(Allen Lane, £25)
Writing in response to Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914, James Barr, a physician and former president of the British Medical Association, had this to say: "The German Kultur must be exterminated, and this savage breed as far as possible wiped out… Germany has produced no genius, there is no scope for individualism, her work is the collective wisdom of commonplace savants, she has never produced nor is ever likely to produce a super-man… The Allies have shown their manhood and the capacity to rule, we must therefore… raise healthy men and women who will hold their own in the battle of life… This can all be rapidly attained by intelligent artificial selection, and the nation which produces the finest, noblest and most intellectual race will win in the long run."
As Niall Ferguson relates, by the first years of the 20th century the idea that human races must struggle for biological supremacy—the "meme" of racism, he calls it—was spreading round the world. Ways of thinking about humans that would have been inconceivable 100 years earlier—survival of the fittest, selective advantage, biological dead ends and supermen—were being touted as scientific truths.
Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, came up with the idea of eugenics; Herbert Spencer championed social Darwinism. Yet it was not in Britain that these ideas found greatest favour. Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Turkey and Serbia were soon showing how the racist game could be played once people got really serious about it.
The War of the World tells what happened next. In this long but gripping survey of "history's age of hatred" Ferguson piles fact upon fact, horror on horror, to make the case that racism was a key ingredient in most if not all of the 20th century's uniquely devastating wars across the globe. He does not say that racism was ever the sole cause: economic uncertainty, the breakdown of empires, accidents of history all played a part. The tectonic plates of the old world order were already on the move. But racial antipathy was a big component of the subsequent conflicts.
The history is raw, revealing, carefully argued and surprising. This is a revisionist account, with little respect for what have become standard assumptions. The writing is opinionated and laced with withering criticism of those with whom the author disagrees. If this is "right-wing history," so be it. It certainly makes for good reading. Punk Gibbon is fine, provided there's enough Gibbon—and there is.
So, I would gladly have left my review of the book at this point, with a wholehearted recommendation of it as an important new analysis of the social, economic and political causes of the breakdown of civilised values, if only Ferguson had left it there himself. But he has not. He has written an introduction of 70 pages, in which he reaches out to evolutionary psychology for further scientific insights into the historical process he describes. He regards this not just as an extra afterthought but possibly as the most important contribution he has to make (see his Guardian article of 11th July 2006). And, to judge by other reviews, his peers have taken him at his own word as a bridge between history and scientific psychology. I and others on the psychology side have certainly been hoping for just such a rapprochement between our science and theirs.
The racial world view, Ferguson writes, is "a singularly successful 'meme' that was already replicating itself all over the world by the start of the 20th century." But here, I'm afraid, he is already off to a bad start. For what is he adding of explanatory value by calling it a "meme"? Well, what he might be adding would be the alarming possibility that racist ideas are self-serving: that they owe their success to their peculiar capacity to turn men's minds to serve the ends of racist ideology rather than human beings themselves. That is roughly what Richard Dawkins meant when he coined the term "meme"—an element of culture that works in the mind something like a virus, changing the behaviour of the individual it infects in such a way as to help spread itself from one mind to another, even though the carrier may get no benefit and may actually be harmed. In his Guardian article Ferguson explicitly uses the phrase "a virus of the mind," suggesting he does indeed think of racism as something that has spread between people, not because it benefits people but because it benefits racism.
This suggestion is not such an outlandish one, in theory. Daniel Dennett, for example, has argued persuasively that just such an analysis might help explain certain aspects of religious belief. But could it possibly be a helpful explanation in the case of racism? On the evidence of Ferguson's book, the answer is no. As he shows again and again people have in fact adopted racist attitudes because it has suited them all too well as individual human beings to do so—out of naked egotism, the pursuit of economic advantage, the desire to eliminate competitors and so on. So racism, far from being a troublesome invader that people might have wanted to throw off, takes hold because it appeals to rational self-interest. That's precisely the problem, and Ferguson's use of the term "meme," by hinting at a quite different dynamic for racism, misses the central point (which is actually his own point).
Still, the concept of a meme is a slippery one, and some evolutionary theorists would say an unsatisfactory one. So perhaps we should not be too hard on Ferguson for nodding in the direction of a fashionable concept, even if he gets it wrong. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of his flirtation with a body of research he does not understand. For it turns out that Ferguson wants to have it several ways at once about racism. While on the one hand he calls it a meme, he also claims elsewhere in the introduction that it is not a cultural product at all but an instinct that is hardwired into human nature. Human beings, he suggests, have evolved to fear and hate other humans who are physically—and genetically—dissimilar, because this is a way of increasing their own reproductive success.
How so? Because, he assures us, breeding with distant strangers is a bad strategy if we want our own genes to prosper. "For there is evidence from the behaviour of both humans and other species that nature does not necessarily favour breeding between genetically very different members of the same species." The phrase "does not necessarily favour," is, for Ferguson, uncharacteristically weak. And, as it happens, so it should be. For the evidence that in human beings breeding with distantly related members of the human species has any deleterious biological consequences is almost non-existent.
Ferguson cites just one possible example, and gets it back to front. "When a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that their blood groups may be incompatible, so that only the first child they conceive will be viable." The problem at issue is the possibility that a rhesus-negative (Rh-) woman will mate with a rhesus-positive (Rh+) man and so—since the Rh+ gene is dominant—have a Rh+ baby with which she is incompatible. But in reality almost no Chinese people are Rh-, so the chance of this happening when a Chinese woman mates with a European man is negligible (less than 1 per cent). Europeans however are 15 per cent Rh-. So when a European woman mates with a Chinese man the risk is certainly important (15 per cent), but hardly greater than when she mates with a European man (13 per cent).
Ferguson's claim here is not just wrong, it is alarmist and irresponsible. The reality is that in general, humans run no significant additional biological risks from interracial breeding for the simple reason that, compared to most animal species, human beings are extraordinarily homogeneous genetically. In his bibliography Ferguson cites a paper in support of his ideas that deals with "optimal outbreeding" in quails. But what goes for quails is simply not what goes for homo sapiens. There may have been a time, earlier in human evolution, when distinct biological species of hominins, all descended from the same ape-like stock, were living together in Africa, and interbreeding might have been unproductive. But even then there is no reason to think that some kind of instinctive race or species-hatred was required to limit sexual relations. In general the boundaries between biological species can be, and are, maintained by a combination of positive sexual preferences and historical opportunity. Horses and donkeys don't have to hate each other, even though mules are a dead-end for their genes: it's enough that typically—in nature—they prefer their own kind.
This is not to deny that human beings have at times seen racial miscegenation as a threat. Ferguson provides chapter and verse that it has often been so. But it is to deny that this has anything to do with an evolved taboo against having sex with people who may have slightly different genes. When Ferguson says, following his discussion of the supposed genetic risks: "We should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilised men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and again after 1900. They were… what made the second world war so ferocious," he is talking in a way that no scientist would. This is Konrad Lorenz or Robert Ardrey talk, not modern evolutionary psychology.
Ferguson then gives his faltering evolutionary thesis a further twist. For it turns out he does not believe that human beings always instinctively recoil from interracial mating. In fact, he admits, sometimes the opposite is true: the exotic is erotic. "The 'hatred' so often blamed for ethnic conflict is not a straightforward emotion. Rather, we encounter time and again that volatile ambivalence, that mixture of aversion and attraction." Thus, Ferguson notes, several leading Nazis had Jewish mistresses.
At one point Ferguson suggests that being attracted to someone of a different race is aberrant but he does not sound convinced. And by the end of the book, he throws a rope instead to Freud's ideas about the co-existence in the human psyche of life and death instincts. A book that starts off by promising a new world of scientific insights as to why human beings commit atrocities and ends up appealing to Freud, has lost faith in its own project. But it didn't have to be like this. The project could have been—still could be—truly illuminating.
If only Ferguson had recognised (as he comes close to doing) that what underlies most of the wars he describes, even those in which talk of race is on everybody's lips, is not antagonism between biologically unique groups of people who threaten to contaminate each other's genetic fitness, but antagonism between culturally united groups of people who threaten to compromise each other's prosperity and way of life. That's to say, it's not antagonism between races who must maintain their genetic distance from each other but antagonism between social tribes who must maintain their internal solidarity—through bonds of loyalty, religion, language and so on. Yet Ferguson seems to be so taken by his own biologising, that even when the warring parties are ethnically indistinguishable—Huns and Tommies in the first world war is his example, but it might be Catholic and Protestant Irish, Arab and Jewish Palestinians—he still wants to see the fighting as derived from instinctive racial hatred. And maybe it's because of this that he largely ignores the body of good research on group identification and inter-group conflict that has been done within traditional sociology and social psychology over the last 100 years.
This is all the more regrettable given that this research has recently received a boost from just the direction Ferguson himself looks to, namely the study of human evolution. There is now a rich literature dealing from an evolutionary perspective with the topics that loom so large in this book: "us" and "them" distinctions, the psychology of coalition formation, stereotyping, dehumanisation of the enemy and so on. Interestingly, what the new work is showing is that the evolution of co-operation, on which human success has so much depended, has been achieved largely through redesigning the landscape of human social emotions so as to make people ever more capable of setting up and policing social contracts—even with strangers. But just as Ferguson suspects, it's not all roses. The moral passions that have enabled humans to achieve great feats of collaboration come in pairs: trust and suspicion, gratitude and vengeance, pride and shame, admiration and detestation. No accident, then, that when human beings are good they are very very good, but when they are bad they are horrid. Sometimes very very horrid.
The War of the World, for all its virtues, reads like a Whitaker's Almanack of human hatred. It contains everything and more that a scientific historian might want to bring to court as evidence of the culpability of the human species. Ferguson—going admirably against the grain of his profession—sets out to prove just how much of human history is down to human nature. Situated in Harvard and Oxford, strongholds of evolutionary thinking, he was as well placed as anyone could be to call on expert witnesses to help make his case. And yet he muffs it.
