2020 was meant to be a year of celebration for Beethoven who was baptized 250 years ago (his exact date of birth is unknown) in Bonn on December 17, 1770. COVID-19 prompted the cancelation of commemorative concerts of Beethoven’s music, but the pandemic didn’t quell efforts by anti-White activists to attack the composer’s reputation and dominant place in the cultural pantheon of the West. Rather than a year full of performances of the great composer’s sonatas, string quartets, concertos and symphonies, 2020 saw repeated attacks on Beethoven for the crime of being a White male genius and for embodying the European musical tradition.

Beethoven is the most-performed composer in the repertoire, and his anniversary year was planned to be no exception. Before the widespread cancellation of concerts, 15 to 20 per cent of the repertoire programmed by leading orchestras was music by Beethoven. Widely regarded as the greatest composer of all time, Beethoven is inescapable because he remade almost every genre of concert music that matters. The concerto and symphony in his hands became driving musical narratives of heroic struggle. His late string quartets open a profound window on to the soul. Unlike his predecessors who were craftsmen who supplied a commodity to a paymaster, Beethoven ushered in the age of Romanticism by insisting on his creative independence and the absolute importance of self-expression: “What is in my heart must come out so I write it down.” This was manifested in his refusal to take a secure, salaried position like his one-time tutor Joseph Haydn who was the master of music for a feudal landowner in what is now Hungary.

Beethoven’s heroism in overcoming the worst thing that can happen to a composer — worsening deafness from young adulthood — to compose some of the greatest music ever has awed generations and become emblematic of triumph over adversity. All the stories of Beethoven’s misanthropy, his eccentricity and wildness, date from the decline in his hearing, which often caused him acute physical pain. Only his art prevented him from taking his own life: “It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.” While Beethoven’s confidence as a pianist and conductor gradually diminished with his creeping deafness, his imaginative powers as a composer grew stronger and stronger, and he cast a daunting shadow over his successors: Brahms did not feel confident tackling a symphony until he was in his forties.

Beethoven excelled at his trade because he was born with a gift and worked at it as hard as it is possible to work. Swafford notes how his sketches and manuscripts reveal that:

Nothing came easily to him, least of all composing. Where Mozart could dream up a whole piece in his head while playing billiards, Beethoven had to worry and whip every note into place in his sketches. The sketchbooks are amazing documents: gold being refined from raw ore, pedestrian ideas becoming revolutionary concepts, incoherence being forged into clarity and purposefulness. Even the final manuscripts are a morass of scrawls and blots and revisions on top of revisions.[1]

Beethoven’s Faustian spirit made him into the kind of figure that dominated the imagination of nineteenth century Europeans: the superhuman genius, the revolutionary hero, the master of his own fate and transformer of the world. This reputation carried over into the twentieth century with the influential French writer Romain Rolland holding the composer up as a role model for a less heroic age, epitomizing personal sincerity and self-denial — in a word, authenticity.[2]

Attacks on Beethoven

Laudatory references to White male geniuses like Beethoven inevitably trigger rage from anti-White commentators who huff that it has “long been an argument of white supremacists, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and racial separatists that ‘classical music,’ the music of ‘white people,’ is inherently more sophisticated, complicated, and valuable than the musical traditions of Africa, Asia, South America, or the Middle East, thus proving the innate superiority of the ‘white race.’” Seen through the Cultural Marxist lens of critical race and gender theory, Beethoven’s music dominates the concert repertoire not because of its exceptional quality, but because White-male privilege and assumptions about White-male genius keep it there. Linda Shaver-Gleason insisted Beethoven’s dominant place in the canon was the result of a White supremacist conspiracy which “intentionally suppressed” the music of non-White composers “in the service of a narrative of white — specifically German — cultural supremacy (because, alas, that too is part of Western culture).”

Slate online recently rebuked Beethoven for his mononym: the fact he is known by a single name, like Michelangelo or Shakespeare. This practice supposedly gives the pedestal of nomenclature to “straight white men at the expense of everyone else.” White male composers, it is claimed, “became so ensconced in elite musical society’s collective consciousness that only one word was need to evoke their awesome specter. Mouthfuls of full names became truncated to terse sets of universally recognized syllables: Mozart. Beethoven. Bach.” The works of composers with mononyms are therefore assumed to be “on a different plane,” whereas this assumption is, we are told, actually the product of “centuries of systematic prejudice, exclusion, sexism and racism.”

In a recent Vox podcast and article, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding claim the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (the famous da-da-da-DUM motif) should not be given their traditional interpretation — the sound of fate knocking on the door and Beethoven’s resilience in the face of encroaching deafness — but should be construed as the sound of the gate slamming shut on minorities, such as “women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color.” They assert (without evidence) that “wealthy white men” embraced the Fifth Symphony as a “symbol of their superiority and importance.” Black clarinetist Anthony McGill agrees, likening the inescapability of the Fifth Symphony to a “wall” between classical music and new, racially-diverse audiences.

Jewish music writer Norman Lebrecht defended Beethoven against Sloan and Harding’s polemic by citing Beethoven’s “liberal” credentials, claiming, for example, that they “fail to explore how Beethoven’s Fifth served for millions as a symbol of freedom in the war against Nazism.” Unmentioned by Lebrecht is the fact that, despite Beethoven’s politics — which were liberal for their time (he had republican sympathies) — the composer made repeated comments critical of Lebrecht’s own ethnic group. On one occasion, he rejected the idea of selling his Missa Solemnis to the Jewish music publisher Adolf Schlesinger in favor of the German publisher C.F. Peters, informing the latter that: “In no circumstances will Schlesinger ever get anything more from me, because he too has played me a Jewish trick.” Beethoven’s disgust with Schlesinger was prompted by repeated experiences of being short-changed with “such insulting niggardliness, the like of which I have never experienced.”[3] In a letter of 1823, Beethoven called Schlesinger “a beach peddler and rag-and-bone Jew.” In his negotiations with another publisher, Beethoven noted the publisher was “neither Jew nor Italian” and that as he himself was also neither of these, “perhaps we shall come to some agreement.”[4]

Sloan and Harding are on stronger ground in arguing the thematic complexity of the Fifth Symphony necessitated unprecedentedly close listening to fully grasp, and this, in turn, led to the establishment of new norms of concert behavior. These norms — sitting still, staying quiet and not clapping mid-piece — led to the strict culture of classical music that persists to this day, and which allegedly oppresses non-Whites who cannot reasonably be expected to conform to such standards of behavior. Sloan and Harding lament that classical concerts are the sole remaining American institution that typically insists on starting on time. Rather than a sign of respect for all parties involved, these behavioral and procedural norms are, they insist, symbols of White supremacy which alienate “diverse audiences,” and their origins can be traced to Beethoven.

Jewish music writer for The New Yorker, Alex Ross, labelled the planned 2020 Beethoven celebrations “a gratuitously excessive celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of a composer who hardly needs any extra publicity.” He insists that, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter riots, an examination of the relationship between classical music, which he labels “blindingly white, both in its history and present,” and racism is “sorely needed” because of the genre’s “extreme dependence on a problematic past.” Ross claims that when the classical music tradition was transplanted to the United States, the “white majority tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy. The classical-music institutions that emerged in the mid- and late nineteenth century — the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and the like — became temples to European gods. … Little effort was made to cultivate American composers; it seemed more important to manufacture a fantasy of Beethovenian grandeur.”

For Ross, classical music can only “overcome the shadows of its past” if it commits itself to a “much more radical confrontation with the white European inheritance,” and by programing more non-White composers like Julius Eastman — a Black composer whose “improvisatory structures, his subversive political themes, and his openness about his homosexuality give him a revolutionary aspect, yet he also had a nostalgic flair for the grand romantic manner.’”

In the frontline of attacks on Beethoven in 2020 was Black music writer and Hunter College academic Philip Ewell, who penned an article titled “Beethoven was an Above-Average Composer — Let’s Leave it at That.” Ewell begrudges the laudatory epithets routinely applied to White composers like Beethoven and their works. For Ewell, adjectives like “genius” and “masterwork,” evoke slavery (master-slave) and sexism (master-mistress), and the classical music lexicon is, in his assessment, overflowing with euphemisms that disguise and reinforce the “white-male frame.”

In addition to “master’ and its derivatives, here are some of the other common euphemisms for white and whiteness in music theory’s white racial frame: authentic, canonic, civilized, classic(s), conventional, core (“core” requirement), European, function (“functional” tonality), fundamental, genius, German (“German” language requirement), great (“great” works), maestro, opus (magnum “opus”), piano (“piano” proficiency, skills), seminal, sophisticated, titan(ic), towering, traditional, and western. Even terms such as “the long nineteenth century” and “fin de siècle” can be considered euphemisms for whiteness and white framing for their close associations with dates and events (and languages) significant to Europe and Europeanism. Such euphemisms are intended to sublimate whiteness into less objectionable forms, thus mitigating the effect of whiteness on music theory and hiding its existence.

Rather than enjoying a merited reputation for the brilliance and originality of his oeuvre, Ewell insists Beethoven’s fame has been upheld by such lexical scaffolding, claiming Beethoven, “along with countless other white males, has been propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master and masterwork.” In Ewell’s jaundiced assessment, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is “no more a masterpiece” than Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells (click the links and judge for yourself). The status of Beethoven’s Ninth is purely, he argues, a product of music theory’s “white-male frame” which “obfuscates race and gender.”

Ewell’s attack on Beethoven is an adjunct of this broader hostility to classical music’s “white racial frame” which, he insists, reinforces the hierarchy of White male composers, and “works in concert with patriarchal structures to advantage whiteness and maleness while disadvantaging POC and non-males.” This frame purportedly encompasses Western tonality itself (with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale) which is assumed to be the “master” language. Ewell even regards the Gregorian calendar as “white racial framing writ large,” insisting “no one can deny the racial element behind how the world now understands the linear and cyclic nature of time.”

Phillip Ewell

In an article for the journal Music Theory Online entitled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Ewell argues that “music theory is white [it is]” and the discipline is undergirded by a deep-seated ideology of White supremacy calculated to thwart Black and Brown (but strangely not East Asian) achievement in classical music. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early twentieth-century music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) who initiated the parsing of musical structures into foreground, middle-ground and background to tease out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Drawing on poststructuralist critiques of Western civilization, Ewell claims this kind of score-driven analysis of musical works as part of Western musicology (what he dubs the “drive to scientificize music analysis”) represents an effort to “shore up whiteness in music theory’s white frame” and to insulate “whiteness from potential criticism.” In attacking Schenker (who was an Austrian Jew), Ewell inadvertently strayed into forbidden fields of inquiry and faced unexpectedly fierce blowback and accusations of “Black anti-Semitism.”

Ewell’s “white racial frame” purportedly extends to musical education where, in the most commonly used theory textbooks in the United States, only 1.63% of musical examples come from non-White composers. This is also problematic for Linda Shaver-Gleason because studying a particular piece “reaffirms its canonical status; enshrining it in a textbook is deeming it worthy of study.” Constantly referencing White composers “reinforces the idea that they’re the ones who deserve the most respect, as if to say, ‘Marvel at the many techniques Mozart used so perfectly!’” Ethan Hein, a (presumably Jewish) doctoral fellow in music education at NYU, likewise decries the stubbornness of music teachers in teaching “European-descended” classical music over that of “music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora.” Orienting music education towards the European classical tradition, an “implicit racial ideology,” is, he declares, “insidious” in its “affirmations of Whiteness.”

In 2020, college-level music pedagogy responded to Black Lives Matter by “dramatically reconsidering which composers and musical traditions we do and don’t discuss in the classroom.” Similar dynamics were at work within other musical institutions. The Metropolitan Opera, upon cancelling its 2020–21 season, announced that it would begin its next season with Black composer Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer to appear on the Met’s stage. Despite such gestures, for Slate journalist Chris White, musicians, academics, and teachers still “have a lot of work ahead to confront the racist and sexist history of classical music.”

Music theory’s white racial frame is also sustained, according to Ewell, by the “citational chain” of white men citing other white men in the musicological literature. He wants to break this chain “in which whiteness begets whiteness and maleness begets maleness.” Meanwhile, Ewell’s own utterly conventional and establishment beliefs are the unreflective product of his engagement with a group of predominantly Jewish critical race and gender theorists: he borrowed the term “white racial frame” from Harvard sociology professor Joe Feagin. Arguing that the entire Western art music tradition is inherently White supremacist, Ewell advocates “overthrowing the existing structure and building a new one that would accommodate non-white music a priori [prior to listening to it??] — no reaching for ‘inclusion’ necessary because non-white composers would already be there.”

Beethoven and the “New Musicology”

Ewell postures as an outsider bravely challenging sinister norms entrenched in Western musicology when, in reality, his perspective has been utterly conventional since the advent of the “New Musicology” in late 1980s — when Cultural Marxists to a significant extent overran the discipline. Musicology was one of the last frontiers for poststructuralism and critical theory which had already infested most of the humanities and social sciences by the early 1980s. The New Musicology was founded by the Jewish-American critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman (born Zukerman) whose journalist father William Zukerman (1885–1961) was a prominent figure in the Jewish media and author of the 1937 book The Jew in Revolt: The Modern Jew in the World Crisis.

A key figure in the ascent of the “New Musicology” was Susan McClary whose 1991 book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality is considered a trailblazing text for the movement. McClary gained fame and notoriety for her feminist “analysis” of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, where she claimed: “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” This risible statement was an elaboration of her belief the Western musical convention of sonata form is inherently sexist, misogynistic and imperialistic: that “tonality itself — with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfilment until climax — is the principle musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire.” The primary “masculine” key (or first subject group) is said to represent the male self, and the secondary “feminine” key (or second subject group) represents the “other,” a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.

Virtually all Cultural Marxist critiques of Western classical music fall back on these kind of entirely speculative metaphors. While purporting to offer additional insight into music, the New Musicology systematically imposes an anti-White male ideology on its subject, and, in this endeavor, happily discards all standards of proof and evidence. The conceit that, before the advent of the New Musicology, the discipline was limited to the rigid boundaries of empiricism and positivism is false; awareness of the context and reception of music has always been a core topic of musicology. There was, however, also a belief in purely musical elements and in the value of studying them. The problem with such “objective” technical analysis, for the likes of McClary and Ewell, is that it invariably leads to “White supremacist” conclusions about the relative quality of different musical traditions. The “problematic dimension” of analyzing “music as simply music,” McClary notes, is that people inevitably point to Western classical music “as evidence of the superiority of European and European-descended people, which marginalizes the rest of the world and, also, minority groups in the U.S.”

Constructing Beethoven as Black

The main alternative to the Cultural Marxist deconstruction (and proposed anti-White reconstruction) of the Western musical canon, has been attempts by Blacks to appropriate Beethoven for themselves. Given Beethoven’s status as the archetypical musical genius, it is unsurprising that aggrieved Blacks have, since the early twentieth century, attempted to propagate the myth that Beethoven had some African ancestry. The basis for this entirely spurious claim was the composer’s slightly swarthy complexion, and the fact part of his family traced its roots to Flanders, which was, for a period, under Spanish monarchical rule. Because Spain had a longstanding historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, a degree of blackness supposedly trickled down to the great composer — this despite the fact the Moors as an ethnic group weren’t even Black.

The myth was eagerly disseminated by Jamaican “historian” Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) in works like Sex and Race (1941—44), the two-volume World’s Great Men of Color (1946–47), 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (1934), Five Negro Presidents (1965), and Nature Knows No Color Line (1952). Rogers, whose intellectual rigor was basically non-existent, claimed that Beethoven — in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others — was genealogically African and thus Black. Despite being thoroughly debunked, the myth still lingers in contemporary culture: in 2007 Nadine Gordimer published a short story collection called Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories. The determination, contrary to all available evidence, to make Beethoven Black is, of course, a desperate attempt to make the composer and his oeuvre a glorious symbol of Black accomplishment.

A pearl of wisdom from Jamaican historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966)

Otherwise sympathetic commentators have cautioned that such efforts are self-defeating, merely serving to treat the Western canon as fundamental and all other styles as deviations from this norm, thus reinforcing “the notion that of classical music as a universal standard and something that everyone should aspire to appreciate.” Trying to make Beethoven Black and desperately scouring the historical records for examples of non-Whites who wrote symphonies is to accept “a white-centric perspective that presents symphonies as the ultimate human achievement in the arts.”

Among those routinely cited by those desperate to prove the racial diversity of the Western art music tradition are the mixed-race composers Chevalier de Saint George, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and George Bridgetower. These figures are remembered solely because they were non-White, not because of the excellence of their compositions. Beethoven personally knew Bridgetower, a talented violinist whose father was from the West Indies. Indeed, Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of one of Beethoven’s most celebrated violin sonatas. Beethoven called it the “mulatto sonata” after Bridgetower (before the word took on a more pejorative sense) and the pair gave the first performance but fell out soon afterwards, whereupon Beethoven renamed the piece for another violinist, Rudolphe Kreutzer.

Conclusion

Classical music, like other aspects of Western culture, has been a casualty of the anti-White diversity mania that now infests Western intellectual life. The Cultural Marxist critique of classical music (and of Beethoven) wallows in bad faith arguments and cognitive dissonance: Western classical music is nothing exceptional, yet cannot be invoked to praise White people because this necessarily implies the inferiority of other races; a White supremacist conspiracy thwarts Black and Brown achievement in the genre, but utterly fails to prevent East Asian interest and success; Black composers have written symphonies (and, indeed, Beethoven himself was Black), yet the Western classical music tradition is inherently White supremacist and needs radical deconstruction.

Ultimately, the reason the classical music canon (and Beethoven’s status as a titan of European civilization) is so keenly resented by anti-White activists, is because the gap in civilizational attainment it underscores is an embarrassing affront to regnant egalitarian assumptions. Western art music (with Beethoven as its leading exponent) stands as a glaring testament to the pre-eminence of European high culture, and implicitly of the race responsible for it. The attacks on Beethoven in 2020 are yet another example of warfare waged against White people through the construction of culture.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, available here and here.

[1] Jan Swafford, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music: An Indispensable Guide for Understanding and Enjoying Classical Music (Knopf, 1993), 184-85.

[2] Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator (Rolland Press, 2008)

[3] Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (Faber, 2015), 760.

[4] Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The music and the Life (Norton, 2005), 533.

The Summer of George is a paradigmatic example of a media-induced moral panic. A whole new, well-funded industry involving “racial sensitivity training” has sprung up where White people are systematically browbeaten into racial submission and abject guilt for the accomplishments of their ancestors. Such moral panics are, so far as I know, unique to the West and a key consequence of individualist culture. Try to imagine a moral panic in an African society. Or China. Or an Arab country. Not going to happen (counter-examples welcome).

My view is that the moral communities observed at the origins of Western history and surfacing recurrently in later centuries tapped into a pre-existing tendency among individualists to create such communities as a force for cohesion that does not rely on kinship relations. Particularly important since the seventeenth century have been the egalitarian moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer ethic whose evolutionary origins are discussed in Chapter 3 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (hereafter Individualism).

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 is a major theme of Individualism  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.

Moral communities are pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West; however, because of their widespread influence, moral communities are particularly noteworthy in the media and the academic world—both areas which have been dominated by a Jewish elite whose gradual rise to power increased greatly after World War II and came to dominate the culture of the West by the 1960s. For example, whereas mainstream social science had been relatively free of morally based ingroup-outgroup thinking prior to World War II, such thinking has had dramatic effects on the social sciences and humanities in later decades, to the point that academic departments and scholarly associations in these areas can be accurately characterized as “tribal moral communities” in the sense of Jonathan Haidt.[3] This is most obviously the case in areas such as social psychology, sociology, and ethnic and gender studies.

The result has been that academic research communities and the media rigorously police research and commentary that conflict with racial egalitarianism or promote the interests of European-derived peoples, and these attitudes have been internalized by a great many White people. Researchers such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, and Ralph Scott who attempt to publish findings on race differences or on public policies related to race find themselves socially ostracized, and they quickly learn that there are steep barriers to publication in mainstream academic journals and no mainstream grant support for their research. Recently Bruce Gilley, a professor at Portland State University, had the audacity to publish an academic article titled “The Case for Colonialism” in which he “suggested that European colonies in the Third World were both beneficial and legitimate, as they generally increased the local standard of living and were often supported by a significant portion of the local population.” The moral (not factual) condemnations quickly followed, and his department is now doing all can to make life miserable for him despite “acknowledg[ing] Gilley’s professionalism: it alleges neither academic misconduct nor personal misconduct on his part but affirms the opposite.” The editor of the journal where the article was published “resigned his position out of fear for his physical safety.”

One wonders how Gilley’s article even got published. When scholarly articles contravening the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors usually become extremely “rigorous”— demanding more experimental controls and other changes in methodology. Such “scientific skepticism” regarding research that one dislikes for deeper reasons was a major theme of The Culture of Critique in discussions of the work of Franz Boas, Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and the Frankfurt School, to name a few.[4] 

One result of this academic reign of terror has been that conservatives often self-select to go into other areas that are not so compromised, such as the hard sciences or computing; there is also active discrimination against conservative job candidates and Ph.D. applicants.[5] The system is therefore self-replicating.

Normal levels of wanting to be liked (not to mention pathological altruism) often involve a sense of self-righteousness, which can be translated as a sense of moral superiority that advertises one’s good reputation within a community defined, as prototypical European groups are, not by kinship but by conforming or exceeding the moral standards of the community. As noted above, such expressions of moralistic self-righteousness have a long history in Western societies and are very salient in contemporary political rhetoric.

It’s interesting that moral outrage, especially by males, acts as a cue to mate value in monogamous marriage that is a fundamental marker of Western social structure.[6] Since women want mates who fit into their moral community, men who signal moral outrage compatible with the values of that community are seen as good marriage prospects. One can imagine how this works on campus environments in the contemporary West where moral outrage directed at pretty much the entire Western past is de rigueur. Or in cities like Portland where, on Columbus Day, statues of Teddy Roosevelt and the sainted Abraham Lincoln (because he ordered the executions of 38 Indians after a Dakota uprising) were toppled by morally outraged antifa mobs.

An example of how self-righteous virtue signaling works at the highest levels of government can be seen in the comments of David Goodhart, a liberal journalist on migration:

There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. … [The political class] failed to control the inflow … in the interests of existing citizens.[7]

An evolutionist can only marvel at the completely unhinged—pathological—altruism on display here, given that the people making these policies are presumably native White British themselves.

This overweening concern with people of different races living in far off lands at the expense of one’s own people was characteristic of many nineteenth-century English intellectuals, particularly those associated with Exeter Hall, who exhibited what Charles Dickens described as “platform sympathy for the Black and … platform indifference to our own countrymen.”[8] In his novel Bleak House, serialized in 1852–53, Dickens portrayed such sentiments in the character of Mrs. Jellyby, whose “handsome eyes had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if … they could see nothing nearer than Africa.”[9] Mrs. Jellyby neglected those around her, including her daughter, her thoughts directed instead towards the fictitious African possession of Borrioboola-Gha and her idealistic plans for its development.

It is well-known that massive non-White immigration has had negative effects most of all on the traditional, White working class of Western societies, while wealthier Whites can escape the problems brought about by immigration by moving to other neighborhoods—the phenomenon of White flight.  They also tend to have jobs, such as in journalism, that have not been impacted by immigration, although visas for workers in technical areas are increasingly common. However, contemporary liberal-minded elites throughout the West are indifferent or even dismissive of the negative effects of immigration on the White working class in terms of lowered wages,[10] lessened community cohesion and involvement,[11] and deteriorating public schools. As noted, in Mrs. Jellyby’s case, this included neglecting her own children—also characteristic of contemporary liberals who typically fail to think seriously about the effects of mass non-White migration on the long-term prospects of their own children as a minority in a majority non-White society.

Such expressions of high-mindedness are attempts to fit into a moral community as defined by the media and accepted by their peers. Because the left dominates the moral high ground, expressing empathy for the native Whites, especially the White working class, makes anyone with such ideas into a moral pariah, as would advocating for their interests, with likely negative effects on career prospects. Indeed, expressions of White identity and especially having a sense of White interests have been condemned by establishment media and academic figures as illustrating the lowest form of moral depravity.

Of course, the motives involved in such cases may involve more than empathy for suffering others. While these elite Whites may feel genuine empathy for suffering others in foreign lands to the point of wanting to inundate the West with them, they are also in effect buttressing their status in the morally defined ingroup. They may even be attempting to be “more moral than thou”—competitive virtue signaling—by out-empathizing others in the group. And whether consciously or unconsciously, they may be aware of severe costs if they fail to conform to the norms of their moral community—as well as the benefits of conforming.

The conviction of self-righteousness characteristic of altruistic people need not be rational:

What feels like a conscious life-affirming moral choice—my life will have meaning if I help others—will be greatly influenced by the strength of an unconscious and involuntary mental sensation that tells me that this decision is “correct.” It will be this same feeling that will tell you the “rightness” of giving food to starving children in Somalia, doing every medical test imaginable on a clearly terminal patient … . It helps to see this feeling of knowing as analogous to other bodily sensations over which we have no direct control.[12]

In other words, the sensations of rightness and nobility act as psychological reflexes, and they are so pleasurable that people are inclined to seek them in their own right and without regard to facts or the long-run consequences to themselves.

Talk to an insistent know-it-all who refuses to consider contrary opinions and you get a palpable sense of how the feeling of knowing can create a mental state akin to addiction. … Imagine the profound effect of feeling certain that you have ultimate answers. … Relinquishing such strongly felt personal beliefs would require undoing or lessening major connections with the overwhelmingly seductive pleasure-reward circuitry. Think of such a shift of opinion as producing the same type of physiological changes as withdrawing from drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.[13]

Feelings of moral righteousness may thus be pleasurable and lead to addiction. “Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again.”[14]

The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong. Or, 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.[15]

This type of sanctimoniousness is, of course, particularly common among the people labeled “Social Justice Warriors.” These are the people screaming “racist,” “misogynist,” “white supremacist,” etc. at any seeming violation of the norms of the moral communities of the left. And, because of the cultural hegemony of the left, such people can often be seen on social media (and in op-eds in the mainstream media) expressing their moral righteousness—a moral righteousness that fits with or extends the boundaries of the cultural left.

Another aspect of this is competitive altruism or competitive virtue signaling. Given that expressions of moral righteousness are typically communicated in a social setting and are aimed at solidifying or enhancing one’s reputation within a group, there may be competition for ever more extreme expressions of self-righteousness—even among people who are not biologically inclined to be prone to be warm and loving to others. Extreme expressions of moral righteousness are not only addicting, they may also raise one’s status in a social group, just as it’s common for religious people to express “holier than thou” sentiments. Strongly religious people compete to be most virtuous in their local church. On the left, we see vegan fanatics shunning vegans who even talk to people who eat meat or eat in restaurants where meat is served—even family members. I imagine there is a dynamic within antifa groups—the shock troops of the establishment’s views on race and migration—where people who do not condone violence or are unwilling to crack heads themselves are ostracized or at least have much less status.

The result is a “feed forward” process in which the poles of political discourse move ever farther apart, doubtless exacerbated by the contemporary fixation on social media. For example, well-publicized attacks on Confederate statues have quickly morphed into attacks on Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus. Sympathy among liberals for granting amnesty to illegal immigrants has morphed into calls by prominent Democrats to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), make border crossing legal, and give them health care, driver’s licenses, voting rights, and ultimately citizenship. Inviting anyone remotely associated with conservative ideas—much less the racialist Right—to give a talk at a college campus has morphed from a tolerated rarity to a context for angry protests, rioting, injuries to conservatives, and damage to property.

I suggest that this competitive virtue signaling is a major cause of the increasing polarization that we see in the United States and throughout the West in the age of social media. A Pew Research Center survey on changes in U.S. political culture from 1994–2017 found that the increasing divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially on immigration and race, was much more due to the median views of Democrats shifting left.[16]

Nevertheless, a theoretically similar phenomenon exists on the right as, for example, when individuals condemn others for being insufficiently militant or ideologically pure. However, because the left dominates the cultural landscape, such competitive virtue signaling has had most of its effects on the left as the median views of liberals shift to the left. Such competitive virtue signaling from both the left and the right is highly characteristic of the social dynamics of social media sites and journalism.

People on the right face the danger of “doxxing,” having their identity and personal information made public. Hosts of shows in the mainstream media may have to cope with losing sponsors and hence their livelihood; e.g., as of March, 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had lost around 30 sponsors, mainly because of his comments on immigration.[17] Or people may fear losing their job as a result of a phone call to their place of employment by a self-described “civil rights” organization such as the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League. This may well be why it is the left that has become more extreme in recent decades, whereas far too many on the right attempt to mollify their leftist critics by knuckling under to their moral righteousness.

The cultural domination of the left has meant that certain views are off-limits for all but the most daring. Thus, media sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, while definitely to the right of the mainstream media, avoid explicit advocacy of White identity and interests. Such constraints are much less apparent on the left, with the result that the left continues to get more and more extreme in their views. As I write, views on immigration noted above and on abortion (making abortion legal up until or even shortly after birth) that used to be virtually non-existent among Democrats are increasingly being espoused by mainstream Democrat politicians and pundits. And because transgenderism has become a leftist cause, pre-pubertal children are now given hormone blockers, at times with disastrous results:

Prescribed puberty blockers by the Gender Identity Development Service as a teenager, the Manchester resident has been left with a male-sounding voice, body hair, a beard, no breasts, and unsure whether she will ever be able to have children.

A critical consequence of this is racial polarization. White Americans have been shifting toward the Republican Party—the last Democrat president to get a majority of White votes was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In general, this is an expression of implicit Whiteness, as non-White groups coalesce in the Democratic Party. The point here is that such trends are likely to increase and polarization become more severe.

Civil war is definitely in the air and one can only imagine the violence that would greet the (at this juncture unlikely) re-election of Donald Trump. But, if Joe Biden wins, a great many Americans, seeing that the changes are happening at warp speed and that the Democrats are aiming at a permanent power via importing Democrat-voting non-Whites, packing the Supreme Court, ending the electoral college and two senators per state and the re(as they already have in states like California), will become disillusioned with the system—like the USSR toward the end of the Cold War. Again, civil war is in the air.

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

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Jonathan Haidt, “Post-partisan Social Psychology.” Presentation at the meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX, January 27, 2011.

https://vimeo.com/19822295

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html

[4] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 2nd edition: Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002), especially Chs. 2 and 6.

[5] Kevin MacDonald, “Why are Professors Liberals?,” The Occidental Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Summer, 2010): 57–79.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321716607_

[6] Mitch Brown et al., “Demonstrate Values: Behavioral Displays of Moral Outrage as a Cue to Long-Term Mate Potential,” unpublished ms, Fairleigh Dickinson University (2020).

[7] David Goodhart, “Why We on the Left Made an Epic Mistake on Immigration,” Daily Mail (March 22, 2013).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297776/SATURDAY-ESSAY-Why-Left-epic-mistake-immigration.html

[8] Arthur A. Adrian, “Dickens on American Slavery: A Carlylean Slant,” PMLA: Journal of the Modern Languages Association of America 67, no. 4 (June 1952): 315–29, 329.

[9] Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Vol. 3 (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1853), 26.

https://books.google.com/books?id=KlsJAAAAQAAJ

[10] George J. Borjas, “The Analytics of the Wage Effect of Immigration,” Working Paper 14796 (March, 2009), National Bureau of Economic Research.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w14796.pdf

[11] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 3 (2007): 137–174; Salter, “The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity”; see also Frank Salter, “Germany’s Jeopardy,” You Tube (January 5, 2016).

[12] Robert A. Burton, “Pathological Certitude,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 131–37, 135.

[13] Ibid., 136.

[14] David Brin, “Self-addiction and Self-righteousness,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 77–84, 80.

[15] Ibid., 80.

[16] Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider” (October 5, 2017).

https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/

[17] Jeremy Barr, “Without Major Sponsors, Tucker Carlson’s Show Leans on Ads for Fox Programming,” The Hollywood Reporter (March 22, 2019).

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/major-sponsors-tucker-carlsons-show-leans-fox-news-house-ads-1196257