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Nee Haw's avatar

This was great. I disagreed with the title at first. You convinced me

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Asmy's avatar

Thanks for the post and your earlier comment pointing me here. I think I have a few disagreements but I wholeheartedly agree on the fiction of human rights and the fact that those Enlightenment philosophers were like fish in water, they didn't see the huge social capital they were relying on to achieve their ideas. The idea of equality and freedom can only be achieved in a culturally homogenous society with enough social capital and trust.

## Cultural vs. Ethnic Homogeneity

But homogenous society doesn't mean ethnically homogenous one; it has to be culturally homogenous. While ethnicity, geography, and culture interplay, I think the advantage of humanity is that as malleable creatures we are, as long as we are unified by a strong enough story, the physical barriers are smoothed, be them genes or geography.

## The Fiction of Race

One of those physical barriers you mention is another fiction, as artificial (and one which appeared around the same time): race. You correctly touted the continuum fallacy, but I think you did a bit of heavy lifting there.

Today Europe is homogenous because there was a homogenizing force under the name of Christianity. Europe in the 5th century, before the arrival of a superior and totalizing culture under the auspices of the Roman Christian religion, was a group of scattered tribes not much superior to the average West African Bantu of the 19th century. It is this force which coalesced and created the continuum and thus gave rise to the fiction which is race. In this case, culture came and became a homogenizing force pushed by a small elite of people (the Franks in our case).

## Elites vs. Commoners: The Overlooked Distinction

Another sweeping you are doing is grouping by people (nation) and not discussing the big differences that were not only between regions but between the elites and the commoners. Because of geographical limitations, nature and such, marriages happened usually in the same region and some between regions (creating the continuum bridges). This usually limited your pool of mating to a certain geographical area. For a long time since basically Charlemagne till the 18th century, most people married locally, thus creating genetic clusters based on region.

Not only that, but elites of different regions married between each other and moved all the time. This gave you over time a drift between the ruling elites of different nations (France, HRE, Spain, England/Scotland) and their respective peoples. Before the rise of nationalism, basically the French king was as close genetically to the average German, Spanish, or French "people," but always closer to the elites of those different nations. I am saying this because it is another way that breaks your fictional concept of race. Race is a social construct. It is not a justification to import millions of Africans or Chinese into your land and go saying "we are all equal," but the fact is that grouping certain people (before nationalism) in an area and saying, "you are all the same race" is equally facetious.

And what happened with the rise of nationalism, it is the language, and culture of those elites which was imposed on whole peoples. The history of the "people" was a manufactured tale to unite all of those. To take an example, in France the Parisian dialect became "French", and all of the traditions of the regions, were deemed backwards and suppressed. Basque, Alsatian, Provençal and Breton were eliminated with whole traditions and cultures behind them. In this way, a French person is a fictional construct which was then made into reality because in breaking those identities they created a mould where those peoples would intermix and create an average French. But that only happened because of "miscegenation" between different cultural groups.

## The Arbitrariness of Racial Categories

For example, if the Roman Empire still existed, you would consider a Spaniard, an Italian, and an Egyptian the same race, when the earlier are South Europeans and the latter North Africans in their phenotype. The same thing you are doing today with "white people." A Scandinavian is different than an Atlantic European, and they are both different than Southern Europeans in terms of "grouped phenotypes." They are also different in cultures, which is something very determining when it comes to considering homogeneous social capital.

A slav, a latin and a germanic european are very, very different, not only in phenotype and culture but in genetics too, and cannot be bound by the "white people" category that is so common in America. Same thing with Arabs. A Moroccan, Algerian, Syrian and Yemeni are basically entire different ethnic groups, to the point you have more diversity in Haplogroups and mitochondrial DNA. Even Moroccans/Algerians have different Amazigh tribes composing them and different genetic compositions, yet they are all grouped as Arabs or North Africans.

## The Question of Miscegenation

Sorry if I made it too long, but this is all a presage to my real question: Why are you so against miscegenation in the case of a set of people who all share the same faith, same culture, and same way of life, but come from different ethnic groups?

In this case, why are you against, let's say, an American white English stock Southerner and a Black American (one descended from the original slaves brought to America), both Christian and similar in values? What would be the problem of miscegenation here? What is logically wrong between the offspring of a Syrian woman (white basically) and a Yemeni man? Or a white man and a Japanese woman other than cultural ethno-nepotistic arguments?

In the same case, would you be for a Basque and a Catalan of different faiths and cultures to "miscegenate" just because the continuum between them is smaller? (Keep in mind Basques are in some ways genetically different from the rest of European populations)

In this case, what is the real issue with miscegenation, other than it feels degenerate and tradition (which isnt a universal constant btw)

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