The erudite Prof. Armand Leroi is famous for his vocal concern over the Andaman islanders. He writes:
… in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But The Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of “Negrito racial stocks” that are “remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia.”
… race matters. It gives us reason—if there were not reason enough already—to value and protect some of the world’s most obscure and marginalized people. When The Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo’s jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.
Yet even after they have gone, the genetic variants that defined the Negritos will remain, albeit scattered, in the people who inhabit the littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually slight frames of some Filipinos. But the unique combination of genes that makes the Negritos so distinctive, and that took tens of thousands of years to evolve, will have disappeared. A human race will have gone extinct, and the human species will be the poorer for it.
I couldn’t agree more. Unlike many leftists, who claim to value “diversity”, those of us who recognize human biodiversity (HBD), truly do value diversity. I do not want the negritos of the Andamans to become extinct. Likewise I do not want their languages to become extinct. As it stands, each Andaman islander is valuable indeed. Not only does he possess the innate value that each human being claims, he is also one of the few custodians of an endangered race and culture. I’ll go ahead and say what others will not: it is more of a tragedy when an indigenous Andaman islander dies than when a Han Chinese dies. There is more of a loss with the former than with the latter (all else being equal). It is my subjective opinion that there is something to be said for preserving established languages and races and not only because the rest of us might learn from them. Members of small tribes, speakers of endangered languages, bearers of rare alleles and the few who carry the torch of worthy traditions have added value beyond what is normally allocated to the rest of us.
On the other end of the continuum we find the dregs of mass culture. They have mostly lost any meaningful links to their past and, instead of representing a perpetuation of their ancestral cultures, they tend to wallow in whatever pop culture currently holds sway. Divorced from their ancestral ways and incapable of attaining the finer aspects of Western civilization, they wallow in a cultural no-man’s land. Lacking motivation, or opportunity, to mate with their own kind, they produce mongrel children. They are the trash people of the world.
What a tragedy when our mobile, nearly borderless, world transforms the caretakers of ancient traditions and languages into trash people. Let me clarify that I am not looking at this from a moral perspective; it might very well be that the tribal elder is a cannibal and a quack witch doctor and his transformation into a crack addict would be an improvement on some level. I am, for a moment, ignoring all this and focusing not so much on what this individual does that is right or wrong. Rather, I am focusing on what he is a vessel of and its role in the bigger picture of Mankind.
Some might say that if a culture/language cannot hold its own and its members vote, through their actions, in favor of a dominant culture/language then so be it. Such a culture does not deserve to survive. I would agree in some cases but what we have today is a juggernaut of the “jeans and t-shirt” mass culture overwhelming everything else simply by force of the media and sheer numbers. This is not an indication of superiority any more than a tsunami is superior to ripples in a pond.
I am not saying that all races, cultures or languages are equal (it should be obvious that this is not the case). I am not arguing in favor of moral relativism. We can all agree that murder is wrong but this does not necessarily mean we should impose justice within other societies. Nor am I arguing in favor of cultural relativism. We can, and should, condemn the actions of individuals according to our own judgment. But this does not mean it is within our purview to act upon such judgments by seeking to alter the mores of other peoples. We should only make sure that they stay away from our own shores.
What I am saying is that the general plurality of races, cultures and languages among humans is a good thing and that we should encourage this state of affairs. I spend a lot of my time on this blog advocating for whites – and yet whites are not perfect. If a council of elders got together and flagged all the undesirable traits that whites tend to have – and then magically made them disappear – would whites still be human if they were a race of angels? Who, among us, feels he is wise enough to be on such a council of elders? Not I. This is why I think it is best to allow a multitude of cultures to survive – but only in their own lands. Bringing them here will transform them into trash people and, ultimately, transform our society into a trash society.
