A recent article, Female Minorities Are More Affected by Racism Than Sexism, Research Suggests, speaks of a study showing that Oriental women who are members of immigrant communities in the United States are upset in a deep and emotional way by racial prejudice but are dispassionate about prejudice against them as women, taking that as an intellectual error.
Despite the fact that there is an objectively defined group of “women”, despite the fact that there were roles assigned to members of that group, it’s not likely to have been a natural group in early human communities. It’s likely that women in most historical and prehistorical periods would have been more likely to worry about their sons’ breeding success than about any fair treatment of the wives of those sons. They likely would have even been more worried that their daughters have lots of children than being concerned that their daughters be educated and have respected roles in the tribe or village.
Race, even if only defined as “those who have similar features to me” is quite suggestive of kinship communities, of breeding communities in a manner of speaking. In gene-centric ways of viewing life, such a community is a proxy, a visible sign, of true genetic relatedness. We act as if, for example, we share a lot of genes with those who look like us and live near us. Those gene-centric ways of thought are exaggerated but not entirely wrong. Kinship communities, tribes, are more than just a population of those who share a common and fairly small pool of genes, but they are founded upon such a relationship. Evolution occurs in the context of kinship communities, family lines, or whatever you wish to call them. Wouldn’t we expect human beings to be more viscerally affected by relationships with a bodily foundation?
I’m certainly not saying that it’s bad to form more abstract or even “artificial” relationships. As a Christian, I believe the main theme of history is the formation of the Body of Christ which is quite abstract in many ways. By ‘abstract’, I mean not illusory nor do I refer to a manner of speaking. I’m referring to an entity defined by relationships which, in some sense, draw or attempt to draw upon realms of created being from which this concrete realm was shaped. Many of our most important relationships in the modern world fall into this category, such as those of our professions or trades, our hobbies or religious affiliations, our politics, and so forth.
I suspect that concern about “women’s rights” is part of a movement towards more rational and more highly moral forms of relationship between human beings, that is, that we should be looking at a candidate for a job in terms of qualifications and not considering either race or sex either to exclude or affirmatively include. We’re a long way from that and the final result of such a change might well be a society in which some traditional differences between men and women and between ethnic groups are confirmed. Things are what they are and will be what they will be, so why should we pretend otherwise, as Bishop Butler pointed out several centuries ago.
We should be careful not to exaggerate the importance of the man-woman divide and careful not to see any prejudice against women as more deeply embedded than the various class prejudices which are more closely tied to genetic relatedness. One of the undeniable advances in the West in recent centuries has been the greater respect paid to men holding humble but important jobs — men of the lower classes. The higher respect paid to these men has shown up in monetary forms of payment as well. The split between haves and have-nots has historically been more concrete and more important than that between men and women. After all, a woman has a lot of reasons to be more concerned about the success of her husband than the success of some women she’s never even met. We’ll never reach a perfect state of fair-treatment of all human beings in this world and we may see a lot of backsliding, but we’ve made more progress, some of which seems likely to be lost for some decades.
Yet, I’m reasonably confident that this issue of fair treatment of all human beings will be a situation where the truth will emerge over time through communal processes and not by political activism preferred by our current batch of visionaries who are no more likely to be right about the future than were Marx or lesser seers going well back in time. We shouldn’t be unduly pessimistic about seeing into the future because we can likely see some aspects of emerging truths, but emerging social structures are not likely to be foreseeable. They are too complex and will reflect too many empirical and contingent elements. We don’t even know what problems and opportunities future generations will face. How can we tell them how to organize their lives and communities?
In any case, the deeply rooted relationships, the ones rooted directly in our flesh, will always be strong and will be the foundations of all other relationships. Love of mother and father might expand to love of those who are like mother and father and then might even expand beyond that. Over time, other relationships, the abstract relationships developing as civilization becomes more complex, may prove to be also very strong. But those newer relationships, such as the ones enjoyed recently by working-class men, are based upon the abstract foundations of a civilization and may decay rapidly if civilization weakens — and Western Civilization is weakening fast. Any civilization is more a manifestation of our deepest moral beliefs than a collection of economic processes and engineering feats, and the loss of Western Civilization will mean certain noble moral beliefs will no longer be concretely manifested. They will return to being noble dreams, for those who remember them.
Those Oriental women have reasonable feelings and thoughts. They feel tied most closely, at a gut level, to those in their ethnic group and their ties to “women” in general will be more abstract — that is, intellectual. Prejudice against women will be perceived at that level — as an intellectual mistake, a mistake in dealing with abstractions. Prejudice against a “gene-based” kinship group, though that group itself be large and somewhat abstract, will be felt in the gut.
I’ll move on to a few short and related comments about other studies discussed in another article, Humans ‘Predisposed’ to Believe in Gods and the Afterlife.
Those who conducted the studies deny making theological claims. They only claim human beings are inclined to believe in supernatural entities and are also inclined to have a dualistic view of their own human nature, believing something of their own selves survive their deaths.
We should take the general claim seriously while discounting, as the authors seemed to do, the specific beliefs. We’re inclined to believe in divinity and in an afterlife. This is similar to our ‘predispositions’ to empirical thought. We try to think in ways that agree with reality, mostly, but that doesn’t mean the average caveman was thinking in ways acceptable to a modern chemist or medical doctor. It doesn’t mean a tribal shaman was thinking in terms that would allow him to understand Jeremiah or Augustine of Hippo or Martin Luther, though he might detect a deep concern for spiritual matters in a general sense. It does mean that tribal shaman and his followers were thinking in terms which allow the long and slow development of more sophisticated understandings of the possibilities of divinity and of life after death.
Our gut-level belief in “more than we see” is very primitive and very real. Once we humans advance in understanding various realms of being, by way of physics and music and biology and literature, we can start refining those gut-level beliefs. We have ‘predispositions’ which allow us to move towards thinking of created being along that spectrum of concrete to abstract. Right now, we’re in the odd position of holding some abstract beliefs and engaging in quite abstract relationships but trying to treat them as being fully a part of the domain of concrete being.