The Three Ways of Dealing with Outsiders: Sub-Humans, Ignorance, or Evangelism

Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders:

1. remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance)
2. considering them sub-humans and acting maliciously or merely neglecting them
3. evangelizing and assimilating them

By "outsider" I mean "people whose behavior is perceived to differ in morally important ways". Those morally important ways are often things like what moral authority you follow, supernatural or otherwise; what you eat; sexual practices; and boundaries of socially sanctioned violence.

You can be perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things, whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.

We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.

a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.

This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.

Name of strategy	Ignorance		Sub-humans	Evangelize
Interaction	Trade, at most*		Living with
Underlying strategy	(no strategy)		Degrade	Assimilate

This could be called either the triune theory of moral resolution, or ISE (sounds like "ice" - for Ignorance, Sub-humans, and Evangelism.) They are as follows.

1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.


2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)

Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.

We also sometimes categorize people in our own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.

Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g., shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)

In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.

As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.


3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.

If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.

There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)



Can There Be Any Solution?

The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.

But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.

You might object that a transactional relationship is not a full one, and you would be correct. Here we can take advantage of the millions of people who we live among in the modern age - you don't have to interact with every single member of your society, and the ones you choose to interact with, you choose at what level you do.

In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (see also here.)


*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.

A Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Alexandria: Alternate History #6

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #5: Colonial Japan. For the next installment, see Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California. Want to see how we might already be living in an alternate timeline, created by a time traveler who went back to kill a dictator who we (of course) don't recognize as such? And what do the patterns in alternate histories we choose to write say about us?

From the Parisian Mahayana Seminary lesson book, Year of the Buddha 2332:

'In the Gandhari original [gospel letters from the Buddhist kingdom of India] Antiochos is referred to as "Amtiyoko nama Yona-raja" (lit. "The Greek king by the name of Antiokos"), beyond whom live the four other kings: "param ca tena Atiyokena cature 4 rajani Turamaye nama Amtikini nama Maka nama Alikasudaro nama" (lit. "And beyond Antiochus, four kings by the name of Ptolemy, the name of Antigonos, the name of Magas, the name Alexander" [1]

"It is not clear in Hellenic records whether these emissaries were actually received, or had any influence on the Hellenic world. Some scholars, however, point to the presence of Buddhist communities in the Hellenistic world from that time, in particular in Alexandria (mentioned by Clement of Alexandria). The pre-Christian monastic order of the Therapeutae may have drawn inspiration for its ascetic lifestyle from contact with Buddhist monasticism, although the foundation and Scriptures were Jewish. Buddhist gravestones from the Ptolemaic period have also been found in Alexandria, decorated with depictions of the Wheel of the Law.[2] Commenting on the presence of Buddhists in Alexandria, some scholars have even pointed out that "It was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established"'.

This was in fact copied from Wikipedia" (today, Year of the Buddha 2556.)

It's a bit odd that a Semitic religion ended up dominating Europe, and a blue-eyed Indo-European's religion ended up dominating East Asia - although oddly, not the land of his birth south of the Himalayas). But in the third century B.C., the Indian Buddhist King Asoka tried. After his conversion, he improved trade routes and sent missionaries throughout South Asia and the ancient Near East. In this he was like a Buddhist Constantine and Paul rolled into one; imagine a Buddhist New Testament with books named after letters to the evangelized city-states, like Alexandrians and Bactrians and Persians (instead of Romans and Galatians and Ephesians). The top image is from Wikipedia, on Buddhism and the Roman Empire. The bottom image is an evangelical Buddhist inscription in Greek and Aramaic - by Asoka, from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Contact between Buddhists and the classical Near East always seem like a bit of alternate history to us modern Westerners.




Of course some of these monuments and markers have been destroyed by our throwback friends the Taliban, but they're just doing what good fundamentalists of all stripes do: think of the Spanish missionaries destroying Mayan texts, or early European Christians censoring and smearing classical materialist works, or any number of political book-burnings in the twentieth century. This brings up an obvious question: if Buddhism had its champion in a Asoka, then where are the Buddhist temples in Athens and Afghanistan today? The answer is obvious in retrospect when you consider religion as just another set of customs. If your philosophy (whether it appeals to the supernatural or not) is not traveling along at the head of a conquering army, or the merchants and diplomats of a powerful empire, the odds are against you if you don't have another trick, like getting endorsements from people in positions of power. (Scientology had the smart idea of spreading into people who have both influence, and weak intellectual immune systems.) It also helps for your philosophy to be intolerant of syncretism and pluralism, and here Asoka was too nice. He felt bad for having prosecuted a bloody war prior to his conversion, and while he did favor Buddhism, he did not punish non-Buddhists. Buddhism eventually did reach the rest of Asia - southeast Asia in Asoka's lifetime, and then China a few centuries later - by "organic" diffusion along the silk road or from missionaries sent out by the religion itself.

Again the differing history of religion in the Far East and the Middle East/Europe is interesting. It might not be anything about the pre-existing culture or geography or political systems of the regions, but rather the coincidental content of the religions themselves. Two innovations that the three Abrahamic religions happened to produce were 1) actively excluding other belief systems and 2) early in their history, successfully infiltrating existing secular powers. Indeed the Abrahamic religions got progressively better at this as time went on. The Jews kept mostly to themselves except during military occupation, then the Christians grew to dominate Rome after a few centuries, and finally Mohammed seems to have conceived Islam as a means to political and military power right from the start. Islam - Abrahamic religion v3.0 - was the best one so far. It's also probably no coincidence that it's the cultural and geographic crossroads of the Middle East where these innovations appeared. A religion that isn't a strong competitor right out of the cradle isn't going to get very far in a place like that!

So there was no Gupta army storming west out of India to force Buddhism onto the Persians and Greeks and Romans, partly because Buddhists are not required to exclude other beliefs. Fair enough; and incidentally, some of the Mongol armies were Buddhist, and some followed an indigenous Mongolian religion, but again, neither of these required conversion. If you paid your taxes the Mongols didn't care. That's why Russians today don't follow the sky god Tengri. (The euphemism "indigenous religion" just means "a religion that's not one of the few indigenous religions that escaped the ethnic group that created them and then spread globally".) But this leaves unanswered the opposite question, which is why India and China aren't Christian or Muslim today. If Alexander had crossed the Indus - or a Chinese-Turkic empire had controlled the Middle East - then very likely whatever religions appeared in this region would have spread east at least as much as they spread west. (In a stable, united post-Alexandrian Eurasia, my money is on a prophet appearing and spreading his faith a little earlier in history.) But we should also remember that we're still in medias res of the global diffusion of ideas, and it's possible that the monotheistic, active-excluding religions just haven't had enough time to crowd out the tolerant ones with tolerant leaders. That is to say, the world's gardens haven't yet all been colonized with the most hardy invasives on offer. Of course, the parts of Asia that came into contact with Abrahamism v3.0 are, in fact, Muslim today.

In closing, modern Korea is a much more interesting case. One half of it has its own brand of exclusive Korean-nationalist communism - originally a European philosophy; how syncretic - which tolerates no (other) religion - and the other half appears very much like it's in the process of becoming Christian, complete with politically ascendant creationists trying to impose restrictions on what is taught in biology classes. And all of this in less than a century.

Sun Yat-Sen and the Enlightenment

I was confused to find universities in mainland China named after Sun, since I'd always associated him with the KMT and therefore the government now in Taiwan. Learning more about him he quickly stands out as a clear extension of the Enlightenment to the East. Scanning through Google Books you'll find some fascinating essays from Sun himself:

Monarchy has steadily shrunk as democracy has steadily expanded. Following the recent war in Europe, which witnessed the downfall of all its remaining autocracies, monarchy has been left with scarcely a foothold on the continent. This has been the tide of political progress throughout the world; it is beyond man's capacity to resist it, being precisely what the ancients meant by the "will of heaven." "Those who follow the way of heaven prosper, while those who defy it perish."

The Enlightenment in China didn't ignite independently of politics of the rest of the world - Sun attended the 'Iolani School in Hawaii and was especially inspired by Western principles through American political history, in particular by Lincoln. (Sun is considered the father of modern China both in Taiwan and on the mainland, hence the institutions named after him in both places; I wonder if this strong American influence on his philosophy is taught in schools in Beijing?) But it's exactly his ancestry to both China's capitalists and (at least nominal) communists that is key. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith were arguing for liberties and an economic order based on reason and material improvement, rather than on authority invested in monarchs by a deity. Sun wasn't afraid to point out problems he perceived with either's theses or the constitutions of contemporary democracies, and as a result he still isn't easy to classify in any Enlightenment ideology dating after the free-market/central planning split. Go back up and read that quote again - this was a revolutionary speaking, but (ignoring the spiritual rhetorical fluorish) these could easily have been the words of Jefferson or Lenin. It has echoes of Marx's inevitable current of history, and every American President's evangelism about the expansion of democracy.

But Sun was primarily concerned with the legitimate basis of governance and liberty - which Jefferson and Lenin largely shared - not with economics. In contrast, today's religious terrorists have more in common with yesterday's deity-justified hereditary autocracies. Even without debating the moral definition of legitimacy, we can look at the practical impact. Countries with strong, predictable, transparent institutions, along with freedom of speech and the press and assembly and open elections, are the ones with the most sustainable growth. Certainly at the two extremes of economic policy, having either zero safety net or absolute redistributivism would hamper development, but the imposed tax burden or lack of social supports turn out to be secondary influences on the fates of nations, after resilient institutions and liberties. When these conditions obtain, it is assured that the political system in question will have mechanisms to correct itself by allowing innovations (which sometimes shine through despite a bad system's best efforts.) It seems that Sun had deduced this early on, since he was willing to align with the communists even though he was not one. Little did he know in 1911 how seriously and literally communist revolutionaries in Russia and later in his own country would take the points of Marx's program for a dictatorship of the proletariat. And how curiously disinterested they would be in its eventual dissolution, as Marx also wrote.

It's also worth observing that although China's communist government appeared later than the Soviet Union's, China's anti-monarchist revolution occurred 6 years earlier. This might lead us to ask why China had a 38 year interregnum between its revolution and the establishment of its lasting government, when Russia's was less than 1 year. More generally it's also worth asking why the U.S. was so fortunate in terms of instability. The U.S. had a 6-year interregnum (the Articles of Confederation) from the official end of hostilities with Britain to our Constitution, but very little fighting, even including my own pugnacious home state of Pennsylvania. Compare these light casualties to the post-revolutionary histories of Mexico and even France. Why was the transition in America so relatively tranquil? But these are separate questions.

In the end, Sun was at heart a patriot who wanted to see a stronger China, and patriotism is a relatively recent phenomenon. When your master and de facto owner is Louis XIV or the Tokugawas, why bother being proud of being part of a French or Japanese nation? Why did it matter if any subject liked or approved of their government? The idea probably would have seemed a little precious and naive to le roi or the shoguns, and puzzling and pointless to peasants. As such, Sun initially approached the Qing court with suggestions for a stronger China. These were either rejected or ignored. In the Qing Dynasty, if you weren't Manchu, your chances of having any influence were slim, although you still had some chance of access to the inner circle of you were willing to jump through the hoops: learn the classics and pass the civil service examinations, all relatively costly signaling that you would devote all your attention and time to the pointless exercises set by the Qing, rather than doing something useful and merit-based. Sun wasn't willing to do this, and many sources connect his turning from a would-be reformer to a revolutionary to these experiences in the mid-1890s. (Modern corporations and governments take note! Do you want talent, or do you want people willing to submit to mindless ritual?) But the Qing were not long for the world, and the resources they forced their best-and-brightest to waste on hoop-jumping was doubltess one factor in their demise.

Finally: the Western world would benefit from a new, well-researched account of the colonization of the New World, as well as of the classical era from the Battle of Marathon through the fall of the Western Roman Empire, by East Asian authors. Doubtless there are artificial distinctions we make and myths that have been promulgated for centuries that Westerners no longer notice or question, and that Asian writers would quickly identify and explode.