Martin Barker: The New Racism, Junction Books, 1981, £4.95.
Covering a variety of related topics (the new racism, conservative ideology, Hume's philosophy of human nature, socio-biology), Martin Barker's book sets out 'to do three jobs that cannot be isolated. (It) is centrally about racism. It attempts to show that certain forms of argument that, to date, have been regarded as relatively innocent, are racist. Its exploration of forms of racist belief shows that they cannot be detached from beliefs about a whole range of other social problems. These are not simply personal connections, or party-political connections, but conceptual connections. In other words, those who adopt the language and forms of argument here described on questions of race and immigration, introduce themselves into a network of concepts and "scientific" theories which, if pushed to consistency, would be seen to have implications for all fields of social life.' The common and unifying theme to these topics and arguments is, in short, the 'project of innateness' which gives rise to the politics of instinct, the most explicit form of which is racism.
Racism, Martin Barker argues convincingly, has changed from an ideology propounding the 'inferiority' of non-whites (which accordingly legitimised imperial conquest and colonisation) to one propounding a non-hierarchical view of racial 'difference' (which correspondingly seeks to legitimise oppression within and repatriation from the UK). Thus the new racism is doubly potent: first, it is no longer based on universally discredited notions of racial inferiority/superiority; and second, it appeals strongly to 'common sense' notions of national consciousness (shared identity, place, feelings, way of life, traditions, etc) and human nature (natural to form bounded communities hostile to 'outsiders').
Furthermore, the acceptability of this new racism has been reinforced by the rise to prominence during the 1970s of supporting 'neutral'/'scientific' theories, in particular socio-biology.
Socio-biology maintains that in the process of evolution, individual genes — and thus persons — attempt to maximise their own chances of survival, and that the most successful reproductive strategy not only requires competition for mating, territory, resources, etc (ie aggression is natural, permitting the long-term emergence of the 'fittest' or 'selfish' gene) but also that it is correspondingly natural to look after only those related persons with shared genes since this ensures the survival of the gene pool over generations. Hence the naturalness (or instinctiveness) of on the one hand altruism towards genetically similar groups (family, nation, race), and on the other of antagonism towards 'outsiders' (other nations, other races). For socio-biology, therefore, racism is genetically determined, and to pretend otherwise is to offend against 'human nature'; human behaviour is depicted as an extension of animal behaviour, the differentiating cultural elements such as speech and technology being dismissed as 'deviant' and peripheral to the evolutionary dynamic of this basic instinctivism.
Martin Barker easily demolishes these 'scientific' claims: he not only shows how behavioural units ('femininity', 'criminality') which are identified by socio-biology so that their determining genetic units may in turn be identified, are in fact themselves taken straight from existing political discourse (and are therefore constructed and not 'natural'), but also the impossibility of linking genes with specific behavioural units anyway, the fallacy of treating people as a mere expression of genetic tendencies, the error of assuming that people are concerned solely with survival, and finally the importance of learning (as distinct from inheritance) in the evolutionary process.
These objections to socio-biology are not new, however, and the real importance of this book lies elsewhere: whereas critiques by liberal-bourgeois academics have tended to focus only on the correctness or otherwise of its scientific claims and either deny its racism or else dismiss this as irrelevant, Martin Barker's critique focusses on its considerable ideological effects in the political arena and in particular on its role in the reconstitution of conservative beliefs.
Socio-biology is politically significant for three reasons. First, unlike other academic work, it has received extensive and uncritical media publicity: socio-biologists and their sympathisers (Morris, Ardrey, Dawkins, Wilson, Eysenck, etc) have been given widespread coverage in the national dailies and women's magazines. Unsurprisingly, their views have quickly been taken up to legitimise the activities of fascist organisations (thus Richard Verrall in Spearhead: 'Socio-biology is transforming our view of man and society... The great question of our time seems to be whether European man, the pinnacle of evolution, will destroy through the unnatural notions which are the modern products of his intellect what his inherited instincts have striven through these eons of time to preserve').
Second, it seeks to justify not only the new racism but (since it forms a project of innateness) also extends the utilisation of the same 'common sense' arguments in support of sexism, militarism and capitalism itself; hence female domesticity, imperialist aggression/warmongering and monopoly capitalism are all presented as 'natural' and therefore immutable elements.
And third, socio-biology both complements and is an integral aspect of an internally consistent system of Tory beliefs (built around a theory of race, nation and human nature) which has re-emerged during the breakdown of bourgeois hegemony in the post-war era; the respectability that socio-biology confers on instinctivism has strengthened and permitted the re-affirmation of traditional conservative philosophy.
Martin Barker is to be congratulated on having written an excellent and politically important book which all socialists must read; we ignore his warnings about the changes in the nature and acceptability of racism at our peril.
TOM BRASS was a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University and now teaches part-time at Cambridge.