Property Rights Part II: Groups Are All In Your Head

How did they get there?

The late, great John Tooby wrote: You are a member of a coalition only if someone (such as you) interprets you as being one, and you are not if no one does.

This essay, the second in the series on property rights, argues that Tooby was right and that groups, just like property rights, exist only because of our beliefs. They don’t have a deep reality beyond that.

Groups are like power: all in the mind.

And just like in the series on power, I’m going to rely on some of my favorite fiction to talk about this topic. In this case, I take you back to an episode of Star Trek (the original series).

This was one of my favorite episodes, in part because of the effective reveal.

Released in January of 1969—the fact that it was the sixties sort of matters—Let That Be Your Last Battlefield focuses on two characters, Lokai and Bele. Enterprise first encounters Lokai, a fugitive, and shortly thereafter, Bele, a representative of their planet's government, who claims to be pursuing Lokai for treason. Thanks to the magic of makeup, both Loka and Bele are split down the middle, bright white on one side, deep black on the other. The allegory is not, to be honest, all that difficult to penetrate. I mean, it was the sixties, so…

As the episode progresses, it is revealed that not only do Lokai and Bele not like each other, but that the whole planet's society is divided and embroiled in a bitter and violent conflict. To see the heart of the conflict, I hope that you’ll have a look at this clip, just from 2:20 to 3:00 or so. This scene, trailing perhaps only a few sequences in The Trouble With Tribbles, is among my favorites in the original series.¹

Just a classic moment. (In my view, Shatner deserves an award just for that expression at 2:58. Classic.)

When Kirk says, “You’re black on one side white on the other,” this tells you how, in his head, he thinks about how to group Lokai and Bele. The group boundary is drawn around the monochromes, like him and Spock, and the bi-chromes, let’s call them.

Lokai, in contrast, asserts he is black on the right side—not just one side—and white on the left. This tells you how he thinks about what the groups are. He more or less doesn’t consider bi-color people (of both sub-types) to be a group, at least not a particularly relevant one.²

Who is right?

Are the groups monochrome and bi-chrome?

Or are the groups white-right, black-right, and monochromes?

In contrast to this puzzling situation, consider my favorite order, Sphenisciformes, the flightless aquatic birds. Penguins, to some of you. Unlike human groups, it’s emphatically not the case that a member of Aptenodytes forsteri, the emperor penguin, is only a member of that species if someone (including you) interprets that individual as being one. If it walks like an emperor penguin, and vocalizes like an emperor penguin—and has emperor penguin genes—then it’s a member of the species Aptenodytes forsteri.

Humans aren’t like this. I mean, yes, humans are human in virtue of their human genes. But human groups aren’t like this.

People are in groups because of beliefs in people’s heads, not their DNA.

Yes, some of those beliefs are formed because of facts in the world. I’m an American because I was born in the U.S.A., have an American passport, that sort of thing. But those facts get their traction because they cause people, including immigration officials and the IRS, to have beliefs about the fact that I belong to the group, American citizens. The stuff in the world causes the belief. In turn, the beliefs—rather than the facts—make me an American.

What makes me a Jew? It is the fact that my parents are Jewish? For some people—including my parents—yes, that’s enough. I wager that if I converted to Buddhism tomorrow, they would still have the belief that I’m really Jewish. What if I went to Australia and told everyone I was Buddhist, and never mentioned my ancestry? There, I would, for all intents and purposes, be a Buddhist. I’m a member of a group if others interpret me as one.

From this we see that, yes, some group memberships pass from parent to offspring in a way that you might be deceived into thinking is like the penguin case. The difference is that penguins pass an essential something on to their offspring. Penguin DNA creates penguins. Penguin essence, if you will. That’s where the reality comes from. I could give you a sample of DNA from my emperor penguin and if you were good at genetics, you could infer what species the creature was.

This is not how human groups work. My dad was a computer programmer. No one thinks that he passed his profession on to me. My dad was Jewish. Some people think he passed Jewishness on to me.

But notice that I’m very different from my penguin friend. I could send my DNA away to 23 and Me and they could tell me a lot of facts about where my ancestors were from. They emphatically could not run the DNA and “discover” that I am Jewish, let alone American. That’s not how group memberships work. DNA tests tell you what DNA your ancestors had.

I’m not, of course, saying that genes don’t cluster geographically. Of course they do. That’s why 23 and Me works. Genes cluster because of the way reproduction works—babies come out physically very close to where mom is. So a genetic analysis can determine something like most of my ancestors came from Europe. And, of course, that means that you can make inferences about traits that covary with geography. One could probably guess about my pigmentation. But, again, what group I belong to depends on the beliefs of the people around me.

Consider the case of the Hutu and Tutsi. Before colonial powers arrived in Rwanda and Burundi, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was tied to roles: Tutsi were cattle herders, and Hutu were primarily farmers. These roles were malleable. A Hutu who gained wealth, for example, could become a Tutsi, and a Tutsi who fell into poverty might be seen as a Hutu. It wasn’t penguin-like. No genetic barrier separated the two; rather, it was a set of beliefs tied to social and economic status that people shared about who belonged where.

Then colonial powers showed up, bringing their own beliefs about human groups. The Belgians, looking for a tidy way to rule, assigned group membership based on external traits—height, nose shape, and skin tone—and issued identity cards that fixed people as either Hutu or Tutsi. What had been fluid became rigid, and what had been a matter of local belief became a matter of colonial administration. Suddenly, group membership wasn’t just in people’s heads; it was on ID cards. But here’s the key: the colonial project worked the way it did because it created new beliefs. Hutu and Tutsi became fixed categories, not because DNA had changed but because the social world had.

This artificial rigidity had horrible consequences, which echo to this day. Once people’s beliefs about group membership hardened, so too did the lines of power and conflict. By the mid-20th century, these categories fueled violent struggles that culminated in the Rwandan Genocide. Even in the aftermath of such horror, the reality remained: the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is still a matter of belief. Just as in the case of property rights—and moral rules as well—if no one believed the distinction mattered, it would vanish tomorrow. There is no penguin-like essential quality separating the two groups. Hutus and Tutsi are Hutus and Tutsis because someone interprets them as being such.

The human mind is ready to accept that there are new groups. In 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a third-grade teacher named Jane Elliott conducted a classroom exercise to teach her students about the effects of racism and discrimination which came to be known as the "Blue Eyes–Brown Eyes" exercise.

Elliott began the exercise by dividing her class into two groups based on their eye color: blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children. She then informed the class that one group was inherently superior to the other. On the first day, she told the blue-eyed students that they were smarter, more capable, and generally better than their brown-eyed classmates. To reinforce this division, the blue-eyed children were given privileges, such as extra recess time and the ability to sit in preferred areas of the classroom. Conversely, the brown-eyed children were subjected to negative treatment. They were scolded more harshly, denied privileges, and made to wear collars to signify their supposed inferiority.

Almost immediately, the blue-eyed children began to exhibit confidence and dominance, treating their brown-eyed peers with disdain. Meanwhile, the brown-eyed children became withdrawn. The dynamic reversed when Elliott switched the roles. The behaviors and emotions displayed by the students mirrored those of the previous regime.

Before the announcement of the categories, the blue-eyed students did not exist as a group or coalition. Their eye color existed, of course. They were similar to each other in this particular respect. But there was no sense in which they were a group until Elliott created the beliefs.

There is an endless array of similar examples throughout history. People create groups strategically. People create subordinate groups to exploit. People claim membership in high status groups to access the perks of being in that group. More recently, people have claimed membership in putatively low status groups to claim the perks of restitution. Is Bill really a member of such and such a group? That depends completely on the beliefs people have about how membership is determined.

I’m not saying that the facts don’t matter. I’m saying that humans choose which facts matter as they create—literally create, just as in the classroom exercise—human groups.

This process can be useful. Understanding someone as a member of a group, for instance, affords inferences. If you meet another Greek outside the walls of Troy, you don’t need to know anything else about them to know that you can leave your sword in its scabbard.

Again, I am not denying that genes clump because of how reproduction works. I’m claiming that which features are used to say that this is a group but that isn’t derives from choices that humans make. Groups aren’t out there, to be discovered, like species. They are synthesized from the choices we make about what traits or history or whatever matters.

From all of this we see that we are like penguins in that, yes, genes are passed from one generation to another. These genes make us humans. However, these genes do not make us members of groups in anything like the same way. Do we inherit features from our parents? Of course. Do some people use these features and see us as a member of a coalition, interpreting us as one, in the words of John Tooby? Again, yes. But it’s the interpretation—not the genes—that is arbitrating the issue.

We have a ton of inherited features that we more or less ignore when it comes to coalitions. We focus on some over others, in no small part, I would guess, because human color vision is so darn good. So humans have used color in a lot of contexts, especially when we started traveling long distances, across oceans, deserts, and mountains, encountering people who we perceived as different.

Now, finally, to bring it back to property rights.

In the last post in this series, I mentioned that inheriting property rights is complicated. What rights do descendants have to their ancestors’ stuff? There is no objective answer to that question. We know what genes the descendants of emperor penguins are going to have. Not complicated. But how do property rights move from one generation to the next? Am I entitled to the plot of land where some number of my ancestors a millennium ago planted and cultivated olive trees? Most people don’t think so.

Even if there is a belief about property rights that transmits down the generations, as we saw in the last post, people disagree about not just the rules of transmission, but the relevant facts of the matter.

And it’s even worse than that. If you’ve believed everything in this post and the last, then people who descended from a place hundreds or thousands of years ago are not, in any objective sense, in the same “group” as the people from who they are descended. Yes, their genes might be more from one region than another, but the reason they are—or say they are—in the same “group” is in virtue of their beliefs.

And now there’s the intersection of those two. If we don’t have a firm answer about how property rights accrue from one generation to the next, then it seems like the problem is still worse in determining this as a “group” right as opposed to an individual right. We can fight over who gets what by virtue of direct descent. It becomes much harder when the right is in virtue of group membership, which itself is just a bunch of beliefs, which might or might not be shared by the relevant parties.

In essence, some of today’s conflicts are due to the fact that people are claiming property rights— which exist only as beliefs in people’s heads—based on group membership— which also exist only as beliefs in people's heads. Recently, Noah Smith wrestled with this issue in the context of the land currently known as the United States. He asks a series of telling questions:

If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors… But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever? … I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups.

My view is that it’s even worse than this. My view is that who counts as part of the collective is inherently ambiguous, without a firm answer. Who is descended from who has firm answer. True. But who is part of a given group has no such objective answer, just as who has a property right has no answer apart from beliefs about how those rights are established.

We can measure the number of protons in an atom and say, yes, that’s titanium. We can look at DNA and say, yes, that’s a penguin. There is no similar work we could do to say yes, this land is your group’s land, but that land is my group’s land. People have to decide whose land is whose. Can they use history for that? Sure. Can they use their interpretation of who is in what group? Sure.

But those beliefs are subject to all the problems that beliefs have. They are self-serving. They can’t be objectively established. Those beliefs are, in the end, opinions, not facts.

And that, my friends, is why the Middle East is a fucking mess.

1. If you don’t want to click to the video, here’s what happens. Bele asserts that Lokai is “of an inferior breed.” Spock and Kirk say, wait, Lokai seems to be of the same “breed” as you: half white and half black. Lokai, incredulous, points out that he, Bele is black on the right side whereas Lokai (and his ilk) are white on the right side. The big reveal is that they don’t think about themselves as both being half black and white. It’s which side you’re black or white on that matters. Eh? Eh?

2. Spoiler. The episode ends with the two characters returning to their world, which has been devastated by war. They go down anyway to fight some more, hence the episode’s title. I feel like there might be some kind of lesson in there about the dangers of relentless obsession with differences in skin color but it’s sort of hard to parse out.