Corollary to “God Delusion”

If you haven’t read “The God Delusion” yet, read it, if only to understand this wondrous post.

Richard Dawkins asserts that it should offend our 21st-century senses to see children labeled with the religions of their parents – e.g. a Muslim child, and Mormon toddler, a Jain newborn – as they are yet unable to even understand the theological beliefs they’re being described as having. I forgot if Dawkins makes this next point or not, but it seems like something he might or the people around him might say – that children should form their own opinions and beliefs re the cosmos when they reach an age of a bit more intellectual maturity.

The same should be true of ethnicity. If children are too young to question that the age of the Earth is 6,000 years, they’re also too young to understand or contemplate critically ethnic origin myths or the supposed sublime beauty of the supposedly ancient rituals and symbols they’re expected to grow up to appreciate. Like Dawkins states that we should all make the switch from “a Protestant child” to “a child of Protestant parents”, I believe it’s time we switched from “a Korean child” to “a child in the process of learning to be Korean” or maybe “a child most likely to become Korean”. I sound glib here but it’s only my need for precision that’s making these descriptions sound utterly silly.

I don’t agree at all though that we ought to let people “come to their own conclusions”. Those of you who know me know I don’t believe in free will, and that the ability of people to make “their own decisions” is overestimated and overvalued. I don’t suggest that children not be indoctrinated into any ethnic group, but rather that children be indoctrinated into a worldwide non-racial, non-national, mostly pacifistic ethnic group. Otherwise they’ll just end up picking the ethnic group of their parents and most of their peers, and that would completely defeat the purpose of my pretending to be able to control what people in the world call each other.

4 Comments So Far

Varangy said,

08/25/2008 @8:01 pm GMT

Is this post written seriously? Or is this just tongue-in-cheek?

Mark said,

08/26/2008 @3:47 pm GMT

Seriously. I remember still how being taught by my junior high school peers how one of my friends who I’d known since preschool was not just darker than I, but “black” – and how that, regrettably, changed my perception of him. In the end, it didn’t need to be taught – his genes certainly exist, and there’s no arguing his hair was curlier or his skin was darker than mine. But the categorization of that into a race and/or ethnicity introduces concepts and claims that kids are way too young to either critically evaluate and either accept or not. Most adults don’t critically evaluate the legitimacy of ethnic categories either, but hey, they should; and if they did, they might not be so quick to teach their kids that not only is natto good food, but only Japanese stomachs can digest it.

08/27/2008 @2:59 pm GMT

Ignoring racial categories is intellectually corrupt. Explain the frequency of various diseases among certain racial/ethnic groups such as Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, dyslexia etc etc

This is also evident in athletics — West African domination in the small-distance sprinting events, East African in the long distance.

And here is the kicker: you can also observe racial patterns in intelligence.

Allow me to pre-empt you: yes, some of these differences are partly due to culture — but certainly nature has its say too.

Look for a severe fisking of this post on my website sometime in the near future.

08/28/2008 @2:43 pm GMT

Write anything you want.

Anthropologists, epidemiologists, and doctors certainly don’t need my permission to categorize humanity the ways they see fit – they know more about human genetic diversity than I do. Experts do, however, use groupings that differ from the racial categories you and I are exposed to in our daily lives. For example, both the African runners you mention would simply be “black” in the US, although as you say there may be pertinent differences between the African populations they descend from which would be noted by people who study such differences. It may indeed be important in some fields of study to determine someone’s genetic history and how this is likely to affect their resistance to particular diseases, or whatnot – but common racial categories are not that kind of matter. “Black”, “Asian/Pacific Islander” and “White” are to human physiology and genetics what kite flying is to aviation. Worse actually, they’re laden with pigeonholes, prescriptiveness and history which children, and come to think of it adults too, don’t really understand or need.

4 Comments So Far

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