Groupies

I recently read four books that are centered around the idea of groups. Unto Others & Darwin’s Cathedral were tracts on the neo-group selection thesis. World on Fire & Lords of the Rim deal with rapacious capitalist minorities in developing nations [1]. The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is pretty self-explanatory in its subject matter.

Pretty soon (as in days) I will write up something that presents the information that I’ve gleaned from these books in a semi-coherent fashion. Additionally, I will touch on the topics of human biodiversity and the difficulties of liberal democracy. This is a big enterprise, so I’m going to give a quick pre-review of these books….

First two books, by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, were pretty good reads. Unto Others was not too technical, but not so squarely aimed at the lay audience that it will bore people with biological backgrounds. I came into the process an individual selectionist of sorts-that’s all I really had studied in college. Wilson has convinced me to give group selectionism a second look-and for now I’ll say I’m an agnostic. Individual selectionism is parismonious and I find it more elegant. But if the empirical evidence supports group selectionism, well, fuck elegance, no? Wilson does present some data, but his main purpose seems to be to convince others to go into this area of research. Darwin’s Cathedral especially goes off on this tangent, sometimes I get the feeling I’m reading a prospectus more than an argument. If you read Unto Others you can skip the technical primer on group selectionism in Darwin’s Cathedral, and I didn’t pay close attention to the second half of Unto Others since it veered into psychology and I have difficulty enough grasping my own mind let alone generalizing on the human condition.

World on Fire deals with the topic of “Market Dominant Ethnic Minorities.” The prelims out of the way first, Amy Chua’s jacket photo is far more flattering than the photo on the Yale web site. What’s up with that? I suspect that the book photo is about 10 years old or so, she looks to be about 30, near the prime of her sexual peak in terms of physical attractiveness. That out of the way, what about the book? Well, it’s a great primer on ethnic conflict driven by economic exploitation and success differentials, but I felt that it went out with a whimper, not really addressing the topic of a practical solution to the coexistence of liberal democracy with multiple lifestyles that correlate with ethnic identification. Lords of the Rim is a more narrow-focus tome that deals with the Overseas Chinese. It doesn’t pretend to be public policy or social science, but rather a survey of the Chinese communites of southeast Asia and to a lesser extent North America. The fact that these communities are tied to specific localities and clans between Guangdong and Fujian on the south China coast is highlighted, and the cartel/mafia character is elucidated by multiple examples in various nations. If it was theoretically more ambitious, Lords of the Rim might have become a Sino-version of Culture of Critique. Though neither of these books deal with biology, if the group evolutionary paradigm is going to go anywhere in the human context, these are the “study organisms” that will need to be modelled and examined.

Finally, the last book is more a work of history, but James C. Russell is clearly aware of the work of the group evolutionists (see the article in The Occidental Quarterly and inspect the footnotes). At about 200 pages it is a short but dense read (footnote heavy, something I favor). The basic thesis is pretty straightforward, the German folk religion conquered Christianity and turned the outward form of that faith into a vehicle for their own inner spirit-racial soul so to speak. Russell doesn’t present it in such a radical and metaphorical fashion, but that is the gist. From the perspective of a student of history, I have many quibbles, though the work as a whole was very stimulating. Though I don’t doubt his background in Northern European history and ethnology, his assertions about the Proto-Indo-Europeans were tenditious at best in my opinion. That field is always disputable, the problem is that a large portion of Russell’s work depends on the interpretations of Indo-Europeanists, and so he seems to present the information as more solidly accepted than I believe it is. But the general thrust of the book seems spot on to me-though in a twist of irony, his idea that the Christianity of Christendom was quite pagan in spirit is probably more amenable to Left-Liberals who are intent on forging an alliance with the Christians of color in the Third World that seem to be going through the same sort of acculturation and transmutation that the early Germans did.

To look at the individual as the basic atomic unit of study and organization is very fruitful. Some might assert that this is all we can do, that groups as simply too undefined and amorphous to truly study with any rigor. I’m open-minded on this question-just because one can’t study it systematically and scientifically doesn’t deny the power of something. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that the individual is quite often the partial sum of the groups in which they participate. The attempt must be made, and these books are the first in a new wave of scholarship that is ressurecting older intellectual traditions but imbuing them with the sharp edge of modern methodologies.

[1] Yes, Lords of the Rim really needed to be titled something that didn’t make it sound like a gay porn flick….