able to going forward. So they have a scarcity mindset. A scarcity mindset is going to activate the tribal instinct. People who are afraid they aren't going to have enough are going to tend to construct a narrower definition of "us" than they might if they feel there is more than enough to go around and they are empowered to procure what they need.
Which is all to say, you can't address racism without also addressing wealth inequality and capitalism. I mean, you can try, Nancy, but it won't work. Because people in a mindset of scarcity aren't going to expand the boundaries of their tribe. It's not one or the other. It's both.
Also, as we continue to degrade an environment that 7 billion+ people depend on for survival, scarcity is going to move from the "artificial" column to the "actual" column. If you thought the wars of the 20th century were bad, wait for the wars people will have over fresh drinking water. So, you know, we might want to stop burning fossil fuels sooner than later. Just saying.
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