Evolutionary Psychology

Rachel Maddow on Jim Russell

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Jim Russell, who is the Republican candidate for New York’s 18th Congressional District, is busy combating accusations about his association with The Occidental Quarterly. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s take is a classic example of the power of the media to create an alternate reality where facts don’t matter and where simply stating Russell’s opinions is enough to create mild amusement in her audience benumbed by decades of leftist propaganda. No need to note that Russell is a scholar who has a Ph. D. and has written a book published by Oxford University Press on how Christianity was influenced by German culture during the early Middle Ages. No need for any informed scholarly opinions on his statements in the article in question. If that well-informed anthropologist and psychologist Rachel Maddow thinks something is outlandish, then it must be outlandish. End of story.

Maddow starts by labeling TOQ a “White supremicist journal” —shorthand for not having to deal with the ideas presented there and not being sensitive to the obvious difference between White supremacy and White advocacy. Does she think that it is always illegitimate for any ethnic group to seek to advance its interests? If so, then she should come out publicly against the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza.

She then puts up on the screen this quote from the article:

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about “bringing us together” and “diversity is our strength,” it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart.

What an absolutely outrageous idea! Maddow, being Jewish by descent,* could not possibly be expected to grasp the concept of a culture that erects barriers between itself and the surrounding society—as Diaspora Judaism has done for its entire history and as Israel has now taken to the point of building walls between themselves and the Palestinians, providing separate roads and neighborhoods—in short, apartheid.

Contemporary mainstream evolutionary theories of culture highlight the  importance of badges of group membership, such as language and modes of dress that function to define ingroups and outgroups, and psychologists are well aware that there is a powerful evolutionary psychology of social identity that responds to these cues by making people in ingroups have exaggerated negative attitudes toward outgroups and exaggerated positive attitudes toward their ingroup.

She then highlights Russell’s quoting “old racist arguments” from T. S. Eliot:

The population should be homogeneous…. What is even more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make a large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

As noted here repeatedly, multiculturalism has huge costs, especially for the majority ethnic group in terms of social cohesion, social isolation, and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods like government-sponsored health care— with no discernible benefits apart from ethnic restaurants. Yet if there has been one overriding goal of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the US and other Western societies over the last century, it has been to legitimize multiculturalism and pathologize any sense that the  traditional people of these societies have any interests in maintaining their demographic predominance and their culture.

Maddow then goes after Russell’s expressed concern about the effects of the media on imprinting children with images of other races because they may affect later mating preferences. Notice that Russell expresses himself quite tentatively: “One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact.” But in fact, there is quite a bit of research that has come out since Russell wrote his article indicating just that. For example, this is a quote from an academic article of mine:

Research on human
infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months
of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However,
racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup
faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006;
Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005).

Research on human infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However, racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005). (p. 1022)

The reality is that social psychology provides strong support for the idea that exposure of babies to other races would make them favor their own race less. And Russell is certainly correct that the media is doing its best to aid this process. However, the good news is that the media does not really have access to infants, or at least much less access than it does to older children and adults. The research seems to indicate that babies learn who their people are by seeing family members–resulting in hysteria over “racist babies.” One can anticipate government programs that force White babies to be exposed to non-Whites (but exempt non-Whites from this process).

Maddow then goes off on Russell’s accusation that the media promotes miscegenation in films directed at adolescents and pre-adolescents and his claim that parents have “a natural obligation as essential as providing food and shelter to instill in their  children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” Again, research supports the idea that media images could indeed overcome our natural liking for people like ourselves (programmed in infancy; see above) and lead people to be more open to miscegenation—especially in impressionable and conformist-minded children who are led to think that such behavior is “cool” and the sort of thing popular, attractive teenagers do. Several prominent social psychologists have argued that constant repetition by media images–especially if they are seen as coming from elite, mainstream sources–can overcome predispositions to be attracted to our own people.

One would think that Maddow would be well aware that her people have had very strong socialization pressures for marrying within the group which has led to very strong genetic commonality among long-separated Jewish groups. Urgings by Jewish religious and secular authorities (e.g., Alan Dershowitz, Elliott Abrams) to marry other Jews are commonplace. But when Russell makes similar suggestions, he is labeled a racist and a kook.

Her piece is a good example of how the media is focused on changing the behavior  of one group and one group only: White Christians.

*According to WikiAnswers, Maddow was raised Catholic, with an Irish mother and Russian father. She asserted she is “distantly Jewish.” See also here.

The Homosexual Lobby: A Prime Example of the Loony Left

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Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is a rare disorder that has shed a lot of light on how biology shapes sex differences. Girls with the disorder have a defective enzyme, and as a result their adrenal glands begin secreting male hormones well before they are born. The result is that to varying degrees their sexual organs are masculinzed at birth, often resulting in surgical repair. More interestingly, their behavior is masculinized: They are more aggressive, more likely to prefer rough, active play, less attracted to taking care of children, and prefer functional clothing to feminine finery. And even more interestingly, they are more likely to be lesbian. It’s the lesbian thing that has the homosexual activists all worked up.

The reason for their ire is that there is a promising treatment for the disorder. (“A rare disorder, a rarer debate“; LA Times, Aug. 15, 2010). The problem for the activists is that as a side effect of treatment, the girl would be less likely to be lesbian. Horrors! The inside headline in the  print edition screams, “Side effect outrages gay advocates.” Their greatest worry is that “some doctors might tell parents that a reduced chance of homosexuality is one of the therapy’s benefits.”

One activist group, Advocates for Informed Choice, “favors allowing children born with intersex conditions to participate in decisions about their gender identity, including delaying a decision until adolescence.”

But by that time the girl would already be masculinized and biologically predisposed to lesbianism. It’s obvious what her “choice” would be. The effects of the hormones during the prenatal period could not be undone at that point. In effect, the girl’s choice would have already been made for her.

So the child cannot meaningfully make a choice. Who can?

Amazingly, there is not one word in the article about what interests the parents have–or even what the real interests of the child are. You don’t have to be an evolutionist to realize that parents have a huge stake in the sexual orientation of their children. It’s likely to be the difference between having grandchildren and not having grandchildren, especially given that these girls have relatively little interest in nurturing children. Even without an evolutionary analysis, it’s obvious that most parents want grandchildren eventually and take great pride and joy in having them. Don’t they have a say?

And what about the child? These gay activists want the child to be just like them. But how does that benefit the child? For an evolutionist, the true interests of the child are clear: Heterosexuality and femininity are far more likely to result in children and well-cared for children at that.  But even apart from that, there is no reason to suppose that lesbians are happier than heterosexual women.

The attitudes of the gay activists here are yet another example of how far the culture of the  left has departed sanity and common sense. For these people, lesbianism  has a value for its own sake, independent of the interests and desires of the parents, and independent of the interests of the child.

As a biologically oriented psychologist, I am not surprised that research indicates the importance of biological influences on homosexuality. The fact that homosexuals have become pillars of the cultural left is deplorable —and quite unnecessary. Homosexuals have ethnic interests just like everyone else, and they can promote those interests even if they don’t themselves have children. It seems to me that one way for homosexuals to promote their ethnic interests is to acknowledge heterosexual marriage as a specially protected cultural norm — its special status guaranteed because of its critical importance in creating and nurturing children.

And they should be very happy that there is a promising treatment that would allow girls affected with CAH to grow up wanting to be wives, mothers, and grandmothers.

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Hormonal regulation of ingroup altruism

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A recent paper by Carsten K. W. De Dreu and colleagues in Science shows that the hormone oxytocin makes people more inclined to help their ingroup (“The Neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans”; Science, June 11, 2010; not available online without subscription). The paper is important for several issues related to group conflict. It begins with the simple statement that more than 210 million people were killed by state action in the 20th century, typically because they were seen in ingroup/outgroup terms. It also cites Darwin’s famous statement that “groups with a greater number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other … would spread and be victorious over other tribes” — a classic argument for group selection. They also cite several studies showing that oxytocin is linked to trust: people with high levels of trust have more oxytocin receptors in their brain, and receiving oxytocin makes people more empathic and generous.

The contribution of De Dreu et al. is to show that all this niceness is reserved for the ingroup — what they call “ingroup love.” Oxytocin increased people’s willingness to contribute to a common fund even though they would lose money in the process. However, it didn’t make them more likely to contribute to a fund where the they would benefit their ingroup at the expense of an outgroup. Oxytocin therefore promotes “ingroup love,” not “outgroup hate.” A second experiment showed that this effect occurred even for people who were not personally inclined toward altruism.

The third experiment is particularly important. Here the game was rigged to distinguish the motives of greed (large upside to non-cooperation if the other person cooperates compared to the downside if they do not cooperate) and fear (large downside to cooperation if the other person doesn’t reciprocate compared to the upside if they do reciprocate).

The greed motive is exploitative: it represents the desire to take advantage of a trusting outgroup; the fear motive is defensive: it represents the desire to protect the ingroup against possible exploitation by a non-cooperating outgroup. Oxytocin activated the fear motive: Under the influence of the drug people were more inclined to not cooperate with the outgroup, especially in the fear condition. In other words, they were defending their ingroup. Oxytocin did not affect greed.

So what does this all mean? First, realize that the ingroups and outgroups in the study are not genetically based, say, on ethnic differences. It would be interesting to see if the ingroup defensive effects of oxytocin would be increased if the ingroup and outgroup were racially homogeneous but of different races. We would also expect that there would be less altruistic donating to the ingroup in the first two experiments if the ingroups were ethnically diverse.

But because ethnicity was not manipulated and groups were randomly constructed, it means that the research is relevant to understanding the biological basis of social identity theory.  Social identity research shows that even randomly composed ingroups show ingroup biases — what De Dreu et al. term “ingroup love.” The ingroup and outgroup are like two ethnically-based football teams with different colored uniforms rather than two groups that differ on the basis of ethnicity. I have argued on the basis of several pieces of evidence that social identity mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation for between-group conflict, and these results certainly provide further support for that.

The results don’t really provide any reason for optimism for White advocacy. We already know that whatever psychological mechanisms we have for loving our racial ingroup are failing miserably throughout the Western world. One reason is that Whites do not identify with other Whites as an ingroup, so they don’t show ingroup love specifically toward Whites. In the experiments, it’s quite clear who the ingroup is, but at least for the last several decades few Whites seem to consider their race as an ingroup. Whereas the experimenters made it very clear who the ingroup was, in the real world we are constantly be told by the media that Whites are not a legitimate ingroup. Once again, “it’s the culture, stupid.”

The result is that Whites do not feel empathy for other Whites who have been victimzed — as noted in a previous blog on empathy research (“Whites lack of empathy for other Whites“). Discussions of the consequences of public policy never mention negative effects on Whites, only the negative effects on other groups. For example, the effects of amnesty are discussed only in terms of what’s good for the illegals as an oppressed, deserving group — not on the long term political and cultural viability of Whites. When public policy results might have positive consequences specifically for Whites, there is enormous anxiety among the chattering class. (This happened not long ago when people realized that tweaking the University of California admission standards to help Latinos and Blacks would likely inadvertently help Whites at the expense of Asians. Asian activists were not happy.) Whites have come to see themselves as an illegitimate ingroup.

The problem with social identity mechanisms is that because ethnicity is not relevant to defining ingroups and outgroups, these mechanisms are manipulable by the wider culture, and that is exactly what we are seeing.

The result is that the most empathic and altruistic among us fail to defend their racial ingroup. I suspect that most Whites with naturally high levels of oxytocin are expending their empathy and altruism on people quite a bit unlike themselves — adopting African babies and other such altruistic acts. And besides the gratification they get from helping others, they also get a great deal of social approval as an added bonus.

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Some thoughts on Richard Wrangham

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My last blog (“Chimpanzees don’t believe in open borders“) necessarily highlighted the work of Richard Wrangham, the Harvard primatologist whose theory on coalitional aggression by male chimpanzees was strongly supported by the study of Mantini et al. Wrangham argues that chimps and humans have both inherited a propensity for aggressive territoriality from a chimplike ancestor. War engaged in by cooperating males was adaptive in our evolutionary past and therefore left its mark in the human mind.

This is a remarkably unsentimental view of the human past–Darwinism red in tooth and claw. And it provides strong support for a biological basis for some of the nastier human qualities that the intellectual left wants to see as grounded solely in pathological cultures.

So one would think that someone like Wrangham would be open to a theory of group competition such as my theory of group evolutionary strategies. Wrangham’s work shows that group competition predated human culture. My theory expands on that to between-group competition not by warfare but over other resources: social dominance, financial resources, and–most centrally–over the construction of culture. My approach is combined with theory and data showing that the higher mental processes central to culture can regulate the more ancient evolved systems of the brain (e.g., ethnocentrism) like the ones that Wrangham’s research points to.

Unlike chimpanzees, humans are therefore quite prone to maladaptive cultures. In contemporary human societies, a large part of group competition becomes intellectual warfare over the construction of culture. Hence my book The Culture of Critique which shows that several important intellectual movements dominated by strongly identified Jews who were acting to advance Jewish interests collectively managed to dominate intellectual discourse on race and ethnicity beginning in the early 20th century. Interacting with the individualistic proclivities of White Europeans, these movements  have been critical to overriding the biologically-based natural tendencies toward aggressive territoriality uncovered by Wrangham’s work.

However, Wrangham was one of the star performers in a tumultuous meeting of the  Human Behavior and Evolution Society at Amherst College in 2000. He presided over a forum devoted to discussing my work, described by Richard Faussette who witnessed the events. In my talk I stressed issues such as the maintenance of group boundaries that are so essential to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and central to Wrangham’s theory of chimpanzee behavior. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of my remarks (reprinted in Faussette’s article), Wrangham called for an ethics investigation into me and my work and asked me to condemn the use of my work by “right wing extremists” and “rabid anti-Semites.” I forget what my response was, but my usual response to that sort of thing is to state that anyone is free to use any scientist’s work. And a lot of these “extremists” and “anti-Semites” have legitimate concerns, whether or not they express them in a language suitable to an academic.

The sad reality is that even hard-headed evolutionary scientists become completely unable to grasp the reality of human competition as it exists in contemporary societies. The chimpanzee neighboring groups that are aggressively defending and trying to expand their borders are doubtless more closely related to each other than the millions of people swarming over the borders of all the countries of the West are related to the traditional White people who have dominated these countries for hundreds or even thousands of years. There are very large genetic distances among human groups compared to the distances between these chimpanzee neighbors–and hence an even greater evolutionary imperative for us to defend our territory against human invaders–Frank Salter’s concept of ethnic genetic interests. But for evolutionary scientists like Wrangham, these relatively large genetic distances suddenly become meaningless when they refer to human groups, and it becomes irrational or even evil to be concerned about the eclipse and displacement of one’s racial group as millions of unlike others pour over the border.

The pall of political correctness hangs over even the best-known evolutionary scientists. Another hostile member of the audience at Amherst was John Tooby of the University of California-Santa Barbara who is prominently associated with the evolutionary psychology movement — a movement that neatly avoids any consideration of traits like IQ or unpleasant issues like race differences in IQ and aggression. (See my “Evolutionary psychology: The really dangerous idea is that it is wrong.”) And then there’s Steven Pinker whom I characterize as having assumed “the Stephen Jay Gould Chair for Politically Correct Popularization of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.

Once again, it’s obvious that the success of the  left derives from having taken over the elite institutions of the society, particularly the media and the academic world. It is a triumph with a very large ethnic component at its core — both in the  ethnic aggression of the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements that have seized the academic high ground and in the ethnic vulnerabilities of the Anglo-Saxons whom they displaced. The remnants of the WASP intellectual elite, like Wrangham, cower in fear of being ostracized while they watch the inexorable logic of evolution work against people like themselves. Certainly a chimpanzee would not be so stupid or cowardly.

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Chimpanzees don’t believe in open borders

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I began my chapter on Jewish involvement in shaping US immigration policy as follows:

Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of fundamental interest to an evolutionist.

So it’s not surprising that animals defend territories. Territories provide resources that can be turned into reproduction. But of course the intellectual left is very uncomfortable with the thought that animals might defend territories — especially if the animals are closely related to us. So they make up stories about chimpanzees as peaceful hippie types living at one with nature.

All this came together in a recent article “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees” in Current Biology (LA Times version; New York Times version). John Mitani and colleagues found that chimpanzee males patrol their territories in deadly serious single file lines with no feeding or socializing. Deadly because there were 18 fatal attacks in a nine-year period, almost all of them by male bands patrolling their territory.

The chimpanzees at Ngogo have expanded their territory at the expense of a neighboring community. Territorial expansion followed a series of lethal coalitionary attacks that formed an especially large source of mortality. … our findings support the hypothesis that killing neighboring conspecifics is adaptive. … [The most likely explanation is that] by acquiring new territory through lethal coalitionary aggression, male chimpanzees improve the feeding success of individuals in their own community, which in turn can lead to increased female reproduction.

Significantly, the authors go out of their way to point out that their results are contrary to the hypothesis that chimpanzee aggression is the result of contact with humans, citing a paper by Robert W. Sussman titled “The myth of man the hunter, man the killer, and the evolution of morality.” Sussman’s paper in Zygon (not available online) shows someone seemingly on a crusade against standard views in evolutionary anthropology.

The “soft” interpretation of the article (mentioned in the LA Times version) is that it tells us something about the evolution of cooperation. But clearly the cooperation is for the purpose of war. The really dangerous idea is that it suggests that organized warfare between males preceded human culture–the view of Harvard’s Richard Wrangham whose views are discussed in the NYTimes article:

Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes. Dr. Wrangham argues that chimps and humans have both inherited a propensity for aggressive territoriality from a chimplike ancestor.

Sussman’s hostility to humans as naturally prone to warfare reminds one of the Boasian school of anthropology (Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique) and its attempt to invent a “pacified past” in which humans were depicted as peaceful myth makers and gift givers. (Sussman was president of the American Anthropological Association.) The truth is quite the opposite.

But the real question is why are White people throughout the Western world failing to patrol their borders and behaving in an evolutionarily maladaptive manner by allowing millions of people unlike themselves into their countries and often subsidizing them to boot? The answer has to be culture. Our evolutionary proclivities tell us to keep out the foreigner and to try to take his territory if possible.

Unfortunately, there are lots of reasons to think that culture can trump our evolutionary tendencies. (See here.) To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the culture, stupid. Xenophobia is an adaptive response, whether it’s for chimpanzees or for humans. But for the better part of a century, our intellectual elites have been telling us that xenophobia is a psychiatric disorder, little more than irrational hatred. This ideology has been spread throughout the school system and saturates the mainstream media. Those who disagree with it are subjected to economic penalties and social ostracism.

A big part of what is needed is to reverse this intellectual onslaught. The paper by Mitani and colleges is certainly a step in the right direction.

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Whites’ lack of empathy for other Whites

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There are doubtless a great many factors accounting for the general willingness of Whites to allow themselves to be pushed aside and to voluntarily become a minority amid a sea of non-Whites, most of whom hold historical grudges against them. My general view is that these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting tendencies of Europeans toward individualism interacting with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.

The problem with individualism is that we have weak ties to other Whites and we don’t have a sense (yet) of common fate. In other words, we are low on ethnocentrism. We hear about a White person who was victimized by a Black criminal or denied a promotion or admission to a university in favor of an “underrepresented minority”, and we don’t feel empathy for the victims simply because they are White. We don’t feel any psychological pain when we hear that White working class men have moved out of an area because their jobs have been taken by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At a rational level, Whites may well think that victimization of Whites is morally wrong. Hence the finding that Whites support ending affirmative action and ending immigration (especially illegal immigration) as has been shown in California and other states. But I suspect that there isn’t any real gut feeling of empathy with other Whites. And it’s the gut feeling of empathy that in the end motivates the sort of behavior that can really begin to alter things politically.

This was demonstrated recently in a study that scanned the brains of Black and White subjects viewing Black and White victims of Hurricane Katrina (Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level, Science Daily). Everyone reported empathy for the victims. This is a verbal judgment that reflects nothing more than conventional morality. People certainly would not want to tell the experimenter that they have callous disregard for suffering.

But the brain’s emotion centers told a different story. Black subjects had empathic responses to Black victims, and the more ethnocentric Blacks had stronger emotional responses. Whites on the other hand, did not show any empathic responses to people of either race.

It’s not that Whites are incapable of empathy. Images of family members would doubtless result in strong empathic responses among Whites — responses that would motivate helping family members. Indeed, all the research shows much stronger family bonds among Whites than among Blacks — bonds that are motivated at least in part by empathic concern for family. But in general, we just  don’t get emotionally aroused when we see Whites  suffering or victimized.

And it also suggests that the many Whites who do behave altruistically toward Blacks or other non-Whites are not acting out of an emotional imperative of empathy, but for some other  reason — quite possibly social approval. What better way these days to show you are a good person?  I thought about this today when viewing a photo of Sandra Bullock with her newly adopted Black baby. Of course, it may be misplaced maternal affection.


But this lack of empathy for other Whites is a problem for political action on behalf of Whites. People are motivated far more by emotions than by rational appraisals. The  empathy among Jews for Jewish suffering is legendary. As Walter Benjamin once said, Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, 1968, 262)

There is undoubtedly variation among Whites for ethnocentrism, implying that at least some Whites would be upset by the suffering of other Whites more than by the suffering of, say, Blacks. In other words, they would have the same pattern that Blacks show, only reversed.

Personally, I have found that I do have an emotional reaction to Whites being victimized. This could be because I am more genetically inclined toward ethnocentrism than most Whites. But it could also be influenced by living in Southern California where Whites are now a minority. Social psychologists have shown that members of majority groups do not have the same sense of an ingroup feeling as do members of minority groups.

The good news is that as Whites become a minority, ingroup solidarity–and empathy for other Whites–would be expected to increase. And getting involved in White advocacy with like-minded others doubtless has the effect of reinforcing and increasing those tendencies, especially when it is not at all difficult to imagine nightmarish scenarios of the future for Whites. Such nightmarish scenarios have a great deal of emotional impact, especially when they are graphically depicted. That is the reason why we will not see such depictions in the media.

The bad news is that even with empathy for other Whites, there are still huge barriers for Whites to really get involved in White advocacy — barriers such as losing one’s job and social ostracism. The power of the left to inflict economic pain is huge, as recently shown by the burgeoning movement to inflict economic sanctions on Arizona for having the temerity to enact a law aimed at getting rid of illegal aliens.

But having empathy for other Whites would certainly be a great first step in the right direction–and probably a step that is necessary if we are going to see really intense commitment by Whites to change the current regime.

My view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
EuropeMy view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
Europe..

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Jews Embarrassed by Jews: Slumlords — and Goldman Sachs

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Jill Jacobs writing in the Forward presents an interesting comment on Jewish ethics  (“When the Slumlords Are Us”). She essentially corroborates Edmund Connelly’s work on “The Culture of Deceit”:  Not only are sharp business practices common among religious Jews, they are encouraged in the sense that Jews with a well-deserved reputation for unethical business behavior are welcomed into the highest reaches of the Jewish community: “Some of these offending landlords have more than Jewish names. At least a couple have been accorded positions of leadership and prominence in their Jewish communities because of the money they give to Jewish groups and causes.”

That’s the important point. It’s certainly the case that all religions have their bad apples. But with Judaism, being a bad apple is quite compatible with being a pillar of the community, as long as you continue to donate generously to communal causes.

Because she has such a strong sense of being Jewish, she feels personally embarrassed because of the behavior of her landlord: “One day, the landlord himself dropped by the building. I shuddered when I saw his long black coat, black hat and bushy beard. Would the other tenants, mostly Latino families, think that all Jews treated others with such neglect?”

Yes, they probably would. That’s how human stereotyping works. The fact is that most people who develop negative attitudes about Jews probably do so as a result of personal interactions with Jews, not by delving into Jewish history or ruminating on the causes of our current malaise. Jacobs notes that she could talk all she wanted about lofty Jewish ethical principles, but it didn’t do much good when reality was so at odds with the lofty theory:

Inevitably, heartbreakingly, someone would say to me, “Jill, you’re telling us that Judaism says all of these great things about how landlords should treat their tenants. So why is it that my landlord, a religious Jew, won’t turn on the heat?” Or worse: “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met who’s not a slumlord.”

Anti-Semitism among Blacks has often been the result of similar negative personal experiences during the period when Jews owned the stores and apartment buildings in Black communities. Jews have mainly moved on to higher callings than running stores and apartments in Black areas, their places taken by newer arrivals. Similarly, a survey conducted by the Jewish Labor Committee in 1945 indicated that the attitudes of working class Americans were shaped by actual experience with Jews. They saw

the Jew as a cheating storekeeper, a merciless landlord or rental agent, an unscrupulous pawn-broker, or an installment salesman and insurance collector who will take away the collateral or let the insurance lapse at the first delinquency. To this is added the idea that the Jews own all business and that at least most Jews are in business. All this is so because the Jews are money-crazy, selfish, grabby, take advantage of others, cheat, chisel, lie, are ruthless, unscrupulous, and so on. (See here, p. 50).

Jacobs recounts some attempts to make such unethical behavior unaccaptable within the Jewish community. She mentions some successes, but such efforts are up against the particularist, ingroup morality that has always characterized Jewish behavior and is clearly spelled out in Jewish religious writing: One moral standard within the group, and a completely different standard outside the group. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Jews put in a great deal of intellectual work inventing a universalist ethics for Judaism as a “light unto the nations” — a moral exemplar for the rest of humanity. But it was always a sham and continues to be so in the contemporary world. As reported by Haaretz, just recently, a rabbi on the West Bank wrote about how it’s permissible for Jews to kill pretty much any non-Jew even if they are not responsible for threats to Jews:

“It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments — because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.

The result of this Judeocentric ethics is that, apart from the efforts of Ms. Jacobs, there is far more concern about molding public perceptions than about altering Jewish behavior. This came up with the Bernie Madoff affair:

As in the [Michael] Milken case, the default  strategy is to proscribe any mention that a person like Madoff, who feeds into all the negative Jewish stereotypes, is Jewish. Indeed, some voices within the Jewish community are bemoaning the fact that Madoff’s Jewishness is so central to the media coverage. For example, in a letter to the New York Times, David A. Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee wrote, “Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?”

It’s well known that when the financial meltdown first hit, the ADL was concerned about “a dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on Internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release is predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complained darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL’s favorite word is ‘canard’] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.”

The recent indictment of Goldman Sachs for security fraud is doubtless causing similar angst in Jewish circles. Yesterday’s front page headline in the LA Times screamed “E-mails show Goldman traders rushed to bet against the mortgage market as crisis spread.” [Addendum, headline for 4/27, print edition: Senate Evidence Mounts against Goldman; online: Goldman Played Key Role in Mortgage Meltdown, Senate Investigators Say] Based on documents released prior to Senate hearings this week, the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and  Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown — whether this is deserved or not. After all, despite the fact that any mention of the Jewishness of the key figures is verboten in the MSM, Goldman Sachs is an icon of Jewish financial power. Everyone knows that its basically a Jewish firm. It certainly doesn’t help that Lloyd Blankfein heads Goldman and is its publicly visible face. Nor does it help that the deal that brought the charges netted the firm of another Jew, John Paulson, $1 billion. (Paulson is worth $12 billion and is #45 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.)

Nor does it help that another firm that is being prominently mentioned as engaging in practices that exacerbated the mortgage meltdown is Magnetar whose principals, including founder Alec Litowitz, are all Jewish.  According to this article, Magnetar actively sought to include the worst possible mortgages into its CDO’s, then managed to get them rated as AAA investments, and then bet massively against them, leaving large financial institutions holding the bag.

Given the enormity of the repercussions of the economic crisis, it is only natural to seek the culprits. The fact that Goldman is  the most prominently featured firm and that other Jews also profited so greatly from the crisis while engaging in questionable practices will naturally feed into the stereotype of Jewish financial perfidy — a stereotype that goes back at least to the 19th century. (See Edmund Connelly’s discussion of Albert Lindemann’s historical research.)

But one thing we can be sure of, if anyone breathes a mention of Jewish involvement in the financial collapse in the mainstream media, the ADL will come out with its guns blazing. Truth is no defense.