Evolutionary Psychology

Review of Ed Dutton’s Race Differences in Ethnocentrism

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Race Differences in Ethnocentrism
Edward Dutton
Arktos, 2019.

“Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have lost an important instinct towards group — and thus genetic — preservation. Once a society, as a whole, espouses Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is acting against its own genetic interests and will ultimately destroy itself.”
Ed Dutton

Watching his incredibly entertaining Jolly Heretic You Tube channel, it’s easy to forget that Ed Dutton is also an extremely serious, and increasingly prolific, researcher, author, and scientist. The recent publication by Arktos of Dutton’s Race Differences in Ethnocentrism follows closely in the wake of Dutton’s At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (2018), How to Judge People by What They Look Like (2018),  J. Phillipe Rushton: A Life History Perspective (2018),  and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How The Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers (2019). In Race Differences in Ethnocentrism, Dutton, who has collaborated with Richard Lynn on a number of occasions, builds impressively on the work of the latter and has offered, in this text, one of the most informative, formidable, pressing, intriguing, and poignant monographs I’ve read in years.

Dutton’s book is a work of science underscored by an inescapable sense of social and political urgency, and has been explicitly prompted into being by the need to address two questions “particularly salient during a period of mass migration”: ‘Why are some races more ethnocentric than others?’ and, most urgently of all, ‘Why are Europeans currently so low in ethnocentrism?’ In attempting to answer these questions, Dutton has designed a book that is accessible to readers possessing even the most modest scientific knowledge, without compromising on academic rigor or the use of necessary scientific language. The text is helpfully replete with explanatory commentary and useful rhetorical illustrations, and its opening four chapters are dedicated exclusively to placing the study in context and exploring the nature of the research itself. This is a book that can, and should, be read by everyone.

In the brief first chapter, Dutton explains ethnocentrism or group pride as taking two main forms. The first, positive ethnocentrism, involves “taking pride in your ethnic group or nation and being prepared to make sacrifices for the good of it.” Negative ethnocentrism, on the other hand, “refers to being prejudiced against and hostile to members of other ethnic groups.” Typically, a highly ethnocentric person or group will demonstrate both positive and negative ethnocentrism, although it is very common for people and groups to be high in one aspect of ethnocentrism but not in the other. It is also apparent that some countries and ethnic groups are very high in both forms of ethnocentrism while others are extremely low in the same. The author sets out to explore how and why such variations and differences have occurred, and are still fluctuating. This is clearly a piece of very novel research. Dutton remarks that “there exists no systematic attempt to understand why different ethnic groups may vary in the extent to which they are ethnocentric.” Dutton’s foundation is built on a deep reading of existing literature on the origins and nature of ethnocentrism, pioneered to some extent by R. A. LeVine and D. T. Campbell in the 1970s, and built upon most recently by Australia’s Boris Bizumic. These scholars advanced the argument that ethnocentrism was primarily the result of conflict. Another highly relevant theory in the study of ethnocentrism has been the concept of ‘inclusive fitness,’ which argues that ethnocentrism provides a method for indirectly passing on one’s genes.

Dutton closes his introductory chapter by providing an interesting overview of historical observations of differences in ethnocentrism. During the so-called ‘Age of Discovery,’ Europeans encountered large numbers of different and distant tribes, and many remarked on the reception they received from these groups. Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit were noted as being extremely friendly, while the negrito tribes of the Andaman Islands, near India, remain notoriously hostile to outsiders, shoot arrows at passing aircraft, and kill intruding foreigners, including an American missionary in November 2018. The Japanese appear throughout history to have combined a moderate level of negative ethnocentrism with very high levels of positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society typified by high levels of social harmony and in-group co-operation, and willing sacrifice for the nation in times of war. By contrast, the Yąnomamö tribe of Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor social harmony, and an inability to form stable social structures of any kind. Differences in general levels of ethnocentrism are important because, as Dutton points out, those societies most welcoming of outsiders were subsequently colonized and fundamentally and permanently changed by migration. Meanwhile, those societies that displayed extreme hostility to outsiders have remained almost intact, and remain unchanged even centuries after the European ‘Age of Discovery.’ Read more

Psychological Mechanisms and White Interests, Part 2

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Psychological Mechanisms that Work to Our Advantage

Implicit Whiteness. However, getting away from the Finnish example, there are also psychological mechanisms that are likely to create an increased sense of White identity and White interests in the years ahead. This should give us some hope for the future. The demographic transformation, in which it is obvious that White political power is declining as Whites head toward minority status, would by itself trigger defensive mechanisms of what I call implicit Whiteness which is the sense that one is White and behaving on the basis of being White without explicitly stating that you are White. For example, as White children get older, they increasingly choose Whites to be friends and associates in a mixed-race setting. Even though their explicit attitudes towards Blacks may be very positive, they feel more comfortable and have more rapport with other Whites. White parents move away from areas with a lot of non-Whites, especially Blacks and Latinos—a phenomenon known as White flight. When asked why they do so, they talk about seeking better schools. This may be true, but it covers up the reality that they don’t want their children in the same school as these non-Whites while shielding themselves from being called racists.

White people are the most individualistic people on earth — a topic central to my forthcoming book Western Individualism and the Liberal Tradition: Evolution, History, and Prospects for the Future. This means that we are less ethnocentric and less embedded in extended kinship networks that are so common in Africa and Asia. Individualists are less naturally ethnocentric, and the left has created a culture that punishes Whites for expressing ethnocentrism while encouraging non-Whites to be ethnocentric. Because the media is dominated by the left and because even the conservative media is terrified of appearing to advocate White interests, explicit messages that would encourage Whites to become angry and fearful about their future as a minority are rare. Indeed, the media rarely, if ever, mentions that Whites are well on their way to becoming a minority. And this for good reason: Whites in the United States and in Canada who are given explicit demographic projections of a time when Whites are no longer a majority tend to feel angry and fearful. They are also more likely to identify as Whites and have sympathy for other Whites.[1]

In other words, explicit messages indicating that one’s racial group is threatened are able to trigger ethnocentrism. This is especially important because many Whites live far from the areas of their countries undergoing the demographic shifts. Their day-to-day life of living in an essentially White environment hasn’t changed much while the population centers throughout the West—places like New York, Stockholm, London, and Paris are changed beyond all recognition from what they were 50 years ago. An obvious inference to be made is that pro-White activists should use explicit messages emphasizing these transformations. They should also note what is happening when Whites give up political control, as in South Africa, where many Whites live under siege conditions behind high walls and security systems, the government has endorsed programs that confiscate land from Whites and, crime, including particularly vicious murders of White farmers, is rampant. Read more

Psychological Mechanisms and White Interests, Part 1

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Turku Castle

Editor’s note: This is a talk given at the Awakening Conference in Turku, Finland, April 6, 2019. 

There are obviously many challenges for White people in the West, starting with the fact that throughout the West the media and academic culture are absolutely dedicated to importing new peoples into lands traditionally dominated by people of European descent. In every case, this transformation has been a top-down phenomenon, as described mainly for the United States in my book The Culture of Critique, in the UK by Andrew Joyce, in Australia by Brenton Sanderson, and in Sweden by .M. Eckehart. By this, I mean that there was never a popular movement demanding more immigration anywhere in the West. In general, these changes occurred as a result of activism by specific groups—my view is that Jewish groups were critical in every case. These activists have had ties to elite institutions in the media, the academic world, powerful institutions like the EU, and the political process. The policies they advocated aimed at changing government policy in a context where there was no public discussion of the long-term effects this would have on native populations. And in every case, the mainstream media has had a record of promoting immigration and preventing discussion of the negative consequences, either now or in the future, to native populations. This is because, quite obviously, these changes do not benefit native populations. It’s one thing to import temporary workers for real economic needs.  It’s quite another thing to make them voting citizens, particularly when they typically have quite different interests in public policy on immigration and on the economic policies related to the availability of public goods like free healthcare, education, and welfare benefits. Most want free stuff. In the U.S., 63% of non-citizens and 50% of naturalized immigrants (i.e., the ones who become citizens) access welfare programs. The great majority of non-European immigrants have come from countries with lower IQ—a trait that is not easily influenced by changed environments. I would be interested in seeing a similar analysis for Finland.

The result of these shifts is that in most Western countries the traditionally dominant populations will be replaced within the lifetimes of many of the people who are alive today. In the United States, maybe even an old guy like me, White Americans are projected to become a minority at least by 2040 and likely sooner. Moreover, we are already at a tipping point because the Democrat Party, which is entirely in favour of replacing the White population, gets around 45% of its votes from non-Whites, so that even though many Whites have deserted the party in recent years, the growth of the non-White population combined with a still-significant number of Whites voting Democrat means that it will be impossible for Republicans to win national elections in the near future—indeed, as early as 2020. Add to that the fact that many Republicans favor high levels of immigration and because Pres. Trump has been unable or unwilling to fulfil his campaign promises; far too many Republicans are agents of big business and want to import cheap labor—and they are deathly afraid of being called a racist if they resist immigration. Illegal aliens now residing in the US have a huge incentive to have children because of birthright citizenship—people born here are citizens, so their parents can claim welfare and other financial support; again 63% are on welfare. It’s not surprising that they don’t want to leave. Read more

Ed Dutton with an Evolutionary Perspective on the Rape of Finland

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The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers
Edward Dutton
Oulu, Finland: Thomas Edward Press, 2019

Finns enjoy an unusually high-trust society. Longtime British resident Ed Dutton describes unmanned roadside vegetable stands that operate on the honor system, with customers reliably leaving the correct price for what they take. Travelers need not purchase a ticket before boarding a train; everyone happily pays the conductor as he comes through. At least until recently, girls in outlying villages could safely hitchhike into larger towns on Saturday nights.

Oulu (pronounced Oh-loo) is the largest city in northern Finland. It tends to be a dull place, and residents like it that way:

Very little crime, very little conflict; very little to report: Everyone eating the same kind of food, wearing the same kind of clothes, following the same cultural traditions: trusting, safe, predictable. The perfect place to raise a child.

By 2005, however, the city had begun accepting small numbers of Muslim ‘refugees.’ That summer,

a 30-year-old worker for the Finnish Lutheran Church had been naïve enough to get talking to a group of Muslim men in a bar and, worse still, go back to their flat. She was rewarded for her friendliness towards these guests by having her clitoris cut off with a pair of scissors which were then inserted into her vagina.

During the next couple of years, several local women were raped by Muslim men in city parks. By 2008, the trend was being reported in a national tabloid—which, however, failed to mention that all of the assaults had been carried out by Middle Eastern men. Oulu’s local daily, Kaleva, stopped reporting perpetrators’ names. As in other Western countries, Finnish journalists tend to be aggressively cosmopolitan leftists who despise the folks back home, ordinary Finns with “their simple desire for a picturesque wooden house close to a lake; their contentment living in a society where people mostly think in the same way.” If such narrow-minded yokels were to learn what was really going on, the multicultural project might be threatened!

Soon, the names of Muslim criminals were being redacted from police and court press releases as well. Official reports spoke only of men “of foreign background,” as if Finnish women were being attacked by German tourists or Japanese guest lecturers from the local university. But the authorities knew the truth: a 2018 a study by the Finnish Police Academy found that 93% of rapes of foreigners in Finland in 2016 had been committed by men from Islamic countries. Read more

When White Liberal Prophecy Fails: Cognitive Dissonance and the Liberal Mind

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Cognitive Dissonance theory might be more important in explaining the Left’s mindset than we appreciate. Although frequently invoked by mainstream conservatives to superficially skewer liberals’ incoherence and hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance should be applied more broadly and explored more deeply. According to psychologists, the dissonance produced in the mind when holding mutually exclusive beliefs is actually nothing short of a form of mental trauma. Facts and opinions which challenge, for instance, one’s self-identity or long-held conventional wisdom can, say experts, result in agony for the afflicted, producing a feeling of desperation akin to starvation or intense thirst. Unsurprisingly then, the resulting discomfort can push the sufferer to great lengths of irrational and extreme behavior in order to obtain relief[1] (Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness, pdf here).Understanding cognitive dissonance, therefore, may go far in explaining our opponents’ aggressiveness and, given the growing unreality of today’s society, their increasingly toxic and desperate behavior.

A basic theme in cognitive dissonance literature is that the brain cannot stand conflict. So hard does the brain work towards resolving it, it’s neural circuitry will actually employ faulty reasoning in order to shut down distress.[2] When presented with contradictory positions, it will, in effect, blind itself to them, for instance, by eliminating the new conflicting belief and clinging to the challenged one. Referring to this characteristic of the mind as our “totalitarian ego”, Psychologist Anthony Greenwald says, much like the thought-control and propaganda devices depicted in George Orwell’s 1984, the mind’s biases are firmly enslaved to the ego’s greater central design (for instance, one’s self-image as a humanitarian and morally righteous person, etc.).[3] This would explain much of liberals’ hyper-defensive reaction to evidence regarding racial differences, for instance, and their aggression toward purveyors of such evidence.

Political psychology professor Drew Weston has found that the brain circuits activating biased reasoning are actually the same ones activated in drug-addicts when getting a fix. Like drug-addicts, the cognitively conflicted will do anything to return to a state of comfort and euphoria.[4] The minds of the conflicted can employ numerous stress responses when, for instance, one’s long-held belief or self-image is challenged, such as avoiding the conflicting evidence in question (and any possible sources of such evidence); resorting to self-denial and magical-thinking[5]; even intentionally misremembering or suppressing past experiences i.e. previous episodes of ethnic tension, etc.[6] And when confronted by ideological opponents, the afflicted can resort to convoluted, fantastical arguments as well as hostile or nakedly diversionary ones, such as making dismissive, personal attacks on the opponent’s motives.[7] No doubt many readers have experienced such episodes from liberals before, even to the point of visible neurosis, hysterical anger, or even threatened or actual violence.[8] As Cognitive Dissonance expert Margaret Heffernan says, “we are prepared to pay a very high price to preserve our most cherished ideas.”[9] Read more

Darwin on the Rise and Fall of Human Races, Part 2 of 2

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On the Human Races

According to Darwin, human races have emerged as a natural consequence of their spreading across the globe, leading to their separate evolution in relative reproductive isolation. As a result of their prolonged separation in different environmental and socio-cultural conditions, humans show differences on a variety of traits; these differences were also shaped through the constant culling of individuals and societies in perpetual tribal warfare. It follows that races are expected to differ. Darwin took the heredity of mental traits and mental differences between races as inseparably entailing one another: “Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind” (148).

In The Descent of Man, Darwin is primarily dedicated to proving that human beings are descended from lower, animal forms of life: “It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion” (43). Darwin is only quite secondarily interested in discussing the differences between human races. He nonetheless endorsed the racial science of his day, observing that “the differences between the several races” was “an enormous subject which has been fully discussed in many valuable works” (18).

Darwin takes for granted the existence of physical and psychological differences between both men and women and between human races: “Man differs from woman in size, bodily strength, hairiness, &c., as well as in mind, in the same manner as do the two sexes of many mammals” (25). Darwin lists numerous areas in which human races differ. The “civilised races” have an inferior sense of smell, inferior eyesight, and smaller wisdom teeth than do “dark races” and “savages” (35, 37, 52). Human races differ in the presence of earlobes (32), hairiness (36), skull length (44), and prognathism (58).

There is . . . no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, — as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.[1] But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitutions, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans, who live under these same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea. (196)

Darwin praises “the old Greeks” in particular as an exceptionally gifted people “which stood some grades higher in intellect than any race that has ever existed” (166). Read more

Darwin on the Rise and Fall of Human Races, Part 1 of 2

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Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin, 2004 [reprint of second edition, London: John Murray, 1879]).

Western intellectual life today is characterized by a marked schizophrenia. On the one hand, virtually everyone accepts the scientific theory of Charles Darwin concerning the emergence and evolution of the various species in the world, including humanity, through the process natural selection. The only exceptions to this rule are a few Creationist hold-outs. On the other hand, our culture denies the biological reality of race and the relevance of hereditarian thinking to human societies. Our egalitarian culture rejects heredity’s implications in toto — both the descriptive (in-born human differences between individuals and races) and prescriptive (e.g. eugenics). Given how taboo racialist thinking still is, it is then useful — in order to think freely — to go back to the roots of evolutionary thinking by looking at what Darwin himself had to say about human evolution and racial differences.

The concept of race or lineage is central to Darwin’s evolutionary thinking. His classic The Origin of Species is indeed subtitled By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In one place, Darwin defines a race as the “successive generations” of a particular population (102). Darwin’s model for evolutionary change is simple and powerful: every species will tend to bear too many offspring, leading to overpopulation, a huge percentage of these will die before reaching maturity or in competition with others (whether of the same species or not), those who survive this struggle will be those with the traits best suited for their particular environment. The constant generation and culling of “races,” that is to say new of populations with different traits, is then central to his system, which also applies to human evolution.

The foundation of Darwin’s entire system is the reality of heredity — that the offspring of plants, animals, and humans tend to inherit the physical and/or mental characteristics of their parents. Concerning humans, Darwin follows the observations of the ancient philosophers in asserting that man’s specificity is in being both a social and rational creature.[1] This, along with his free hands, have enabled humanity’s remarkable conquest of the Earth: our intelligence and dexterity allowed our prehistoric forbears to fashion tools, our social instincts enabled us to work together to bring down much larger animals, and the combination gave us a unique ability to adapt to the most varied environments. Darwin says concerning intelligence and sociability: “The supreme importance of these characters has been proved by the final arbitrament of the battle for life” (68). Our hands and brains were incidentally developed at considerable cost: we are awkward bipeds and the tension between enormous heads and narrow hips means that childbirth is quite dangerous to our women. Read more