Approaching racism realistically

In the aftermath of the horror in Charleston I've seen some productive discussion about race and racism. Some new insights include the following:

• Pretending (or aspiring) to be "colorblind" is not helpful. It's easy for someone from a more privileged ethnicity to say, "I don't see or treat other races as inferior, and I don't see any racism, so the problem is essentially done." This negates the very real obstacles that others face due to systematic racism. We have to be able to see and hear about racism in order to address these obstacles effectively.

• It's great that our culture has gotten to the point of essentially agreeing that racism is wrong. Yet this positive development has ironically spawned a new problem: the "black hat villain" problem. To wit, it's the reasoning that "Racists are evil villains; my friends and I are not evil villains; therefore we are not racists."

This "evil villain" reasoning is particularly counter-productive when addressing racism because it is very, very hard to root racism out of your outlook and attitudes entirely. I think that the whole idea that "either you're racist or you're not" is an inaccurate and unhelpful model. It's better to look at it in terms of how far you've progressed and how committed you are to looking honestly and unflinchingly into your own psyche to continue to seek out and address any residual racism lurking in the dark corners.

If you respond by getting angry, defensive, and insulted every time people point out some racism you have expressed, you are guaranteeing that you will never improve and never be a true ally.

I discussed this a bit in a post from 2010:

Every time you notice an unfounded prejudice that you hold, you should be glad that you noticed it -- because it is only by noticing it that you can root it out. Having empathy for all humanity is something you can work on for your whole life and never truly succeed. Yet, some things are worth doing even though they're very hard.

Another essay has been popping up in my reading list lately which nails the point even better. I would recommend to everyone to read The pernicious impact of "white fragility" by Dr. Robin Deangelo. The author lists 11 defensive ways white people may react to feedback on racism, which sound pretty accurate. The 11th one is particularly grotesque:

To suggest my behavior had a racist impact is to have misunderstood me. You will need to allow me to explain until you can acknowledge that it was your misunderstanding.

And the author offers some practical advice for a constructive alternative:

1. How, where, and when you give me feedback is irrelevant – it is the feedback I want and need. Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it. From my position of social, cultural, and institutional white power and privilege, I am perfectly safe and I can handle it. If I cannot handle it, it’s on me to build my racial stamina.
2. Thank you.

Let's work on taking this advice.

Your true race?

Race is real. It is a real social construct. The race(s) that people perceive you as being a part of have a real effect on the others perceive you, what they think of you, and how they treat you. Your own perception of your own racial identity affects you as well. Racial identity is closely tied with community, family, and heritage. And the construction of one's racial identity is extremely complex -- not easily reducible to a handful of simple, universal guidelines.

There's been a lot of discussion about the (former) professor in Montana who chose to identify as black even though she was white! Personally, I think that what she did was extremely misguided and indeed dishonest. But I think it is also misguided to try to come up with a simple set of guidelines about who is allowed to identify as which race just so we can have some general, objective standard for criticizing her. (I don't want to pick on this one article, but here's an example, for reference).

For one thing, I don't think it's useful to insist on having a theoretical framework that works perfectly for both racial identity and gender identity. That's like insisting that your framework for gay marriage must also fit poly-marriage: there are very clear and real parallels, but there's a sufficient difference in complexity that you can't treat them as interchangeable.

What qualifies as a race anyway? Some choices include white, black, Asian, Pacific islander, Native American, hispanic, Jewish, Muslim -- I've even seen Brazilian and Hawaiian treated as "races". I'm not trying to say "Ha, ha, how silly to consider these 'races' when we all know a 'real' race is XYZ..." -- quite the opposite. These can all be categories that affect how others perceive you and treat you and how you think of yourself. But which categories are perceived as real categories depends very strongly on the culture and society you're in. You probably have multiple racial/ethnic identities. Your racial identity may change depending on your own experiences and on which group(s) you're currently interacting with.

But this Montana lady is white, and hence she was pretending to have faced discrimination and disadvantages she never faced! True, and very problematic. But I would be wary of using this example to define general guidelines. There are plenty of people with mixed heritage who look so white that no one would ever spontaneously guess they're something else! They don't face quite the same discrimination as others in their family and community. I read lots of blogs and articles by folks in this category (in addition to knowing some personally), and I've consistently seen the message that such people understand that they experience privileges that their fellows don't. Yet, if their racial/ethnic heritage is important to them, it would be totally inappropriate to tell them they have no business identifying as XYZ if they look white.

But this lady in Montana intentionally made herself look black and lied about her black heritage to become a leader in the NAACP! And that was dishonest (not to mention deeply weird, considering being white wouldn't have disqualified her for the position). It was unethical. But that doesn't mean we should conclude that you can't change your racial/ethnic identity. Nor should we conclude that you can't go from a more privileged identity to a more marginalized one. Nor that your racial/ethnic identity has to derive from your ancestral heritage. Think about the categories on my list above. Some people integrate into a new group to the point where they identify with the new group completely (and are seen by outsiders as part of that group) -- and there's nothing inherently false or dishonest about such a conversion.

I would not judge those who don't want to identify with some part of their heritage, regardless of whether they're rejecting a more privileged or a more marginalized identity. I think we should respect people's own decisions about which parts of their heritage (and which new communities) they identify with and which they don't.

It doesn't make sense to suggest that a person has one true race that can be objectively determined and defined for them.

As far as genetics are concerned, I assume I don't have to explain to my readers that all attempts to use genes to canonically divide the human species into races has failed completely. Yes, the color of your skin, the texture of your hair, and the shape of your facial features all depend strongly on your genes. But the handful of superficial features that are used culturally as cues to determine someone's race are essentially worthless for dividing people into any kind of meaningful genetic groupings. The most distantly-related human populations in the world -- aboriginal Australians vs. some populations in Africa -- get simply grouped as "black people" when we use these superficial traits. In the meantime, some populations of "white people" and "black people" are much closer to each other genetically than either one of them is to the populations mentioned above. The experience of race is real -- members any of the above categories of "black people" would probably have similar experiences if they moved to a majority-white country. But the genetic basis for grouping them? Not so much.

My son's two best friends are an interesting case in point. His one friend is a Muslim from North Africa, and the other is... well... his dad is Mexican, and his mom is mixed further: her dad is from Haiti and her mom is French Canadian. So "racially" he's half Mexican (is that even a "race"? -- he doesn't speak any Spanish...), and he's a quarter "black", and, I guess, a quarter "white". I've heard that the French Canadians, like the Mexicans, have a high proportion of Native American heritage, but, from a superficial-racial-characteristics point-of-view, they're basically indistinguishable from any other white people. Um, except the ones that "look black"...? Anyway, the funny thing is that from a superficial-racial-characteristics point-of-view, the two friends could easily pass for being of the same ethnicity as each other, despite the fact that their backgrounds have nothing to do with one another. These superficial characteristics affect our lives so much, but it's sad that we place so much weight on them, considering that they are so completely arbitrary.

Now, I will add one caveat that I think there exist cases where it makes sense to question someone's choice of racial identity. The Montana professor, for example -- she was deceptively implying a set of experiences she didn't really have. For another, I'd question folks who use a trivial ancestral connection to harm others, eg. folks who claim that they had some Native American ancestor, hence their opinion on some team name not being racist should be taken seriously. But outside of such obviously problematic cases, I think we should err on the side of allowing people to define their own racial identity based on their own experiences.

The trouble with "The Help"

I admit it -- I read The Help and enjoyed it, as an entertaining novel. It struck me as a little odd to have a novel about racism with a white person writing the perspective of a black person, but it's not a priori impossible to do it well.

Then, courtesy of the Hathor Legacy, I found an interesting series of reviews that explain a lot of problematic aspects that I hadn't quite put my finger on.

From Rebecca Wanzon:

One of the three narrators, Aibleen, says that she realizes she is more free than the racist character that destroys her livelihood, a claim that encourages readers to feel better about segregation because, in this logic, nobody can take real, psychological freedom from anyone. Freedom is really about how you feel, not about, you know, the law. It makes Jim Crow an inconvenience, not an obstacle.

I read an Amazon review of the novel that told a reader not to worry that they would have to read over 400 pages of depressing oppression. This is true -- "The Help" makes Jim Crow palatable. I don't think this is a good thing.

African American women had voices before Miz Skeeter gave them the idea

From Duchess Harris:

So instead of incorporating a real Black woman’s voice in a novel purported to being about Black domestics, the Skeeter/Stockett character is comfortingly centralized, and I can see why white women relate to her.

Her Black characters lack the credibility reflected in Coming of Age in Mississippi, a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody, an African American woman growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1960s. Moody recalls doing domestic work for white families from the age of nine. Moody’s voice is one of a real Black woman who left her own house and family each morning to cook in another woman’s kitchens.

Sounds really interesting -- maybe I should pick up a copy of that book...

Scene at the Bahnhof

Part of the reason I'm so hard on the US is because I actually follow US politics. I read the stuff about the anti-immigrant laws in Arizona or Tea Party's latest antics, and it makes me want to tear my hair out -- it leaves me with the impression that the US must be the most militantly, wilfully ignorant country on the planet.

Then I remember that it's easy to wander around Switzerland with the (mis)impression that everything is candy-canes and lollipops -- as long as you don't speak German well enough to understand what people are saying...

Sometimes bad stuff is hard to miss, though -- for example, the cutesy-cartoon-racist political posters that are often plastered all over town. (I posted about them once before here.) Lately we've been treated to a new version of the "white sheep kicking the black sheep our of Switzerland" poster:



I was waiting at the train station with my son the other day, and the only free bench on the train platform had the white-sheep-black-sheep poster behind it. But my son wanted to sit down, so we did (with me muttering to myself about having to sit by this racist poster).

The interesting thing, though, was that apparently folks hadn't let this message pass without comment. There were three messages written on it in ball-point pen:

Naturally, since I have the wrong skin color, I'm a bad person. And naturally I chose my skin color! (originally: Naturlich habe ich nicht die richtige Hautfarbe, also ich bin eine schlechte Person. Und naturlich habe ich meine Hautfarbe ausgewählt!)

Thanks a lot, SVP! They're so intelligent! (originally: Danke schön zu dem SVP! Sie sind so intelligent!)

I suffer every day because of my skin color... I didn't need a poster like this one to remind me. :( (originally: Je souffre tous les jours à cause de ma coleur de peau... Je n'avais pas besoin d'une telle affiche pour me la rappeler... :()

I don't really have anything to add -- I just found it to be an interesting urban dialog.

Racism is personal and economic

Folks, I'd like to share with you today some of the most important insights I've picked up in my world travels. Please feel free to add, agree, disagree, whatevs, in the comments.

1. People don't realize how little they empathize with people who are different

Here I'm not just talking about people of a different color, but also of another gender, age, economic class, education level, belief system, language, and others.

It's interesting how natural it is for the human brain to create a simple shorthand, perceiving different groups in terms of a handful of stereotypes. It's not surprising, really -- I think that the ability to identify with other individuals at all is the exceptional trait. It's not clear whether any other species is capable of it.

It seems, however, that human empathy has some limitations. Obviously it takes more work to relate to people whose experiences are very different than your own. What is counter-intuitive is how hard it is to grasp that foreign/other groups are as varied as your own group. To explain what I mean, let me use a couple of examples. First, the "Smurfette effect."

Smurfs come in all these different categories: the wise elder, the jokester, the artist, the girl, etc. Feminists have long noted that girls are as varied as guys, hence "girl" shouldn't be a role/trait on the same level with "baker" or "brainy-know-it-all."

But the thing is that the "Smurfette effect" isn't merely something that happens when men think about women. People (unintentionally) limit their picture of other groups in the same way. For example, take the category of "the French person." As I noted earlier, he nearly always dresses up as Marcel Marceau (and tends to have a particular -- stereotyped -- set of traits).

When I first moved to France, then, it was a bit of an epiphany. It's not that I thought French people all fit the stereotype (and dressed like Marcel Marceau...). Yet it was still a learning experience to really get that they have the same range of human types -- little kids, old people, really nerdy computer guys, etc. -- not just the small subset of educated, cosmopolitan young adult French folks that I'd met in the U.S.

(Maybe I should be ashamed to admit this, but) the first time I saw a black lady scolding her daughter in French, I was actually mildly startled to hear a black person speaking anything other than English. On an intellectual level it was no surprise, but it made me realize that (on an unconscious level) I had a rather limited mental picture both of French people and of black people.

(Another counter-intuitive point is that learning a new culture tends to merely increase your mental "us" category, but doesn't stop you from stereotyping other other groups. It helps, but learning a new culture doesn't automatically confer some sort of blanket enlightenment.)

2. One shouldn't be ashamed to admit to ignorance and uncertainty, one should be ashamed to not want to learn.

As far as racism and bigotry are concerned, I think it's important to recognize what we're up against. Even wanting to avoid racism/bigotry/stereotyping is a non-trivial step -- one that should be commended. On the other hand, I doubt there's a single person on the planet who has completely overcome the tendency to stereotype other groups.

Every time you notice an unfounded prejudice that you hold, you should be glad that you noticed it -- because it is only by noticing it that you can root it out. Having empathy for all humanity is something you can work on for your whole life and never truly succeed. Yet, some things are worth doing even though they're very hard.

It's also important to keep in mind that racism exists in every human culture. It's wrong (and ironic) to dismiss an entire culture as "those guys are the bigots, unlike our enlightened tradition." Ignorance and hate need to be fought within every culture.

3. People don't recognize how heavily their sense of what is "right" and "fair" is skewed towards favoring their own group.

I'd like to build a little on what I said in be the good guys and stand by your home-grown tyrant.

Humans value fairness as a virtue for society to strive for. At the same time -- if you read any human literature or stories -- you see immediately that a "good/happy" outcome is one where the protagonist comes out ahead. Humans simultaneously believe "good = fair" and "good = we win." That's why I don't like stories that have a classic villain who does evil just out of a pure love of evil. I think that type of story encourages people to view rivals as being motivated by evil -- as opposed to understanding that typically a rival is just someone else who wants what you want just like you.

In order to determine what is fair, you have to understand your rivals' needs, desires, and motivations. And in order to decide how to treat others, you have to try to see from their perspective -- not just project your own 2-D mental cartoon images onto them.

Still segregated after all these years: Jonathan Kozol's "The Shame of the Nation"

Seems like only a half-century ago that the U.S. Supreme Court declared (in Brown v. Board of Education) that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." And where are we today?

Still separate. Still unequal.

It turns out that -- while it's not so hard to eliminate de jure (legally-enforced) segregation -- de facto segregation is a bit harder to root out. Kozol reports that the poorest schools (in large, Northern cities) typically have a student body that is more than 90% black and Hispanic. Schools with a real mixture of races are actually quite rare in and around U.S. urban areas -- they're typically either almost entirely black+hispanic or almost entirely white+other. Even in areas of NYC where the residential neighborhoods themselves are fairly integrated, school choice programs within the public school system create a dynamic where the white kids get sent to one school and the black kids to another.

Kozol describes the harm. Poor schools often have major infrastructure problems such as overcrowded, dilapidated buildings with chemical hazards. It's not rare to lack playgrounds, not to mention basic materials like books and chairs for every student. When one school can spend $17,000 per pupil and another only $9000, it makes a huge difference (multiplied by the number of kids in the school) in terms of the quality of teachers you can attract and the supplies and infrastructure you can buy.

Since race is mixed in with the money situation, it makes the "haves" care that much less about the plight of the "have nots." Probably most of the people reading this post are right now saying to themselves "Of course the children of the rich deserve a better quality of education than the children of the poor because they're paying more in property taxes." When people call America a "land of opportunity," they don't mean it's supposed to have a level playing field. They mean that you can buy opportunity (if you have the money), otherwise you get a curriculum that is designed to produce docile, obedient, low-level employees.

Kozol argues that the de-facto segregation is itself a problem (apart from the money problem) because being able to interact easily and comfortably with people of other races is an important factor for success in a mixed-race country. I agree, as I discussed in my post European dream.

Unfortunately, the problem is incredibly difficult to grapple with. De-facto segregation is not illegal, and apparently is not covered by the Brown decision mentioned above. People who would like to see greater equality can do very little to stop the momentum of the current system. A major overhaul would not merely be expensive -- it would be a political impossibility. In today's America, putting equality and the common good above the individual's right to leave his fellows in the dust (if he can) is almost universally viewed as "communism" and hence evil.

This problem illustrates the difference between civil rights for black people and civil rights for gay people. Black people in the U.S. face major structural inequalities that don't have any simple solutions. The thing that's so infuriating about anti-gay discrimination is that it's just so gratuitous! You could pass a law that doesn't affect the straight majority, and problem is essentially solved. Refusing to grant gay people equal rights is like kicking them in the face just for the sake of kicking them in the face. For black people, it's not nearly so simple. The relevant laws and court cases have been on the books for nearly a half-century or more -- and the inequalities are still there. It's because there's no simple, obvious, fair way to even things out. Ditto for Hispanics and immigrants.

The most encouraging possibilities mentioned in Kozol's book are found in the few schools that really are integrated. Their success demonstrates that it's possible, and may encourage parents to do more to integrate the schools in their own districts.

European dream

I attended a very white high school in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Looking at my high school yearbook, out of my graduating class of 550, I count less than ten faces "of color." And when I say "of color" here, I'm including the Asian students and the kids from the A.B.C. program: the handful of kids brought in from inner-city school districts to get "A Better Chance."

About the only minority my school district had managed to integrate was the Jewish population. I can't really even estimate for you what portion of the student body was Jewish because they didn't look different and they didn't self-segregate. All I know is that many of my friends were Jewish and many were not, and either case was perfectly ordinary. You may think that integrating the Jewish population is no big deal, but considering the fact that a big chunk of my town had been explicitly chartered as "no blacks and no Jews," I feel like integrating the Jews at least showed some good improvement.

In history class, we learned about segregation. We learned about "separate but equal." We learned about the civil rights movement and "separate is inherently unequal" and about forced integration through busing. Just imagine this charming scene of all of these lily-white young faces learning such things from a history book instead of from real life experience. We also got to learn about things like "de facto segregation" and "white flight."

And thus my white liberal high school teachers encouraged me to think about racism.

I've talked about how difficult it is to avoid racism -- the gut level sentiment that those guys aren't just ordinary people like us -- and I concluded long ago that one of the most effective and painless techniques is to have people of different races and ethnicities interacting with each other in their daily lives, and especially to play together as children, as in Martin Luther King's dream.

But I figured that realistically I'd be one day be faced with a choice between sending my kids to an integrated school or a good school, and not have an option that includes both. As a high school student I fretted over this question, and I basically concluded that I would probably end up sending my future kids to a school system as white as the ones I attended because it wouldn't be fair to my kids to shortchange them on their education for the sake of my idealism.

Fast forward to today. I chose my neighborhood here in Bordeaux, France based on its proximity to downtown and to the tramway line, not the school district. And when my kids reached school age, I was pleasantly surprised with what they got.

It would be a whole additional article to describe how impressed I am with the quality of the education my kids are getting -- the curriculum, the materials, the outings, the programs, and how closely their development is followed. And I didn't have to make the unfortunate choice that I thought I'd have to make. The school is about a third white non-Muslim, about a third Muslim or of Muslim origin, and about a third "other" including black, asian, various hybrids, and many whose ethnic origins are difficult to identify precisely. From the names and from the fact that we're near a large synagogue, I assume some of the kids are Jewish as well. I wouldn't consider moving out to the suburbs to take my kids out of this school.

In France, the education is run 100% at the national level. Every kid of the same age in all of France has the same basic curriculum. The teachers are hired and assigned at the national level. In the U.S. -- as you know -- education is 100% local.

As a consequence, in the U.S. an individual school district or school can experiment with an innovative new program or teaching style that could prove to be very effective and catch on in other places. Impossible in France. As a consequence, in the U.S. if one community wants its kids learning an additional subject that the next town over doesn't want to bother with, they can add it to the public school curriculum. Again not possible in France. As another consequence, the disparity between the rich kid's education and the poor kid's education is dramatically greater in the U.S. than in France.

The disparity creates a vicious circle in the U.S. where bad schools get worse -- as parents who have an interest in their kids' education and who have the means to get their kids out of a poor school will do it.

I'm not claiming that French schools are perfect in the diversity-peace-and-love department. Far from it. Yet I feel like some very positive options exists in some cities here, and I haven't seen anything quite like it elsewhere. Watching the interactions among the kids, teachers, and parents at our school, I get the impression that nobody's even aware of the racial/ethnic differences. I can't tell if it's P.C. politeness or if it really is that after a certain amount of time living in the city you stop worrying about it. And the school does an impressive job of teaching the kids about France -- instilling them with the idea that they're all French -- while at the same time recognizing the diversity by teaching stories and songs from Africa and other countries and having programs where parents whose native language is not French (like me!) come in and read stories or sing songs in their native language.

Recently my little family took a trip by train, and as usual the kids spent most of the train ride drawing and coloring. Nico was getting ready to color Batman's chin, so he asked me for the "beige" (the French term for caucasian flesh-tone). I looked down at the handful of colored pencils I'd brought and found I'd forgotten that one. Before I had even a moment to think what to do, Nico said "That's okay, I'll just use brown," and grabbed the brown pencil out of my hand and colored Batman's face with it. He then proceeded to draw a bunch of other people and colored their smiling faces brown as well.

I feel like I shouldn't have been surprised: it's just a color, after all -- it doesn't mean anything.

Well, it shouldn't mean anything. That's my European dream.

Is religion the problem?

Should we try to eliminate religion entirely? Deconvert the world?

These are the big questions making the rounds of the atheist community these days.

I say it depends on what your goals are. Let's say for the sake of argument that the goal is to leave a human-habitable planet with a sustainable human society on it for our descendants. Preferably a free and open society, and not some bizarro soylent-greenish solution like "okay we have enough resources for everyone to live happily until they're thirty, then we have to eat them..."

Given our current globally-interdependent world, creating a sustainable human society/lifestyle will require a great deal of cooperation among all of the peoples of the world.

(This post will be full of unsubstantiated claims and opinions like that one -- please feel free to dispute any or all of them in the comments.)

I think religion can hinder cooperation and understanding among peoples, but I don't think it's necessarily the primary obstacle. And setting out with a goal to eliminate religion can interfere with more important goals.

Consider the goals of freedom of/from religion, separation of church and state, and a free society with a shared secular public sphere. Consider the goal of high-quality public education, which is what allows people to recognize the difference between actual freedom and the slogan "freedom" (and vote for the former in a democracy). All of these are goals where lots of believers can get on board with us.

There's one thing to keep in mind about believers who are political moderates: Just because they're not violent/dangerous/insane, that doesn't necessarily mean they're not attached to their faith. If they get the impression that the ultimate goal of science education (and/or freedom of religion) is to eliminate religion, many will feel threatened and start to sympathize with the theocrats. There's no reason to alienate our allies like that. Keeping crap-masquerading-as-science out of the schools is not some sort of stealth evangelizing for atheism, and it benefits the whole society. People of differing worldviews can coexist and interact in a free society as long as they agree to do so.

Some say that if there were no religion there would be no war. After all, it's easier to convince people to go out and kill other people if they think it's God's will. God kills people all the time, and carrying out his will is -- by definition -- good. And it's easier to convince people to risk their own lives if they think martyrdom leads to paradise, not to true death.

Still, I think that -- even without religion -- the root causes of war would still be there. War is fundamentally about competition over resources.

People who feel confident that they will see their children grow up to be successful adults have little to gain and lots to lose from violence. The most dangerous people are those whose prospects are so bleak that they're better off taking resources by any means, including killing and risking death. I talked about this in my fertility, mortality post. Any human community can be persuaded to get along with any other human community -- regardless of religion -- as long as it's in their interest to do so.

I would argue that the converse is also true: That (regardless of religion) any human community can be persuaded to kill any other human community if it's in their interest to do so. Humans have a remarkable ability to stereotype and make assumptions about any human community they see as "other." It's weird, but while you naturally see that your own community is full of all different types of people, it's nearly impossible to avoid mentally flattening different races and nationalities into cartoon caricatures. Even educated people who know intellectually that foreign societies have the full spectrum of human qualities still have a difficult time feeling on a gut-level "they're more like us than they are different." Actually living in a city where you're surrounded by people of different origins (or living in a foreign society) seems to be the only way to see that people are the same, and even then it's not clear whether you're learning that "people everywhere are just people" or whether you're merely expanding your own community.

The problem (as well as the "adaptive" value) of mentally simplifying other groups is obvious. The belief that "they're like that, they're not ordinary people like us" is what paves the way for the belief that "they can't be reasoned with; we have no choice but to kill them."

I think that the meta-strategy for peace and sustainability is to see to it that the children of every country have a real opportunity to grow up healthy (again see fertility, mortality for details). See to it that every parent has the expectation that all of his/her children will live to adulthood, which makes it so that investing themselves completely in raising a few treasured children well (and not a quiver-full of disposable warriors) is the most attractive strategy.

How does religion play into this? Regardless of what is written in any official holy book, most people are going to act in their best interest. When it's time for war, those who like the scriptures about God killing all the infidels will rise to power, and when it's time for peace, those who prefer the passages about God loving everyone will rise to power. I figure we might as well make friends with that latter group and compare notes with them. They're the ones who are in a position to sway the (political) opinions of the average believer.

Let's look at this in terms of strengths and weaknesses: The advantage that the fascists, racists, fanatics, and theocrats have is that they enjoy lockstep, unswerving, unquestioning obedience from their followers. Their disadvantage? They can't get along with their closed-minded counterparts in any other racial/ethnic/religious group.

For those who want a free, open, secular/pluralistic society it's the opposite: Everybody has an opinion, nobody will unquestioningly follow the leader through right and through wrong. So our weakness is that most of the time we're marching in a bunch of different directions at once. But our strength is cross-cultural cooperation. Every race, creed, and culture has its open-minded people, and by definition their superficial differences aren't a barrier to working together.

If we can agree (atheists as well as people of faith) on meta-strategy, we can start to make progress on how to carry it out. It's easier said than done at every step of the way, though, so we'll see...