Racism and The Evolution of
Distant Othering
Chris
Chase-Dunn, Marilyn Grell-Brisk and E.N. Anderson
Institute
for Research on World-Systems
University
of California-Riverside
To be
presented at the ASA session on “The ‘Other’, Global Inequalities, and Race”
Sun, August 12, 2:30 to 4:10pm, Philadelphia, PA. This is IROWS Working Paper
#129 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows129/irows129.htm
V 8-2-18, 14416 words
Abstract: This paper presents an
overview of the ways in which human individual and collective identities and
ideas about outsiders have changed as human polities have gotten larger, more
complex and more hierarchical since the Stone Age. We are especially interested in forms of
distant othering that are similar in some ways to modern racism and seek to
understand how racism has evolved and where it may be going. We contend that
all human polities have defined the boundaries of solidarity and support in
ways that excluded and demonized other humans and non-humans, but that the
boundaries have expanded over time to include larger and larger numbers of
people. Boundary expansion has not been a smooth upward curve. When population
grows beyond the ability of institutions to provide resources, people go back
to smaller units of solidarity to try to protect their access to
resources. Thus, there have been cycles
of expansion and contraction with occasional upswings in the scale of
cooperation. And both solidarity and othering are entwined with the building
and maintenance of power structures. Status threats
incite reactive movements when status characteristics are changing, especially
on the part of those who think their privileges and resources are threatened. Comprehension
of the long-term cyclical trends of inclusive solidarity and othering has
implications for meeting the challenges of the 21st century.
We
are social scientists studying the long-term, large scale evolution[1] of
organizational structures, institutions and the ideational changes that relate
to the scale changes that have emerged since the Stone Age. We employ concepts
mainly from sociology and anthropology, disciplines that have examined
sociocultural evolution and the behavior of human individuals and groups. Our
discussion presumes the classical and contemporary literature on the self as an
institution (Mead 1934), identity theory, the connection between the self and
others, role theory and Simmel’s important concept of social distance (Simmel
1955, 1971).
Othering is based on the
construction of socially legitimate boundaries between the individual self and
others and between “us” and “them” -- in-groups and out-groups. Othering and selfing are like wrestlers in a clinch. All human societies
have organized identities around othering. And othering has always been
important for reproducing differences and inequalities. But “the other” has
evolved along with the uneven expansion of social complexity and the emergence
of hierarchies since the Stone Age. This paper describes the evolution of the
self, the other and the forms taken in distinguishing between in-groups and
out-groups with a focus on how racism as a form of othering has changed over
the course of human sociocultural evolution from Stone Age nomadic foraging
groups to the contemporary global system.
We mainly focus on the issue of socially distant others because we want
to discern the ways in which things like modern racism have existed and evolved
in the past.
Our theoretical perspective is institutional
materialism and we study sociocultural evolution using the comparative
world-systems perspective (Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2015). Immanuel Wallerstein (1987) contended that racism is structurally
connected with the modern core/periphery hierarchy. Thus, we are very
interested in the issue of modern global racism as it is related to the
core/periphery hierarchy in the contemporary global system. We also want to
inquire about the connections between distant othering and premodern
core/periphery hierarchies.
Georg Simmel (1955, see also Coser 1956) noted that conflict is an important form of
association because in-group solidarity is related to, and mainly produced by,
competition and conflict between groups. What “they” are depends on, and is
related to, what “we” are and what “I” am.
Sociocultural evolution has involved the invention of institutions that
allow larger, more complex and more hierarchical human polities to function.
Accompanying these long-term changes have been the emergence of more complex
selves as well as larger and more abstract collective identities and
solidarities. And these have been related to the restructuring of
conceptualizations of internal and external others. Human nature is understood
biologically to include the capability for institutionalized and socially
constructed categories to be taken as natural and real (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2015: Chapter 3). As is well-known, racism is
socially constructed. It works differently in different modern polities, and it
has taken different forms as human polities got larger and more complex.
Status characteristics are beliefs
about social categories that are consensually held by members of a society
(Berger, Cohen and Zelditch 1972). Status
characteristics are stereotypes that structure expectations about the behavior
and evaluations of others, especially strangers. Many status characteristics
are ranked. Examples are wealth, income, education, gender, ethnicity and
race. In this approach, racial
categories are socially constructed, and the content and evaluation of these
categories differ across societies and change over time within a society.
Profiling is an example of how status characteristics affect expectations. And
expectations about behavior often stimulate feelings such as comfort, fear and
anger. Status characteristics vary in the degree of consensus about them. They
are often contested, and they change over time. Status threats incite reactive
movements when status characteristics are changing, especially on the part of those
who think their privileges and resources are threatened. Obvious contemporary
examples are race and gender (Alvarez 2019)
The idea of social distance is made
most clear in Simmel’s (1972 [1908]) essay on the stranger. Simmel’s stranger
lives within the local society but is seen as socially distant from most of the
community members. This distance is primarily due to the stranger’s origins. Of
course, Simmel is talking about Jews in Europe and ethnic minorities. Social
distance does not equate physical distance as the stranger is simply
“perceived” as outside the group despite being in constant contact with the
group. This stranger is in the group but not of the group. Still, there can be
both internal and external distant others. For example, the phenomenon of
scape-goating may involve identifying and blaming
enemies within the society and external enemies. Our discussion of the
evolution of distant othering will take this into account.
The analysis of modern racism often
distinguishes between the attitudes, beliefs and emotions of individuals and
institutional or structural racism in which outcomes of power processes produce
material inequalities. Here we are
interested in the subjective (individual and collective) aspects of othering,
and in the connections between the institutional and structural forms of power
that produce differential outcomes.
The
evolution of human sociability, language, and culture remains highly
controversial. There is no question that
intolerance, prejudice, and othering are deeply inscribed in human society (Kteily, Bruneau, Waytz, and
Cotterill 2015; Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau 2016).
Castano has argued that the hated or despised group is typically thought of as
human, just unworthy of consideration or of good treatment. This is primarily
due to a lack of empathy. He introduces the term “infrahumanization”
for this. Genocide and prejudice scholars have remarked on this phenomenon.
For Thomas Hobbes (1657) and John
Locke (1689), humans in their natural state were true “savages” (Latin homo sylvaticus, “person
of the forest”). They were warlike,
isolated in small groups, nomadic, and without laws, private property, or true
moral orders. The authors located their
“savages”, not amongst themselves but rather, in “America,” despite having
plenty of material at hand to show them that American Native people were not
even remotely like their stereotypes.
Still, Hobbes and Locke’s notion of
the savage was most likely based on the old idea of the “wild man,” going back
to Enkidu and persisting in the medieval European “savages” and “wodewoses.” This
idea of the “savage” in America created a foundation for the despicable
treatment of Indigenous people by the settlers of the New World and
Australia. The most striking exception in
the early exploration period is the very strong and enlightened advocacy of the
Spanish humanists, notably Bartolome de Las Casas (1992, orig. 16th
century), but also Diego Duran, Bernardino de Sahagun, among `others. They fearlessly and successfully argued that
Native Americans were fully human, had souls, could not be killed at will, and
had rights (including property) that had to be respected. They argued less successfully that Native
people should not be enslaved.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau later argued
for a less negative view of “savages.”
Contrary to persistent myth, he never used the phrase “noble savage,”
nor did he think savages were particularly noble. His savage was in fact the chimpanzee
(Rousseau 1986 [1755]), which was, indeed, hairy, nonlinguistic,
forest-dwelling, somewhat social, and powerful, like the wodewose. He was the first, but far from the last, to
see the chimp as our ancestor.
Religious wars spun out of control
in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, leading to
exhaustion that led in turn to religious tolerance in a few countries (Te Brake 2017). The
slave trade, already huge, vastly increased in the 18th
century. Rapid colonial expansion led to
genocides from Australia and the Americas to west China (the Dzungarian genocide
of the mid-18th century) and Siberia. It is with settler colonialism and the slave
trade that we see a significant rise in racism and distant othering, and in the
idea that distant people are savages or otherwise inferior. More precisely, Stocking (1968) and Baker
(1998) have demonstrated that the rise of racism can be traced to its
connection with exploitative economics.
Samuel Bowles (2006, 2008) argued
that humans evolved in competing groups; the bigger and more combative groups
eliminated the smaller ones, leading to the rapid evolution of larger groups
and more warlike and murderous behavior.
Despite factual evidence to support it, this notion has been challenged.
The most recent contribution is based on a sophisticated simulation involving
comparison of a wide range of mammals. González-Forero and Gardner (2018) argued that bigger brains allow
bigger social groups and more communication, which allow better foraging, and
thus a positive feedback mechanism is created.
Sociability alone could not account for the increasing size of the human
brain over time because mammals that are highly social, actually
have smaller brains than their more independent relatives (gnus and
naked mole-rats are examples).
Competition does not either, since it has high costs that interfere with
maintaining large brains and complex behavior.
They conclude that only a widening diet and ecological niche can explain
it, pointing to social omnivores of high intelligence, such as raccoons and
wolves.
While this is a good model (cf. Anderson 2014), it does
not explain the extreme levels of intergroup violence and hatred that exist in
almost all known societies. The most likely scenario is one in which large
foraging groups expanded into new areas, displacing existing smaller
groups—initially, at least, more primitive hominins.
Nevertheless, not all human groups are combative. A few extremely peaceful ones are known.
These are typically small and threatened by larger, stronger and more
aggressive neighbors; coming to peace through fear. In the best comparative
study to date, Robarchek and Robarchek
(1998) compared the extremely peaceful Semai, with
the more violent Waorani. Both societies were fairly
similar in their everyday existence, hunting, food cultivation, system
of lineage. They practiced permissive childrearing and were gentle and tolerant
most of the time. The only difference relevant to their behavior was their
relations with outsiders. The Semai were constantly
harassed, robbed, and enslaved by the far more powerful Malays, and had no
recourse except to flee. There was little doubt that their peacefulness was
basically fear: they could not successfully resist and therefore would chose to
leave. They generalized their fear response into nonviolence in all situations. The Waorani were
able to fight back against heavy odds, succeeding in part by creating the image
of themselves as utter mad-dog fighters.
Again, they generalized this response.
The Robarcheks noted that people can choose
where to situate themselves on the fight-flight-freeze response continuum, and
then culture constructs responses.
Falk and Hildebolt (2017)
showed that societies worldwide have an average violence rate that is moderate,
but that tribal societies vary enormously.
The Semai and their neighbors pin the peaceful
end, the Waorani and the New Guinea Highland groups
anchor the warlike one. Small
hunting-gathering bands are generally relatively peaceful, and so are modern
states. Chiefdoms and early states are
particularly violent. Steven Pinker
(2011) argues that peacefulness has been increasing throughout history; figures
loosely support him, but many anthropologists consider his work on tribal
violence highly exaggerated and note that he underplays modern violence,
relying e.g. on war and murder rates without looking into genocide, slavery,
and deliberately-caused famine (Fry 2013).
In almost all cases, neighbors are enemies. Neighboring tribes and states develop
enmities that grow over time. The famous
rivalry of the French and English is typical.
Other cases include the Thai vs. the Burmese and Khmer, the Chinese vs.
the central Asian steppe peoples, the Japanese vs. the Koreans, the Amhara vs.
the Tigre and Oromo, the Aztecs vs. the Tlaxcalans,
and so on around the world. Typically, a
polity—be it a hunting-gathering band or a modern state—will ally itself with
the neighbor’s neighbors on the other side.
The hated group is thus crushed between two polities. This is a dangerous strategy, however. Once the hated group is crushed, the two
allies are suddenly each other’s’ neighbors.
They then often fight. As an
example, in the Mongol conquest of China, the Song Dynasty allied itself with
the Mongols to crush the Jin Dynasty, but once Jin was destroyed the Mongols simply went on to conquer
Song—using the Jin armies, now Mongol subjects!
Highly negative stereotypes of neighbors are
universal. Neighbors are subhuman,
immoral, disgusting, and, in short, barbarians, to the extent they are
culturally different from “us.” In non-state
societies, there is usually little contact with groups more remote than the
immediate neighbors, but some societies specialized in long-range raiding and
slave-taking on a large scale. Examples
range from the Haida and Lekwiltok of the Northwest Coast
of North America to the Vikings, some Turkic groups, and the East African
Arabs. Such groups always develop highly negative stereotypes of the
people they raid, partly to justify to themselves the cruelty they use in their
activities.
Otherwise, truly distant peoples are little
considered. Often, they are thought to
be too weird to be truly human. The
bizarre beings in Pliny—the dog-headed people, people whose faces are on their
chests, and so on—are matched by the beings in the Chinese Classic of Mountains
and Seas (Shan Hai Jing 1999), which
apparently represent shamanistic visions of spirit lands.
This brings us to the important and underappreciated fact
that worldwide, strangers are generally
welcomed. Field anthropologists have
found themselves welcomed everywhere except in societies that had had recent
and frequent negative interactions with outsiders. Even E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940), carrying
out ethnographic research on a group that had been subjected to seven major
British colonial military assaults in the recent past, managed to do a thorough
ethnography in spite of intense early suspicion. Most field ethnographers report incredible
levels of hospitality, generosity, and help.
It is the neighbors that one hates, not the aliens. Almost every comprehensive ethnography
records negative stereotypes and historic feuds with neighbors.
Stone Age Othering
As populations
grew the annual migration routes of nomadic foragers shrank and eventually
sedentism emerged as people learned how to store enough food to remain longer
in winter camps that became hamlets and then villages (Nassaney and Sassaman 1995). The
transition from larger to smaller annual migration routes corresponded with the
emergence of regional styles of tool kits, especially projectile points, that
archaeologist interpret as evidence of the emergence of regional ethnic
identities.
We begin with Marshall Sahlins’s (1972: 196-204) typology of the institutional
forms of interaction in small-scale, Stone Age, societies. In small-scale human
societies the economy and the polity are mainly organized around kinship, a
consensual normative moral order that designates social obligations based on a
set of kin categories that individuals occupy. Sahlins
notes that sharing and reciprocity are usually organized in such societies
based in kinship distance. Sharing, or what Sahlins
calls generalized reciprocity does not calculate who gets what and so there is
no quantification of debt.[2]
All the interactors have the right to take what they need and the failure to
reciprocate does not result in the giver ceasing to give. In Sahlins’s model of the “domestic mode of production this
form of interaction occurs among very close kin, usually within the household.
His diagram of kinship distance and forms of exchange (1972:199
Figure 5.1. Reciprocity and Kinship Residential Sectors) is a nested set of
circles with the household in the center. As we move out from the center to the
lineage and village sector the type of interaction becomes “balanced
reciprocity” in which a gift is expected to be repaid.[3]
Beyond the village sector is the tribal sector, and beyond that is the intertribal
sector where something called negative reciprocity is in operation. Negative
reciprocity is a relationship in which theft is legitimate. There is no
expectation of repayment. One is supposed to get as much as one can and give as
little.
Figure 1. Reciprocity and Kinship Residential Sectors Source: Sahlins 1972: 199 Figure 5.1.
This model of institutional types of
interaction is germane to understanding the ways in which individual and
collective identities operate within small-scale societies and is both similar
and different from the ways in which modern individual and collective
identities and the other operates. The self has much obligation to socially
close others and obligation decreases with social distance until it becomes
negative reciprocity involving either no obligation or active enmity. Most small-scale societies had little
inequality among lineages and so rank did not play a big role in structuring
forms of interaction.[4] We know from ethnographic studies of
small-scale societies that genders were highly differentiated, though some had
third-gender men who lived socially as women and had important jobs. But gender
differentiation was usually not accompanied by gender hierarchy. The identities of men and women were
constructed as different, but women usually had important participation in
group decision-making. And these small-scale societies usually had a form of
individualism that was organized as differentiated relations with spiritual
allies. Coming of age for each person involved a spirit quest in which a deal
was made with one or more powerful allies. Thus, the relationship with the
powers of the universe was somewhat constructed by each individual and each had
a personal relationship (or relationships) with these that changed over time.
Every person was unique with regard to his or her
relationship with spiritual others. Those individuals, both women and men, who
spent more time communicating with their spiritual allies were deemed to be
doctors or shamans who had the ability to help others ward off bad spirits
causing sickness. This form of individualism existed despite a very simple
societal division of labor in which all men were hunters and all women were gatherers.
Animistic religions saw non-humans and what moderns see as inanimate objects,
such as trees or mountains, as the other.
A mountain is a spiritual power that requires demonstrations of respect
lest it do injury. The universe is alive, and the entities require respectful
communication. Shamanic specialists become possessed by spirits and can take
the form of a bird or an animal or insect. Every person has the capability to
use spiritual allies to do harm or good to others, and so everyone could become
a witch. This possibility can undermine the solidarities and trust expected of
close kin and co-villagers, which could cross-cut the outer edges of
reciprocity in ways that reduce the ability of polities to mobilize warfare
with one another (Bean 1974).
Leadership was usually a matter of a
designated head man who welcomed visitors on ritual occasions and gave
speeches. The head man is also often entrusted with the care of the village
medicine bundle that is the symbol and substantiation of the sovereign polity.
This position usually passed from father to son, but if no son with appropriate
rhetorical skills were available the position might pass to a daughter.
Specialized leaders were sometimes designated to coordinate intergroup hunting
efforts such as deer drives. Usually the best hunter was selected for this.
In some ethnographically-known societies of sedentary
foragers the head man sometimes had more than one wife, often the sister of the
first wife (sororal polygyny). Sovereign
polities usually included one or a few villages. Beyond that, alliances were
formed based on participation in ritual feasting, dancing, gambling, reciprocal
gift-giving and support in warfare (Vayda 1967). Wars were of two kinds: line wars were ritual
encounters meant to resolve violation of collective territorial claims to
gathering or hunting sites or other transgression. The two sides would line up and throw rocks
or shoot arrows at one another until someone was injured. Then the headmen from
each side would talk about whether what had happened could resolve the issue or
not. If not, the “fighting” could continue. Eventually the issue was usually
resolved without much injury. Line wars
tended to occur among polities who shared a language or who had ties by
inter-marriage. The other kind of warfare was raiding. In a raid, a village of the
enemy was attacked, and an effort was made to exterminate all the residents.
Raid wars occurred primarily between polities that did not share a language and
between which there were few intermarriages.
The difference between line wars and
raid wars suggests an important distinction between types of negative
reciprocity. There is a big gap between indifference and a level of enmity that
justifies extermination. Close othering involves both
similarities and obligations, while distant
othering involves differences and either no obligation or negative
obligation (enmity). In many small-scale
societies the word for those who share a language often means “the people.”
This implies that others outside of this collective identity are the
non-people. This is an important form of distant othering that is similar too,
but also different from, distinctions between in-groups and out-groups in
larger scale polities. Often distinctions about differences in beliefs about
creation or differences in food preferences are used to denigrate proximate and
more distant others. All human polities have something like modern nationalism,
a collective identity in which people see themselves as like one another and
different from others. The general term for such a collective identity is
“solidarity.” Collective identities are
first constructed in kinship terms, but later they are constituted in different
ways.
Trade among small-scale societies is
usually organized as gift-giving between heads of physically adjacent polities.
Goods may travel long distances from being traded from group to group
(so-called down-the-line trade) but there is no long distance “merchants”
bringing goods from afar. This is because strangers from afar are usually seen
as trespassers and are likely to be killed. Long-distance trade or procurement
treks are extremely dangerous. An example of an internal stranger would be a
witch who is believed to use spiritual power to harm others. Such internal
strangers are often killed. Distant othering also involves stories about
giants, demons, wild men (sasquatch or big foot) and old women who steal
children and eat them (Suttles 1987: Chapter 6).
An intermediate form of distant
othering also found in some small-scale societies occurred when war captives were
taken to be traded. The pre-contact Pacific Northwest of North America feature a large, hierarchical system in which the core
polities had enough economic power to motivate the peripheral polities to
employ warfare against one another. Within the coastal polities (Haida, Kwatkiutl, Tlingit, etc.,), hereditary “big men” maintained
their status and power in a system of competitive feasting and gift-giving
known as the potlach. These maritime polities were hunter-gatherers with access
to valuable coastal food resources (marine mammals, fish and shellfish): they
had enough economic power to extract war captives from peripheral polities. The
peripheral polities raided one another and sold captives in exchange for food and other valuables. The coastal polities had ranked
lineages, slaves, and a very strong ideology of superior birth. Between five and
twenty-five percent of the population of the coastal polities were slaves
(Mitchell and Donald 1985). This was an unusual kind of core/periphery
hierarchy.
The Pacific Northwest shows the existence of
economic imperialism in the absence of pronounced commodification. A
proto-money (dentalium shells) was used as medium of exchange. But most
exchange took the form of reciprocal gift-giving carried out by village heads.
This down-the-line trade relocated war captives from distant slave raiders to
the maritime core polities. But slaves and their children in the core polities
usually became integrated into the local kinship system by marriage and
adoption: so, this was a very different kind of system from the better-known
chattel slavery based on racism that emerged in and was an important
developmental feature of the modern Europe-centered world-system (Patterson
1982). Regarding the issue of distant othering, the ability of the war-captive
slaves to regularly become integrated into the core kinship structures implies
the absence of a form of distant othering that conceptualizes subordinates as
permanently inferior (like racism). This
case is unusual both because it was a form of imperialism and core/periphery
exploitation that was not based on the project of military power from the core
to the periphery, and because it formed a core/periphery hierarchy that was not
based on racism or a form of distant othering similar to
racism. The integration of former slaves into the kin networks of the core
societies implies a lack of distant othering similar to
racism.
Othering
in Big Man and Chiefdom Systems
Human settlements and polities grew, and socially constructed
inequalities increased, at first in chiefdoms and then in early states. Big man and chiefdom polities evolved
hierarchical forms of kinship in which lineages were ranked and class
distinctions between commoners and sacred chiefs became institutionalized. Chiefs were members of lineages that were
thought to be more closely descended from founding ancestors and to have
special powers over the forces of the universe. Commoners had no legitimate
independent claim to land and were thought to be only very distantly related to
revered ancestors. This was the birth of class society and it had significant
consequences for the social construction of selves as well as close and distant
others. Land and nature, rather than seen as a living spirits that all were
empowered to placate, became the property of chiefs because of their alleged
descent from revered ancestors. Creation myths typically involved stories about
ancestor coming out of local caves or geographically dramatic islands.
Topophilia was reconstructed as legitimation of power. This provided the basis for chiefs to convert
reciprocity into centralized redistribution. Yet, the idea that the leaders and
the led were still linked by generalized reciprocity remained. As Sahlins (1972: 205) notes, “noblesse oblige
hardly cancelled out the droits du
seigneur.”
To have access to
land for horticulture, commoners had to turn over a portion of their production
to chiefs. The chiefs had obligations to the commoners, but the basis of
unequal exchange was laid in the institutionalization of land ownership. And
this was maintained by ideological constructions and by the exercise of
institutionalized coercion. Chiefs imposed taboos to regulate resource use, and
commoners who violated taboos were punished and sometimes killed. This was the
beginning of the tributary mode of accumulation.[5]
But the remaining aspects of reciprocity attached to kinship obligations were a
limitation on how large and centralized a chiefdom could be. This limitation
was eventually transformed by the emergence of states in which the connection
between power and kinship was separated, allowing priests and kings to
autonomously control resources that were not subject to reciprocity.
Cannibalism and
ritual sacrifice of war captives is known from both chiefdom cultures and early
states. This presumes distant othering, but there are interesting ironies.
Maori warriors ate enemy warriors to gain their power, though once this had
happened it became a source of pride for the eater and shame for the eaten. “I ate your grandfather” was a putdown said
by the descendent of a warrior who had eaten someone’s ancestor. The practice
of ritual human sacrifice is frequently found in archaeological evidence from
early states. Ethnographic knowledge
often implies that being sacrificed when a kind died or when a new temple was
erected was seen as a badge of honor, not a statement
about distant othering.
Bronze
Age Othering
Early states and cities first emerged in Bronze Age Mesopotamia in
a region that already had paramount chiefdoms and the beginnings of irrigated
agriculture. States are different from chiefdoms in that they have specialized
institutions of regional control and the central power of the state is less
organized around kinship. The form this took in Mesopotamian cities was
theocracy in which the temple was the state and both the city residents and the
priests were slaves of the city god. The temple economy, which tithed and
redistributed food and other goods, was on top of a kin-based economy organized
around sharing and reciprocity (Zagarell 1986). Kinship identities were still important, but
a new identity had been added –slaves of the city god. The first city to emerge was Uruk, but copycat cities emerged nearby on the flood plains
of the Tigris and the Euphrates, each organized around a different city
god. The city was the god and the state.
The collective identity was organized as membership in an urban community.
“Citizenship” was organized as obligations to the temple and rights to
participate in rituals and feasting. The
temple owned property within the city and agricultural land outside the city.
But kin groups also owned both. These
early states shared a Sumerian language and culture, but earlier
Semitic-speaking migrants from surrounding regions also became residents,
forming an ethnically distinct class of workers and servants (Yoffee 1991).
Cuneiform writing was
invented in the Mesopotamian states to keep records regarding transactions in
the temple. Mental labor and abstract
cognition allowed for the altering of the self of the ruling class and
distinguished them from the selves of the direct producers (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2015: Chapter 9).
Because the
Mesopotamian flood plain contained little stone, and because trees and timber
quickly became scarce, the cities organized long-distance trading with adjacent
regions, trading grain and pottery for copper, tin, building and precious
stones and other goods desired but not locally available. Uruk
organized what was probably the first colonial empire in which citizens of Uruk moved to quarters in distant settlements to carry out
this trade (Algaze 1989, 1993). This was also an
early example of what Philip Curtin (1984) called a “trade diaspora.” Trusted co-citizens or co-religionists take
up residence in distant locations to carry out long-distance trade. This has implications for distant othering.
Non-citizens and
non-co-religionists are not likely to observe the norm of reciprocity. Trade diasporas emerge in a situation in
which trade is profitable but trust and other institutional mechanisms that
ensure payment of debts are not in place (negative reciprocity). When minority
ethnic groups specialize in long-distance trading they become Simmel’s
stranger, an internal socially distant other. Trade diasporas lose their
function when trust and institutional mechanisms emerge that allow direct trade
with distant peoples – what Curtin calls a “trade ecumene.” The
institutionalization of money and markets allows strangers to interact with and
trust one another even though they do not know much about each other or share a
lot of cultural assumptions. Thus, does the emergence of commodification of
goods and wealth, decrease reliance on cultural consensus and facilitate
multicultural interdependence.
Bronze Age
Mesopotamia may be the birth place of a set of othering distinctions organized
around ideas of civilization, barbarism and savagery. But most healthy human societies see
themselves as the center of the universe and this conviction is usually based
on beliefs about cultural superiority vis-à-vis distant others. As reported
above, sedentary foragers already did this and they
had beliefs about the “wild man” that functioned to reproduce what they
believed authentic humans to be.
Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk in a period in
which competing city states were emerging and the palace, home of the battle
king, had emerged as an important locus of power contending with the temple
(Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2015: Chapter 8). Fragments of
early stories about Gilgamesh were woven into single “epic of Gilgamesh” during
the late Bronze Age when Gilgamesh was deified as a culture hero during the
Third Dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian restoration that occurred after the fall of the
Akkadian Empire. The epic of Gilgamesh
reflects the competitive relationship between the temple and the palace.
Gilgamesh refused to become the consort of Inanna, a powerful priestess. And
Gilgamesh got important support from his Wildman friend Enkidu, with whom he
was able to fight and defeat powerful enemies. The Enkidu figure is an
interesting instance of the idea of the noble savage. This is a recurring trope
in all systems that have a core/periphery hierarchy. Peripheral peoples are often seen as inferior
and sometimes as threatening savages, but sometimes they are depicted as noble
savages living in a pure state of nature. Distant othering in core/periphery
hierarchies seems to include both versions at least since the Bronze Age and
they contend with one another. Beliefs about the Wildman are similarly ambivalent
in many cultures (Anderson 2005; Bartra 1994, 1997).
Bronze
Age Mesopotamia also developed the threatening savage version of the distant
other. The
accumulation of stored wealth was greater than ever before, and this
constituted a license to steal for peripheral nomads. Incursions by
nomads from the periphery were an important phenomenon that influenced the
development of agrarian empires and cities in several world regions (Thompson
and Modelski 1998). The Amorite tribes were nomadic pastoralists who came into
Mesopotamia from the deserts of the northwest. In order to prevent their
incursions, the Ur III dynasty constructed a Great Wall of Mesopotamia clear
across the northern edge of the core region (Postgate 1992:43). This led to an
ideology of "subhuman barbarism" that seems to have been somewhat
like modern racism. Jerrold Cooper (1983:xxx) contends that
the Mesopotamians did not generally vilify different ethnic groups, but saw the
Gutians as savage, beastlike imbeciles, and the
Amorites as curious primitives, less horrible, if every bit as threatening
militarily, than the Guti. Cooper’s characterization
of the Sumerian beliefs about the Gutians and the
Amorites suggests that something like racism is not a uniquely modern
phenomenon. Of note here, is that the very negative distant othering in
Mesopotamia seems to have emerged regarding peoples who were
seen as threatening to the core societies. In this case Wallerstein’s
hypothesis of a connection between core/periphery hierarchy and racism is borne
out.
Peter Turchin (2003) argued
that the relevant process is one in which group solidarity is enhanced by being
on a “metaethnic frontier” in which the clash of
contending cultures produces strong cohesion and cooperation within frontier
societies, thus promoting state formation and empire formation (see also Turchin 2009). Turchin focuses
especially on relations between polities that face each other on a transition
boundary between steppe and irrigated agricultural ecological zones.
His (2009) mirror-empires model proposes that antagonistic distant
othering interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists
often resulted in an autocatalytic process in which both nomadic and farming
polities scaled up their polity sizes. This phenomenon is an instance of
Simmel’s contention that in-group solidarity is produced by between-group
competition, especially when the within-group/between-group difference involves
a large cultural divide.
Iron Age and Axial Age
Othering: The Rise of World Religions
Cities and empires rose and fell, but
they got larger in episodic events that are known as upsweeps (Inoue et 2012;
Inoue et al 2015). Empires rose because states developed the military
capability to conquer adjacent regions and the governance capability to extract
resources from the conquered regions. The law (written rules), bureaucracies,
armies, transportation technologies and the emergence of commodified exchange
using money facilitated the expansion of empires. Trading city states emerged
within the interstices of tributary empires, encouraging commodity production
and the expansion and intensification of trade networks (Chase-Dunn, Anderson,
Inoue and Alvarez 2015). The law emerged
as written rules to extend over groups of people who did not share a single
consensual moral order. This was
functional for states that had conquered and incorporated culturally different
groups. Normative order based on
consensus continued to exist, but within a framework in which the state
proclaimed and enforced laws. The state
had now become an institution that could claim to rule over peoples that spoke
different languages and had different beliefs. But authority in this situation,
is frequently seen as illegitimate and this raises the level of resistance and
rebellion. People who had been conquered often saw themselves as subject to
illegitimate power. Religious social
movements emerged in colonized regions that produced new forms of individual
and collective identities and expanded moral orders to catch up with the scale
of legal orders.
Peter
Turchin (2003: Chapter 9) notes the relevance of Ibn Khaldun’s
cyclical model of the rise and fall of regimes and the importance of changing
levels of asabiyah (loyalty, solidarity and
group feeling) as old regimes became decadent and new challengers emerged from
the desert to form new regimes (see also Amin 1980; Chase-Dunn and Anderson
2005; Anderson 2018). The phenomenon of peripheral and semiperipheral
march states and their role of these in the formation by conquest of larger and
larger empires is related to issues of solidarity and internal othering (Inoue et al 2016). As empires got larger
inequalities within states also became more extreme. Non-core polities were
usually less stratified than core polities in premodern world-systems.
Peripheral
and semiperipheral marcher lords are often alpha
males who have strong solidarity with their warriors, whereas the elites of
urbanized agrarian empires are socially distant from their soldiers and have
trouble inspiring their trust. Institutions like the harem undercut class
solidarity among men, as many poor men must go without female mates because the
king or emperor has so many.
Sex and
Empire
Walter Scheidel’s (2009a) fascinating
discussion of empires and harems employs an evolutionary psychology approach to
explain why men with power wanted to gain sexual access to large numbers of
women; but it also provides an insight into the spreading of a global moral
order that can allow distant othering. Wealthy and powerful kings could have
both the r and the K reproduction strategies.[6] But
why did monogamy become the predominant form of marriage in modern global
culture, even for rich and powerful men. Most polities had allowed polygyny
(one husband, more than one wife) for a small number of men. Human instincts
probably have not changed much over the past 2000 years, but there are few
polities remaining that allow wealthy and powerful men to have more than one
wife (at the same time). So evolutionary psychology cannot supply the answer.
In subsequent work, Scheidel (2009b) has tried to address what is known about
the causes of what he calls the institution of “socially imposed universal
monogamy” (SIUM) and its displacement of polygyny][7] in
world history. A purely historicist explanation would note that the Romans
and the Greeks were monogamous and the European polities that descended from
them eventually took over the world and so monogamy was imposed by the
powerful. Christianity got monogamy from the Romans, as a perusal of the Old
Testament will make plain. Christians took over most of the world because of
European colonialism and the rise of industrial capitalism. Thereby, the rules
of the winners became the global moral order. This is probably the best overall
explanation, although Scheidel points out that there
is very little research on the history of colonialism and monogamy that would
substantiate this account.
Henrich et al 2012 have
published a study of polygyny and monogamy that suggests several ways in which
SIUM is functional for society. This raises the issue of the direction of the
causal arrow between winners and monogamy. Is SIUM a competitive advantage in
competition among polities, and if so how does that work? Since the gender
birthrate is naturally 50/50, elite polygyny deprives some men of wives. This
is a well-known problem for modern religious groups who practice polygyny. Many
young men have no prospect of marrying because older richer men have taken most
of the women. Henrich et al (2012) contend that monogamous
marriage systems reduce competition among males for mates and decrease the
number of unattached males who are an important group in the commission of
violent crimes. So, monogamy decreases competition among men and lowers the
crime rate. And women also benefit from SIUM because it reduces the average
male/female age difference within marriages, lowers the fertility rate, and
reduces gender inequality and within-household violence. Henrich et al.
(2012) also contend that polygyny may have been functional for war-making
empires because it increased the size of the pool of unattached young males who
could serve as soldiers who were strongly motivated to capture women from other
polities.
But it also likely that
SIUM facilitates greater solidarity between elites and their soldiers than does
elite polygyny. Greater solidarity between classes is a big advantage in
competition among states. Soldiers and citizens are more likely to identify
with, and to support, leaders who appear to follow the general moral rules
regarding legitimate access to women. This might have been an important source
of Greek and Roman advantages over their polygynous opponents. However, once
monogamy became sanctified by the religion of the European West, it became part
of the cultural package that European colonialism imposed on most of the rest
of the world. So economic and military power, as well as possible functional
advantages must be an important part of the explanation of the spread of SIUM.
And, once a global moral order has emerged, emulation of global modernity also
becomes a factor. China was never a colony, but the Peoples Republic made
polygyny illegal in 1955. Laws prohibiting polygyny were adopted in 1880
in Japan as part of the modernization effort that was the Meiji Restoration. Post-colonial
India made polygyny illegal in 1953 (Henrich et al 2012:
657). Therefore, the global spread of monogamy was a matter of comparative
advantage in warfare, imposition by the victors and emulation. This is relevant
for our examination of othering because class relations within polities are
part of othering and because the expansion of polities and the rise of the West
has produced convergence on a global moral order in which cannibalism, ritual
human sacrifice and polygyny are proscribed. This reduces the cultural
differences upon which distant othering is usually based.
The rise of the world religions[8] during and after the
Axial Age[9] display the
interaction between social movements and forms of governance. World religions
in our sense separate the moral order from kinship, allowing for and
encouraging the inclusion of non-kin into the circle of protection. This is the
expansion of human rights beyond the bounds of kinship and the expansion of
what Peter Turchin (2016a) calls “Ultrasociety”
– altruistic behavior among non-kin.
Marvin Harris (1977) pointed to the frequency of ritual cannibalism
practiced on enemies in systems of small scale polities. In small systems
non-kin are not really humans. They are enemy others that are not due any
positive reciprocity (Sahlins 1972). The question of who the humans are and who
are not the humans is important in all cultures. In small-scale polities the
distinction between “the people” and the non-people is usually a mixture of
kinship relations and familiarity with a language. The moral order applies to
the circle of the people and heavy othering sees the non-people as not fully
human.[10] When interaction
networks and polities expanded, important debates occurred as to whether newly
encountered peoples had souls, or not. The rise of what we currently call
humanity as a social construction was a long slow, back and forth and uneven
process that continues in the current struggle over citizenship.
World
religions locate great agency in the individual person even if it is only the
right to declare obedience. To become a
member of the moral order a convert must confess and proclaim belief in the
godhead. This is the act of an individual person. One’s own action is required.
Non-world religions usually tie membership to one’s birth parents. Salvation is
also a further democratization of the afterlife. Now the masses too may go to heaven or become
enlightened.
Marvin
Harris (1977) contend that the rise of world religions was functional for
expanding empires because they included the conquered populations within the
moral order of the conquerors. This proscribed cannibalism and reduced the
amount of resistance mounted by prospective conquerees.
The king makes you pay tribute and taxes, but he will not eat you. Most world
religions began as social movements from the semiperiphery
or the periphery (Bactria, Palestine) that were eventually adopted by the
emperors. Prophets and charismatic leaders mobilized cadres who spread the word
orally and with written documents. Sects and communities of believers were
organized, eventually producing formally structure churches. Older institutions
resisted, often repressing the new movements, but they continue to spread, in
some cases becoming conquering armies, and in other cases becoming adopted by
kings and emperors. Some of the world
religions were monotheistic, but others had no godhead at all except the path
to enlightenment. Peter Turchin’s (2016a: Chapter 9) depiction of the rise of the
world religions during the Axial Age focusses on the importance these moral
orders had for the construction of legitimate authority. The king and even the emperor were supposed
to also obey the religious commandments, at least in theory. This gave the
conquered a claim to membership in the moral community and provided a basis for
claims against the authorities if they were violating the rules. Turchin mentions that monotheism puts God above the
Emperor, but in China the same function was performed by the idea of the
mandate of heaven without a daddy in the sky. These religions often include a
large dollop of magical wishful thinking that gives hope to the downtrodden,
such as the promise of immortality.
There
is a well-developed and convincing literature on early Christianity as a social
movement (Blasi 1988; Stark 1996; Mitchell, Young and Bowie 2006). The
interesting thing already mentioned is world-systemic context of the origin of
the movement. Christ and his followers emerged in a context of a powerful Roman
colonialism in which the colonized peoples were faced with overwhelming force.
The ideology of individual salvation and rendering unto Caesar what is
Caesar’s, with concentration on the rewards of life after death was a powerful
medicine for those who faced a mighty Roman imperialism. Paul’s mission to
other colonized peoples and the delinking of salvation from ethnic origin was a
recipe that allowed the movement to spread back to the poor peoples of the
core. And eventually it was adopted by the Roman emperors themselves as a
universalistic ideology that could serve as legitimation for a multi-ethnic
empire. The prince of peace and salvation ironically proved to be a fine
motivator for later imperial projects such as the reconquest of Spain from the
Moors and the conquest of Mesoamerica and the Andes (Padden 1970). And as Cora Dubois (2007:116) has
said, it also worked for the conquered as a way for them to survive
psychologically and to adapt to a world in which their indigenous lifeways were
coming to an end (see Chase-Dunn’s discussion on “revitalization movements”).[11]
Another interesting characteristic
of early Christianity is that it was primarily an identity movement. The early
Christians did not propose to change the larger social or political order
(Blasi 1988). They simply wanted the freedom to be allowed to have dinner
together in Christ’s name. Repression of the movement by authorities who saw
this as a violation of religious propriety was a driving force in the formation
of the early Christian communities.
Hinduism
and Confucianism are not very proselytizing but they both spread successfully
because they provided a new justification for hierarchy and
state-formation. The spread of Hinduism
to mainland and island Southeast Asia occurred because its notion of the
god-king (deva-raja) provided a useful ideology for the centralization of state
power in a context of smaller contending polities (Wheatley 1975). Confucianism
provided a different justification for state power based on the notion of the
mandate of heaven and it spread from its original heartland to the rest of
China and Korea.
East
Asia also saw periodic eruptions of popular heterodox religious movements. Mass
heterodox movements are known to have been a recurrent feature of East Asian
dynastic cycles (Anderson 2019). During
a period of peasant landlessness during the Han dynasty large numbers of poor
people were drawn to worship the Queen Mother of the West who grew longevity
peaches that, once eaten, made people immortal (Hill 2015). The Queen Mother
lived in a mythical palace on a mountain somewhere in the West. This idea seems
to have been present as early as the Shang Dynasty, but recurrent eruptions of
the worship of the Queen Mother corresponded with periods in which there were
large numbers of landless peasants. The attraction of stressed masses, to “pie
in the sky when you die” reoccurs in world history.
The world religions developed
important new forms of individualism and new kinds of collective solidarity
that legitimated and facilitated larger empires and trade networks. These were
important steps on the way to modern individualism and human rights.
Chinese and Japanese
Distant Othering
The Chinese are famous for
their low opinion of “barbarians,” but, as usual, the story is more
complex. Early groups now called
“barbarians” (or the Chinese equivalent) were called by specific ethnic terms
that do not appear to have been particularly pejorative at the time. They were simply the names of the
groups. Most were neighbors and thus
often enemies, and their lifestyles were judged negatively, but they were not
quite as uncouth and loathsome as the English word suggests. The literature from the Warring States period
and later Han Dynasty histories refers to the Rong and Di in the north and
northwest, the Qiang in the west, the Koreans in the
east, and the Yue in the south. The Qiang and of course the Koreans are still with us. The Rong and Di were early conquered and
assimilated, and we have no idea what languages they spoke. The “Hundred Yue” were a diverse group,
speaking a wide range of languages including Tai, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese
(“Viet” is the Vietnamese pronunciation of “Yue”). They were judged negatively in proportion to
how different their cultures were from the Chinese. Unassimilated ones were
“raw” barbarians, Sinicized ones were “cooked.”
In the Han Dynasty, the Xiongnu
state arose in Mongolia and conquered southward, taking a large slice of
northwest China and menacing the entire country. They were the first of many steppe empires to
attack China’s frontiers. China’s
attitude toward them were more negative and they were viewed as the other. The
Chinese described them as wandering nomads, “people of the mutton-reeking
tents,” and other unflattering stereotypes.
A whole literary tradition developed from those stuck among the supposed
uncouth nomads, whether as prisoners, as brides, or as traders.
Over time, and usually through conquest, northwest
Chinese grew accustomed to steppe ways, and were laughed at by other Chinese,
who saw them as sunken into barbarism with their mutton, yogurt, kumys (fermented mares’ milk), and rough clothing suitable
for horse-riding (Anderson 1988, 2014).
The steppe nomads developed a low opinion of settled
people: slothful, weak, degenerate, eating soft foods that weakened them. This stereotype they carried with them into
Central Asia, where they attacked Iranic societies,
only to learn quickly that Iranians could fight hard whether settled or
not. A steady drift of Turkic steppe
people settling in towns and cities complicated the picture.
Once most Yue were conquered and assimilated into south
China, Chinese began to regard southeast Asians in an increasingly slighting
way. Man and fan became more
prejudicial terms for foreigners, especially southern ones. The Europeans were assimilated to this
slot. Famous in English colonial days in
Hong Kong and southeast Asia was the Cantonese insult fan kuai lou (Mandarin
fan gueizi),
literally “foreign ghost person” but usually translated “foreign devil.” However, fan
was also continually used as a simple nonjudgmental word for “foreign.”
Quite separate and distinct are the Chinese myths of the ye lang, “wild
man.” This is the Chinese version of the
Tibetan yeti. Both are local forms of the universal
human belief in wild, hairy, humanoid creatures that do not speak but are
powerful and wily—in short, “savages” of the “wodewose”
form. They most likely represent local
stories inspired by bears, monkeys, or memories of the orangutan (once native
to China). In Tibet, hairs and
footprints of “yeti” are often found,
and so far, have invariably turned out to be from bears. Unlike even the rawest of raw barbarians, the
ye lang and
yeti are not considered to be fully
human.
The Japanese in early times competed with the
Emishi (presumably related or like the Ainu) and judged them harshly as uncouth
and uncultured sorts—true barbarians.
They continued through time to regard outsiders as frightening,
uncultured, and unpleasant. As usual,
this was most true of their immediate neighbors, especially the Koreans. The Chinese were greatly respected. Truly strange aliens, the Europeans, suddenly
and mysteriously appeared in the 16th century, and were widely
distrusted—not without reason, since the Portuguese soon started to plot
invasion. This led to a closed,
xenophobic mindset that dominated well into the late 20th century.
It is often claimed that racism is a
modern phenomenon, and certainly if we define it as differences among humans
regarding genetic makeup then it is. Genes are a recent discovery, but earlier
ideas about blood and phylogenetic differences in skin color, facial features,
hair color and texture, etc. have all been used in distant othering. Cedric
Robinson (1983) found evidence of white racism toward Africans in medieval
Europe, thus concluding that racism existed before European colonialism and the
predominance of capitalism. Still, John Craig Venter, who helped mapped the
human genome has argued that “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific
basis; and… there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another in the five
Celera genomes” (Venter 2001: 317) and “skin colour
as a surrogate for race is a social concept, not a scientific one” (BBC News
2007) (also, see Fields and Fields 2014 Racecraft).
The modern story of racism focusses on
white racism and the non-white peoples of lands that were colonized by the
Europeans. Whiteness itself was invented
in this process. And the categorization of non-white peoples into different,
and inferior races was a complicated process. From the perspective of distant
othering this was the construction of superior and inferior identities to
justify genocide and exploitation. But
the exact terms of the constructions of racial hierarchy took some interesting
turns. One of the most important was a dispute in 16th century Spain
about whether “Indians” (indigenous peoples of North and South America) had
souls. Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish priest, contended that the Indians did
have souls and were fully human. He opposed slavery and the encomienda and is
seen as a progenitor of the human rights movement.
Regarding the effects of racist
slavery on the slaves and slave owners Toni Morrison (2017) uses several
examples to demonstrate how sadistic and morally depraved slave owners
(including the wives) were, while claiming the savagery of the Africans. The
most compelling examples come from the writings of Thomas Thistlewood
who documents the repeated rapes of African women in the same way he documents
his household management details. It is cold, removed and written with no
emotion, even making a notation about whether he had an orgasm (see Burnard
2004 for a collection of Thistlewood’s writings).
Another appalling example was from The
History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, written from the slave's perspective
(Prince, 1831). In it, is a description the wife of a slave owner beating Mary
for a broken vase which Mary was not at fault for breaking. She beats Mary
until she is exhausted, takes a break, and gets back to beating Mary. Morrison
(2017:29) writes, "how hard they work to define the slave as inhuman,
savage, when in fact the definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the
punisher." [12]
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (2000)
contend that the connection between race and slavery emerged in England during
the 17th century as Africa became the main source of slaves for New
World plantations. Before this, slavery
was a legal status that could be held by any person, not just Africans. The
story of the incorporation of Africa into the expanding Europe-centered
world-system is relevant for our study of distant othering. Africa was an external arena, largely
disconnected from the emerging modern world-system in the long 16th
century. The plantation complex was an
organizational structure based on the Roman latifundium in which slave labor
was used to produce agricultural commodities. Its use in the production of
sugar cane began on islands in the Mediterranean and then spread to islands in
the Atlantic adjacent to Africa and then to the Americas (Curtin 1990). The Atlantic slave trade arose to supply
labor to the plantation economies of the European colonies in the Americas.
Africa was a source of labor power obtained by buying slaves that were captives
of African polities specializing in capturing and selling people (Rodney 1970;
1974). This was a phase of plunder and parasitism that had severe consequences
for African societies and produced a racialize core/periphery hierarchy. Most of Africa was colonized by European
states only in the last quarter of the 19th century. At the Berlin
Conference on Africa in 1884 the European states parceled out Africa. This was
an effort by the British to peacefully incorporate rising Germany into a world
economy in which Britain was still the hegemon. But it gave the Europeans a
stake in colonial economies within Africa and transitioned from plunder to
parasitism (Wallerstein 1986).
There is a huge gulf between the
traditional rivalry of the French and English –fighting a lot but seeing each
other as fully human, and frequently shifting residence, intermarrying, and
admiring each other’s achievements –and the extreme racism seen in the
enslavement of Africans and Native Americans by European colonists. Most
othering is somewhere in between. There is a vast range, with societies
distributed along a complex gradient.
The Rise of Secular
Humanism and Science
Humanism and science are core
ideologies of modernity. Usually these are understood as products of the
European Enlightenment but they both have roots in the world religions of the
Axial Age discussed above. And secular humanism was much more central to both
Buddhism and Confucianism than it was to the daddy in the sky religions of the
West. As we have already mentioned,
world religions make a crucial step toward individualism when they separate
kinship from the moral order by erecting a moral community in which an
individual can become a member by means of confession or self-declaration.
Locating this power at the level of the individual person is the beginning of
modern individualism. The world
religions all did this. The rise of
humanism also raises the issue of how human nature is conceived and where the
boundaries between the human and the not human are placed. These boundaries
continued to evolve as polities and trade networks got larger.
Secular humanism and science are
still challenged by religious fundamentalism, and these are sometimes
counter-hegemonic ideologies that mobilize resistance to contemporary global
institutions. Though religious fundamentalism
is a recurrent phenomenon, it is notable that it did not play a very important
counter-hegemonic role in the world revolutions of the past. However, since the
demise of the Soviet Union and the secular socialist and communist movements of
the 20th century, religious fundamentalism has taken an increasingly
counter-hegemonic role (Wallerstein 2008; Moghadam (2009; 2012).
Nationalism is perhaps the most
important collective identity in the contemporary world-system. Ethnic
identities have long emerged and ethnogenesis has been an important process
since the Stone Age (Barth 1969; Hall 1984).
Benedict Anderson’s (1991) important study of nation-building focusses
on the importance of literacy and the printing press as communications
technologies that facilitated the growth of what he called “imagined
communities.”[13]
Nationalism is constructed in different ways, and its strength varies across
countries and over time within countries.
Civic nationalism is based on shared histories, traditions and customs.
Racial nationalism is based on beliefs about hereditary similarities.
Patriotism is a sentiment that motivates cooperation and sacrifice for the
nation. As with other collective identities, rituals, symbols, songs, political
constitutions and historical memories are important for producing and
reproducing membership. The solidarity produced by nationalism is a vital
component of the ability of countries to compete with one another, especially
militarily.
Furthermore, the deeply
institutionalized nature of nationalism is an important feature of global
society that demonstrates the power of socially constructed solidarities that
are beyond the scope of genetically produced altruism. Nationalism is viewed as
part of the global moral order but so is individualism, which justifies a
degree of distance from nationalism and patriotism. Individuals are supposed to
be loyal to their nation, but they are also supposed to be loyal to their
families and to themselves. Hyper-nationalism
seems to reemerge in periods in which the global political economy is in
crisis, as in the first half of the 20th century and the early
decades of the 21st century.
Fascism in the 20th century was primarily organized around
hyper-nationalism.[14] It can be understood as a reaction against
internationalism and global cosmopolitanism, that gains strength when there is
economic and political turmoil. People go back to earlier collective identities
when they feel threatened or afraid.
The abolition of slavery and
serfdom, decolonization and the extension of citizenship have been important
modern processes that have had large consequences for both within-society and
between society othering. The French Revolution was a blow against monarchy and
the divine right of kings and for the legitimation of governance from below ---
popular sovereignty. The extension of
the franchise to men of no property and to women and the abolition of legal
slavery were important developments in the further institutionalization of
human rights. These developments were made possible by social movements from
below that were mobilized by elites that were competing with other elites, and
by energy regime transitions that reduced the reliance on unskilled human
labor. The core/periphery hierarchy has
not been abolished and global inequality is still huge, but neocolonialism is
still an improvement over colonialism.
Individualism is another pillar of
modernity. Possessive, honorific,
socialist and anarchist individualism are forms that vie with one another in the
context of social changes that increasingly locate legitimacy and
responsibility at the level of the person (Meyer 2009). Beck and Beck (2002)
call the organizational and cultural features of this transition
“individualization.” It corresponds with
the reorganization of work and occupations that has produced the replacement of
the proletariat with the precariat (Standing 2011; 2014; Kalleberg
2009). The human rights movement
supports the idea that individuals are unique and should be empowered. This strong
emphasis on individual freedom has been an important legitimation for
capitalism, but it does not follow that individualism should be attacked by
those who wish to organize a more humane and less ecologically destructive form
of human society. Human rights and
individualism are enemies of distant othering.
The current wave of anti-immigrant
sentiment and racism can be understood as a reactionary response to neoliberal
globalization that scape-goats certain people for problems caused by neoliberal
capitalism. Distant othering is back in
the form of white nationalism, shithole countries, terrorists and MS-13
animals. Alternative forms of progressive cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism
are in retreat, as is neoliberal globalization. We are entering a period of
deglobalization corresponding with U.S. hegemonic decline. But the long and uneven upward trend toward
the extension of citizenship and humanism is likely to continue after the
current downturn has had its day.
What about the future of distant
othering and racism? Transhumanism, cyborgs and machines that are smarter than
humans are going to provide opportunities for more distant othering in the
future. And scientific racism is still around. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) are
still infamous. More recently we have the work of Cochrane and Harpending (2009) who summarize the evidence from the
HAPMAP study that shows that biological change among humans has speeded up over
the past 10,000 years contrary to what most social scientists believe, but then
they go on to speculate about how this could account for uneven development of
different world regions and inequalities among contemporary groups. The
implication is that existing inequalities have been caused by genetically-based
differences in intelligence. The winners
really are smarter and the losers are getting what they deserve!!.
Fields and Fields (2014) call it by its correct name – Racecraft, a jedi
mind trick used to justify exploitative, repressive action. Color-blind racism
and the idea of racial formations are mainly reformulations of the idea of
structural racism – a focus on unequal outcomes across racial groups that does
not tell us much about the causes these outcomes.
While we are in the midst of a downturn in the expansion and institutionalization
of human rights, the long-run evolutionary trend has been toward more inclusive
solidarities and the extension of citizenship to the whole human species. The
recent rise of hate crimes and atrocities that are occurring around gender,
race, ethnicity and nationalism are repugnant, but the idea of status threat
implies that these signal that the status characteristics organized around
gender and race are changing, and in the long run gender and racial equality
will become more accepted and institutionalized. While racial fears are still used by
politicians to mobilize support for reactionary actions and policies, we think
that humanity will construct a democratic and collectively rational global
commonwealth in which conflicts can be resolved peacefully. This is by no means
inevitable because we have developed the technical capability to destroy
ourselves. This could happen, but unless it is very thorough, the humans will
survive and will eventually get back to something like the situation we are now
in. We are hopeful that the 21st century will not be as bad as the
first half of the 20th century was and that the 22nd
century will be much better. The long run trajectory of distant othering gives
us hope.
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