When did the interests of our
elites begin to diverge from ours? (Wikicommons)
Kinship ties have historically
been weak among Europeans north and west of a line running from Trieste to St.
Petersburg. Within that area, and going back at least a millennium, almost
everyone would be single for at least part of adulthood, with many staying
single their entire lives. In addition, children usually left the nuclear
family to form new households, and many individuals circulated among unrelated
households, typically young people sent out as servants.
This marriage pattern is
associated with an equally unusual behavioral pattern: stronger individualism;
weaker loyalty to kin; and greater willingness to trust strangers. These
tendencies have a psychological basis. Affective empathy is not expressed
primarily within intimate relationships, as between a mother and her child. Instead,
it is extended to everyone, unless that person is judged to be a moral outcaste.
Morality itself is less situational and more universal—absolute rules that apply
equally to everyone. Finally, the ability to internalize that kind of morality
is stronger, as are the feelings of guilt you experience when breaking a rule—even
if you are the sole witness to your misdeed.
Some say the "Western
European Marriage Pattern" began with Western Christianity—what would
become Roman Catholicism and, later, Protestantism. By forbidding cousin
marriages and by framing morality in terms of universal rules, the Western
Church laid the basis for a new civilization (Schulz et al. 2019). Others say
this pattern goes farther back in time; the Western Church thus assimilated
pre-existing social norms from its northwest European converts (Frost 2017;
Frost 2020).
Whatever the cause, northwest
Europeans possess a behavioral package that has helped them create larger
social networks independently of kinship. One example is the market economy.
Keep in mind the distinction between "market economy" and
"markets." The latter are as old as history, and yet for most of
history they were little more than marketplaces—pockets of economic activity
limited in time and space, incapable of becoming the main organizing principle
of society. That role was filled by kinship. Production of goods for a market
was secondary to the reproduction of life for one’s family and kin group.
The market economy did not
originate in the markets of Greece and Rome. It ultimately goes back to the North
Sea communities of the seventh century. There, trade underwent a sustained expansion
that would in time eclipse trade on the Mediterranean, eventually creating the current
global economy (Callmer 2002, see also Barrett et al. 2004).
Greer (2013a, 2013b) pinpoints
the fourteenth century as the time when the North Sea economies began to outpace
the rest of the world:
[...] the two exceptions are
Netherlands and Great Britain. These North Sea economies experienced sustained
GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to
diverge from the rest of Europe long before the 'West' begins its more famous
split from 'the rest.'
[...] we can pin point the
beginning of this 'little divergence' with greater detail. In 1348 Holland's
GDP per capita was $876. England's was $777. In less than 60 years time
Holland's jumps to $1,245 and England's to 1090. The North Sea's revolutionary
divergence started at this time. (Greer 2013b; see also Greer 2013a and Hbd
*chick 2013)
The rise of the West is
usually attributed to things like the European conquest of the Americas, the
invention of printing, the creation of modern financial institutions, the
Atlantic slave trade, and the Protestant Reformation. Yet the West was already
rising before any of that happened. The ultimate cause was behavioral: the West
was better at exploiting the market concept because it could extend the sphere
of high trust far beyond small groups of closely related individuals.
The rest is ... history. The
market economy grew and grew and grew. Initially, its main vehicle was the nation-state;
the nations of northwest Europe thus became fierce rivals for commercial
dominance. Only later would the market economy be freed of that vehicle. When
exactly? At the dawn of the twentieth century, when the elite of the British
Empire became fully global in its ambitions? After the two world wars, which
left the United States as the dominant power in the global market? During the
1980s, when offshoring of jobs got into full swing?
The liquidation of the
nation-state was a process, not a point in time. Over the twentieth century our
national elites went global and lost any loyalty they once had to the old
working class of the West, eventually viewing it as an anachronism. After
weighing the costs and benefits, they concluded it should be replaced with
cheaper labor from other sources. The old working class has thus been caught in
a vice. On the one hand, high-paying jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries;
on the other hand, low-wage labor is insourced for those jobs that cannot be
outsourced, typically in services and construction. The result? Non-elite
individuals have seen their wages stagnate throughout the West, particularly in
the United States. And the peoples of the West are being progressively replaced,
even in their ancestral homelands.
Well, so what? Yes, they
created the concept of the market economy, but that concept no longer belongs
exclusively to them and no longer requires their existence. So why should they
continue to exist?
That question has two answers.
First, the market economy isn't just a concept. It is also certain ways of
being and doing. As northwest Europeans dwindle away and eventually disappear,
there will be a shift toward behaviors and mindsets that prevail elsewhere.
People will become less trusting of each other, and less sure about what they
pay for. Transactions will have to be checked and double-checked, and many will
no longer be worth the bother. To keep the market economy from collapsing,
governments will become increasingly authoritarian and adopt Orwellian levels of
surveillance. Like China, but not as nice.
The second answer is
existential. It's the answer that explains every living thing on this planet. We were. We are. We will be. Existence
is not justified by argument. It is justified by an act of will.
Frank Salter and the National Question
Frank Salter is an Australian
political scientist who is probably best known for his book On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and
Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (2003). In a recent speech, he has
argued for a new balance between the market economy and our need for kinship.
This balance would be provided by “national liberalism,” as defined by the
nineteenth-century thinker John Stuart Mill:
Where the sentiment of
nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all
the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to
themselves apart [...] One hardly knows what any division of the human race
should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective
bodies they choose to associate themselves.
This twinning of nationalism
with liberalism was common during the nineteenth century. Liberals saw the
nation-state as a means to emancipate the individual from the confines of local
and regional identities. France was the go-to model. Originally, its people mostly
spoke various regional languages; only a minority could speak French. Even the
laws differed from one part of the country to the other. After the Revolution,
a uniform language was imposed through the schools, and the laws too were made
uniform. Individuals could now freely circulate and express themselves within a
much larger territory. There were also economic benefits: economies of scale,
labor mobility, and a more rational distribution of the factors of production.
That logic, however, didn't
stop with the nation-state. It eventually led to globalism. We like to see
globalism as a healthy reaction to the sins of nationalism, particularly the
two world wars, yet nationalism was already morphing into globalism before 1914.
Look at John Stuart Mill's country. In the early nineteenth century it was,
arguably, a nation-state. Most people under British rule were of British origin
and shared the same language, culture, and life-ways. When the century came to an
end, all of that had changed: the British were now a minority within a vast multinational
empire. The country no longer served its people as a vehicle for their survival.
It now served an increasingly globalist elite.
As Frank Salter points out,
nationalism can be diverted into post-national channels. Modern techniques of
propaganda can create an artificial feeling of kinship that serves elite
interests:
... investment in ethnic kin
carries risks due to reliance on culture, which is more prone to error than the
instinct-laden bonds of family. In his book, Imagined Communities, the Marxist
historian Benedict Anderson argued convincingly that national communities are
perceived indirectly through cultural channels, such as stories, books, films,
press reports, memorials, and so on. The same goes for events that are
perceived to enhance or threaten the nation. The sense of fellowship can be
extended through cultural devices to elicit bonding with hypothetical kin.
Likewise, the realm of antagonisms, of distrust, hatred and combat, can be
hugely inflated in scope and intensity in the ethnocentric mind. (Salter 2020)
The risks are obvious. The
national elite may pursue its self-interest to the detriment of the nation it
supposedly serves. Instead of using its cultural dominance to promote common
national aims, it may manipulate the nation’s culture to further its own post-national
and supra-national ambitions.
References
Barrett, J.H., Locker, A.M.
and Roberts, C.M. (2004). Dark Age Economics revisited: The English fish bone
evidence AD 600-1600. Antiquity 78 (301):
618-636.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/dark-age-economics-revisited-the-english-fish-bone-evidence-ad-6001600/898F73D2812CA7E5F5BDF3EA071341F0
Callmer, J. (2002).
North-European trading centres and the early medieval craftsman. Craftsmen at
Åhus, North-Eastern Scania, Sweden ca. AD 750-850+, UppSkrastudier 6 (Acta Archaeologica Lundensia Ser. in 8, no. 39),
133-158.
Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal
line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe. Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf
Frost, P. (2020). The large
society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology 10(3): 214-134.
https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012
Greer, T. (2013a). The Rise of
the West: Asking the Right Questions. July 7, The Scholar's Stage
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-rise-of-west-asking-right-questions.html
Greer, T. (2013b). Another
look at the 'Rise of the West' - but with better numbers. November 20, The Scholar's Stage
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.ca/2013/11/another-look-at-rise-of-west-but-with.html
Hbd *chick (2013). Going
Dutch, November 29
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/going-dutch/
Salter, F. (2020). Sir Henry Parkes's liberal-ethnic
nationalism. Sydney Trads, December
18
https://sydneytrads.com/2020/12/18/sir-henry-parkess-liberal-ethnic-nationalism/
Schulz, J.F., D. Bahrami-Rad,
J.P. Beauchamp, and J. Henrich. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and
global psychological variation. Science
366(707): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5141
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