The blessing of America

Here's a passage from Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, picked up on Steve Sailer's blog:

Anyway, the divisions in Kenya didn't stop there [between Africans and Indian merchants]; there were always finer lines to draw. Between the country's forty black tribes, for example. They, too, were a fact of life. You didn't notice the tribalism so much among [half-sister] Auma's friends, younger university-educated Kenyans who had been schooled in the idea of nation and race; tribe was an issue with them only when they were considering a mate, or when they got older and saw it help or hinder careers. But they were the exceptions. Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me. "The Luo are intelligent but lazy," they would say. Or "The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious." Or "The Kalenjins -- well, you can see what's happened to the country since they took over."

Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. [At this point, Obama has spent a little less than two weeks in his life in Africa.] "It's thinking like that that holds us back," I would say. "We're all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia."

And Jane would say, "Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don't you?"

And Zeituni would say, "You sound just like your father, Barry, he also had such ideas about people."

Meaning he , too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him ...

Here's where things stand in Kenya right now: neighbors hacking and burning to death neighbors of different tribes, with whom they've lived for years:

ELDORET, Kenya, Jan. 2 -- One after another, bandaged men and women offered chilling details: that a swarming mob of machete-wielding men chained the front door of a mud-and-steel church, trapping about 100 people, mostly women and children, inside.

The mob shoved mattresses against the outside walls, doused them with gasoline and tossed a match.

Those inside who tried to escape through windows were hacked to death with machetes.

But for Joseph Njuguna, who rested in the sun outside a hospital Wednesday, his head and hands bandaged from fighting off a machete blade, there was one detail that disturbed him more than all the others: a familiar face in the screaming mob.

"Paul," said Njuguna, who is from the Kikuyu tribe, referring to a man from a different tribe. "He's my neighbor. He is my friend. I did not think that Paul could do something like that."

Another man reports holing up inside a church for safety, and hearing the mob that would burn the church down with women and children in it coming up the street: "Even some were calling us by name," he said. "They were murmuring in their own language. Then they came all at once."

That, my friends, is human nature. It's not just Africans. We know all too well about Germans and others who turned their Jewish neighbors in to the Nazis. I am old enough to have known white people -- gentle, elderly white people -- who wouldn't have batted an eye at horrific violence done to their black neighbors. This is not all that people are, but it's what's at our instinctive core. The science columnist Michael Shermer explains that he used to believe humans were born cooperative and peace-loving, but were made competitive and violent by social constructs. He no longer does:

The data from evolutionary psychology has now convinced me that we evolved a dual set of moral sentiments: within groups we tend to be pro-social and cooperative, but between groups we are tribal and xenophobic. Archaeological evidence indicates that Paleolithic humans were anything but noble savages, and that civilization has gradually but ineluctably reduced the amount of within-group aggression and between group violence. And behavior genetics has erased the tabula rasa and replaced it with a highly constrained biological template upon which the environment can act.

As the Kenyans are today, so the ancestors of us Americans, wherever we come from, were yesterday -- even here, in this country. What was the civil rights struggle but an attempt by one "tribe," a minority one, to overturn laws and customs by which the dominant "tribe" oppressed them? Don't think we use violence in our politics? Ask Martin Luther King's family.

Of course it's absurd to compare the violence surrounding American politics in these past few decades with what nations like Kenya suffer. What I want to say, though, is that to the extent that we fight our political battles through speeches and caucuses and primaries, and we can all rely on the peaceful transfer of power, it's because of the extremely hard and lengthy work of the civilizational process. That is, we collectively had to work, in countless places over decades and centuries, to learn to restrain our darker passions, and to build not only the laws, institutions and customs that keep those passions governed, but to inculcate the beliefs in the collective heart of society that support peaceableness, respect for the law, civility and suchlike. America was founded on the ideal that membership in the national "tribe" does not depend on accident of birth, but by sharing the national ideals, and that a man should not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

Countless men -- including Martin Luther King, martyred for the American cause 40 years ago this year -- died for that ideal, which even to this day we struggle to more perfectly realize. In that regard, we are a better country today than the country I was born into in 1967. I was born into a South which was just beginning to emerge from segregation; now, the United States might elect the son of an African immigrant as our next president! God bless America.

But we should not lose sight of how exceedingly rare and fragile an achievement in human history American liberal democracy is. Amy Chua, a Yale law professor and daughter of Chinese immigrants, recently wrote in a Washington Post column about immigration:

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

The United States is in no danger of imminent disintegration. But this is because it has been so successful, at least since the Civil War, in forging a national identity strong enough to hold together its widely divergent communities. We should not take this unifying identity for granted.

The greatest empire in history, ancient Rome, collapsed when its cultural and political glue dissolved, and peoples who had long thought of themselves as Romans turned against the empire. In part, this fragmentation occurred because of a massive influx of immigrants from a very different culture. The "barbarians" who sacked Rome were Germanic immigrants who never fully assimilated.

Chua is not against immigration, but her column points out that we have got to work harder at strengthening the national ideals that unify us Americans. What we have now is not humankind in its natural state. Liberal democracy is an artificial creation. If we want to keep it, we have to work hard to care for it, and to nurture the conditions under which it can thrive. It is by no means unthinkable that we could find ourselves like Kenya one day, should the bonds that connect individuals to a shared national identity decay to the point in which they would not hold us together in a severe crisis, or series of crises.

The fragility of civilization is not generally appreciated in our country, in our time.