The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (4 page)

Not without reason, Hermann Göring explicitly called the Second World War ‘the great racial war’. That was indeed how many contemporaries experienced it. The importance then attached to notions of racial difference now seems rather strange. The science of modern genetics has revealed that human beings are remarkably alike. In terms of our DNA we are, without a shadow of a doubt, one species, whose origins can be traced back to Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, and who began to spread into new continents only as recently as 60,000 years ago – in evolutionary terms, the proverbial blink of an eye. The differences we associate with racial identities are superficial: pigmentation (which is darker in the melanocytes of peoples whose ancestors lived close to the equator), physiognomy (which makes eyes narrower and noses shorter at the eastern end of the great Eurasian landmass) and hair type. Beneath the skin, we are all quite similar. That is a reflection of our shared origins.
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To be sure, geographical dispersion meant that humans formed groups which became physically quite distinct over time. That explains why the Chinese look quite different from, say, the Scots. However, outright ‘speciation’ – to be precise, the development of ‘isolating barriers’ that would have made interbreeding impossible – did not have time to subdivide the species
Homo sapiens.
Indeed, the genetic record makes it clear that, despite their outward differences and despite the obstacles of distance and mutual incomprehension, the different ‘races’ have been interbreeding since the very earliest times. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators have shown that most Europeans are descended from farmers who migrated northwards and westwards from the Middle East. The DNA record suggests that there were successive waves of such migration, attended always by some mingling of the incomers with indigenous nomads. The great
Völkerwanderung
(‘wandering of the peoples’) of the late Roman Empire left a similar
genetic legacy. Most striking of all have been the consequences of the modern migrations associated with the European discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the subsequent era of conquest, colonization and concubinage. Biologists today call the process ‘demic diffusion’. Nineteenth-century racists spoke of ‘miscegenation’; Noël Coward simply called it ‘the urge to merge’. But the phenomenon was already a familiar one when Shakespeare wrote
Othello
(whose mixed marriage is doomed more by his credulity than his colour) and
The Merchant of Venice
(which also touches on the issue, notably when Portia tests her suitors).

The results are plainly legible to those who study the human genome today. Between a fifth and a quarter of the DNA of most African-Americans can be traced back to Europeans. At least half of the inhabitants of Hawaii are of ‘mixed’ ancestry. Likewise, the DNA of today’s Japanese population indicates that there was intermarriage between early settlers from Korea and the indigenous Jomonese people. Most of the Y chromosomes found in Jewish males are the same as those found among other Middle Eastern men; for all their bitter enmity, Palestinians and Israelis are genetically not so very different. The evolutionist Richard Lewontin famously calculated that around 85 per cent of the total amount of genetic variation in humans occurs among individuals in an average population; only 6 per cent occurs among races. The genetic variants that affect skin colour, hair type and facial features involve an insignificant amount of the billions of nucleotides in an individual’s DNA. To some biologists, this means that, strictly speaking, human races do not exist.

Others might prefer to say that they are in the process of ceasing to exist. A generation of American social scientists working during and after the 1960s documented the rise of interracial marriage in the post-war United States, portraying it as the most important measure of assimilation in American life. Though ‘multi-culturalism’ has done much to challenge the idea that assimilation should always and everywhere be the goal of ethnic minorities, a rising rate of intermarriage is still widely regarded as a key indicator of diminishing racial prejudice or conflict. In the words of two leading American sociologists, ‘rates of intermarriage… are particularly good indications of the acceptability of different groups and of social integration’. The US
census currently distinguishes between four ‘racial’ categories: ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Native American’ and ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’. On this basis, one in twenty children in the United States is of mixed origin, in that their parents do not both belong to the same racial category. The number of such mixed-race couples quadrupled between 1990 and 2000, to roughly 1.5 million.

And yet throughout the twentieth century men repeatedly thought and acted as if the physically distinctive ‘races’
were
separate species, categorizing this group or that group as somehow ‘subhuman’. While ‘demic diffusion’ has occurred peacefully and even imperceptibly in some settings, in others interracial relationships have been viewed as deeply dangerous. How, then, are we to explain this central puzzle: the willingness of groups of men to identify one another as aliens when they are all biologically so very similar? For it was this willingness that lay at the root of much of the twentieth century’s worst violence. How could Göring’s ‘great racial war’ happen if there were no races?

Two evolutionary constraints help to explain the shallowness but also the persistence of racial differences. The first is that when men were few and far between – when life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, as it was for 99 per cent of the time our species has existed – the overriding imperatives were to hunt or gather sufficient food and to reproduce. Men formed small groups because cooperation improved the individual’s chances of doing both. However, tribes that came into contact with one another were inevitably in competition for scarce resources. Hence, conflict could take the form of plunder – the seizure by violence of another tribe’s means of subsistence – and downright murder of unrelated strangers to get rid of potential sexual rivals. Man, so some neo-Darwinians argue, is programmed by his genes to protect his kin and to fight ‘the Other’. To be sure, a warrior tribe that succeeded in defeating a rival tribe would not necessarily act rationally if it killed all its members. Given the importance of reproduction, it would make more sense to appropriate the rival tribe’s fertile females as well as its food. In that sense, even the evolutionary logic that produces tribal violence also promotes interbreeding, as captured womenfolk become the victors’ sexual partners.

Nevertheless, there may be a biological check on this impulse to
rape alien females. For there is evidence from the behaviour of both humans and other species that nature does not necessarily favour breeding between genetically very different members of the same species. No doubt there are sound biological reasons for the more or less universal taboos on incest in human societies, since inbreeding with siblings increases the risk that a genetic abnormality may manifest itself in offspring. On the other hand, a preference for distant relatives or complete strangers as mates would have been a handicap in prehistoric times. A species of hunter-gatherers that could only reproduce successfully with genetically (and geographically) distant individuals would not have lasted long. Sure enough, there is strong empirical evidence to suggest that ‘optimal outbreeding’ is achieved with a surprisingly small degree of genealogical separation. A first cousin may actually be biologically preferable as a mate to a wholly unrelated stranger. The very high levels of cousin-marriage that used to be common among Jews and still prevail among the highly endoga-mous Samaritans have resulted in remarkably few genetic abnormalities. Conversely, when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that their blood groups may be incompatible, so that only the first child they conceive will be viable. Finally, it must be significant in its own right that separate human populations so quickly developed such distinctive facial characteristics. Some evolutionary biologists argue that this was a result not just of ‘genetic drift’ but of ‘sexual selection’ – in other words, a culturally triggered and somewhat arbitrary preference for eye-folds in Asia or long noses in Europe quite rapidly accentuated precisely those characteristics in populations that were isolated from one another. Like attracted and continues to attract like; those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may in fact be atypical in their sexual predilections.

A further possible barrier to interbreeding is that races may have a ‘sociobiological’ function as extended kinship groups, practising a diffuse kind of nepotism that stems from our innate desire to reproduce our genes not only directly through sex but also indirectly by protecting our cousins and other relatives. Human beings do seem predisposed to trust members of their own race as traditionally defined (in terms of skin colour, hair type and physiognomy) more than members of other races – though how far this can be explained in
evolutionary terms and how far in terms of inculcated cultural prejudice is clearly open to question. Taken together, these factors may help to explain why races seem to be dissolving rather slowly, despite the unprecedented mobility and interaction of the modern era. Recent work on ‘microsatellite markers’ has challenged the view that in strictly biological terms races do not really exist, showing that American ethnic groups identifying themselves as, variously, white, African-American, East Asian and Hispanic
are
in some respects genetically distinguishable. The key point to grasp is the fundamental tension between our inherent capacity for interbreeding and the persistence of discernible genetic differences. Racial differences may be genetically few, but human beings seem to be designed to attach importance to them.

It may be objected that the historian, especially the modern historian, has no business dabbling in evolutionary biology. Is not his proper concern the activity of civilized man, not primitive man? ‘Civilization’ is, of course, the name we give to forms of human organization superior to the hunter-gathering tribe. With the advent of systematic agriculture between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, people became less mobile; at the same time, more reliable supplies of food meant that their tribes could become much larger. Divisions of labour developed between cultivators, warriors, priests and rulers. Yet civilized settlements were always vulnerable to raids by unreconstructed tribes, who were hardly likely to leave undisturbed such concentrations of the nutritious and the nubile. And even when – as happened gradually over time – most human beings opted for the pleasures of the settled life, there was no guarantee that settled societies would coexist peacefully. Civilizations geographically distant from one another might trade amicably with one another, allowing the gradual emergence of an international division of labour. But it was just as possible for one civilization to make war on another, for the same base motives that had actuated man in prehistoric times: to expropriate nutritional and reproductive resources. Historians, it is true, can study only those human organizations sophisticated enough to keep enduring records. But no matter how complex the administrative structure we study, we should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilized men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and again
after 1900. They were a large part of what made the Second World War so ferocious.

‘Two peoples never meet,’ the American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits once wrote, ‘but they mingle their blood.’ Mingling, however, is only one of a range of options when two diverse human populations meet. The minority group may remain distinct for breeding purposes but become integrated into the majority group in all or some other respects (language, religious belief, dress, lifestyle). Alternatively, interbreeding can go on, at least for a time, but one or both of the two groups may nevertheless preserve or even adopt distinct cultural or ethnic identities. Here is an important distinction. Whereas ‘race’ is a matter of inherited physical characteristics, transmitted from parents to children in DNA, ‘ethnicity’ is a combination of language, custom and ritual, inculcated in the home, the school and the temple. It is perfectly possible for a genetically intermixed population to split into two or more biologically indistinguishable but culturally differentiated ethnic groups. The process may be voluntary, but it may also be based on coercion – notably where major changes of religious belief are concerned. One or both groups may even opt for residential and other forms of segregation; the majority may insist that the minority lives in a clearly delineated space, or the minority may choose to do so for its own reasons. The two groups may cordially ignore one another, or there may be friction, perhaps leading to civil strife or one-sided massacres. The groups may fight one another or one group may submit to expulsion by the other. Genocide is the extreme case, in which one group attempts to annihilate the other.

Why, if minorities face such risks by not assimilating, do ethnic identities persist, even in cases where no biological distinction exists? There are, to be sure, fewer ethnic groups in the world today than there were a century ago; witness the decline in the number of living languages. Yet despite the best efforts of the global market and the nation state to impose cultural uniformity, many minority cultures have proved remarkably resilient. Indeed, persecution has sometimes
tended to strengthen the self-consciousness of the persecuted. Passing on an inherited culture may simply be gratifying in its own right; we enjoy hearing our children singing the songs our parents taught us. A more functional interpretation is that ethnic groups can provide valuable networks of trust in nascent markets. The obvious cost of such networks is, of course, that their very success may arouse the antagonism of other ethnic groups. Some ‘market-dominant minorities’ are especially vulnerable to discrimination and even expropriation; their tightly knit communities are economically strong but politically weak. While this may be true of the Chinese diaspora
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in parts of Asia today, it also has applicability to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War or the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second. However, because exceptions suggest themselves (the Scots were unquestionably a ‘market-dominant minority’ throughout the British Empire, but aroused minimal hostility), two qualifications need to be added. The first is that the economic dominance of a vulnerable minority may matter less than its political lack of dominance. It is not only wealthy minorities that are persecuted; by no means all the European Jews were rich, and the Sinti and Roma were among Europe’s poorest people when the Nazis condemned them to annihilation. The crucial factor may have been their lack of formal and informal political representation. The second qualification is that, if an ethnic group is to be deprived of its rights, property or existence, it cannot be too well armed. Where there are two ethnic groups, both of which have weapons, civil war is more likely than genocide.