Quick multiple choice quiz. Throughout much of human history:

(a) Men have oppressed women.

(b) Slavery has been a feature of many societies.

(c) Jews have been persecuted.

(d) Rape, murder, robbery, and fraud have gone on, even when outlawed.

(e) All of the above.

The correct answer is (e) All of the above. Now, for extra credit, please complete the following statement: Because the aforementioned conditions and activities have been so ubiquitous and long-enduring:

(a) We should feel lucky to live at a time when they are finally on the wane.

(b) We should realize that they must be good things because they have been with us so long.

If you answered (b), you may well enjoy Adam Bellow's amazingly wrongheaded opus "In Praise of Nepotism," a book that gives new meaning to the word "slippery."

An editor at large for Doubleday (which publishes this book) and a son of the more famous Saul, Adam Bellow admits that his initial plan was to write a polemical defense of nepotism along the lines of the late William Henry's "In Defense of Elitism."

Along the way, though, he changed his mind and decided instead to offer a full-scale history of the phenomenon, which, rather than praising nepotism would simply present what Bellow considers a balanced view of it.

But if the book is intended to serve as a history, why, one wonders, does it bear the title that it does? Is it merely a device to grab some attention?

Yes and no. It is true that as one wends through the historical, sociobiological, anecdotal, and journalistic material that Bellow has amassed, one encounters not only praise of nepotism, but criticism, too.

Certainly, no sentient historian of nepotism could fail to notice that it is far more prevalent in what sociologists call "low-trust" societies, "where," as Bellow explains, "everyone who is not a relative or friend is necessarily an enemy...." Bellow contrasts "poor, agrarian" southern Italy, where Mafia-style "amoral familism" has been the rule, with "wealthy, modern" northern Italy. "Found for the most part in conditions of extreme privation," he aptly sums up, "amoral familism promotes cooperation within families but undermines cooperation between families; it thereby perpetuates the very culture of poverty that produced it."

Conversely, he notes, societies where people have learned to suspend their distrust of outsiders and to cooperate with strangers are the ones in which civil society, capitalist expansion, and liberal political institutions flourish.

But despite the overwhelming evidence (which he himself presents!) that nepotism is associated with distrust, backwardness, violent codes of personal and familial "honor" found among Mafiosi and in other neofeudal societies, and contempt for law and fair play, Bellow nonetheless comes to the following conclusion: "In short, nepotism works, it feels good, and it is generally the right thing to do.... Nor, despite our best efforts over hundreds of years, have we succeeded in stamping it out. And a good thing, too. For if we have not made as much progress as we like to believe in our misguided war on nepotism, we have in some respects already gone too far."

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