Western Culture

Where is the historical West? Part 2 of 5

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Carleton Coon

What follows is a revised paper trying to answer the same question while taking account of the prohibited criteria of race. This is not a paper on the geographical distribution of the Caucasoid race. The objective is to ascertain the historical geography of Western civilization/culture without ignoring race. The concept of race will be implicit rather than the subject of investigation. I will accept as generally true the standard investigation of Carleton S. Coon’s book, The Living Races of Man, published in 1965. Humans are members of the species Homo sapiens, and all the members of this species, regardless of geographic location, can breed together and produce mixed offspring.  However, “humans also vary racially to an unusual degree,” and thus it is possible to divide humans into sub-species of races. While there is (still) no general consensus on the number of races, the term “race” is sufficiently precise to allow for a general classification of humans on earth. For the purposes of this paper, it should suffice to mention that, according to Coon, the three major sub-species of races are: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Congoid. He identifies four more races. He also draws further divisions within each of these main racial types to take account of important additional morphological differences, geographical variations, and the ways in which different environments engendered cultures which “profoundly” affected the character of the races. The following succinct statement by Coon is worth quoting:

A race is a major segment of a species originally occupying, since the first dispersal of mankind, a large, geographically unified, and distinct region, and touching on the territories of other races only by relatively narrow corridors. Within such a region each race acquired its distinctive genetic attributes – both its visible physical appearance and its invisible biological properties – through the selective forces of all aspects of the environment, including culture. After having become differentiated in this fashion, each race filled out its space, resisting, because of its superior local adaptation, the encroachment of outsiders with whom it mixed, from time to time if not continuously, along its borders (p. 10).

But what about the much talked-about difference between ethnicity and race? The more we emphasize culture the closer we are to the concept of ethnicity. The term “race” pays closer attention to the genetic attributes of a given group, whereas when the term “ethnicity” pays closer attention to the cultural attributes of a group, i.e., language, religion, customs, institutions, and historical experiences. This does not mean that ethnicity excludes the genetics of race. Liberals think they can suppress the concept of race by defining ethnicity in cultural terms and thereby defining race as a “cultural construct”. Coon correctly avoids this arbitrary elimination of physiological and genetic factors from his definition of race without ignoring the importance of culture. I use the term ethnicity as an intermediate term between race and culture. Western civilization comprises many ethnic groups with difference languages, cuisines, histories, which are nevertheless members of the Caucasoid race. Likewise there are many ethnic groups within the Mongoloid and Congoid sub-species.    Read more

Where is the historical West? Part 1 of 5

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Over a year ago I completed a 5000-word draft offering an answer to this question.  A few months later, after recurrent visits to VDare, American Renaissance, The Occidental Observer, and Counter-Currents my answer seemed naïve, adolescent; one more paper carved out under the “tyranny of liberalism” and the belief that the Western world was different from the Rest in its cultivation of universal values and transcendence of ethnic identities.  I no longer accepted the claim that humans around the world could become Western through proper guidance in the merits of civic equality, free markets, and tolerance.

I had been inching my way in this direction for some years, but never to the point of allowing the word ‘race’ to enter into my writings. In the draft I emphasized the ancient and medieval pre-liberal social context upon which the historic success of liberalism was predicated, but the convergence of my view with liberalism was obvious: the triumph of universalism was the high point of the West. I thought that identifying the location of the West was a matter of tracing the historical evolution of this ideology, beginning with the rise of citizenship and rational discourse in ancient Greek times, through the Roman invention of the legal persona, the Catholic fusion of reason and faith, the discovery of the individual in Renaissance times, the Newtonian Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on, until the Allied victory in 1945 or even the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

What concerned me above all (in the draft) was challenging the leftist liberal idea that the historic West was a social construct without definite geographical and cultural boundaries. I rejected the view that all cultural expressions were equally valid and that a proper liberal attitude required an egalitarian view of world history. I was reacting to an academic environment in which the teaching of Western civilization had been replaced by a new curriculum emphasizing “the unity in diversity” of the world’s peoples. Only a handful of universities were still teaching the history of Western civilization. Everyone was captivated by the postmodernist claim that “no concept is by itself, and consequently in and of itself”: ergo the West must be conceived only in relation to the rest of the world.   Ancient Greece was an outgrowth of the Near East, or, as Martin Bernal put it, “Afroasiatic”.  Greek civilization was not founded by Aryan settlers but was instead the product of Egyptian and Semitic influences.

Even the landmass of “Europe” was found suspect. How can a small straggling peninsula on the western end of a much larger and richer Asian landmass be called a “continent”? The “the racist privileging of Europe” (on Mercator-derived maps) should not be allowed; accordingly, the Peters projection was promoted, where Europe was “considerably downgraded.”   The TV serial drama, The West Wing, created by Aaron Sorkin, endorsed this new projection as a great way to raise the status of the Third World against Western privilege. A variety of other projections were soon announced; the one world historians were most enthused over was the “Hobo-Dyer Equal Area Projection Map,” in which the world was turned upside down with  Europe occupying a marginalized corner in the south east. No one cared to mention that Europeans were the ones who discovered and mapped the entire geography of the earth.

The Hobo-Dyer Projection

Facing this challenge, I thought it was important to identify the West as the birthplace of liberal universalism. The key was to delineate geographically the expansion of Western liberal values and institutions. I concluded that Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were currently the most deeply Western; whereas Eastern (Catholic) European countries were  closely Western but not entirely due to their lack of well-developed democratic institutions. Latin America was unevenly progressing in a Western direction but was not yet quite ready to be allowed in the universal club. So were the Orthodox countries, Russia and the Balkans.   Read more

The High-Mindedness of the British: New Zealand and the United States

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Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States.
David Hackett Fischer
New York: Oxford University Press, xxv + 629 pages.

I have to start off by saying that David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America has shaped the way I see American history and much else. He provides a compelling account of how the four main British-derived groups (Puritans, distressed Cavaliers, Quakers, and Scots-Irish borderers) differed and their struggle for dominance in America. To me as an evolutionist, a big part of the attraction is that Fischer roots these cultural differences in the distant past—in English pre-history. Thus the tendencies of the two main groups, Puritans based in East Anglia and the Cavaliers in Southeast England, go back to the murky period of English pre-history. These types (Puritans relatively egalitarian, Cavaliers elitist and hierarchical) indicate very strong cultural differences and thus likely to be influenced by ethnic-genetic differences.

Fairness and Freedom continues his comparative approach, this time comparing two different British-derived societies, New Zealand and the United States. The basic thesis is that New Zealand political culture is much more infused with “an abiding concern for fairness” (p. 14), while the U.S. is more focused on an ideology of individual freedom.

Interestingly, until the mid-20th century and then doubtless because of Western influence, there are no words for fairness in languages apart from English, Danish, Norwegian, and Frisian. Moreover, the words for fair and fairness have no Greek or Latin roots, but are nevertheless traceable to an Indo-European origin where they appear only in the above group of Northern European languages (and notably excluding German). The original Indo-European word meant “to be content,” later giving rise to the Gothic fagrs, meaning pleasing to behold and often connoting blond hair and fair complexion. It eventually came to mean something that could be agreed on by most parties—e.g., a fair price. Read more

The Future of the European Peoples, Part 2

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The following is part 2 of the translation of my speech delivered in the German language ( Die Zukunft der Völker Europa) at the NPD Summer Academy in Saarbrucken, Germany (August 23-26, 2012).  The meeting and the lectures were also attended by several representatives of the Front National from the nearby Alsace, France. The original speech in the German language can be downloaded here. 

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A Forthcoming War in Europe

A likely war in Europe is not going to have clear cut demarcation lines between “good White Europeans” vs. “evil dark-colored non-Europeans,” as many nationalists in Europe and the USA often anticipate. The pending war will demonstrate nasty features of combined class struggles, racial struggles and messy interethnic struggles within, between and amidst Europeans themselves. And yet, the aforementioned distorted and politically biased historical narratives must not be an excuse for Europe’s age-old small time nationalisms. Petty nationalism, whether of the German, Croatian, American, English, or French extraction, has inflicted immense damage to all European peoples. Only in retrospect can wee see the disastrous legacy of the nation-state which has bequeathed upon us, in the span of the last two hundred years, murderous religious wars, ongoing territorial disputes, and false historical memories. Last, but not least, we must all raise an embarrassing question: What does it mean today to exclaim “I am proud of being a German, a Fleming, a French, or an American,” considering that more than 10 percent of Germany’s citizens, 15 percent of  France’s  citizens and 30 percent of the U.S. population are of non-European descent? Read more

The Future of the European peoples (Part 1)

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The following is a translation of my speech delivered in the German language ( Die Zukunft der Völker Europa) at the NPD Summer Academy in Saarbrucken, Germany (August 23–26, 2012).  The meeting and the lectures were also attended by several representatives of the Front National from the nearby Alsace, France. My original speech in the German language can be downloaded here. 

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First off, thanks to the NPD for the invitation. I would also like to extend my greetings from my colleagues from our American Third Position Party. The ethnic and demographic situation in Europe today looks completely different from 40 years ago. Therefore, it is appropriate to reevaluate differently terms such as ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘national consciousness’.  My main thesis is that the future of the European peoples, or rather their chances of survival, lie in the rejection of petty nationalism, in the rejection of all forms of interethnic resentments, as well as in the revival of the idea of the Reich.

I must point out that some unpredictable historical deviations occurred during the period of the last decade of the previous century. In the early nineties of the last century communism collapsed in Eastern Europe because its ideas had already been better put into practice in the West — albeit under a different name. Many paleo-communist ideas, such as egalitarianism, the intellectual Gleichschaltung, as well as the belief in permanent economic progress in a putative multicultural system — all those ideas the early Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist intellectuals had dreamed about — were better realized in the capitalist West. For that reason alone, it was to be expected that former Marxist intellectuals and politicians in Germany or the EU could easily convert to liberalism and the ideology of the free market. Read more

Research on Pornography and the Sexualization of Culture

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Lasha Darkmoon’s current TOO article provides case studies illustrating the sexual deviance of some of the main promoters of pornography. The question here is whether the availability of pornography is bad for Whites or, indeed, for any group.

Historically, explicit sexuality was a taboo in all Western societies. Growing up Catholic in the 1950s, one was aware that sexually explicit material was far underground and that it was eminently disreputable. Implicitly and perhaps explicitly in some circles, pornography was seen as incompatible with the social utility of creating social supports for marriage based on love and affection between partners; marriage thus conceived encourages fertility and provides an ideal environment for children.

Implicitly at least, there was a recognition that sex is a strong biological urge, an attitude that no evolutionary psychologist would question. The basic findings of research on pornography fit well with the evolutionary theory of sex: males are naturally more attracted to pornography than females because males benefit from relatively indiscriminate mating, multiple mates, and depersonalized and even coercive sexual encounters.

Females, on the other hand, are expected to place a greater value on relationships of intimacy and love as signals of male investment in them and their children. Females generally suffer huge costs from indiscriminate mating and from sexual coercion (no paternal investment; bad genes). Because of the demands of pregnancy and lactation, they do not benefit from multiple mates with the result that polyandry is vanishingly rare in human societies. Read more

Snow White and the Huntsman

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Snow White and the Huntsman
Directed by Rupert Sanders
Produced by Sam Mercer, Palak Patel, Joe Roth
Screenplay by Evan Daugherty

I realize that if a studio is going to spend $170 million on a movie, they are going to do their best to appeal to a wide audience. Movies with mass appeal necessarily have emotional hooks that draw the audience in. In Snow White, there are two such hooks. Read more