A Window on the Warping of Whites: The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine

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As a lonely state-school grad in a family of smarties, I get to read alumni magazines from more prestigious places:  Stanford, Columbia, Northwestern, Swarthmore.  High-powered and hard-left is the typical formula, but the October 2009 edition of Swarthmore’s was such a jaw-dropper, I must share.

The cover, as you can see, is an artsy photographic depiction of a Jewish 2005 alum named Mark Hanis who, the magazine tells us, “stands up to genocide around the world.”  He’s motivated, of course, by the memory of the Holocaust, and finds himself compelled to make noise about the ethnic killings in Darfur and the crimes committed by Charles Taylor in the civil wars in Liberia. The article oozes with adulation for the brave and selfless Hanis, who has “I refuse to be a bystander to genocide” marked on his hands for some super-sexy Annie Liebowitz-style shots.  Tres chic!

Mark Hanis, Swarthmore ’05

Naturally, Hanis won’t be found addressing the genocide of the Palestinians, so “genocide around the world” isn’t quite accurate. But if that weren’t enough, Swarthmore grads are treated to a silly article in the back of the magazine by a Jewish professor named Malka Kramer Schaps about the joys of conversion to Orthodox Judaism, life in Israel and her wonderful Jewish self generally.  It includes still more mentions of the Holocaust, the virtuosity of the Jews, and her search for intellectual honesty.

The Palestinians?  Not a part of the search, apparently.

Elsewhere in the magazine:

* A white 2007 graduate named Katie Chamblee heads to Ecuador to, as with a million other upper-class white women before her, help the little brown people.  Or, as she puts it, “create a new fluidity and class mobility.”  Good luck with that, Katie.  It seemed to go well for Amy Biehl.

Katie Chamblee with her Ecuadorian charges

* A 1932 graduate named Bertram Schaffner is lauded for his homosexuality.

* Meet the Class of 2013:  A Definition of Diversity.  A graphic in the magazine tells us that 40% of the student body is a “person of color” and 7% are international students.  Whites are the only group that is underrepresented based on their percentage of the population.

* Sarah Posey, 2004, “wanted to teach in an urban school where kids needed her attention.”  Shouldn’t there be a limit of one of these per alumni magazine?

The altruistic Ms. Posey

* Evolution Evolves:  brief article on professor Scott Gilbert, who’s big into Darwin.  Wonder if Gilbert’s ever read Steve Sailer’s withering writing on this topic?  Probably not (a good liberal believes in evolution — but that it stopped cold 50,000 years ago.)

* Graduates Wilson Hall, 1995, and Krister Johnson, 1995, are celebrated for a comedy career that openly mocks Christianity (they dress in goofy colors, play the guitar and wear “Virginity Rocks” T-shirts).  Imagine friendly coverage of a comedy duo that mocked Jews.

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What’s so amazing to me about Swarthmore, as reflected in its alumni magazine, is the totality of intellectual takeover:  not an inch of idea territory is left unoccupied by its central tenets:  the superiority of the Jews, the absurdity of Christianity, the virtuosity of the Third World, the hipness of homosexuality, the irrelevance of whites.  Almost every single article is directed toward these explicitly political goals… I don’t even see where anyone’s working on plain old academic stuff like star distances.

Talk about totalitarianism.  Nobody can get a word in edgewise.

I’m left to wonder if some of the presumably intelligent people of Swarthmore get this?  Isn’t there a rebel streak somewhere?  Can it possibly be good for a purported haven for intellectuality to be so thoroughly cleansed of errant thoughts?  Is that even good strategy for the multiculturalists?

The bigger problem for Whites is the high levels of power concentrated at a place like Swarthmore, along with the other prestige colleges of America.  This is where the best and brightest go, and its graduates populate the power positions of our society.  They make the decisions that affect our lives.  So for a place like Swarthmore to be so manifestly anti-white is a big problem for us.

Whites are only valued, they’re taught at Swarthmore, as helpers of other racial groups — certainly never their own.  Katie Chamblee and Sarah Posey have absorbed their lessons well.  This is positively destructive of the white race.

We as whites need to recognize this problem and think of ways to address it or get around it.  Because right now, Swarthmore grads aren’t “standing up to genocide.”  They’re causing it.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Christopher Donovan on Swarthmore

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Christopher Donovan’s current TOO article “A Window on the Warping of Whites:  The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine” is yet another example of the anti-White hostility that is rampant in American universities. Coming on the heels of Trudie Pert’s exposé of German Studies at the University of Minnesota in TOO and a New York Times article on the institutionalization of the left at American universities, it shows the unrelenting messages of multiculturalism, White altruism toward non-Whites, and the legitimacy of non-White ethnocentrism. Besides earnest Whites helping Blacks and Ecuadorian Indians, Whites are presumably also altruistic simply by paying tuition. The article shows that one year tuition at Swarthmore is  $49,600 (!). 55% receive financial aid averaging $35,450. The proportion of incoming students not receiving financial aid is pretty much exactly the percentage of White students. Here’s the featured photo of the class of 2013. I doubt they’ll be paying their way.

Swarthmore is proud of its Quaker heritage. The president of Swarthmore, Rebecca Chopp, told the first-year students about one of Swarthmore’s founders:

She was 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed not quite 90 pounds. Over the course of her lifetime (1793–1880), Lucretia Mott would not only help found Swarthmore College but also shelter runaway slaves in her home, co-found with her husband the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, advocate for peace rather than war, and sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment at the first women’s rights convention, which she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1848.

Quakerism is part of the indigenous culture of critique so important during the 19th century and seamlessly joining the current culture of political correctness now. As I noted in my review of Eric Kaufmann,

An important node this network [of leftists who worked to undermine the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the US] was the Settlement House movement of the late 19th century–early 20thcentury. The settlements were an Anglo-Saxon undertaking that exhibited a noblesse oblige still apparent in some White leftist circles today. They were “residences occupied by upper-middle-class ‘workers’ whose profile was that of an idealistic Anglo-Saxon, university-educated young suburbanite (male or female) in his or her mid-twenties” (p. 96). The movement explicitly rejected the idea that immigrants ought to give up their culture and assimilate to America: “To put the immigrants (as individuals) on an equal symbolic footing with the natives, a concept of the nation was required that would not violate the human dignity of the immigrants by denigrating their culture” (p. 97). Cultural pluralism was encouraged: “The nation would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity” (pp. 97–98).

The leader of the Settlement House movement, Jane Addams, advocated that America shed all allegiance to an Anglo-Saxon identity. Addams came from a liberal Quaker background — another liberal strand of American Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, like the Puritans stemming from a distinctive British sub-culture. In general, the Quakers have been less influential than the Puritans, but their attitudes have been even more consistently liberal than the Puritan-descended intellectuals who became a dominant intellectual liberal elite in the 19th century. For example, John Woolman, the “Quintessential Quaker,” was an 18th-century figure who opposed slavery, lived humbly, and, most tellingly for the concept of ethnic defense, felt guilty about preferring his own children to children on the other side of the world.

We who are dismayed at the impending self-destruction of our culture and people have to look in the mirror and attempt to understand this strand of ethnic self-abnegation characteristic of so many Whites.

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Christopher Donovan: An all-White basketball league?

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Christopher Donovan: According to the Augusta Chronicle, entrepreneurs are planning an all-White pro basketball league. (“Basketball league for white Americans targets Augusta“) Assuming this is all on the up-and-up and not a joke, it would make a great test case for legal exclusivity. The Supreme Court held in Boy Scouts v. Dale that some forms of “expressive” association can exclude others, though they’ve also held that purely private all-male clubs are unconstitutional.  Law schools also unsuccessfully argued that they have the right to exclude military recruiters, though there was a federal statute on point that made this a slam dunk for the military.

On the whole, of course, we are denied the right of racial exclusivity in employment, housing and most major areas.  This is the truly new policy hegemony that none of our ancestors would have approved.

My argument is that freedom of association is a primary — if not the primary — human right, outstripping even freedom of speech in its importance to human fulfillment.  Or the “right of privacy”, advanced by Brandeis and Warren.  It’s so basic, perhaps, that it doesn’t have fully-fleshed arguments on its behalf.  But that’s what it needs.

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Ted Sallis: Taking a Initial Look at the American Third Position Party

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Ted Sallis: The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a new political party that purports to represent the interests of the white American majority.  As such, it is a refreshing change from the standard Republicrat/Democan one-party system and gives hope that, finally, the political system can be used to further our specific group interests. 

These are early days and one cannot make any definitive conclusions about A3P at this point.  However, some progress has been made, and the party has put forth some initial positions on major issues, so it is worthwhile to examine these. Readers are urged to look at A3P’s program and policies.  I have no major disagreement with their stance on crime, economy, education, etc.  Instead, I would like to take a closer look at two of their major policy initiatives. Emphasis added to all quotes. 

The following summarizes the party’s key positions on immigration:

 To safeguard our identity and culture, and to maintain the very existence of our nation, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration. Recognizing our people’s right to safety, and respecting the sanctity of the rule of law, we will immediately deport all criminal and illegal aliens. We believe, too, that American citizenship should be exclusive and meaningful. As such, the American Third Position will end the practice of automatic birthright-citizenship for children of illegal aliens. To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands. 

This is good – stopping the influx, deportation of illegals, and an end to the concept of “anything goes” birthright citizenship.  Even more impressively, the possibility of repatriation of “recent, legal immigrants” is brought up – the only instance of an American political party raising the “R” issue.  I would like even more – a more comprehensive repatriation program for example, but this is a good start. Also: 

Immigration affects our culture. It affects the way we feel, act, and operate within a community. It affects whether or not we can have actual communities at all. It affects our welfare and livelihood in ways that are immeasurable, aside from the efforts we go to in protecting against it. Immigration erodes our culture and sense of identity. In cities where many cultures meet, there is an atmosphere of hostility. Neighborhoods become atomized, and a true community is never established. 

True and good, but it’s not only culture. Not surprisingly, I would like to have seen a more explicitly Salterian mention of the actual physical, demographic, biological effects of immigration.  They add: 

While we accept that ethnic minorities are, and will always be, part of America, we want our will to be observed and exercised as it should be, and as it should have been. We have a right to sovereignty and to exercise our will as a people. We want an America that is recognizable to us, one that we can feel comfortable in. We believe that this desire is not unique to our nation or our own people, and we believe that all people’s have a right to sovereignty. Accordingly, we will stop all immigration into America, except in special cases. To help restore our national identity, we will offer generous grants to recent immigrants who have a desire to return to their countries of origin. While this can be easily repositioned by a media who is hostile to our people or to a political establishment who relies on recent immigrants for votes, we only mean to create a system of mutual benefit, where the wills of both parties are observed and respected, as they should be. Wherever a recent immigrant has a need to get back home but is without the resources to do as much, we will lend a helping hand. 

I don’t know about the first set of phrases, but I understand that this party needs to navigate within the streams of the politically possible – for now – and that a too radical program at first may be difficult.  A contrasting argument would be that it’s a mistake to start off too moderate.  An initial moderate stance may “lock in” this moderation and prevent future shifts toward more radical positions since, having attracted a mass of more moderate supporters at the beginning, the party would be loathe to lose that support by shifting towards more radical solutions to the pressing problems of race, culture, and nation.  Truth be told, I’m more supportive of the latter mindset – that it is better to lay your cards on the table at the beginning and build in depth with more revolutionary support.  Of course, the assumption here is that the A3P leadership and I actually agree on these more radical ideals.  It may be that our vision is not congruent, and that the party program is what it is because that’s what the party leaders want it to be.  And, of course, A3P leadership has the right to formulate their own party’s positions as they see fit.  I merely make suggestions and offer some contrary views.

The A3P also has an excellent position on space exploration.

This is important; I am a very strong supporter of space exploration (both manned and unmanned).  This is part of Western Man’s Faustian soul, will yield important information and discoveries, and, hopefully, eventually lead to Western Man’s expansion into, and colonization of, space (assuming of course we are not first Third Worldized out of existence).  That the A3P has included space exploration as a key part of their program is therefore encouraging and demonstrates a willingness to look at long-term objectives, and also the ability to look beyond the standard “right-wing fare” (immigration, economy, crime, etc.). 

One point though is that they should go beyond space exploration and put together a broader position on overall science and Technology.  In other words they should also: encourage the development of alternative and novel sources of energy, promote advances in biomedical research (which should include not only basic research and that aimed at disease therapeutics, but also research on race and eugenics), stimulate development of advanced computing, and encourage continued and expanded research into the fabric of the universe and of reality itself (e.g., astronomy and, especially, both theoretical and applied advanced physics, cosmology, etc).  Further, Americans need to be in the lead of what can be called “global disaster abatement” – research aimed at investigating and, if possible, preventing asteroid strikes, super volcano eruptions, pandemics, environmental degradation, etc.  While some of the latter may seem like “science fiction,” that is more a function of our limited knowledge and imagination than it is to any real limitation of the possibilities. 

The A3P can also state an interest in Western cultural artifacts – an interest in opposing the current “Winter” of our High Culture, and its sewer-like degraded atmosphere, with a contrasting encouragement of Western cultural rebirth and the creation of a civilization that can make us, our ancestors, and our posterity proud.

In summary, there is some more work to be done and I hope that a bit of constructive criticism will be appreciated.  However, all in all, A3P seems at this point to be a very positive development, and I wish them well.

A major concern is that the landscape of “movement” history is littered with the scattered remnants of past projects that, initially, looked promising and generated enthusiasm, but quickly petered out due to lack of progress and direction, infighting, the action of infiltrators and agent provocateurs, diminished interest of activists with short attention spans, and the ability of the establishment to use a variety of methods to thwart nationalist progress.  We can hope that things will be different this time.

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Implicit Whiteness in Scott Brown’s campaign

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The day before the election I happened to catch Keith Olbmermann at his smirking best — looking intensely into the camera and declaring that Scott Brown and all the people voting for him are racists. What’s the evidence for this? You see, Brown used a pick-up truck in his commercials. (Gasp!!) You know, pick-up trucks are pretty much the same as men in pointy hoods burning crosses. Next thing you know, candidates will seek endorsements from country music singers and NASCAR drivers.

What’s going on here, of course, is implicit Whiteness — implicit whiteness of a certain sort, that basically says “I, Scott Brown, am the candidate of the White working class.”

As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. These people are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Unfortunately, there were no exit polls for this election. It would be fascinating to see the racial breakdown. In the 2008 presidential election, 80% of the electorate in Massachusetts was White. Working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes betwen $50-75K.

Obviously, that did not happen this time around. Although it’s still a long shot, we can hope that eventually candidates will be able to explicitly assert the legitimacy of White identity and White interests.

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The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer

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Review of The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science and Ideology, by William H. Tucker; University of Illinois Press, 2009.

During his twilight years of retirement, Raymond Bernard Cattell had achieved what few social scientists could ever dream of attaining. The American Psychological Association (APA) nominated the highly respected psychologist, author, and co-author of 500 research papers and 56 books, to receive the Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award — the pinnacle of top honors in the profession — during the APA’s annual convention in August 1997. In nominating Cattell to receive this prestigious award, the APA summarized his legacy in the APA’s flagship journal The American Psychologist:

In a remarkable 70-year career, Raymond B. Cattell has made prodigious, landmark contributions to psychology, including factor analytic mapping of the domains of personality, motivation, and abilities; exploration of three different medias of assessment; separation of fluid and crystallized intelligence; and numerous methodological innovations. Thus, Cattell became recognized in numerous substantive areas, providing a model of the complete psychologist in an age of specialization. It may be said that Cattell stands without peer in his creation of a unified theory of individual differences integrating intellectual, temperamental, and dynamic domains of personality in the context of environmental and hereditary influences. (American Psychologist, 1997, 797).

Although Cattell received numerous tributes over the years for his multifaceted work in psychology, the APA’s decision to recognize Cattell’s lifetime work firmly anchored his place as a pioneer in the field. After decades of tireless energy and unrivaled persistence in pursuing new frontiers in personality and intelligence research, Cattell finally had earned proper recognition as a distinguished authority from the leading organization of American psychologists.  As a trail-blazing researcher, Cattell’s work spawned a productive stream of empirical findings and theoretical breakthroughs that led to several innovative advances in the study of personality. His theoretical and empirical contributions helped anchor the field of personality and intelligence research on firm scientific principles. Many consider Cattell the father of personality trait measurement.

Cattell at age 15

In 2002, a survey of 1,725 psychologists ranked Cattell 16th among the most eminent psychologists (top 100) of the twentieth century. Cattell edged out Behaviorist John B. Watson who placed 17th and followed just below Hans Eysenck (13) and William James (14). He was the eleventh most-cited psychologist according to the 1975 Social Science Citation Index.

Cattell co-founded the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) with his wife Karen Cattell in 1949. IPAT continues to provide testing tools for private firms to assist in occupational consulting, human resource management (employee screening, selection, and placement), and clinical guidance. In 1960, Cattell founded the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) and launched its journal Multivariate Behavioral Research.

After his retirement from the University of Illinois, Cattell took up residence in Hawaii after briefly moving to Colorado and continued work on unfinished research projects. Upon his retirement, the University of Illinois presented Cattell with a leather-bound set of his published books.

In the two weeks prior to the APA’s convention in Chicago, Cattell’s work came under intense scrutiny. As the focus of a last-minute smear campaign, Cattell’s critics — extreme far-left ideologues — waged an intense media blitz of distortions, rumor, and innuendo. These axe-grinding ideological adversaries worked vigorously behind the scenes to undermine the APA’s presentation of the Gold Medal Award. They accused Cattell of “racism” and “anti-Semitism.” The APA decided to postpone the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award and investigate the matter with a “blue-ribbon” panel of experts. The New York Times and other news organizations sensationalized the “controversy” that ensued. Cattell denied the allegations, responded to his critics, and pulled his name as a nominee of the Gold Medal Award, and, at age 92, died a few months later in February 1998.

This sordid ordeal is the subject of William H. Tucker’s The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology published by the University of Illinois Press. Tucker, the author of The Science and Politics of Racial Research and The Funding of Scientific Racism, has carved out a niche as a muckraker of epic proportions. His modus operandi is to discredit scientists who research racial differences in intelligence and personality (anthropologists, geneticists, and evolutionary psychologists). He misleadingly links scholars, no matter how remote, to a rogue’s gallery of sinister culprits. If one recognizes biological race differences or the plausible advances that eugenics offers mankind, Tucker concludes that one is therefore complicit in genocidal mass murder.  The author fundamentally sees the world through a Marxist prism of oppressed and oppressors; for Tucker the realm of human existence consists of radical egalitarians, such as himself, or goose-stepping fascists hell-bent on racial genocide. His career pursuit, put forth in three books published by the University of Illinois Press, focuses on exposing race-realist scholars as “extremists” affiliated with sordid political operatives in the fever swamps of the far right.

To his credit, Tucker recognizes the importance of Cattell’s main body of research in personality, intelligence, and factor analysis. Much of his description of Cattell’s scientific work is largely favorable.

Nevertheless, Cattell is deservingly regarded as one of the most productive research psychologists in the history of the discipline. A true generalist in a field known for the extent of its fragmentation, he was one of the very few social scientists to put forth a comprehensive theory of human behavior, relating abilities, attitudes, motivations (drives), and personality traits to each other, thus bringing together in a dynamic system the classic tripartite categorization of mental activity into cognition, affection, and conation. Perhaps unique among psychologists, he also made contributions to theory, research, measurement, test development, and methodology; it is difficult to think of anyone else with this breadth of accomplishment.

The real rub for Tucker is Cattell’s philosophical views set forth in two complementary volumes, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (1972) andBeyondism: Religion from Science (1987), and his outlook early in his professional career, set forth in Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight For Our National Intelligence (1937), and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938).

Most of Cattell’s academic research centers on the application of objective criteria (factor analysis) to identifying core personality and mental traits. Another half-dozen books explore his ideas on forging scientific-derived values from Darwinian natural selection, a systematic approach of applying objective evolutionary principles to ethical and social problems (evolutionary-based ethics) as well as articulating eugenic perspectives on society, differential birthrates, culture, civilization, and national trends. Cattell’s blunt assessments of the role of science in solving societal problems —his scientific-based ethics of “Beyondism” — generated much of the opposition to his receiving APA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Cattell’s first few books reflect the thinking of the young scientist at an early stage in his professional career. These writings also reflect the milieu of the times for an academic traveling in progressive intellectual circles in the early 1900s, namely an enthusiastic interest in Darwinian evolution, eugenics and the scientific study of human behavior and social problems. The ranks of the eugenics movement in England and the United States attracted a wide range of prominent authors, statisticians, biologists, and social scientists across the political spectrum — progressives and conservatives alike.

Cattell at age 30

One of his major concerns (along with Sir Ronald Fisher, William McDougall, Leonard Darwin and other leading eugenicists) was the dysgenic generational decline of intelligence. In The Fight for Our National Intelligence, Cattell investigated the relationship between differential birthrates and falling IQ levels. His analysis of this trend was based upon test results from selected English communities. Cattell warned of the misplaced priorities of middle- to upper-class professionals in substituting materialistic luxuries in place of childrearing. He viewed the problem of differential birthrates — impoverished low IQ individuals having large, unsustainable families at the expense of society just as high IQ professionals were forgoing children — as undermining societal stability.

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His critique of the cultural impact of the mass media, from his chapter “False Beacons of Social Progress” in Psychology and Social Progress, reveals an insightful grasp of journalists’ self-aggrandizing role as the ultimate arbiters of “truth” in modern democracies. It reflects a thoughtful critique of the mass media that remains just as valid nearly eight decades later.

On the face of things, the press is at once the most confident and the most unsuitable claimant to the leadership of social thought. Beginning as a system of news retailing, it has become a parvenu politician and social philosopher with intellectual manners and powers, the pinchbeck qualities of which are obvious at some time or other to the meanest reader.

To say that the press merely reflects public opinion is the greatest humbug. It does to a considerable extent reflect the popular intelligence, the popular taste for slipshod methods of reasoning and unembarrassed ignorance, but through these contacts it endeavors to shape public opinion ruthlessly into forms which are rarely sympathetic to the potential sentiments and will present in the public. …

[A]nything in print appears to have the seal of mass approval behind it and carries with it all the powerful herd suggestion which is infinitely stronger than reasoned argument. For this reason the press renders a thousand times more strong the crude herd opinion already present and so holds in vice-like tentacles all attempts at enlightened action necessarily differing from the average viewpoint….

The average newspaper editor feels himself at liberty to contradict an authority in any field whatsoever. In a few minutes he will write a leading article refuting a book representing the work of a lifetime. But he is equal to even more than that. He will venture to put thousands of our democratic rulers — our electorate — hopelessly astray in any subject which he fancies himself at the moment to be an authority.

Cattell’s early work reflects the insights of an astute observer of national and cultural trends, one who can easily bore through the fog of pseudo-intellectual discourse. An objective reading of his early work indicates that the young psychologist could cut to the quick of any fallacy, slipshod argument, or popular fad.

A significant aspect of Tucker’s critique is Cattell’s alleged affiliations with so-called unsavory individuals on the “far-right.” He describes Dr. Roger Pearson, an editor and publisher of academic journals and monographs and author of several books, including an entry-level college textbook, Introduction to Anthropology(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), as an “extremist.” Marginal individuals, however remotely affiliated with Cattell, feature in Tucker’s muckraking narrative as sinister rogues one goose-step removed from Josef Mengele. It is a classic guilt-by-association tactic used by contemporary leftists to discredit the ideas of any prominent scholar who rejects their egalitarian multiracialism. (This guilt-by-association tactic, casting aspersions on one individual vis-à-vis the character of others, no matter how distant the affiliations or acquaintances, was vociferously denounced and labeled as “McCarthyism” when directed at leftists.) Cattell’s intellectual company of Pearson, classicist scholar Revilo Oliver, and airline executive, author, and segregationist Carleton Putnam, according to Tucker, “provided additional reason for concern.”

Much of Tucker’s opposition to Cattell’s eugenic perspectives rests on popular fallacies of eugenics. Implicit in Tucker’s critique is the notion that eugenics is grounded on “ideology” and “politics” (hence the ultimate aim of eugenics is the elimination of oppressed racial minorities) rather than firm scientific principles. Left-wing critics of eugenics often argue that it is scientifically baseless. Richard Lynn’s monumental Eugenics: A Reassessment demolishes this argument outright. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rejects this implicit assertion in his recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth:

Political opposition to eugenic breeding of humans sometimes spills over into the almost certainly false assertion that it is impossible. Not only is it immoral, you may hear it said, it wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, to say something is morally wrong, or politically undesirable, is not to say it wouldn’t work. I have no doubt that, if you set your mind to it and had enough time and political power, you could breed a race of superior body-builders, or high-jumpers, or shot-putters; pearl fishers, sumo wrestlers, or sprinters; or (I suspect, although now with less confidence because there are no animal precedents) superior musicians, poets, mathematicians or wine-tasters. The reason I am confident about selective breeding for athletic prowess is that the qualities needed are so similar to those that demonstrably work in the breeding of racehorses and carthorses, of greyhounds and sledge dogs. The reason I am still pretty confident about the practical feasibility (though not the moral or political desirability) of selective breeding for mental or otherwise uniquely human traits is that there are so few examples where an attempt at selective breeding in animals has ever failed, even for traits that might have been thought surprising.

In an interview for The Eugenics Bulletin, published in 1984, Cattell offered his views on eugenics, social problems, progress in social science research, welfare policies, religious and cultural diversity in the U.S., “Beyondism,” IQ, and a variety of other issues. He was specifically asked about the matter of race from the eugenicists’ perspective,

TEB: Many eugenicists feel it’s best to be noncommittal on the race question, since it’s not our major concern. What do you think?

CATTELL: I agree that the only reasonable thing is to be noncommittal on the race question — that’s not the central issue, and it would be a great mistake to be sidetracked into all the emotional upsets that go on in discussions of racial differences. We should be quite careful to dissociate eugenics from it — eugenics’ real concern should be with individual differences.

Any fair consideration of Cattell’s writings would reveal very little on the subject of race. The subject is rarely indexed in his core scientific books, if mentioned at all. In his books on philosophy, ethics, religion, and social problems, where Cattell mentions race, his views are far from “extreme.” One rare exception of expanded reflection on the subject is his chapter on “Nation and Race: Their Significance” in Psychology and Social Progress. Even here Cattell’s writing largely echoes the scientific milieu of its day. He recognizes race and racial differences as biological realities, but also goes out of his way to stress that any discussion of race should not be based on “a question of superiority and inferiority of races.” For a book published in 1933, one ironically could classify Psychology and Social Progress as projecting progressive ideas of the early twentieth century: religious skepticism, eugenics, birth control and the problem of dysgenic birth-rates, cultural decline, war and peace, nationalism, education, class divisions of rich and poor, etc.

Tucker repeatedly portrays Cattell as some racially consumed fascist ideologue, noting

In fact, despite his personal charm, Cattell’s ideological thought — from his evolutionary ethics in the 1930s to its refinements as Beyondism four decades later —was essentially an intellectual justification for the form of fascism adopted by Nazi Germany and most pricelessly encapsulated by the phrase “totalitarian tribalism.”

This is simply Tucker’s way of projecting his own distorted views when describing what Cattell really believed, as if the psychologist was telegraphing his true sentiments in code to his fellow racialist comrades! It is the mindset of conspiracy mongers and “true believers” of multiracialism.

What Cattell actually stated about race, based on a passage in his first “Beyondism” volume, not only contradicts Tucker’s selective and distorted interpretation but frames egalitarian ethical assumptions of “racism” in perspective,

In accordance with good dictionary practice we may define a racist as one who asserts the superiority of his own race or people, without perception of the inherent impossibility, in our ignorance, of making such a value assertion. But both contra-suggestibility and the departures from objectivity due to the pleasure principle have developed a sect equally prejudiced in the opposite direction. These bigoted individuals may be called ignoracists because in recent years they have totally refused to consider the scientific possibility that races may show statistically significant differences. An open and enquiring mind must accept the possibility that observed differences of culturo-racial groups could be as significant in inherited components of, for example, mental capacity and temperament as in the historically acquired cultural features. Both racism and ignoracism are extreme and dangerous fallacies equally unable to lead to happy and realistic solutions of our problems. Beyondism calls for a more mature attitude than exists in either. It demands as a first act of respect the reality principle that human beings recognize equally the cultural and genetic origins of individual and group differences, and build an ethics of progress on that basis. [emphasis in original]

In a Chicago Tribune article on the decision to postpone the Lifetime Achievement Award, when asked about his self-described “Beyondism” perspective, Cattell said that “important policy decisions should be based on scientific information and knowledge rather than prejudice, superstition or political pressure.”

John Horn summarizes Cattell’s Beyondist views in his obituary published in The American Psychologist,

Cattell’s writings on [Beyondism] are particularly revealing of his drive and character. In these works, as in his books of the 1930s, Cattell argued that morality should be based on science. Beyondism symbolized the idea that humans cannot know what will be required for continuance of their species in the future. Therefore, they should strive to live in accordance with evolutionary principles that maximize the chances of a survival of a species. They should encourage great variety —individual differences — among themselves, so that environmental stresses that might wipe out a homogeneous group would eliminate only some individuals, not all. To this Darwinian principle of survival of individuals, Cattell added the idea of survival of societies: Survival will accrue to societies that can adapt under changing conditions. There should be great variety in societies. Diverse groups should be left alone to pursue their own programs for building the “best” society. No group should dictate to any other, but with that proviso, no group need aid the survival of any other group.

As to the point about pressure to conform to the group, psychology professor and IQ author Robert Sternberg defended the work of prominent psychologists whom he often disagreed with, such as Arthur Jensen and Raymond Cattell, for defying conformity and pursuing productive independent careers. As an open-minded liberal, Sternberg argued that society has benefited from innovations of maverick geniuses. For Tucker and his ideological ilk (Barry Mehler, Abe Foxman, Andrew Winston, Mark Potok, Heidi Beirich, and others) maverick intellects who go against the grain of multiracial egalitarianism should not be recognized for an otherwise productive career as a respected pioneer.

Tucker and other Marxists pseudo-intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to serve as ideological filters — establishing subjective standards for deciphering which individuals are worth honoring and which are worth shunning. His denunciation of Cattell’s work, on the grounds that an “antisocial” and “destructive” ideology influenced his views, is chutzpah with a capital “C”. Ideology, not scientific inquiry nor integrity, fuels Tucker’s anti-Cattellian screed. The difference is that Tucker’s fundamental ideology when extended to logical extremes (totalitarian Bolshevism) is ultimately more deadly than the evolutionary ethics of Cattell’s “Beyondism.”

For a thorough refutation of Tucker’s previous writings on Cattell, visit John Gillis’s website.

Wikipedia offers a more balanced description of Cattell’s career.

The full interview with Cattell in the Eugenics Bulletin is here.

The Cattell family maintains a website in his honor that includes documents on the APA Lifetime Achievement Award, Cattell’s respoonse, etc. See here.

The Indiana University psychology website on Cattell's contribution to IQ research is reasonably balanced.

Kevin Lamb (email him), a freelance writer, is a former library assistant forNewsweek, managing editor of Human Events, and assistant editor of theEvans-Novak Political Report. He is the managing editor of The Social Contract.

Kevin Lamb’s review of Tucker on Cattell

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Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk. (“The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer”) Tucker, who calls himself a psychologist,  is no better than the $PLC or the ADL, substituting guilt-by-association arguments for intellectual engagement with Raymond Cattell on issues like eugenics and race differences. Richard Lynn’s review of Cattell’s Beyondism shows why the left hates Cattell.  Cattell viewed racial hybridization as leading to a genetic potential for IQ that is midway between the two parent races, leading to a decline from the IQ of the superior group. This is basic behavior genetics for a trait like IQ — and well supported by the results of White/African admixture in the US.

As a result, races should remain separate, and incompetent peoples should be allowed to die out. (Haiti comes to mind.)

For Cattell the basic principles for a scientific ethics are these: diverse societies and types; competition between societies and between individuals; survival of the fittest, extinction of the unfit. This is the way to a better world. How different from most prescriptions for Utopia, with their socialistic world states in which competition is extinguished and all men work together in a spirit of co-operation, brotherly love and, no doubt, boredom.

The most pathetic thing is that Cattell spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Illinois, and yet the U of I Press published Tucker’s book. Tucker should be ashamed, but he will doubtless be praised effusively by his colleagues.

In my last blog I conceded the humanities departments to the political left while acknowleding the power of the left throughout the university. The sordid tale of Raymond Cattell and the story of the denial of his lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association shows that the political pressures are very strong in the social sciences and that scientific rigor can easily be pushed aside for political purposes.

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