The Roots of White Moralistic Aggression: Pursuing Utopian Causes Framed as Moral Issues

The Western world is in a crisis in large part because its culture from beginning to end is depicted as immoral in the elite media and throughout the educational system. It has affected a great many White people—people like those depicted in my compendium of White liberals rejoicing at the decline of people like themselves. As I noted,

As individualists, White people are particularly prone to forming moral communities (rather than kinship-based communities like the rest of the world) and to punishing people who dissent from their moral world view, even at substantial cost to themselves and even if they share many of the same characteristics as the people they are punishing, such being White. This is termed altruistic punishment by evolutionary psychologists and is a major theme of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. Liberals therefore rejoice when Whites are punished for their racial attitudes.

To flesh out the theme that moral communities rather than kinship-based communities are fundamental to thinking about the West, I post a section from Chapter 6 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition which provides some historical background. As noted in the section quoted below, “A critically important feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues.” In the nineteenth century, the main moral issue was slavery—Puritan-descended intellectuals were the main influence in developing the moral case against slavery. Now it is the charge of “systemic racism” whereby Whites, just by being White, are recipients of “White privilege.” Whites buy into a system that systematically disadvantages People of Color (ignoring the success of several non-White groups, such as Chinese-descended Americans).

Thus in my view, this moralistic fervor—a fervor that has often led to altruistic punishment of White people like themselves—has deep roots in the culture of the West, particularly the cultures of northwest Europe. In Individualism I argue that these tendencies are genetically based on the basis of historical patterns in family structure and genetic clines. However, my view is that the current culture of moralistic self-hatred is not an inevitable consequence of White tendencies toward moralistic utopianism and altruistic punishment: “With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America. With their base in the Ivy League universities, Puritan-descended intellectuals dominated intellectual discourse in the United States until the rise of a Jewish elite beginning in the 1920s which accelerated after World War II and became dominant after 1965.”

There are, of course, other reasons besides feeling morally superior for buying into the culture of anti-White hate—most obviously that individuals who publicly dissent from that culture are likely to be punished with ostracism and loss of job; and there are rewards for White people who go along with it—there is a very prosperous diversity industry manned by people—many of the White—who get rich by participating. But as I note, “After the evil has been vanquished, the rhetoric dies down, and disillusionment may occur as people realize that evil has not, after all, been extirpated.” They’ve been trying to “close the gap” in performance with African-Americans for 50+ years now, but it never seems to go away; same for the crime. But by the time disillusionment sets in, it may be too late for White America.

*   *   *

In short, the Puritan Revolution meant the end of the Indo-European world and its Christian version: the king and aristocracy (“those who fought bellatores”), the Church (“those who prayed, oratores”), and the commoners (“those who worked, laboratores”).[1] It was thus the quintessential modern revolution—a fundamental break in the history of the West. It marked the beginning of the end of aristocratic individualism with its strong emphasis on hierarchy between social categories and the beginning of the rise of egalitarian individualism with its ideology of social leveling.

The revolution, although begun in England, was slow to reach its completion there, whereas in the United States, “as a consequence of the Civil War, the absolute hegemony of the leveling, acquisitive and utilitarian society pioneered by the Puritan Revolution was firmly entrenched.” The Civil War pitted “the Cavaliers of the Old South [who] recalled the highest ideals of European chivalry” against “the soulless materialism of Northern capitalism.”[2]

The new order was far more egalitarian than the older order. Congregations elected their ministers, who served at their pleasure.  Whereas war had been the province of the nobility, Cromwell’s New Model Army was based on citizen participation.

It was also profoundly spiritual and created enormous energy—energy that was eventually characterized far more by capitalist financial concerns than religious spirituality. “Possessive individualism” and “tasteful consumption” had come to define the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon character and culture. The government of England and other Anglo-Saxon areas became dominated by commercial and financial interests.

When the intellectuals of the new order looked at the English past, they did not see a social order of liberty and reciprocity. Rather, Whig historians saw the Middle Ages as oppressive, that people had no share in the government and the vast majority were the villeins, vassals, or bondsmen of their lords.[3]

In the United States, the Puritan revolution was carried to its extreme. Freed of the hereditary aristocracy and religion of England, during the Jacksonian era “the few remaining conservative influences in religion, politics, and law” were swept aside.[4] The result was an exultant radical individualism in which every person was to have direct, unmediated access to God. This radical individualism distrusted all manifestations of corporate power, including chartered private corporations. However, the corporations established by the heirs of Puritanism, referred to as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the following, eventually metastasized into monsters “incapable of preserving either the class boundaries of the bourgeoisie or the ethnic character of the Anglo-American nation as a whole.”[5] In the hands of recent and contemporary Anglo-Saxons, the modern business corporation is analogous to the “proposition nation” concept: merely a concatenation of contracts, with no ethnic character, although Fraser is quick to note that corporations dominated by other groups do not lose their ethnic character.

Fraser usefully divides U.S. history into four periods defined by three transformation: The Constitutional Republic dating from the American Revolution to the Civil War and based on political decentralization, liberty and egalitarianism; the Bourgeois Republic resulting from the victory of the North in the Civil War and lasting until Franklin Roosevelt, typified by the Fourteenth Amendment and a large increase in federal power; and the Managerial/Therapeutic leviathan since that period, characterized by an even greater concentration of power at the federal level, combined now with energetic attempts to change the attitudes of Americans in a liberal and eventually in an Anglophobic direction.

None of these eras was explicitly Anglo-Saxon Protestant: Even at the outset, “the Anglo-Saxon character of the Constitutional Republic was merely implicit.[6] The fourth, as yet unrealized, republic is slated to be the Transnational Republic where all traces of White domination have been erased and WASPs have become” a shrinking and despised minority.”[7]

The Puritan-energized egalitarian tendencies of the first period, the Constitutional Republic, eventually ended the aristocratic, Indo-European-derived social order of the Old South.

A natural social order dating from time out of mind had been leveled. The egalitarian sense that every free man must participate in labor now outlawed “invidious” social distinctions between those who worked, those who prayed, and those who fought. It also aggravated the growing split between the North and South. Both the celebration of work and the disparagement of idleness made “the South with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery even more anomalous than it had been at the time of the Revolution.” Combined with the anti-institutional fervor of evangelical revivalism, the democratic ideology of free labor eventually lent its mass appeal to a multi-pronged crusade against Negro slavery. … The conquest and destruction of the Old South marked the second phase of the permanent American Revolution.[8]

The triumph of the North in the Civil War meant that the US was even further removed from its Indo-European roots than before.

The result of Lincoln’s victory was that limits on federal power “were swept aside by executive decree and military might. By crushing the southern states, Lincoln fatally weakened the federal principle; his arbitrary exercise of emergency powers laid the foundations for executive dictatorship whenever exceptional circumstances justify the suspension of constitutional liberties. The war was an exercise in constitutional duplicity; the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 was accomplished only by means of blatant fraud and military coercion. Nonetheless, once securely enshrined in the Constitution, the amendment provided both the Second [i.e., Bourgeois] Republic and the Third [i.e., Managerial/Therapeutic] Republic with their formal constitutional warrant. … By the standard of the First (Federal) Republic, the Fourteenth Amendment was unconstitutional. But, despite some initial resistance, the legal priesthood of the Republic soon elevated the amendment to the status of sacred writ.[9]

Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Trends

A critically important feature of Puritanism is the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues—their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[10] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety”[11]—their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.

Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—quite possibly a form of altruistic punishment as discussed in Chapter 3. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.[12] Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during World War II for “exterminating the German people … the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”[13]

It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominent seventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem.”[14] “They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”[15]

Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews have been able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years and even during periods when they adopted crypsis to avoid persecution. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward outgroups, even when the outgroup was their close relatives in the Confederacy. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of White America, Jews, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.[16]

With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America. With their base in the Ivy League universities, Puritan-descended intellectuals dominated intellectual discourse in the United States until the rise of a Jewish elite beginning in the 1920s which accelerated after World War II and became dominant after 1965.

Ernest Tuveson notes that the moralistic, idealistic strand of American thought tends to come to the fore in times of crisis—“the expansionist period, the Civil War, the First World War.”[17] After the evil has been vanquished, the rhetoric dies down, and disillusionment may occur as people realize that evil has not, after all, been extirpated.[18] However, it lurks in the background and may revive in times of crisis. “Yet, despite post-Civil War disillusionment, the myth of the Redeemer Nation kept a hold on the deepest feelings of the country, and in critical moments asserted itself,”[19] citing several speeches of Woodrow Wilson: “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.”[20]

[1] Andrew Fraser, The WASP Question (Arctos, 2011), 117,

[2] Ibid., 122.

[3] Ibid., 156.

[4] Ibid., 27.

[5] Ibid., 254.

[6] Ibid., 280; emphasis in text.

[7] Ibid., 322.

[8] Ibid., 287–288. In the passage, the inner quotations are to Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 336–337.

[9] Ibid., 294–295.

[10] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (Oxford University Press, 1989), 357.

[11] Alden T. Vaughn, The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620–1730 (University Press of New England, 1997), 20.

[12] Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars (Basic Books, 1999), 477.

[13] Ibid., 556.

[14] Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 20–21.

[15] Ibid., 20.

[16] See Kevin MacDonald, “The Israel Lobby: A Case Study in Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 33–58.

[17] Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (University of Chicago Press, 1968), 199.

[18] Mark Twain commented early in the twentieth century in notes for a projected essay: “[Robber Baron Jay] Gould Followed CIVIL WAR & Cal.[i.e., California] sudden-riches disease with a worse one… by swindling and buying courts.” Quoted in Tuveson, Ibid., 208.

[19] Ibid., 209.

[20] Ibid., 212.