Kevin B. MacDonald - A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples

A PEOPLE THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE

JUDAISM AS A GROUP EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY,
WITH

DlASPORA PEOPLES

Kevin MacDonald

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

A People That Shall Dwell Alone

Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples

All Rights Reserved 2002 by Kevin MacDonald

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Contents

A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (hereafter, PTSDA) was originally published in 1994 by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group. It is the first book in a trilogy of books on Judaism. The second book is Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory ofAnti-Semitism (MacDonald 1998; hereafter SAID), and the third is The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (MacDonald 1998/2002; hereafter CofC).

PTSDA develops the idea of a group evolutionary strategywhat one might term an evolutionarily significant way for a group of people to get on in the world. The book documents several theoretically interesting aspects of group evolutionary strategies using Judaism as a case study. These topics include the theory of group evolutionary strategies, the genetic cohesion of Judaism, how Jews managed to erect and enforce barriers to gene flow between themselves and other peoples, resource competition between Jews and non-Jews, how Jews solved the free-rider problem, how some groups of Jews came to have such high IQs, and how Judaism developed in antiquity. This preface updates several of these topics by discussing recent relevant research. However, the bulk of the preface describes several other groups that, like Judaism, have developed group structures that, at least for a time, served to keep

them separate from surrounding peoples. Like Jews, several of these groups developed as ecological specialists.

RECENT RESEARCH RELEVANT TO PTSDA

One issue of PTSDA that keeps coming up is the theoretical status of groups and group selection (e.g., Crippen 1997; Hartung 1995; Sanderson 2001). I am continually amazed at the extent to which evolutionists have been indoctrinatedmainly by Richard Dawkinsagainst supposing that groups have any important role to play in human evolution. The problem comes about for two reasons: Failure to comprehend cultural group selection, and failure to appreciate the extent to which selection between groups has shaped the human mind. Regarding cultural group selection, I have very little to add beyond the material in Chapter 1 of PTSDA. Formal models of cultural group selection continue to be elaborated (e.g., Richerson & Boyd 1998),but it has always seemed to me that the basic principle was so obvious and easy to understand that formal models were not really necessary.

There is a critical difference between humans and other animals that renders all of the arguments against group selection moot. It is simply this: Humans are able to solve the free-rider problem by monitoring and enforcing compliance to group goals. So far as we know, animals cant do this. As a result, although there may well be limits on the extent to which natural selection can build stable cohesive groups, much less altruistic groups, in the absence of massive genetic overlap, these limits do not apply to humans.

Humans are able to solve the free-rider problemthe problem that organisms would tend to take advantages of group membership without paying the costs. For example, soldiers in virtually all modern armies serve because they are conscripted. If they attempt to evade dangerous duty, they are shot. Consider the practices of the Soviet Army in W.W.II. Following the German invasion in 1941, the Soviet Army relied on the infliction of the greatest possible compulsion and terror, combined with an endless propaganda campaign intended to ensure political sway (Hoffman 2001). Disobedience of even minor orders could result in immediate execution. The result was a cohesive group where individual interests and individual goals mattered little.

Judaism and the other group strategies discussed here did not, of course, use such draconian methods, but at a theoretical level it is no different. As discussed in Chapter 6 of PTSDA, in traditional societies there were a variety of controls on the behavior of individual Jews that ensured that group interests prevailed, including paying communal taxes, guarding against free-loaders, creating pressures for charitable contributions, and respecting business monopolies held by other Jews.

These phenomena are, of course, by no means restricted to Jews. Boehm (1999) shows that human hunter-gatherer groups have been characterized by an egalitarian ethic for an evolutionarily significant periodlong enough to have influenced both genetic and cultural evolution. The egalitarian ethic implies that meat and other important resources are shared among the entire group, the power of leaders is circumscribed, free-riders are punished, and virtually all important decisions are made by a consensus process. The egalitarian ethic thus makes it difficult for individuals to increase their fitness at the expense of other individuals in the same group, resulting in relative behavioral uniformity and relatively weak selection pressures within groups. Mild forms of social control, such as gossip and withholding social benefits, are usually sufficient to control would-be dominators, but more extreme measures, such as ostracism and execution, are recorded in the ethnographic literature. By controlling behavioral differences within groups and increasing behavioral differences between groups, Boehm cogently argues that the egalitarian ethic shifted the balance between levels of selection and made selection between groups an important force in human evolution.

Recently, Fehr and Gachter (2002) found that people will altruistically punish defectors in a one-shot gamea game in which participants interact only once and are thus not influenced by the reputations of the people they are interacting with. Subjects who made high levels of public goods donations tended to punish people who did not, even though they did not receive any benefit from doing so. Moreover, punished individuals changed their ways and donated more in future games even though they knew that the participants in later rounds were not the same as in previous rounds. Fehr and Gachter suggest that people have an evolved negative emotional reaction to free riding that results in their punishing such people even at a cost to themselveshence the attribution of altruism.

These results are of great importance for thinking about situations where people help strangers in situations where future interactions are not anticipated. Essentially Fehr and Gachter model the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Their results are therefore least applicable to groups such as Jews which in traditional societies were based on extended kinship relationships, known kinship linkages, and repeated interactions among members. In such situations, actors know the people with whom they are cooperating and anticipate future cooperation because they are enmeshed in extended kinship networks, or, as in the case of Jews, they are in the same group. The results are most applicable to individualistic groups because such groups are not based similarly on extended kinship relationships and are much more prone to defection. In general, high levels of altruistic punishment are more likely to be found among individualistic, hunter-gather societies than in kinship based societies based on the extended family.