Have We Evolved Beyond Racism?

No.

First, consider the biological reason. The brain physiology underlying our minds has not evolved appreciably since the stone age. Not only every race but every tribe considered itself chosen by God to kill the others. There has not been enough time for our brains to have undergone significant biological evolution. We have their stone age brains.

Second, the cultural reason. Surely we have evolved beyond ancient mindsets by cultural evolution? I am afraid that the answer here, also, is no. Certainly, we have made progress in the past 150 years. But we have not left racism behind. Instead we have just pushed it into our subconscious minds. It still calls the shots in many cases, and often determines what we do, but we may not be aware of it.

The major example of which we Americans, and observers from around the world, are aware is the utter determination of the Republican Party (which is disproportionately white compared to the American population) to destroy Barack Obama. They were confident that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election. When Obama won re-election, the Republicans went to Plan B: destroy Obama. I consider their subconscious motivation to be racism. Here’s why.

Obama is a lame duck. There is no political need to destroy Obama; if Republicans succeed, they will have President Joe Biden. (Similarly, Democrats held back from impeaching George W. Bush, not wishing to have President Dick Cheney.) If there is no political reason to destroy him, then there must be a personal reason.

How do we know that the Republican attacks on Obama are not merely politically motivated? We know this because we can scientifically test this hypothesis: If the Republican hatred of Barack Obama were politically motivated, then they would hate him less than they hated Bill Clinton. But, as it turns out, they hate him much much more.

And the evidence for this? There are, as I see it, three differences between Bill Clinton (while he was president) and Barack Obama. They are as follows.

First, Barack Obama has high ethical standards than Bill Clinton did as president. Instead of having a Monica Lewinsky hanging around him, Obama is a morally upright husband and father. The Obama family is the picture-perfect American family. (In this way Obama also compares favorably to John F. Kennedy.) This should be a reason that Republicans, who claim to be God’s representatives of purity and morality upon the face of this sordid planet, would like Obama better than Clinton. Therefore the ethical difference between Clinton and Obama cannot be the reason for Republican hatred of Obama.

Second, Barack Obama is more politically and fiscally conservative than Clinton. Republicans decry Obamacare as socialist, but it is much, much less socialist, and incorporates more market forces, than did the ill-fated 1993 health care plan proposed by Bill Clinton. Republicans reacted strongly against the Clinton plan, but not with the ferocity of their attack on Obama. Obama’s comparative fiscal conservativeness should be a reason that Republicans would like Obama better than they liked Clinton. Therefore the political difference between Clinton and Obama cannot be the reason for Republican hatred of Obama.

A third difference is race. Clinton is white and Obama is black (actually, biracial, but he identifies with his black heritage). This is the only reason that I can think of that would make Republicans hate Obama worse than they hated Clinton. And it is clearly a personal, intense hatred.

Of course, Republicans forced a government shutdown during the first Clinton Administration also. The federal government shut down all but emergency services twice: from November 14 through November 19, 1995 and from December 16, 1995 to January 6, 1996, a total of 28 days. As of tomorrow, the 2013 government shutdown will have reached the same number of days as the first shutdown, in November of 1995. Republicans appear resolved to continue the shutdown even if it means defaulting on contractual funds on October 17. And this time, we have all seen evidence of the extreme antipathy that Republicans have showed toward Obama. They have shown him the kind of disdain that slavery advocates—from the Union states, the confederate states having seceded—showed Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

As further evidence that Republican antipathy is not merely political, consider that the Republicans could achieve their aims in a constitutional manner. They could pass a bill repealing Obamacare in both the house and senate, and have the president sign it. He won’t, because he won re-election in 2012 largely on the issue of Obamacare. The constitutional way for Republicans to have their way would have been to win the 2012 election. Instead, they pass laws creating programs then refuse to fund those same programs.

I believe that in the long run American history will evaluate Obama the same way as it depicts Lincoln. At the time, many strong voices attacked Lincoln as a dictator who wanted to ruin the United States by giving black people the rights of citizenship. Today, those voices are buried in the dustbin of history under a patina of disgust. Similarly, I believe, the Republican voices of our day will be derided in the same way as are the 1865 voices in support of slavery. The party of angry old white men, and a few angry young white men, and a very very small number of angry Latinos and blacks, will dwindle into an insignificance from which their stockpiles of guns cannot resurrect them.

There are other ways in which Republican positions have racist effects. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions from human activity, for which white industrial nations are largely responsible. But most of the burden of famine and disease will be borne by nations dominated by people of color, especially in Africa. Republicans, I assume, do not hold their global warming denialism with racist intent. But subconsciously they might be thinking, who cares about a bunch of Africans?

Of course, Republicans will claim they are not racists. And they may honestly believe they are not. But I conclude for the above reasons that racism is operating in their subconscious minds. We are all cavemen in modern clothes, some of us more than others.

It's Official: Republicans Reject Altruism

Now for some late-breaking news about altruism. (By late-breaking I mean less than a week old. I usually get month or year old news to you.)


President Barack Obama made a statement that sounds like a completely non-controversial, common sense description of altruism as it plays out in our communities and in our nation. Here is the original quote. Obama was talking to small business owners: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

I cannot imagine that anyone would object to this. Businesses do not teach their employees how to read and write and add and subtract. Some businesses build their own private roads, but those roads connect to highways that are built by counties, states, and the federal government. If you’ve got a business, you did not build the schools and roads. (I plan to operate a small business myself soon, so I can say soon that Obama’s statement reflects the common sense beliefs of a small business owner.) Businesses and families can thrive only within stable communities, bound together by altruism, which is facilitated by reasonable regulations and reasonable taxes.

Altruism, as I have written several times previously, is doing well by doing good. One animal (such as a human) does good things to and for another animal of the same species, and both of the animals prosper as a result. There are innumerable examples of altruism, confirmed by observation and (thanks to people like Martin Nowak) mathematics. It is one of the clearest components of evolutionary theory. And it is intuitively obvious to all of us.

Mitt Romney, however, had to attack Barack Obama for this statement. Obama clarified that he meant that if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build the schools, roads, and bridges. On August 13, Romney attacked even more vigorously, saying that this context was even worse than the original statement. Perhaps Romney, and therefore the mainstream of the Republican Party, envision a future in which America consists of individuals who do not help one another out but just fight and struggle with one another for dominance. Gated communities that are entirely self-contained? I cannot believe that Republicans are stupid enough to believe this. I suspect that Romney simply attacks anything Obama says without even thinking about it. If Obama said the sky is blue, Romney would say that this is Obama’s Democratic bias, and that the sky is really Republican red. Long ago John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself,” and until now pretty much everyone accepted this as true. Welcome to the Republican vision of what America should be like. Or not; as I said, I think Mitt spoke without thinking.

Mitt Romney is not the only one to speak without thinking. When Joe Biden said, this week, that the Republicans want to put people (he was speaking to a largely black audience) back in chains, he easily won the Stupidest Statement Award. Where did Obama find this clown anyway? Biden is the same one who emailed all of Obama’s supporters and said that if Obama did not win the election it was their fault for not giving more money. As one of those followers, I emailed my response: that this was an offensive statement. But while Joe Biden is destroying altruism by clownish incompetence, it appears that Republicans are destroying it deliberately.

If Mitt Romney makes a big deal about attacking Obama on the issue (previously, non-issue) of altruism, I can only wonder if he has any ideas of his own. Perhaps American businesses can prosper by investing their money in overseas banks the way he does? If Romney makes the rich richer, will this automatically lift up the middle class? The rich have been getting richer, and the middle class has been getting poorer (especially by debt burden). Raising up the rich has not raised up the middle class in recent years, and there is no reason to expect that it would in the future.

This is just one more example of Republicans taking on what should be a non-partisan topic—something confirmed by science—and attacking it. Evolution, global warming, stem cells, and now altruism. As a biology instructor, what can I do? Do I need to ask the Republican Party whether carbon atoms really exist before I teach about molecular structure? The Bible does not, after all, say that carbon atoms exist. I can only hope that this example is extreme; but I would never have guessed that altruism would be treated as a dangerous theory either.

Good luck to all of you altruists.

A similar essay appears on my evolution blog.

Politics and Religion again

At the moment I am writing numerous other things, which at the moment are not connected with this blog. But I hope to write more things for this blog very soon. I just want to reassure you that this blog is not dead. If you have not checked on the archives, particularly some of the earliest posts, please do so. An agnostic is not someone who carelessly decides to not bother thinking about what, if anything, God might be, but one who is always asking new questions and looking for new ways of thinking about what God might be.

But I have noticed that in the tumultuous landscape of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain are the leading contenders. Both are bedeviled with sexual scandals--those of Cain alleged, those of Gingrich confirmed. The Republicans still consider themselves the defenders of Christian family values. But it is Barack Obama, and his family, that actually live in a Christian manner. Christianity is not something you say but something you do.

The Church of Hopeful Uncertainty: A Message from Frank Schaeffer

In the 1970s and 1980s, Francis Schaeffer was an iconic figure among evangelical Christians. He popularized the intellectual underpinnings of religious and political conservatism. Perhaps his principal sidekick was his son Franky, who wrote his own books, including one that defends capitalism as the Christian system by which the world should run. Franky now goes by Frank and visited Tulsa yesterday to tell us about the changes that have emerged in his thinking since the 1980s. He is now appalled at the monster that political evangelical Christianity created.

Schaeffer and many others describe the political right, today, as the American Taliban. It is no joke. The religious right does not want democracy; they want to establish a religious dictatorship, and they are accumulating caches of weapons to do so. Polls repeatedly show that a large minority of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. There is no more opportunity for dialogue or compromise with this position than it is possible to have meaningful compromise with Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Schaeffer pointed out that the conservatives among whom he grew up, such as his father and William F. Buckley, would not recognize the monstrous form of conservatism that now dominates the political scene. Schaeffer said that Barack Obama represents our last and best hope to avoid a religious dictatorship in the United States; if his presidency fails, a religious dictatorship is nearly certain. The motivation of the religious right is not godliness—an astonishingly large number of the leaders of the religious right lead immoral lives—but power, and they have no more esteem for truth than they do for godliness. He also pointed out that conservative leaders would publically talk about Christianity but in secret they would laugh at the Christians who played into their hands. Schaeffer changed his views when he realized that he would not want to live in the world he was trying to create, and that the secularists whom he publicly opposed were better people, personally and morally, than the leaders of the religious right. Schaeffer said that if Obama fails, this nation is screwed for the next hundred years.

Schaeffer also talked about what he now considers to be true religion. To the American Taliban, all that matters is that you assent to certain religious doctrines and are willing to use any and all means to oppose those who disagree with them. But to those who are truly religious, the right way is openness to the beauty and awe of the universe. The American Taliban fantasizes that it fully understands the truth; but we can never know the full truth. Our brains are biological structures that evolved within a physical universe; we are “stuck in” the universe and cannot objectively observe it or ourselves. Schaeffer opposes fundamentalist atheists as much as he does fundamentalist Christians, although, of course, the former are not dangerous like the latter. He describes his religious affiliation as “the church of hopeful uncertainty.” We cannot understand the universe any more than an infant can. We can never be certain but there is reason for us to believe that goodness and love are fundamental truths. Theology just gives us a rationalization for what we already know is true and good. In saying this, Schaeffer echoed the views of evolutionary psychologist Michael Gazzaniga, although Schaeffer may never have heard of him.

Schaeffer said nearly everything that people like me are saying, but much more powerfully—and from a position of being a former insider in the religious right.