Are whites exceptionally guilty of racism and oppression? Should the American story be rewritten to center the nation’s shameful past, with white men as the villains of the piece? Must the Western canon be upended to represent minority voices in proportion to their current numbers? For John Ellis, the answers are clear: no, no, and no.
An emeritus professor of German literature at University of California, Santa Cruz with a strong command of modern history, Ellis’s late career productivity is impressive, combining deep and broad-gauged scholarship with decades of experience as a dissenter in the belly of the liberal beast. His early studies in German literature soon involved him in questions of linguistics and the philosophy of language. This interest, in turn, gave him a front-row seat to the degradation of these fields and of the humanities in general, as more and more “theorists” became dogmatically attached to their pet causes and impervious to counterarguments while self-segregating into groups of like-minded academics. In time, these self-protective groups, collaborating with one another, captured not just whole departments but entire universities. Ellis’s exemplary The Breakdown of Higher Education (2020) traced how the Left used emotional blackmail and activism to capture the modern university over a span of decades. His observation that political monocultures tend toward extremism is especially insightful.
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His latest book, A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How The World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism, is equally impassioned and readable. Ellis agrees with woke critics that the contemporary West, especially the Anglosphere, is distinct among civilizations. But there the agreement ends. Far from being history’s villain, the Anglo-Saxon West, Ellis argues, is its hero. Pale-skinned westerners, notably Anglos, are largely responsible for humanity’s unprecedented moral progress toward overcoming racism, slavery, and imperialism. Indeed, they gave rise to the reigning operating system of the West and its world order, which Ellis dubs gens una sumus (“we are all one family”)—the ideal of a common humanity.
This creed maintains that all of us deserve equal rights and respect, regardless of tribe. Haltingly but steadily, we have come to understand that denying equal treatment to people based on characteristics like skin color or religion is wrong. This supersession of tribalism is not universal, even in the West. Yet the movement to enlarge our circle of respect—begun in the western Enlightenment and developed most effectively by Britain and America—has brought immense moral progress.
White people largely made the modern world, notes Ellis. This is not because one racial category has virtue or genius encoded in its DNA, but due to accidents of history. Chance conditions set forces in motion which led to an economic and cultural efflorescence in a part of the world that happened to be inhabited by people with pale phenotypes.
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Why did the northwest of Europe emerge transformed after 1500? This is not a focus of the book, but historian and archaeologist Ian Morris has argued for a multi-factorial explanation of this transformation. In Britain, the standoff between king and nobility gave birth to Magna Carta in 1215, creating a liberal tradition that later reformers could draw upon. Climate, coal deposits, and rivers may have made a difference to British industrialization, accelerating labor mobility and economic freedom. Power competition between major European states led to a technological arms race that did not occur as readily in more unified imperial environments like China. Advanced ships and their voyages of exploration opened the silver deposits of the Americas, boosting the money supply. The Catholic Church’s prohibition on cousin marriage and the Reformation’s emphasis on literate individuals reading the Bible rather than obeying religious authority may have played a role, too. Of course, the correspondence between race and modernity is far from perfect: the pale Irish, Poles, Russians, and Balts contributed notably less than the relatively swarthy French and Italians. Still, Ellis’s broad point holds.
As Ellis observes, physical traits were tightly circumscribed by geography everywhere in the world. Though Europe remains predominantly white today, between 1500 and 1950 it was effectively homogeneous. Anglo-Saxon offshoots in Australasia and North America were also heavily white until the 1980s. One reason they are now less homogeneous is that the gens una sumus ideal prompted them to progressively open themselves up to peoples that were more distant from their ethnic core.
The central claim of A Short History of Relations Between Peoples is that the West—especially the Anglo West—is relatively virtuous. Measured against the perfectionist yardstick of cosmic justice, it falls woefully short. But measured against other, actual civilizations, it shines. On an apples-to-apples basis, the West’s record places it in the front rank of civilizations. Societies of similar power and technology have, on average, behaved much worse.
Karl Marx categorized civilizations along an evolutionary continuum which includes primitive and slave societies. His primitive category encompasses hunter-gatherers who lived in societies, as Harvard’s Steven Pinker notes, where the chance of dying violently was hundreds or thousands of times higher than our own. No wonder native groups often feared each other more than they feared European settlers—hence their willingness to team up with Europeans against common foes such as the Pequots of Connecticut or Aztecs of Mexico. There is perhaps no theory more divorced from empirical reality than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage.
Empires, with their ordered hierarchies (complete with slave systems), greatly reduced the death rate compared to hunter-gatherer societies, but were still unspeakably cruel. Ellis notes that there are 290 empires listed on Wikipedia, which is undoubtedly an undercount. These span all epochs of recorded history, from the ancient Hittites and Egyptians to the modern Soviets and Japanese. They span every continent, encompassing Aztecs and Mayans, Zulus and Ashanti, Persians and Arabs, Mughals and Hindus, Russians and British. Just because the Russians or Chinese conquered groups primarily on land doesn’t make them less imperial than the Dutch or British.
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The book invites us onto the world stage in 1500, when the moral project of gens una sumus was just a twinkle in the eye of a few visionaries. This was a Hobbesian world without international law in which the operative principle was to conquer and enslave or be conquered and enslaved. Ellis terms this the rule that “bigger is better (and safer).” Before the principles of state sovereignty, national self-determination, and human rights came to be encoded into international norms and bodies like the United Nations, diplomacy—to the extent it existed—was merely war by other means. People’s circle of trust was limited to their tribe, later extending to their ethnic group and civilization.
In the centuries after 1500, Western empires expanded across the world. They initially did so without regard to existing political structures, obeying the Hobbesian logic that had driven mankind since its inception. When they encountered native peoples and empires they did as all peoples had done, approaching them with tribalism and a sense of superiority while measuring them against themselves. On this score, westerners were more technologically, and often morally, advanced. Cannibalism and child sacrifice, for instance, were common in many of the hunter-gatherer and primitive agricultural societies that Western colonizers encountered.
These encounters left impressions that produced prejudices and reinforced the colonizers’ sense of superiority. Because race was correlated with civilization, this led to racism—though one must not forget that racial prejudices against internally less advanced groups (such as the Irish) were also rampant. Exceptional native individuals who defied sweeping generalizations about their race were discriminated against and held back. The notion that only westerners held prejudices toward outsiders, however, is naïve. As Ellis acerbically remarks with respect to Edward Said’s criticism of westerners’ “othering” of the “oriental”:
Did Eastern cultures really have the sunny attitude to Europeans that Said seems to assume? The historical record is quite clear on this point: they didn’t. The Ottoman Empire is proof enough of that.
Over time, the rise of a literate public and the spread of Enlightenment and evangelical Christian ideas brought progress in the West toward equal treatment and humanitarianism. The British Empire began as a conventional tribal venture designed to maximize British wealth, power, and prestige. It ended by prioritizing principles like anti-slavery, anti-racism, and liberal democracy, which prodded Britain to divest itself of its possessions. Colonial administrators, especially in the British Empire, often governed in the best interest of their subjects, though Ellis acknowledges that some gave in to disproportionate violence when attacked. The West has certainly not achieved moral perfection, but it has proceeded closer to this goal than any other civilization.
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The age of Western imperialism was a time of transition from tribalism to gens una sumus. Along the way, the West’s residual tribalism combined with its power to produce oppression and racism. But those flaws should not obscure the immense moral progress the West made for the world.
Proof of this may be seen in the aftermath of decolonization, when many former colonies regressed into corruption and civil war. A substantial number of ex-colonial dependencies also elected to voluntarily remain part of the British commonwealth of nations. This is hardly a damning verdict on their colonial experience.
If slavery and settler-colonialism are historically universal, and the West—especially Anglo-America—has been the least worst imperialist in history, why is the contemporary Left so intent on castigating the British and Americans? One reason is that Western imperialists possessed the technology and power to engage in conquest and slavery on a larger scale than less advanced empires like the Māori or Zulus. More importantly, the Western progressives who set the tone in elite culture have an outlook marked by what British writer Ed West terms “parochial cosmopolitanism”: ignorant of world history, obsessed with the sins of their own country and civilization, while possessing outward-focused attachments rather than ties to kith and kin.
John Ellis’s book is a must-read, but its affection for overcoming tribalism arguably produces a blind spot around the excesses of gens una sumus. Indeed, the book abruptly transitions from its historical analysis of detribalization to a critique of today’s race-obsessed social justice Left. Yet a good case can be made that the Western attempt to supersede its tribal loyalties has overshot the mark, leading to more sympathy for the outsider than for itself. White progressives are arguably cosmopolitan afficionados, so detribalized that they compete to virtue-signal their contempt for their kinsmen. What I term the “asymmetrical multiculturalism” of the social justice Left thus fuses tribally-minded minority intellectuals with anti-tribal white progressives. Though minority tribalists do need to broaden their circle of sympathy, ethnic majority elites have overdosed on gens una sumus and must rediscover a moderate, healthy, tribalism.
Rather than seek to fully overcome our human nature, we must balance the universal with the particular. Too much tribalism leads to the clannish, stagnant, low-trust societies examined by Ellis. Yet northwestern Europe’s detribalization has proceeded too far in the opposite direction, producing self-hate and rapid ethnic transformation. As Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has remarked, there can be no cosmopolitans without locals. In this sense, it would be a shame if humanity fully overcame its tribalism.
