From: Jacques Du Pasquier (jacques@dtext.com)
Date: Sat Nov 24 2001 - 06:09:00 MST
We're arguing about general trends, where there is a whole spectrum of
situations, so it's probably difficult to establish anything, but here
are some more comments.
J. R. Molloy wrote (23.11.2001/05:27) :
> From: "Jacques Du Pasquier" <jacques@dtext.com>
> > isn't it likely that there be an
> > important genetic and cultural self-selection ? Those who stay tend to
> > be more traditional and conservative, content with what they have, and
> > not willing to take risks. Those who go tend to be more adventurous,
> > more confident in themselves, more eager to discover new things
>
> Not necessarily, because often "those who go" don't have any choice. For
> example, English who colonized Australia were convicts expelled from England.
> Also, many who came to America were "losers" who could not cope with the
> situation in Europe, or (as another example, the Irish) emigrated because of
> disaster in their homeland.
It seems to me that even when you are not successful, there is always
"some kind of place" for you in any society, but it may be very
humble, and even quite unfree. People are always eager to dominate one
another, so if you're not successful they will be glad to manage a
dominated slot in the society for you.
It takes some openness, self-confidence, pride and adventurous
attitude to go, even when your present condition is bad. And if you're
really dieing, then you cannot even go.
Of course the case of British convicts taken to Australia is special,
as it is not a free act. Choosing to leave because you are too poor or
you don't like life here, on the contrary, is a free act.
> So, it could be that the best and the brightest
> are the ones with the least reason to emigrate.
I never said "best" or "brightest". European elites are much brighter
that American elites, for example ;-) I'm referring to a disposition
to embark in the unknown with hope to make your situation better.
If you consider this disposition as brightness, well, that's because
you're American :-)
> Christopher Columbus was brave
> to cross uncharted seas, but was he more confident in himself than Galileo who
> never left home?
Some risk-taking / self-confidence / taste for the unknown do not
result in self-selection, but migration does.
>
> > Is it not imaginable that, by successive such migrations, an evolution
> > by self-selection happens (both genetic and cultural), such that you
> > can basically calculate the "adventurous index" based on the distance
> > from central Africa ?
>
> What about the Africans who travelled great distances from central Africa as
> slaves?
That was not self-selection, but artificial selection performed by the
Americans based on external properties.
> I see where you're going with this, but you've failed to reckon with the
> negative aspects of migration, such that selection pressure may operate to
> drive out the unfit (or less fit) members of a population, leaving the best
> back home where they have secured good reproductive options for themselves.
However good "good" is, it can still be better. You have extra
incentive to go if your life is bad, but even if it's good you may be
tempted to make it even better, if that's how your mind works.
> > Couldn't there be
> > some kind of automatic hatred for the successful and not traditional,
> > some negative thinking, and avoidance of responsability (think of the
> > "altruism claim") explainable by such genetic-cultural differentiation
> > through absence of migration ?
>
> Yes, and it works both ways: Those who hate the successful and non-traditional
> may be the very ones to travel to distant lands to set up communes to practice
> primitivism. As P. J. O'Rourke has said, "America was founded by religious
> fanatics with guns." The Pilgrims were not avante garde intellectuals, after
> all.
Some kind of convictions may be for some the support of
self-confidence. You know that everything will be different there --
but at least you can rely on yourself, you know who you are, what are
good and bad, etc.
> > Can't you actually correlate riches to the "adventurous" index : the
> > farther you go from central Africa, the more riches you find ?
>
> Quite the opposite: The poorest are driven to the "adventurous" task of
> desperately seeking sustenance by traveling to distant lands.
What I was saying is, you can NOW correlate these things. You have
self-selection through migration (with the possible pressure of
difficult conditions), and then success resulting, over time, from the
selected behaviour.
One obvious OTHER FACTOR (for the "success of the settler") is that
everytime you have to REDO something, you have occasion to do it
better. So when you arrive in a land with nothing established, you have
to re-think every single thing, and so you question what you know,
and you make it better.
Though on the other hand, one could say that you tend to dismiss too
easily things (like social institutions, or moral conduct, or
politeness forms) that have grown over time, as you are not able to
grasp their intricate usefullness when you redesign things from scratch.
One can probably also witness this occasional shortcoming in the US
society.
It may be the source of the impression of naïvety that Europeans
(French at least) sometimes have when examining American behaviour or
discourse. There is a fine line between naïvety and freedom from
tradition / openness to new solutions.
Jacques
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