Kevin B. MacDonald:Indoctrination and Group Evolutionary Strategies.Department of Psychology.California State University-Long Beach. In I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt & F. Salter (Eds.),Ideology, Warfare, and Indoctrinability Oxford and Providence: Berghahn Books, pp. 345–368; in press, expected mid-1998. Proceedings of the Symposium on Ideology, Warfare, and Indoctrinability sponsored by the Max Planck Society at Ringberg Castle, Germany, January 12, 1995 Indoctrination into the Group Ethic of Judaism. Collectivist cultures (explicitly includes Judaism in this category) place a high emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather on individual rights and interests.Ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and submerge individual goals to the needs of the group are paramount. Collectivist cultures develop an unquestioned attachment to the ingroup,including the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup.These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups (p. 55) Judaism has been able to retain a very high level of group cohesion and withingroup altruism over a very long period of historical time, at least partly because of social controls acting within the group that served to penalize non-altruists and non -cooperators, while cooperative altruists were ensured a high level of social prestige (MacDonald 1994). Nevertheless, social controls do not appear to be the whole story. If only social controls were involved, Judaism or any similar group evolutionary strategy, would be a sort of police-state in which the only motivations for socially prescribed behaviour would be fear of the negative consequences of non-compliance. However, it is difficult to imagine that such a group would long endure, and, in any case, a very salient feature of historical Judaism has been the indoctrination of individuals into psychological acceptance of group aims. The power of the Jewish group strategy has derived from the following: 1.) Judaism has been characterized by cultural and eugenic practices that produced a highly talented and educated elite that was able to improve the fortunes of the entire group; 2.) universal Jewish education resulted in an average resource acquisition ability of the entire group was above that of the rest of the society; and 3.) there were high levels of within-group altruism and cooperation (see MacDonald 1994). Given the presence of a very powerful group strategy within a society, there is the expectation that dynamic processes will develop between the strategizing group and the rest of the population. In particular, as a group strategy such as Judaism comes to be increasingly salient and powerful within a society, outgroup members are expected to be increasingly likely to join highly cohesive groups in an effort to further their own interests. The theory and data discussed in this paper therefore not only provide a perspective on evolutionary strategies such as Judaism, but also provide a tool for understanding the development of antithetical group strategies, as represented historically by anti-Semitic movements (MacDonald, in press): External threat results in a higher sense of group cohesion among Jews, but the same processes occurring among gentiles imply that gentiles would be increasingly likely to join cohesive, relatively altruistic groups when they perceive themselves as engaged in resource competition and threatened by a highly cohesive group. The suggestion is that in the long run highly successful group strategies spawn mirror images of themselves as non-group members increasingly perceive a need to organize against the group strategy. The result is a fascinating historical dynamic in which the individualistic tendencies of prototypical Western societies have been punctuated in critical historical eras by the development of highly collectivist Western societies with powerful overtones of anti-Semitism (late Roman and medieval Western Christianity, Naziism).
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 08:00:17 +0000
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