I went to meet a white nationalist leader the other day and even though he wanted no Jews in his country, he sought out a kosher restaurant for me and when I went to his home, he provided kosher food. When I hung out with his fellow white nationalists, he looked out for my welfare and even though many of these whites had anti-Jewish views, they toned them down to be considerate of my feelings.
I know of a white nationalist who went to a Klu Klux Klan meeting and there was one black or Filipino in the audience and as a result, all the Klan speakers toned things down to avoid hurting the feelings of this black man.
By contrast, if you are one of the few whites at a black nationalist meeting, you’ll hear lots of talk about killing whitey, killing his women, killing his children.
In my life experience, whites are the most empathic people around. It’s not even close.
Anthropologist Peter Frost writes:
Why was affective empathy more advantageous at the northwestern end of Eurasia? Together with empathic guilt, it may be part of a larger behavioral adaptation called the Western European Marriage Pattern, which seems to reflect a culture where kinship ties are relatively weak and thus insufficient to enforce rules of correct behavior.
The WEMP predominates north and west of an imaginary line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg and has the following general characteristics:
– men and women tend to marry relatively late and many never marry
– children usually leave the family to form new households
– a high proportion of non-kin circulate among different households (Hajnal, 1965)
This zone of relatively weak kinship existed before the Black Death of the 14th century and is attested by fragmentary evidence going back to the 9th century and even earlier (Hallam, 1985; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94). I suspect its origins go back to a unique Mesolithic culture that once existed along the North Sea and the Baltic (Price, 1991). At that time, an abundance of marine resources drew people to the coast each year for fishing, sealing, and shellfish collecting, thus creating large but fluid settlements unlike anything seen in other hunter-gatherers. Social interactions would have largely involved non-kin, and there would have thus been strong selection for mechanisms that could enforce social rules in the absence of kin obligations.
Conclusion
Through their high capacity for affective empathy and empathic guilt, these Northwest Europeans had an edge in adapting to later cultural environments that would be structured not by kinship but by other ways of organizing social relations: the State, ideology, and the market economy.
This has been one path that leads to advanced societies, but it is not the only one. East Asian societies have pursued a similar path of cultural evolution while having relatively low levels of affective empathy and empathic guilt. They seem to have done so by relying more on external means of behavior control (shaming, family discipline, community surveillance) and by building on cognitive empathy through learned notions of moral duty.
Meanwhile, Northwest European societies have had their capacity for empathy pushed to the limit, as seen in the commonly heard term “aid fatigue.” And there is no easy way to turn it off. The only real way is to convince oneself that the object of empathy is morally worthless.
Was it all an evolutionary mistake? Time will tell.
