The White man has no friends

 

Togolese representation of a white man (Wikicommons: Collectie Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen)

In a previous post, I wrote that the recently published book De quelle couleur sont les Blancs ? was originally supposed to provide a new perspective on French race relations. How do the Français de souche perceive, imagine, and experience their increasingly multiracial society? What does it mean to be White in France? The “invisible majority” would thus be brought into the dialogue of race relations and given its own voice.

In this, the book has failed. From beginning to end, the Français de souche are objects, and not subjects. They are commented on, but never allowed to comment. They are analyzed at length, but given no chance to challenge this analysis. Yet one cannot hope to understand ethnic relations unless one hears both sides. This one-sidedness appears in a chapter where a man with Algerian parents recounts his childhood in Toulouse:

In the neighborhood, we had a chum who was blond with blue eyes. He was the son of a working man, of a modest background, like us, but he seemed perfect to us: beautiful, blond, white. We were subordinate to him. Until the moment when someone from our gang came and confronted him. When the blond got his first punch in the mouth, he was demystified. (Cherfi, 2013, p. 61)

It would be interesting to know how their blond “chum” perceived this demystification. North African boys like to act collectively, and such collective action takes precedence over individual ties of friendship. For French boys, individual action is the norm. No white gang comes to the blond’s defense. This is a recurring pattern, as in a case that Frantz Fanon took on as a clinical psychiatrist during the Algerian War:

Case no. 1 – Murder by two young Algerians 13 and 14 years old of their European playmate.

The 13-year-old:

- We weren’t angry with him. Every Thursday we would go hunting together with slingshots, on the hill above the village. He was our good buddy. He no longer went to school because he wanted to become a mason like his father. One day we decided to kill him because the Europeans wanted to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill the “grownups.” But him, as he was our age, we can. We didn’t know how to kill him. We wanted to throw him into a ditch, but he might have been only injured. So we took a knife from home and we killed him.

- But why did you choose him?

- Because he played with us. No other person would’ve gone up with us, up there.

- Yet he was your buddy?

- What about them wanting to kill us? His father is a militiaman, and he says we should have our throats cut.

- But he [the boy] had said nothing to you?

- Him? No.

- You know he’s dead now?

- Yes.

- What is death?

- It’s when it’s all over. We go to heaven.

- Did you kill him?

- Yes.

- Does that do anything to you to have killed someone?

- No, since they wanted to kill us, so …

- Does that bother you to be in prison?

- No. (Fanon, 1970, p. 195)

Over the past millennium, Western Europeans have created a social environment where the individual is largely free from collective ties of kinship and ethnicity. Because the State has imposed a monopoly on the use of violence, there is less need to rely on kinsmen to safeguard one’s life and property. That’s what the government is for. In many other societies, however, the State is much more recent and often foreign. Collective identity still matters most and, when the chips are down, personal ties of friendship matter little. Your real friends are your “blood.” In any case, real friendship isn’t just about sharing your recreational activities. It’s also about risking your life for someone else.

Collective identity likewise trumps the pursuit of truth. Only when the individual is freed from the collectivity does truth apply equally to everyone, whether friend or foe. Only then does true science become feasible. Did the boy’s father really say that all Arabs should have their throats cut?(1) Does that make sense at a time when the French militias relied so heavily on Arab auxiliaries?

European individualism comes up in another chapter of De quelle couleur sont les Blancs ?, where Mineke Schipper reviews African oral and written literature:

Impatience, love of money, individualism, all of these traits define Westerners for Africans: “The Whites don’t stop running, they want to stay ahead of us. We take our time. […] One day, surely, they will stop. After all, one cannot endlessly run for centuries. They will understand that two or three weeks of vacation are not enough for the kind of life they lead.”

[…] According to Matip, African solidarity is under threat of giving way to the European every-man-for-himself. In African novels, this counter-discourse is seen in remarks like “the White man has no friends” or “we aren’t Whites who couldn’t care less about the misfortunes of others.” (Schipper, 2013, pp. 100-101)

Yet individualism also seems to be part of the White man’s secret of success. In African literature, the desire to know this secret is a recurring theme, along with a feeling that Christianity is a false secret, an attempt to keep the real one hidden:

Their conversion was motivated by the promise of recompense: the Whites were stronger and the secret of the White man’s strength could only be his religion. One evening, while Father Dumont observed that the Africans, who until then had been converting in great numbers, were now abandoning the faith, his cook Zacharia explained to him: “The first of us who came rushing to religion, they came as they would to a revelation… The revelation of your secret, the secret of your strength, the strength of your planes, new railways, how can I put it … The secret of your mystery! Instead of that, you began talking to them about God, about the soul, about eternal life, and so on. Don’t you think they already knew all of that before, long before you came? Gracious me, they got the impression you were hiding something from them.” (Schipper, 2013, p. 105)

Africans have some awareness that the White man’s strengths are related to his weaknesses. Because the White man has no friends, he doesn’t have to share his wealth with them. He can invest it as he sees fit. But how can one live without friends? In Africa, you need friends to defend you and fight for you. Otherwise you’ll still have to share your wealth … but with a lot of thieving non-friends. 

Christianity, too, is part of the White man’s secret—not the Christianity of the 1st century but the one that developed during the Middle Ages, the one that supported the State in its effort to punish the wicked so that the good may live and prosper in peace … in short, by executing violence-prone individuals on a large scale (see previous post). Only then did it become possible to create a high-trust society where people could better themselves through work and trade … and not through theft and plunder. But this too is both a strength and a weakness. A pacified society is dependent on a State that may, one day, refuse to do its job.

Note 

1. According to the older boy’s testimony, this threat was not heard directly from the victim’s father or from anyone within the French community: “In our community (chez nous), people said that the French had sworn to kill all of us one after another” (Fanon, 1970, p. 196).

References

Cherfi, M. (2013). “Quand je suis devenu blanc…” in S. Laurent and T. Leclère (eds.) De quelle couleur sont les Blancs ? Des « petits Blancs » des colonies au « racisme anti-Blancs » (pp. 58-64), Paris: La Découverte, 298 p.

Fanon, F. (1970). Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspero. 

Schipper, M. (2013). « Le Blanc n’a pas d’amis. » L’Autre européen dans les littératures africaines orales et écrites, in S. Laurent and T. Leclère (eds.) De quelle couleur sont les Blancs ? Des « petits Blancs » des colonies au « racisme anti-Blancs » (pp. 98-109), Paris: La Découverte, 298 p.

Where do those tensions come from?

 

Home sweet home in the Scottish borderlands. This was one of the last regions of Britain to be pacified and brought under State control. People lived in fortified homes where the second floor could be reached only by an external ladder that could be pulled up. The stone walls were up to 3 feet thick. (source – photo owned by Les Hull)

I first went to elementary school in a largely English Canadian neighborhood of Scarborough. Schoolyard fights were only occasional, and there was almost always a good reason. My family then moved to a largely Scotch-Irish town in central Ontario. There, the schoolyard fights were a daily occurrence, and they seemed to happen for no reason at all. I eventually found out the reason … something to do with “respect” or rather the lack of it.

We like to think that people everywhere respond to situations more or less as we do. If the response is anger—red boiling anger that can kill—we assume there must be a very good reason. Otherwise, the person wouldn’t be so angry.

Hence the puzzlement over the Boston bombers. What drove them to such an act? Had they been treated badly? This was the conclusion reached by Justin Trudeau, the recently elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada:

But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded. Completely at war with innocents. At war with a society. And our approach has to be, where do those tensions come from? (The National, 2013)

Actually, the Tsarnaev brothers were hardly excluded from American society. Tamerlan married the daughter of a well-off American family and lived in their spacious home. Sure, if you look hard enough, you may find evidence of exclusion. There must have been slights and indifference, perhaps jokes about his first name, but such things don’t cause normal people to kill.

“Normal” is a relative term. In other societies, people do kill for apparently trifling reasons. In Les damnés de la Terre, Frantz Fanon discusses male violence in Algeria, particularly the lack of restraint and the apparently trivial motives:

Autopsies undeniably establish this fact: the killer gives the impression he wanted to kill an incalculable number of times given the equal deadliness of the wounds inflicted.

[…] Very often the magistrates and police officers are stunned by the motives for the murder: a gesture, an allusion, an ambiguous remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an olive tree or an animal that has strayed a few feet. The search for the cause, which is expected to justify and pin down the murder, in some cases a double or triple murder, turns up a hopelessly trivial motive. Hence the frequent impression that the community is hiding the real motives. (Fanon, 2004, p. 222)

This behavioral pattern begins early in life. Parents seek not to suppress it but to channel it in the right direction, i.e., defense of the family:

In Algerian society for example, children are raised according to their sex. A boy usually receives an authoritarian and severe type of upbringing that will prepare him to become aware of the responsibilities that await him in adulthood, notably responsibility for his family and for the elderly. This is why a mother will allow her son to fight in the street and will scarcely be alarmed if the boy has a fall or if she sees a bruise. The boy of an Algerian family is accustomed from an early age to being hit hard without whimpering too much. People orient him more toward combat sports and group games in order to arm him with courage and endurance—virtues deemed to be manly. (Assous, 2005)

This pattern of behavioral development doesn’t differ completely from my own. The difference is largely one of degree. But there’s also a difference in kind: the violent male as an independent actor who fights for himself and his immediate family. For “normal” boys in Western society, male violence is legitimate only when done under orders for much larger entities: the home team, the police, the country, NATO … Everywhere else, it is evil, criminal, and pathological.

This schizophrenic attitude to violence was the subject of the Milgram experiment. You’ve probably heard of it. Assistants are told to administer ever stronger electric shocks if a subject fails on a learning task. About 65% of the assistants—the real subjects of the experiment—will increase the shock intensity up to the top end of the scale, even when the pseudo-subject pleads for cessation. Yet the same assistants act very differently if the decision is theirs. Only 1.4% of them will, on their own initiative, increase the shock intensity up to the top end of the scale (Milgram, 1974)

You may not have heard, however, that this finding holds true only for societies like our own. When the Milgram experiment was done with Jordanian assistants, they were just as willing as Americans to inflict pain under orders (62.5%). But they were more willing than Americans to inflict pain when no orders were given, with 12.5% of them delivering shocks right up to the top end of the scale (Shanab & Yahya, 1978).

How would Chechens have responded in the same situation? Or Algerians? Or Scotch-Irish? Male violence has long been viewed differently in different societies. In our own, it is stigmatized, except when done “under orders” by soldiers or the police. Some societies, however, had no police or army until recent times. Every adult male was expected to use violence to defend himself and his family. Yes, you could go to a law court to settle your differences with someone. But even if the court ruled in your favor, the sentence still had to be enforced by you, your brothers, and other male family members. That’s the way things were done. For millennia and millennia.

Gene-culture co-evolution

Humans differ from other animals in that we create a large part of our environment. We adapt not only to a physical environment of climate, landscape, vegetation, and wildlife but also to a cultural environment of our making: codified laws, behavioral norms, religious beliefs, social and political systems, and so on. We shape our environment, and this environment shapes us. To be more precise, it selects the kind of individuals who can live in it.

Initially, all adult males everywhere had to defend themselves and their families, not by paying taxes but by getting their hands bloody. This situation changed with the rise of the State. In other words, some powerful men became so powerful that they could impose a monopoly on the use of violence. Only they or their underlings could use it. Male violence had been “nationalized” and could be used only if ordered by the State or in narrowly defined situations of self-defense.

In this new pacified environment, the violent male went from hero to zero. He became a criminal and was treated accordingly. Society now favored the peace-loving man who got ahead through work or trade. This process has been described for England and other parts of Western Europe by several academics, like Gregory Clark. With the establishment of strong States toward the end of the Dark Ages, and a subsequent pacification of social relations, the incidence of violence declined steadily. Violent predispositions were steadily removed from the population, either through the actual execution of violent individuals or through their marginalization and lower reproductive success. The meek thus inherited the earth (see previous post).

Or rather a portion of it. In some parts of the earth, particularly remote mountainous areas, State control came very late. These are societies in the earliest stages of pacification. Male violence is a daily reality, which the State can only contain at best. Such is life in Chechnya … and elsewhere.

Genetics of male violence  

But is such gene-culture co-evolution possible? How susceptible is male violence to the forces of natural selection? Are some men more predisposed to violence than others? Is this a heritable trait, or something that men pick up from their peers?

A meta-analysis of twin and adoption studies estimated a heritability of 40% for aggressive behavior (Rhee & Waldman, 2002). A later twin study found a heritability of 96%, where the subjects were 9-10 year-olds of diverse ethnic backgrounds (Baker et al., 2007). This higher figure reflected the narrow age range and the use of a panel of evaluators to rate each subject. In the latest twin study, the heritability was 40% when the twins had different evaluators and 69% when they had the same evaluator. By comparison, many of us accept that homosexuality is inborn even though the heritability of that behavior is much lower: perhaps 34-39% for gays and 18-19% for lesbians (Wikipedia, 2013).

The actual neural basis remains to be sketched out. Perhaps a greater predisposition to violence simply reflects stronger impulsivity and weaker internal constraints on behavior (Niv et al., 2012). Or perhaps there is a lower threshold specifically for expression of violence. Or perhaps ideation of violence comes easier. Or perhaps the consequences of a violent act trigger feelings of pleasure. Frantz Fanon noted that the violent male seems to feel pleasure at the sight of blood. He needs to sense its warmth and even bathe in it. There is in fact an extensive medical literature about “abnormal” individuals who feel pleasure at the sight of blood and even wish to feel and taste it, whereas “normal” individuals feel disgust and often faint (Vanden Berghe & Kelly, 1964). Again, words like “normal” and “abnormal” are relative …

All of this may seem incomprehensible to nice folks like Justin Trudeau. Surely, no one in his right mind would enjoy violence. There must be another reason for such horrors. A good reason. A reason that would make sense to nice folks. Because, deep down, we’re all nice folks, aren’t we?

References

Assous, A. (2005). L’impact de l’éducation parentale sur le développement de l’enfant, Hawwa, 3(3), 354-369.

Baker, L.A., K.C. Jacobson, A. Raine, D.I. Lozano, and S. Bezdjian (2007). Genetic and environmental bases of childhood antisocial behavior: a multi-informant twin study, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116, 219-235.

http://cnpru.bsd.uchicago.edu/PDFs/Baker_2007_JAP_RFAB.pdf 

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority, New York: Harper & Row.

Niv, S., C. Tuvblad, A. Raine, P. Wang, and L.A. Baker. (2012). Heritability and longitudinal stability of impulsivity in adolescence, Behavior Genetics, 42, 378-392.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3351554/  

Rhee, S.H. and I.D. Waldman. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis of twin and adoption studies, Psychol Bull., 128, 490-529.

Shanab, M.E. and Yahya, K.A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 11, 267-269.

The National. (2013). Trudeau on Boston bombings, April 17

http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/ID/2380243779/

Vanden Bergh, R.L., and J.F. Kelly. (1964). Vampirism. A review with new observations, Archives of General Psychiatry, 11, 543-547.

Wikipedia (2013). Biology and Sexual Orientation,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation

 

 

The Milgram experiment: A cross-cultural perspective

You’ve probably heard of the Milgram experiment. Assistants are told to give a ‘subject’ progressively stronger electric shocks whenever he or she fails on a learning task. Most of the assistants—the real subjects of the experiment—obediently do as they are told, even when the pseudo-subject is visibly in pain and pleads for cessation of the shocks. (In reality, the pseudo-subject is a trained actor and no shocks are actually given). When Stanley Milgram began this research at Yale in the early 1960s, he found that 65% of his subjects kept on administering electric shocks right up to the top end of the scale.

In the postwar era, Milgram’s work was in line with several other studies, notably The Authoritarian Personality, that painted a dark picture of America. This cynicism appeared in a 1979 interview on Sixty Minutes:

Safer: Are you suggesting that, that it could happen here?
Milgram: I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps
in any medium-sized American town. (Blass, 2000, pp. 35-36)

But were the subjects really brutal because they were acting under orders? Perhaps they just enjoyed having a chance to be brutal. This potential criticism occurred to Milgram (1974, pp. 70-71):

Indeed, one theoretical interpretation of the behavior holds that men harbor deeply aggressive instincts continually pressing for expression and that the experiment provides institutional justification for the release of these impulses. According to this view, if a person is placed in a situation where he has complete power over another individual, whom he may punish as much as he likes, all that is sadistic and bestial in man comes to the fore.

… It becomes vital, therefore, to compare the subjects’ performance when they are under orders and when they are allowed to choose the shock levels.

When allowed to choose the shock levels, only one of the seventy-one subjects (1.4%) administered shocks right up to the top end of the scale. Milgram (1974, p. 72) concluded:

Insofar as the experiments tell us something about human nature, the revelation on how men act toward others when they are on their own is here. Whatever leads to shocking the victim at the highest level cannot be explained by autonomously generated aggression but needs to be explained by the transformation of behavior that comes about through obedience to orders.

The Milgram experiment has been replicated outside the United States. These replications, however, are almost wholly confined to subjects in European or European-descended countries. To date, only Shanab and Yahya (1978) have replicated the Milgram experiment with non-European subjects, these being 48 students at the University of Jordan in Amman. The Jordanian subjects resembled Milgram’s in being just as willing to inflict pain under orders (proportion = 62.5%). But they differed in being more willing to inflict pain on their own initiative. When allowed to choose the shock levels, 12.5% of the Jordanians delivered shocks right up to the top end of the scale.

One in eight Jordanians is a sadist? And these were university students, presumably the cream of Jordanian society. How would the experiment have turned out if done with Bedouins, for instance, or some other group where the State has only recently monopolized the use of violence?

This question is addressed with respect to Algerians by Frantz Fanon. Better known as a political thinker, Fanon was also a psychoanalyst who knew the literature on violence in his adopted country and who reviewed it in a chapter of his book Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth). He first discussed the incidence of violent crime:

It’s a fact, the magistrates will tell you, that four fifths of the cases heard involve assault and battery. The crime rate in Algeria is one of the highest in the world, they claim. There are no petty delinquents. When the Algerian, and this applies to all North Africans, puts himself on the wrong side of the law, he always goes to extremes (Fanon, 2004, p. 222)

The acts of violence also show less restraint and the precipitating causes seem banal:

Autopsies undeniably establish this fact: the killer gives the impression he wanted to kill an incalculable number of times given the equal deadliness of the wounds inflicted.

… Very often the magistrates and police officers are stunned by the motives for the murder: a gesture, an allusion, an ambiguous remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an olive tree or an animal that has strayed a few feet. The search for the cause, which is expected to justify and pin down the murder, in some cases a double or triple murder, turns up a hopelessly trivial motive. Hence the frequent impression that the community is hiding the real motives. (Fanon, 2004, p. 222)

These facts were not challenged by Fanon, who attributed them to the effects of colonialism. As proof, he argued that violent crime was declining among Algerians established in France:

Yes, the Algerian spontaneously acknowledged the magistrates and police officers were right. This narcissistic aspect of Algerian criminality as a manifestation of genuine virility had to be tackled again and reconsidered in the light of colonial history. By showing, for example, how the criminality of the Algerians in France fundamentally differed from the criminality of the Algerians directly subjected to colonial exploitation. (Fanon, 2004, p. 229)

Frantz Fanon wrote the above thoughts in 1961. Like Stanley Milgram, he was writing at a time when State violence seemed to be the main problem and when individual violence could plausibly be seen as a State-induced pathology. If they were still alive, would the two of them think differently today?

References

Blass, T. (2000) “The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we know about obedience to authority”, in T. Blass (ed.) Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, pp. 35-60, Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row.

Shanab, M.E. & Yahya, K.A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 11, 267-269.