Ethnocentrism, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Abandon Eternally Unreciprocated Altruism

Author: Ashley Messinger

Like many or perhaps most people with a verbally slanted intelligence profile, I used to invest a lot of energy into heady academic philosophy, especially ethics. The distant vision of a cognitively post-human species and a suffering-free world governed by utilitarian moral codes probably stimulated my endogenous opioid system. In retrospect, it seems to have been little more than an indulgence, which is my impression of credentialled ethicists generally – particularly utilitarians. They are content to spend eternity arguing over the merits of classical vs. negative utilitarianism, or whether the balance of hedonic and dystonic impulses that sentient life experiences can be said to make it “worth living or reproducing,” etc. For what it is worth, my meta-ethical views are anti-realist: I do not believe that any moral system is the “correct one.” Utilitarianism may be useful insomuch as most beings do value happiness and disvalue suffering. But the complexity of moral values in humans is such that these categories will never be quantifiable to anyone’s satisfaction, and prescriptive antinatalism is a dead end for reasons I have discussed before. Although, non-human life is not such a tough call. People who romanticise the beauty of the natural world are admiring the décor of a planet-sized torture chamber. It is, as Dawkins observed, “beyond all decent contemplation,” and I would have no compunction in painlessly culling most of it if I and my kind were the governors of the known universe.

If. Herein lies a cautionary tale against the distinctly European tendency of embracing blind universalism. There is no coming future of global utilitarian welfarism, at least not one with internally coherent goals or loyalties, because for most of the peoples of this Earth, the only relevant loyalty is to their group, their moral community, their kith and kin – whatever that looks like. It need not be racial, although it usually is in part. Recent computer model data have shown how ethnocentric orientation fares in competition with three alternative group strategies: humanitarianism (English liberals, effectively), egoism, and traitors (SJWs). The last of these is found to be the least effective strategy by far, which is why in the long run there is little reason to worry about traitorous progressive ideologues. Eventually they will learn the hard way. Ethnocentrism wins the day against humanitarianism too, by exploiting the generosity of humanitarians. This sheds light on how ethnocentrism evolved without invoking impossibilities such as group selection in humans, and how it is that this strategy seems to predominate, quietly, even in relatively humanitarian populations. It also illustrates why calling immigration leftist or anti-tribal is such a farce. Far too many white people see it as such because they are humanitarians – optimised to believe that their group-blind, gene-blind preferences are completely generalisable.

There is no indication that moral preferences can ever transcend genetic conflict. If it could, an awful lot of things in human history would have taken a different course. Political preferences are certainly heritable, and although it may be impractical to seek twin-study data on ethical systems, I would be willing to bet that there is also a common genetic architecture to utilitarians, humanitarians, libertarians, and advocates of “effective altruism.” One aspect of their shared phenotype is distinctly visible whenever large numbers of them congregate, as many have observed. Some even seem to understand, perhaps unconsciously, just how rarefied their values are and endorse global government as a solution. But would all the opportunities for abuse in such a system be worth it? Would anyone other than its own architects, presumably Westerners, consent to its rulership? Indeed, if these are the measures necessary to bring the world into value-alignment, why not push for genetic imperialism, i.e. diluting the phenotypic diversity of the human species through genetic engineering so as to render everyone effective clones of Will MacAskill and Diana Fleischman?

Don’t laugh. Some people actually take this seriously as a solution. Their profile is predictable: white, middle class, educated, and living in a country in which the problems that were not there before multiracialism are getting increasingly hard to ignore – although it is a relatively safe assumption that they live nowhere near it themselves. They understand that group differences, even in something as simple as IQ, are enough to cause resentment (that is why racial affirmative action exists), and advocate post-racialism via genetic enhancement. It sounds nice enough until you realise that it would give hostile aliens yet more reasons to emigrate to the West, with our finite resources, but there is no reciprocal allowance for whites to move into Africa and Asia and take them over. Furthermore, given that there is more to group conflict than IQ, who is to say that this would ameliorate group tensions enough to be worth the risk? In the end, what we are talking about is a literal horror movie replacement scenario in which POC are converted into high-class whites who just happen to have brown bodies. How many would willingly subject themselves to this, and how many of those who rejected it would continue to fan the flames of ethnic conflict?

The reason the appraisal of group differences is important to begin with is that nearly all human altruism is based on either reciprocity or sociogenetic closeness. Thus, a universal basic income within a homogeneous society is at least justifiable on the grounds that it is helping to maintain the social order, reducing economic inequality, and the recipients, if they do something destructive with the money, are only going to self-destruct. In a country like the United States, those paying through their taxes, whites, would have legitimate cause to wonder: “Why is money being forcefully extracted from me and given to people who often explicitly say they want me destroyed?” This, too, spurs on conflict. Foreign aid has yet more pitfalls. Since Africans mostly lack the intelligence to build civilisation alone, they rely on foreign donors, their population explodes, and then masses of them die in Malthusian collapses.

Some humanitarians are prepared to accept that we will probably never get to explore much of the universe, for a host of pragmatic reasons. It seems all the more implausible these days. With two interstellar objects passing through the solar system in as many years, it is looking as though interstellar space is chock-full of fast-moving debris, and since no one actually wants to live on Mars (I don’t), we may well be stuck on this planet. Yet, the same people are unwilling to acknowledge the barriers to moral unity within the human species, and the power dynamics inherent to any attempts at “conversion.” It has already been tried by colonialists. Didn’t work. Why would it this time?

Ultimately, idealists must accept that the only effective way for their ideas to propagate is for their moral community to propagate its genes. The most effective way to do that is for the idealists to secure for themselves exclusive territories, build artificial uteri, and use them to create more copies of themselves. After all, natural human reproduction is much less efficient than that of some e.g. fishes, which can produce a million offspring in a year. Technology offers a way around this, such that we can all be Genghis. The result? An endless supply of persons who share your values and interests, not to mention all the possibilities of genetic and cybernetic enhancement. Not everyone will be welcome to your territory. But I promise, the sooner you can get over that, the happier and saner you, and everyone, will be.