I composed the following analogy after being challenged to come up with a good reason for why members of a race should be concerned for the collective well-being of their race, and not solely for the well-being of individuals.

Someone named "gdoube" challenged me to defend the merits of my analogy.

Jenab wrote:
"The relation between individual behavior and racial behavior is the same as the relation between the speed of the atoms in a gas and the temperature of the container."

gdoube wrote:
I'm not really sure how far you mean this analogy to extend. What tends to happen in 'canisters' of gas is that when the temperature is measured, it is an effect of large numbers of particles, each with a different energy, as you have said. This is because the measuring apparatus tends not to be of a small enough size as to measure the energy of just one particle. Thus the concept of 'temperature' really only applies to large numbers of particles rather than to individual particles...

And that is appropriate, since a concern of a laboratory technician (or a kitchen cook) is whether the container is hot enough to injure him, not whether any particular atom inside the container is moving fast or slowly. Furthermore, the technician (or cook) isn't really concerned about damage to individual skin cells: he's concerned with damage to a group of cells, his hands, the number of which is large enough to be statistically important, and he is concerned with the loss of function that damage to his hands would entail.

If I were to extend your thoughts about my comparison, then I'd have to imagine that the technician or cook has no regard for his hands as a collective of cells having many important emergent properties. No, all he should be concerned about, according to you, is whether this cell will be harmed by a collision with that fast-moving molecule over there. Also according to your thinking, the temperature of the container should not "prejudice" (a malapropism in this context) the technician or cook against hot containers; he has a "duty" to put his cool hands on hot containers and attempt to repair his harmed cells individually.

The possibility that you could entertain such a limited (and actually rather selfish) perspective on the properly moral White response to Black violence is funny. You can't possibly be that thick-headed. A moral person is not concerned merely for his own well-being, but also for the well-being of his kindred folk. The whole reason moral codes came to be a part of culture was helping a group of related people, a tribe, to survive dangers as a collective.

The moral individual does not concern himself with individuals alone. He regards both his tribe and competing tribes as collectives with their respective emergent properties, and he makes his social choices according to the well-being of his tribe, and not according to his own well-being only.

gdoube wrote:
So 'racial behaviour' is soem sort of measurement of a collection of individuals' behaviour and does not in itself exist. So far so good.

No. So far, so bad. Races are not merely collections of individual persons. There is a class of properties that occurs among collectives that causes them to be something more than the sum of their parts: emergent properties.

Even something as tiny as a proton is the result of emergent properties in the association of three quarks. A proton has a nature that is not found in any of the quarks, even in part. Yet it is the emergent property of a proton that makes all of the chemical elements of nature possible.*

A responsible person values himself much, but he values his race more.

gdoube wrote:
...particles bump into each other and transfer energy between themselves. Thus in a cylinder of a gas at a given pressure, it is reasonable to expect that there will be small differences in energy between particles all through the volume of the gas. This is the point at which the analogy breaks down. We know that races of people do not behave in this fashion. There is not a direct transfer of behaviours between people in the same fashion.

That's true, but not important. Consider what my analogy was intended to show, namely, that individual behaviors of a large group's members can have a collective significance. I don't care, for this purpose, whether the property of the individuals in question can or can't be transferred among them, provided that the distribution continues to have the same characteristics despite any such transfers.

gdoube wrote:
I wasn't trying to offer any individualistic moral perspective on anything at all, I was just pointing out the disanalogy. The disanalogy does not occur because large numbers of fast moving particles damage large numbers of skin cells. Rather my point was that the disanalogy occurs because of the difference between the transmission of energy levels between particles, and the transmission of behaviours within groups.

I knew that was what you literally meant; however, I believe that you made that comment to create confusion, by suggesting that a flaw in my analogy had a relevant importance, when, in fact, it was irrelevant and unimportant.

It is true that molecules of gas in a container individually exchange amounts of kinetic energy through collisions.

It is true that people of a race don't change their inborn traits and potentialities by mutual interaction - though they might excite each other to the use of such traits or to the realization of those potentialities.

So it is true that the analogy can't be used to compare the individual nature of a molecule with the individual nature of a person.

That, however, is not important.

What is important is that the analogy shows how a large number of individual behaviors produce a statistical envelope of collective behavior as an emergent property. In the case of a groups of molecules, the emergent property is called temperature. In the case of a groups of people, emergent properties can likewise be found.

Race is not the only factor that can induce emergent behavior: any perceived common interest can do this. But race is the most fundamental cause of group identification. A person gets his race before he has a chance to gain religion or wealth, and race stays ineluctably with a person, though religion can be discarded or changed, and wealth gained or lost. And race has an older history.

Races do have emergent properties. If they didn't, there wouldn't be such large correlations between racial demographic percentages and the per capita rates for violent crimes - everywhere you care to look.

gdoube wrote:
Your concern is more with the interaction between groups, however, so let's address that. A realism about emergent properties is all very well, but to take temperature again as an example of such an emergent property, the question must be asked, of what is it a property? What makes it true that 'this thing is 135 degrees celcius'? Perhaps to take a Lockeian perspective, we might ask, are emergent properties primary or secondary? But this does not really get to the heart of it.

I am not an avid hair-splitter like Kant or Hegel.

gdoube wrote:
The crucial concept is that of measurement. A temperature reading is a measurement. The particle's motion (or wave function's frequency or what have you) is not. If we wish to collapse this distiction, we must collapse it towards measurements, ie make the particle's motion into a measurement, and not make the temperature into the particle's motion.

While I am familiar with the terms of quantum mechanics, I don't toss them out for the sake of making gobbledegook.

gdoube wrote:
I agree that 'temperature' is in some sense a property of a 'collective'; but the thermometer, the person reading the thermometer, and the conventions which allow that person to read the thermometer must be included in the collective. Only then could 'temperature' emerge. I.e., the motions of particles in themselves are a necessary condition for temperature (as they are a necessary condition for most things, if you believe in them), but they are not a sufficient condition. There are many other conditions which must be satisfied before 'temperature' arises out of the movement of particles, which do not involve the movement of those particles.

You are being unnecessarily abstruse about something simple.

If a person puts his hands on a hot container, then his hands will be burned. Having been burned, they will hurt. Injury could be severe enough to cause loss of function. Similarly, Whites who live around Blacks can expect to be the victims of violence much more often than would have been the case if their neighbors had been Whites instead.

Delving into philosophical pedantry and scientific jargon won't help you.

gdoube wrote:
Since you like the analogy so much, let's stick with it apply it to 'racial behaviour'. What are some necessary conditions for there to be a fact of the matter about 'racial behavior'?

I'm glad you asked. I'm even happier that you made an attempt to answer.

gdoube wrote:
1) someone needs to have the idea that a certain group of people comprise a race. They do not actually need to comprise a race. They may well comprise a race, but it is not necessary that they do so. The important thing is that they comprise a finite group of people. Indeed the only thing that they need to have in common is that they are being measured in the present study.

Not so. Racial lines are not arbitrarily drawn. If you select groups at random, your correlations will be very small. You get the best correlations between demographic groups and behavioral traits when you draw the lines correctly.

(You understand, I hope, that you'd be begging the question if you selected "criminals" as the demographic group and "crimes" as the trait. Circular reasoning doesn't help.)

gdoube wrote:
Analogously, it is not necessary that a person taking the temperature of a volume of gas thinking that it is pure hydrogen is correct or not. The temperature reading is still a temperature reading, just of something other than what the reader thinks it is.

You may believe that you've identified another flaw in my comparison, but you haven't. At equal temperatures, hydrogen moves faster than nitrogen does. Under equal social and economic conditions, Blacks differ from Whites by being more violent (among other differences).

If the person taking the temperature reading knows that his container holds hydrogen, he will calculate a certain average speed for the molecules therein, but if the person knows that his container holds nitrogen, his calculated value for the average speed will be less.

If you are made aware that a given number of crimes occurs each year in a given jurisdiction, you will need to know which race predominates in that jurisdiction in order to make a reasonably good estimate of the size of the population. If you are told that the region contains mostly Blacks, your estimate of the population will be lower than it would be if you believed that the region contained mostly Whites. You would need about ten times as many Whites as Blacks to observe the same number of crimes.

gdoube wrote:
2) there needs to be a measurement device. In our case it is statistics. eg., the number of blacks arrested versus whites arrested.; the number of blacks convicted versus whites convicted etc. These statistics do not need to be correct, or form an accurate picture. If my thermometer is wrong, then there must be a fact of the matter about the right temperature. But had there never been a measurement device (eg if organisms had never had thermal receptor nerves) there could never had been 'temperature'.

You're wrong. Temperature is a physical quantity. It does not depend on subjective interpretations for its realness. Even if nobody could feel warmth - even if living things did not exist - ice would still melt at the temperature it does now, and water would boil likewise, and whether hydrogen fusion would occur inside stars would not be affected in the slightest.

Likewise, Blacks would be more prone to violence than Whites, regardless of whether anyone is, or isn't, "keeping score."

No doubt arrest statistics are imperfect measuring devices for estimating the racial differences in violent tendencies. But though they are imperfect, they are still pretty good: reliable enough to base social policy on, for example.

gdoube wrote:
3) There needs to be a person reading the measuring device. And if they are just looking at the shiny mercury going up and down the tube, they are not really reading the temperature. They must have a concept of temperature for the temperature to be read. One must have a concept of 'racial behaviour' for a set of statisitics to be read as providing evidence for and against propositions about it. Thus the concept of racial behaviour is necessary for the emergence of racial behaviour.

I see that you are again headed toward an irrelevant issue.

A scientific instrument is calibrated. It's markings are placed according to where the indicator is during a controlled measurement of a standard phenomenon, such as liquifying nitrogen, melting ice, boiling water, melting lead, etc.

However, if the emergent property is the per capita murder rate within a given population, then no calibration needs doing. All you have to do is count the perpetrators of murder as the police arrest them, and divide their number by the size of the population from which they came. If you happen to notice that your measurements of this emergent property are well correlated with a demographic statistic, such as race, then you can entertain the idea that the statistic and the emergent property are somehow related.

If race is correlated better than any other statistic is with race, then you can assume that either the murder rate causes race or that race causes the murder rate. The former assumption is logically implausible, but the latter is merely politically incorrect.

http://www.jabpage.org/images/correlate2.jpg
http://www.jabpage.org/images/correlate.jpg
http://www.jabpage.org/images/uscitymu.jpg
http://www.jabpage.org/images/usblakil.jpg

No one has ever found a statistic that is better correlated with violent crime than race is.

gdoube wrote:
These are some necessary conditions for there to be such a thing as 'racial behaviour'. It is not necessary that there be any such thing as 'race'. To be wrong about something supposes that there is the possibility of being right about it: I might be wrong that these people comprise a race; I might have terrible statistics and an inadequate grasp of them; I might read the statistics wrongly. I might therefore be entirely wrong about 'racial behaviour', even to the extent that I might be wrong about whether or not it exists. But that I could be right is a necessary condition for there being a fact of the matter about 'racial behaviour'.

While there is always the possibility of errors in the data, one must go with the data until the errors are known to exist.

When substantial errors are known to exist (as opposed to trivial ones), one suspends one's judgment on any conclusions drawn from the corrupted data, but one does not automatically leap to any alternative position. Liberal equality dogma, for example, would not be proved right merely because racists were proved wrong about the extent or direction of racial inequality. It might be that the races were yet unequal, but not in the manner the racists had been saying.

Substantial errors are not known to exist in the data that racists have been using to identify "Black violence" as an emergent property of the Black race. Accordingly, reasonable people will go with the data unless such substantial errors are found.

gdoube wrote:
It is not necessary that I could be right about an individual's behaviour for there to be a fact of the matter about that behaviour. If 'racial behaviour' is an emergent property, it follows that it emerges only under certain conditions (the classic case, I believe, is that of whether individual H2O molecules are wet - wetnees only emerges under the condition of a large number of molcules, much like temperature). Now, that I could be right about 'racial behaviour' is not a fact that those individuals in the group have made true. Thus the facts about 'racial behaviour' are not entirely dependent upon the facts about the constituent individuals' behaviour, as you have pointed out. The extra facts that are necessary are facts about how the group is measured, who is doing the measuring, and so forth, as you have neglected to point out.

You have wordily managed to make another argument for me. If Blacks accustomed to Black violence are telling us how much violence is "normal," they might tell us that 100 murders per 100,000 population per year is normal. If Whites accustomed to White levels of violence report on the same subject, their normal value might be only 10 murders per 100,000 population per year. But, again, that's one of those disingenuous or irrelevant points that you seem to raise frequently.

The implicit question we've had all along is whether the races should be mixed. The different expectations of Blacks and Whites about how much violence is "normal" (i.e., who is doing the measuring) is a reason that the races should not be mixed. Blacks might accept Black violence as normal, even as they seek the comparative safety of White company. Whites, however, do not accept Black violence as normal. Whites would do well to avoid the company of Blacks, for the same reason a laboratory technician would do well to avoid touching a hot canister of gas.

Jerry Abbott