Bias in Academia

Doused and Denounced

A cold civil war has been brewing within academe, a war between “biologians” and “culturists.” Many modern biologists, genomic scientists, and physical anthropologists are biologians.  They think evolutionary adaptations are partly responsible for some racial disparities.   On the other hand, most historians, social scientists, public leaders, and mainstream journalists are culturists.  They minimize the importance of biology and evolution and say that history and culture explain the variations in the distribution of human characteristics.

One of the landmark events in this academic civil war occurred in 1975, when E. O. Wilson, a biology professor at Harvard, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.  Professor Wilson presented a mountain of evidence to establish that biology influenced many forms of social behavior in the animal kingdom.  Then, in the last chapter of the book, Professor Wilson maintained that this was also true for human beings.

Among biologists, the initial reaction to Sociobiology was overwhelmingly favorable.  The response of many historians and social scientists, however, was quite critical.  This was not surprising, for most historians and social scientists regard human nature as relatively unaffected by our evolutionary past, as something that is shaped by social forces.  Some scholars, especially those with Marxist beliefs, have emphasized the special importance of economic forces that are extraneous to human biology.

As it happened, a Marxist group at Harvard, Science for the People, responded to Sociobiology with printed leaflets and teach-ins that were harshly critical of Professor Wilson.  For a few days a protester in Harvard Square used a bullhorn to demand that the university fire Professor Wilson, and on one occasion two students invaded the professor’s class on evolutionary biology to shout slogans and deliver anti-sociobiology monologues.  To make matters worse, Professor Wilson received little support from his colleagues on the Harvard faculty, and to avoid embarrassment he stayed away from department meetings for an entire year.

Professor Wilson considered offers to move to other universities, but he decided to stay at Harvard.  “The pressure was tolerable,” he has written, “since I was a senior professor with tenure . . . and could not bear to leave Harvard’s ant collection, the world’s largest and best.”

The opposition reached something of a climax in 1979, when Professor Wilson was scheduled to speak at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.    As he sat at a table near the lectern, a young man from the audience grabbed the microphone and harangued the assembled scholars.  A young woman then poured a pitcher of water over Professor Wilson’s head and demonstrators chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet,” and “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

Despite the vilification he received in the 1970s, things eventually turned out well for Professor Wilson.  By the turn of the twenty-first century, he was widely celebrated as the pioneering founder of two new academic fields, the evolutionary biology of humans and evolutionary psychology.  He was the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, and he received many academic awards.  When Harvard University Press published a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Sociobiology in 2000, it was evident that Professor Wilson’s theory appealed to many of the best minds in science.  By then Amazon.com listed 416 titles under “sociobiology” and 1, 218 under “human evolution.”

Nevertheless, as I have recently learned the hard way, many historians know little or nothing about sociobiology, evolutionary biology, or evolutionary psychology.

Read more

Justin Murphy’s “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers”

Here is Justin Murphy describing his background, research, and activism:

Why is there not more rebellion against status quo institutions? How have economic and political processes pacified our capacity for radical collective action? As a political scientist, I am interested in the roles played by information, communication, and ideology in the pacification of political resistance and conflict. Before joining the faculty of Politics and IR at the University of Southampton in the UK, I did my PhD at Temple University in the US. There I was active in Occupy Wall Street, some civil disobedience and shutting down of things, some longer-term campaigns against the big U.S. banks, and sundry other works and deeds, including a radical warehouse project where I lived for nearly three years.

So Murphy is an academic on the left. He is therefore part of the establishment, a card-carrying member of the institutional structure that dominates intellectual discourse in the West. But, unlike the vast majority of his academic brethren, he is quite aware that the left is now the status quo and that it is doing everything it can to preserve its elite status — and that its self-preserving tactics are at base nothing more than irrational assertions of power and privilege. Murphy makes these claims in a blogpost: “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers.” Part of the subtitle says it all: “The real motivation of respectable progressivism is managing guilty conscience and conserving bourgeois privileges.”

What’s so refreshing about this is that instead of “exclud[ing] independent right-wing intellectual work on moral grounds,” he would actually “enjoy thinking” with intellectuals on the right. Indeed, moral indictments have become the stock in trade of establishment intellectuals — as noted in my three-part “Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival.” Moral condemnations are easy. No intellectual heavy lifting required. All one need do is appeal to conventional moral intuitions as shaped by the the same institutions that are now the status quo — the media and academic culture. As I note, those who dissent from the status quo are “not only misguided, [they are] malevolent … consumed by hatred, anger and fear towards non-Whites, gays, women and the entire victim class pantheon, or so goes the stereotype And that’s the problem. Being cast as evil means you are outside the moral community. There’s no need to talk with you, no need to be fair, or even worry about your safety. You are like an outlaw in Old Norse society  — ‘a person [who] lost all of his or her civil rights and could be killed on sight without any legal repercussions.’” Read more

No Campus (Or Country) for White Men

Does anyone remember my column of nine years ago called “Letter of Termination to the White Race?” I don’t believe we know who really wrote this letter — or why, but the point is, it paints a chilling picture of what is in fact happening to the White race right before our eyes.

For instance, in the letter the author laid out what is in sad reality unfolding:

By carefully controlling and managing the schools, universities, media, and press, this “out group” has managed to convince the great bulk of your racial kinsmen that not only is resistance futile, but that it is immoral, barbaric, depraved, and unworthy of a “thinking” individual. By promoting the stereotype of a “racist redneck resistance,” they have made the idea of a struggle for White Identity a veritable sin in the minds of nearly every White person. In short: they have convinced European-derived peoples that a prolonged suicide is preferable to the unmitigated evil of “racism.”

Do I need to suggest who this “outgroup” might be?

TOO has emphatically emphasized the reality of this War on Whites, featuring the topic Anti-White Attitudes in fifty-three articles, and in particular the topic Jews as a Hostile Elite, fifty-five times. My article today belongs in either category [Ed.: actually both!].

Nine years ago, I was very taken with a literal belief that Whites were being systematically attacked in a coordinated strategy against us. I have no reason to doubt this now. Around the time I wrote “Letter of Termination to the White Race,” I also wrote kindred columns. For instance, I wrote about former Washington Post political columnist, Harold Meyerson, no friend of the White race. Read more

Take Those PC Blinders Off: How to Read Mainstream Books

theylive

As a rule, I encourage all people, and perhaps especially political heretics on the Alt Right, to read some mainstream books, especially history books. I am obviously not discouraging the reading of courageous dissident historians like Dominique Venner,[1] Anne Kling, or David Irving. But I also think it is important we do not create our own echo chamber, but remain abreast of the insights and research of academia, so that we remain close to reality.

Mainstream academics’ work in the social sciences can of course be politicized, often atrociously so, but their work is also often of value (e.g. Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna, Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire, Neagu Djuvara’s History of Romanians, etc.) if only because they have vast institutions and resources behind them to conduct research. In contrast, our humble work is far freer, but necessarily artisanal. (By the way, have you subscribed to The Occidental Quarterly or donated to The Occidental Observer recently? [Editorial Note: Great idea!])

Mainstream academic work in the social sciences however can be read most profitably only if one bears its limitations in mind. Typically, these are state-employed functionaries paid to teach ordinary people. As such, their expressed opinions are bound to be circumscribed by what the state and student body (or their parents) find tolerable. Furthermore, Judeo-American academia in particular has tended to be extremely left-wing and liberal. And since academic societies and reputations are international, European universities tend to follow the lead of their much more numerous and well-funded American counterparts. In short, these academics must (unless protected by tenure and particularly courageous), take care to at least appear politically-correct. Read more

The University as Hotbed of Anti-White Propaganda: A Student’s Perspective

The following is a general summation of the attitudes disseminated by my liberal professors in the History and English departments this past semester:

US and European history is negative and evil, but every other culture on the planet should be celebrated. Women are treated like children, and are without agency, free will, or much ability. Men are villains, barely able to conceal their “toxic” true selves. Biological differences between the sexes are socially constructed, and yet every transgender person must take hormones and have countless surgeries because they were “born” the opposite sex. Every culture is equal, but we must change everything about ours while other cultures are perfect as they are. Majority White nations must be made multicultural through unfettered immigration, without consent from their White majorities, but other nations have the right to preserve their identity, autonomy, and culture.

As a White male, I had the privilege (how dare I, let the public flagellation commence!) of taking a course at an American university this past semester, taught by a self-professed Marxist and feminist. The course was a “capstone course” in the history department, which implies that it was meant to be the culmination of all my prior collegiate education. The course was worth four credits, as opposed to the standard three, and an additional hour per week was allotted. However, the last few weeks of the course we rarely even met as a class, with the purported reason given, “so students could devote time to their projects.”

The course dealt with the history of alcohol in the United States. I was initially very excited for the potential course material. Between early settlers, Prohibition, wars, amazing literature, and civil rights, I anticipated an immense wealth of subject matter, to be addressed from a more alcohol-centric approach.

I should have known better. Read more

Moorish Spain: A Successful Multicultural Paradise? Part 2

Part 1.

It is more difficult to generalize about the situation of Jews in Moorish Spain. Visigothic law regarding the Jewish community was harsh, and designed to make it disappear eventually. Accordingly, as mentioned above, Spanish Jews formed an alliance of convenience with the Muslim invaders. Even after being reduced to dhimmi status, however, the position of Jews in early Moorish Spain (before the Almoravid invasion of 1085) was more favorable than it had been under the Christian Visigoths.

Some Muslim rulers found it convenient to employ Jewish officials since, unlike well-born Muslims, they remained entirely dependent on royal favor and were thus easy to control. Thus, a Jewish scholar named Hasdai (died c. 970), e.g., became the de facto foreign minister of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III, and was an active benefactor and protector of the Jewish community. Rabbi Samuel Ibn Naghrela (993–1056) became the most powerful Jew in the history of Moorish Spain as vizier to the ruler of Granada, earning the Hebrew title HaNagid (“The Prince”).

But such favored Jews were also resented by the Muslim population. It is recorded that Samuel Ibn Naghrela was regularly insulted by a Muslim merchant each time he rode through the gates of Grenada. His employer became the subject of a satirical poem:

He has chosen an infidel as his secretary
When he could, had he wished, have chosen a Believer.
Through him, the Jews have become great and proud
And arrogant—they, who were among the most abject.
And how many a worthy Muslim humbly obeys
The vilest ape among these miscreants?

Naghrela’s son Joseph, also a high-ranking official, was killed in the anti-Jewish riots which broke out in Granada in 1066. Read more

Moorish Spain: A Successful Multicultural Paradise? Part 1

Andalusian ParadiseThe Myth of the Andalusian Paradise:
Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain
by Dario Fernandez-Morera
Wilmington: ISI Books, 2016

Dario Fernandez-Morera, of Cuban extraction, is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He has previously published American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (1996), as well as numerous papers on the literature of Spain’s Golden Age.

In this new book he tackles one of the anti-European left’s most cherished delusions, viz., that al-Andalus, or Moorish Spain (711–1492 AD), was a successful multicultural society in which Christians, Jews and Muslims flourished together beneath the tolerant eye of enlightened Islamic rulers. These supposed halcyon days of Moorish tolerance are contrasted favorably with both the Visigothic Kingdom that preceded them and the Spain of the inquisition that followed.

So popular has the romantic image of enlightened Muslim Spain become that it has been publicly endorsed by such distinguished historical scholars as Barack Obama and Tony Blair. Indeed, according to Prof. David Levering Lewis, Europeans missed a golden opportunity by not going down to defeat at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. If only Charles Martel’s Franks had succumbed, he writes,

the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders … one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths.

In two-hundred-forty pages of exposition backed up by ninety-six closely printed pages of notes, Fernandez-Morera methodically demolishes this optimistic multicultural object lesson by means of copious references to the primary documents: writings by Muslims, Christians and Jews who actually lived under Islamic rule in Spain. The cumulative effect of the evidence he cites should be enough to prove to any unbiased observer that Moorish Spain, if no worse than other Muslim-controlled societies of its time, was also no better. Read more