Justin’s Notes

Grand Strategy Has an Implicit Anthropology

2026-09-13 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy of human-nature theories reads like a philosophy seminar, but Thayer's note shows the stakes are geopolitical: rival powers assess each other's strength through their own implicit theory of human nature.

American multiculturalism is Derbyshire's Culturism translated into policy. If the mind is a blank slate and human nature is infinitely plastic, then a nation needs no particular cultural core — any population can be shaped into citizens, and the mix itself costs nothing, because "culture" is just an environmental input that can be swapped or blended at will. Multiculturalism isn't merely a preference; it's the political cash value of the Boasian premise.

The Chinese perspective Thayer describes rejects that premise wholesale. Reading multiculturalism as "a sickness" implies that cultures are not interchangeable software running on identical hardware — that national strength depended on the specific Anglo-Protestant core, and that dissolving it dissolves the thing that made America formidable. Given the racial essentialism Thayer's broader source documents, the Chinese view sits closer to a hard version of Derbyshire's Biologism: peoples differ, cohesion is rooted in sameness, and a state that denies this is engaged in self-harm.

The interesting twist is that each side's theory of human nature doubles as a prediction about the other's trajectory. If the Culturists are right, America's diversity is a non-event or an asset, and Chinese confidence in homogeneity is brittle chauvinism. If something like the Biologian view is right, the Chinese read on American decline is not propaganda but diagnosis — and it's a diagnosis America's official anthropology makes it impossible to even entertain.

This suggests a test Derbyshire's framing doesn't offer: theories of human nature can be arbitrated not just in the lab but in great-power competition. Two civilizations have, in effect, placed opposite bets on whether Culture or Biology rules. The next few decades of national cohesion — whose society frays, whose holds — will function as a natural experiment on a question anthropologists have argued about since Bastian.

Woven from these notes

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed
From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-­Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.
— Thayer THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States