Our Nervous System is Calibrated for Racism

Insights into Europe's Shift to the Right

In the wake of yesterday’s elections in France, Europe’s ideological elites are in disarray. What once appeared to be an ocean of centrist politics, albeit with some ripples here and there, suddenly seems have veered violently to the right. All across northern Europe - be it Germany, France, Holland or the UK - populist right-wing parties are gaining ground apace.

What is causing this? Is fascism returning? Will Hitler soon be back among us?

The cause, in my opinion, is actually our nervous system. Let’s take a look.

The human nervous system has been forged by a billion years of natural selection to protect us from danger. Traits that didn’t protect well just didn’t get passed on to the next generation. One of the bigger threats that we experienced throughout aeons of this time was that posed by people who were different to us. Other tribes were generally hostile. Early hominids spent much time fighting other groups of humans. Apes and related primates likewise.

When we meet someone who’s ethnicity is different from ours, our nervous system will register a threat. We will naturally react with suspicion to people of different skin colour, different language or even a different accent of our own language. These reactions are entirely natural.

We still have some level of control. We don’t need, from this state of being triggered, to go into racial hatred or violence. We don’t need to become racist or adopt racist worldviews.

But our nervous system is triggered nonetheless.

And then, along comes ideology. Seeking to improve our world and diminish racism, modern cultures propogate an ideology that all races should be regarded as of the same inherent value.

This might seem entirely reasonable. But there’s a problem. The brain has a hierarchy of control. It is by no means a level playing field, or a blank slate, into which ideologies may simply be planted and create better human beings. Especially when in a state of being triggered, our brain will quickly dump ideology and other frontal lobe-mediated strategies, and simply resort to brain stem and midbrain processes - those which served in our evolutionary past.

In order for ideological thinking that runs contrary to nervous system programming to succeed, it has to tag onto other circuits, in this case namely those associated with shame and social status. This gives ideologies a chance in our hierarchically-organised brain. If people can be made to feel ashamed for being racist, or deemed to be of “lower status,” then ideologies can take root.

And this has been, I submit, the way that ideologies such as anti-racism have managed to survive and thrive in the modern age. But it has, in truth, always been a narrow thing. It might appear that racism has become a thing of the past for a while, usually in a time of prosperity. But it will not take much for all the imagined gains to come crashing down.

In a situation where other social, status-related pressures are mounting, such as economic recession, those locked-off gates of our brain, that are holding us back from outright racism, start to flick back back from 0 to 1. The pressure to blame someone for our declining living standards starts to outweigh the psychological pressure to not be racist. People feel each other out for underlying racist tendencies. Populist politicians begin to garner followers. Blame objects attract more hits in mass media.

This gradual shift happens little by little at first. But at some point, an en masse gate shift in the brain can become initiated. Populist politicians experience unheard of levels of support as nervous system reality cascades back into the brain of the average citizen. Ideologues in government and social pressure think tanks can’t comprehend what is happening. And so they simply double down on old strategies in a desperate bid to shame and propagandise the unwanted shift away. Inevitably, this doesn’t work.

What to learn from all this? What are the useful take-aways?

For me, it’s to understand just how much power our nervous system has and the resilience of older parts of our brain to ideological change. There has to be an acceptance that our brain evolved to be, at least to a degree, racist. And that this must be acknowledged and worked with intelligently, not through propaganda and social-shaming strategies that will anyway collapse as social pressures shift.

With intelligence we can step up. Without it, we crash back.