We still recall our fascination one autumn evening around 2011, at developing media reports of running battles in the streets of East London between followers of the popular Association Football teams West Ham and Millwall. What on earth, we wondered, could these largely homogenous groups of young, poor males find to divide them-so brutally and so effectively? The only possible response came from a wiser acquaintance, who speculated; “the River Thames?”
The tendency of heavily armed hominins to draw lines between them, and fight over the consequences, has long been a source of fascination for this blog.(LSS 2 1 21; 13 4 23, et al).We think that the time and energy so wasted could be better deployed in co-operative pursuits. The development of new medicines or the exploration of space spring to mind. Readers may consider their own ideas at this point. Yet it’s good to see that a wiser scholar has also considered the matter. Thus we present the learning of Dr Karim Bettacche,[1] who makes a fascinating distinction between xenophobia, which is natural, and racism, which is not. In a nutshell he asseverates:
Human beings can be divided into any category imaginable, inevitably resulting in xenophobia.
We love it, gentle readers when a single thought suddenly knits together the observations of so many . Think again of Orwell‘s two minutes’ hate from 1984. Think of the baroque intellectual constructions of Nazi ideology. Or the production line of hated out-groups from so many well funded right-wing newspapers and TV stations. And the trouble with out-group hatred is: it works. The only hope is to try to drain the economic and social swamps in which it thrives. No easy task.
#xenophobia #racism #psychology #economics #sociology #history
Learning, Science and Society 