This is a very interesting argument, and I agree with much of it. I particularly like your catalog of various atrocities perpetrated by groups all over the world.
I have a slightly different take on some aspects of the argument, though, which may be just a difference of emphasis. One of your headings, for instance, says that “The Worst People Within any Group Often Rise to the Top of Power Structures” and another one says “The Worst Groups Also Tend to Rise to the Top.” Your opening sentence says this: “For much of recent history, certainly since industrialization, it isn’t hard to find a white hand somewhere in the chain of command leading to many of the world’s atrocities, or at least those that we in the west are the most aware of.”
My take on this stuff is that in framing the issue this way, you already concede a bit too much to the people making these arguments. I’d phrase each of your points this way:
- “The Best and Worst People Within any Group Often Rise to the Top of Power Structures”
- “The Best and Worst Groups Also Tend to Rise to the Top”
- “For much of recent history, certainly since industrialization, it isn’t hard to find a white hand somewhere in the chain of command leading to many of the world’s greatest achievements and worst atrocities, or at least those that we in the west are the most aware of.”
In other words, those people and groups that rise to the top are disproportionately going to be the ones that harbor the most aggression and ruthlessness but also the most energy, creativity, dynamism, propensity for rethinking and innovation, etc. You move towards making essentially this point by the end of your article, but I’d be framing it this way from the outset. And there’s a second point to be made here, which is that once a group reaches the top of a hierarchy, because it has the most power and influence over the course of subsequent history, it’s inherently going to be disproportionately responsible for every outcome, whether good or bad. And this is why white people have wrought so many great things and so many horrific things.
I’d say two more things. As far as the question of why white people got to the top in the first place, since you mention guns, if you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s much-acclaimed Guns, Germs and Steel, you might be interested. The irony of white people getting guns first, which is something you correctly observe as being instrumental in their subsequent dominance, is that, of course, gun powder was invented in China in the 9th century, not in the West, which was then still going through its dark ages. So you have to ask the question of why, as the centuries unfolded, these small Western nations like Britain and France leapfrogged China in the race for world supremacy. And you also have to ask, in general, why it was that the West, i.e., Europe, as opposed to Asia or Africa or the native peoples of the New World happened to achieve technological supremacy. Guns, Germs and Steel aims to answer that question, and it offers a compelling narrative that accords primacy to fortuitous geographical factors that we wouldn’t necessarily realize could play such an important role. Anyway, you might find that book interesting.
The last point I’d make is that you sometimes use the pronoun “we” in referring to white people or the West. You’re obviously free to identify howsoever you wish, and this is just my personal note, but I firmly believe that these kinds of identifications — divisions of the world into “us” and “them” on the basis of racial groups that are supposed to live together functionally and peaceably in close proximity — further entrench problematic fissures that have developed over centuries and that have become particularly acute within the past decade or so. Divisions of the world into “us” and “them” on the basis of national identity vs. foreign identity is useful and even necessary if any nation is to function as a coherent whole. I’ve developed that argument in more detail here:
But when, instead of identifying together as members of one nation sharing common goals, we instead find ourselves being torn apart at the seams as the result of pitting one racial or ethnic or gender or sexual group against another, we all suffer for it. Because of this, I don’t think of my race as a “we” that sets me apart from a “they” of a different race. I don’t derive any particular satisfaction or ego boost from the fact that Homer or Shakespeare or Newton or Darwin or any other Western greats happened to be white, as opposed to something else. Races are incoherent categories from a biological standpoint and exist primarily on a sociological level, and so I think we’re best off opposing such identifications rather than entrenching them.
I feel much closer to those black Americans, Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans who share important aspects of my culture, worldview and preferences than I do to those white Americans (or, still more obviously, white foreigners) who differ from me in such fundamental cultural respects.
So while I have no problem with an article that aims to explain why white people achieved global preeminence, the one thing I personally wouldn’t do is equate it with why we achieved global preeminence. But, again, that’s just my view.
Thanks again for sending the article my way.
