Christopher Donovan: An all-White basketball league?

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Christopher Donovan: According to the Augusta Chronicle, entrepreneurs are planning an all-White pro basketball league. (“Basketball league for white Americans targets Augusta“) Assuming this is all on the up-and-up and not a joke, it would make a great test case for legal exclusivity. The Supreme Court held in Boy Scouts v. Dale that some forms of “expressive” association can exclude others, though they’ve also held that purely private all-male clubs are unconstitutional.  Law schools also unsuccessfully argued that they have the right to exclude military recruiters, though there was a federal statute on point that made this a slam dunk for the military.

On the whole, of course, we are denied the right of racial exclusivity in employment, housing and most major areas.  This is the truly new policy hegemony that none of our ancestors would have approved.

My argument is that freedom of association is a primary — if not the primary — human right, outstripping even freedom of speech in its importance to human fulfillment.  Or the “right of privacy”, advanced by Brandeis and Warren.  It’s so basic, perhaps, that it doesn’t have fully-fleshed arguments on its behalf.  But that’s what it needs.

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Ted Sallis: Taking a Initial Look at the American Third Position Party

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Ted Sallis: The American Third Position Party (A3P) is a new political party that purports to represent the interests of the white American majority.  As such, it is a refreshing change from the standard Republicrat/Democan one-party system and gives hope that, finally, the political system can be used to further our specific group interests. 

These are early days and one cannot make any definitive conclusions about A3P at this point.  However, some progress has been made, and the party has put forth some initial positions on major issues, so it is worthwhile to examine these. Readers are urged to look at A3P’s program and policies.  I have no major disagreement with their stance on crime, economy, education, etc.  Instead, I would like to take a closer look at two of their major policy initiatives. Emphasis added to all quotes. 

The following summarizes the party’s key positions on immigration:

 To safeguard our identity and culture, and to maintain the very existence of our nation, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration. Recognizing our people’s right to safety, and respecting the sanctity of the rule of law, we will immediately deport all criminal and illegal aliens. We believe, too, that American citizenship should be exclusive and meaningful. As such, the American Third Position will end the practice of automatic birthright-citizenship for children of illegal aliens. To restore, with civility, the identity and culture of our homeland, we will provide incentives for recent, legal immigrants to return to their respective lands. 

This is good – stopping the influx, deportation of illegals, and an end to the concept of “anything goes” birthright citizenship.  Even more impressively, the possibility of repatriation of “recent, legal immigrants” is brought up – the only instance of an American political party raising the “R” issue.  I would like even more – a more comprehensive repatriation program for example, but this is a good start. Also: 

Immigration affects our culture. It affects the way we feel, act, and operate within a community. It affects whether or not we can have actual communities at all. It affects our welfare and livelihood in ways that are immeasurable, aside from the efforts we go to in protecting against it. Immigration erodes our culture and sense of identity. In cities where many cultures meet, there is an atmosphere of hostility. Neighborhoods become atomized, and a true community is never established. 

True and good, but it’s not only culture. Not surprisingly, I would like to have seen a more explicitly Salterian mention of the actual physical, demographic, biological effects of immigration.  They add: 

While we accept that ethnic minorities are, and will always be, part of America, we want our will to be observed and exercised as it should be, and as it should have been. We have a right to sovereignty and to exercise our will as a people. We want an America that is recognizable to us, one that we can feel comfortable in. We believe that this desire is not unique to our nation or our own people, and we believe that all people’s have a right to sovereignty. Accordingly, we will stop all immigration into America, except in special cases. To help restore our national identity, we will offer generous grants to recent immigrants who have a desire to return to their countries of origin. While this can be easily repositioned by a media who is hostile to our people or to a political establishment who relies on recent immigrants for votes, we only mean to create a system of mutual benefit, where the wills of both parties are observed and respected, as they should be. Wherever a recent immigrant has a need to get back home but is without the resources to do as much, we will lend a helping hand. 

I don’t know about the first set of phrases, but I understand that this party needs to navigate within the streams of the politically possible – for now – and that a too radical program at first may be difficult.  A contrasting argument would be that it’s a mistake to start off too moderate.  An initial moderate stance may “lock in” this moderation and prevent future shifts toward more radical positions since, having attracted a mass of more moderate supporters at the beginning, the party would be loathe to lose that support by shifting towards more radical solutions to the pressing problems of race, culture, and nation.  Truth be told, I’m more supportive of the latter mindset – that it is better to lay your cards on the table at the beginning and build in depth with more revolutionary support.  Of course, the assumption here is that the A3P leadership and I actually agree on these more radical ideals.  It may be that our vision is not congruent, and that the party program is what it is because that’s what the party leaders want it to be.  And, of course, A3P leadership has the right to formulate their own party’s positions as they see fit.  I merely make suggestions and offer some contrary views.

The A3P also has an excellent position on space exploration.

This is important; I am a very strong supporter of space exploration (both manned and unmanned).  This is part of Western Man’s Faustian soul, will yield important information and discoveries, and, hopefully, eventually lead to Western Man’s expansion into, and colonization of, space (assuming of course we are not first Third Worldized out of existence).  That the A3P has included space exploration as a key part of their program is therefore encouraging and demonstrates a willingness to look at long-term objectives, and also the ability to look beyond the standard “right-wing fare” (immigration, economy, crime, etc.). 

One point though is that they should go beyond space exploration and put together a broader position on overall science and Technology.  In other words they should also: encourage the development of alternative and novel sources of energy, promote advances in biomedical research (which should include not only basic research and that aimed at disease therapeutics, but also research on race and eugenics), stimulate development of advanced computing, and encourage continued and expanded research into the fabric of the universe and of reality itself (e.g., astronomy and, especially, both theoretical and applied advanced physics, cosmology, etc).  Further, Americans need to be in the lead of what can be called “global disaster abatement” – research aimed at investigating and, if possible, preventing asteroid strikes, super volcano eruptions, pandemics, environmental degradation, etc.  While some of the latter may seem like “science fiction,” that is more a function of our limited knowledge and imagination than it is to any real limitation of the possibilities. 

The A3P can also state an interest in Western cultural artifacts – an interest in opposing the current “Winter” of our High Culture, and its sewer-like degraded atmosphere, with a contrasting encouragement of Western cultural rebirth and the creation of a civilization that can make us, our ancestors, and our posterity proud.

In summary, there is some more work to be done and I hope that a bit of constructive criticism will be appreciated.  However, all in all, A3P seems at this point to be a very positive development, and I wish them well.

A major concern is that the landscape of “movement” history is littered with the scattered remnants of past projects that, initially, looked promising and generated enthusiasm, but quickly petered out due to lack of progress and direction, infighting, the action of infiltrators and agent provocateurs, diminished interest of activists with short attention spans, and the ability of the establishment to use a variety of methods to thwart nationalist progress.  We can hope that things will be different this time.

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Implicit Whiteness in Scott Brown’s campaign

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The day before the election I happened to catch Keith Olbmermann at his smirking best — looking intensely into the camera and declaring that Scott Brown and all the people voting for him are racists. What’s the evidence for this? You see, Brown used a pick-up truck in his commercials. (Gasp!!) You know, pick-up trucks are pretty much the same as men in pointy hoods burning crosses. Next thing you know, candidates will seek endorsements from country music singers and NASCAR drivers.

What’s going on here, of course, is implicit Whiteness — implicit whiteness of a certain sort, that basically says “I, Scott Brown, am the candidate of the White working class.”

As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. These people are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Unfortunately, there were no exit polls for this election. It would be fascinating to see the racial breakdown. In the 2008 presidential election, 80% of the electorate in Massachusetts was White. Working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes betwen $50-75K.

Obviously, that did not happen this time around. Although it’s still a long shot, we can hope that eventually candidates will be able to explicitly assert the legitimacy of White identity and White interests.

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The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer

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Review of The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science and Ideology, by William H. Tucker; University of Illinois Press, 2009.

During his twilight years of retirement, Raymond Bernard Cattell had achieved what few social scientists could ever dream of attaining. The American Psychological Association (APA) nominated the highly respected psychologist, author, and co-author of 500 research papers and 56 books, to receive the Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award — the pinnacle of top honors in the profession — during the APA’s annual convention in August 1997. In nominating Cattell to receive this prestigious award, the APA summarized his legacy in the APA’s flagship journal The American Psychologist:

In a remarkable 70-year career, Raymond B. Cattell has made prodigious, landmark contributions to psychology, including factor analytic mapping of the domains of personality, motivation, and abilities; exploration of three different medias of assessment; separation of fluid and crystallized intelligence; and numerous methodological innovations. Thus, Cattell became recognized in numerous substantive areas, providing a model of the complete psychologist in an age of specialization. It may be said that Cattell stands without peer in his creation of a unified theory of individual differences integrating intellectual, temperamental, and dynamic domains of personality in the context of environmental and hereditary influences. (American Psychologist, 1997, 797).

Although Cattell received numerous tributes over the years for his multifaceted work in psychology, the APA’s decision to recognize Cattell’s lifetime work firmly anchored his place as a pioneer in the field. After decades of tireless energy and unrivaled persistence in pursuing new frontiers in personality and intelligence research, Cattell finally had earned proper recognition as a distinguished authority from the leading organization of American psychologists.  As a trail-blazing researcher, Cattell’s work spawned a productive stream of empirical findings and theoretical breakthroughs that led to several innovative advances in the study of personality. His theoretical and empirical contributions helped anchor the field of personality and intelligence research on firm scientific principles. Many consider Cattell the father of personality trait measurement.

Cattell at age 15

In 2002, a survey of 1,725 psychologists ranked Cattell 16th among the most eminent psychologists (top 100) of the twentieth century. Cattell edged out Behaviorist John B. Watson who placed 17th and followed just below Hans Eysenck (13) and William James (14). He was the eleventh most-cited psychologist according to the 1975 Social Science Citation Index.

Cattell co-founded the Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) with his wife Karen Cattell in 1949. IPAT continues to provide testing tools for private firms to assist in occupational consulting, human resource management (employee screening, selection, and placement), and clinical guidance. In 1960, Cattell founded the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP) and launched its journal Multivariate Behavioral Research.

After his retirement from the University of Illinois, Cattell took up residence in Hawaii after briefly moving to Colorado and continued work on unfinished research projects. Upon his retirement, the University of Illinois presented Cattell with a leather-bound set of his published books.

In the two weeks prior to the APA’s convention in Chicago, Cattell’s work came under intense scrutiny. As the focus of a last-minute smear campaign, Cattell’s critics — extreme far-left ideologues — waged an intense media blitz of distortions, rumor, and innuendo. These axe-grinding ideological adversaries worked vigorously behind the scenes to undermine the APA’s presentation of the Gold Medal Award. They accused Cattell of “racism” and “anti-Semitism.” The APA decided to postpone the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award and investigate the matter with a “blue-ribbon” panel of experts. The New York Times and other news organizations sensationalized the “controversy” that ensued. Cattell denied the allegations, responded to his critics, and pulled his name as a nominee of the Gold Medal Award, and, at age 92, died a few months later in February 1998.

This sordid ordeal is the subject of William H. Tucker’s The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology published by the University of Illinois Press. Tucker, the author of The Science and Politics of Racial Research and The Funding of Scientific Racism, has carved out a niche as a muckraker of epic proportions. His modus operandi is to discredit scientists who research racial differences in intelligence and personality (anthropologists, geneticists, and evolutionary psychologists). He misleadingly links scholars, no matter how remote, to a rogue’s gallery of sinister culprits. If one recognizes biological race differences or the plausible advances that eugenics offers mankind, Tucker concludes that one is therefore complicit in genocidal mass murder.  The author fundamentally sees the world through a Marxist prism of oppressed and oppressors; for Tucker the realm of human existence consists of radical egalitarians, such as himself, or goose-stepping fascists hell-bent on racial genocide. His career pursuit, put forth in three books published by the University of Illinois Press, focuses on exposing race-realist scholars as “extremists” affiliated with sordid political operatives in the fever swamps of the far right.

To his credit, Tucker recognizes the importance of Cattell’s main body of research in personality, intelligence, and factor analysis. Much of his description of Cattell’s scientific work is largely favorable.

Nevertheless, Cattell is deservingly regarded as one of the most productive research psychologists in the history of the discipline. A true generalist in a field known for the extent of its fragmentation, he was one of the very few social scientists to put forth a comprehensive theory of human behavior, relating abilities, attitudes, motivations (drives), and personality traits to each other, thus bringing together in a dynamic system the classic tripartite categorization of mental activity into cognition, affection, and conation. Perhaps unique among psychologists, he also made contributions to theory, research, measurement, test development, and methodology; it is difficult to think of anyone else with this breadth of accomplishment.

The real rub for Tucker is Cattell’s philosophical views set forth in two complementary volumes, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (1972) andBeyondism: Religion from Science (1987), and his outlook early in his professional career, set forth in Psychology and Social Progress (1933), The Fight For Our National Intelligence (1937), and Psychology and the Religious Quest (1938).

Most of Cattell’s academic research centers on the application of objective criteria (factor analysis) to identifying core personality and mental traits. Another half-dozen books explore his ideas on forging scientific-derived values from Darwinian natural selection, a systematic approach of applying objective evolutionary principles to ethical and social problems (evolutionary-based ethics) as well as articulating eugenic perspectives on society, differential birthrates, culture, civilization, and national trends. Cattell’s blunt assessments of the role of science in solving societal problems —his scientific-based ethics of “Beyondism” — generated much of the opposition to his receiving APA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Cattell’s first few books reflect the thinking of the young scientist at an early stage in his professional career. These writings also reflect the milieu of the times for an academic traveling in progressive intellectual circles in the early 1900s, namely an enthusiastic interest in Darwinian evolution, eugenics and the scientific study of human behavior and social problems. The ranks of the eugenics movement in England and the United States attracted a wide range of prominent authors, statisticians, biologists, and social scientists across the political spectrum — progressives and conservatives alike.

Cattell at age 30

One of his major concerns (along with Sir Ronald Fisher, William McDougall, Leonard Darwin and other leading eugenicists) was the dysgenic generational decline of intelligence. In The Fight for Our National Intelligence, Cattell investigated the relationship between differential birthrates and falling IQ levels. His analysis of this trend was based upon test results from selected English communities. Cattell warned of the misplaced priorities of middle- to upper-class professionals in substituting materialistic luxuries in place of childrearing. He viewed the problem of differential birthrates — impoverished low IQ individuals having large, unsustainable families at the expense of society just as high IQ professionals were forgoing children — as undermining societal stability.

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His critique of the cultural impact of the mass media, from his chapter “False Beacons of Social Progress” in Psychology and Social Progress, reveals an insightful grasp of journalists’ self-aggrandizing role as the ultimate arbiters of “truth” in modern democracies. It reflects a thoughtful critique of the mass media that remains just as valid nearly eight decades later.

On the face of things, the press is at once the most confident and the most unsuitable claimant to the leadership of social thought. Beginning as a system of news retailing, it has become a parvenu politician and social philosopher with intellectual manners and powers, the pinchbeck qualities of which are obvious at some time or other to the meanest reader.

To say that the press merely reflects public opinion is the greatest humbug. It does to a considerable extent reflect the popular intelligence, the popular taste for slipshod methods of reasoning and unembarrassed ignorance, but through these contacts it endeavors to shape public opinion ruthlessly into forms which are rarely sympathetic to the potential sentiments and will present in the public. …

[A]nything in print appears to have the seal of mass approval behind it and carries with it all the powerful herd suggestion which is infinitely stronger than reasoned argument. For this reason the press renders a thousand times more strong the crude herd opinion already present and so holds in vice-like tentacles all attempts at enlightened action necessarily differing from the average viewpoint….

The average newspaper editor feels himself at liberty to contradict an authority in any field whatsoever. In a few minutes he will write a leading article refuting a book representing the work of a lifetime. But he is equal to even more than that. He will venture to put thousands of our democratic rulers — our electorate — hopelessly astray in any subject which he fancies himself at the moment to be an authority.

Cattell’s early work reflects the insights of an astute observer of national and cultural trends, one who can easily bore through the fog of pseudo-intellectual discourse. An objective reading of his early work indicates that the young psychologist could cut to the quick of any fallacy, slipshod argument, or popular fad.

A significant aspect of Tucker’s critique is Cattell’s alleged affiliations with so-called unsavory individuals on the “far-right.” He describes Dr. Roger Pearson, an editor and publisher of academic journals and monographs and author of several books, including an entry-level college textbook, Introduction to Anthropology(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), as an “extremist.” Marginal individuals, however remotely affiliated with Cattell, feature in Tucker’s muckraking narrative as sinister rogues one goose-step removed from Josef Mengele. It is a classic guilt-by-association tactic used by contemporary leftists to discredit the ideas of any prominent scholar who rejects their egalitarian multiracialism. (This guilt-by-association tactic, casting aspersions on one individual vis-à-vis the character of others, no matter how distant the affiliations or acquaintances, was vociferously denounced and labeled as “McCarthyism” when directed at leftists.) Cattell’s intellectual company of Pearson, classicist scholar Revilo Oliver, and airline executive, author, and segregationist Carleton Putnam, according to Tucker, “provided additional reason for concern.”

Much of Tucker’s opposition to Cattell’s eugenic perspectives rests on popular fallacies of eugenics. Implicit in Tucker’s critique is the notion that eugenics is grounded on “ideology” and “politics” (hence the ultimate aim of eugenics is the elimination of oppressed racial minorities) rather than firm scientific principles. Left-wing critics of eugenics often argue that it is scientifically baseless. Richard Lynn’s monumental Eugenics: A Reassessment demolishes this argument outright. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins rejects this implicit assertion in his recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth:

Political opposition to eugenic breeding of humans sometimes spills over into the almost certainly false assertion that it is impossible. Not only is it immoral, you may hear it said, it wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, to say something is morally wrong, or politically undesirable, is not to say it wouldn’t work. I have no doubt that, if you set your mind to it and had enough time and political power, you could breed a race of superior body-builders, or high-jumpers, or shot-putters; pearl fishers, sumo wrestlers, or sprinters; or (I suspect, although now with less confidence because there are no animal precedents) superior musicians, poets, mathematicians or wine-tasters. The reason I am confident about selective breeding for athletic prowess is that the qualities needed are so similar to those that demonstrably work in the breeding of racehorses and carthorses, of greyhounds and sledge dogs. The reason I am still pretty confident about the practical feasibility (though not the moral or political desirability) of selective breeding for mental or otherwise uniquely human traits is that there are so few examples where an attempt at selective breeding in animals has ever failed, even for traits that might have been thought surprising.

In an interview for The Eugenics Bulletin, published in 1984, Cattell offered his views on eugenics, social problems, progress in social science research, welfare policies, religious and cultural diversity in the U.S., “Beyondism,” IQ, and a variety of other issues. He was specifically asked about the matter of race from the eugenicists’ perspective,

TEB: Many eugenicists feel it’s best to be noncommittal on the race question, since it’s not our major concern. What do you think?

CATTELL: I agree that the only reasonable thing is to be noncommittal on the race question — that’s not the central issue, and it would be a great mistake to be sidetracked into all the emotional upsets that go on in discussions of racial differences. We should be quite careful to dissociate eugenics from it — eugenics’ real concern should be with individual differences.

Any fair consideration of Cattell’s writings would reveal very little on the subject of race. The subject is rarely indexed in his core scientific books, if mentioned at all. In his books on philosophy, ethics, religion, and social problems, where Cattell mentions race, his views are far from “extreme.” One rare exception of expanded reflection on the subject is his chapter on “Nation and Race: Their Significance” in Psychology and Social Progress. Even here Cattell’s writing largely echoes the scientific milieu of its day. He recognizes race and racial differences as biological realities, but also goes out of his way to stress that any discussion of race should not be based on “a question of superiority and inferiority of races.” For a book published in 1933, one ironically could classify Psychology and Social Progress as projecting progressive ideas of the early twentieth century: religious skepticism, eugenics, birth control and the problem of dysgenic birth-rates, cultural decline, war and peace, nationalism, education, class divisions of rich and poor, etc.

Tucker repeatedly portrays Cattell as some racially consumed fascist ideologue, noting

In fact, despite his personal charm, Cattell’s ideological thought — from his evolutionary ethics in the 1930s to its refinements as Beyondism four decades later —was essentially an intellectual justification for the form of fascism adopted by Nazi Germany and most pricelessly encapsulated by the phrase “totalitarian tribalism.”

This is simply Tucker’s way of projecting his own distorted views when describing what Cattell really believed, as if the psychologist was telegraphing his true sentiments in code to his fellow racialist comrades! It is the mindset of conspiracy mongers and “true believers” of multiracialism.

What Cattell actually stated about race, based on a passage in his first “Beyondism” volume, not only contradicts Tucker’s selective and distorted interpretation but frames egalitarian ethical assumptions of “racism” in perspective,

In accordance with good dictionary practice we may define a racist as one who asserts the superiority of his own race or people, without perception of the inherent impossibility, in our ignorance, of making such a value assertion. But both contra-suggestibility and the departures from objectivity due to the pleasure principle have developed a sect equally prejudiced in the opposite direction. These bigoted individuals may be called ignoracists because in recent years they have totally refused to consider the scientific possibility that races may show statistically significant differences. An open and enquiring mind must accept the possibility that observed differences of culturo-racial groups could be as significant in inherited components of, for example, mental capacity and temperament as in the historically acquired cultural features. Both racism and ignoracism are extreme and dangerous fallacies equally unable to lead to happy and realistic solutions of our problems. Beyondism calls for a more mature attitude than exists in either. It demands as a first act of respect the reality principle that human beings recognize equally the cultural and genetic origins of individual and group differences, and build an ethics of progress on that basis. [emphasis in original]

In a Chicago Tribune article on the decision to postpone the Lifetime Achievement Award, when asked about his self-described “Beyondism” perspective, Cattell said that “important policy decisions should be based on scientific information and knowledge rather than prejudice, superstition or political pressure.”

John Horn summarizes Cattell’s Beyondist views in his obituary published in The American Psychologist,

Cattell’s writings on [Beyondism] are particularly revealing of his drive and character. In these works, as in his books of the 1930s, Cattell argued that morality should be based on science. Beyondism symbolized the idea that humans cannot know what will be required for continuance of their species in the future. Therefore, they should strive to live in accordance with evolutionary principles that maximize the chances of a survival of a species. They should encourage great variety —individual differences — among themselves, so that environmental stresses that might wipe out a homogeneous group would eliminate only some individuals, not all. To this Darwinian principle of survival of individuals, Cattell added the idea of survival of societies: Survival will accrue to societies that can adapt under changing conditions. There should be great variety in societies. Diverse groups should be left alone to pursue their own programs for building the “best” society. No group should dictate to any other, but with that proviso, no group need aid the survival of any other group.

As to the point about pressure to conform to the group, psychology professor and IQ author Robert Sternberg defended the work of prominent psychologists whom he often disagreed with, such as Arthur Jensen and Raymond Cattell, for defying conformity and pursuing productive independent careers. As an open-minded liberal, Sternberg argued that society has benefited from innovations of maverick geniuses. For Tucker and his ideological ilk (Barry Mehler, Abe Foxman, Andrew Winston, Mark Potok, Heidi Beirich, and others) maverick intellects who go against the grain of multiracial egalitarianism should not be recognized for an otherwise productive career as a respected pioneer.

Tucker and other Marxists pseudo-intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to serve as ideological filters — establishing subjective standards for deciphering which individuals are worth honoring and which are worth shunning. His denunciation of Cattell’s work, on the grounds that an “antisocial” and “destructive” ideology influenced his views, is chutzpah with a capital “C”. Ideology, not scientific inquiry nor integrity, fuels Tucker’s anti-Cattellian screed. The difference is that Tucker’s fundamental ideology when extended to logical extremes (totalitarian Bolshevism) is ultimately more deadly than the evolutionary ethics of Cattell’s “Beyondism.”

For a thorough refutation of Tucker’s previous writings on Cattell, visit John Gillis’s website.

Wikipedia offers a more balanced description of Cattell’s career.

The full interview with Cattell in the Eugenics Bulletin is here.

The Cattell family maintains a website in his honor that includes documents on the APA Lifetime Achievement Award, Cattell’s respoonse, etc. See here.

The Indiana University psychology website on Cattell's contribution to IQ research is reasonably balanced.

Kevin Lamb (email him), a freelance writer, is a former library assistant forNewsweek, managing editor of Human Events, and assistant editor of theEvans-Novak Political Report. He is the managing editor of The Social Contract.

Kevin Lamb’s review of Tucker on Cattell

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Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk. (“The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer”) Tucker, who calls himself a psychologist,  is no better than the $PLC or the ADL, substituting guilt-by-association arguments for intellectual engagement with Raymond Cattell on issues like eugenics and race differences. Richard Lynn’s review of Cattell’s Beyondism shows why the left hates Cattell.  Cattell viewed racial hybridization as leading to a genetic potential for IQ that is midway between the two parent races, leading to a decline from the IQ of the superior group. This is basic behavior genetics for a trait like IQ — and well supported by the results of White/African admixture in the US.

As a result, races should remain separate, and incompetent peoples should be allowed to die out. (Haiti comes to mind.)

For Cattell the basic principles for a scientific ethics are these: diverse societies and types; competition between societies and between individuals; survival of the fittest, extinction of the unfit. This is the way to a better world. How different from most prescriptions for Utopia, with their socialistic world states in which competition is extinguished and all men work together in a spirit of co-operation, brotherly love and, no doubt, boredom.

The most pathetic thing is that Cattell spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Illinois, and yet the U of I Press published Tucker’s book. Tucker should be ashamed, but he will doubtless be praised effusively by his colleagues.

In my last blog I conceded the humanities departments to the political left while acknowleding the power of the left throughout the university. The sordid tale of Raymond Cattell and the story of the denial of his lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association shows that the political pressures are very strong in the social sciences and that scientific rigor can easily be pushed aside for political purposes.

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Haiti the quintessential dysfunctional society

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In doing some reading of Tom Watson’s writing on the Leo Frank case I came across an interesting comment on Haiti from 1915. (Watson was the only media figure who argued for Frank’s guilt and for the justice of Frank’s lynching.) Watson quotes a passage from a New Republic article on Frank’s lynching that illustrates the common perception of Haiti at the time. Like the rest of the mainstream media of the time, The New Republic was condemning the lynching of Leo Frank, comparing Georgia with Haiti, which is pretty much the worst thing you could say about a society:

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, comunities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

In short, nothing much has changed in Haiti in 100 years. The only exception is the attitudes of the liberal media: The New Republic‘s liberal politics didn’t prevent it from attributing Haiti’s troubles to its lack of civilization.

The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a de facto occupation again. Haiti is already on welfare — a “Republic of NGOs” where half the budget comes from foreign aid and 3000 NGOs operate most government services, including education and health care. (A search on Haiti and NGOs turns up lot of articles blaming Haiti’s problems on poorly managed charity or  as a modern form of imperialism! See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The other thing that has changed in 100 years is that now there is a very real danger is that Haitians will now be allowed to immigrate in huge numbers to the US. VDARE.com’s blog is an indispensable source of information on this. As Rob Sanchez writes, Haiti is about to become our Camp of the Saints. There are sure to be hundreds of thousands of orphaned children and others pulling at America’s heart strings. And as Patrick Cleburne notes, their neighbors in the Dominican Republic are not so stupid, but already there are calls for mass airlifts of Haitian children to the US. Will the first Black president in American history stop it. I rather doubt it.

But if there is a huge influx of Haitians, I do think that the great majority of Whites (apart from the Angelina Jolie types and professors in the humanities and social sciences) will recoil against it. It would be a politically risky move for an administration that already has little support among White Americans.

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Hermann and the Death of German Studies

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In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution and genocide. Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as a culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. (Kevin MacDonald, Preface to the paperback edition, The Culture of Critique).

The city of New Ulm, Minnesota, founded in 1854 by a group of German immigrants, is home to an imposing statue of the Germanic chieftain, Hermann. In the year 9AD, a coalition of Germanic tribes under Hermann for the first time in the history of the Germanic tribes ambushed and defeated three invading Roman legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus. The defeat, in the Teutoburger Forest, caused Caesar Augustus and his successors to forego conquering north central Europe. A new imperial policy changed European history for the people of central Europe, who developed independently of Roman rule.

In 1897, the Sons of Hermann, an American national fraternal organization of German Americans, proud of its heritage and desiring to keep it alive for future generations, commissioned a monumental statue of Hermann to be erected in a New Ulm city park. The Hermann Monument is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On September 24, 2009, a two thousand year ethnic celebration commemorating the victory of Hermann the German against foreign aggression took place in New Ulm, MN.

The Hermann Monument, New Ulm, Minnesota

The Hermann celebration was an isolated example of German ethnic identification in this country, even though Germans represent the largest ancestry group in the US. California and Texas have the largest populations of German origin, while the states of the Midwest, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have the most concentrated German populations.

In spite of their numbers, however, the study of the language and literature of the German people has dropped drastically nationwide. In 2006, only 6% of students learning a foreign language nationwide were enrolled in German. Many schools no longer offer German as a subject of study. Some colleges have eliminated whole departments of German and replaced them with departments of non-European languages. The University of Southern California, for example, after dropping its doctoral program about a decade ago, recently eliminated its entire German department. Spanish, of course, continues to grow, though most of its speakers on this Continent are of non-European descent. The languages that are experiencing tremendous growth nationwide in numbers of learners include Mandarin, Japanese, Urdu, and Arabic.

What does this mean for people of European descent? Unfortunately, it means a serious loss of connection to their European heritage and culture. Language is intrinsically connected to ethnic identity and allegiance to the group with which one shares ancestral links. Even where modern day ethnic groups can claim no country of their own, as in the case of the Welsh, the Basques, and the Kurds, retaining their language has enabled these groups to remain viable.

The elimination of German from the curriculum is occurring even in those areas of the country which have a majority German-American population. Notwithstanding Garrison Keillor’s stereotype of Minnesota as majority Lutheran-Norwegian, Minnesota is actually home to 36.7% people of German ancestry. Those of Norwegian background total 17.3%, Irish 11.2%, Swedish 9.9%, and English 6.3% (US Census Bureau Report June, 2004).  A significant number of mestizos have taken residence in Minnesota since the last census, and the Federal Government has placed large numbers of Hmong, a South-east Asian people, and  Somalian Negroes into the Twin City area, no doubt altering the proportions somewhat. The largest faith group is Catholic. Jews comprise .9% of the population.

Suppressed during the two World Wars, German re-established its place as one of the two most popular languages after each War. Until recently, many of the students in German language courses were “heritage learners,” students who wanted to remain connected to the language of their forefathers. In addition, German, along with French, has always been considered a language of research and cultural refinement. Now, however, English has become the language of research, cultural refinement is passé, and economic interests have displaced cultural connections for Whites. Perhaps school districts are receiving directives to remove German. Possibly also the continuing revilement against Germans caused by the unceasing barrage of venomous anti-German Holocaust memoirs, films, and television programs has contributed to the decline in German language learning.

For whatever reasons, the result is that German has all but disappeared from public high schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Currently, of the seven public high schools in Minneapolis, all offer Spanish (multiple classes at each level), 6 offer French, 3 Mandarin, 2 Japanese, 1 Arabic, 1 Latin, 1 Ojibwe, (a Native American language), and 1 German. (See here.) The situation is similar in St. Paul. (See here.)

Like the public schools of the Twin Cities, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, is a tax-supported institution and many of its 51,000 students are residents of the State.  UM does not appear on the Hillel list of the 60 colleges and universities with the largest Jewish student enrollments. In the past, significant numbers of high school German teachers were trained at this campus. Students who obtained their Ph.D. were frequently offered positions on the faculties of smaller Midwest colleges.

As mentioned earlier, a number of colleges in the country have eliminated their German departments entirely. Others have rescued them from extinction by changing their concentration away from the traditional study of language and literature to the vocational study of “Business German.” UM retains a foreign language requirement and the University’s German Department (German, Scandinavian and Dutch) continues to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in language and literature.

The focus of its teaching and research has shifted, however, from analyzing literary merit to promulgating politically correct social causes. The following is a comment not only on the state of German studies, but an excellent case study of what university departments in the humanities have become — bastions of the left influenced deeply by Jewish concerns and by Jewish intellectual movements, particularly the Frankfurt School. The following dissertation titles, course descriptions, and faculty publications all reflect the change in direction which the study of German literature has taken.

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Some recent representative dissertation titles include:

Toward a Multiculturalism for the 21st Century: German and Scandinavian Literary Perspectives, 1990–2005

Projecting Deviance/Seeing Queerly: Homosexual Representation and Queer Spectatorship in 1950’s Germany

Reading and Revising the Topography of German culture: Christina Reining on Gender and Sexuality

Representing the Afro-German in Early West German Cinema

The Space of Words: Diaspora and Exile in the Works of Nelly Sachs

Off the Road: Remapping the Shoah Representation from the Perspectives of Ordinary Jewish Women

Negotiating the German-Jewish: the Uncomfortable Writing of Karl Emil Franzos

Writing against Objectification: German Jewish Identity in the Works of Grete Weil and Ruth Klueger

Represented here are the favorite topics of “cultural criticism”: sexism, racism, homophobia, diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, and Jewish victimization. No work from the rich canon of German literature is the subject of a dissertation. Sadly, the literary criticism that grew out of the Frankfurt School and has monopolized the interpretation of literature in English and foreign language literature departments for the last thirty years will no doubt continue. Complacent non-Jewish graduate students are being recruited and trained to enshrine the politically correct ideology permanently into the American University system.

Banner for the University of Minnesota Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, with Star of David

Below is a quick overview of some key faculty members — all graduates of elite Eastern universities, who publish, teach graduate courses, and advise grad students on dissertations. They also recommend students for grants and fellowships and future employment. Quotations are from the annual magazine of the German Department.

Professor Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Department of German

“She has a vision about how to open up the canon of German Literature and a determination to rewrite history to include women….In Nov. 2006 an interdisciplinary conference titled, ‘Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation’was held in her honor… (on teaching Goethe’s Faust) she has the students read through the lens of their choice: Bakhtian, Freud, gender theory, or queer theory’…. I don’t believe in objectivity.”

Courses include:

Women Writers in German Literature: Writings and Films of Minority Women. “In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”?

Topics in Literature and Diversity: Diversity Troubles. One of the required texts for this course is the novel, Der Vorleser, by the contemporary German novelist, essayist, and judge, Bernard Schlink. Published in English in 2008, as The Reader, it was recently made into an American film. The novel deals with the guilt of an illiterate German woman for her actions in a German concentration camp. In 2005, while filming The Reader, Kate Winslet, its star, stated, “I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? … No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar.” (She was right!)

Incidentally, in one of his essays, the author, Bernhard Schlink, son of a Protestant minister, makes the theologically astonishing claim that German guilt for the Holocaust is hereditary and will be carried by subsequent generations of Germans (Vergangenheitsschuld, Diogenes, Zürich, 2007). This inverts a fundamental teaching of Christianity. Christianity teaches that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are the central events of history and that the Jews are forever responsible for the unforgivable crime of deicide. Schlink, however, suggests that Germans are and will be responsible for the Holocaust for all time, thus ostensibly substituting the Holocaust for the Crucifixion as history’s greatest crime and central event.

Professors Rembert Hueser and Richard McCormick, Department of German

These professors of German Film Studies specialize in feminism, Nazi Cinema, Weimar culture, and gender studies. Recent publications include, “Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity.

Courses include:

German Cinema of the Weimar Republic: Aesthetics and Politics, Gender, and Sexuality, Modernism and Modernity. “Of importance is the question of Weimar sexual ‘decadence;’ was it … something that facilitated the rise of the Nazis? Or was it about the emancipation from rigid gender and sexual identities, something that threatened the Nazis and their sympathizers? Something ‘postmodern’ — or even ‘queer’ in a positive sense?”

In addition to courses in the German Department, students of German are strongly encouraged to participate in classes of affiliated departments. Recommended faculty of affiliated departments include:

Prof. Gary C. Thomas, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Specialties include: 17th– and 18th-century German literature, gender/sexuality studies, and cultural musicology

Publications include: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology

Courses include: Queer Theory

Professor Richard Leppert, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Publications include: Theodor Adorno – Essays in Music

Courses include: Adorno/Aesthetic Theory

It is indeed puzzling why so many non-Jewish faculty members have adopted the teachings of the Frankfurt School, promoting its agenda to degrade Western culture by glorifying deviancy, multiculturalism and Jewish victimization. One wonders whether they are actually adherents of a position totally inimical to their own White racial interests, or have chosen to be academic Uncle Toms for the sake of tenure and the dependable pay check. Some are clearly part of the homosexual-left culture that is so prominent at the university these days. Their identity as a homosexual victim of cultural oppression is far more important to them — and far more lucrative professionally — than identifying as a White person and having a sense of White interests.

Incidentally, the glorification of Jewish victimization has achieved official academic legitimacy in the rather new discipline of Jewish Studies. Begun only about thirty years ago at colleges with majority Jewish faculties and student bodies, Jewish Studies has quickly grown. The Association of Jewish Studies is now a large network of 1800 members with independent departments on most campuses across the country.

Two influential German Department professors specialize in Jewish Studies and are exceptional in the large number of works they have published, in the number of grants and fellowships they have been awarded, and in the range of affiliated departments to which they belong. Unlike the previously mentioned non-Jewish professors, who corrupt their own ethnic Western interests by adopting the tenets of the cultural revolution, these Jewish faculty members overtly and militantly employ the Frankfurt School’s ideology and methods to promote their specifically Jewish interests. The promotion of specifically Jewish interests was not shared by Jewish professors of the former generation. Until they were replaced by the individuals described below, three German-born Jewish professors, because of their vast knowledge and love of their subject, were highly regarded members of the German faculty. More German than Jewish they promoted German, not Jewish, culture.

Professor Jack Zipes, Department of German (recently retired)

At the present time Amazon is briskly selling an amazing 21 of Jack Zipes’ books about fairy tales, including several pricey compendia. Pertinent to the discussion here are two types of his works about fairy tales: the theoretical, dealing with Frankfurt School deconstruction of fairy tales, and the practical, the use of fairy tales in the public schools.

In Breaking the Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Zipes provides a Marxist interpretation of folk and fairy tales through the filter of Frankfurt School criticism. His aim is to interpret the socio-historical forces that shaped the tales and to deconstruct and/or reconstruct them to influence and help form the society of the future.

An early chapter in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is devoted to a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno about the Marxist utopian function of the fairy tale.

With the manual, Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Zipes suggests practical ways to encourage children to deconstruct traditional tales. Co-founder of the theatrical method named, “The Neighborhood Bridges Project,” Zipes has introduced a technique of re-interpreting fairy tales. Used by Minneapolis Public Schools since 1997 it seeks to expose the sexism, racism, and classism in the traditional value system of the fairy tales and of society. For his outstanding contributions to the field of Children’s Literature, Zipes has won several significant awards plus an honorary degree from the University of Bologna!

Prof. Zipes specialties include: Critical Theory (i.e., Frankfurt School theory); Fairy Tales (or rather their deconstruction); Jewish Studies

Publications include

Political Plays for Children

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion

Don’t bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales

Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution:

Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany

The Potential of Liberating Fairy Tales for Children

Don’t Bet on the Prince: Feminist Fairy Tales

Walter Benjamin and Children’s Literature, in The Germanic Review

Marx as Moralist

Negating History and Male Fantasies through Psychoanalytic Criticism

Adorno May Still be Right

Marx and Engels Without Frills

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000 (with Leslie Morris, below)

The Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Antisemitism

Disparate Jewish Voices and the Dialectic of the “Shoah Business” in Germany

Holocaust Survivor as Literary Pope in Germany

Jewish Life as Stigma, in: Simon Wiesenthal Center Report

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust, in: New German Critique

The Operated German as Operated Jew, in New German Critique

The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis

Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature

The Holocaust and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Identity in New German Critique

Professor Leslie Morris, Department of German

While Prof. Morris holds a tenured position in German, she is also a member of four affiliated centers. Two of these affiliations are especially noteworthy. She is a member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies, of which she was director from 2002–2009

Prof. Morris specializes in 20th and 21st (sic) German/Austrian Literature and in Jewish Studies.

According to her biography in the German Department Magazine: “She is interested in issues of exile and Diaspora that are central to the experience of Jews, especially since the 1930’s… to gain a deeper understanding of what ‘Jewishness’ means. (The name) Morris morphed out of Moskowitz.”

Publications include:

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 (with German Prof. Jack Zipes)

Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory and Art after Auschwitz

How Jewish is it? The Question of Contemporary German-Jewish Writing

Der modifizierte Jude als Stigmatext

In her book, Unlikely History, the Changing German Jewish Symbiosis, Prof. Morris addresses the topic of holocaust memoirs. She has two concerns. Not only is there a problem with future supply since the last holocaust survivors are succumbing to old age, but Prof. Morris finds many of the memoirs to be intrinsically dull and of limited literary value. She compares the authentic memoirs to the many fraudulent “memoirs,” originally marketed as first person accounts, but later found to be fakes, much to the embarrassment of their publishers. She judges these fake “memoirs” to be more imaginative, moving, and of greater literary value than the genuine accounts. Disregarding standards of academic ethics she suggests that the fraudulent accounts ought to be redeemed and accepted into the body of holocaust literature as genuine memoirs. Not only are the fakes better than the genuine accounts, but their production is unlimited!

Courses include:

Approaches to Analysis: Required readings — “Archive Fever”: Derrida, “History of Sexuality: Foucault, “Moses and Monotheism”: Freud, “Three Case Histories”: Freud

Seminar in 20th Century German Literature and Culture: Listening to German Anxiety — “We will think about the specificity of German anxiety — anxiety about modernity, anxiety about the Jews…”

~Required readings — “We will start with Freud’s, ‘Problem with Anxiety,’ and move to works by Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Schoenberg…”

So close is the German Department to the Center for Jewish Studies, with which Prof. Morris is affiliated, that the two Departments recently jointly sponsored a University of Minnesota tour titled, “Jewish Life in Berlin and Prague.” The informational meeting for the trip was held at a community center in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Affectionately known as “St. Jewish Park,” by both Jews and gentiles, this modern day Jewish ghetto has been the home of many successful Jews. These include Thomas Friedman, New York Times journalist, Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, and the Coen Brothers, film makers. In fact, the newest Coen Brothers film, “The Serious Man,” is set in the St. Louis Park of the 60’s. Ari Hoptman, UM German instructor, plays a department head.

The nine day University of Minnesota tour to Berlin and Prague was jointly led by German Department, Prof. Leslie Morris and History Department, Prof. Gary Cohen. Prof. Cohen is also Director of the Center for Austrian Studies, and a faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies. The UM-sponsored tour included visits with the chief rabbis of both Berlin and Prague, with members of the Israeli Council in Berlin, and Shabbat services and Shabbat dinner with Berlin congregations. Lunch was planned at kosher restaurants.

A Center for Catholic or Christian Studies does not exist at the University of Minnesota. Therefore, there will be no University-sponsored trip titled, “Christian Life in Europe,” with Mass at the Cologne Cathedral and an audience with the Pope.

The most recent issue of German Quarterly, from summer, 2009, explores the possible reciprocal effects of German and Jewish Studies. Responding to the title of this issue, “How Jewish is German Studies? How German is Jewish Studies?” Prof. Morris states in the introduction:

VERY….What I hoped to do with this special issue was to move the discussion about Germans and Jews beyond merely establishing affinities between historical expression and cultural expression. Part of the ‘thought experiment’ behind this special issue was to see what might happen if we were to slip within the hyphen separating ‘the German’ and ‘the Jewish’ and begin a ‘queering’ of German-Jewish Studies that would rupture the intact diacritical mark of the hyphen and destabilize the markers of ‘German’ and ‘Jew.’

Rethinking the links and the ruptures contained within the ‘German Jew’ also necessitates a new conceptualizing of Jewish and ‘queer’ identity; to pull apart the hyphen that sutures the ‘German Jew’ is at the same time to expand ‘queerness’ beyond sexual practice and ‘experience’ and to disrupt what R. block has termed a ‘geographic transversal’ that links Germany and Zion. My calling for a ‘queering’ of German Jewish Studies is a strategy to move us away from ‘constructions of the Jew or the German as either positive or negative, stereotyped or ‘authentic,’ and to consider an approach to German Jewish text that will push the very boundaries of the German and the Jewish. I propose instead that we consider German Jewish writing as inhabiting a new space of a trans-, or a newly imagined community that exists in a border zone of textual and historical memory, projection and fantasy, pathology and desire, and that will always exceed the geographic, linguistic, and ethnic/national markers in which they are enacted.

The next activity jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota German Department and the Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled in the spring. On April, 13, 2010, Prof. Leslie Morris will present a public lecture titled, “Why Germany Loves the Jews.” The lecture will be delivered at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.

HERMANN, BE THERE!

Trudie Pert is the pen name of a teacher.  Email her.

Unless otherwise noted all material is from the official University of Minnesota website.