Realism, as the term is used in foreign policy, builds upon the same foundations as Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand analysis of economics. It is an empirical analysis at the level of human actors without necessarily making any explicit attempt to understand why it is that those actors behave as they do. Hence, the invisibility. And unlike thinkers in certain ideologies (such as neoconservatism or libertarianism), foreign policy realists look at the various actors, individuals and various sorts of communities—especially nations, as empirical entities—as Smith looked at the butchers and bakers in London and Glasgow of the middle of the 18th century. It’s far from clear that we can build up the Soviet Union as of 1955 or the Scottish and English economies as of 1760 by using individuals as building blocks, but deeper insights can be derived by those who understand the history of Marxism as well as the history of Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, by those who understand the history of the Scots: Gaels and Picts and Anglo-Saxons or Anglo-Normans, pagan Celts and Celtic Catholics and Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and various sorts of dissident Protestants.
Those human beings formed by the various historical processes were, and are, the result of general sorts of evolutionary processes. By the phrase, “general sorts of,” I mean that these processes include the two understood well by Darwin, natural selection and sexual selection, as well as various genetic processes which sometimes operate with surprising independence—in the short-term—from reality external to genes. There are still other complications such as some mysterious and difficult-to-define “group selection” processes which seem to exist except when studied.
These processes didn’t operate to produce a human race which has remained free of deep changes ever since some magical date. The peoples in much of China and Southeast Asia have the characteristics, personality and others, which allow them to survive and to reproduce successfully as communal rice-farmers while the peoples of much of Europe have the characteristics allowing them to survive and reproduce in as wheat-farmers with a much stronger leaning to individualism. I wrote of this is two recent essays:
- Yes, Genetics and Evolutionary Biology are Relevant to Our Political and Social Problems, and
- Darwinism is Fine so Long as I Can Still Believe All Human Beings are Just Like Me.
As I noted in those essays, scientists now think human evolution accelerated greatly about 10,000 years ago when our ancestors began living in more complex societies, especially the civilizations at the center of large regions such as Mesopotamia and China. Relatively great changes in personality and—yes—IQ can occur in a surprisingly short number of generations when human populations are relatively isolated at least as a breeding population. For a good and accessible overview, see The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.
So it is that we can learn from more specific works by the geneticist Bryan Sykes and the historian Norman Davies, two thinkers well-read in the field of the other, that modern Scots are a mixture, as a population and as individuals in varying combinations, of:
- the European population at the last retreat of glaciers which occurred on the order of 12,000 years ago,
- Scandinavians settlers and Vikings (“raiders”), who were sometimes the same men,
- Brythonic Celts whose culture/language and much of whose genes came from the `Scythians’ who developed proto-Indo-European culture and language—roughly—in the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russian (north and northwest of the Black Sea),
- Anglo-Saxons—a catch-all for various Germanic peoples, some of who hadn’t really developed a strong tribal identity when they showed up on the radars of the Greek and Roman historians, and
- Irish, Gaelic Celts, who are now said to be a mixture of those `Scythians’ and a people resulting from the slow movement of “first-farmers”, coming from the region in northern Iraq and adjoining regions of Turkey where complex agriculture and cities first developed in Western Asia; those “first-farmers” migrated over centuries along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and mostly settled in the region of Portugal and northwest Spain where they mixed with a Celtic people before some moved into Ireland (largely uninhabited so far as anyone can tell) and maybe some parts of Great Britain.
This sort of information, along with information about the physical environments and climates of the British Isles and other parts of Europe, helps greatly in understanding why it was that particular British peoples responded in certain ways to specific possibilities given by the environment and by surrounding populations—as well as the challenges brought by pirates and raiders and invaders and merchants coming from previously unknown cultures and so on.
This is all still best understood by the traditional methods of historians, though supplemented by the new scientific knowledge. Certainly those who seek to understand must be open to other forms of human culture, to other forms of human being. I suspect that some day historians of human thought will explore one of the strangest and most contradictory of complex events: by way of empirical analysis of their own peoples and their own best (or at least good) ways of living and of organizing political systems and so on, a major line of thinkers (Hobbes and Locke and Human and Adam Smith and through the Classical Liberals and Libertarians of the past two centuries) have arrived at the idea that all human beings are supposed to be Northwestern Europeans with their strongly individualistic inclinations. In other words, empirical investigation of a specific group of populations of human beings was allied with a true blindness to the characteristics of other populations of human beings; the `true’ human nature of Nigerians and Samoans was at hand with a proper understanding of Anglo-Saxons. Even the West’s own political and economic and moral and other systems were to be deformed far beyond the true particularities or peculiarities of the peoples of the West. (And the nature of spreads in human characteristics even in well-defined populations tells us there are many human beings in Glasgow of 1770, who were not so individualistic as the entrepreneurs, butchers and bakers, observed by Adam Smith.
Read about this subject of foreign policy realism from the viewpoint of a thinker, Justin Raimondo, who follows von Mises: Why the War Party Dominates the Media. Raimondo’s essay was partly a response to one written by a notable advocate of foreign policy realism, the Harvard Professor, Stephen Walt. Walt’s essay is found at: What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like?. Walt’s essay is definitely worth reading, along with his other writings and those of other foreign policy realists. Some of the foreign policy realists I often read are: Stephen Cohen, Chas Freeman, and William R Polk. And read Raimondo if you wish to see that wisdom can come out even when the thinker holds some wrongful understandings of human being—the same is true in spades of the late and great libertarian thinker, Murray Rothbard, whose thought was studied by Raimondo. Then again, I think Rothbard was and Raimondo is more pragmatically realistic than might be implied by their own labels of `libertarian’.