Integration seems one of the great political issues of our era. That is, people express great concern about factional favoritism based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, etc., and push for laws and policies to prevent it, or to encourage mixing and ties across factional boundaries. I’ve tended to assume that such policies have been sufficient, and perhaps even excessive.
"I think people would be more amenable to policies that subsidize interactions between groups rather than subsidize mating. Forcing high quality schools to take quotas of low and middle income children would be a way of subsidising inter-class marriage."
Most people in the world don't think there should even be such a thing as a "high quality school", at least in principle (there will always be local, natural variations in student and teacher quality, but systemic causes, like American schools depending on highly localized taxes, can be tackled). The same education for every child, no matter how much dough their parents have, and yes, that's an excellent way to get mixing between all sorts of groups and create more of a shared identity.
It seems odd that the author would choose examples from societies that failed to sustain themselves by being able to grow large. In particular the Hopi tribe is a tribe that never grew large and has been dominated by larger societies. Athens lasted less than a century after Cleisthenes reforms. The professor's agenda in the piece is social engineering and not the growth and survival of a republic.
What would you social engineers do about people breeding out of wedlock? Who would want to have a marriage if it was something that the state regulates like this? It would just go underground. Would you have abortions or infanticide of "racially homogenous" children? Who would be chosen to breed? You need a vicious dictatorship to put your scheme into action. Even with the Chinese dictatorship, they could only achieve a 1.5 or 1.6 child fertility rate even though their intent was for women to have only one child. Human beings aren't farm animals and they can choose their own mates without the "help" of the state. Another aspect of this forced "exogamy" is that it's a good way to get rid of the Jews. But, I'm beginning to suspect that eliminating Jews is on the wish list of the left. Is your goal or is it to get rid of white people in general and pesky religious minorities in particular? This is just another means of genocide without the death camps. The left is irredeemably evil.
Skin color is a discrete trait, so even extensive mixing would not lead to any kind of literal uniformity.
So is eye color, but, among white people, it cannot be used to reliably assess ancestry or membership in any socially meaningful group. At most, it is weakly correlated with broad geographical areas.
The same thing occurs for hair color, stature, and so on.
The point is that, after a few centuries of substantial interracial mixing, people wouldn't have all exactly the same skin color, but skin colors wouldn't strongly correlate with identifiable groups.
You can see this in such places as Brazil and other countries in Latin America,
IIUC, in Brazil the upper class elites tend to be white because they mostly descend from wealthy European landowners who didn't mix to any significant extent with anybody else. The rest of the population consists of a mix between the descendents of poor European immigrants, African slaves and natives.
"many would object to subsidizing marriages between ages or classes, as they see examples of this as exploitative or disgusting"
Between classes? Where do you get this from? Between class marriage is the classic love story, whether "Cinderella" or "The Lady and the Tramp".
There are certain examples of this that people do not approve of, relationships which are essentially about one person's wealth and another person's looks and not about some "deeper" appreciation of the other human being e.g. Anna Nicole Smith to Howard Marshal.
I think what you are capturing here is a general disapproval of the idea that marriage should be for reasons other than a deep emotional attachment to another, i.e. it should be for a love. An attempt to treat marriages as serving some other end offends modern western sensibilities (rightly or wrongly).
I think people would be more amenable to policies that subsidize interactions between groups rather than subsidize mating. For example, pushing to have greater diversity (wealth or ethnicity wise) within schools. Forcing high quality schools to take quotas of low and middle income children would be a way of subsidising inter-class marriage.
In medieval Catholic-dominated Europe, the Catholic Church mandated exogamy by making it illegal to marry anyone related to you up to fifth cousins. (It was relaxed somewhat when people ended up having no idea if someone was a fifth cousin or not.) After a while, it pretty much ended clannish tribalism in Europe.
Doing some googling, Mormon retention rates were 92.6% 1970-2000, but have dropped to 64.4% since. The trend for orthodox Judaism is the reverse, they have a retention rate below 50% if you include those who came of age between the 1950s and 1970s, but 83% of those currently between 18-29 are still Orthodox.
There is no part of a person's life that is so personal, private, or sacrosanct (if you are religious) that some social engineer, usually some coffeehouse academic, won't want to control it. This is the end result of the diversity worship of the left. I guess no one has heard of civil wars between people belonging to the same ethnic, linguistic and racial group. There is always religion and politics that cannot be "bred out" of people. See how the intellectuals just assume that the rank and file humanity are farm animals that they can just arbitrarily breed, send to slaughter, and manipulate to achieve some artificial Utopia. This idea is not well intentioned. It just shows how much contempt pseudointellectuals have for people in general and free human life in particular. It's just evil and rotten to the core. Any people that would tolerate forced or coerced exogamy from their government deserve whatever else that government dishes out.
I think that this is a good idea. One specific case I have been thinking about is changing the law so that if you are born in the US you are only an American citizen if at least one of your parents is also an American citizen. This is a pretty big incentive I think for immigrants who want to have children and it should prevent the sort of enclaves you see in Europe from developing in the US.
Hell, in Banks' Culture books, "human" is so loosely defined as to include thousands of species that aren't even capable of interbreeding without genetic manipulation.
(And, in the quality-SF tradition, this isn't just assumed for convenience or out of laziness; it's explained with a panspermia argument in-universe, just as an aside.)
Ever heard of outbreeding depression? "Hybrid vigor" is not guaranteed.
My thoughts exactly.
"I think people would be more amenable to policies that subsidize interactions between groups rather than subsidize mating. Forcing high quality schools to take quotas of low and middle income children would be a way of subsidising inter-class marriage."
Most people in the world don't think there should even be such a thing as a "high quality school", at least in principle (there will always be local, natural variations in student and teacher quality, but systemic causes, like American schools depending on highly localized taxes, can be tackled). The same education for every child, no matter how much dough their parents have, and yes, that's an excellent way to get mixing between all sorts of groups and create more of a shared identity.
He may end up in the morgue. Don't assume that a fistfight won't end as a one-sided gunfight.
It seems odd that the author would choose examples from societies that failed to sustain themselves by being able to grow large. In particular the Hopi tribe is a tribe that never grew large and has been dominated by larger societies. Athens lasted less than a century after Cleisthenes reforms. The professor's agenda in the piece is social engineering and not the growth and survival of a republic.
In that case, oops.
What would you social engineers do about people breeding out of wedlock? Who would want to have a marriage if it was something that the state regulates like this? It would just go underground. Would you have abortions or infanticide of "racially homogenous" children? Who would be chosen to breed? You need a vicious dictatorship to put your scheme into action. Even with the Chinese dictatorship, they could only achieve a 1.5 or 1.6 child fertility rate even though their intent was for women to have only one child. Human beings aren't farm animals and they can choose their own mates without the "help" of the state. Another aspect of this forced "exogamy" is that it's a good way to get rid of the Jews. But, I'm beginning to suspect that eliminating Jews is on the wish list of the left. Is your goal or is it to get rid of white people in general and pesky religious minorities in particular? This is just another means of genocide without the death camps. The left is irredeemably evil.
Skin color is a discrete trait, so even extensive mixing would not lead to any kind of literal uniformity.
So is eye color, but, among white people, it cannot be used to reliably assess ancestry or membership in any socially meaningful group. At most, it is weakly correlated with broad geographical areas.
The same thing occurs for hair color, stature, and so on.
The point is that, after a few centuries of substantial interracial mixing, people wouldn't have all exactly the same skin color, but skin colors wouldn't strongly correlate with identifiable groups.
You can see this in such places as Brazil and other countries in Latin America,
IIUC, in Brazil the upper class elites tend to be white because they mostly descend from wealthy European landowners who didn't mix to any significant extent with anybody else. The rest of the population consists of a mix between the descendents of poor European immigrants, African slaves and natives.
"many would object to subsidizing marriages between ages or classes, as they see examples of this as exploitative or disgusting"
Between classes? Where do you get this from? Between class marriage is the classic love story, whether "Cinderella" or "The Lady and the Tramp".
There are certain examples of this that people do not approve of, relationships which are essentially about one person's wealth and another person's looks and not about some "deeper" appreciation of the other human being e.g. Anna Nicole Smith to Howard Marshal.
I think what you are capturing here is a general disapproval of the idea that marriage should be for reasons other than a deep emotional attachment to another, i.e. it should be for a love. An attempt to treat marriages as serving some other end offends modern western sensibilities (rightly or wrongly).
I think people would be more amenable to policies that subsidize interactions between groups rather than subsidize mating. For example, pushing to have greater diversity (wealth or ethnicity wise) within schools. Forcing high quality schools to take quotas of low and middle income children would be a way of subsidising inter-class marriage.
Actually, unlike the US, many EU countries don't have the jus soli, and this is generally recognized as a barrier to integration.
In medieval Catholic-dominated Europe, the Catholic Church mandated exogamy by making it illegal to marry anyone related to you up to fifth cousins. (It was relaxed somewhat when people ended up having no idea if someone was a fifth cousin or not.) After a while, it pretty much ended clannish tribalism in Europe.
Doing some googling, Mormon retention rates were 92.6% 1970-2000, but have dropped to 64.4% since. The trend for orthodox Judaism is the reverse, they have a retention rate below 50% if you include those who came of age between the 1950s and 1970s, but 83% of those currently between 18-29 are still Orthodox.
WTF?
There is no part of a person's life that is so personal, private, or sacrosanct (if you are religious) that some social engineer, usually some coffeehouse academic, won't want to control it. This is the end result of the diversity worship of the left. I guess no one has heard of civil wars between people belonging to the same ethnic, linguistic and racial group. There is always religion and politics that cannot be "bred out" of people. See how the intellectuals just assume that the rank and file humanity are farm animals that they can just arbitrarily breed, send to slaughter, and manipulate to achieve some artificial Utopia. This idea is not well intentioned. It just shows how much contempt pseudointellectuals have for people in general and free human life in particular. It's just evil and rotten to the core. Any people that would tolerate forced or coerced exogamy from their government deserve whatever else that government dishes out.
I think that this is a good idea. One specific case I have been thinking about is changing the law so that if you are born in the US you are only an American citizen if at least one of your parents is also an American citizen. This is a pretty big incentive I think for immigrants who want to have children and it should prevent the sort of enclaves you see in Europe from developing in the US.
Hell, in Banks' Culture books, "human" is so loosely defined as to include thousands of species that aren't even capable of interbreeding without genetic manipulation.
(And, in the quality-SF tradition, this isn't just assumed for convenience or out of laziness; it's explained with a panspermia argument in-universe, just as an aside.)