Being Smarter Than Dogs Doesn't Mean You Can Kick Them

There's one race, the posthuman cyborg/interstellar space squid race.

"There's one race, the human race!"

"Race is nothing but skin colour."

"We're all the same under the skin."

You've heard these platitudes more times than you can possibly count, and in all probability you've used them yourself on more than one occasion. Such slogans serve to reinforce the multicultural, multiracial, cosmopolitan utopia that we either live in, or is just around the corner, depending on who you ask. They emphasize an underlying biological hypothesis - that there are no important distinctions between racial groups beyond the merely cosmetic - that is absolutely necessary to justify the ongoing project of eliminating any and all forms of racial disparity between racial groups. If the races do not differ then disparities in outcome must arise from disparities in treatment, and disparities in treatment are unjust if there are no differences in properties beyond the merely superficial.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, this is all dangerous nonsense.

I'm not going to wade into the human biodiversity debate here, which has been done to death and is frankly boring at this point.

Instead, let's do a thought experiment. Say our descendants, many thousands of years hence, encounter an intelligent alien species, something quite obviously different from Homo sapiens sapiens, indeed not a member of the hominidae, the class of mammalia, or even the phylum of chordata. Perhaps an intelligent squid. In addition to a very obviously distinct appearance from a human being, our alien has an entirely divergent neural architecture, possessing several independent brains animating its various tentacles in addition to its central nervous system, which serves more as a central coordinating point than the seat of consciousness. Further, its sensory modalities are completely different: while possessing two eyes operating according to standard telescopic principles, it is also capable of seeing (and tasting) through its skin, which is in turn covered in chromatophore cells that enabled its ambush-predator ancestors to camouflage themselves, but with which our intelligent squid is able to communicate in a subtle and intricate language of form and colour.

I’m not a racist, I’m just saying the Elder Gods seem a bit different from you and me, you know?

Our intelligent squids have, like our descendants, built an interstellar civilization comprising many hundreds of colonized worlds, linked together by interstellar vessels travelling near the speed of light. Where our ships are metallic terrariums filled with air, theirs are mobile aquariums filled with salt water. Where our descendants covet rocky worlds with some amount of surface water, their cephalopod counterparts care not a bit for the land and are perfectly happy to settle high-gravity, oceanic super-Earths with not a single crag poking above the waves.

Not every world will be purely suitable for only one or the other species; likely there are many worlds with enough water and enough land that both can make a home there. Further, since both are space-faring civilizations, they will take a similar level of interest in the ambient resources available outside of habitable planets: the hydrogen and helium of gas giants, the mineral wealth of asteroids, the photonic energy of stars.

It is therefore probable that the two species will not simply pass one another like ships in the night, but will be forced to interact and cohabitate, and will occasionally come into conflict over resources desired by both. This means that some degree of diplomacy must be established, which requires some degree of mutual understanding from which disagreements can be articulated and agreements reached. Of course, both species being curious, technology-using entities, there will probably also be mutual benefits to communication, in the form of trade of technological developments, cultural artifacts, and scientific insights.

None of that requires that any member of either species proclaim "there is one race, the human-squid race". Such a proclamation would be absurd on its face. Yet at the same time, for communication and diplomacy to be possible there must be a mutual recognition of that which is shared, as well as a mutual recognition of that which is irreconcilably different. In this case, the shared element is necessarily at a very abstract level: both species are self-aware, rational lineages, who can at the very least probably agree on basic matters of mathematical truth. Proceeding from this, both species can come to mutual agreement that the other is possessed of intrinsic moral value, for the simple reason that, being rational entities, they are capable of perceiving moral value in the first place. After all, certain elementary aspects of morality emerge directly from game theory - the inevitable success in iterative tit-for-tat games of strategies that start by cooperating, and defect only if defected upon, leading directly to the Golden Rule of Do Unto Others.

So, to go back to our more contemporary and very real racial issues. The insistence that 'we're all the same under the skin' implies rather directly that, if race were more than 'skin deep', it would be moral to abuse others on a racial basis. It amazes me that crusaders against racial 'injustice' should be so blind to this glaring defect in their position ... especially given that the evidence for very real biological differences is now so overwhelming as to be impossible for any honest human to deny.

Put another way, few would argue that because a human is clearly more intelligent than a dog, it is acceptable for a human to go around kicking dogs.

So, if Africans are less intelligent than Eurasians, or East Asians less prone to violence than Australian Aborigines, or Arabs more prone to congenital birth defects than indigenous Peruvians, or Pygmies less capable of running marathons at high altitude than Tibetans, does any of that imply a moral justification for racial discrimination?

It does and it doesn't.

While our intelligent squids share certain foundational elements of rational intellect with humans, it would be insane to treat them as interchangeable. At the most obvious level, a human would drown in the squid's native environment, and the squid asphyxiate in the human's. Clearly, both require very different conditions to survive and to thrive, and this probably goes a lot further than the gross physical properties of their respective environments, extending to encompass social, spiritual, economic, and other aspects required for each to lead their best lives. If our two species are to get along, accommodations must be made. The preferences of one cannot be applied to the other. Perhaps the squids consider mass cannibalism amongst hatchlings to be an essential part of growing up; clearly humans would rebel if the squids were attempt to force the practice on their own families, but attempts by humans to prohibit the squids from the time-honoured ritual would be equally unacceptable to the squids, all of whom fondly remember the moment they emerged, triumphant and alone, from their hatching pool, the taste of their siblings' blood tingling all over their skin.

Just so, if different human ancestral lineages differ not just in their abilities (as they do), but in their personality and behavioural predispositions (as the evidence also suggests they do), then the social conditions required for one group to thrive are likely to be experienced as onerous by other groups. It's no accident that, left to their own devices, multi-ethnic human societies whether at the urban or the imperial level have tended towards mutual segregation, with stable territorial boundaries within which each group is more or less free to order their lives as they prefer. Similarly, it is no accident that, following generations of state-mandated desegregation, African-descended peoples in European-dominated environments have begun demanding their own spaces from which Whites and Asians are excluded.

It also follows that, if ability distributions are different, population-level expectations should also be different. Members of one group may be more generally suited to certain occupations than others, and likely to be happier when so engaged. In such a case, social harmony demands, not only that territorial boundaries be respected, but that each group is able to live a good and prosperous life doing whatever it is they are best at doing within the larger social organism. If blacks are poorly suited to intellectual work, but well suited to manual labour, then it should be possible to live comfortably as a manual labourer.

Those are the ways in which 'discrimination' is justified, although a better way to put it would be a laissez-faire attitude towards disparate outcomes, combined with an ethos of basic fairness when it comes to distributing the good things produced by society.

On the other hand, in some cases discrimination is not justified. If an intelligent squid is capable of making contributions to the hyperspace quantum chromofluid dynamics of our interstellar society's cutting edge physics, it should be free to do so, providing it's willing to endure minority status in a field that may be dominated by a different species and in which the research institutes are primarily set up with the comfort of the field's majority species in mind.

Just so, it strikes me as counterproductive and rather ridiculous to bar any given individual from practising an occupation for which members of his group are not statistically speaking generally suitable, for the sole reason that he is a member of that group. If you can hack it, you can hack it (and if you can't, you can't). If only a tiny minority of Dravidians possess the physical strength and stamina to go toe-to-toe with Samoans in the wrestling ring, this should be no impediment to a Dravidian freak of nature who does have what it takes and is inclined to do so. Of course, knowing that he'll be interacting with a large number of Samoans, it behooves the Dravidian in question to accommodate himself to the cultural peculiarities of the Samoans; he has to go into it knowing that he'll be something of a curiosity, and prepared to deal with the implications of that.

The point of this piece is this: harmony between black, white, red, and yellow (and between space squid and post-human cyborg), if it is achievable at all, absolutely demands that we take note of differences as well as points of commonality. No interaction is possible without establishing common ground on the basis of shared traits. No harmony is possible without acknowledging the differences, because ignoring the differences and attempting to treat everyone as interchangeable ciphers possessed of nothing beyond a homogenized 'human nature' blinds us to the specific conditions required by each group for basic social contentment. It further leaves us with no explanation beyond 'people are mean' for inevitable disparities that emerge between the gross demographic content of society and the granular demographic makeup of any given occupation, neighborhood, or socioeconomic stratum.

In other words, we'd all be a lot happier if we embraced cheerful racism.