Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Perhaps race is what Durkheim called a social fact, which you
recall, has two elements. First, a social fact is a way of acting,
thinking, or feeling that doesn’t originate within the individual.
Second, a social fact has coercive power attached to it. Perhaps race
has its reality as a social fact, not a biological or psychological one.
Western culture comprises societies of the sort that Tönnies
describes. Our cities, towns, and states are heterogeneous mixtures
of different socioeconomic classes and communities of different
skin colors and ancestral origins. This isn’t accidental; homogenous
groups largely live clustered together. There may be both informal
and formal means of enforcing the boundaries.
This segregation has two important effects. First, it means that
social customs and expectations develop in different social
contexts. Second, psychological effects make the lines between us
darker and deeper.
The division that splits society into separate communities is
group chauvinism and the fundamental attribution error.
In-group chauvinism arises from the fact that humans are
programmed to be irrationally optimistic. We have the strange
ability to imagine a positive future for ourselves and to believe that
this imagined future will materialize with a high probability.
We then transfer this happy projection to those whom we think
are like us. We recognize aspects of ourselves in others, and
the more like us we think they are, the more our brains react
whom we identify.
are taught to recognize certain people as being more like us
than others, and once we internalize that, there are neurological
results. We are wired to prefer people whom we are taught to
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