Giving away the farm. Why?

A frequent preoccupation of our ilk (TOO) is why Europeans and N. Americans of Euro stock have so easily allowed Europe and N. America to be invaded by so many immigrants from around the world.  After all, it’s not as though they first sent armies to conquer us, à la Genghis Khan. The Indians were over-run, too, but they lacked firepower if not the desire to defend their territories. We have had plenty of firepower but little desire to protect our interests. Why?

An interesting take on the matter may reside in the 2000 book by Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, the relevance of which, for our purposes, will take several steps to show. The book is an exceedingly entertaining and amusing analysis of many features of human and other animals’ behavior from the standpoint of “sexual selection.”  Charles Darwin discussed this extensively and Miller provides a grand opportunity for practicing “selection thinking” in that regard. Males choose females and females choose males for reproduction. What they choose is what gets reproduced, at least if it’s genetically influenced. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. It’s very costly to grow and it’s a handicap in defending against predators. But they grow them anyway because peahens found them attractive (for unknown reasons locked in their little heads, i.e., some sort of “sensory bias”). The more peahens liked them, the more males were “selected” for growing them, and the more peahens were “selected” for liking them — since their daughters would be best off being attracted to the most successful males, i.e., those with the “best tails.” As long as the sexual reproductive advantages outweighed the costs of big tails, there would have been a sort of “runaway” selection for big tails.While the selection could be just an arbitrary result of a quirky sensory bias, a less surprising basis for sexual selection is “fitness indication,” a cue for especially good health and reproductive capacity. What males often find attractive in a female can be seen as an indication of her good health and ability to bear healthy children. But a “handicap” can function as a “fitness indicator” by, in effect, demonstrating that if the male peacock can afford to have such a big tail, he must be really something!

Now then, what do humans value in a mate? Personality traits are important and Miller is convinced that human “morality”, related as it seems to be to personality, is

a direct result of  sexual selection. We have the capacity for moral behavior and moral judgments today because our ancestors favored sexual partners who were kind, generous, helpful, and fair. We still have the same preferences. David Buss’s study of global sexual preferences found that ‘kindness’ was the single most important feature desired in a sexual partner by both men and women in every one of the 37 cultures he studied. It ranked above intelligence, above beauty, and above status. (p. 292)

Well, if a potential sexual partner wants kindness, one had bloody well better demonstrate kindness. How? By being kind to her/him. But also demonstrating kindness in all sorts of other situations, including situations that indicate a trait that is not just manifested when one wants to get someone into bed. Charity! Showing sympathy for the poor and the down-trodden! Supporting their immigration to the West to escape their economic and political situation. And of course the more one genuinely, unconsciously, feels sympathy, the more convincing is one’s demonstration of kindness; hence a selection for actually feeling sympathy and not just pretending to have it. A person who genuinely felt sympathy would be quite willing to undergo costs in time, safety, money and other handicaps to help those who are oppressed. Why? Ultimately in order to impress the opposite sex, because if it weren’t for that, selection would surely operate strongly against such unselfish behavior, according to Darwinists, given that one is not helping kin and not expecting any sort of reciprocity.

Finally, suppose appearing to be kind in that particular way became a bit more common in one’s social circle (for no direct genetic reasons).  At some point there would be good reason to compete in favoring diversity.  Certainly there would be good reason NOT openly to oppose immigration — because doing so would make you appear unkind, a consequence of not being “politically correct” according to current fashion.

When individuals espouse ideological positions, we typically interpret their beliefs as signs of good or bad moral character. Individuals feel social pressure to adopt the beliefs that are conventionally accepted as indicating ‘good heart’, even when those beliefs are not rational. (p. 332; emphasis added.)

Miller suggests that

human rationality consists largely of separating intellectual argument from personality attributions about moral character. Our difficulty in making this separation suggests that political, religious, and pseudo-scientific ideologies have been part of moralistic self-display for a very long time. [p. 332]

OK, so what are we to do if we are fully aware of the disasters awaiting us with further immigration to the West resulting in population increases and loss of social capital, but are threatened with the outrage of liberals and leftists? Apparently, the many examples of political correctness correspond to “Nash equilibria”, which Miller discusses very helpfully. For example, as soon as most British decided to drive on the left side of the road, it became impossible to drive on the other side.  Drivers became locked in on a particular behavior.  The only way to drive on the right-hand side now is to go to a different country. The topic of “eugenics” is taboo in the West but not in China, so a geneticist wanting to work on eugenics might want to move to China.

In other words, a person with rational reasons for opposing immigration and the great give-away would have to switch to a different social circle or form a different community rather than simply address the conventional politically correct population as a whole. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) seems to be doing this:  focusing one or two issues until a critical mass of like-minded is achieved, whereupon the rest of society, especially the media, starts to take their issues seriously.  A new equilibrium is established regarding what is a legitimate political stance. At that point, the 67% of the British population that is against further immigration (The Economist, 2 Feb., 2013, p. 48) can be open about it.

This analysis is consistent with top-down models of the shift in attitudes on immigration and diversity. That is, suppose, as Kevin MacDonald argues, that important segments of the Jewish community has been the main driver of immigration policy and that they are motivated by fear and loathing of the people and culture of the West rather than moral sentiments. However, since the issue was framed for public consumption in moral terms (i.e., those who oppose these policies are labeled racists, bigots, Nazis, anti-Semites, etc.; see above link) and since Whites who expressed positive moral sentiments about immigration and diversity were rewarded by access to elite media, academic, and political circles (and ultimately sexual selection, one could argue, citing Miller’s perspective), the result was a feed-forward process in which there was competition among Whites to display their positive attitudes and behavior on these issues. This competition occurs despite the irrationality and even self-destructiveness of these attitudes and behaviors.

Such an account conforms to the historical timeline of positive attitudes on immigration and diversity. That is, Whites were not competing to appear as moral paragons on issues related to immigration and diversity until the rise of the new post-1960 elite and the displacement of the former WASP elite as a result of the rise of the Jews and their very positive attitudes on immigration and multiculturalism framed as moral imperatives.

It also conforms to the fact that, despite kindness being a pan-human universal, as noted above, displacement-level immigration and multiculturalism have not been seen as a moral imperatives in non-Western societies — that is, in societies where elites have not framed these issues in moral terms.