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I appreciate the discussion around Trump lately, but I've had this idea in my head that I can't shake, so I guess I have to post about it now. It's about liberalism again.
When I get bored at work, I tend to surf Wikipedia for historical and cultural tidbits. One of the things that dizzies me is taking a look at the various ethnic groups of Asia. There are an insane amount of them in India, in China, in Russia, in Southeast Asia, and most of them have their own language. A shocking amount of diversity. Even more shocking is learning of the occasional huge impact of former ethnicities -- I had never heard of the Circassian genocide before bumping into it on Wikipedia, nor of the Moriori genocide in New Zealand, nor of most of the stateless peoples fighting for their own nation. It makes a nation like Japan seem somewhat boring, since it was mostly one ethnicity just interacting with itself instead of duking it out with dozens or hundreds of other ethnicities in a massive historical cultural bloodbath.
Where this ties into America, and liberalism: America, for the most part, has had all its ethnicities jumbled together. It was really, really great at integrating people in the melting pot. I am, by blood, Irish mixed with German, but I hold no allegiance with Ireland or Germany. I, and most white people I know, would describe themselves as American, if anything. But seeing this culture war flare up and the value differences becoming obvious makes me think: what if the rise of social justice politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberalism? Maybe we're seeing the rise of a new ethnic group, not based on shared genetic traits, but on certain cultural traits being emphasized more than others, as has happened thousands or millions of times in history?
If that's what's happening, then we might say that liberalism is not entirely at fault for the rise of progressivism (or whoever you blame for causing this rift). Liberalism is more of a new thing, but diversification of ethnic groups is far older. I would argue that this stratification has been intensified by the internet and television and other mass communications enabling people to self sort into their own groups, regardless of geographic distance. Perhaps you might also say that liberalism gave more of an equal playing field for cultures to fight it out amongst themselves, thus accelerating such diversification. But it may have been inevitable.
I'm going to nitpick that I don't think this is a historically accurate picture of Japan.
Firstly, Japan has historically possessed non-Yamato ethnic groups which were driven out, destroyed, or assimilated by the Yamato. The Ainu are the most famous one still extant, but historically you might consider the Emishi, the supposed 'shrimp barbarians' of northern Honshu who appear to have been either wiped out or assimilated into the Yamato whole.
Secondly, we should not assume that the Yamato specifically constitute a single 'ethnicity' who historically understood themselves to be a single united people. Modern Japan is the product of several generations-long processes of nation-building - the Tokugawa shogunate wanted to tamp down on regional identities and clan loyalties, and promoted a pan-Japanese identity, and the imperial government after Meiji took over intensified that process even further. Even today the process is not entirely complete or successful, and you will find very strong regional rivalries, including different languages and customs.
Go back a few centuries and I suspect that if you asked a group of people from northern Honshu whether they are 'one ethnicity' or 'one people' with a bunch of people from Kansai, and then you asked both groups whether they are 'one ethnicity' with a group of people from southern Kyushu, they would all say no. They might realise that they are more similar to each other than any of them are to Koreans, or to Han Chinese, or heaven forbid the Nanban, but I don't think they would see themselves as one homogenous group.
And just in general - I'm not sure how a person could look at the history of Japan and say that it's striking for lacking a "massive historical cultural bloodbath". Surely the history of Japan is a history full of distinct regional groups slaughtering each other? It feels like a form of special pleading to say "oh, that's different clans within a single cultural/ethnic group", rather than recognising that as different cultural groups. Perhaps they were all Japanese, in the same way that, say, the different states of the Holy Roman Empire were all German, but there is definitely a history there of rivalry, warfare, and bloodshed between groups that spoke differently, behaved differently, and felt themselves to be meaningfully different to one another.
In contrast to the previous comment, I DO disagree. Japan's only ethnic groups are the Yamato and the pre-Yamato "barbarians" (and the Ryuukyuuans, although those were annexed much later and are not in the main archipelago).
The Yamato did historically understand themselves to be one people organized under the priesthood of the Imperial family, which performed a yearly ritual to ensure good rice harvests for all. They used one language, with various dialects - similar to the way most languages work, like English. They shared an overwhelming proportion of their material culture and religion (local cults and the abortive Christian movement notwithstanding). For multiple extended periods of Japanese history they were united under central rulership, although in earlier centuries this was pretty distant rulership.
Modeling Japanese conflict as regional is nonsensical - the better model would be family (or clan) conflict, with only a few interesting exceptions like the militant Buddhists around Osaka during the Sengoku period (or the rising of the farmer-samurai, same period). The closest thing I can think of to a strictly regional conflict was the east-versus-west conflict of the Genpei war - which is, once again, even named after the two families in conflict. The regions in question are mostly important as the places where the warring parties have their farms.
If you want the clearest evidence, consider that every group that succeeded in WINNING one of these conflicts sought out the SAME goal: entitlement to lead the Japanese people, typically as Shogun but in one memorable case as Emperor. (On the small scale, it was the right to rule over a local group of Japanese in a pretty typical Japanese fashion, which is to say with high taxes.)
Your requirements for a given people being "one ethnicity" appear utterly unattainable anywhere. What standard could possibly be met? If there's ever a conflict between two groups, isn't that - from the argument as you have stated it - sufficient proof that these were not coethnics in the first place?
But didn't the people in those states agree that they were German? Or else what was the pan-Germanism movement that arose in response to Napoleon's invasions?
I'm not sure that shifting from regional to family-based conflict makes the distinction you want here? Ethnic or group identity can be tied to family or clan just as easily as it can to region. In fact it's usually a nexus - families or lines of ancestry, habitation in particular regions, shared language, shared cultural practices, and so on. What makes an ethnicity an ethnicity is a kind of overlapping Venn diagram.
Further I'm happy to say also that ethnicities can be fractal - contained within each other, going down level by level. 'Slavic', 'Germanic', or 'Turkic' are 'large' ethnicities, but they all contain within them smaller ethnicities. 'German' is a subset of 'Germanic', and then of course 'German' contains within it even smaller ethnic tribes. All Bavarians are German, all Germans are Germanic, and so on.
Likewise in Japan. All Satsumans are Yamato, but am I willing to say that Satsuman is a different ethnicity to Choshuans? It feels like asking whether Bavarians are a different ethnicity to Prussians or Saxons. It's largely in how you define 'ethnicity', and you can move that around however you like and I can't really argue.
What I would argue, though, is that regardless of whether we think the word 'ethnicity' is appropriate or not, historically Japan has been often divided, and people from different parts of Japan understood themselves to be meaningfully different to one another - certainly to the point of fiercely conflicting with one another.
The primary question was whether conflicts in Japan can be classified as ethnic. If you want a definition, here you are: coethnics recognize themselves as the same "kind" of people. An ethnic conflict is a struggle between mutually recognized "kinds," where the direct competition between the "kinds" is driving everything involved. The groups in conflict will directly reference the underlying cultural or genetic differences (especially material) in identifying the group they oppose. Think slurs here.
The modal ethnic conflict is Israel/Palestine: two self-identified groups competing over specific territory and resources. When one wins, they move the other off the territory entirely. When they win they enforce their cultural habits and obliterate the practices of the losers in any ways they care about.
I'd go so far as to say that NO internal Japanese conflict maps to that, except the conflicts with the barbarians, which the Japanese very explicitly labeled as a conflict between their "kind" and the barbarian "kinds." (Maybe the stuff with the Christians could be labeled as an abortive ethnogenesis.) Japanese conflicts are typically one of the following: jockeying for position under an accepted sovereign power; attempting to overthrow the sovereign power; attempting to create an independent hierarchy parallel to the sovereign power (this never worked outside of the Sengoku period; they all got cleaned up and subdued by the start of the Edo period). One group of elite warriors fights another, vassalage agreements are reordered, anyone who doesn't fit in gets killed, and the village headman starts paying taxes to someone new.
You know what doesn't happen? The people of Satsuma expelling farmers from the outskirts of Kumamoto and settling the territory, destroying the local art and buildings and replacing it with their own. The Japanese do that to the barbarians, sure, but not to each other. Therefore, not an ethnic conflict.
Only somewhat true. Let's start from prehistory and round dates aggressively:
So, adding that up, when was it divided? Maybe in prehistory, but if we start from the appearance of writing, we have around 600 years of general unity with a single period of civil war oriented around who gets to lead the government. Following the appearance of samurai, things get a lot more spotty, but there's a couple of unified governments, and even in the rough times nobody is arguing that one cultural subcategory of Japan should exterminate another. Still, from 1150-1600, you have about 150 years of unity and 300 years of disunity. Following that, you have one (1) more internal war (which I will overestimate as 25 years of serious internal instability) in the 400 years leading to the present and otherwise total unity.
Across this time period, although I have no idea what is sufficient in your eyes to be "meaningfully different" - perhaps it's the Edo-period complaint that the Kantou or Kansai eat their noodles like fucking animals, perhaps not - no people in Japan felt their "meaningful differences" were good reason to start a war. Directly competing ambitious elites certainly had a reason to start wars with one another, and did so frequently, but just as frequently took vassals and intermarried and felt no particular need to enforce one way of producing miso over another. That was the concern of peasants, after all.
The thing that irks me about your initial comment isn't that it implies Japan was ever violent. Certainly it was violent! Certainly there was great discord and strife! Coethnicity is no panacea against human conflict. The second story in Genesis is about someone killing his very brother. What irks me is that it seems to be based on a definition of "ethnic" that has no meaningful subject, or else is based on a representation of Japanese history which is not reflected in reality. The reality of Japanese history, and Japanese conflict, is something I've found deeply interesting, and it has its roots in petty court intrigues and the powerful and chaotic dynamics of feudal vassalage. But there is no ethnic side to these conflicts, and they do not need an ethnic side to be interesting. Trying to color them as ethnic loses the real hue of that history, which is what changes as conflicts cease to be feudal and begin to be ethnic - which, incidentally, is a good description of what happened over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
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I don't disagree, but still think the description of Japan as "monoethnic" still has merit. I see the question as being one of cultural proximity, since by your definition there wouldn't be such a thing as a truly monoethnic part of the world - people tend to bifurcate hugely even within a small geographic region, and even those ethnic groups who are 99% similar culturally will often consider each other as irreconcilably different due to the remaining 1% of variance - Scott's post "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" comes to mind. It's not entirely wrong to state that the Yamato gained political and demographic dominance fairly early in Japanese history.
Even if the Yamato might not have considered themselves a singular group, it is also true that they would have been fairly culturally homogenous due to a shared origin from the Yayoi and a lot of cultural flow between different parts of Japan, and excepting a bunch of fringe minority groups like the Ainu, much of the ethnic/cultural bifurcation basically amounted to the tyranny of small differences. This is not to say these small differences aren't significant in local context, and cultural variance is a weak proxy at best for a spongy concept like self-identified "ethnicity", but there's a material difference in variance between a country like Japan vs. the exceptionally diaspora-like nature of many Southeast Asian countries (for example Yamato comprise over 98% of Japan's modern population, whereas Malays comprise 58% of the Malaysian population, with a lot of very distinct subgroups within every ethnic group and a lot of syncretism between them). Perhaps Japan wasn’t just one self-described ethnicity, but the level of within-country cultural variance is relatively low in global context, no matter how much tribal warfare they participated in.
I guess the point I would emphasise is that the idea of Japan being 'monoethnic' had to be produced, in large part by the Japanese themselves, through a struggle that took at least centuries. Japan, like every modernising nation, went through a process whereby national identity had to be constructed, often in the form of top-down policies of homogenisation and assimilation from the metropole.
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White liberals and conservatives are undergoing ethnogenesis, and eventually those capable of maintaining a higher fertility rate in modernity will replace those that aren’t. It’s a long process but white liberals won’t be such a problem in a few centuries.
And no, we won’t be led by nonwhites. The different groups of minorities hate each other too much. One would have to be clearly dominant and that doesn’t look like it’s fixing to happen.
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How much have you read about 18th-19th century European state formation, national awakenings, the Huegenots etc.? In European France, French was spoke by 10% of the population when the revolution started https://books.google.com/books?id=jKX1TenIOH0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sur+la+necessit%C3%A9+gregoire&source=bl&ots=3hG3zAtBfF&sig=7aqGkOkwSlxt3wRG-3mp4TMDbSg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1p5MUOGZLoWa9gS_sYHoCQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Sur%20la%20necessit%C3%A9%20gregoire&f=false
This actually happened quite a lot. People of all races became German in Central European cities, e.g. in the great immigration waves from the Netherlands, Scotland, Germany etc. after Poland was depopulated by the Mongols. Those city dwellers were specifically craftsmen as opposed to farmers etc. The aristocrats became French in culture (there were 2 waves of Frenchification in the 13th century and 17th centuries) (or German by blood, especially after the 18th century.)
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Rather than contort it into an ethnic group, or any group, I think it's best to go back to tried historical principles and consider this modern strain of thought as an ideology. We can think about it the exact same way, because it's the same thing. Along those lines, I think it's becoming a little clear to me that classical liberalism is a distinct and different ideology than this new ideology, which still needs a good name (I don't think progressivism is the right word, for two reasons: there's older progressivism which is different, and two current progressives are a bit distinct in a number of ways). In history these ideologies affect large swaths of society despite having harder cores of specific adherents.
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What does this mean?
If you can accept that ethnicity is not always based on genetic difference, but also things like language or values, and something like Conservatives as Moral Mutants outlines that values between the two tribes have drifted substantially, then depending on how lenient you are in describing ethnicity, you might be able to claim that what we are seeing in the culture war is more like an inter-ethnic conflict.
In hindsight, that probably doesn't mean anything too different from just talking about tribes. I thought it was an interesting way of looking at it in a new light. But I don't actually know how groups like the Samoyedic tribes diversified to the extent that they did; splintering and reproducing, sure, but for what reasons? Anything like what we're seeing today? Is this culture war and possible fracturing of a nation new, or is it something that has repeated itself many times? Maybe something like the Balkans is a recent example of it?
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Large, diverse empires often produce "multiple choice" origin stories. In Rome, depending on your tastes, you could tell the story of the Trojan Aeneas carving out a part of his ancestral homeland on Italy, or the story of Romulus and Remus creating a cultural melting pot first through offering safe haven to foreign criminals then through the kidnapping of women of the Sabine people, or the story of the last king of Rome, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, whose overthrow marked the start of the Roman Republic. Each story emphasized different aspects of Romanitas, and each could be used to argue for Rome being more culturally open or closed, or more willing to embrace foreigners as fellow Roman citizens or to reject them.
While the United States isn't a central example of an old-fashioned empire (China and Russia are far closer to this model), it is big enough and diverse enough that it has started to develop a "multiple choice" origin story of its own. There are several possible "foundation myths" for America. There's the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, the "second founding" after the Civil War (where the 13th-15th Amendments saw a massive increase in Federal power), or the "modern founding" of America as the global hegemon with the victory in WWII and the defeat of the Axis powers. There's the Mayflower and the Pilgrims vs. the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.
I'm not sure I'd buy the idea of "social justice politics" as a form of ethnogenesis. By and large, I do think the assimilated "white Americans" have largely displaced "anglo Americans" as a distinct cultural group, and that after two or three generations most white American immigrants are indistinguishable from any other white American. I suspect that most light-skinned Hispanics will probably be similarly absorbed into the white blob within a generation or two, thus strengthening the "white" coalition. At the same time, groups that are more visually distinct occupy a weird space. Asians kind of get treated as "honorary whites" or "model minorities", but I recently spoke to an Asian American man who felt threatened enough in the community he was living in (trucks of Trump supporters were driving through Asian ghettos and harassing the residents) that he went out and bought a gun. And of course, the hardest square to circle is the African American community, especially the ADOS subgroup which has never held power (note that Barrack Obama was not of ADOS descent.)
I think that social justice politics is just an attempt to form a non-"white men" coalition. College educated white women were xenophilic enough that they were happy to throw in with a variety of visible minorities in order to argue for shared interests in the spoils system of jobs, prestige and power. But with the election of Donald Trump there's been a vibe shift, and I'm not sure if the non-"white men" coalition can hold into the future. Heck, Kamala lost, but the coalition she tried to throw together was certainly some odd bedfellows, like Liz and Dick Cheney. I think we're about due for a political realignment, and I'm not sure where every group will end up in the new arrangement.
Really? Theres a difference between recruiting people of various ethnicities, and creating a cultural melting pot. Do you see any evidence pointing to one in the mythology? I would expect that a small group of exclusively men of working age would form a culture of their own, dominated by extreme founder effects, random developments, and whatever the boss decided. I would predict it to be farther from the italic average than average.
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In a world where one side is MAGA, the coalition-defining message of the other side is "America is basically okay and can continue to get better incrementally, so cleansing her with fire and the sword would be really fucking stupid." Biden was able to articulate that message while he still had a functioning brain. Harris tried and failed to.
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Many of those shared cultural traits didnt exist a hundred years ago, and are highly atypical compared to any other cultures. The liberals here like to emphasise the way progressives are hypocritical and who/whom, and they are, but its not all there is to it. Thats just tribalism, and tribalism is not, in and of itself, a culture.
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This has been the case for a long time — the thing is that genetic distance within, say, white people is much larger than the genetic distance to a black person. I mean, the only genes that differ are essentially about some obscure pigmentation. As far as the science of the human genome goes, "ethnicity" has always been a cultural thing, not a genetic one.
This isn't even remotely the case. Genes involving intelligence, impulse control, self-confidence, aggression, and so on differ quite a bit. Almost certainly also genes involving parental investment, promiscuity, industriousness, and many others.
Brain size, bone structure, proportion of fast vs slow twitch muscle fibers, etc. Hormonal timings, e.g. blacks generally hit puberty about a year before whites. We are very different.
Part of the problem here is that research into these things is borderline forbidden.
None of these phenotypes experience significant selection pressure on the genetic level, they are strongly influenced by the environment (take e.g. lead in gasoline), and variability in the white populate alone is so high that even population-level differences between blacks and whites would to amount to meaningless differences on average.
The onset of puberty is controller by many factors — most environmental, nourishment being the most important.
Does this mean that you won't cite source for any of your claims?
You know I had originally dismissed this post as trolling and moved on, but it's been on my mind for some reason, and I'd like to stop and ask just in case you're serious. From my perspective the amount of bad-faith canards you're throwing out doesn't look like an accident, but, you know, maybe I'd actually believe that stuff but for the grace of God. So who can say?
What do you mean? I'm not quite sure how to read your reply as a question; my best guess is that you're asking "Are you serious?" and my answer to that is "Yes".
(As for trolling: I don't troll and I abhor it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to prove otherwise to you — it is in the nature of trolling that the troll claims to not troll, and that it's hard to verify that. The next best thing I can give you is my word.
More generally, I think it's generally bad epistemology (= the philosophy of knowledge) to judge statements based on what I believe about the intentions or situation of the person making the statements. Example: I have studied mathematics. If a homeless person were to walk up to me, and claimed that they had solved one of the millenium problems, and that they are about to explain the solution to me, then I would stop and listen (for a couple of minutes at least), because the truth of their statements can be verified independently and does not depend on who delivers them — I can apply the rules of logical reasoning to check whether they are right or wrong. Likewise, just because a troll says it, it doesn't mean that it's false (or true).
Even more epistemology: For every statement I hear, say "X is bad for you", I have come into the habit of forming the opposite in my head, "X is good for you", play a few "mental chess moves" of what consequences this would have. If I don't find a contradiction quickly, then I have to seriously consider the idea "X is good for you", even if my original gut feeling was "X is bad for you". Doesn't feel pretty, but if I want to know what "X" really is, then I have no choice. )
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This is often repeated, but I think this is false (Lewontins Fallacy?)
Reading the Wikipedia article on Lewontin's Fallcy, it appears that the main difficulty is to make the statement precise. The cited reference Witherspoon 2007 explains:
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I believe it's also very much not true if you go by fst, but I'm not exactly an expert
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Is this true? I would think the genetic distance between two Europeans to be smaller than that between a European and an SS African. The last common ancestor between any two Europeans is much more recent than between a European and a Sub-saharan African (something like 1,000 years ago vs 80,000 years ago).
I think the person you're replying to is talking about within the US, where supposedly most "African-Americans" have at least some white ancestry, and they seem to be comparing against the largest genetic difference you'll find between white Americans, not the average or most common case. Certainly the context of the larger conversation is about something that primarily applies to the US.
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As a matter of scientific record, yes. I think that Witherspoon 2007 explains the situation nicely:
The very short argument is this: A sub-saharan African will very likely have dark skin color, whereas an European will likely have light skin color, due to selection pressure on Vitamin D und UV protection. You can distinguish populations with this. However, that's about it — most other genes face little selection pressure, or similar selection pressure which is not dependent on population location. Some genes do face selection pressure, e.g. Italy contained many swamps and was prone to Malaria, so the incidence of hemophilia from this location is higher, because that correlates with protection against Malaria.
The versions of homo which did have significant genetic differences to be separate species, such as Neanderthals, have already died out.
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