There are multiple cultural myths, often missed by Europeans/White Westerners because of excessive focus on their own cultural myths. These include some which require a knowledge of a specific language to recognize, but often a tribal group names itself with a term that essentially means "the humans", thus in essence denying full humanity to other groups.

But there is also, in the general "Western world" a second cultural myth that allies to a great extent, but not perfectly, with racism. That is the Calvinistic myth that prosperity goes with godliness. Given the history of Western culture, prosperity largely attributes to whites rather than other racial groups, so whites must be more godly, except for the poor whites and the occasional wealthy persons of color. Again this essentially reduces the non-wealthy, regardless of race, to a somewhat less than full human status.

But if we ignore this economic discrimination and focus solely on the racial aspects we will miss a very important element of discrimination.

But to more directly respond to the question, without some myth to explain differences, discrimination cannot be supported, whether the myth is racial or economic, or some other form.

The myth of European exceptionality can be found in a number of intellectual positions that we still adhere to, as in the proposition, still widely taught, of Ancient Greek philosophical and perceptive genius, placing them outside the cultural parameters of the time. A review of many intellectual conceits is in order, not just European.

There are multiple cultural myths, often missed by Europeans/White Westerners because of excessive focus on their own cultural myths. These include some which require a knowledge of a specific language to recognize, but often a tribal group names itself with a term that essentially means "the humans", thus in essence denying full humanity to other groups.

But there is also, in the general "Western world" a second cultural myth that allies to a great extent, but not perfectly, with racism. That is the Calvinistic myth that prosperity goes with godliness. Given the history of Western culture, prosperity largely attributes to whites rather than other racial groups, so whites must be more godly, except for the poor whites and the occasional wealthy persons of color. Again this essentially reduces the non-wealthy, regardless of race, to a somewhat less than full human status.

But if we ignore this economic discrimination and focus solely on the racial aspects we will miss a very important element of discrimination.

But to more directly respond to the question, without some myth to explain differences, discrimination cannot be supported, whether the myth is racial or economic, or some other form.

Excellent point, William, but as an Ancient Historian, educated but not practising, I tend to direct my concerns further back. The exceptionality of Europeans has been exaggerated and has its place in our particular cult of history.

Of course they can be directed elsewhere. Rascism is predominantly associated with Africans' enslavement, even if the operation of slavery in Africa was more complex than commonly assumed, and in constructs of African inferiority in order to sustain slavery and the colonisation that followed in its wake. Myths were then made, only now being unwrapped. The conquered and oppressed tend to be considered inferior by their conquerors and oppressors.

These racial myths, mainly at present European, although other cultures have developed equally potent ones, have in the modern world been directed to or have their source in either Africa or the Americas, developed in order to sustain expansion and explain Europe's apparent military success. Calvinist myths, based on work, reached an early apogee in the North Americas, used as an excuse to exterminate the indigenous population and enslave Africans. It was used also to incarcerate the urban poor in unsanitary prisons and the mad in torture-facilities, mad-houses.

Firs, Aryan, not the Arian. The Arians are a Christian denomination. The Aryans are Hindu noblemen. Hitler established a priori that German was the strongest breed, but it is wrong clasification, but clasification. "Main Kampf" is something of a political style bildungsroman, very touching, becaouse he lost his father should work and did not go to university, read very much press, and it was all by the Jews and Marxist.

The problem is how to define 'race'. Originally it differentiated phenotypical differences among people, but very fast was extended to 'biological' and then 'intellectual' differences and acquired a connection to language capabilities, real or imagined. From there to hierarchical ranking and rejection of assumed 'inferiors' was not far. This is a development of the 18th and 19th century in Europe. Hostility against the - different-looking or -talking - 'Other' is of course much older, also subjection for that very reason, and it is not limited to Europe. But Europe (esp. Germany) so to speak managed the systematisation and assumed 'scientification' of race and racism. In other words: from mere hostility to systematic murder, in the last instance. So you could say you have here a scientific myth, because very little of this was based on empirical research.

Btw: Aryan has nothing to with 'race' (the Nazis have, as usual, a lot to answer for), but is a linguistic category comprising language that are related among others because they have a similar word or syllable (ari) for 'noble' or 'guest'. Hope this helps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)

Aryan is Hindu.

It certainly is not! There are Hindus in South India. And they do not perceive themselves as Aryan at all!

I wish I could remember the exact details of a paper I last read in 1997 that I found convincing. This argued that modern racism was not so much the product of myths about race as the result of deliberately constructed ideas that were manufactured in the 18th century to justify retention of Negro slaves for life. As I recall the paper argued that slave owners were under pressure to fulfil Biblical injunctions to first teach slaves about Christianity and then to release them after a maximum of 7 years following their adoption of Christianity. The author argued that slave-owners promulgated the idea of White superiority in order to both justify retaining their property and to head off objections about loss of jobs from poor whites. Unfortunately the only details I can remember were that it was recently, in 1997, published in an American History journal that at the time Keele University subscribed to which is probably not sufficient to locate it.

I think William Mayor has the most valuable approach. Myths (or histories) are generally developed to justify a sociocultural situation whether that be Colonialism or out-and-out slavery. Economics first followed by justifying myths. This process is not peculiar to the West, but can be found on every continent and in many countries. Those who are exploited are always viewed as 'less' and the exploitation then justified by cultural, religious or 'scientific' myths. (For the last, check what German psychologists and anthropologists were producing prior to WWII.)

I don not know why we stand a priori about strong of some race. Against all and Hercules will not help.

As a final observation race is itself a myth. See attached.

Quite an interesting question! I am a Hebrew as well as a Zadokite. Our family has kept our genealogy for at least 1400 years and we use it not only to exclude ourselves from the others but also to choose a bride or a groom to keep the Priestly line pure. In the Torah, G-D Says that we are H-S eternal priesthood and the chosen ones from among all the nations, including the Israelite's and the Jews (whether Kohan or not). We also have G-D Saying that H- gave the world to be inherited by all the nations of the world except us. We have been exclusively selected to have G-D as our eternal inheritance. I think there was a time in the past when this exclusivity was helpful in our survival, but it is no longer valid. Thanks.

Going back to basics, it needs to be said that there is only one race, the human race. Anything else is socio-culturally constructed. I do agree there are varied dimensions of this artificial construction of race; the most insidious being the scientific and religious myths of race. They have a force of their own which blind many people to believe them and shape their conduct without critical thinking and without questioning.

One group differentiating itself from another has been going on since the initial Mesopotamian states and Ancient Egypt-for example Egyptians had certain characteristics-behavioural, psychological, cultural-that made them different from Punt, Libya (all those dwelling outside of Egypt to the West), Canaan and Syria. Others were defined as inferior. But-race was not the issue, only culture. Definition of a state or group identity and cultural development require perhaps an alternative to measure that identity and development. It also encouraged inter-group or state competition.

Ah, but what of race? Contrary to my above assertion, Egyptians painted Asians (those of Palestine and Canaan) with certain physical characteristics. Those from Punt were also easily recognisable. Egyptians were characterised as lithe (even athletic) and usually youthful, no matter how old. But-Libyans were described as fair haired.

To a certain degree geographically described/defined peoples have changed and continue to do so. Predominant types in North Africa are different today from the past. As probably with Greece. European types inhabited all of Western China in the bronze and early iron ages. Different languages were common then, and Indo-European languages or the possible base language types from which they emerged were spoken by all different groups. Europeans-whatever that really can mean for the altered inhabitants of the Asian pennisular, who after all were probably originally dark skinned-probably spoke a number of distinct languages.

Lastly, the German myths of Aryan superiority, especially military superiority, were always rediculous. Europe was for many millennium notable for successful invasions from East Asian and Central Asian groups, who at a later point chased German tribes into the arms of Rome and pushed German tribes out of Eastern Europe. Mongol groups came close to subjugating Central Europe centuries later. Anyway, German groups/tribes were originally defined in opposition to Rome, forming great clans in order to confront Rome's military might and probably only then popularising one particular Central European dialect that we now call German. Culturally, for centuries the 'German' and 'Celtic' groups were hard to tell apart.

Rome incidentally was cosmopolitan.

During most of the 4000 years of Hebrew and Jewish history, the mentality was tribal rather than racial. It was based on being "the chosen people". The racism of the non-Hebrews through the ages continued to re-inforce this myth and actually helped us to survive as a people to this day. This is counter to the negative attitude towards racism. In our case, racism of the people around us helped us to remain as one nation even though we were dispersed across the globe. However, over the last couple of centuries with the rise of European Ashkenazim and their intellectual and economic achievements out of proportion to their numbers have introduced racism within the Hebrew/Jewish mentality. This is most clearly seen in Israel today where the European Jewry holds almost all the power. In this case the myth is not that of the chosen people but of economic superiority and intelligence. This is a mentality that the Ashkenazim borrowed from the Europeans and are applying on the Hebrew/Jewish nation. This mentality has created cracks within the Israeli society and is probably the most dangerous threat to the integrity and even survival of our people/nation. This threat is internal rather than external. There is a historical precedence to this phenomenon when ancient Israel broke apart into two nations. But that was based on religious grounds rather than racism. I do not know if the modern nation of Israel is capable of surviving this internal threat. Other than the myth of chosen people which acted as a glue, there is, in my opinion, no other way to keep us together. So, here is an example of a myth that helps in the survival of a people and a nation. The question that now arises is, "should the Hebrew/Jewish people/nation give up the myth that binds them together or not"?

Examining and dispatching myths is difficult as they tend to construct our view of the world. Looking at my last piece here above I can see a number of myths that I've presented as facts:

Steppe peoples/Mongolian military supremacy: usually temporary, and based not just on movement but surprise.

Original Europeans were dark-skinned: we don't know. Political correctness perhaps? Recent research has indicated how confusing the picture actually is of hominin dispersal around the world, hominin evolution, and the appearance of sapien groups including Neanderthal. Probably, cro-magnon travelled into Europe via Central Asia or the Near East and may in fact have been fairly light complexioned.

Indo-European: A VIctorian construct based upon a number of language similarities indicating a shared lifestyle, not a shared language group? Possibly. We cannot yet be sure.

Historians commonly present myth as fact, and the most entrenched are hard to winkle out and examine.

I would also note that myths are culturally specific. In the example of the steppe peoples being militarily superior, as Stanley Wilkin noted, that was a temporary phenomena and based heavily on surprise , but also ignorance. The steppe people moved into Western Europe because they had been displaced by a formerly subject people. The steppe culture was based on horses, and when the local climate changed to reduce grain availability, the subject people, who were a cattle based culture, gained ascendancy, cattle processing the available grass more efficiently. In that culture, the horse based steppe people were militarily inferior.

Myths arise to explain and or justify beliefs. Beliefs may or may not, often not, be based on some objective reality. That Blacks TEND to be better runners and Caucasians TEND to be better swimmers is largely based on biology (where the center of the body mass tends to be located), therefore has an objective basis. That men are better in math and women better in vocabulary holds true for a couple years in youth at most and is thus more based in belief than anything objective. That any race is superior, whatever that means, is also based in belief.

After Imperium Romanum, race is very unsharped notion. Aleksander Macedonian, ordered to multiply with the conquered nations.

Mustafa,

Were Israel and Judea ever united? That too may be myth to illustrate the true nature of Jerusalem's religion, uncorrupted by outside peoples. Outside of the Bible, like most ancient literature myth rather than reality, there is little evidence for a joint monarchy.

I don't know whether my answer can be relevant in this context, but I'm very much of the view the Middle Ages should be duly taken into account. Alt-right and far-right propaganda are both reliant on manipulating medieval topói and images for pushing their own arguments and ideology. The Middle Ages are always equated with a pristine epoch, which hadn't been spoilt by foreigners or migrants. Campaigners of the National Front in France commemorate, on a yearly basis, Joan D'Arc (I suggest reading George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' to understand how manipulative the whole thing is). I think it's a truism to underscore how Nazi propaganda relied (and still relies) on a questionable reception of Germanic mythology. I hope this makes sense and answers your question.

I'm not sure that Germany had any sense of itself in medieval times as it didn't exist then, except as the Holy Roman Empire. Few countries in Europe did, even England with lands in Britain and France. Would they even have known what a nation state was?

Stanley: They certainly would not.The Holy Roman Empire of German Nation comprised areas nowadays split into many states, and until 1871, Germany did not exist: it was a conglomerate of little chieftaincies (well, not all so little: Prussia was quite big) all speaking some German dialect. But the idea of culturally belonging together was around from ca. the time of Luther. Same would apply, I think, for other countries, but the idea of nation-state would have met with total consternation. One lovely example: Charlemagne (or Karl der Große) is thought to be French in France, German in Germany, in fact he was a Frank (and do not ask me where they came from...)

European rascism is not so much a nationalist construct, Dagmar, as people assume but surely imperial? I'm assuming it evolved from the taking-over of the Americas, the initial enslavement of sections of its population before bringing in preferred African slaves. Really and truly: Discuss.

Stanley: It is probably both. It started with the hierarchisation of difference and pretending that to be 'scientific'. In mediaeval times this hierarchisation did not really exists: I still remember Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival who had a halfbrother whose mother was a dark queen (probably from Persia or India) and who was called Feirefiz (he was checked black and white!). He eventually joined Parzival in the search for the grail, married a princess and went with her to India where he begot Jovan (Prester John). Racism in its pseudo-scientific shape started, in my view, with early colonialism in the age of discovery and conquest.

Phenotype is developed according to the climate, environmental conditions. We should rather said about genus and spacies, not race. Two other clones will be different in other climate enviromental. will got different mind.

Dagmar, the concept of belonging to recognisable culture groups would have been recognised in medieval Germany judging by the accounts of the Holy Land that divide groups by cultural grouping, e.g. Franks and Easterners, which are further divided by what we would now call national cultures, e.g. German, Italian, French & Spanish.

Culture is defined by comunity of imaginations, why We could not think then some nations? is in psychosis. I rode Frezer and he wrote that Arians ot druids and belive in trees, they cutivata magic depends on trees. It Was very wise nation. Modern Nazizm based on comunity of blood (Fichte), but they talk about blood from father, unfortunately blood we got from mother, from father we got only gamets. I wrote something like that after reading Lyotards "La Differance":

Timothy: yes, culture groups would have been recognised in Mediaeval Germany and in the crusades, but what are today Germans were made up of many such groups. Deutsch appeared only in the name of the knightly order: Die Deutschritter, the Teutonic Knights. And they were not a cultural group.

Piotr: absolutely right: Fichte had indeed funny ideas about the basis of community, like blood of the father (he was not the only one). The mother was rarely considered which lets the whole idea of ‚blood community‘ fall flat on its face.

Stanley, for us Zadokites/Sadducees our faith was always restricted to The Torah, The Temple and Jerusalem. Even though the Temple does not exist, we follow only the Torah and consider only Jerusalem as our homeland. It is irrelevant to us whether there was a united monarchy or not. It has been irrelevant to us what the Northern Kingdom followed or what became of it and it's people. Our concern is Jerusalem only and not even Judea. We are Hebrews, tribe of Levi, Clan of Zadok. We do not consider ourselves as jewish or follow the rabbinic judaism. The founding and the flourishing of the rabbinic judaism is proof that the religion of Jerusalem has not remained unchanged despite our efforts. Still, we feel closer to the jewish people than to any other people because of our shared history, culture, language and that judaism still has The Torah at it's core. There is no concept of conversion among us and we do not consider converts to judaism either as being part of our extended tribe.

Thanks Mustafa.

On the issue of Medieval group identity:

In England both English and French were spoken, largely according to class. 14th century literature began to be written, although not exclusively, in Middle English by Chaucer and others. Although using European poetic forms, Chaucer et al had abandoned European (ie French) gender inflection common to most European languages. The concept of Englishess fundamentally emerged with the French expulsion of English forces from France in the 15th century.

English aristocracy, that is those with their power-base in England, had land in Scotland, as, for example, Robert the Bruce, the Scottish King, had land in England. The aristocracy did not see themselves as English, speaking French. The English were the lowest classes. John of Gaunt had land in present day Belgium, as well as France. Concepts of Englishness also became more common as the tribal clashes of the 15th century aristocracy killed of most of the aristocracy primarily associated with the Norman/French conquest of the 11th century, increasing with the teaching of English in schools in Tudor times.

I found the following reflection in a paper by Charlie Pierson, in which he considers the relationship between racism and nationalism. The entire paper can be read here. https://fluencycontent-schoolwebsite.netdna-ssl.com/FileCluster/CharterhouseSchool/MainFolder/Academic/Academic%20Review/Charles%20Peirson.pdf Also, Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities: Relections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism" is essential reading for understanding this complex issue.

"Racism is a modern ideology which largely originated in the late eighteenth century building upon primitive theories in developing disciplines such as anthropology, anthropometry, craniometry and other areas of research to falsely construct typologies. which served to support the classification of human races. This emergence of scientific racism in the nineteenth effectively allied itself with the justification of European imperialism and went on to have various other ideological applications. With the progression of physical anthropology and after the racial atrocities of World War Two such typologies have generally been denounced; notably, in "The Race Question", a UNESCO statement issued on 18th July 1950, which concluded that "The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering". Racism can be defined as the "hierarchical arranging of group relations on the grounds of a dispositive of bodily properties". As argued by Dietmar Schirmer in "Identity and Intolerance" despite the fact that racism grounds itself in biology and scientific theories "it is not so much a discourse on natural qualities as a discourse on naturalized social relations that deems certain people to be degraded."

I think the correct answer to the question is, in fact, zero or at any rate rather little. Myths, whether spontaneously arisen or carefully constructed, are not what gives rise to racism. They are a consequence not a cause, although they can then act to reinforce previously existing racial attitudes. Rather it is social conditions in a society.

If a particular group, denominated by skin color or other physical features, is in a subordinate position in society, slavery being the extreme version of this but far from the only, this will quite naturally generate "racial" prejudices against them. The prime (but not the only) generators of racial prejudice in modern Western society are the heritages of chattel slavery, leading to prejudice against those of African descent, and the heritage of imperialism, leading to racial prejudices against those of African, Asian and Latin American descent.

Between the concept of "myth" and the concepts" "racism" and "race theory" (as a theory of inequality of races, following Gobineau) are significant differences - with a small amount of overlapping in using them as ideologies.

Thank you all for the comments, questions, insights, and links. It seems to me that the degrading of others, whether it be through racism, a caste system, religious systems, prejudicial immigration policy, colonialism, expansionist nationalism, institutionalized inequality before the law or other inequities, are attempts to preserve or expand a particular status quo. But the answer to this apparently very human and very enduring desire to assert superiority of "my" group over "your" group for some kind of social or economic advantage lies not in saying that all human beings are created equal but, as Senator Thaddeus Stevens asserts in Steven Spielberg's movie "Lincoln" all people deserve to be treated as equal under the law. Your thoughts?

How is racism disconnected from power relations? That seems to be an odd concept. In my opinion, the reverse is true. "Racism," an ideological construct according to which one ethnically-described human group is superior to another, is not at all the same thing as resentments arising from mere intergroup conflicts. It is a reflection in the human mind of actual power superiority of one ethnically-described group over another, due to real world phenomena such as slavery and imperialism.

I thought I was done with this topic, but I have an additional observation: just wait a few years until the Pacific Rim countries are ascendant and watch what our racists make of that. It should make for some interesting rationalizations.

I have a great admiration for Thaddeus Stevens, but I don't think that's quite an adequate answer to racial oppression (a more precise statement of the problem than "racism," which ought ideally to be considered as an "ism"). We have formal racial legal equality in most countries, though how the lawbooks read and and how people are treated under the law are often different stories, as the "black lives matter" movement has pointed out.

But why is that? Because of ideological racism in the minds of policemen and others, which perhaps could be cured through retraining? Alas, no. The roots of racial oppression are ultimately sociological not ideological. In America, which on racial matters as in so much else has become a model for the rest of the world, black people as a heritage of slavery are what some scholars have called a "race/color caste," analogous to castes in India, sociologically expected to be "hewers and drawers of water," or rather in America the unemployed, entertainers, athletes and criminals (the "underclass" as conservative sociologists have put it). Since the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s racial barriers have weakened, and we even have a black President. For that matter, in India nowadays you have formal legal caste equality and even affirmative action for lower castes, and members of lower castes who are wealthy and hold prominent political postions. Nonetheless in both Indian and America the subaltern position of lower castes in India and black people in America remains essentially unchanged.

Of course people are not equal, but they are endowed with equal rights, and not only before the law, but also in other respects. I agree with John that racism has always to do with power and superiority (the caste system has that aspect, but not only, so it is not quite comparable). But also agree with Douglas: once the Pacific Rim countries (and China!) are in the ascendant, we might hear of the 'racial superiority' of their group (just look how China talks about Africans already now).

It seems to me that racism and enduring cultural, national, and religious mythologies are all fundamentally based, not in economics, power relations, or imperialism but in something even more basic: the existential human need for certainty. If one accepts that the hierarchy of needs is what motivates all human activity, and I do, the natural activity that eventually flows out of fighting for survival, security, and subsistence is a rationalization of putting others at a disadvatage in the battle for resources or taking advantage of their weaknesses. The rationalization follows the process of answering the questions that seem to underlie all human introspection: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Why do we ask them? Because we have an innate need for psychological certainty, the inner corollary of physical security which lies at the base of Maslow's hierarchy. According to Benedict Anderson in his seminal "Imagined Communities," it was the loss of its sense of religious certainty that drove European "nations" to develop national borders and contributed in a major way to the rise of nationalism throughout the world in the 19th century. Racism, I believe, in its past and current forms, is, as some of you have pointed out, a kind of justification that we engage in, a mythologization that assures us (gives us certainty), that our actions are okay according to a particular world view or ethic. In other words, in terms of social evolution, my belief is that the rationalizing aspect of racist mythologies (my people are better than your people) developed after tribal groups began to collectively reflect upon and rationalize why it was necessary for their survival and growth to dominate, kill, enslave, their rivals. In turn, as those mythologies slowly coalesced and became part of tribal and cultural foundational myths, they formed the ethos, mythos, and M.O. of a social group.

I could not disagree more with scholar Thomason's analysis. Fundamentally, everything comes down to economics in the last analysis, imperialism and power relations in general included. The fundamental foundation of the imperialism of the Roman empire, and it is a word from Latin after all, came down a system for the extraction of economic resources from the rest of the Mediterranean for Rome. Not terribly different from modern era imperialism. And the "democratic imperialism" of Athens bears similarities to the "democratic imperialism" of contemporary America right down to the smallest details. Racism is simply a mental reflection of actually existing physical and economic relations of oppression of one ethnically-defined group by another. Without that, it would not exist. It does play a justificatory role of course, but the deed always comes before the thought.

John Holmes - thanks for responding. I get your point but have to disagree...sort of. In my view of the sociology of history, everything does not fundamentally come down to economics rather, economics is one of the four major factors in the formation of societies. The other three, geography, genetics, and ideas writ large (including philosophy, religion, political science, historiography) play equally important roles with geography leading the way according to Jared Diamond who makes a very strong case for this in his best-selling "Guns, Germs, and Steel." When one analyzes the historical record, especially social history, through these four lenses, a remarkable picture begins to come into focus I think. Roman hegemony and expansion was also about securing geographic frontiers and consolidating support for Rome by offering protection and citizenship. If you re-read my comment you will see that we are not in disagreement that deeds come first and rationalization follows. I think this is absolutely true in the genesis of myths and a particular mythos. I think it is really important to take the long view about the development of mythologies as Joseph Campbell does. I have no doubt that many of our myths have roots that are tens of thousand of years old if not more.

A discussion among intelligent folk who disagree is often more helpful than one among those who do agree. Certainly economics is dependent on the factors that make it possible, namely natural resources, population and physical geography. I believe however that the geographic/environmental reductionism of Jared Diamond is somewhat similar to the economic reductionism of the late Charles Beard, except worse as even more simplistic. As for Rome, why would a city state be interested in securing distant geographic frontiers, if not for economic reasons? As for Roman "protection," that was something those on the receiving end generally preferred to do without. And citizenship only became a desirable goal for those under Roman rule after they had already been subdued. Moreover, by the AD years, Roman citizenship really didn't mean much anymore.

I do not dismiss the importance of longstanding myths, they certainly have a life of their own and can influence economic development and everything else, but in my opinion, like all ideological and cultural factors, they are ultimately, well, superstructural, not the fundamental determinants of societal evolution.