James Edwards on Mel Gibson

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James Edwards’ current TOO article (“On the crucifixion of Mel Gibson“) emphasizes themes that have been a staple here: Jews adopting very different strategies and attitudes in Israel than in the Diaspora and Jews making alliances with other minorities against the White majority. It reminds us once again that, unlike the old WASP elite, the new elite in America will not be principled.

Ari Emanuel is horrified that Gibson would use the N-word but he comes from a long line of racial Zionists–followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky who believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish. For example Jabotinsky stated, “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.” On the other hand, as soon as they move to the US, the family adopts the leftist, pro-multicultural, anti-White attitudes typical of American Jews. His mother was a civil rights worker in the US, and of course his brother Rahm Emanuel is a major power in the Obama administration and its left-leaning multicultural, anti-White agenda. Edwards shows that Emanuel’s talent agency also represents several White-hating rappers. Of course, Jews have their own grudges against the people and culture of the West, epitomized by the hostility toward Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.

It’s only common sense for Whites to fear an America in which they are a minority with a hostile Jewish elite that has made an alliance with Blacks and other minorities with their own historical grudges.

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Is Racial Purism Decadent?

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“Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”

—Oswald Spengler

Recently I spent a good deal of time re-reading the great Oswald Spengler: for general enlightenment, but also with an eye to criticizing his teachings about race, which seemed at first reading confused, bizarre, and dangerous. Much to my surprise, however, I have come to see much sense and truth in Spengler’s views.

Biological Race

Although Spengler speaks dismissively of Darwinism, he does not deny that race is a biological phenomenon. For Spengler, races are extended families, people who share the same “blood” (i.e., genes). Spengler even speaks of a race as a vast collective body of individuals through which the same genes circulate.

But Spengler denies that biology is all there is to race. Race, it turns out, has both psychological and cultural aspects as well.

Like Darwinists, Spengler believes that biological races are mutable. They change over time. According to Spengler, the principal force that shapes races is “landscape,” i.e., environment. This is consistent with the biological view that a distinct race emerges when a human population is isolated and subjected to unique environmental conditions. These conditions select for certain genetic variations. These variations then spread throughout the entire population through inbreeding. (If there are barriers to breeding between different parts of the population, then multiple new races or subraces will emerge.)

Where Spengler departs from sound biology is his belief that landscape can shape a population independent of genetic change, and that different races, when placed in the same landscape, will converge in their traits without genetic blending. Spengler even refers to Franz Boas’s false and probably fraudulent claims that in America, the offspring of different European racial stocks had convergent biological traits that were products of environment alone. But none of Spengler’s conclusions about race depend on these false assumptions, which can be excised without changing his overall viewpoint.

Psychological Race

What is “psychological” race? Spengler often speaks of “having race” and being “of race.” But having race is not merely having certain genes. It is a matter of having a certain feeling: a primitive, vital urge to propagate oneself. It is the drive to immortalize oneself through one’s progeny. In The Hour of Decision, Spengler writes:

A woman of race does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but amother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race. Out of this instinct arises the primitive jealousy which leads one woman to take away from another the man whom she covets as the father of her children. The more intellectual jealousy of the great cities . . . betrays the waning of the race urge to permanence; and that instinct for permanence cannot be reawakened by speeches and writing. . . . A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors. That is the Nordic idea of immortality. These peoples have known no other and desired none. It is the source of that tremendous yearning for fame, the wish to live on among posterity through one’s work, to see one’s name perpetuated on monuments or at the least held in honourable memory. (Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934], 220–21)

This feeling of race is not “racial consciousness,” i.e., awareness of belonging to a certain race. The feeling of race is forward-looking. Racial consciousness is backwards-looking. The feeling of race impels us to create new life. Racial consciousness is merely awareness of life that has already been created, the life handed down to us. The feeling of race is the stirring of the same creative force in ourselves.

Race and Culture

How, then, is race also “cultural”? If a race is a collective body that exists and propagates itself through individual bodies, a culture is a collective mind that exists in and through individual minds, propagating itself by means of language.

Race shapes and limits culture. But once culture arises, it turns back on and reshapes its racial substratum in the light of ideas that are not dictated by biology. These ideas include conceptions of beauty and fitness that guide mate selection, myths and religious beliefs that regulate sexual behavior, moral ideals that promote the propagation of certain types, etc.

Cultural selection may be eugenic, dysgenic, or both, but if exercised over a long enough period of time, it can produce human populations as varied as different breeds of dog.

Race Change

Spengler puts great stock in the mutability of races.

He denies what might be called “race Platonism,” namely the idea that races are immutable kinds that are more or less well-instantiated by particular individuals. For Spengler, a race is just a collection of individuals with common blood. If a race can be likened to a collective organism, this organism does not exist over and above its individual members. Instead it exists only in and through them.

Spengler also denies what can be called “race Traditionalism,” the idea that in the distant past, a godlike super-race existed, which has since declined because of miscegenation with inferior races or spiritual transgressions or both.

Race Platonism sees every concrete, living organism as an imperfect reflection of its ideal archetype. Race Traditionalism sees all change as degeneration. Both views see change as metaphysically inferior to timeless perfection, and the Traditionalists think that as time rolls on, things usually go from bad to worse.

But if race Platonism and race Traditionalism are false, then change is notnecessarily a bad thing. Life is constant change, and stasis—even frozen perfection—is death.

In Spengler’s view, a race just is a constantly changing group of individuals who share the same genetic traits at any given point in time. But these traits are not timeless and permanent either. (That would be just a sneaky, immanent form of Platonism, i.e., Aristotelianism.) Genetic traits also change over time. This means that if we go far enough back in our family trees, we will find people quite unlike ourselves.

The unity of a race, therefore, is ultimately not defined by the persistence of something that remains unchanged in time, but merely the continuity of an ever-changing process, one of the strands of the ever-changing process that is nature itself.  

Race Preservation?

What is race preservation? Most race preservationists will answer that it consists of maintaining a certain set of genes. This is, for instance, the core of Frank Salter’s concept of Ethnic Genetic Interests.

But if Spengler’s view of race is correct, then this is tantamount to the demand that time stop. It is tantamount to taking a snapshot of a moving process and demanding that no further change take place.

Yet if a race is a constantly changing collective organism, then the demand to “preserve” it at a certain arbitrarily chosen moment is actually the demand to kill it. It is analogous to “preserving” a bird at the height of its beauty—by shooting it and taking it to the taxidermist.

Every generation of a race is shaped in part by the conscious and unconscious choices of its forbears. Each new generation will be slightly different, and when we compare our remote ancestors and our remote descendants, they will hardly resemble one another.

At one end of the family tree, there will be the ape-like primitives of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the other end, there might be something like the macro-cephalic, telepathic “butt heads” of the original Star Trek series. But they will still be “one” race, one extended family.

Allowing that story to unfold is the only genuine form of race preservation that is possible.

The false race preservationist, however, decides that his generation—or some previous generation—is the “right” generation to preserve. Then he seeks to hold onto—or “get back” to—a particular genetic snapshot or cross-section of the race’s life.

All generations before that point were not just shaped by previous generations, they also shaped subsequent generations. But the race preservationist decides that from a certain point on, every generation will be made by previous generations. But they will not be allowed to make future generations in their turn. They will no longer be agents of change, but merely agents of preservation.

Who are they to change anything?

Racial Purism as Decadence

Spengler regards such a mindset as decadent. Consider the following passage from The Hour of Decision:

In speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike—that is, healthy—generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had “race,” to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it.

This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply. God is, in the familiar words of Frederick the Great, always on the side of the big battalions, and now if ever this shows itself. The millions who fell in the World War were the pick of all the white world had in the way of race, but the test of race is the speed with which it can replace itself. A Russian once said to me: “The Russian woman will make good in ten years what we sacrificed in the Revolution.” That is the right instinct. Such races are irresistible. (The Hour of Decision, 219–20)

Following Nietzsche, Spengler holds that positive values and a healthy culture are the products of “ascending life.” Negative values and a decadent culture are products of declining life.

Ascending life is active, conscious of what it can do, of its power to change the future. Declining life is passive, conscious of what has been done to it and cannot be undone.

Ascending life is vital and life-giving. Declining life is devitalized and devitalizing.

Ascending life is forward-looking and hopeful; it creates and embraces change; it pursues gain rather than avoids loss; it is motivated by love and passion, not fear; it is warlike, willing to risk life for higher gains.

Declining life is backwards-looking, fearful of the future, fearful of change, fearful of loss, fearful of risk and conflict, conservative, stinking of senility, hemmed by shrinking horizons, chilled by looming death.

Ascending life is aware of the past, but selectively so: it remembers what is empowering and forgets what is not. When the past becomes restrictive, it sloughs it off like a snake discards an old skin.

Declining life is less selective. It has a long memory, brooding over old mistakes and picking at old wounds. Declining life is defined by the past, which it carries as an ever-growing burden, like a snail adding to its lifeless shell even as its living substance wanes, until finally it is crushed under the dead weight.

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According to Spengler, when the healthy man thinks of race, he is less concerned with the race we have been than the race we will become. He may feel grateful to his ancestors for the positive gifts—the strengths—they have bequeathed him. He gives no thought to their mistakes and imperfections, even those that mark him. It is enough to be aware that they were not perfect, that there is room for improvement. And a healthy man thinks that he can make improvements. He thinks that he can bequeath more to his progeny than his ancestors bequeathed to him.

Thus the healthy man “of race” is not concerned with racial purity—defined as the preservation of a certain set of gene frequencies, whether his own or his ancestors’. He is pleased with the good traits he has received, and he would like to pass them on. But, as Spengler says, he is more concerned with strong sons than pure ones, and he would not hesitate to breed with an outsider if he thought this would improve his progeny.

For Spengler, a concern with racial purity is a sign of racial decadence, of a lack of racial vitality. The racial purist looks to the past, not the future, because he does not have the vitality in him necessary to create a future. He is defined by the past and feels that he does not have the power or the right to change it, only to repeat it (or talk about repeating it, and urge others to repeat it).

As Spengler writes, “Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.” This means that the people who talk the most about reproduction do it the least. And, Spengler might add, that is a good thing. Let the sapless branches rattle in the wind all they want, as long as they spare us their shriveled fruit.

White Nationalism: A Degenerate Movement?

Racial purists often claim that their intellectual opposition to miscegenation is merely a healthy “instinct.” They also claim that there is something biologically sick about the instincts of miscegenators.

Spengler thinks that the exact opposite is true. He would predict that those who intellectually oppose miscegenation and advocate racial purity and preservation would be, on average, less virile, less fecund, and less mentally and physically healthy than the average person, including the average miscegenator.

Based on ten years of experience in the American White nationalist movement, I have to say that Spengler’s prediction is absolutely correct. White nationalism in America is an overwhelmingly degenerate movement, and I do not exempt myself from this judgment.

But what does this mean, exactly? It means merely that, from the point of view of biological vitality, a White man who preaches racial purity but has no children is less healthy than a White man who chooses to have children with a non-White woman.

It does not mean that the White nationalist is wrong in his convictions about biology and politics. It does not mean that, from a eugenic point of view, Whites have anything to gain from mixing with other races. (As a matter of fact, I think we do not.)

Decadent people can be right, and healthy people can be wrong.

But there is a lot more to politics than simply being right.

And from the point of view of practical politics, we White nationalists need to take a good hard look at ourselves. Can such a degenerate movement win?

Should it win? For the sake of all that is holy, shouldn’t we want to keep nostalgia-addled kooks away from any power over the future of life, lest they murder and mummify the race in their quest to preserve its purity?

Vitalizing White Nationalism?

What would a vital White nationalism look like?

This is where Spengler’s views of how culture shapes race come in. I also take inspiration from Michael O’Meara’s essays on myth and politics in his Toward the White Republic and Alex Kurtagić’s “Learning from the Right” and related essays.

White nationalists love sobering facts, so let’s begin with one. The White nationalist movement, which seeks the salvation of nature’s fairest and most talented race, is less capable of motivating real world activity than Star Trek, a silly but entertaining set of movies and TV shows about multiracial and miscegenating liberals who live in Tupperware, dress in pajamas, and fly around the galaxy preaching high-minded, hypocritical twaddle about tolerance and pluralism and diversity.

Even if we correct for the differences in the size of audiences, Trekkies accomplish more in the real world than an equal number of White nationalists.

Why is that? It has nothing to do with idealism. Both movements are highly idealistic. It has everything to do with animal vitality. For all its silliness, there is something about Star Trek that motivates human action and creativity—that taps into pure animal vitality—better than White nationalism.

Present-day White nationalism is conservative: backward looking, devitalized, decadent, and gloomy. Star Trek is progressive: forward-looking, optimistic, and hopeful. (Nauseatingly so.)

With this in mind, ask yourself who is more likely to preserve the White race: (1) the present White nationalist movement, or (2) a group of kooks who, taking Tolkien as their bible, decide that through eugenics, they are going to mold every successive generation of their progeny closer to the archetype of the elves: the fairest and wisest race?

The elves have it. Why? Because, kooky though it may be, creating a race of elves far better captures the imagination and mobilizes human vitality than dark predictions about the rising tide of color.

A vital White nationalist movement would be a utopian, progressivist, eugenicist mythical-cultural phenomenon. It would not be founded on empirical studies of how race influences culture. It would not propagate itself through academic conferences and policy studies. It would be founded on a grand culture-creating, race-shaping myth, propagated through art and religion, that enthralls and mobilizes a whole people. (No, I don’t have one handy.)

It would be less concerned about the race we were or the race we are than about the race we can become. It would not brood over whether the Finns or Armenians or Sicilians are White enough. It would not obsess over the odd Jew or Amerindian in someone’s ancestry, as long as he or she makes a net contribution to the coming race. (No, this is not special pleading on my part.) Besides, eventually, we will be able to just edit out undesirable genetic code, although I hope we will be more concerned with the perfections we can write in.

Most importantly, a vital White nationalist movement should require its leaders to lead by example, by marrying wisely and fruitfully. No, the movement should not and cannot turn away talented people who have the misfortune of being unwilling or unable to reproduce. But the movement should definitely have a hierarchy, and anyone who wants to rise to the top needs to do more than talk about a future for White children. He needs to contribute White children to the future.

This article is also posted at Counter-Currents.com with a section for readers’ comments.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

John Paul Stevens as a prototypical WASP

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There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that soon there will be no WASPs on the Supreme Court. What does it mean? And does it really matter?

What’s fascinating is that John Paul Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court as a moderate Republican who gradually moved further to the left as he got older.  What strikes me is his strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group. After all, that’s what being principled means: Doing something because you value an ideal, not because there is anything in it for you. If I don’t steal something because I am afraid of getting caught, it’s not a matter of principle. But if I refrain from stealing some money it even if there is no possibility of being caught and even if getting the money would mean a lot to me, then I am acting on principle.

Stevens’ liberalism meant that despite being nominated by a Republican, he timed his retirement to occur during a Democratic administration. Even without knowing who would be the Democratic president, he surely knew that a Democratic president would nominate someone quite unlike himself to fill his position. The chances of any Democratic administration appointing a WASP to the Supreme Court are less than zero. And of course, Obama appointed someone who seems to all appearances to be a strongly identified Jew — not to mention that she has no visible qualifications and has benefited immensely from Jewish ethnic networking.

Much the same could be said about David Souter–another WASP appointed by a Republican who chose to retire during a Democratic administration and was replaced by a Latina.

The result is that the Obama administration has has had two appointments very early on, predictably appointing people who represent two important Democratic constituencies–Latino and Jewish. (Jews contribute at least 60% of the money for the Democratic Party, and Latinos are an increasingly important component of the non-White ethnic coalition that the Democratic Party has now become.)

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor. This is reflected in his writing:

“The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. “If those ideas are worth fighting for—and our history demonstrates that they are—it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that what’s important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

Writing in the LATimes, Gregory Rodriquez framed the the issue by titling his article “The triumph of WASP culture“: the lack of WASPs means the WASPs have won. The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and Souter as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave. WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (See my review of Eric M. Kaufmann’s The Rise and  Fall of Anglo America.) (The exception was during the 1920s when the WASPs sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for–even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle –“Let us die to make men free” as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of ingroups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their proneness to moral universalism — ethnic traits in my view and in  the view of many WASPs in the 19th century — made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s.  Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

And now that the forces of liberal cosmopolitanism have won out, the WASPs — even the liberal ones — are being rapidly jettisoned by our new, substantially Jewish elite. The replacement of Stevens by Kagan is deliciously paradigmatic.

Kaufmann points out that one of the defining features of the  WASPs is the tendency to believe that as a result of assimilation everyone would be just like them. Immigrant Catholics would shed their religion and become proper Protestants. In fact, becoming a WASP wasn’t all that hard if you had enough money, dressed right, joined the right clubs, and became an Episcopalian or Congregationalist. As I wrote about growing up in Wisconsin:

I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. … But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I suspect therefore that Stevens and Souter think, perhaps unconsciously, that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least.

In fact, it is far more likely that now that the WASPs are gone, the Supreme Court and every other important institution will be divvied up as an ethnic spoils system, especially for the Democrats as they try to appease the various parts of their ethnic coalition. And the Republicans will doubtless appoint at least some non-Whites to show that the principles of WASP idealism are not dead.

The reality is that the  various non-White ethnic groups jockeying for power in America are not like the WASPs at all. Their powerful sense of ethnic identification means by definition that they are unprincipled–that they can be reliably predicted to see things in terms of what is good for their ethnic group. Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment comes to mind, and Kagan’s strong ethnic identity implies that she, like the rest of the Jewish community, will be mainly motivated the old dictum of “what’s good for the Jews”: the Supreme Court as a lifetime legislative appointment to be used to advance the interests of their ethnic group. Kagan’s unprincipled views on issues such as free speech are entirely within the mainstream of the Jewish community. Indeed, in one of her law review articles she anticipated the recent hate crimes legislation that was pushed so strongly by the ADL and supported by the rest of the organized Jewish community. The most glaring aspect of Jewish political behavior now is their remarkably unprincipled support for the multicultural left, including massive non-White immigration in the United States while at the same time providing unquestioning support for an apartheid, racialist Israel with laws that make Arizona’s immigration laws pale by comparison.

Stevens and Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the  future.  All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.

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Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together

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The English translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together, “The 1920s,” is now available. (See here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. However, it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great deal of new information for Western audiences. It is a very long chapter (>26000 words). In the current TOO article, I summarize some of the main points and draw analogies to the current situation in the West. I encourage comments on Solzhenitsyn’s chapter and my article here.

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Hormonal regulation of ingroup altruism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amy Biehl Syndrome, Acute Case: Professor Peter Erlinder

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Peter Erlinder is a law professor recently released from a Rwandan prison, where he found himself jailed for his attempts to represent an opposition leader.

Whatever the merits of his cause, Erlinder strikes me as a typical White American academic/liberal who thinks he can make the world a better place by immersing himself in the messes of Black Africans.  The stirring, Academy Award-winning movie based on his heroic life — complete with singing, drumming Africans in the background — plays in his head on the plane ride over.  For him, going to jail probably only added to the romance.

Erlinder walks towards the baggage claim with his wife, Masako Usui, by his side. StarTribune.com

Of course, his towering mistake is to think that anything he does will have any influence over the lives of Black Africans.  It won’t, largely because black Africans simply don’t operate like white Westerners:  they don’t think like them, behave like them, or value what they value.

Neither, of course, do many black Americans, one of whom robbed Erlinder at gunpoint upon his return.  (The robber was Black, a fact censored by the press, as usual.)

Does it get any better than this?  What will it take for Peter Erlinder to understand that Black people are simply not worth his intellectual energy?  We joke about people who wouldn’t know something “if it smacked them in the face”, but for White people, it can truly be said that the vast majority of Whites wouldn’t acknowledge racial difference if it smacked them in the face.  Or robbed them at gunpoint.

Attention, White law professors:  the people needing heroic advocacy are your own people.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Elena Kagan and the new (unprincipled) elite

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Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman had a bit of Jewish triumphalism published recently in the NY Times (“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP“).  Now that the WASPs have gone down to zero seats on the Supreme Court and there’s a Black president, it’s time to congratulate the WASPs for holding onto their principles even though their principles caused their demise: WASPs as the first and only proposition ethnic group.

Satisfaction with our national progress [by having 3 Jews on the Supreme Court and no WASPs] should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

I would go beyond Feldman by saying that no other elite has ever voluntarily allowed itself to be eclipsed because of steadfast adherence to principle. Feldman is doubtless quite happy because he realizes that the new elite (including himself) will not allow itself to be eclipsed by such madness–suicide by principle.

Indeed, Kagan’s arrival on the Supreme Court is a sort of official coming out party for the new elite. It’s been there for quite some time, but the Kagan nomination is an in-your-face-demonstration of the power of Jewish ethnic networking at the highest levels of government. And the first thing one notices is that the new elite has no compunctions about nominating someone for the Supreme Court even though she has no real qualifications.  So much for the principles of merit and inclusion: Inclusion does not apply to WASPs now that they have been deposed. And the principle of merit can now be safely discarded in favor of ethnic networking.  As I noted previously,

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

The same goes for Jewish over-representation in elite academic institutions–far higher than can be explained by higher Jewish IQ. Does anyone seriously think that Jewish domination of Hollywood and the so much of the other mainstream media  (see, e.g., Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article) is about merit rather than ethnic networking and solidarity? And then there’s the addiction of the new elite to affirmative action for non-Whites.

Whatever else one can say about the new elite, it certainly does not believe in merit. The only common denominator is that Whites of European extraction are being systematically excluded and displaced to the point that they are now underrepresented in all the important areas of the elite compared to their percentage of the population. The new elite distinguishes itself mainly by its hostility to the traditional people and culture of those they displaced. It is an elite that cannot say its name. Indeed the ADL was all over Pat Buchanan for merely mentioning that Kagan is Jewish and that, upon her confirmation, Jews would be one-third of the Supreme Court.

This lack of principle at the foundation of the new elite extends to every area of the culture: The financial elite that produced the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression by participating in and massively profiting from wholesale fraud in the mortgage market; the academic elite that systematically excludes ideas related to the legitimacy and reasonableness of White ethnic interests; the media elite that routinely provides invidious depictions of Whites and especially Whites with a sense of White identity and ethnic interests; the political elite that fails to perform the most basic function of government: protecting the people and culture from invasion and displacement; the organized Jewish community with its influence spread throughout the government, routinely supporting an expansive ethnonationalism in Israel while condemning any hint of ethnonationalism in White Americans.

This lack of principle will certainly extend to Elena Kagan once she accedes to the  Supreme Court. Her academic publishing record, meager as it is, indicates someone who does not believe in principles such as free speech:

Kagan [will]  be quite willing to fashion her legal arguments to attain her liberal/left policy goals, and that is exactly what her other writings show. Her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” (60 University of Chicago Law Review 873; available on Lexis/Nexis) indicates someone who is entirely on board with seeking ways to circumscribe free speech in the interests of multicultural virtue: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” She acknowledges that the Supreme Court is unlikely to alter its stance that speech based on viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment, but she sees that as subject to change with a different majority: The Supreme Court “will not in the foreseeable future” adopt the view that “all governmental efforts to regulate such speech … accord with the Constitution.” But in her view there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Clearly, she does not see the protection of viewpoint-based speech as a principle worth preserving or set in stone. Rather, she believes that a new majority could rule that “all government efforts to regulate such speech” would be constitutional. All government efforts.

I suspect  that the new elite will continue to pay lip service to the founding documents, the rule of law, and high principles like merit. But in reality these documents will be interpreted in ways that benefit the new elite and allow it to consolidate and maintain its power. I believe that with one more vote after Kagan’s confirmation, the First Amendment will be a historical curiousity.

And the principle of merit will mainly come down to promotional hype  in the media (when not obviously a matter of affirmative action).  Feldman represents Kagan as an exemplar of the shift to an American meritocracy — despite her remarkably undistinguished record. (A Google ssearch for “Elena Kagan” and “Harriet Miers” yields dozens of articles on the very real question of her qualifications.)  Senator Jeff Sessions correctly called Kagan the least experienced nominee “at least in the last 50 years.” He also noted that his main concern about her is his fear that she lacks a firm sense of the  rule of law–in other words, that she does not see law as defending the principles that were so sacrosanct to her WASP antecedents: “Will she as a judge subordinate herself to the constitution and keep her political views at bay?”

That is the question precisely. And all the evidence is that Kagan, like the rest of the new elite, will reject principle in favor of interest. We already see that honest, empirically grounded analyses of the Jewish role in the new elite and how this new elite serves Jewish ethnic interests will continue to be proscribed. As in the USSR, the topic will be officially off limits. (Solzhenitsyn makes this point in 200 Years Together.)

Finally, I agree with Feldman that the WASP elite was extraordinarily principled–uniquely so. This is not the entire story, however, since the WASPs did mount an ethnic defense culminating in the 1924 immigration law. It failed, in my opinion mainly because of the rise of Jews as a hostile elite who attained their position by seizing the moral high ground and making alliances with and promoting the more principled (suicidal) component of the WASP elite. (WASPs like Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and A. Lawrence Lowell were not part of the the WASP suicide mission; they could see the writing on the wall and I think they understood who the enemy was.)  As Israel Zangwill said in opposing the 1924 immigration restriction law, “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way” (see here, p. 266).

Jewish intellectuals understood that WASP dedication to principles and ideals was their soft spot. We can expect that the new elite will not be similarly inclined to adhere to principles at the expense of self-interest. The result will be a catastrophic loss to the people who founded and built America.

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