The desire of intellectuals for some grand theory that will
explain complex patterns with some solitary and simple factor has
produced many ideas that do not stand up under scrutiny, but which
have nevertheless had widespread acceptance — and sometimes
catastrophic consequences — in countries around the world.
The theory of genetic determinism which dominated the early 20th
century led to many harmful consequences, ranging from racial
segregation and discrimination up to and including the Holocaust.
The currently prevailing theory is that malice of one sort or
another explains group differences in outcomes. Whether the lethal
results of this theory would add up to as many murders as in the
Holocaust is a question whose answer would require a detailed study
of the history of lethal outbursts against groups hated for their
success.
These would include murderous mob violence against the Jews in
Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire, and the Ibos in Nigeria, among others. Class-based mass
slaughters of the successful would range from Stalin’s
extermination of the kulaks in the Soviet Union to Pol Pot’s wiping
out of at least a quarter of the population of Cambodia for the
crime of being educated middle class people, as evidenced by even
such tenuous signs as wearing glasses.
Minorities who have been more successful than the general
population have been the least likely to have gotten ahead by
discriminating against politically dominant majorities. Yet it is
precisely such minorities who have attracted the most mass violence
over the centuries and in countries around the world.
All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United
States would not add up to as many murders as those committed in
one year by mobs against the Jews in Europe, the Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire or the Chinese in Southeast Asia.
What is there about group success that inflames mobs in such
disparate times and places, not to mention mass-murdering
governments in Nazi Germany or the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia? We
can speculate about the reasons but there is no escaping the
reality.
Groups that lag behind have often blamed their lags on
wrong-doing by groups that are more successful. Since sainthood is
not common in any branch of the human race, there is seldom a lack
of sins to cite, including haughtiness by those who happen to be on
top for the moment. But the real question is whether these sins —
real or imagined — are actually the reason for different levels of
achievement.
Intellectuals, whom we might expect to counter mass hysteria
with rational analysis, have all too often been in the vanguard of
those promoting envy and resentment of the successful.
This has been especially true of people with degrees but without
any economically meaningful skills that would create the kinds of
rewards they expected or felt entitled to.
Such people have been prominent as both leaders and followers of
groups promoting anti-Semitic policies in Europe between the two
World Wars, tribalism in Africa and changing Sri Lanka from a
country once renowned for its intergroup harmony to a nation that
descended into ethnic violence and then a decades-long civil war
with unspeakable atrocities.
Such intellectuals have inflamed group against group, promoting
discrimination and/or physical violence in such disparate countries
as India, Hungary, Nigeria, Czechoslovakia and Canada.
Both the intellectuals’ theory of genetic determinism as the
reason for group differences in outcomes and their opposite theory
of discrimination as the reason have created racial and ethnic
polarization. So has the idea that it must be one or the other.
The false dichotomy that it must be one or the other leaves more
successful groups with a choice between arrogance and guilt. It
leaves less successful groups with the choice of believing that
they are inherently inferior for all time or else that they are
victims of the unconscionable malice of others.
When innumerable factors make equal outcomes virtually
impossible, reducing those factors to genes or malice is a formula
for needless and dangerous polarization, whose consequences have
often been written in blood across the pages of history.
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