Identity Group Dangers

Nancy and I have been reading a highly interesting book of the Old Testament, the book of Esther; and with this blog post, I hope to share with my readers some of the ideas generated by this reading. The book of Esther deals with the history of a conflict between the ancient Persians and the Jews in Mesopotamia, where the Jews were exiled during the 5^th Century BC. Esther, the queen, who was a Jew, became the deliverer of her people from certain extinction by the Persians. Haman, a hater of the Jews had convinced King Xerxes to kill all the Jews in the kingdom in order to gain a high position in government for himself. Esther and her uncle, Mordecai, exposed the plot and saved all the Jews from certain destruction.  

The problem described in the book of Esther illustrates some of the political and social problems that plague our societies now in the 21^st Century.  I think you will see that this Bible story is not so very “out of date.” The same problems with the development of cultural conflict in the world of the ancient Jews exist in today’s development of “identity groups.” You will see that political forces working in Queen Esther’s time are still operative even in 21^st Century America. 

To begin this discussion, I need to define what is meant by “human capital.” Human capital may be defined as the skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or population, viewed in terms of their value or cost to an organization or country. Human capital refers to the production factors, coming from human beings, that are used to create goods and services. Our knowledge, skills, habits, and social and personality attributes all form part of the human capital that contributes to the creation of goods and services. Creativity also contributes. Examples of human capital are the tendency to work hard, get educated, obtain on-the-job experience; the development of human capital includes a wide radius of trust among the group members so as to allow one person to reliably trust other members of the group. Thus, with lots of human capital and a wide radius of trust, it becomes easy to do business without a lot of government regulation.

As cultures and nations develop, there is an easily recognizable political problem that arises when two or more ethnic cultures live side by side, either in one single nation or in neighboring nations. The problem of conflict begins when one majority cultural group lags behind a minority cultural group in their respective possession of human capital.  The Jews have traditionally surpassed many other cultural groups in the possession of human capital. This tendency has produced cultural resentment among majority cultural groups who feel forced to compete with the Jews. Of course, this feeling of resentment is not limited to cultural interaction with Jews only. Resentment builds up among societies that find themselves living with other cultural groups who have different amounts of human capital (or, in other words, different skill sets). Disparities of income and wealth among groups with different amounts of human capital produce resentment that often breaks down in violence; such was probably part of the problem with the Jews and Persians in the 5^th century BC. 

When one social group is lagging behind a more successful social group, living next to them a challenging situation will often develop. This situation presents a logical opportunity for a lagging group to better itself by acquiring the skills of the more advanced group through following their example in development of technical and administrative skills. This can be done through efforts of the lagging group to learn from the examples set by the more advanced group. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be transferred to others without those from whom it is transferred having any less for themselves. So…it seems only logical for a lagging group to learn the skills being demonstrated by the more skillful group and thereby improve the life situation of the whole society. 

Unfortunately, this is not the way it works out in practice very often. What usually happens is that opportunistic politicians latch onto the differences in skill sets and make the most of the unfortunate situation for their own personal aggrandizement politically. These politicians will follow a familiar trajectory in their speeches. They will play on the resentment felt by the lagging majority group, define the situation so as to show how “put upon” the lagging group is by the skillful and more advanced neighboring group and, thus, to spotlight every drop of resentment they can in order to gain control for themselves. This process is currently being described by the development of isolated “identity groups” deliberately setting one group against another. We can see this process being worked today, particularly by such politicians as Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a whole host of Democrat presidential candidates. 

Modern examples of this sociological phenomenon are many. In the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, the Armenian peoples of what is now eastern Turkey were severely persecuted by the then current leaders of the Ottoman Empire; a blood bath of persecution broke out, and thousands of Armenians were killed. The Jews of eastern Europe and Germany were targeted by Hitler and millions were exterminated. The conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka were set against one another by an opportunistic politician, Solomon Bandaranaike—thousands were slaughtered in the ensuing rebellion, although before Bandaranaike they had lived peaceably together for many decades. Bandaranaike was the catalyst that started the whole destructive process. In Nigeria, a skillful tribal group (the Ibos of the southeastern part of the nation) was set upon by the Hausa-Fulani tribal group in the north; and the Biafran conflict resulted in thousands of Ibos being killed. Chinese in the Philippines are among the many productive groups whose economic success has led to violent backlashes. When Romania acquired territory from the defeated Central Powers after the First World War, this territory included universities that were culturally German or culturally Hungarian. The Romanian government made it a political priority to force Germans and Hungarians out of these universities, even though most Romanians were still illiterate at that point and so could not replace the Germans or Hungarians. The expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970’s led to the collapse of the Ugandan economy, because there were not enough qualified Ugandans to replace them in the business sector that people from the Indian subcontinent had been managing. The same pattern occurred in Rwanda in the late 20^th Century when Hutus slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. All this, being said, does not even mention the persecution of the Jews in Russia under Stalin where approximately 20 million Jews were exiled to Siberia and most of them were executed. Chairman Mao systematically starved millions of his people to death using the identity group method to get rid of the intelligentsia in China in the early 20^th Century. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge was a brutal dictator who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot's attempts to create a Cambodian “master race” through social engineering ultimately led to the deaths of more than 2 million people in the nation and destroyed about half of the entire population.

By encouraging resentment among a majority lagging group, those seeking either the leadership or the votes of lagging groups tend to offer them four assurances:

1.    Assurances that their lags are not their fault.

2.   Assurance that their lags are the fault of some advanced group that they already envy and resent.

3.   Assurance that the lagging group and their culture are just as good as anybody else’s if not better.

4.   Assurance that what the lagging group needs and deserves is a demographically defined “fair share” of the economic and other benefits of society, sometimes supplemented with some kind of reparations for past injustices or some special reward for being indigenous “sons of the soil.”

Such are the forces working in our society, today. Groups are being developed and identified as described above—presently under the impression that income inequality can be remedied best by the governmental operation of money redistribution. The wealthy in our country, today seems to be the identity group that is receiving the brunt of criticism and blame for the unfortunate situation perceived by the less accomplished in our nation. It seems to me that the forces working in the administration of Xerxes is still functional in American politics.  

It should be said that this tendency toward social disintegration does not necessarily have to happen. There are the examples of Scotland in the 18^th Century and Japan in the 19^th Century where a lagging social group chose a more constructive route to take in order to better themselves without violence. Both of those nations rose to world prominence by educating themselves and adopting the more successful roles of their envied neighbors. Similar favorable behavior and policy also occurred in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These examples show that it is not necessary to inflame identity groups in order to produce good effects in a nation. (Data from this paragraph was gleaned from a book, “Wealth, Poverty, and Politics,” by Thomas Sowell.)

If I could do anything about our present economic situation in the U.S., I would wish that people who want to better themselves would work hard to learn the skills of the more affluent. Then, all the people would be better off.  Reparations and other devised techniques of money transfers will never solve the problems of our society.