Adultery and murder have happened in just about every human society in the history of time but nobody thinks we shouldn't bother trying to suppress those impulses.
When murdering someone or cheating on your partner, you probably have a lot more time to second-guess your motives. When subconsciously judging a passer-by, you don't. In my case at least, they are long gone before I even realise that I've judged someone.
I don't think you could ever make an argument that murder is good, but tribes have their benefits. For example, we know that homogenous societies have less conflict, a greater sense of community, and higher social trust.
Urbanization doesn't necessarily regress the issues I'm talking about, especially since cities can still have their own neighborhood and block communities.
Urbanization isn't unnatural and it agrees with our tribal instincts.
Look at Tokyo: extremely high density with extremely small social unrest. Paris, now a collection of different tribes, can't say the same.
Is that the only thing that's different about Tokyo and Paris? Beijing is over 95% Han Chinese and yet I don't think things look as harmonious.
On another note, I think Japan ends up with kind of a distorted picture since so much of the crime is associated with organized criminal groups with ties to legitimate business and government operating with a degree of openness that I think would surprise most Western observers. Dubro's Yakuza book is a great primer on the topic.
Adultery has become vastly more socially acceptable. It isn't considered nice, but it doesn't get you killed anymore.
And for murder, that can be a bit of a tautology as socially unacceptable killing is murder and anything else isn't considered on the same level as murder. But if we consider killing that isn't considered murder and if you consider forms of killing that, if not legal, are punished lighter than murder, it becomes clear that our society does allow some forms of killing others.
Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument? Use sexual assault if you prefer. The point is that a behavior being natural or instinctual doesn't make it moral or desirable.
>Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument?
It does if there are enough nitpicks showing that natural behaviors are becoming more accepted because they are natural. That isn't to say they are acceptable, but they are more accepted. And this doesn't have to be true of all behaviors, because there are many factors at play. It is even possible there could be a trend where behaviors are becoming more acceptable because they are natural even if all behaviors were becoming less acceptable, if there was another stronger force acting to make all behaviors less acceptable.
But if we want to get to the actual argument first presented, we would have to realize that comparing it to murder, adultery, or sexual assault is a strawman to begin with. The OP wasn't defending going around and murdering people who didn't look like you. They were saying that millions of years of evolution will influence our behaviors in small ways. It would be compared to other preferences, such as preferences in intimate partners. So, is wanting to have a specific gender, race, etc. in an intimate partner wrong? Is it socially unacceptable?
This is a philosophical question as much as anything else, but I believe that, whether we are successful in perceiving it or not, there is such a thing as objective right and wrong as distinct from social acceptability. I'm hesitant to say anything about how people should pick romantic partners, but it seems to me as though that is actually rather considerably narrowing the scope of what we're talking about. I do think it is wrong to intentionally seek to form an ethnically homogenous group of friends and associates.
Most of us would agree with you, I think what OP is saying is that it's irrational to say things like "It's 2017, who murders people anymore!?". People still murder, but we should definitely continue to try suppress that behavior.
Usually a post like the OP's is a lead-in to an argument about why discrimination is actually fine and shouldn't be fought, so I guess I let my previous experiences get ahead of what the post actually says.
It's more nuanced than that though. The question is where to draw the line about which behaviors are bad and which ones aren't. Things like murder are obviously bad in most cases and should be suppressed, but social structures are not so clear cut. If there aren't any clear consequences to a instinctual behavior then it's probably better to not suppress it.
Depends on the behavior and even the consequences are not as "clear" as you make it sound because reactions to behavior can be rather subjective. Context actually matters even tho it's too often ignored these days in favor of generating drama.
It's a factor way too often ignored with this issue: If "hurting people's feelings" will become a crime, then we will see no end of regulating "undesired behaviors" because people get their feelings hurt in the most subjective and unintended ways [0].
Redlining. School segregation. Unequal economic opportunity. Disproportionate use of force in encounters with police. You get the picture. These are all negative effects of racism.
there are countless facets to tribalism, and racism doesn't have to be one of them. But in any case my point is more general in nature and not about tribalism.
Well, that isn't really true, since the conception of what races exist and who belongs to which shows wide cultural variation.
More to the point, though, racism is an obvious manifestation of the kind of tribalism I think we are talking about and I don't think it's really controversial to argue that it is harmful at least to the marginalized groups. I'd personally even go further and say it harms all parties involved.
If it is true, as is often claimed, that racism is universal and therefore fighting it is pointless or should not be done, then the same should be true of other universally-occurring antisocial behaviors.