"The White Man has no friends"

Anthropology has long viewed non-Whites through the eyes of Whites. But what about the reverse? How do Whites appear when they are the “other”?

Written by Peter Frost.

Ten years ago I contributed to a book on the situation of “Whites” in France. How do they see themselves? How do they experience their increasingly multiracial society? What does it mean to be White? The book seemed to have the aim of giving the Français de souche a voice and bringing them into a dialogue.

That aim was not achieved. In the different chapters, Whites are presented as objects, rather than subjects. They are commented on, but not asked to comment. They are talked about, while having no chance to talk. Yes, that is how non-Whites used to appear in countless ethnographies and scholarly works. But instead of righting that wrong, this book, like so many others, goes to the other extreme.

The perspective is especially unbalanced when Whites are victimized as Whites. In one chapter, Sadri Khiari argues:

But if one envisages racism as a power relationship, one cannot place on the same level those who benefit from the entire power of the racial system and those who often have only their words to resist. Today, the notion of “anti-White racism” is being mobilized to delegitimize the anti-racist movement … (Khiari, 2013, pp. 45-46)

Yet anti-White racism is not just words. It is also actions. Today, interracial violence skews overwhelmingly in one direction. Why? If Whites are so powerful, why do they allow this?

The answer should be clear. Insofar as Whites have power, they normally use it as individuals to defend individual interests. One has to be naïve to think they use it collectively, the poor laborer being in league with the globetrotting businessman. That claim used to be made by racists about certain groups. It’s now the stock in trade of anti-racists.

But let’s accept the book’s underlying premise: we need to reverse the longstanding perspective between Observer and Observed. Fine. How, then, do Whites appear to others? In what ways do they think and act strangely? And how did they become strange? Finally, how does their strangeness work against them in a post-White world?

Togolese representation of a White man (Wikicommons: Collectie Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen).

Whites are too trusting

In one chapter, a contributor with Algerian parents is interviewed about his childhood in Toulouse:

In the neighborhood, we had a chum who was blond with blue eyes. He was the son of a working man, of modest background, like us, but he seemed perfect to us: beautiful, blond, white. We were subordinate to him. Until the moment when someone from our gang came and confronted him. When the blond got his first punch in the mouth, he was demystified. (Cherfi, 2013, p. 61)

North African boys like to act collectively, and such action supersedes individual ties of friendship. For French boys, individualism is the norm. No gang comes to their defense when trouble starts. This pattern has been noticed by other non-European observers, like the clinical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon when describing a case during the Algerian War of Independence:

Case no. 1 – Murder by two young Algerians 13 and 14 years old of their European playmate.

The 13-year-old:

- We weren’t angry with him. Every Thursday we would go hunting together with slingshots, on the hill above the village. He was our good buddy. He no longer went to school because he wanted to become a mason like his father. One day we decided to kill him because the Europeans wanted to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill the “grownups.” But him, as he was our age, we can. We didn’t know how to kill him. We wanted to throw him into a ditch, but he might have been only injured. So we took a knife from home and we killed him.

- But why did you choose him?

- Because he played with us. No other person would’ve gone up with us, up there.

- Yet he was your buddy?

- What about them wanting to kill us? His father is a militiaman, and he says we should have our throats cut.

- But he [the boy] had said nothing to you?

- Him? No.

- You know he’s dead now?

- Yes.

- What is death?

- It’s when it’s all over. We go to heaven.

- Did you kill him?

- Yes.

- Does that do anything to you to have killed someone?

- No, since they wanted to kill us, so …

- Does that bother you to be in prison?

- No. (Fanon, 1970, p. 195)

Over the past millennium, the French, like other Western Europeans, have lived in an environment where the State has a monopoly on violence. They are forbidden to act violently and cannot rely on their kinsmen to protect life and property. That’s the government’s job. In many other societies, however, the State is more recent, often foreign, and generally unreliable. Men are still expected to use violence to defend themselves and their loved ones, and such violence is often organized collectively by “brothers” – young men of the same clan or extended family.

In such societies, your real friends are your “brothers.” Friendship isn’t just about sharing the same recreational activities. It’s also about risking your life for your kin.

Whites are too individualistic

In another chapter, an African discusses the individualism of White people:

Impatience, love of money, individualism, all of these traits define Westerners for Africans: “The Whites don’t stop running, they want to stay ahead of us. We take our time … One day, surely, they will stop. After all, one cannot run endlessly for centuries. They will understand that two or three weeks of vacation are not enough for the kind of life they lead.”

… According to Matip, African solidarity is under threat of giving way to the European’s every-man-for-himself. In African novels, this counter-discourse is seen in remarks like “the White man has no friends” or “we aren’t Whites who couldn’t care less about the misfortunes of others.” (Schipper, 2013, pp. 100-101)

Yet, in some strange way, individualism seems to explain the success of White people. But how? This is a recurrent theme of African literature: the desire to find out this secret, along with a feeling that Christianity is a false secret, an attempt to hide the real one:

One evening, Father Dumont observed that the Africans, who until then had been converting in great numbers, were now abandoning the faith. His cook Zacharia explained to him: “The first of us who came rushing to religion, they came as they would to a revelation… The revelation of your secret, the secret of your strength, the strength of your planes, new railways, how can I put it … The secret of your mystery! Instead of that, you began talking to them about God, about the soul, about eternal life, and so on. Don’t you think they already knew all of that before, long before you came? Gracious me, they got the impression you were hiding something from them.” (Schipper, 2013, p. 105)

Africans understand how individualism might be a source of strength. Because Whites have weaker kinship ties, they have fewer people to share their wealth with. They can invest it as they see fit. But this is not a realistic option in Africa. If you don’t share your wealth with tons of “brothers” and “sisters,” you’ll still end up having to share it – but now with a lot of unfriendly non-relatives. 

Boats on the North Sea, Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915). The Western market economy originated in the steady expansion of North Sea trade from the 7th century onward.

So what is the secret?

In the late Middle Ages, the peoples of northern and western Europe gradually consolidated into nation-states and began a relentless expansion outward, first within Europe and then beyond… until they dominated the entire world. This domination was most obvious in their creation of colonial empires, but it was also apparent in other areas: the economy, science, technology, and so on.

So what was the secret of their success? It seem to suggest something to do with trust, individualism, and Christianity. Many readers here will also shout out: “Intelligence!” Perhaps. But a number of human groups have reached high levels of cognitive ability, maybe even higher, while failing to achieve the same dominance. Think of the Parsis, the Ashkenazim and the Chinese.

There seem to be several interacting factors, but how do they all fit together? And what brought them together? Was it colonialism? The slave trade? The printing press? The Protestant Reformation?

If we look at historical data from northwest Europe, specifically at growth in GDP per capita for England and Holland, we find that this region began to overtake the rest of the world before any of the above happened – back in the 14th century (Frost, 2022a). This trend can be traced back further to the 7th century among the peoples bordering the North Sea. With little prior experience, they took to international trade like Meiji Japan, exchanging not only goods but also ideas. “Annalists gathered information from these merchants, kings used them to pass messages back and forth, and missionaries traveled with them” (Melleno, 2014).

The North Sea traders were able to transcend their ties of kinship and organize new networks within a growing market economy. In this respect, they surpassed other trading peoples for whom a “market” was simply a marketplace – a small center of trade limited in time and space. Beyond the  marketplace, most goods and services were not produced for a wider market. They were produced to meet the needs of one’s family or kin group.

Those North Sea traders, and their descendants, would be the first humans to extend the market principle beyond the marketplace and, ultimately, to society as a whole – thus making kinship obsolete as a means to organize relationships. This trajectory was made possible by a pre-existing tendency toward individualism and weak kinship ties. Specifically, north and west of the “Hajnal Line” (an imaginary line stretching from Trieste to St. Petersburg), humans have exhibited certain behavioral tendencies for at least the past millennium:

• Living alone for at least part of adulthood, with many individuals remaining single their entire lives.

• Leaving the nuclear family upon reaching adulthood, either to form new households or to circulate among unrelated households, typically as servants.

• Showing greater individualism, less loyalty to kin, and greater willingness to trust strangers.

• Being inclined toward impersonal prosociality, i.e., social interaction that is less emotionally intense while encompassing a larger number of people (Schulz et al., 2019; see also Frost, 2017; Frost, 2020; Hajnal, 1965; Hartman, 2004; hbd*chick, 2014; ICA, 2020; MacDonald, 2019; Seccombe, 1992, pp. 94-95, 150-153, 184-190).

The above points are widely accepted. Some authors (Frost, hbd* chick, MacDonald, Schulz) have gone on to argue that these behavioral tendencies explain why the market economy and the State arose earlier in northwest Europe than elsewhere. If people are less bound by kinship, they can more easily organize their social and economic relationships in other ways.

To varying degrees, the above authors have also argued that impersonal prosociality is supported by a certain mindset:

• Moral universalism and moral absolutism. Rules are followed and enforced more willingly if framed in universal and absolute terms, as opposed to the situational and relativistic rule-framing of kinship networks.

• Moralized perception of non-kin. Help is more willingly provided to non-kin as long as they belong to the community of rule-followers. Continual rule-breaking leads to expulsion from the community. Insiders are thus separated from outsiders by a line dividing “the morally worthy” from “the morally worthless.”

• Guilt activation. Rule-breaking is punished more through internal activation of guilt than through external activation of shame. Guilt is the distress felt by a rule-breaker even when the rule-breaking is witnessed by no one else. Conversely, shame causes distress only when the rule-breaking is witnessed by someone else (Benedict, 1946).

• Broader range of targets for affective empathy. Affective empathy is extended from the mother-child relationship to all social relationships. Through this involuntary transfer of another person’s feelings to oneself, rule-breaking is experienced as harm not only to the victim but also to oneself. Some researchers have argued that affective empathy and guilt are two overlapping aspects of the same mental mechanism.

This mental/behavioral package is attributed by some authors to Western Christianity (Schulz, hbd* chick) and by others to earlier forms of social organization (Frost, MacDonald).

According to the first scenario, the Western Church diverged from the Eastern Churches by imposing an extreme ban on cousin marriages ­– which resulted in weaker kinship ties, less clannishness and, eventually, much more individualism. Previously, Roman Civil Law had banned only first-cousin marriages. The Western Church extended the ban two degrees further in the 7th century by adopting the anti-incest prohibitions of the Visigothic Code. Then in the early 9th century it began to calculate degrees of kinship differently by adopting the so-called “Germanic system,” thereby doubling the number of forbidden marriage partners. The extreme ban on cousin marriages thus seems to have come from norms that already existed among northwest Europeans, particularly the Germanic tribes (Frost, 2020); McCann, 2010, pp. 57-58).

Those norms were certainly promoted and enforced more effectively by the Church, but their origins go back further (Frost, 2020; see also Tensor, 2021). In the 9th century, when the extreme ban on cousin marriages was being introduced,  French households were already small and nuclear, with 12% to 16% of adults being unmarried and with adults usually marrying in their mid to late twenties (Hallam, 1985, p. 56; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94). As for earlier times, we cannot draw firm conclusions from available evidence, which is fragmentary and mostly concerns elite males with young brides. A high level of individualism is indicated by a tendency to postpone marriage long after puberty, as noted by Julius Caesar and Tacitus among the Germanic tribes:

Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest commendation among their people: they think that by this the growth is promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts. Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6: 21

Late comes love to the young men, and their first manhood is not enfeebled; nor for the girls is there any hot-house forcing; they pass their youth in the same way as the boys. Tacitus, Germania 20

We now come to the second scenario, which postulates that this mental/behavioral package emerged before Christianity, specifically in post-glacial times among the fishing peoples of the North Sea and the Baltic. Those humans differed from other hunter-gatherers by forming large semi-sedentary coastal communities, thanks to an abundant food supply of fish, seals, and shellfish (Price, 1991). They thus had to solve the “large society problem” at an earlier date, and not necessarily in the same way as other peoples would.

Perhaps they reduced clannishness by discouraging cousin marriages and by imposing the same universal rules on all community members. This cultural evolution would have provided a template for genetic evolution – by favoring those who could more readily internalize universal rules and feel affective empathy in all social relationships (Frost, 2020). Such gene-culture coevolution may explain how the space of high trust expanded beyond the kin group to encompass a much larger social environment.

Whatever its origin, this mindset would be key to the later enlargement and deepening of the space in which goods were produced and exchanged. Two other key factors were the North Sea trade and Christianization. On the one hand, maritime trade greatly enlarged the space of wealth creation. On the other, Christianity deepened the degree of trust between non-kin:

• by providing a more effective means to promote, inculcate, and enforce universal rules;

• by preventing clan formation – and clan vendettas – through more effective enforcement of a pre-existing norm against cousin marriages; and

• by calling on the State to pacify social relations through the execution of violent males (Frost, 2023; Frost and Harpending, 2015).

In sum, people could focus on creating wealth through peaceful means, rather than through theft and plunder.

Such wealth creation required certain skills, like literacy, numeracy, and planning. Those were the skills of a growing middle class that translated economic success into demographic success, if only because “business partners” were often married couples who expanded their workforce by having more children. Middle-class lineages thus grew in number from the 12th century onward until they made up most of the population – not only the middle class itself but also much of the lower class through the downward mobility of “surplus” offspring. Gregory Clark has argued that this demographic change led to a shift in behavior and mindset: "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving” (Clark, 2007, p. 166; Clark, 2009; Clark, 2023; Frost, 2022b).

This shift can be seen in the genome. If we look at DNA from human remains, we find an increase in the prevalence of alleles associated with high cognitive ability from medieval to modern times (Frost, 2024; Piffer and Kirkegaard, 2024). That increase brought a corresponding growth in the “smart fraction” of the population. Eventually, a point was reached where thinkers could come together in sufficient number to exchange ideas and create new ones. This intellectual ferment, called “the Enlightenment,” occurred across all domains of production – not only the sciences but also literature, music, and the arts (de Courson et al., 2023).

That is the secret of the Whites and their success. Such success, however, has an Achilles heel: the need to maintain a space where relationships are peaceful and based on trust. Without that space, everything else will collapse like a house of cards.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits, notably skin color, hair color and eye color. Other research interests include gene-culture coevolution. Find his newsletter here.

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References

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