The Grouper, being a class of fish, is easiest to define.
The word "grouper" comes from the word for the fish, most widely believed to be from the Portuguese name, garoupa. The origin of this name in Portuguese is believed to be from an indigenous South American language.
In New Zealand and Australia, the name for several species of Grouper is referred to as Groper, as the Epinephelus lanceolatus Queensland Groper. In the Middle East, the fish is known as Hammour, and is widely eaten, especially in the Persian Gulf region.
In the United States, Grouper are often found in waters off Florida.
Clearly, if they have a harem, groupers are found in groups.
They are protogynous hermaphrodite, i.e. the young are predominantly female but transform into males as they grow larger. They grow about a kilogram per year. Generally they are adolescent until they reach three kilograms, when they become female. At about 10 to 12 kg they turn to male. Usually, males have a harem of three to fifteen females in the broader region. In the rare case that no male exists close by, the largest female turns faster.
A group, as is generally understood, is made up of a number of individuals which share certain characteristics, presumably recognizable by each member, as well as outside entities. It's a concept that leads to communal behaviors, observable by humans, but also, presumably, recognized by the participants. A group of minnows, for example, not only reacts in unison, but follows a leader in pursuit of food, which it captures by crowding around. Indeed, what looks like contest to the human eye, actually serves to contain a food source and make it easier to consume.
Humans seem to be naturally inclined to perceive groups or groupings and to form themselves up in groups, as well--i.e. humans are groupists.
The word groupist seems not widely used to describe the human tendency to form groups, but I have come across a couple of fairly recent uses of the term. One essay does so in an effort to categorize David Brooks as not a true conservative because he's focused on membership in a group, rather than the ideology conservatives are supposed to share--in this case, a commitment to "individual liberty" and "personal responsibility," which I would specifically refute. That is, what I'd argue is that the reason Brooks harps on personal responsibility is because that's the negative consequence of individuals NOT following the directions of the group to which they are supposed to belong.
So, I do agree with the perception that
The only way Brooks can consider it possible to "deviate toward the center" and still be a conservative is if "Conservatism" is a group name, not a worldview title.
to a certain extent and suggest that the failure to maintain a consistent worldview is exactly what has conservatives upset. It calls into question what shared values their group actually has and leaves them without a purpose.
When we think about group behavior or "group think," it's usually in the context of a temporary or convenient classification and, from the liberal perspective, somewhat aberrant from the norm. That is, we liberals assume that humans are individuals acting independently and their participation in groups is either random or in response to some emergency or threat. And that seems to be the perspective of academics who have some interest in studying what they refer to as ethnocentric grouping.
Recent computer modelling by political scientists Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan showed that, when interacting with others individually, software agents which act in a "groupist" way - dividing others into groups and acting so as to favour "their group" and discriminate against, or "cheat", outsiders not in "their" group - in fact do best, at the expense of the others.
Just like the minnows in my pond. But, the cheating would seem to be a prejudicial insert to skew the results.
In other words, groupism seems the most effective behavioural strategy for the success of an individual and their group, mathematically speaking: groupists and their group survive and even thrive.....
Other experiments, e.g. by psychologist Henri Tajfel of the University of Bristol using groups of teenage boys, suggest that "if you put people into different groups, call them red and blue, north and south, or whatever, a bias towards one's own group will automatically emerge".
And then comes the core question which actually led me on today's quest.
But if groupism is indeed the best policy, if in-group favouritism is the best strategy, one fundamental question is: how should you assign people, what criteria should you use to determine who's in your group and who isn't?
Now research shows that color, race and ethnicity have no real intrinsic biological significance, as such: "We know that the genetic variation between individuals within one racial or ethnic group is generally much larger than the average difference between such groups. As in the virtual world, race and ethnicity are arbitrary markers that have acquired meaning" (emphasis added). So why is it that there is racial discrimination? Why do people group by race?
To which I would answer, why shouldn't a groupist focus on easily observable racial, gender and age-specific characteristics, since what's beneficial is to be IN a group--i.e. social creatures do well in a group and poorly on their own. But, this simple explanation seems to be overshadowed by the assumption that inclusive behavior is naturally transformed into exclusive behavior--i.e. antagonism towards outsiders and other groups. That, I would argue is a cultural artifact that's promoted, for their own interests, by some individuals who aren't actually groupist themselves. They don't want to belong to a group; they want to manipulate one. And, in fact, in the long run, the antagonism they foment is actually destructive of the group.
But, I want to go a step further and suggest that some people are actually groupist in the sense that seeing other people as members of a group, rather than as individuals for whom membership is only one characteristic, is a constant perspective. That is, the individual, and that may include the person herself, may not be able to think of another person except in terms of a group, or even several--much as we might find it impossible to think of a bluebird as other than a bird. In other words, some people may just be tuned to the perception of categories into which individual people have to be fit.
This would account, for example, for the apparent comfort some Republicans derived from Judge Sotomayor referring to herself as a Latina. That's just as they saw her and that was good. Where it went bad was in her sticking to the category "wise," which is clearly a personal attribute, since the conservatives hadn't applied it to her. Self-determination is not a conservative group virtue. Obedience is. Indeed, even the rule of law is not a conservative group virtue; unless its meaning has been defined by the group--preferably the group that's doing the ruling.
Perhaps the only conundrum to come out of this consideration of the conservative commitment to the centrality and permanence of the group is the apparent resistance to and antagonism towards other groups, such as socialists, communists, or even individualists. Perhaps the explanation is that they're not really antagonistic and merely use these groups as a reference point to define their own shared interests, which are, when you come right down to it, very similar.
So, if it's true that
for groupism to work, interestingly it seems not to matter what criteria you group by - as long as others also:
* group by the same criterion, and
* act groupistly.
we might actually be able to counteract racial antagonism by not acting antagonistically. Which, I guess, is what "affirmative action" was supposed to mean before the antagonists got a hold of it.
Which leads me to the conclusion that humans are naturally groupist or "groupies" but the antagonism is an add-on and, really, ought not to be put up with. There's a difference between competition and contest and, for some reason, much of American enterprise has been infected with a lust for the latter, for someone to be better than everyone else. As a result, everyone is worse off.
Conservatives seem to be convinced that the individual human is intrinsically evil and needs to be coerced to function in a group. Maybe it's this coercive attitude which generates the antagonists in our midst. Whatever the reason for these outliers to be multiplying like parasites, our commitment to human rights needs to include a determination that abusive behavior will be checked.
Why, exactly, is the law enforcement group entitled to consider harsh words the equivalent of a physical assault, but the so-called leaders of conservative groups get away with accusatory rants on a daily basis? I think it was this basic unfairness which set Professor Gates off on a rant of his own--to be ultimately resolved by the beer group. Which does not, however, resolve the problem of antagonistic white men like Rush Limbaugh trying to take conservatives in a self-destructive direction. Perhaps we should begin by asking the question whether Limbaugh ranting makes anyone feel better. It obviously hasn't done Limbaugh himself much good.