Western Civilization

A Negative Review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

A rather negative review of my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future appeared by someone who calls himself thezman. I am not familiar with his blog, but he seems to be basically on the right side of things as indicated by its blogroll, which includes Vdare.com, AmRen, Steve Sailer, etc. Since most people are not going to wade through a 500+-page book, this is my version of the main ideas.

Thezman’s review will not be helpful to someone who isn’t familiar with the book because it leaves out critical information and basic ideas. The review begins by complaining that I don’t get around to defining individualism until Chapter 8. But a major point, ignored by the reviewer, is that there are two clearly spelled out definitions of individualism in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, the aristocratic individualism of the Indo-Europeans, and the egalitarian individualism of the northern hunter-gatherers. Unless one discusses these concepts, the entire point of the book is missed because it’s essentially about how these two types of individualism played out in history, with the power of aristocratic individualism gradually decreasing after the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. One would do better by reading some of the reviews on Amazon, such as this one; or even better, read Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s 9-part review for the Council of European Canadians.

Re aristocratic individualism, from Chapter 2:

The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was not based on a single king or a typical clan-type organization based on extended kinship groups but on an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group. Critically, this elite was not tied together by kinship bonds as would occur in a clan-based society, but by individual pursuit of fame and fortune, particularly the former. The men who became leaders were not despots, but peers with other warriors—an egalitarianism among aristocrats. Successful warriors individuated themselves in dress, sporting beads, belts, etc., with a flair for ostentation. This resulted in a “vital, action-oriented, and linear picture of the world” [citing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization]i.e., as moving forward in pursuit of the goal of increasing prestige. Leaders commanded by voluntary consent, not servitude, and being a successful leader meant having many clients who pledged their loyalty; often the clients were young unmarried men looking to make their way in the world. The leader was therefore a “first among equals.” …

Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships [not biological relatedness] were characteristic of [Proto-Indo-Europeans] and this practice continued with the various [Indo-European] groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree).

Thus aristocratic individualism is fundamentally about individual accomplishment rather than kinship ties as being at the heart of social organization while retaining a strongly hierarchical social structure. Chapter 3 describes Egalitarian Individualism:

As noted in Chapter 2, there were already strong strands of individualism in Indo-European-derived cultures. Thus the argument here is not that northern [hunter-gatherers; h-gs] are the only basis of Western individualism, but that Indo-European individualism dovetailed significantly with that of h-gs they encountered in northwest Europe. The major difference between these two strands is that I-E-derived cultures are strongly hierarchical and relatively egalitarian only within aristocratic peer groups (aristocratic individualism), while the h-g’s were strongly egalitarian without qualification. The burden of this chapter is to make the case for this.  The contrast and conflict between aristocratic (hierarchical) individualism and egalitarian individualism is of fundamental importance for my later argument.

I really don’t understand how a competent reviewer could miss this, or the material in the following paragraph on the evolutionary basis of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer groups and the central importance of moral communities as the social glue binding hunter-gatherer communities rather than extensive kinship. This concept is critical for understanding Chapters 6–8. From Chapter 3:

Egalitarianism is a notable trait of hunter-gatherer groups around the world. Such groups have mechanisms that prevent despotism and ensure reciprocity, with punishment ranging from physical harm to shunning and ostracism.[1] Christopher Boehm describes hunter-gatherer societies as moral communities in which women have a major role,[2] and the idea that Western cultures, particularly since the seventeenth century, are moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer egalitarian ethic will play a major role here, particularly in Chapters 6-8. In such societies people are closely scrutinized to note deviations from social norms; violators are shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized. Decisions, including decisions to sanction a person, are by consensus. Adult males treat each other as equals.

Re climate, I certainly agree that climate is important, as emphasized in Chapter 3 on the northern hunter-gatherers, where the harsh climate of Scandinavia resulted in a general deemphasis on extended kinship in favor of nuclear families. The Indo-Europeans originated in what is now Ukraine but developed a very different culture than the hunter-gatherers. Their culture was completely militarized—likely needed to survive and prosper in the steppes where marauding groups were the norm (not the case in Scandinavia). Their individualism, whereby individual merit mattered more than kinship, was highly adaptive in getting the best leaders. I suppose this could have been simply a cultural invention enabled by domain-general processing (see below; the cultural invention approach is emphasized by Joseph Henrich in his The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous re the role of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages). Or it could have been due to a similar scenario as that sketched in Chapter 3 for the northern hunter-gatherers: Both of these groups lived in areas where one kinship group couldn’t control the basis of economic production. In the case of the northern hunter-gatherers, their source of food on the Scandinavian littoral was not available year-around, forcing them to retreat into small family-based bands where only very close kinship relationships mattered for part of the year (Chapter 3). On the other hand, the proto-Indo-Europeans periodically traveled for extended periods in their wagons in small family-based groups to grazing areas for their cattle and returned to the larger encampment. Again, no kinship group could control the vast steppe region, and relatively intensive kinship typical of hunter-gatherers rather than extensive kinship relations (e.g., in a Middle Eastern clan) would continue as the fundamental basis of social organization. I favor the ecological scenario, but the cultural innovation perspective is also possible. However, a purely cultural shift would have to entail strong social controls to prevent evolved predilections for kinship ties from dominating. Seems difficult and there is no evidence for it.

[thezman:] The first three chapters of the book cover the migration of people into Europe and what we know about the organizational structures. Europe was initially settled by hunter-gatherers with an egalitarian culture. Then nomadic people with an aristocratic warrior class came in from the east. MacDonald argues that the genetic basis for egalitarianism and meritocracy is in these original people. This is not an argument from science, but rather an argument from inference.

Thezman thus ignores the ecological argument of Chapter 3, the clear evidence for individualism in both of these groups, and the genetic cline from northern to southern Europe revealed by population genetic research discussed in Chapter 1.

[thezman:] It cannot be emphasized enough how marriage patterns and family formation helped define what we think of as the West. The rapid decline in cousin marriage, for example, is arguably the great leap forward for Western people. It naturally lead [sic] to the evolution of alternatives to narrow kinship in human cooperation. MacDonald does a good job summarizing how these mating patterns were brought to the West with the aristocratic people who migrated from the East.

But it’s not just the aristocratic peoples from the East that created the familial basis of individualism (i.e., a tendency toward nuclear families rather than, say, compound families common in Southern and Eastern Europe based on brothers living together with their wives). I argue in Chapter 4 that the nuclear family pattern is strongest in Scandinavia, a result I attribute to climate (monogamy is favored in harsh environments because of the difficulty of men provisioning the children of more than one woman) in conjunction with the ecological argument noted above.

[thezman:] In the next chapters the focus shifts to culture and history. Chapter four is about European family formation. The focus is entirely on Europe, so the reader is left to guess why this differs from the rest of the world.

But the arguments from Chapters 2 and 3 make it clear that the roots of individualism in both the Indo-Europeans and the northern hunter-gatherers are essentially primordial, as noted above.

[thezman:] Chapter eight is an interesting chapter in that he finally gets around to providing a definition of individualism. He states at the opening that individualist societies are based on the reputation of the individual. Group cohesion depends on the members judging other members on an individual basis. Each member also accepts that he will be judged by society as an individual. This contrasts with other societies where membership in a tribe or clan is the basis for judging people.

But the theme of the importance of reputation appears long before Chapter 8. Indeed the word ‘reputation’ appears around 80 times in the entire book, beginning with Chapter 1 and throughout the book. The stage is set for developing the importance of reputation in the emphasis on individual military reputation in Chapter 2 on the Indo-Europeans and the concept of moral communities in Chapter 3—individuals were trusted to the extent that they had a good reputation, and trust was not based on kinship distance. This chart contrasting northwestern European hunter-gathers with the Middle Old World culture  is from Chapter 3:

Northwestern

European H-G

Cultural Origins

Middle Old-World

Cultural Origins

Evolutionary

History

Hunting, gathering Pastoralism, agriculture
Kinship 

System

Bilateral;
weakly patricentric
Unilineal;
strongly patricentric
Family System Nuclear family;

simple household

Extended family;
joint household
Marriage  Exogamous;

monogamous

Endogamous,
consanguineous;
polygynous
Marriage

Psychology

Individual choice based on personal characteristics of spouse Utilitarian; based on
family strategizing within kinship group
Position of

Women

Relatively high Relatively low
Ethnocentrism Relatively low Relatively high
Social Status Mainly influenced by reputation Mainly influenced by status in kinship group
Trust Trust based on individual’s reputation Trust based mainly on kinship distance

Contrasts between European and Middle Old-World Cultural Forms

[thezman:] This gets to the major flaw in the book. It needs an editor. The parts are here for a straight line argument that individualism has genetic roots and that it was selected for in European people. As humans adapted to the harsh northern climates, they adopted social structures that rewarded the behaviors necessary to survive as a group in the areas we now call Europe. While we cannot locate an “individualism gene” we can infer it through things like marriage patterns and family formation.

I realize that at 511 pages, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is something of a tome but I think there is in fact a straight-line—albeit complex—argument. The difficulty is that one is dealing with two different forms of individualism and how they play out in history. The primordial tendencies of all three groups (the Indo-Europeans, the northern hunter-gatherers and Early Farmers) and how they influence family structure (Ch. 4) must be integrated. But one must also include the argument on the role of the Church in accommodating to aristocratic individualism in the early Middle Ages (the Germanization of Christianity) and ultimately facilitating egalitarian individualism (e.g., the canon law of moral universalism, monogamy, exogamy. Canon law swept away the morality of the ancient world based on natural inequality characteristic of the aristocratic moral framework and substituted a morality based on moral egalitarianism and individual conscience, paving the way for outbreaks of Protestant-type individualist thinking about religion during the later Middle Ages) (Ch. 5). This culminated in the Protestant Reformation and the rise to dominance of egalitarian individualism, leading to the English Civil War and the gradual decline of aristocratic individualism (Ch. 6). And then Chapter 7 (which is completely unmentioned in the review) focuses on egalitarian individualism and how it figured in the movement to eradicate slavery by creating a moral community that abhorred slavery. In any case, its tomeishness is no reason to fail to comment on the central differences and the historical dynamic between aristocratic individualism and egalitarian individualism. There is an argument there, but I rather doubt that thezman read it carefully enough to get it.

[thezman:] This [a shorter book] would make for a nice, crisp two-hundred-page book. Instead, these bits are spread over five hundred pages, mixed with material that is highly debatable. People familiar with the history of the early church, for example, will scratch their head at the assertions made in chapter five. The section on Puritanism often seems to contradict what he said in early chapters about individualism. A professional editor could have pointed this out and forced a rethinking of these chapters.

It’s not professional to complain about the statements in Chapter 5 without saying what was puzzling. And the chapter on Puritanism shows that essentially it started out as what one might call a group of individualists (because of their evolutionary background as northern Europeans). This concatenation of individuals formed a cohesive group via powerful social controls embedded in Calvinism. In America, the Puritans originated with the intention of keeping non-Puritans out of Massachusetts (building “the proverbial city on a hill”), but this gradually gave way, mainly because of the colonial policies of the British government preventing the colony from restricting immigration and settlement. During the nineteenth century, several intellectual offshoots of Puritanism, having escaped the powerful social controls of Calvinism, revealed themselves to be radical individualists (e.g., the libertarian anarchists).

[thezman:] Another problem with the book is that it is not really about individualism so much as a way to support his theory of group evolutionary strategy. As a result, he reduces group behavior to individual motivations. This sort of reductionism is common among older right-wing writers for some reason. That generation has always had a fetish for assigning base human desires to the behavior of groups. For some reason, emergent behavior lies beyond their intellectual event horizon.

Sorry, but I don’t get this; I would like to see examples where I reduce group behavior to individual motivations or assign “base human desires to the behavior of groups.” The whole point of cultural group selection theory (which has gradually become eminently respectable) is that groups are a fundamental category of natural selection, that groups are far more than a concatenation of individuals—an idea I first developed regarding the ancient Spartans (Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (Plenum, 1988) and later applied to traditional Jewish groups (A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger, 1994). Take a look at Chapter 1 of the latter; it’s a cultural group selection argument. Think of a military unit. Group behavior is not a simple function of individual motivations but of a hierarchical command structure enforced by rigid discipline; cheaters in the ranks are often forced to suffer severe penalties, thereby solving the fundamental problem of group selection: human groups, unlike the vast majority of animals, are able to develop social controls and  ideologies that prevent individual cheating detrimental to group interests. This is a major theme of A People That Shall Dwell Alone where I show that heretical Jews were dealt with harshly.

Moreover, my argument is definitely not biologically reductionist, since there is a major role for cultural innovation via human general intelligence and its control over the modular mechanisms of the lower brain (see here and here on the links between general intelligence and innovation, solving novel problems, and solving old problems in new ways). My view is that ideologies are not reducible to the deterministic output of evolved modules, and this should have been apparent from reading the book, especially Chapters 5 and 8. From Chapter 5:

Religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by implicit [modular] processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[3] For example, people are able to effortfully suppress sexual thoughts, even though there is a strong evolutionary basis for males in particular becoming aroused by sexual imagery. Thus, under experimental conditions, male subjects who were instructed to distance themselves from sexually arousing imagery were able to suppress their sexual arousal. Imagine that instead of a psychologist giving instructions, people were subjected to religious ideas that such thoughts were sinful and would be punished by God.

Ideologies such as the Christian ideology of the sinfulness of sexual thoughts are a particularly important form of explicit processing [i.e., non-modular processing linked to general intelligence] that may result in top-down control over behavior. That is, explicit construals of the world may motivate behavior. For example, explicit construals of costs and benefits of religiously relevant actions mediated by human language and the ability of humans to create [emphasis added here] explicit representations of events may influence individuals to avoid religiously proscribed food or refrain from fornication or adultery in the belief that such actions would lead to punishments in the afterlife.

Ideologies, including religious ideologies, characterize a significant number of people and motivate their behavior in a top-down manner—i.e., the higher cognitive functions involving explicit processing located primarily in the prefrontal cortex are able to control the more primitive (modular, reflexive) parts of the brain such as structures underlying sexual desire. Ideologies are coherent sets of beliefs. These explicitly held beliefs are able to exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions.

There is no reason to suppose that ideologies are necessarily adaptive. Ideologies often characterize the vast majority of people who belong to voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a particular religious sect). Moreover, ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls—rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in religious institutions [e.g., Marxist control of the educational system in the USSR]. The next section illustrates these themes as applied to regulating monogamy in Western Europe.

Ideologies are cultural creations enabled by human general intelligence and language; they are not a deterministic outcome of evolved psychological mechanisms. In Chapter 8 I discuss the ability of ideologies such as racial egalitarianism created by elites throughout the West that dominate the media and academia to control evolved tendencies toward ethnocentrism—a major problem for White people now. Hence, I absolutely reject biological reductionionism. Thus the title of my book, The Culture of Critique. Culture is critical and underdetermined by our evolutionary history.

[thezman:] The final criticism of the book is that it fails to explain why individualism has led the West to the verge of self-extinction. It has become an article of faith in certain circles that Western individualism is the cause of decline. Some argue that it makes it possible for tribal minority groups to exert undue influence on society to the detriment of the majority population. If so, then why now and not a century ago or five centuries ago when the West was far more fragmented?

Again, I think the argument is quite clear: the rise of a substantially Jewish elite (i.e., thezman’s “tribal minority”) hostile to the traditional people and culture of the West discussed extensively in Chapters 6 and 8, and continued in Chapter 9. From Chapter 9:

So, what went wrong? Why, little more than a half century after the countercultural revolution, is the West on the verge of suicide, everywhere inundated by other peoples—peoples that are typically far more clannish, far more prone to corruption (an endemic problem in much of the Third World where relationships are based primarily on kinship rather than individual merit and trust of non-kin), and often of demonstrably lower intelligence. This has continued to the point that Western peoples are on the verge of becoming minorities in areas they have dominated for hundreds or, in Europe, thousands of years.  Ultimately, if present trends continue, their unique genetic heritage will be lost entirely. One need only look at the demographic trend lines in all Western countries, steady declines in the White percentage of the world population, and generally below-replacement White fertility in the context of massive immigration of non-Whites. Extinction, after all, is just as much a part of the story of life as the evolution of new life forms.

This ongoing disaster for the traditional people of America is the direct result of the rise of a new elite as a result of the 1960s countercultural revolution. This new elite despises the traditional people and culture of America.

The above is essentially a reference to the argument from Chapter 6 on the decline of the WASP elite and the rise of a substantially Jewish elite, culminating in the 1960s countercultural revolution and recounted in my book The Culture of Critique (especially Chapter 3). The above passage continues:

The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and academe were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism discussed throughout this volume. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of these activist intellectuals, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The triumph of these intellectual movements to the point of consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil.

It was noted in Chapter 6 that during the period of ethnic defense in the 1920s, Darwinist thinking on race was common throughout Western culture and assumed prominence among many U.S. immigration restrictionists, energized by the changing ethnic balance of the United States. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that the intellectuals who became influential beginning in the 1930s (particularly the Boasian school of anthropology) targeted Darwinian theories of race as well as individual identities based on White racial group identity. For example, attacking racial identities in favor of atomized individualism for European-Americans was a central strategy of the Frankfurt School. Group identities based on race and even the family, were portrayed as an indication of psychopathology. Radical individualism was thus promoted by intellectuals who retained a strong allegiance to their own group and self-consciously promoted group interests.

These ideologies fell on particularly fertile soil because they dovetailed with Western European tendencies toward individualism. And whereas individualism has been the key characteristic of Western peoples in their rise to world dominance, these ideologies and their internalization by so many Europeans now play a major role in facilitating Western dispossession.

In particular, the ideology that White identity and having a sense of White interests are signs of psychopathology has made it impossible in mainstream media and academia to argue for the legitimate interests of White people in having homelands and in avoiding becoming minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds, and in the case of Europe, thousands of years. Such ideologies are disseminated by the mainstream media—including conservative and libertarian media—and throughout the educational system, from elementary school through university.

They have in effect created a moral community that is radically opposed to the interests of Whites. And as with the Puritans, the new elite has been able to create a culture of altruistic punishment in which White people punish fellow Whites who deviate from the dogmas of the moral community created by the new elite, even at the cost of compromising the long-term interests of themselves and their descendants.

These ideologies have been increasingly buttressed by powerful social controls. As discussed in Chapter 8, in much of the West these controls include formal legislation punishing critics of immigration and Western dispossession. Because of the First Amendment, such statutory controls are in their infancy in the United States but are likely to gain traction in the coming years if the left gains power.

However, informal controls are also very effective in the United States and throughout the West. For example, many people have been fired from their jobs as a result of the actions of activist organizations simply phoning their employers. These organizations take advantage of the moral community created by media and academic elites over the last 50 years by limiting the influence of dissident individuals and exposing them to public scrutiny, thereby subjecting them to ostracism and job loss. The effectiveness of these tactics relies on elite consensus and conformist popular attitudes for their effectiveness. Scientifically based ideas that were entirely respectable less than a century ago now result in ostracism and job loss.

You can disagree with that (please do!), but it’s unprofessional to review this book without mentioning the book’s discussion of the role of the rise of the Jews in creating the culture of Western suicide. But once again, a critical piece of the argument is missing from the review. One wonders if thezman did anything more than thumb through the book.


[1] Christopher H. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture (Issue, #1, April, 2010), unpaginated; see also K. MacDonald, K. (2009). Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture. Evolutionary Psychology, 7(2), 208–233.

西洋文化をユニークにしたものは何か (“What Makes Western Culture Unique”)

What Makes Western Culture Unique? 翻訳

Kevin MacDonald

西洋文化をユニークにしたものは何か

原文:http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/west-toq.htm

 

一般に、文化のユニークさは自然由来か教育由来かのどちらかである。これは昔から変わらない二項対立である。
しかし我々は現在これらの問題について昔よりもより良く扱える立場にあり、そして自然由来説と教育由来説のどちらも重要であることを説明しようと思う。
西洋文化は、どのような生物学的/進化論的理論でも予測がつかないほどの独特の文化的変貌を経験してきたが、同時にユニークな進化の歴史もあった。
西洋文化は、世界の他の文明や文化を築いた人々とは遺伝的に異なった人々によって構築された。
西洋文化が他の伝統的文明と比較してユニークな文化的プロファイルを持つことを以下で論じる。

1. カトリック教会とキリスト教

2. 一夫一妻制の傾向

3. 核家族が基本のシンプルな家族構造の傾向

4. 結婚が両性の合意に基づいており、相互の愛情を基本にする傾向が強い

5. 拡大血縁(extended kinship relationships)とその互恵関係の重視を避け、エスノセントリズムが比較的弱い

6. 個人主義へ向かう傾向。国家に対する個人の権利、代議制政府、道徳の普遍主義化、自然科学へ向かう傾向

私のバックグラウンドは進化生物学の分野であり、性の進化論を扱った時に最初に感じた疑問の一つは、「なぜ西洋文化は一夫一妻制なのか?」だった。
性の進化論は非常にシンプルである。女性は生殖に多大な投資が必要である。妊娠、授乳、そして育児は大抵膨大な時間を要求する。
その結果、女性の生殖には厳しい制約がある。最高の条件を用意してもらっても、最大でも20人程度の子どもしか育てようがない。
しかし、男性にとっては生殖のコストは低い。結果として、男性は複数の配偶者から恩恵を得ることも可能で、富と力を持つ男性はそれを活用して可能な限り多くの配偶者を確保することも期待できる。
要約すれば、富と力を持つ男性による集中的な一夫多妻制は男性にとって最も適切な戦略であり、個々人の男性の生殖の成功にとって最も適切な振る舞いである。

この理論は十分に支持されている。世界中の伝統的な社会では、富と生殖活動の成功との間に強い関連性がある。裕福で力のある男性は非常の多数の女性をコントロールできる。
中国、インド、イスラム社会、新世界文明、古代エジプト、古代イスラエル等の世界中の全ての伝統的文明のエリート男性は、大抵数百人から数千人にもなる側室を持っていた。
サブサハラ・アフリカでは女性は一般的に男性の扶養なしで子どもを育てることができるので、結果として、男性はできるだけ多くの女性をコントロールするために競争する低レベルの一夫多妻制になった。
これらいずれの社会においても、これらの関係から産まれた子どもは合法的だった。彼らは財産を相続することができ、世間から蔑まれることもなかった。
中国の皇帝には数千人の側室がおり、モロッコのスルタンは888人の子どもを持つことでギネスブックに登録されている。

勿論、一夫一妻制が標準の社会は他にもある。生態学的に課せられた一夫一妻制と社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制とを区別することが一般的である。
一般に、生態学的に課せられた一夫一妻制は、砂漠や寒冷地等の非常に過酷な生態的条件への適応を強いられた社会で見られる。
このような過酷な条件下では、各男性の投資は一人の女性の子供達に向かわざるを得ず、更に多くの女性をコントロールすることは不可能である。
基本的考え方としては、過酷な条件下では女性は一人で子どもを育てることが不可能で、男性からの手助けが必要である。
このような条件が、進化論的に意味を成すほど長期間続いた場合には、人口は一夫一妻制に向かう強い傾向を発達させると予想できる。

実際に、一夫一妻制の傾向が強くなりすぎると、生態学的条件の変化に直面した場合でも一夫一妻制に向かう心理的・文化的傾向へとつながることが予想できる。
私はヨーロッパ人の進化で正にこのことが起きたのだと提案しており、以下で詳述する。

Richard Alexanderは”socially imposed monogamy” (SIM)[社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制]という用語で、過酷な生態的条件なしの一夫一妻制を定義した。
過酷な条件とは男性が直接子供を養育せざるを得ない条件のことを指す。それ以外の状況では、男性は自分にできる限り多数の妻を持つために競争すると予想でき、一般的にもそうなる。

 

西洋のユニークさの最初の例

世界の他の経済的先進地域の文化は、成功した男性による一夫多妻制が特徴であるのに対して、西洋社会には古代ギリシャ・ローマから現代にいたるまで一夫一妻制の強い傾向がある。

古代ローマには、一夫一妻制を志向する様々な政治制度や思想の背景があった。
ローマで社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制の起源は歴史から忘れられているが、一夫一妻制を維持させるための幾つかのメカニズムが存在した。
一夫一妻制の外で生まれた子どもの法的地位を下げる法律、離婚を妨げる習慣、不適合な性的行動に対してネガティブな社会意識、そして一夫一妻制が性的に正統だと定める宗教思想があった。
これらのメカニズムのバリエーションは西洋の歴史を通じて現代まで続いている。

共和制ローマの時代には、コンスルの任期制限、二人のコンスルを同時に存在させるなどで特定の貴族の一族が専制を敷けないようにする仕組みもあった。
下層市民の政治代表権についても、護民官を設置するなど徐々に法整備が進んだ。近親者の結婚を妨げる広範な法律も存在した。
これらの法律が親族集団内での富の集中を防ぎ、特定の貴族の一族の支配を防いだ。

ローマの一夫一妻制は完璧とは程遠かった。
特に帝政期には離婚が増加し、共和制初期の特徴だった一夫一妻制を性的に正統とする思想が衰退したことで、それまでの家族機能が全般的に崩壊した。
それでも法的には、少なくとも理論的には、ローマ文化は最後まで一夫一妻制だった。一夫多妻制は法律で認可されることは無く、一夫一妻制の外で生まれた子どもには相続権は無いままで、母親の社会的・法的地位を受け継ぐことになった。

カトリック教会はエリート男性に一夫一妻制を課そうとしたので、一夫一妻制を巡る争いは中世の重要な特徴となった。
カトリック教会は西洋文化のユニークな一面である。
13世紀に中国に訪れたマルコ・ポーロや1519年にアステカに到着したコルテスは、現地の世襲制貴族・神官・戦士・職人・農民から成る農業社会を観察し、彼ら自身の社会との多数の類似点に気づいた。
社会同士の間には圧倒的な収斂性があった。しかし彼らは、宗教組織が世俗組織より優れていると主張し、世俗エリートの生殖行動の抑制に成功しているような社会は西洋以外に見出せなかった。
また、Louis IX (St. Louis) のような、フランスを統治しながらも一人の妻と一緒に修行僧のような生活をし、聖地解放の十字軍に参加するような王は、西洋以外には見出せなかった。

一夫一妻制が法と慣習として根付いたローマ文明の相続人であったカトリック教会は、中世には勃興してきたヨーロッパ貴族に一夫一妻制を課すようになった。
確かに、中世初期のヨーロッパ貴族の一夫多妻制は、中国やイスラム諸国のハーレムと比べてかなり小規模であったが、それは中世初期のヨーロッパの経済状況が比較的未発達であったことも一因であろう。
なにしろ中国の皇帝は広大で人口の多い莫大な余剰経済生産を持つ国を持っていた。彼らは中世初期ヨーロッパの部族長より遥かに裕福で、その富と力ではるかに多くの女性を手に入れた。

とにかく、一夫多妻制はヨーロッパにも存在しており、中世には教会と貴族の紛争の種となった。
教会は「中世ヨーロッパで最も影響力が強く重要な政府機関」で、世俗的な貴族に対するこの権力の主要な一面が性と生殖の規制だった。
その結果、富裕層にも貧困層にも同じ性的規制が課せられた。
教会の目論見として「信徒の中でも特に最も有力な者に対し、教会の権威に服属して彼らの道徳、特に性道徳を監督させることを要求した。これにより、結婚を通して教会は貴族をコントロールできた。結婚と夫婦間の問題は全て教会に持ち込むことを強いられ、教会のみが解決できるとされていた。」

進化心理学の観点からこの時期の教会の行動を理解する試みは、この論文の範囲外である。
しかし、権力欲は人間の普遍的な欲求であるが、他の全ての人間の欲求と同様、それが必ずしも生殖の成功と関連する必要はないことに注意する必要がある。
同様に、人はセックスの欲求があるが、母なる自然がそのようにデザインしたにもかかわらず、セックスを沢山すれば必ずしも多くの子供を持つことに直結するとは限らない。

教会のユニークな特徴の一つとしては、教会が利他的であるというイメージ(及びその実態)がその人気を支えていた。
中世の教会は、女性をコントロールしたり生殖で高い成功を収めることに教会はあまり関心を持たないと人々に思わせるイメージ戦略に長けていた。
これは常にそうだったわけでは無い。中世の改革以前には、多くの司祭が妻や側室を持っていた。
Saint Bonifaceは742年にフランスの教会について以下のように書き、ローマ教皇に苦言を呈した。「いわゆる司祭補佐は、少年時代から放蕩、姦淫、あらゆる穢れに人生を浪費し、その悪評のままで司祭補佐になり、今やベッドに4、5人の側室を抱えたまま福音書を読む有り様である。」

にもかかわらず、聖職者の改革は本物だった。13世紀のイングランドの高位聖職者で妻や家庭を持った者はいなかったとされる。
この時代のイングランドでは下級聖職者の間でさえ妻帯者は例外的であり、この聖職者のモラルの高さは宗教改革の時代まで保たれた。

教会はこのように貞操と利他主義のイメージを人々に植え付けた。その権力と富は生殖の成功に向けられてはいなかった。
教会の真の生殖利他主義は、極めて禁欲的な修道生活の魅力が非常に広まった要因であったようだ。
この禁欲主義は、中世中期の一般大衆の教会に対する認識において重要な要素であった。
11世紀から12世紀にかけて数千の修道院が建てられた。独身の禁欲的な男性で構成され、主に裕福な層から採用された修道院は、「教会全体の精神性、教育、芸術、そして文化の伝達の雰囲気の担い手だった…」。
修道士の祈りが全てのクリスチャンの助けになるという思想が、修道士の利他主義のイメージを育んだ。

これらの修道会は、非常に人気の大衆イメージを教会にもたらした。
13世紀の間、托鉢修道士達(ドミニコ会、フランシスコ会)は教会に対する教皇の権力を増大させ、聖職者の独身主義の規則を施行し、縁故主義や聖職売買を防止し、世俗権力に対抗する力を教会に与える教会改革に貢献した。それには信徒の性的関係を規制する権力の獲得等が含まれた。
「初期の托鉢僧は、最貧困層の最も搾取される人々に寄り添うように自発的に窮乏し自らに極貧を課していた。それらは世俗の聖職者の出世主義と虚飾、修道院の富と排他性とは全く異なっていた。それらは良心を突き動かし、商業コミュニティの気前の良さを刺激した。」

中世中期に…社会の最も有力で最も富裕、あるいは少なくとも豊かな層の多数のメンバーが、地上の快楽を最大限満喫する最良のチャンスを自ら断念したことは、歴史上最も驚くべき現象の一つである。…
新しい志願者の流れは、禁欲生活(修道生活)の規則が古代の厳格さに戻った地域、それどころか古代以上に厳しくなった地域で特に印象的であった。…
禁欲生活(修道生活)を選ぶ主な動機は、仮に長い人生の中でその原動力の一部を喪失したり、最初から他の動機が混ざっていたとしても、常に禁欲主義の世界終末論的理念があったと考えるべきであろう。

13世紀の間、托鉢修道士は基本的に貴族や地主などの裕福な家族から採用された。彼らの両親は普通の親がそうであるのと同じく孫を待ち望んだため、大抵それに反対した。
「裕福な家族にとって、子どもが修道士になることは悪夢だった」。これらの家族は、子どもが修道生活に勧誘されるのを避けるために子どもを大学に送るのをやめ始めた。

社会の中心にあったのは、人々は利他的であるべきであり、裕福に生まれても禁欲主義に生きるべきだというイデオロギーを持つ機関であった。
これが結婚とセックスに関して教会の権威が認められた理由であるが、そもそも、なぜ裕福な人々が修道院に入って禁欲(独身)を貫くことになるのか不思議である。
好き嫌いは抜きにして、この時期の西ヨーロッパは優生学と無縁であった。

中世の教会は西洋文化のユニークな特徴であったが、この論文のテーマは、批判的な意味で、それが最も非西洋的であったということにある。
なぜなら、中世ヨーロッパはグループアイデンティティとそれへの献身意識が強い集団主義の社会であったからだ。
私は、西洋社会は個人主義への献身においてもユニークであり、実際に個人主義が西洋文明を定義づけると以下で論ずる。

中世後期の西欧社会の集団主義はしっかりしたものだった。
例えば聖地をイスラム教徒の支配から解放しようとする十字軍遠征に伴う多数の巡礼者と宗教的熱狂、イングループ的な熱狂が示すように、社会のあらゆる階層でキリスト教への激しいグループアイデンティティと献身が存在していた。
中世の教会は、ユダヤ人に対するクリスチャングループの経済的利害の鋭い意識を持っていた。大抵の場合でユダヤ人の経済的・政治的影響力を阻止し、クリスチャンとユダヤ人の社会的交流を防ぐべく努力した。

以上のように、特に托鉢修道士、その他多数の宗教者、世俗エリートに至るまで、高レベルの生殖利他主義が存在した。
世俗エリートの生殖利他主義は主に強制の結果であったが、フランスのルイ9世のように自発的な抑制の場合もある。
ルイはクリスチャンの性道徳の模範であっただけではない。
彼はユダヤ人に対するクリスチャングループの経済的利害の鋭い意識も持ち、聖地をクリスチャンの手に取り戻すべく十字軍にも深く関与した。
ヨーロッパ人は、強力かつ脅威であった非クリスチャンのアウトグループ(特にムスリムとユダヤ人)に対し、自分達をクリスチャンのイングループの隊列の一員と見なした。

教会の力に基づく統一されたクリスチャン社会の理想と、エリートの間での性的抑制との間には、確かにギャップがあった。
しかしこれらのギャップに関しては、多くの中世クリスチャン、特に中世社会の主人公である以下の人々の認識を考慮するべきである。
修道院運動、托鉢修道士、改革派教皇、熱狂した十字軍、敬虔な巡礼者、更には多くのエリート貴族でさえ、彼ら自身を高度に統一された超国家的な集団の一員と見なしていた。
この根本的な集団主義志向を理解すれば、心理学の観点から中世の集団への激しい献身と利他主義とが分かる。それは現代の西欧とはあまりにも異質である。

 

西欧の社会的に課せられた一夫一妻制を保つ社会コントロール&イデオロギー

西欧では、教会は貴族の生殖の利益と正反対の教会式結婚モデルを採用した。その結果、12世紀末には家族構成の変化と教会による一夫一妻制の強制が起きた。
一夫一妻制の強制と維持には以下の要因が最も重要であっただろう。

離婚の禁止。
裕福な男性は簡単に再婚できるので、簡単に離婚できる場合の最大の受益者である。
ユーラシアの他の社会では離婚は一般的で、キリスト教以前のヨーロッパ諸部族の間でも合法であった。しかし教会の見解では結婚は一夫一妻制かつ不可逆であった。
クリスチャンローマ皇帝の下で離婚はますます制限され、9世紀から12世紀にかけて教会は貴族の離婚事件を争点にして貴族との紛争に勝利した。
例えば12世紀後半、フランス王フィリップは妻を嫌いでかつ妻が不妊であったにもかかわらず離婚を阻まれた。王はパリの修道院で宗教者グループに対し謝罪させられた。

離婚が許される場合もあったが、それは最初の結婚で男児の跡継ぎを産めなかった場合に限られた。例えば中世フランスのルイ七世とEleanor of Aquitaineの場合が当てはまる。
(しかし教皇は、ヘンリー八世が跡継ぎを産めない妻と離婚することを許可しなかった)
1857年の改革まで、イギリスでは離婚は「一握りの大金持ち以外には不可能だった」。しかしそれ以後でも離婚率は低さを維持し続けた。
「16世紀に離婚を合法化したヨーロッパの地域では、離婚率がグラフの横軸と区別できるようになるまで300年以上かかった」
イギリスでの離婚率は1914年まで0.1/1000以下、1943年まで1/1000以下だった。(Stone 1990)1910年当時、離婚率が0.5/1000を超えるヨーロッパの国は無かった。
私の知る限りでは、離婚を非常に避けるこの傾向は西欧文明特有である。

非嫡出子に対するペナルティ。
進化論の観点から、生殖に関する社会コントロールの最も重要な面は、内縁関係・事実婚のコントロールである。
非嫡出子のコントロールは、内縁関係・事実婚を困難・不可能にし、非嫡出子の財産相続を妨げる等で非嫡出子の将来性を危うくさせることで、裕福な男性の生殖利益を抑制する。

教会は内縁関係、特に正妻を差し置いての内縁関係を熱心に抑え込んだ。
非嫡出子の相続に対する社会コントロールは大抵効果的だったようだ。教会は、合法的結婚が合法の子供を産み、それ以外は法的地位を持たないという姿勢だったが、特定の時代には私生児は他の子供より地位が高かった。(see below)
私生児の相続財産は教会や国が没収したため、私生児に財産を残そうと願っても当局に阻止される可能性があった。
ピューリタン時代のイングランドでは、遺言状に私生児は一切登場しなかった。

教会の直接の影響力以外にも、世俗権力や世論によって、非嫡出子の出生にはその他様々なペナルティが科せられた。
非嫡出子の父親と特に母親には追放や投獄が科せられ、母親はその地域を去ることを含めて妊娠を隠すあらゆる努力をするのが普通だった。
これらの社会コントロールの影響は非嫡出子の死亡率にまで及んだ。近世の英仏では非嫡出子の方が乳児死亡率が高かった。
女性は非嫡出子を大抵捨てた。非嫡出子は大抵死産として報告され、嬰児殺しを暗示しており、女性は時として堕胎によって非嫡出子の出産から逃れようとした。

エリートに対する内縁関係の統制。
中世にはエリート男性に対する内縁関係の統制はますます効果的になった。よって12世紀は極めて重要であろう。
この時代の例には、一夫一妻制を支持する社会・イデオロギー的コントロールをうまく回避したエリート男性たちの話もあり、エリート男性でありながら完全な一夫一妻制を守った話もある。
一般のパターンは、英国王の非嫡出子の数から読み取れる。1066年から1485年までの18人の英国王の内で10人が愛人を持ち、恐らく計41人の非嫡出子を持った。
1100年から1135年のヘンリー一世は、この内20人を持ち、さらに5人の非嫡出子を持つ可能性もある。中世では他に三人以上の非嫡出子を持った王はおらず、八人の王は非嫡出子を持った記録が無い。
ヘンリー一世は領土的野心のために大量の子孫を欲したユニークな王である。それでもヘンリーは非嫡出子を嫡出子より遥かに酷く扱った。嫡出子は甘やかされ、宮廷で手ほどきを受け、大貴族の生活が約束されていた。
一方で私生児は王位継承から除外され、大抵は結婚のチャンスすら無かった。
12世紀に起きた結婚に関する考え方と慣習の大きな変化を反映して、その後数世紀で非嫡出子の数と重要性は低下した。

中世以降の性行動の取り締まり。
中世の教会の主な目標の一つは、一夫一妻制の結婚外での性行為を取り締まることであった。性的違反の取り締まりは中世から少なくとも17世紀末まで教会裁判所の重要な仕事であった。
これらの裁判所は17世紀のイギリスで非常に活発で、淫行・姦通・近親相姦・違法同居などを訴追した。
これらの教会の処罰の有効性は地域と時代により異なるが、「犠牲者は仲間に追い回され、村八分にされて生計を奪われ、追放者として扱われた」という悲惨な結果の例もある。

17世紀の高等宗務官裁判所には、他の司法手続きから免除されそうな富裕層に対し、姦通に対する制裁を含めた制裁を課す権限が認められていた。
「法の下の平等のこのような強制執行により、裁判所は17世紀のイングランドの重要人物たちに嫌われた」。
治安判事などの世俗当局も、それらの犯罪を訴追する用意があった。例えばエリザベス朝の法令に基づき16世紀と17世紀の治安判事たちは、男女の性犯罪者に対し、さらし台に拘束し、腰まで服を脱がせて(女性は「背中が血まみれになるまで」)公開鞭打ち刑に処すと宣告するのが普通だった。

一夫一妻制を促進するイデオロギー。
最終的には社会コントロールに依存していたものの、中世の教会は一夫一妻制と性的抑制を促進するべく巧みなイデオロギーを発展させた。
一般にこれらの著作は、独身主義の道徳的優位性とあらゆる種類の婚外性行為の罪深さを強調した。一夫一妻制の結婚以外での全ての性関係は、近世から現代にいたるまで宗教権威によって例外なく非難された。夫婦のセックスは嘆かわしく罪深いがやむを得ないものとされ、妻に対する過度の情熱は姦淫と見なされた。
18世紀には比較的緩和されたが、19世紀には激しい反快楽主義の宗教的性イデオロギーが台頭した。

結論。
中世以来、社会コントロールとイデオロギーの巧みなシステムが、西欧の広い地域で程度の差はあれ一夫一妻制の完全な押し付けに成功した。
「中世初期の大きな社会成果は、富裕層と貧困層の双方に同じ性行動・家庭行動のルールを課したことにある。王は宮殿にいて、農民は小屋にいたが、例外は無かった。」
とはいえこのシステムは決して完全な平等主義では無かった。工業化以前のヨーロッパでは富と生殖の成功の間の正の相関があった。

西欧では一夫多妻制にペナルティを課して非一夫一妻制を生殖と関わらないものに変えたり、完全に抑圧する等の、驚異的な継続性を持つ様々な慣例があった。
これらの慣例の変化や政治・経済構造の大変化にも関わらず、ローマ文明から始まる西洋の家族制度は明らかに一夫一妻制の社会的押し付けを目指してきた。この努力は大部分成功した。

 

一夫一妻制の効果

一夫一妻制は西洋のユニークさの中心的面であり、複数の重要な効果を持つ。
一夫一妻制はヨーロッパ特有の「低圧」人口動態の必要条件である可能性が高い。この人口動態は、経済的欠乏期に高い割合の女性が晩婚になったり独身になった結果である。
一夫一妻制との関連で言えば、一夫一妻制の結婚では男女ともに貧しい者は結婚すらできない状態になる。しかし一夫多妻制では、貧しい女性が過剰にいても、裕福な男性にとって側室の価格が安くなるだけである。
例えば、17世紀末には40~44歳の未婚率は男女共に約23%であった。しかし経済的チャンスの変化に伴って18世紀初頭にはこの割合が9%まで低下し、それに伴い結婚年齢も下がった。
このパターンは一夫一妻制と同様、ユーラシアの階層社会の中ではユニークであった。

同様に、低圧の人口動態は経済状態にも影響したようだ。
結婚率は、人口増加の主な抑制要因であっただけではない。特にイギリスでは好景気に対応する結婚率の上昇が大きく遅れる傾向があったため、人口増加が食料供給にかける圧力より好景気時の資本蓄積の傾向が強かった。

経済の変動と人口動態の変動の間のローリング調整はこのように緩慢に発生した。実質賃金は緩やかに大きく上昇する傾向にあったので、産業革命以前の全ての国の飛躍を妨げてきた低所得の罠から抜け出すチャンスを得た。
実質賃金の長期的な上昇は需要の構造を変化させ、生活必需品以外の商品の需要を不釣り合いに強く押し上げる傾向がある。産業革命が起きた場合は生活必需品以外の部門の成長こそが特に重要になる。

よって一夫一妻制は、工業化の必要条件である低圧の人口動態をもたらしたと考えることもできる。
全体を見れば、女性の晩婚化・独身化がワンパターンで進んでいるわけでは無い。それより、結婚は経済的制約に左右される。
豊かな時代には男女共に結婚年齢が低下し、子供を残さない女性は減った。その結果、リソースの利用能力に非常に左右される結婚制度になった。
「ヨーロッパの重要かつ飛び抜けた特徴は、システム転換の軸となった、人口を経済に適応させる柔軟な結婚制度であった」
これは、一夫一妻制が西洋近代化に不可欠な基本概念の中心面であった可能性を示唆する。

一夫一妻制と子どもへの投資
一夫多妻では、リソースが生殖に割かれて子供への投資が比較的少なくなる傾向がある。一夫多妻の男性にとっては、追加の妻や側室、投資額が少なく済む彼らの子供に向けて追加投資するのが魅力的である。
一夫多妻社会では、追加の側室に投資すれば報酬が大きい傾向があり、その子供への投資も安く済む。
側室の子供には比較的小さな遺産が与えられ、社会的地位は下がるのが一般的であった。
ハーレム女性の子孫の性比は低く、圧倒的に娘が多い。理論的には、一般的に女性の方が交尾しやすいため、低投資で済む子孫に偏ることを示す。
これら側室の娘は父親に比べて社会的地位は低いものの、交尾はしやすい傾向にある。一方で上流階級の息子は身分の低い一族からの持参金競争の対象となった。
いずれにせよ、父親が側室の子供に時間・労力・金銭を投資する必要は殆ど無い。

しかし一夫一妻では、個々の男性が投資できるのは一人の女性の子供に限られる。
拡大された親族関係が衰退し(see below)、全ての社会階層で一夫一妻が制度化されると、 子どもたちへの支援は独立した核家族次第になった。
後述のように、この「シンプルな」家族こそが西洋近代化の決定的手段であった。

 

拡大血縁(extended kinship relations)の衰退と単純世帯の台頭

一夫一妻制の場合と同じく、拡大血縁の衰退にも教会が関与した。
しかしこの場合の教会の政策は、強力な中央政府の台頭に助けられた。中央政府は拡大された家族関係を抑制し、個人の利害を保証することで拡大家族の役割を継承した。

進化論の観点からは、親族関係の潜在的な重要性を過大評価するのは難しい。
生物学的血縁関係のために親族は共通の利害を持ち、協力や自己犠牲行動への閾値も低いであろう。
ローマ帝国末期に西欧の大部分に定住したゲルマン諸部族は、男性間の生物学的血縁関係に基づく血縁グループとして組織化されていた。彼らは血縁の絆に基づく強いグループ連帯感を持っていた。
「初期のゲルマン人は攻撃や飢饉の脅威に直面しても、官僚的帝国の保護と支援に頼ることができなかったため、共同体の各男女は家族や共同体の連帯の絆が体現するグループ・サバイバルという社会生物学の基本原則に固執する義務があった」。
この部族に基づく血縁集団の世界こそが、王や教会が根絶したいものだった。

拡大血縁に対する反対勢力
大規模かつ強力な血縁グループを根絶することは教会と貴族の双方にとって利益があった。
高度に中央集権化された国家権力は、それ自体で拡大血縁の重要性を下げる傾向があり、その権力が個人の利益を保護する場合には特にそうなる。
進化論の観点から見れば、拡大血縁グループはコストと利益がある。
利点はより広い親族から提供される保護と支援であるが、この利点にはコストも伴う。
1)親族からの互恵的なサービスの要求が高まる
2)親族は、ある個人が親族集団の中で他の人より過度に出世するのを妨害する傾向がある事実
3)平等主義と程遠い親族構造の中で自己を確立する困難さ
結果として、自分の利益が他の制度によって保護されている場合、例えば拡大血縁の利益は無くコストだけがある場合には、個人は拡大血縁グループに絡まるのを避けるであろう。
一般に、中央集権が弱体化すると、個人は拡大血縁グループの保護を求める傾向があり、国家権力が自分達の利益を充分守れる力を持つ場合には、それに伴って拡大血縁グループから逃げ出す。

単純な家族に基づき近親者への義務から解放された貴族が、単純な家族構造の農民を支配し、拡大血縁とは違う隣人や友人から成る社会に組み込まれた。それが、徐々に発展した西洋の図式である。
この社会構造は中世後期の成果である。中世後期には、英仏の農民にとって拡大血縁は重要ではなくなっていた。

教会の政策。
教会の政策の一つとして、教会は近親婚(近い血縁の結婚)に反対し、双方の同意のみに基づく結婚を支持して、西欧での拡大血縁の絆の根絶に貢献した。
近親婚については、教会は拡大し続ける個人の集団の間での結婚を禁じた。六世紀にはまたいとこまで、11世紀までには6th cousins、つまりgreat-great-great-great-great grandfatherが共通になる個人にまで禁止が拡大された。
明らかに、これらの近親婚の禁止の範囲は進化論で予測できる範囲より遥かに広い。
加えて、同様に遠い、婚姻で生じた親族(結婚で親族になった場合)や精神的親族の個人間(代父母としての親族)でも結婚は禁じられており、生物学的血縁は重要とされなかった。
この政策の効果は、拡大血縁のネットワークを弱体化させ、より広い親族グループへの義務から解放された貴族を生み出した。

教会のこれらの禁止命令がどのように正当化されたにせよ、貴族が教会の規則に従った証拠がある。
十世紀から十一世紀のフランス貴族の間で、4th or 5th cousinsより近い親族間の結婚はほとんど起きなかった。
これらの慣習は、近親婚の範囲の拡大が「結婚による血縁の強化」を排除して拡大血縁グループの連帯を妨げたので、拡大血縁グループを弱体化させた。
その結果、生物学的血縁が社会の頂点に集中することなく、貴族全体に分散して広がった。
より広い親族グループだけでなく家族の直系の子孫も恩恵を受けた。「世俗の高い地位の男性は、…自分の直系の子孫のためにできるだけ自分の財産と家族を一元管理しようとし、より広い親族は二の次だった」。

近親婚に対する政策に加えて、結婚における同意という教会の教義が、拡大血縁に対抗する力として働いた。
「家族・部族・氏族は個人に従属していた。もし結婚したいなら、自分で相手を選ぶことができ、教会はその選択を弁護する」。結婚は同意の結果として起こり、性交によって批准された。
結婚の基礎を、家族や世俗支配者の支配から当事者自身に譲渡させることで、教会は伝統的親族・家族の絆に対抗する権威を確立した。
結婚相手の選択の自由は近代を通してイングランドの原則であり、親のコントロールは人口の上位1%でのみ起こった。

 

西洋個人主義の民族的基盤

Magian(東方人)の人間は、上から下に降順で整列しており、「我々」なるものの空っぽな一部分にすぎず、全てのメンバーが代わり映えが無い。
肉体と魂としては彼は自立しているが、異質で高次な別のものも彼の中に宿っている。それは彼の全ての気配と信念とを単なるコンセンサスの一員にする。それは神の放出物として、自我の自己主張の可能性を排除する。
彼にとっての真理は、我々、特にヨーロッパ精神を持つ我々にとっての真理と全く異質である。
個人の判断に基づく我々の認識論的方法は全て、彼にとっては狂気とのぼせ上がりである。その科学的結果は、その真の性質と目的において精神を混乱させ欺く邪悪な所業である。
この洞窟の世界の中にはMagianの究極かつ近寄りがたい秘密がある。自我が考え・信じ・知ることの不可能性こそが、これらの宗教の基礎の前提にある。

ファウストの世界観
「Wolfran von Eschenback、セルバンテス、シェイクスピア、ゲーテにとって、個人の人生の悲劇の線は、内側から外側へ、ダイナミックに、機能的に発展する」。
「…神が見せる、または見せたと言われる仮面の言葉が、殴っても空々しく聞こえるならば、神を疑うことさえする」オズワルド・シュペングラー

これまでのところでは、同意と愛、一夫一妻制、拡大血縁の重要性の低下に基づく個人主義的な核家族の出現は、単に私が述べた社会プロセスの結果に過ぎないと思う人もいるだろう。
しかし実際には、これらの変化が世界の他の地域より遥かに素早くかつ徹底的に発生したのである。
西洋世界は、個人主義の全てのマーカーが基本的な特徴である唯一の文化圏であり続けている。一夫一妻制、夫婦の核家族、国家に対抗する個人の権利としての代議制政府、道徳普遍主義、科学。
更に言えばこの文化は、これら特徴を幾つか備えたローマ文明の強固な基盤の上に築かれた。
よって私は、これらの傾向は西欧文化圏のユニークなものであり、民族的基盤が支えていると提唱する。
西欧人がユニークな生物学的適応を果たしているとまでは思わないが、全人類は適応の特徴の程度にそれぞれ違いがあり、ユニークな文化の進化を可能にするには十分な量の違いがあっただけである。
同様に、全ての人間は象徴表現や言語のような特徴的な精神的能力を備えているが、文化に大きな影響を与えるには十分な量の人種間のIQの違いが存在する。恐らく、少なくとも質的な違いをもたらすには十分な量の違いがある。

私は、最近の進化の過程で、ヨーロッパ人はユダヤ民族やその他の中東の人種集団と比べてグループ間自然選択を受けにくかったと提唱する。
これは元々Fritz Lenzが提唱したもので、氷河期の厳しい環境のために北欧人は少人数グループで進化し、社会的孤立の傾向があるというものだ。
この観点は、北欧人がグループ間競争に必要な集産主義メカニズムを持っていないことを示唆するものでは無い。集産主義メカニズムが比較的巧みではない、そして/またはメカニズム発現に、より激しいグループ間紛争が必要だと示唆している。

この観点は生態学の理論と一致する。生態学的に不利な環境下で、適応は他のグループとの競争よりも不利な物理環境に対処することに向けられる。そのような環境下では、拡大血縁ネットワークや高度集産主義グループに対する選択圧力は弱いであろう。
進化論的なエスノセントリズムの概念化は、イングループ競争でのエスノセントリズムの有用さを強調する。したがってエスノセントリズムは物理環境との格闘では全く重要でない。また、そのような環境は巨大なグループを支えられないであろう。

ヨーロッパ人グループは北ユーラシア・北極周辺の文化圏の一部である。この文化圏は、寒冷で生態学的に不利な気候に適応した狩猟採集民に由来する。
このような気候では男性が家族を養う圧力と一夫一妻制に向かう傾向がある。生態が、進化的に重要になる期間に一夫多妻制と大グループを支えなかったからである。
これらの文化では、男性と女性の両系統が双務的に重要になる親族関係が特徴であり、一夫一妻制の条件下で期待される以上に両親の貢献度が対等になると示唆される。
また、拡大血縁は重視されず、結婚は族外婚、つまり親族グループの外に向かって起こる傾向がある。
これらの特徴は全て、ユーラシア南部の旧世界中央部の文化圏の特徴とは反対である。この文化グループにはユダヤ人やその近縁の近東グループがある。

このシナリオは、北欧人が個人主義に向かいやすいことを示唆する。なぜなら彼らは拡大血縁に基づく巨大な部族グループを支えられない生態的環境に長期間住んでいた。
ミトコンドリアDNAによると、ヨーロッパ人の遺伝子の約80%は三~四万年前に中東からヨーロッパに到着した人々に由来する。
これらの集団は氷河期を生き延びた。四万年間北部の寒い曇りの環境で進化したヨーロッパ人は、金髪と青い目だけでなく環境に適応した気質と生活様式の嗜好を発達させたであろう。

これらの人々は農耕種族ではなく、狩猟採集民であった。経済生産のレベルは比較的低いため、狩猟生活では男性は女性を得やすい。
なぜなら、人間の脳に必要なエネルギー量は質の高い食事でのみ満たされるからである。
人間の脳は体重の2%しかないが、全エネルギーの20%を消費し、胎児期には70%を消費する。
これが、一夫一妻の心理的基盤であるつがいの絆(女性が育成し男性が養育する協力体制)を五十万年前から始めさせた。
狩猟には「相当な経験、質の高い教育、長年の集中的な実践」も必要だった。言い換えればこれは高投資の子育てである。
また人間の狩猟は、走力や体力よりも認知能力に左右されるため、知能も必要である。
狩猟のシナリオは複雑かつ常に変化する。どの動物種、個体も、性別・年齢・気候・地形などの内的条件に応じて固有の行動特性を示す。
これらの傾向は全て、単位面積当たりのエネルギーが少ない北方で強い。

歴史的証拠が示すところでは、ヨーロッパ人、特に北西ヨーロッパ人は、強力な中央政府が台頭して自分達の利害が保護された時、比較的早く拡大血縁ネットワークと集産主義の社会構造を捨てた。
中央の権威が台頭すると、世界の普遍的傾向として拡大血縁のネットワークが衰退する。
しかし北西ヨーロッパの場合では、この傾向は遅くとも中世後期までには早くも台頭し、それ以前に既に西欧特有の「単純世帯」は生まれつつあった。
単純世帯は、一夫一妻とその子供たちが基本である。
この世帯のタイプは、フィンランドを除くスカンジナビア・イギリス諸島・ネーデルラント・ドイツ語圏・北フランスで典型的である。
これはユーラシア他地域で典型的な、兄弟とその妻の二組以上の親族カップルから成る共同世帯構造とは対照的である。
産業革命以前の単純世帯は、結婚年齢は遅く、未婚の若者を使用人として働かせて富裕層の家庭の間をぐるぐる回らせることが特徴であった。
共同世帯は、男女とも結婚年齢は早く、出生率は高く、必要に応じて二つ以上の世帯に分離できることが特徴であった。

この単純世帯システムは、個人主義文化の基礎の特徴である。
個人主義の家族は拡大血縁の義務と制約から解放され、世界の他地域で典型的な息苦しい集産主義の社会構造からも解放され、家族自身の利害を追求できるようになった。
個人の同意と夫婦の愛に基づく結婚が早い時期に、親族関係と懸念事項に基づく結婚に取って代わった。

単純世帯の形成に向かうこの比較的強い傾向は、民族性に基づくであろう。
過酷な気候に適応した人々にとって、単純世帯は生態学的に合理的であるだけではない。以前に指摘したように、この傾向はゲルマン民族の間でより強い。
英仏海峡のサンマロとフランス語圏であるスイスのジュネーブを結ぶ「永遠の線」から北東に住むゲルマン民族の区分に対応して、フランス国内に大きな違いが存在することは興味深い発見である。
この地域は18世紀の農業革命以前から、成長する町や都市を養える大規模農業を発展させていた。
それを支えたのは町の熟練職人たちであり、中規模農家たちが形成する大きな階層であった。
彼らは「馬、銅のボウル、ガラスの杯、大抵は靴も持っていた。彼らの子供達は頬がふっくらしており、肩幅は広く、赤ちゃんまで小さな靴を履いていた。これら子供たちは誰も第三世界のくる病の膨れた腹をしていなかった。」
北東部はフランスの工業化と世界貿易の中心になった。

北東部は識字率でも南西部と差があった。19世紀初頭、フランス全体の識字率は約50%に対し、北東部は100%近く、少なくとも17世紀から差が生じていた。
更に身長でも顕著な差があり、18世紀の新兵のサンプルでは北東部の人々の方が2センチ近くも背が高かった。
Ladurieは以下のように指摘した。軍は南西部の背の低い人々をあまり受け入れないため、人口全体で見ればその差はもっと大きいであろう。
家族史家は以下のように指摘した。経済的に独立した核家族への傾向は北部で顕著であり、南東部に移るにつれて共同世帯への傾向が見られる。

これら調査結果は、民族の違いがヨーロッパでの家族形態の地理的違いに寄与していることを強く示唆する。
ゲルマン民族は進化の過程で資源が乏しい北欧で自然選択されたため、個人主義に向かう生物学的傾向が強く、核家族の社会構造へ向かう傾向も強いことが示唆された。
これらグループは拡大血縁グループにあまり魅了されず、拡大血縁ネットワークの衰退に伴って状況が変化すると、単純世帯の構造が素早く出現した。
この単純世帯の構造が比較的容易に採用されたのは、このグループがすでにそのユニークな進化の歴史によって、単純世帯システムに向かう比較的強い心理的素因を持っていたからである。

ゲルマン民族とヨーロッパ他地域の間のシステムの違いは重要ではあるものの、西欧とユーラシア他地域との間の全般的違いほど大きくはない。
単純世帯に向かう傾向と人口動態の変動は北西ヨーロッパで最初に生じたが、比較的早期に全ての西洋諸国に広がった。

西洋のユニークさのもう一つの要素として、単純世帯を特徴とする北西ヨーロッパの農民家庭では、若者を他の家庭の使用人に送り出す慣習があった。
工業化以前のイギリスでは30~40%の若者は他人の家庭に使用人として出向いており、使用人は20世紀まで最大の職業グループであった。
使用人を雇う慣習は、単に外部の人間を導入して誰かのニーズを満たすだけにとどまらない。
人々は時には自分の子供達を使用人に送り出すと共に、同時に縁のない使用人を受け入れた。
使用人になったのは貧しい土地を持たない人々の子供達だけではない。裕福な大農家でさえ子供たちを使用人としてよそに送り出した。
17、18世紀には、人々は結婚後早い段階で、自分の子供達が仕事を手伝えるようになる前に使用人を受け入れ、子供が十分成長して人手が余ったら子供をよその家庭に使用人として送り出した。

これは、深く根付いた文化的慣習が、結果として親族関係に基づかない高水準の互恵関係に結びついたことを示唆する。
この慣習はまた、非親族を世帯の一員に迎え入れるという、相対的なエスノセントリズムの欠如も物語っている。
これらの工業化以前の社会は、拡大血縁を中心に組織されたものでは無く、産業革命と近代世界にあらかじめ適応していたことが容易に理解できる。
ユーラシア他地域では、世帯は親族だけで構成される傾向が強かった。

興味深いことに、古典的中国のような性競争社会では、女性使用人は家長の側室になりやすく、世帯のリソースを直接生殖に回すことができた。
よって西欧モデルでは、裕福な男性はユーラシアの性競争社会よりもはるかに多くの非親族を養っていた。
過酷な気候で生きる狩猟採集社会が大抵、肉などのリソースの共有を目指す非常に巧みな相互扶助のシステムを持つことは興味深い。
工業化以前の西欧に非常に典型的な、非親族同士の相互扶助のシステムも、過酷な北方の気候で長期間進化してきた遺品の一つではないだろうか。

親族社会のしがらみから解放された単純世帯の確立の後には、西洋近代化の他の全てのマーカーが続いた。
個人が国家に対して権利を有する制限された政府、個人の経済的権利に基づく資本主義経済企業、個人主義的な真理の探究としての科学。
個人主義社会は共和制の政治制度と科学的探究の制度を発達させ、グループは最大限の透過性を持ち、個々のニーズを満たせない場合には離反される可能性が高いであろう。

 

個人主義の結婚。結婚の基礎である同意・愛・伴侶関係。

夫婦の同意に基づく単純世帯の台頭は、家族が拡大血縁のしがらみの中にある状況と比較して、結婚相手の個人的な資質がより重要になったことを意味した。
拡大家族が支配する状況では、結婚は一般的に血族婚になり、家族の戦略に左右される。
単純世帯システムでは、結婚相手の個人的特性がより重視される。知能、性格、心理的相性、社会経済的地位などである。

集産主義社会が結婚の際に家系や遺伝的血縁の程度を重視するのに対して、個人主義社会は個人的魅力、例えば恋愛や共通の利害を重視する傾向がある。
ジョン・マネーは、北欧人のグループが結婚の基礎として恋愛を重視する傾向が比較的強いことを指摘した。
Frank Salterは以下のように提唱した。北欧人グループは性行動に関して多くの個人主義的適応を持つ。それには寝取られを防ぐための社会コントロール機構よりむしろ、恋愛や遺伝特性へのより強い傾向がある。
心理的なレベルでは、個人主義の進化論的基盤には、集産主義文化のように家族の戦略や強制によって課されるのではなく、適応的行動が本質的にやりがいがある、恋愛のようなメカニズムが含まれる。
これは、自由に同意できる多かれ少なかれ平等なパートナー間の個人的な求愛と、女性の見合い結婚が成立するまで男性親族に隔離・管理される近東のpurdahの制度の違いである。

中世からパートナー間の愛情と同意に基づく伴侶結婚に向かう傾向が始まり、最終的には高位の貴族の結婚の決定まで左右するようになった。
「大半の社会とは違い、西洋の工業社会では男性と妻の感情の関係が第一優先される」
実際、これは東洋と西洋の階層社会の間で普遍的に異なる点である。
一夫一妻の結婚の基礎としての恋愛の理想化は、古代末期のストア派や19世紀のロマン主義などの西洋の世俗知的運動をも周期的に特徴づけてきた。
他の社会で配偶者間の愛情が存在しないという訳ではない。西洋社会ではそれがより重要であるというだけだ。

中世以来の西洋の結婚の特徴としての、結婚への個人の同意は、結婚相手の個人的な特徴をより重視する個人を生み出すであろう。
その効果の一つは、結婚相手の年齢の平準化である。結婚年齢が比較的平準であることと晩婚化は、西欧結婚システムの特徴である。
女性の結婚年齢は、西欧ではユーラシアやアフリカの他地域よりも高く、これは共同家族が特徴の西欧農民社会を含めても同じ傾向だった。
実際、1550-1775年のイギリスの大規模なサンプルでは、女性の平均結婚年齢は1675年まで26歳前後で変動していたが、1800年には24歳過ぎにまで低下し始めた。

単純世帯がもたらしたもう一つの結果は、愛情とつがいの絆が結婚の基礎になったことである。
結婚は、親族グループ間や親族グループ内での政治同盟、純粋な経済関係、単なる性的競争の側面としては重要性を失い、愛情を含む対人魅力に基づくようになった。
結婚生活での愛情は、単純世帯の台頭と共に文化的な規範となった。
西洋の求愛現象(ユーラシア・アフリカ文化の中でユニークな)は、将来の結婚相手が個人の相性を評価できる期間を提供した。
マルサスの言葉を借りれば、両性に「同類の気質を見出し、結婚生活が幸福より不幸を多く生むことにならないよう、強く持続的な愛着を形成する」機会を与えた。

 

ヨーロッパ人の個人主義と民族意識の低下

ここまでで私が描いたシナリオの要約は以下である。西ヨーロッパ人が比較的エスノセントリックでないのは、拡大血縁が比較的機能しない悪環境の下で長期間自然選択されてきた結果である。
西欧人は拡大血縁の束縛から解放され、原点回帰し、近代化の原動力となった単純世帯を容易に採用した。伴侶結婚、国家に対抗する個人の権利、代議制政府、道徳普遍主義、科学。
その結果、創造性、征服、富の創造などの、現代まで続く並外れた時代が到来した。
しかし、ユダヤ教に関する私の著作のテーマの一つは以下である。個人主義は、凝集的グループ戦略に対して貧弱で無力な戦略である。

西洋では、近代化に必要な前段階として拡大血縁グループが排除されたが、グループ間競争が全面的に排除されたわけでは無い。
19世紀以降、集産主義者で民族意識が強いユダヤ人たちと、西洋個人主義エリートたちとの間で競争が起きた。

人類学的には、ユダヤ人は旧世界中部の文化圏に由来する。
この文化圏は、西洋社会組織の特徴とは正反対である。Table 1に示すように、ユダヤ教は集産主義であり、エスノセントリズム・xenophobia(外国人憎悪)・moral particularism(道徳非普遍主義)に陥りやすい。

Table 1 省略

ユダヤ教に関する私の著作では、個人主義社会は、歴史的にはユダヤ教が代表する凝集的グループの侵略に対して特に脆弱であるというテーマが随所に登場する。
進化経済学者の最近の研究は、個人主義文化と集産主義文化の違いについて、興味深い洞察を提供する。
この研究の重要な面は、個人主義グループ間の協力の進化をモデル化する点にある。
人々は「ワンショットゲーム」で離反者を利他的に罰する。このゲームでは参加者同士は一度しか交流せず、交流相手の評判はゲームを左右できない。
この状況は、参加者は親戚関係のない他人であるため、個人主義文化をモデル化している。
驚くべき発見として、公共財の寄付を高水準で行った被験者は、寄付しない参加者を、罰するコストをわざわざ費やしてまで罰する傾向があった。
そして、罰せられた人は、以降のラウンドの参加者が前のと違うのを知っていたにもかかわらず、戦略変更してより多くの寄付をするようになった。
研究者たちは以下のことを提唱した。個人主義文化圏の人々は、free ridingに対するネガティヴな感情反応を進化させ、自分がコストを払ってでもフリーライダーを罰するようになった。これは”altruistic punishment”(利他的罰)と呼ばれる。

この研究は本質的に、個人主義の人々の間の協力の進化モデルを提供する。
彼らの結果は個人主義グループに最も当てはまる。なぜなら、そのようなグループは拡大血縁グループに基づいていないため、離反がより起きやすい。
高レベルの利他的罰は一般的に、拡大家族を基盤とする親族ベースの社会より、個人主義の狩猟採集社会で多く見られる。
彼らの結果は、ユダヤ人グループや他の高度集産主義グループのような、伝統社会では拡大血縁・既知の親族関係・メンバー間の繰り返しの相互関係に基づくグループには、ほとんど当てはまらない。
そのような状況では主体者は拡大血縁ネットワークに巻き込まれており、もしくはユダヤ人のように民族グループで固まっているため、協力者を知っており、将来の協力への期待も込みである。

よって、ヨーロッパ人は正にこの研究がモデル化した類のグループである。
彼らは拡大家族のメンバーとよりも見知らぬ人との協調性が高いグループであり、マーケットでの関係や個人主義に傾倒しやすい。

これは以下のような魅力的な可能性を示唆する。ヨーロッパ人同士を互いに離反させようとするグループにとっての鍵は、ヨーロッパ人自身が道徳的非難に値することを彼らに納得させることで、ヨーロッパ人同士の間で利他的罰を引き起こさせる点にある。
ヨーロッパ人は根っからの個人主義者であり、他のヨーロッパ人がフリーライダーであり道徳的非難に値すると見なすと、道徳的怒りでそのヨーロッパ人に対して容易に決起する。これは、狩猟採集民として進化した過去に由来する、利他的罰への強い傾向の発現である。
利他的罰の判断を下すのに、相対的な遺伝距離は無関係である。フリーライダーはマーケットにおいて見知らぬ人であり、つまり彼らは利他的罰を行う側とは家族・部族のつながりは無い。

ピューリタンは、利他的罰を求めるこの傾向の典型例として、非常に興味深く影響力のあるヨーロッパ人グループである。
ピューリタンの決定的特徴は、道徳問題としてユートピアの大義を追求する傾向である。彼らは’よりハイレベルの法’に対するユートピア的訴えや、政府の主要目標は道徳にあるという信念に左右されやすい。
ニューイングランドは「人間の信念を完成させ」、「沢山の’isms(主義)’の生みの親」になるのに最も適した肥沃な土地であった。
政治的代替案を、一方を悪魔の化身として、他方を道徳的に必要不可欠なものとして、極端に物事を対照的に考える傾向があった。
ピューリタンの道徳的熱情は、彼らの「深い個人的な敬虔さ」、つまり聖なる生活だけでなく厳格で勤勉な生活を送りたいという彼らの献身への熱意にも見て取れる。

ピューリタンは道徳的正しさを求めて、自分達の遺伝的いとこに対してさえ聖戦を繰り広げた。
これは、拡大血縁に基づくグループよりも、協力的な狩猟採集グループの間で多く見られる利他的罰の一形態であることが示唆される。
例えば、南北戦争につながった政治・経済の複雑さがどうであれ、ヤンキーの奴隷制に対する道徳的非難がレトリックを左右し、アフリカからの奴隷の代理人として英米人の近親者同士が行った大規模な殺戮はピューリタンの中で正当化された。
軍事的には南部連合との戦争は、アメリカ人の生命と財産にこれまでで最大の犠牲を強いた。
ピューリタンの道徳熱と、悪人への厳罰を正当化する傾向は、以下のコメントにも見て取れる。「ニューヨークのHenry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Churchの会衆派牧師は’ドイツ人を絶滅させ…1000万人のドイツ兵の不妊手術と女性の隔離’を呼び掛けるほどだった」。

これらが現代西洋文明に特徴的な、現在見られるような利他的罰である。
一度ヨーロッパ人が自分達自身の民族が道徳的に破産したと確信したら、あらゆる罰の手段を自分達の民族自身に対して用いるであろう。
他のヨーロッパ人を包括的な民族・部族共同体の一部と見なすよりも、同じヨーロッパ人を道徳的非難に値する存在と見なし、利他的罰の標的と見なした。
西洋人にとっては道徳は個人主義的である。フリーライダーが共同体規範を侵害すると、利他的攻撃で罰せられる。

一方で、ユダヤ教のような集産主義文化に由来するグループ戦略は、親族関係やグループの絆が優先されるため、それら策略に対して免疫がある。
彼らの道徳は非普遍主義である。グループの利害のためならどのようなことも正当化する。
これらグループの進化の歴史は、見知らぬ人とではなく親族同士との協力が中心であったため、利他的罰の伝統を持たない。

よって、ヨーロッパ人を破滅させる最良の戦略は、ヨーロッパ人に自身の道徳的破産を確信させることである。
私の著作「The Culture of Critique(批判の文化): An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements」の主題は、これこそがユダヤ人知的運動がやってきたことだと証明する点にあった。
彼らは、ユダヤ教はヨーロッパ文明よりも道徳的に優れており、ヨーロッパ文明は道徳的に破綻しており、利他的罰の標的に相応しいと訴えてきたのだ。
その結果、ヨーロッパ人は自身の道徳的堕落を一たび確信すれば、利他的罰の発作で自分達自身を破滅させようとする。
道徳的な猛攻が利他的罰の発作を誘発した結果として、西洋の文化が全面的に解体され、最終的に民族の実体のようなものさえ死滅するようなことが起きる。
こうしてユダヤ人知識人たちの間では以下の激しい努力が見られる。ユダヤ教の道徳的優越性と歴史上の不当な被害者の役割のイデオロギーを維持する努力。同時に、西洋の道徳的正当性を猛攻撃する継続的努力。

つまり、個人主義社会は、ユダヤ教のような高度集産主義・グループ最優先の戦略を持つ人々にとって望ましい環境である。
非ヨーロッパ系移民の問題が、米国のみならず西洋世界全体で深刻かつ争点だらけの問題となり、他地域では全くそうなっていないことは重要である。
ヨーロッパ起源の民族だけが、世界の他の民族に門戸を開いて、数百年占有してきた自民族の領土の支配権を失う危険にさらされている。
そして彼らは大部分、移民活動家たちが自身の民族的目標を達成するべく巧みに利用した道徳的反省に、引っ張られ誘導されていた。

西洋社会には個人主義ヒューマニズムの伝統があり、それが移民制限を困難にしている。
例えば19世紀には最高裁は、中国人排斥法を、個人に対してではなくグループに対して立法しているという理由で二度却下している。
移民制限の知的根拠を構築する努力の道には紆余曲折があった。
1920年まで、移民制限論は北西ヨーロッパ人の民族的利害の正当性を根拠としており、人種主義の思想を帯びていた。
これらの発想はいずれも、Israel Zangwill等のユダヤ人移民推進活動家が強調したように、人種・民族グループへの帰属が公的な知的是非を問われない共和制・民主主義社会の政治・道徳・人道イデオロギーとの調和が困難なものであった。
1952年のMcCarran-Walter act immigration actを巡る論争で、これら民族的自己利害の主張が「同化可能性」のイデオロギーに置き換えられたことは、反対派にとっては「racism(人種主義)」の煙幕に過ぎないと受け取られた。
結局この知的伝統は、本書で検討した知的運動の猛攻の結果として倒壊し、ヨーロッパ出身諸民族の民族利害を守る中心の柱も倒壊した。

ユダヤ人知識人の非常に顕著な戦略の一つは、社会の民族基盤が全般的に損なわれるほどの radical individualism(急進的個人主義)とmoral universalism(道徳普遍主義)の促進であった。
言い換えればこれら運動は、西洋社会がすでに個人主義と道徳普遍主義のパラダイムを採用しており、自民族に対する利他的罰を行う傾向が強い点を利用した。
これら運動は、ユダヤ教を強い凝集力のあるグループベースの運動として無傷で残したまま、ヨーロッパ人に残っていたグループ凝集の源泉を弱体化させた。
この戦略の手本はフランクフルト社会研究学派の取り組みである。左翼の政治イデオロギーや精神分析家たちについても同様であろう。
端的に言えば、非ユダヤ人グループ(特にヨーロッパ系)のアイデンティティは精神病の指標とされている。

拡大血縁の衰退と個人主義の台頭にもかかわらず、ヨーロッパ人はより大きな共同体の一員としての意識を完全に放棄してはいなかった。
米国のヨーロッパ人は20世紀に入っても、人種に基づく民族感覚を保ち続けていた。
この民族感覚、人種の一員であるという意識は、ダーウィン主義の学問が支えていた。ダーウィン主義者たちは、人種間の差異を確立された科学的知見と考えただけでなく、白色人種をユニークな才能を持つ人種と考えていた。
しかし、生物学の視点で民族感覚を見出そうとするこの最後の試みは急激に衰退した。The Culture of Critiqueで論じたような知的運動の結果、今日では学界で恐怖の目で見られている。

 

Conclusion

西洋の個人主義社会が、ヨーロッパ起源の人々の正当な利害を守ることができるかどうか、疑わしい。
現在の傾向から言って、個人主義を放棄できないなら、最終的にはヨーロッパ人の遺伝・政治・文化影響力はかなり減少していくと予想できる。
これはパワーの前代未聞の自主放棄である。進化論者は、どこかの段階で人口の大部分がそのような自主放棄に抵抗すると予想する。
抵抗する彼らは恐らく、我々の中のよりエスノセントリックな人々であろう。
皮肉なことにこの抵抗反応は、グループに奉仕する集産主義のイデオロギーと社会組織を採用し、ユダヤ教の一面を模倣するであろう。
ヨーロッパ人の衰退が進むか止まるかに関わらず、グループ進化戦略としてのユダヤ教が西洋社会の針路を左右し続けるであろう。

 

引用・参考文献等は原文を参照

Guillaume Durocher’s “The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Ancient Greece”

 

The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Ancient Greece
Guillaume Durocher
Amazon Createspace, 2021

This is an extended version of the foreword to The Ancient Ethnostate.

Guillaume Durocher has produced an authoritative, beautifully written, and even inspirational account of the ancient Greeks. Although relying on mainstream academic sources, he adds an evolutionary perspective that is sorely lacking in contemporary academia at a time when the ancient Greek civilization, like the Western canon in toto, has been subjected to intense criticism reflecting the values of the contemporary academic left. To get a flavor of the current state of classics scholarship, consider the following from the New York Times:

Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field [of classics] was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.” …

For several years, [Dan-el Padilla] has been speaking openly about the harm caused by practitioners of classics in the two millenniums since antiquity: the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms. Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education. Last summer, after Princeton decided to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs, Padilla was a co-author of an open letter that pushed the university to do more. “We call upon the university to amplify its commitment to Black people,” it read, “and to become, for the first time in its history, an anti-racist institution.” Surveying the damage done by people who lay claim to the classical tradition, Padilla argues, one can only conclude that classics has been instrumental to the invention of “whiteness” and its continued domination.

In recent years, like-minded classicists have come together to dispel harmful myths about antiquity. On social media and in journal articles and blog posts, they have clarified that contrary to right-wing propaganda, the Greeks and Romans did not consider themselves “white,” and their marble sculptures, whose pale flesh has been fetishized since the 18th century, would often have been painted in antiquity. They have noted that in fifth-century-B.C. Athens, which has been celebrated as the birthplace of democracy, participation in politics was restricted to male citizens; thousands of enslaved people worked and died in silver mines south of the city, and custom dictated that upper-class women could not leave the house unless they were veiled and accompanied by a male relative. They have shown that the concept of Western civilization emerged as a euphemism for “white civilization” in the writing of men like Lothrop Stoddard, a Klansman and eugenicist. Some classicists have come around to the idea that their discipline forms part of the scaffold of white supremacy — a traumatic process one described to me as “reverse red-pilling” — but they are also starting to see an opportunity in their position. Because classics played a role in constructing whiteness, they believed, perhaps the field also had a role to play in its dismantling.[1]

Durocher’s treatment is a refreshing antidote to this contemporary academic orthodoxy. Unlike so many scholars, whose main concern is to score political points useful to the anti-White left and thereby improve their standing in the profession, he has attempted to present an accurate account of these writers and the world they were trying to understand and survive in. The phrase “so-called white culture” in the above quotation from Rachel Poser’s New York Times article is indicative of this mindset. Durocher does not shy away from discussing slavery, the relatively confined role of women, or the cruelty that Greeks could exhibit even toward their fellow Greeks. But he also emphasizes the relative freedom of the Greeks, their intellectual brilliance, and the ability of the two principal city-states, Athens and Sparta, to pull together to defeat a common foe and thereby save their people and culture from utter destruction.

The contemporary academic left has abandoned any attempt to understand the Greeks on their own terms in favor of comparing Western cultures (and typically only Western cultures) to what they see as timeless moral criteria—criteria that reflect the current sacralization of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But even the most cursory reflection makes it obvious that moral ideals such as valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion are not justified because of their value in establishing a society that can survive in a hostile world. They are valued as intrinsic goods, and societies that depart from these ideals are condemned as evil. Recently there was something of a stir when a video was released by the website of Russia Today, a television station linked to the Russian government, comparing ads for military service in Russia and the United States.[2] Ads directed at Russians show determined, physically fit young men engaged in disciplined military units and difficult, dangerous activities under adverse conditions. On the other hand, the recruitment ad for the U.S. military features a woman who, although physically fit, dwells on her pride in participating in the marriage of her two “mothers.” The contrast couldn’t be more striking. The Russian military is seeking the best way to survive in a hostile world, while the American military is virtue-signaling its commitment to the gender dogmas of the left.

Durocher emphasizes that the Greeks lived in a very cruel world, a world where “the fate of the vanquished was often supremely grim: the men could be exterminated, the women and children enslaved as so much war booty. Our generation too often forgets that our political order exists by virtue of a succession of wars — from the revolutionary wars of the Enlightenment to the World Wars of the Twentieth Century — and it cannot be otherwise.” We in the contemporary West have a life of relative ease, wealth, and security that was unknown to the ancient Greeks who were threatened not only by other Greek poleis, but by foreign powers, particularly the aggressive and much more populous Persian Empire. In such an environment, there is no room for virtue signaling. Survival in a hostile, threatening world was the only worthwhile goal:

Before anything else, a good city-state was one with the qualities necessary to survive in the face of aggressive foreign powers. This was ensured by solidarity among the citizens, each being willing to fight and die beside the other. Hence the citizen was also a soldier-citizen.

 Aristocratic Individualism. Ancient Greece was an Indo-European culture, and thus prized military virtues, heroism, and the quest for honor, fame, and glory. Homer “tells of a terrible war for sexual competition, for the heart of beautiful Helen, and its inevitable tragedies. But the maudlin self-pity and effeminacy of our time are unknown to Homer: if tragedy is inevitable in the human experience, the poet’s role is to give meaning and beauty to the ordeal, and to inspire men to struggle for a glorious destiny.” “Their way of life is one of ‘vital barbarism,’ having the values of ruthless conquerors, prizing loot, honor, and glory above all.” Achilles “prefers a brief but glorious life to one of lengthy obscurity.” “Quick, better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches, slowly crushed to death – helpless against the hulls in the bloody press, by far inferior men!” (Iliad, 15.510). Trust was confined to people within one’s social circle. Strangers and foreigners could not be trusted: “As in the Iliad, in the Odyssey strangers and foreign lands are synonymous with uncertainty and violence. This is a world without mutual confidence. Even the gods do not trust in one another.”

This sense of heroic struggle in a hostile environment is central to the classical world of Greece and Rome, and was evident among the Germanic peoples who inherited the West after the fall of the Roman Empire. As Ricardo Duchesne notes, the Indo-European legacy is key to understanding the restless, aggressive, questing, innovative, “Faustian” soul of Europe. Indo-Europeans were a “uniquely aristocratic people dominated by emerging chieftains for whom fighting to gain prestige was the all-pervading ethos. This culture [is] interpreted as ‘the Western state of nature’ and as the primordial source of Western restlessness.”[3] Durocher expands on this beautifully:

This Aryan ethos is what so appealed to Nietzsche: a people not animated by pity or guilt, nor trying to achieve impossible or fictitious equality in an endlessly vain attempt to assuage feelings. Rather, Hellenic culture, driven by that aristocratic and competitive spirit, held up the ideal of being the best: the best athlete, the best warrior, the best poet, the best philosopher, or the most beautiful. This culture also held up the collective ideal of being the best as a whole society, for they understood that man as a species only flourishes as a community.

This competitive ethic so central to the West is fundamentally individualistic, not based on extended kinship. It is in strong contrast to the contemporary West where the main goal of far too many of its traditional peoples is to uphold moral principles and to feel guilt for differences in wealth and accomplishment. In individualist Western culture, reputation is paramount, and in the modern West, reputation revolves mainly around being an honest, morally upstanding, trustworthy person, with moral rectitude defined by media and academic elites hostile to the Western tradition. In my Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition I ascribe this fundamental shift in Western culture to the rise of the values of an egalitarian individualist ethic that originated among the northwestern European hunter-gatherers—an ethic that is in many ways the diametrical opposite of the Indo-European aristocratic tradition.[4] This new ethic began its rise to predominance with the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and remains most prominent in northwest Europe, particularly Scandinavian cultures.

The aristocratic individualism of the ancient Western world implies a hierarchy in which aristocrats have power over underlings (although there was the expectation of reciprocity), but there is egalitarianism among peers. “The kings … are not tyrants: they are expected to welcome legitimate criticism from their peers and even tolerate a good deal of backtalk.” In the Iliad, the Achaean army is made of several kings and is therefore fractious, with no one having absolute power over the rest. Decisions therefore require consensus and consultation. Aristocratic individualism is always threatened by what one might term a degenerate aristocracy—the ancient tyrants and early modern European monarchs kings who aspired to complete control. For example, King Louis XIV of France (reigned 1643-1715) had power over the nobility undreamed of in the Middle Ages while his legacy of absolute rule led ultimately to the French Revolution.

Herodotus notes that a common strategy for ruling elites was to form a distinct and solidary extended family by only marrying among themselves, for example by the ruling Bacchiadae clan of Corinth (Herodotus, 5.92). This also occurred in the European Middle Ages and later as elites severed ties with their wider kinship groups and married among themselves—likely a tendency for any aristocratic society.

But even apart from peers, there was an ideal of reciprocity within the hierarchy—a fundamental feature of Indo-European culture. As I noted in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships were characteristic of [Proto-Indo-Europeans] and [Indo-Europeans] and this practice continued with the various I-E groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers, and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree). (p. 34)

Such reciprocity is apparent in Homer’s world: “The Homeric ideal of kingship is one of familial solidarity, moderation, trust, piety, strength, and reciprocal duties between king and people, to the benefit of one another. Hierarchy and community are fundamentally necessary in Homer’s world. Followers require leadership and, indeed, servitude in a sense makes them foolish.”   

Greek Collectivism: The Necessity of Social Cohesion

Given the exigencies of survival in a hostile world, Greek conceptions of the ideal society were firmly based on realistic assessments of what was necessary to survive and flourish. In my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition,[5] I noted that the Puritan-descended intellectuals of the nineteenth century, like today’s academic and media left, were moral idealists, constructing ideal societies on the basis of universalist moral principles, such as abolitionist ideology based on the evil of enslaving Africans. The Greeks also had ideas on the ideal society, but they were not based on moral abstractions independent of survival value. And among those values, social cohesion was paramount. Because of its inherent individualism and the practical necessity of social cohesion, Western culture has always been a balance between its individualism and some form of social glue that binds people together to achieve common interests, including forms of social control that impinge on the self-interest of at least some individuals, but also providing citizens with a stake in the system.

There is thus a major contrast between the Greeks and a slave-type society such as the Persian Empire—a contrast the Greeks were well aware of. For example, Aristotle wrote “these barbarian peoples are more servile in character than Greeks (as the peoples of Asia are more servile than those of Europe); and they therefore tolerate despotic rule without any complaint” (Politics, 1285a16). The social cohesion of the West has typically resulted from all citizens having a stake in the system. In the world of Homer, kings understood that they would benefit if the citizens are willing to fight and die for their homeland: “The Odyssey reaffirms the Iliad’s tragic message: that good order and the community can only be guaranteed by the willingness to fight and die for family and fatherland.” And Herodotus noted that Athens became a superior military power after getting rid of tyrants and developing a citizenry with a stake in the system: “while they were under an oppressive regime they fought below their best because they were working for a master, whereas as free men each individual wanted to achieve something for himself” (Herodotus, 5.78).

My interest in understanding the West has always revolved around kinship, marriage, and the family as bedrock institutions amenable to an evolutionary analysis. An important aspect of social cohesion in the West has been institutions that result in relative sexual egalitarianism among males, in contrast to the common practice (e.g., in classical China, and the Middle East, including Greece’s main foreign enemy, the Persian Empire) where wealthy, powerful males maintained large harems, while many men were unable to procreate. In ancient Greece, the importance of social cohesion can be seen in Solon’s laws on marriage (early sixth century BC). Solon’s laws had a strongly egalitarian thrust, and indeed, the purpose of his laws was to “resolve problems of deep-seated social unrest involving the aristocratic monopoly on political power and landholding practices under which the ‘many were becoming enslaved to the few.’”[6] As Durocher notes, Solon “abolished existing private and public debts and banned usurious loans for which the penalty for defaulting was enslavement. In his poems, Solon condemns the nation-shattering effects of usury and poverty, which lead unfree citizens to wander the world, homeless.”

The concern therefore was that such practices were leading to a lack of social cohesion—with people not believing they had a stake in the system. As in the case of the medieval Church, the focus of Solon’s laws on marriage was to rein in the power of the aristocracy by limiting the benefits to be gained by extra-marital sexual relationships. In Solon’s laws, legitimate children with the possibility of inheritance were the product of two Athenian citizens, a policy approved by popular vote in 451 B.C. As Pericles noted, bastards were to be “excluded from both the responsibilities and privileges of membership in the public household” (in Patterson, 2001, 1378). Given that wealthy males are in the best position to father extramarital children and provide for multiple sexual partners, it’s critical that Solon’s legislation (like the Church’s policies in the Middle Ages) was explicitly aimed at creating sexual egalitarianism among men—giving all male citizens a stake in the system.

Greek thinkers and lawgivers thus had no compunctions about reining in individual self-interest in the interest of the common good. For example, “Aristotle’s discussion of population policy and eugenics reflects the view which the Greeks took for granted: that the biological reproduction and quality of the citizenry was a fundamental matter of public interest. The citizen had a duty to act and the lawmaker to regulate by whatever means necessary to achieve these goals.” The public interest in achieving a society able to withstand the hostile forces arrayed against it was paramount, not the interests of any particular person or segment of the society, including the wealthy.

Greek cultures therefore often had strong social controls aimed at creating cohesive, powerful groups where cohesion was maintained by regulating individual behavior, effectively making them group evolutionary strategies. These cultures certainly did not eradicate individual self-interest, but they regulated and channeled it in such a manner that the group as a whole benefited. For example, in constructing an ideal society, Aristotle rejected a mindless libertarianism in favor of a system that had concern for the good of the society as a whole. Anything that interfered with social cohesion or any other feature that contributed to an adaptive culture had to be dealt with—by whatever means necessary.

Solon’s laws on marriage and inheritance would therefore have been analyzed by Aristotle for their effect on social cohesion. Egalitarianism, like everything else, had to be subjected to the criterion of what was best for the community as a whole, and that meant that societies should be ethnically homogeneous and led by the best people. Aristotle’s arguments for moderate democracy are not founded on abstract “rights” or a moral vision, ideas that have dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment, “but rather, are based on what benefits the community as a whole. … Aristotle’s citizens rule and are ruled in turn, this reciprocity fostering a spirit of friendship between social classes.” “Aristotle is clear … that private property is not a right enabling individuals to be as capricious and selfish as they please, but merely a sensible way of producing wealth, whose aim must ultimately be the well-being of the community.” The social cohesion needed in a hostile world was a fundamental value that trumped any concern for individual rights. Durocher:

Aristotle’s unabashed ethics are typically Hellenic: there is no egalitarian consolation for the ugly and the misbegotten, there is no pretense that all human beings can be happy and actualized. Rather, Aristotle, like the Greeks in general, celebrates excellence. … This vision is in fact unabashedly communitarian and aristocratic: Firstly, the human species cannot flourish and fulfill its natural role unless it survives and reproduces itself in the right conditions; secondly, the society must be organized so as to grant the intellectually-gifted and culturally-educated minority the leisure to exercise their reason.

Sparta was even more egalitarian among the Spartiates, giving the citizens a stake in the system, but with an ethic that rejected effeminacy and weakness and in which individuals strived to achieve excellence in military skills. Also likely promoting social cohesion was that the Helot slave class was an outgroup that Spartans understood needed to be rigorously controlled, setting up a very robust ingroup-outgroup psychology that promoted social cohesion and high positive regard for the ingroup along with disparagement and even abuse of the outgroup. Spartan social cohesion is legendary and likely contributed to the intense solidarity needed to defeat the far more numerous Persian Empire:

By their triumph in the Persian Wars, the Greeks preserved their sovereignty and identity, setting the stage for the Golden Age of Athenian power and philosophy. The Greeks triumphed because of the winning combination of their culture of civic freedom and solidarity, and the successful alliance between Athens and Sparta, which required both cities to adopt a conciliatory attitude. Herodotus’s Histories are a poignant commemoration of the fragility and value of Greek unity.

The results have resounded down the ages:

In the Persian Wars, the Greeks showed that a small and scattered nation could, with luck, skill, and determination, triumph even over the greatest empire of the day. This example can still inspire us today and discredit all defeatism. In their victory, the Greeks were able to pass down an enormous political, cultural, and scientific heritage to generations ever since. No wonder John Stuart Mill could claim: “The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”

This emphasis on giving individuals a stake in the system as a mechanism for social cohesion thus has strong roots in Western culture. The political system of the Roman Republic was far from democratic, but it was also far from a narrow oligarchy, and the representation and power of the lower classes gradually increased throughout the Republic (e.g., with the office of tribune of the plebs). The highest offices, consuls and praetors with military and judicial functions, were elected by the comitia centuriata, a convocation of the military, divided into centuries, where people with property had the majority of the vote (people were assigned to a century depending on five classes of property ownership, with the lower classes voting after the wealthy; the election was typically decided before the poorer centuries could vote).

A deep concern with social cohesion enabled by having a stake in the system was also apparent in the Germanic world after the fall of the Roman Empire. Although unquestionably hierarchical, early medieval European societies had a strong sense that cultures ought to build a sense of social cohesion on the basis of reciprocity, so that, with the exception of slaves, even humble members near the bottom of the social hierarchy had a stake in the system. The ideal (and the considerable reality) is what Spanish historian Américo Castro labeled “hierarchic harmony.”[7]

For example, the Visigothic Code promulgated by seventh-century King Chindasuinth of Spain illustrates the desire for a non-despotic government and for social cohesion that results from taking account of the interests of everyone (except slaves). Regarding despotism:

It should be required that [the king] make diligent inquiry as to the soundness of his opinions. Then, it should be evident that he has acted not for private gain but for the benefit of the people; so that it may conclusively appear that the law has not been made for any private or personal advantage, but for the protection and profit of the whole body of citizens. (Title I, II)[8]

Thus the concern with social cohesion is a strong current in Western history.

Ethnic Diversity and Lack of Social Cohesion.

Aristotle was well aware that extreme individualism may benefit some individuals who gain when a culture discourages common identities. I recall being puzzled when doing research on the Frankfurt School that intellectuals who had been steeped in classical Marxism had developed an ideology that prized individualism—jettisoning ethnic and religious identities in favor of self-actualization and acceptance of differences.

In the end the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology. … The prescription for gentile society is radical individualism and the acceptance of pluralism. People have an inherent right to be different from others and to be accepted by others as different. Indeed, to become differentiated from others is to achieve the highest level of humanity. The result is that “no party and no movement, neither the Old Left nor the New, indeed no collectivity of any sort was on the side of truth. . . . [T]he residue of the forces of true change was located in the critical individual alone.”[9]

Aristotle understood this logic, noting that both extreme democrats and tyrants encouraged the mixing of peoples and losing old identities and loyalties. Aristotle:

Other measures which are also useful in constructing this last and most extreme type of democracy are measures like those introduced by Cleisthenes at Athens, when he sought to advance the cause of democracy, or those which were taken by the founders of [the] popular government at Cyrene. A number of new tribes and clans should be instituted by the side of the old; private cults should be reduced in number and conducted at common centers; and every contrivance should be employed to make all the citizens mix, as much as they possibly can, and to break down their old loyalties. All the measures adopted by tyrants may equally be regarded as congenial to democracy. We may cite as examples the license allowed to slaves (which, up to a point, may be advantageous as well as congenial), the license permitted to women and children, and the policy of conniving at the practice of “living as you like.” There is much to assist a constitution of this sort, for most people find more pleasure in living without discipline than they find in a life of temperance. (Politics, 1319b19)

The ancient Greeks were also aware that ethnic diversity leads to conflict and lack of common identity. As Aristotle noted, “Heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time. Most of the cities which have admitted settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction.” Realizing this, tyrants often took advantage of this evolutionary reality by importing people in order to undermine the solidarity of the people they ruled over.

It’s interesting in this regard that such efforts to undermine the homogeneity of populations continue in the contemporary West. In the wake of World War II, the activist Jewish community, in part inspired by the writings of the Frankfurt School,[10] made a major push to open up immigration of Western countries to all the peoples of the world, their motive being a fear of ethnically homogeneous White populations of the type that had turned against Jews in Germany after 1933.[11] Corroborating this assessment, historian Otis Graham notes that the Jewish lobby on immigration “was aimed not just at open doors for Jews, but also for a diversification of the immigration stream sufficient to eliminate the majority status of western European so that a fascist regime in America would be more unlikely.”[12] The motivating role of fear and insecurity on the part of the activist Jewish community thus differed from other groups and individuals promoting an end to the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws which dramatically lowered immigration and restricted immigration to people largely from northwestern Europe. These same intellectuals and activists have also pathologized any sense of White identity or sense of White interests to the point that it’s common for White liberals to have negative attitudes about White people.

 

Greek Race Realism. The ancient Greeks were vitally concerned with leaving descendants and they understood that heredity was important in shaping individuals—a view that is obviously adaptive in an evolutionary sense. Aristotle writes that “good birth, for a people and a state, is to be indigenous or ancient and to have distinguished founders with many descendants distinguished in matters that excite envy” (Rhetoric, 1.5). The Greeks also had a sense that they shared a common ethnicity and culture with other Greeks, resulting in common expressions of the need for ethnic solidarity, particularly in the wars with Persia. Durocher notes that “One cannot exaggerate the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of kinship and pan-Hellenic identity throughout the conflict.”

The Greeks were thus proud of their lineage and had a sense of common kinship. However, it was not the sort of extensive kinship that is typical of so much of the rest of the world. There was an individualist core to Greek culture stemming from its Indo-European roots, resulting in the famously fractious Greek culture, with wars between Greek city-states. Even during the Persian wars, several Greek city-states failed to join the coalition against Persia, and “the sentimental love for Hellas was often overridden by personal or political interests. Prominent Greek leaders and cities frequently collaborated with the Persians, either because the alternative was oblivion or simply for profit.”

As in individualist cultures generally, lineage is confined to close relatives, and there are no corporate kinship-based groups that own property or where brothers live together in common households: “Despite typically vague modern notions of a primitive clan-based society as the predecessor to the historical society of the polis, early Greek society seems securely rooted in individual households—and in the relationships focused on and extending from those households.[13]

And congruent with contemporary behavior genetic research, there was an expectation that children would inherit the traits of parents: King Menelaus is impressed by Odysseus’s son Telemachus: Surely you two have not shamed your parentage; you belong to the race of heaven-protected and sceptered kings; no lesser parents could have such sons” (4.35-122). Menelaus later adds: “What you say, dear child, is proof of the good stock you come from” (4.549-643).

Reflecting the common Greek view that it was necessary to regulate society in order to achieve adaptive goals of the city as a whole, the Greeks accepted the idea that individual behavior needed to be regulated in the common interest, resulting in eugenic proposals by philosophers and, in the case of Sparta at least, practices such as killing weak infants. Both Plato and Aristotle accepted eugenics as an aspect of public policy. Plato was particularly enthusiastic about eugenics—Durocher labels it “an obsession,” and, like many evolutionists, such as Sir Francis Galton, he was much impressed by animal breeding as a paradigm for eugenic policies for humans. For Plato, eugenics was part of a broader group evolutionary strategy he proposed for the Greeks. As Durocher notes, Plato advocated

a great reform of convention grounded in reason and expertise, to transform Greece into a patchwork of enlightened, non-grasping city-states, cultivating themselves intellectually and culturally, reproducing themselves in perpetuity through systematic and eugenic population policies, avoiding fratricidal war and imperialism among themselves, and working together against the barbarians, under the leadership of the best city-states. Taken together, I dare say we can speak of a Platonic Group Evolutionary Strategy for Greece.

It’s worth noting in this context that the basic premises of eugenics are well-grounded in evolutionary and genetic science and were broadly accepted in Western culture, even among progressives, from the late nineteenth century until after World War II when the entire field became tarred by association with National Socialism. It is thus part of the broad transformation among Western intellectuals away from thinking in terms of racial differences and the genetic basis of individual differences—to the point that it’s currently fashionable to deny the reality of race and any suggestion that race differences in socially important traits such as intelligence could possibly be influenced genetically. As Durocher notes, “Race is, especially in geographically contiguous land masses, typically a clinal phenomenon, with gradual change in genetic characteristics (i.e., allele frequencies) as one moves, for instance, from northern Europe to central Africa.” However, in the contemporary West, intellectual and cultural elites have sought “to suppress cultural chauvinism and ethnic solidarity, for example by glorifying foreign cultures and shaming native ethnic pride. Such nations are unlikely to survive long however.” So true. 

Scientific Think as Characteristic of the West

In his discussion of Herodotus, Durocher describes the “beginnings of scientific thought concerning both nature and society, for instance with plausible speculations about the formation of the Nile Delta, micro-climates, and the effect of the natural environment on human biology and culture.” Analogical thinking is fundamental to science (e.g., Christiaan Huygens’s use of light and sound to support his wave theory of light; Darwin’s analogy between artificial selection and natural selection—with obvious implications for eugenics; the mind as a blank slate or computer). Scientific thinking is thus apparent in the eugenic recommendations noted by Greek philosophers based, as they were, on analogies with animal breeding.

Such scientific thinking is a unique characteristic of Western individualist culture. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich describes “WEIRD psychology”—i.e., the psychology of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic people. A major point is that the psychology of Western peoples is unique in the context of the rest of the world: “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. … When reasoning WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world.” (21)

Henrich notes that people from cultures with intensive kinship are more prone to holistic thinking that takes into account contexts and relationships, whereas Westerners are more prone to analytic thinking in which background information and context are ignored, leading ultimately to universal laws of nature and formal logic. I agree with this,[14] but, while Henrich argues that analytical thinking began as a result of the policies on marriage enforced by the medieval Church, this style of thinking can clearly be found among the ancient Greeks. Consider Aristotle’s logic, a masterpiece of field independence and ignoring context, in which logical relationships can be deduced from the purely formal properties of sentences (e.g., All x’s are y; this is an x; therefore, this is a y); indeed, in Prior Analytics Aristotle used the first three letters of the Greek alphabet as placeholders instead of concrete examples. Or consider Euclidean geometry, in which theorems could be deduced from a small set of self-evident axioms and in which the axioms themselves were based on decontextualized figures, such as perfect circles and triangles, and infinite straight lines. Despite its decontextualized nature, the Euclidean system has had huge applications in the real world and dominated thinking in geometry in the West until the twentieth century.

Ancient Greece was an Indo-European-derived culture (Individualism, Ch. 2) and, beginning in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, logical argument and competitive disputation have been far more characteristic of Western cultures than any other culture area. As Duchesne notes, “the ultimate basis of Greek civic and cultural life was the aristocratic ethos of individualism and competitive conflict which pervaded [Indo-European] culture. … There were no Possessors of the Way in aristocratic Greece; no Chinese Sages decorously deferential to their superiors and expecting appropriate deference from their inferiors. The search for the truth was a free-for-all with each philosopher competing for intellectual prestige in a polemical tone that sought to discredit the theories of others while promoting one’s own.”[15]

In such a context, rational, decontextualized arguments that appeal to disinterested observers and are subject to refutation win out. They do not depend on group discipline or group interests for their effectiveness because in Western cultures, the groups are permeable and defections based on individual beliefs are far more the norm than in other cultures. As Duchesne notes, although the Chinese made many practical discoveries, they never developed the idea of a rational, orderly universe guided by universal laws comprehensible to humans. Nor did they ever develop a “deductive method of rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms,”[16] as seen in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. Indeed, I can’t resist noting the intelligence and creativity that went into creating the incredibly intricate Antikythera Mechanism designed by an unknown Greek (or Greeks). Dated to around 150–100 B.C. and “technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards,” it was able to predict eclipses and planetary motions decades in advance.[17] Western scientific and technological creativity did not begin after the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution.

Schematic of the Antikythera Mechanism

As Durocher notes, “The fruits of Hellenic civilization are all around us, down to our very vocabulary.”

 

Conclusion

The Ancient Ethnostate should be at the top of everyone’s reading for those interested in understanding Western origins and the uniqueness of the West. It is also an inspiring work for those of us who seek to reinvigorate the West as a unique biocultural entity. The contemporary West, burdened by loss of confidence and moral and spiritual decay, cannot be redeemed by a fresh influx of ethnically Western barbarians as happened with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Germanic Europe. There are no more such peoples waiting in the wings to revive our ancient civilization.

Reinvigoration must come from within, but now it must do so in the context of massive immigration of non-Western peoples who are addicted to identity politics and are proving to be unwilling and likely unable to continue the Western traditions of individualism and all that that implies in terms of representative, non-despotic government, freedom of speech and association, and scientific inquiry. Indeed, we are seeing increasing hatred toward the people and culture of the West that is now well entrenched among Western elites and eagerly accepted by many of the non-Western peoples who have been imported into Western nations, many with historical grudges against the West. It will be a long, arduous road back. The Ancient Ethnostate contains roadmaps for the type of society that we should seek to establish.


[1] Rachel Poser, “He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?,” New York Times (February 2, 2011). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html;  see also Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEnxmzqXJN8

[3] Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 51.

[4] Kevin MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future (Seattle: CreateSpace, 2019).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Susan Lape, “Solon and the institution of ‘democratic’ family form. Classical Journal 98.2 (2002–2003), pp. 117-139, p. 117.

[7] Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 497; see also Américo Castro, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

[8] The Visigothic Code (Forum judicum), trans. S. P. Scott (Boston, MA: Boston Book Company, 1910; online version: The Library of Iberian Resources Online, unpaginated).

http://libro.uca.edu/vcode/visigoths.htm

[9] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political movements (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2002; originally published: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 165, quoting J. B. Maier, “Contribution to a critique of Critical Theory,” in Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, ed. J. Marcus & Z. Tar (New Brunswick, NJ: 1984, Transaction Books).

[10] Ibid., Ch. 5.

[11] Ibid., Ch. 7.

[12] Otis Graham (2004). Unguarded Gates: A History of American’s Immigration Crisis. (Rowman & Littlefield), p. 80.

[13] C.B. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, MA: 2001, Harvard University Press), pp. 46–47.

[14] MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 112–113.

[15] Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 452,

[16] Ibid.

[17] S. Freeth, et al. (2006). Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Nature 444: 587-591, 587.

Why Are Whites Cancelling Their Race? Chapter 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

Whites cleaning messy destruction of blacks in Minneapolis

Do you know why Europeans across the political spectrum — Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists — are morally committed to a politics that is leading to the dissolution of their millennial racial identities while promoting the racial identities of non-white immigrants within their own nations?

There are many answers out there. Whites have been brainwashed by elites in control of our schools, media, and government institutions. The importation of immigrants is a strategic ploy by leftist parties to create a permanent bloc of immigrant voters. Corporations are looking for cheap labor and real estate development.

But the deeper answer puts the blame right in front of White themselves: immigrant diversity is rooted in a culture that takes the individual as its basic ontological principle, disparages any form of ethnic nationalism among Whites in favor of the rights of all humans to become citizens of European nations. The Western ideals of individualism, egalitarianism and moral universalism are the ultimate causes.

White Moral Communities

In our extended review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition we have seen that for Kevin MacDonald individualism is the core principle of Western civilization. The root of this principle is the separation of the individual from kin-based ties. It would seem, then, that MacDonald would hold this separation responsible for the plight of Whites today. His answer to this question, however, goes beyond a straightforward blaming of liberalism. The West today is not dominated by free-wheeling individuals. It is dominated by extremely powerful “moral communities” in the media, universities, “civil rights” organizations, political parties, and business groups. These moral communities are “pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West”. The “conventional morality and intellectual discourse” of the West is dominated by “leftist ideologies of race and ethnicity”. While the “cohesion” of these communities is not grounded in ethnic ties, it is still “tribal” in the sense that those who dissent from its values are “socially ostracized” and curtailed in their ability to make a living.

These moral communities, moreover, are not bereft of a biological basis — they are anchored in an evolved psychological need humans have to seek a “social identity” inside groups where they are positively valued. The members of these moral communities are no less inclined than kin groups to view outgroup members in negative terms. The negatively evaluated outgroup is defined primarily as a white who has an ingroup attachment to his ethnic group or race. The individual rights of those who dissent from these moral communities can be curtailed since they are members of a hated outgroup.

While the moral communities of Whites are not based on kinship ties but on morally approved principles, MacDonald brings up research studies, including his own, showing that ingroup favoritism and discrimination against outgroups remain very powerful biological drives. Experiments have shown that Western individualists will favor their own group even when those groups are “constructed using random labels for ingroup and outgroup…and even if there are no conflicts of interest between the groups”. The need to identify with a group, to wish to be validated by ingroup members and discriminate against outgroup members is an evolved result of natural selection, and it is a tendency that continues to prevail among Whites despite their condemnation of biologically based identities. The mental processing that goes on in the expression of these identities is “not the result of conscious reflection but more like an innate psychological reflex”.

In the same vein, MacDonald draws a distinction between implicit and explicit processing of social or ingroup identities among Whites. Just as Whites have an instinctive need to form ingroups that exclude outsiders, they have an instinctive inclination to prefer members of their own race, as is evident in white flight, choice of neighborhoods and schools, and in what some have identified as “stuff White people like to do”. But since these biases are prohibited in White communities, these behaviors are manifested implicitly rather than expressed consciously or explicitly. Whites have been socialized to control their ethnocentric tendencies. Their evolved ethnocentric inclinations are thus kept in check by their conscious “higher brain centers located in the cortex”, which is the area of the brain that reasons and assimilates the values of society. Since Western culture is “hostile to white ethnocentrism”, the higher brain inhibits the instinctive ethnocentrism of Whites.

White moral communities also provide lucrative jobs, security, and emotional comfort to White individuals who abide by the ideological rules. We are not dealing with ethereal beings motivated by high minded principles. Those who engage in “competitive virtue signaling” are self-interested creatures with highly charged emotional feelings of moral righteousness. These feelings are very pleasurable and may lead to an irrational addiction for incessant moral approval from one’s ingroup members. MacDonald cites an authority about “the pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong…that your method of helping others is so purely motivated and correct that all criticism can be dismissed with a shrug, along with any contradicting evidence”.

PM Justin Trudeau’s political career has been all about virtue signalling

In other words, to understand why Whites are so vehemently obsessed with diversity and so keen (or at least indifferent) about their own replacement, one needs to keep in mind the powerful economic incentives and emotional comforts which characterize the supposedly “conscientious” communities of Whites. The “empathy” whites have for non-whites is backed up by “a very elaborate infrastructure” that provides multiple opportunities for Whites. Whites have been “incentivized” economically and emotionally.

Some in the dissident right think the way to overcome these moral communities is to encourage Whites to exhibit stronger ethnic identities just like blacks and other minorities. But this message would go against the central thesis of MacDonald’s book, which is that White individualism has a genetic basis. The moral communities Whites created in the past were not antithetical to their interests but were indeed the most successful communities created in history, the basis of immense achievements. As I argued in earlier parts, following MacDonald’s line of thought, the city-states created by the ancient Greeks, the incredibly successful republican form of government created by the Romans, the highly dominant nation states of modern Europe, can all be seen as “moral communities” created beyond the old tribal and highly nepotistic communities of non-whites.

Personality of Whites

This chapter has a very insightful section showing that Whites have unusual personality traits. Insomuch as Whites developed relations with wider tribal networks and went on to create city-states and institutions based on merit, their concern for reputation did not end “at the border of the family and the wider kinship group”. Whites sought “a moral reputation as capable, honest, trustworthy and fair” in the wider society and nation. There were evolutionary pressures for conscientiousness, responsibility, reliability, trustworthiness, dutifulness, and honesty outside the kin group. It is not accident that all the moral philosophies seeking concepts with universal validity (fairness, impartiality, due process) were developed by Whites.

I can’t recall a historian of civilizations writing about this fundamental contrast in personalities. Modernization theorists in the 1950s identified these personality traits as products of modernity per se. Educational experts and aid packages were lauded as the way to create multiple Switzerlands in the African continent. But personality systems run deep. Corruption and ethnic nepotism are pervasive in modernized Third World nations.

This lack of trust beyond the kinship group is the fundamental problem that prevents the development of civil societies in much of Asia and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. People who have good jobs are expected to help their relatives, leading to high levels of corruption.

But if we can’t remake our personalities in an African way, how are we going to counter the suicidal moral communities of the West? MacDonald’s answer is that Whites do have an implicit inclination to favor their own race, to be ethnocentric. The problem is that the left controls the moral communities. These communities were not anti-White in the recent past. But the “culture of critique” is currently in charge of “programming the higher areas of the brain” of Whites, so the explicit culture is continually suppressing the “implicit ethnocentric tendencies of White people”. This is what the ADL and the SPLC are about: policing the thoughts and behavior of Whites while promoting the ethnic interests of Jews.

MacDonald anticipates that as Whites become aware of their “impending minority status” this will trigger White ethnocentrism. Whites will come to the realization that their culture of individualism, rule of law, and social trust require them to create moral communities that are “adaptive in a Darwinian sense”. Whites will come to the realization that in nations that are committed to multiculturalism and the celebration of the ingroup identities of non-whites, their only hope for survival is to create strong ingroups based on moral principles that value white history, traditions, and family — and exclude those who seek the destruction of Whites.

Reposted from EuroCanadian.ca

From Puritan Individualism To Jewish Infiltration – Chapter 6 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

Editor’s note: Chapter 6 is an important part of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition because the Puritans became an elite group in the United States, dominating the academic, media, financial, and industrial establishment. They instigated for the Civil War, and their moral idealism remains with us today as we confront our current moral panic surrounding Black Lives Matter and our wars for democracy in the Middle East. Since around 1950 they were increasingly replaced by a new Jewish elite with very different values and outlook, and this cultural revolution was substantially accomplished by the 1970s, resulting in the America we see today. I thank Dr. Duchesne for his excellent introduction and commentary on this material.
Franklin Roosevelt (front, second from left) with football team, 1899

Chapter 6, “Puritanism: The Rise of Egalitarian Individualism and Moralistic Utopianism,” of Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, claims that Puritanism and the intellectual movements descending from this religion were the “most important” forces shaping the culture of the United States “from the eighteenth century down to the mid-twentieth century.” Puritanism, and the WASP culture it engendered, would cease to be hegemonic over American culture as Jews came to infiltrate “critical sectors of American life” from the early 1900s onward.

For some time, Anglo-Saxon Darwinism managed to hold Jewish influence at bay, winning the battle for immigration restriction with the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924. But the Jews were growing behind the scenes.  Two million arrived from Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1924. While they lost the fight against immigration restrictions, their influence would grow unimpeded in the media, the social sciences, the legal profession and in finance. Darwinism, and the theories of race associated with this movement, would soon face defeat in academic circles, in no small measure because of the influence of Franz Boas. By 1965 Americans would come to agree with Jewish elites that their WASP nation was meant to be a “melting pot” of multiple races based on universal principles.

Jewish Infiltration of WASP Community Norms

Was there something in Puritanism and the Anglo-Saxon mind set that made them susceptible to this kind of infiltration? Contrary to common interpretations, MacDonald does not frame this debate solely in terms of  WASP individualism versus Jewish in-group strategic control. He distinctly says that individualism is not incompatible with in-group strategies and collectivist norms. The Puritans had strong in-group markers. Their Anglo-Saxon descendants had a strong sense of ethnic identity, what it meant to be “distinctively American”. In fact, as we will see in our examination of later chapters, MacDonald believes that the “liberal cosmopolitanism” ruling the Western world today resembles “the Puritan tradition of combining individualistic tendencies with strong social controls”.

Western individualism has engendered its own forms of collectivism. The difference is that the collective identities the West promoted have tended to be based on moralistic/ideological principles rather than on kinship relations. Their ethnic attachments were exhibited within in-groups far larger (city-states and nation-states) than the typical clannish tribal groups we find outside the West. The argument is not that Western individualists were bereft of any communitarian ties. The argument revolves around different types and degrees of individualism in relationship with different types and degrees of “ideological” collectivism.

The type of moral communities whites created (relatively freed from kinship ties) left them susceptible to out-group infiltration. While Americans managed to create very powerful nation-state with a strong in-group WASP ethnic identity, their liberal and egalitarian values left them susceptible to out-group infiltration. The Jews successfully radicalized  the Anglo-Saxon “sense of fairness and egalitarianism” against  an America based on a WASP identity.

“Puritanism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”

MacDonald believes that the English Civil War, which established the influence of Puritan culture in both Britain and the United States, should be “seen as a turning point 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 and parliamentary democracy — blended with capitalism and wealth accumulation.

In other words, the egalitarian individualism that originated among northwest European hunters and farmers took the upper hand away from the aristocratic individualism which prevailed in ancient and medieval times. MacDonald notes that Puritanism originated in East Anglia, a region with a strong tradition of freedom, fond of town meetings and arguments, with the “highest average intelligence in Britain,” a larger proportion of literate inhabitants, scholars and scientists.

I would add that East Anglia was a region with a high proportion of yeomen farmers, that is, a “middle class” of farmers, just below the gentry, in possession of their own land, without subordination to feudal lords, as well as free to serve on juries and in municipal police forces, from the 15th through 18th centuries. They were also individualistic in their heavy participation in the woollen cloth industry since the fourteenth century, which nurtured a tradition of self-determination and consensual social contract.

However, the one cultural trait Puritans have stood out for historically, and Protestants generally, is liberty of conscience; every individual should be allowed to live by the faith that seems to true to him; every individual should have “direct, unmediated access to God”. MacDonald observes that the “Puritan revolution was carried to its extreme in the United States,” where they were “freed of the hereditary aristocracy and religion of England, during the Jacksonian era”. Another feature of Puritanism was its tendency to “pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues,” in terms of “appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral.”

There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil.

This brings me to a trait MacDonald brings up right from the beginning, and it is that Puritans were also “strongly collectivist”, with clear ingroup-out group distinctions. This is why he writes of Puritanism as a “group evolutionary strategy”. It was not a “genetically closed strategy” (even though Puritans were ethnically homogeneous for a long time) since they were open to outsiders who converted to Puritanism. Puritans came to constitute, nevertheless, a very cohesive group with a

powerful emphasis on cultural conformity…and public regulation of personal behavior via social controls related to sex, lack of religious piety, public drunkenness, etc.

MacDonald calls these controls “anti-individualist” in the same vein as he designates Puritanism as an “individualistic group strategy”. This may seem confusing to those who think that individualism is inherently anti-collectivist, but it is not. The Puritan “individualist group strategy” was “remarkably adaptive in an evolutionary sense,” both in England and the United States. In the United States, Puritans “multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries”. They nurtured very strong families, with strict yet warm family practices and bonds. They emphasized literacy in both sons and daughters, supporting public libraries and schools. Within their communities, Puritans were indeed committed to egalitarian fairness “and the good of the group as a whole”, rather than allowing each individual to maximize his interests as a private agent. They had a strong moral commitment to the moral well being of others. Farmers without any educational background, for example, “voluntarily contributed some of their harvest to support university faculty and students”.

Early Puritan in America

At the same time, in the United States, as Puritans prospered and “became more inclined to commercialism and materialism,” the religious controls waned, particularly as the population grew, and the areas originally inhabited by Puritans grew into cities, as they were opened to waves of immigrants who were not committed to a Puritan way of life. But these developments did not bring an end to the moral commitments of Puritans, but resulted in the rise of a “secular version of moral utopianism”.

 Puritan-Descended Transcendentalist Intellectuals

Transcendentalists were a very influential intellectual elite (roughly from 1830 to 1860) in America with Puritan origins. They are called “transcendentalists” because they believed that humans could transcend their animal instincts by using their minds in the creative way it was meant to be used. They believed that humans could overcome their greedy impulses, lust for sex and power, and ethnocentric biases, through socialization in the ideals of “brotherly love” and control over their bodily senses and appetites. MacDonald notes that this utopian optimism coincided with the incredible material progress American was witnessing in the nineteenth century, in science and technology. This progress inculcated the belief — and not just among transcendentalists — that a “golden age of peace, harmony, righteous behavior and material comfort” was attainable.One could get into a long discussion here about how the ability of whites to form groups freed from biologically-based kin-groups is what allowed them, not just transcendentalists, but Western thinkers from ancient times onward, to employ their minds in far more creative ways than all the other cultures combined. This creativity, witnessed in multiple fields — the arts, architecture, music — can hardly be identified as inherently naive just because it presupposes the freeing of the mind from purely Darwinian pressures. It can, and has been, the basis for Western “realism” and the formation of powerful ethnic states, and indeed the creativity behind Darwinism. This transcendence, however, can be very dangerous as we have seen aplenty in the many utopian worlds whites have concocted out of their imagination. The American transcendentalists, as was observed of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the main intellectuals of this group, tended to be men with a “cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil” — easy prey to manipulators of the mind.

Although the ideas of transcendentalists would lose their preeminence after the bloody Civil War, and American intellectuals would be influenced by ideas of progress based on realistic assessments of human nature, their illusions about a peaceful “brotherhood” across the world would continue to influence American liberalism thereafter.

Anglo-Saxon Individualism and Ethnic Identification

One could argue, roughly speaking, that the Anglo-Saxon liberalism that came to dominate America from the late 1800s through to the 1960s was a compromise between the universalism of transcendentalism and the materialism of Darwinism. On the moderate side (so to speak) were the Anglo-Saxons who were proud of their ethnic identity and view their individualism as a unique attribute of their ethnic heritage, while believing, at the same time, that immigrants from other European ethnic groups could be assimilated into the dominant WASP culture. They were influenced by the Social Darwinists, but they also believed that non-Anglos could be socialized to act like “good Anglo-Saxons”. They believed that their individualism “sprang from their ethnic heritage” and that if this heritage was to be preserved immigrants had to be raised as good Anglos.
Some Anglos were more radical in their individualism, advocating individual freedom from all remaining Puritan social controls; identified by MacDonald as “early precursors of 1960s’ hippiedom, celebrating self-discovery, emotion over logic, intuition, rebellion free love, Black jazz”, but others were on the right of the Anglo-Saxon spectrum, influenced by Darwinian theories of race. While we can say that the Anglo-Saxons intellectuals who advocated assimilation were voicing the majority view among Americans, MacDonald identifies the long period from 1880 to 1965 as a period of “ethnic defense” in acknowledgement of the considerable influence that Social Darwinian ideas (developed by Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gustave Le Bon, Herbert Spencer, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard) played in ensuring the Immigration Act of 1924 and keeping the borders close until 1965. For these Darwinians, racial differences were real, and the races were “in competition with each other for supremacy”.
For MacDonald, then, the WASP culture of Americans, had nurtured within itself a strong Darwinian movement capable of instilling a solid sense of ethnic identity among white Americans. But this current would not last. Right from the beginning, as this school held sway, a cadre of Jewish immigrants, freshly off the boats, set out to argue that the American ideals of individualism and universalism were inconsistent with any notion of America as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic state.

Between Jewish Universalism and Jewish Nationalism

Some Jews argued that all races, including Jews, should dissolve themselves within an American melting pot of races. But the more influential Jews, themselves influenced by Darwinian race theories, believed that Jews, in the words of Felix Adler (1851-1933), should only “universalize themselves out of existence when the task [of ethnic dissolution of non-Jews] was complete”. The Jews had their own unique universalist ethics, with a commitment to bring an end to the ethnic and racial identities of Americans (and the rest of the world). Jews should preserve themselves as the harbingers of a new world order. At the same time, Jews should build their own nationalism in order to protect themselves in a world full of antisemitism. Some Jewish intellectuals (Israel Zangwill, for example) would argue that “Jews were a morally superior race” with a morally superior religion—Judaism—with a “moral vision” to become the shinning light for a future America bereft of its historic Anglo-Saxon identity.
I was very surprised to learn from MacDonald (when first I read some four years ago his article, “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965“) that Jews were the first to articulate the idea of multiculturalism. I thought that the theory of multiculturalism was quintessentially Canadian. While I still think that Canadians, such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, would go on to develop a full explanation of how multiculturalism, not assimilation, was consistent with Western liberalism, it continues to surprise me (reading this chapter) that back in the early 1900s Jews were already making the case that America was meant to be a “polycentric” nation characterized by cultural pluralism. To compel immigrants to assimilate to a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, Jewish intellectual were arguing long ago, would constitute a violation of their “human dignity”. Assimilation entailed the denigration of the culture of immigrants. The nation of America must be de-linked from its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core. Anglo-Saxon culture should be seen as just one culture among many others.
Jews arriving in America

Worse than this, actually, for Jews the Anglo-Saxon majority culture in America was never meant to be a particular culture in its own right, but a culture inherently open to multiple cultures with their own particular identities. This view was only a few steps away from the Canadian idea that immigrant minorities deserve special group rights to protect themselves from the majority European culture with its inherent tendency to be racist and discriminatory.

MacDonald emphasizes how Franz Boas and his followers would assume control over the American Anthropology Association, as well as every major department of anthropology, by 1926, displacing the Darwinians. Jewish intellectuals effectively exploited the moral universalism of American liberals, a task becoming all the more easy after the Second World War, which discredited ethnic nationalism as inherently belligerent and genocidal. This intellectual displacement of the Darwinians (and the American intellectuals who emphasized their Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage) came together with the “unseen power” of Jewish international finance, increasing control of the media and outright ownership of major newspapers. Henry Ford famously wrote about this influence, observing in the 1920s that Americans had been made to feel that public discussion of the Jewish Question was improper.
It does not seem quite accurate to say that collectivist Jews exploited the inherent inability of American individualism to generate any form of ethnic identity. It seems more accurate to say that they hijacked Anglo-Saxon moral communities. The same Jewish intellectuals who would “expose the power structures of white America” would come to create a rigid ideological community with norms prohibiting debate on race differences, biological differences between the sexes, criticism of mass immigration, and white identity.  A strange social order would appear, characterized by the decline of the family, paternal authority, and genuine individualism. The Anglo-Saxons were genuine individuals in their appreciation of the capacity of the rational ego to decide what is the good life in communication with others. But this rational self, capable of choosing its own religious beliefs, was substituted by what Christopher Lasch would call in the 1970s a narcissistic individualism entrapped to a world of consumerism, helpless, dependent and passive, but assured by the politically correct community that he is living a meaningful life as long as he accepts diversity without rational criticism, views whites as inherently racist, praises non-whites for their authentic culture and longs for a multicultural world across the West.

Hail the Catholic Church for Forcing Monogamy Upon the Nobility: Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne comments on Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

Since the beginning of his academic career in the early 1980s, Kevin MacDonald has been wondering why only in the West “wealthy, powerful men” have not sought “to control ever larger numbers of women”. Evolutionary biology teaches that male reproductive success benefits greatly from the acquisition of multiple mates. In all societies, except those in which harsh ecological conditions limit the amount of surplus the society can generate, “it is expected that males with wealth and power” will employ their surpluses to “secure as many mates as possible”. This is evolutionary biology 101.

It is also what the historical record shows.

The elite males of all of the traditional civilization around the world, including those of China, India, Muslim societies, the New World civilizations, ancient Egypt, and ancient Israel, often had hundreds and even thousands of concubines.

White elite men were the only ones in history who did not follow this biologically prescribed tendency. We saw in Parts 3 and 4 (of my extended analysis of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition) MacDonald’s argument that a genetic disposition for monogamy may have evolved among European men back in hunting and gathering times due to harsh environmental conditions in northwest Europe during the last glacial age. In chapter five, “The Church in European History,” which is the subject of this article, MacDonald explains that, while “the Catholic Church cannot be seen as originating monogamy,” this Church was very effective in regulating the sexual behavior of powerful aristocratic men, the ones most inclined to pursue sexual variety.

Many books have been written about how and why Catholicism birthed the modern world. The most popular one is Thomas E. Wood’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (2012). This book persuasively shows the indispensable role Catholicism played in the creation of universities, the promotion of science and rational law. It asks many interesting questions, such as: “How the Church humanized the West by insisting on the sacredness of all human life?” “How the idea of a rational, orderly universe — fundamental to the Catholic worldview, but absent in non-Christian cultures — made possible the flowering of science in West?”

MacDonald acknowledges the importance of Christian ideas in history. The crucial difference is that he wants to know whether these ideas were actually able “to exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions”. What stands out for MacDonald about the Catholic Church was its ability to regulate the sexual behavior of powerful White men in a monogamous direction away from the strong inclination of such men for polygamous relations. Essentially what the Church did was to instill strong religious norms (about mortal sin and punishment in Hell) in the mental processing of the higher brain centers of aristocratic men, damping down the instinctive appetite of the lower parts of the brain for multiple mates.

In this effort, MacDonald pays careful attention to Larry Siedentop’s book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014). This book is about the Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th centuries, which involved the establishment of the supremacy of the papacy over religious affairs, control over the selection of the clergy away from secular aristocrats, the revitalization of Roman law leading to development of Canon law, coupled with the moral restoration and expansion of monasteries manned by a clergy committed to celibacy and the weakening of kinship networks among traditional German aristocratic families. There was a concerted emphasis, this time in the history of the Western family, on marriage based on consent of spouses, prohibition of divorce even if the marriage was infertile, elaboration of rules against consanguineous marriages, and delegitimization of concubinage.

In other words, the Church promoted consensual and egalitarian marriage relations based on the free will of individual men and women. This is what Siedentop means by the Catholic “invention of individualism”. This individualism, according to Siedentop, was rooted both in the Christian notion that humans had individual souls with moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God and in the Greco-Roman idea that one could be a citizen of the polis regardless of tribal identities.

The collapse of Rome, however, and the conquering barbarian Germanic peoples, had resulted in the reinforcement of tribal identities. This is what the Catholic Church set out to undermine. It set out to break down “Germanic tribes organized as kinship groups based on biological relatedness among males,” while simultaneously harnessing their warrior ethos for the spread of Christianity. Codes of honor about one’s kindred and one’s war band, as well as marriage of blood relatives, were still quite strong among  Germanic barbarians, notwithstanding their individualist tendencies. MacDonald observes that the prohibition in the sixth century of consanguineous marriages among second cousins was extended by the eleventh century to sixth cousins.

Christian Collectivism Replaces Kin-Based Collectivism

But how can we say that the same medieval age everyone has characterized as “communal” and “collectivist” was the age in which the individualist tendencies of the West were consolidated? MacDonald is quick to point out that the Church itself took on the role of building in the West “a strong sense of group identification and commitment”. The “collectivism of European society in the High Middle Ages was real,” but it was a pan-European ideological-Christian form of collectivism set up against the in-group biological collectivism of smaller kinship groups. It was (if I may express MacDonald’s thesis in unmitigated terms) a collectivism of moral precepts operating at the conscious “higher brain centers located in the cortex” rather than at the instinctive biological levels of the reptilian and mammalian brain. It was a collectivism with its own ambitions for power set up “at the expense” of traditional sources of power — kings and the aristocracy with their persisting kinship networks — with the ability to provide power-seeking Christians incentives to join the expanding and revenue-generating institutional structures of the Church.

It was a collectivism that promoted Western individualism by promoting monogamy, individual choice in marriage outside one’s kinship network, and sexual restraint among powerful aristocratic men. MacDonald goes over other aspects of the Christianized monogamous families of the West, late marriage, relatively high number of unmarried women, celibacy, along with its attendant “low pressure” demographic profile, which lessened consumption of scarce resources and allowed for greater capital accumulation and economic well-being.

But the point I would like to emphasize is the implicit idea in MacDonald that a collective moral identity is consistent with the promotion (or existence) of individualism. Collectivism versus individualism is not the issue. There has never been, and there will never be, a society based on individualism alone. The question is both degree of individualism/collectivism, and the nature of the individualism and collectivism prevailing in a society. As I started arguing in Part 2, weak kinship/tribal ties are not a bad thing, but indeed allow for the rise of broader forms of collective identities, as occurred in ancient Greece when equal citizenship was granted to all native members of the city-state in order to avoid endless tribal conflicts.

Christianity ran against the particular kinship relations and interests of Germanic tribal groupings and aristocratic blood networks, and it did so by cultivating a moral community of believers. Many on the dissident right today blame Christianity for promoting universal values and the equality of human souls across the earth in the eyes of God. MacDonald does not blame Christianity. He does not argue that the Catholic Church created the conditions for the subsequent rise of multicultural collective norms. He is aware, as we will see in future parts, that the same leftists who advocate for the breakdown of biologically-based identities have created powerful moral communities which stand against individual dissent. Instead of calling the West a flat out “individualist” culture, we should rethink very carefully the changing relationships and substantive natures underlying the uniquely Western dialectic between individualism and collectivism.

We will see in our examination of chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 of MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Tradition that he looks at other intervening stages in the rise of Western individualism, including the way Jewish intellectuals transformed Western individualism into a call for the complete erosion of Western ethnocentric collectivism. One anticipatory question I will allow myself to make now is whether we can look at the rise of Western nationalism in the modern era as a rational strategy by European ethnic groups freed from restrictive tribal identities on the basis of broader territorial ties, historical memories, linguistic similarities, and ethnic lineages.

From their inception, Western national states were heavily ethnic-oriented territories with strict immigration controls up until the 1970s — the most efficient fighting machines and engines of growth created in human history. But increasingly since WWII Whites have been made to believe that the very idea of sovereignty goes against the principle of individual freedom because it “discriminates” against individuals from other nations who have a “human right” to become citizens of Western nations. Europeans need to understand that their individualism can only be fulfilled within a nation state that recognizes the reality of racial and sexual groupings.

There are no chapters in MacDonald’s book on nationalism, and I have never conducted an in depth study of the grand epoch of Western nationalism. But in light of MacDonald’s insights about the peculiar dissolution of Western kinship ties and the rise of individualism, we should start thinking about the dissolution of kinship ties as a process whereby Europeans were trying to generate wider forms of collective identity controllable by the higher brain centers, beyond the lower Darwinian drives that came to prevail in the non-Western world.

This article originally appeared at Eurocanadian.ca.

 

Can Church Influence Explain Western Individualism? Comment on “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation,” by Jonathan F. Schulz et al.

Because of its uniqueness, Western individualism presents a daunting question for scholars and in particular for a theory based on evolutionary psychology. There are essentially two ways for an evolutionary perspective to attempt to understand uniqueness. One is to propose a unique evolutionary environment resulting in genetically based uniqueness; the other is to propose universal psychological mechanisms interacting with particular cultural contexts.  Jonathan Schulz et al.’s “The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation” is an example of the latter. It presents a theory of Western individualism in which the cultural context created by the medieval Catholic Church, particularly the prohibitions on relatedness in marriage, played a central role in the development of the individualistic psychology of the West. More precisely, the paper attempts to explain “a substantial portion” of the variation in psychological traits widely recognized to be characteristic of individualism (“individualistic, independent, analytically minded, and impersonally prosocial [e.g., trusting of strangers] while revealing less conformity, obedience, in-group loyalty, and nepotism”) by exposure to the medieval Western Church.[1] Within this cultural framework, there is no attempt to present the motivations of the Church for creating this cultural context in terms of particular psychological mechanisms.

These issues intersect with much of the discussion in my recently published Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. However, my theory is based on the proposal that Western uniqueness derives ultimately from unique ancestral environments in northwestern Europe, with emphasis on a north-south genetic cline in the relative genetic contributions of northern hunter gatherers, Indo-Europeans, and Early Farmers from the Middle East. While Schulz et al. control for a wide range of variables, they do not control for regional genetic differences within Western Europe that have been uncovered by recent population genetic research (reviewed in my Chapter 1), nor do they review research by family historians indicating important regional variation within Western Europe that does not at all map onto exposure to the Western Church (reviewed in my Chapter 4).

However, I do discuss the influence of the Western Church, concluding that the Church’s

influence was directed at altering Western culture away from extended kinship networks and other collectivist institutions, motivated ultimately by the desire to extend its own power [analyzed as an evolved human universal]. However, although the Church promoted individualism and doubtless influenced Western culture in that direction, this influence built on individualistic tendencies that long predated Christianity and were due ultimately to ethnic tendencies toward individualism unique to European peoples (Chapters 1–4). [From Chapter 5, 170]

My approach thus combines pre-historic natural selection for individualist psychology with particular cultural contexts, one of which is the influence of the Catholic Church, the latter interpreted as building on pre-existing tendencies. My Chapter 5 on the medieval Church argues, on the basis of data similar to that cited by Schulz et al., that the Church facilitated individualism—and may well have sped up the establishment of individualism, but did not cause it. Given that Schulz et al. claim to have achieved only a partial explanation, there is thus no fundamental disagreement. However, based on my treatment, here I attempt to show why exposure to the medieval Church is an inadequate explanation of psychological individualism in the West.

There is much that our approaches have in common. In particular, they note that kinship relationships are central in understanding human societies and that the general trend has been a shift away from extensive kinship relationships typical of hunter-gatherers throughout the world (i.e., relatively weak ties to many people of varying genetic distance—discussed in my Chapter 3) to intensive kinship relations (i.e., kinship deeply embedded within closely related groups, e.g., clans and kindreds with a distinct hierarchy based on degree of genetic relatedness) commonly found in agricultural societies. Read more