Kevin MacDonald

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Jimmy Carter Grovels

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One of the virtues of being an ex-president is that there is no need to cater to the political constituencies that are essential for election. American presidential candidates, and especially Democrats, are beholden to Jewish financial support, and Jews are an important swing voting bloc in several states, especially New York. I recall that the first time I thought about Jewish influence, at least in a negative way, was during the 1976 election campaign when Jimmy Carter made the obligatory campaign stop in New York and pledged fealty to Israel.

But since his presidency, Carter has definitely gotten on the bad side of serious Zionists — prototypically the folks at David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com. Here’s the video version of Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews. (Pop Quiz: An article on Frontpagemag complains that a certain religious group defiles Christmas and this year engaged in a “hatefest” on Christmas Day. Which group is it? For answer, see here.)

But now Carter has apologized. “We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel.” In particular, he now says that the use of the word ‘apartheid’ in the title of his 2008 book was a prediction of the future if the Palestinians are not allowed to control the West Bank, not a comment on present realities. Moreover, “Carter said he never meant to convey the impression that the pro-Israel lobby silenced criticism of Israel, only that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was the “most influential lobbying group” and that presidents including himself and congresses have historically been “totally committed” to Israel’s security.

Since Carter realizes the West Bank is an apartheid society (complete with walls of separation, separate roads for Jews and Arabs, etc.) and since the Israel Lobby does indeed have a long history of doing everything it can to silence its critics (see Cong. Paul Finley’s aptly named They Dare to Speak Out [1st edition, 1985]) and since Carter is well aware of all of this, his apology is has to count as groveling. To be sure, Carter claims that his views are mainstream (e.g., he says his positions are the same as J Street’s). But this is surely a significant move on Carter’s part, especially since he now asserts things that are manifestly untrue. So what possessed him to make such a statement?

Although he denies it, there is a strong suspicion that the statement was intended to help Jason Carter, his grandson, in his campaign for the state senate in Georgia in a district with a “substantial” Jewish community. Indeed, JTA reports that “The younger Carter has been trying for days to reach Liane Levetan, a former state senator and CEO of DeKalb County, and as soon as they connected Tuesday, he directed her to the JTA Web site to read the letter.” Jason obviously has a bright future in politics.

Pretty much no matter what Jimmy Carter says, at this point he is persona non grata with Jews. Jimmy Carter’s former honesty will not be forgiven and it will not be forgotten. Groveling never helps, but it may well help Jason: The article notes that Jesse Jackson’s son managed to have a political life despite the transgressions of his father, but only after a lot of fence mending with Jews.

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Gabriel Schoenfeld exists in an alternate universe

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Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Weekly Standard  article “Back to the Future: British Anti-Semitism Returns with a Vengeance” is the sort of thing that makes you want to bang your head against a wall. The idea is that those virulent anti-Semites John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt managed to “peddle” their vicious article on the Israel lobby to the London Review of Books when it was sensibly rejected by American publishers. It then metastasized into a book that was much admired in the US by the likes of David Duke and pretty much no one else. The “respectable middle” were on page with Leslie Gelb’s authoritative review in the august New York Times which accused them of “shoddy scholarship” that promoted anti-Semitism. As I noted in an earlier blog, “Some of Gelb’s charges might even seem reasonable—if you haven’t read the book.”

The fact that Mearsheimer and Walt managed to first publish their monstrosity in England is no accident. After all, the Brits are a bad lot and always have been. “Anti-Semitism has deep roots in England. In the 12th century, many of the country’s Jews were put to the sword in a wave of massacres. The 13th century began with the introduction of the yellow badge, the mandatory marking that Jews were compelled to wear, and ended with the mass expulsion of the Jews.”

There you have it. Nothing much has changed in England since the 12th century when it comes to the Jews. Anti-Semitism remained rampant in England throughout the 20thcentury, going underground when the Brits were fighting the Nazis (who were even more anti-Jewish), but re-emerging now into the open. In its latest incarnation, it manifests itself as hatred toward Israel.

According to Schoenfeld, this irrational anti-Jewish hate is more obvious than ever.  You can tell that because Britain is now “a congenial home” where radical Muslims “preach their genocidal doctrines.” (Never mind the role of Jewish organizations in facilitating immigration into England and opposing nationalist parties like the BNP that want to keep England English. See Ch. 7 of Culture of Critique.)

In fact, right now Parliament is considering a law to force Jews to report to concentration camps.

No wait. Actually, it’s an inquest into how Tony Blair made the decision to join in the Iraq invasion. Not only that, but a newspaper columnist had the temerity to complain that two of the panelists were Jews. Another chimed in that this complaint was “helpful” because the war was “initiated .  .  . by a group of influential American neocons .  .  . nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists.” And the London Times didn’t even label all of this “anti-Semitic.”

And then there was Peter Oborne’s program (see Martin Webster’s TOO article) on the influence  of the Israel Lobby: “With shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shades of Mearsheimer-Walt, the program conveyed a picture of a nefarious conspiracy to plunge Britain into war in Iraq.”

The last straw is the court decision that an Orthodox school is guilty of discrimination for insisting on matrilineal descent as a criterion of admission. Schoenfeld puts ‘discrimination’ in quotes because, you see, it’s not discrimination if Jews do it. Surely it’s obvious that Jews (and no one else) ought to be able to discriminate on the basis of biological descent.

Obviously, Jews like Schoenfeld (and they’re the ones we keep hearing from in the media) are out of touch with reality. This is Abe Foxman on steroids. In Scheonfeld’s eyes, the inquest into the Blair government’s actions and the Oborne program are nothing more than updated examples of centuries-old anti-Jewish hatred. No need to look at what actually happened.

Indeed, the very thought that Jews might be biased against finding that Jews whose main allegiance is to Israel were the major force behind the decision of the British government to join the Iraq invasion is so obviously wrongheaded that even asking the question betrays vicious hatred of Jews. By their very nature Jews are impartial and completely uninfluenced by their ethnic identification. Schoenfeld doubtless sees himself as an exemplar of evenhandedness — completely above the fray and able to judge Israel’s actions and all things Jewish with brutal, impartial honesty.

Schoenfeld and the rest of these Jewish spokespeople are living in an alternate universe — a universe where mundane things like facts and truth are irrelevant. It’s an absolute article of faith that Jewish behavior is always — always —completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism. No matter how much money Jewish activists and organizations shower on politicians and no matter now much media they own and influence, Jews never actually influence anything. And if they do happen to have a slight influence, they only want the best for everyone. There could not possibly be legitimate conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews.

There is simply no way to communicate with people like Schoenfeld. And that’s a big part of the problem.

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Morris Dees — Allegations of Sociopathy

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Arthur Kemp has posted excerpts from the divorce papers of Morris Dees. It portrays someone eager to have sex with pretty much anything that moves — perhaps not that uncommon in 1970s America. But the excerpts also portray him as a sociopath — someone with no sympathy or empathy and inclined to use people to attain selfish goals — in Dees’ case, sexual gratification. Sociopaths feel no remorse for committing crimes against others. The prisons are full of them.

In particular, Dees is alleged to have entrapped his wife in order to get favorable terms in the divorce, and then “He hit her and gave her a busted jaw.” The allegations of sexually molesting his 16-year-old stepchild also indicate sociopathy — an attempt to take advantage of a minor in a way that would likely lead to psychological distress and perhaps dysfunction later. Another indication is that his mistress “had become pregnant by him and had received an abortion which he had paid for.” In other words, even though the relationship with the mistress is described as “permanent,” it was about self-gratification rather than family creation.

It’s not surprising that someone like Dees has no feelings for his people. Sociopaths never do. Such sociopathy is rampant among White people in our political and media elite. Bill Clinton comes to mind.

One of the things that struck me in reading the academic literature on the Bolshevik horror in the USSR was that the ethnic Russians who were involved in mass murder and torture were “psychopaths [another word for sociopaths] and criminals.” (See the Preface to the paperback edition of CofC.) Most of the damage was done by ethnic outsiders, predominantly Jews. These people quite often had strong feelings for their families and their own people — their cruelty directed at ethnic outsiders.  But there was no lack of sociopathic Russians to aid in dispossessing their own people.

We are seeing the same thing now.

Israel’s fallback position on organ harvesting

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Following up on Alison Weir’s article “Israeli Organ Trafficking and Theft: From Palestine to Moldava,” Israel now admits that they harvested organs of Palestinians and others without permission from the families. But they say it happened during the 1990s and that the practice has been discontinued. It’s worth mentioning that Donald Bostrom’s chilling account refers precisely to the 1990s. Bostrom’s article has been translated into English and is posted as a TOO article. The article includes a very graphic photo of a Palestinian whose gaping chest wound had been stitched up —  obviously consistent with organ harvesting. This Palestinian was a stone thrower who had been murdered by the Israeli army, his body then taken away for “autopsy.”

Yet when Bostrom’s article came out it was described as the worst sort of anti-Semitism in the Israeli press and by Jewish activist organizations throughout the  world. If the practice has indeed stopped, I suppose it is only because of the glare of this negative publicity.

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Jewish Revenge Fantasies

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A recent panel discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds had some interesting tidbits about Jewish revenge fantasies:

But [Dr. Amy] Kalmanofsky quickly put that argument [that Jews should feel guilty about revenge]  to bed, noting that Jewish texts have always embraced revenge fantasies, from the destruction of the Egyptians in Exodus and Haman & Co. in Megillat Esther. And [Rabbi Jack] Moline — echoing the message of one of his Yom Kippur sermons from earlier this year — also praised the film, describing it as a way of helping American Jews shed some of their Holocaust baggage and getting more comfortable with their Zionist sides.

Moline told his congregants: “To my surprise, my complete and utter surprise, there was something cathartic and deeply satisfying watching this revenge fantasy play out. It was as if something I did not dare admit — my secret blood lust to do unto them what they did unto us — was being acknowledged, permitted and validated. I was liberated from victim hood.”

For making Jews feel good about their blood lust, Tarantino’s future in Hollywood is assured. The producer, Lawrence Bender, told Tarantino “Quentin you are about to make your Bar Mitzvah movie, you are going to be officially let into the tribe.”

This reminds me of Alison Weir’s wonderful recent article “Israeli Organ Trafficing and Theft: From Palestine to Moldova.” She discusses the work of Prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley:

Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust.”

She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her “it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

Scheper-Hughes says that she “even heard doctors saying that.”

I think that revenge fantasies are a common among Jews and it goes way beyond Nazis. In “Memories of Madison” I wrote that

In my experience at Madison during the 1960s, there was also a strong desire [among Jews] for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure—perceived by them to be the goyish, fascist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semitic social structure. … This fits well with the set of interviews with New Left Jewish radicals in Percy Cohen’s Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews: many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.” These fantasies of destruction of the social order were combined with a belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a non-oppressive social order.

As Whites become a minority in Western societies and Jews constitute a hostile elite, this Jewish focus on revenge  has grave implications for the future. Revenge becomes an important issue given that Jews tend to interpret their history of living among Europeans as a long series of persecutions beginning with Christianity and ending with the Holocaust. (See, e.g., Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?.)

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A Reply to Jobling

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Ian Jobling has posted an unfriendly reply to my blog article. It can only be described arrogant, hostile, and condescending — the sort of thing one expects from children who don’t play well with others. The arrogance is especially surprising given that, unlike his adversaries, he has not published even one article related to evolutionary psychology or the theory of kinship in a refereed scientific journal. But worse, it is massively confused on the theory and willfully ignorant of the data.

Here I reiterate and elaborate the main idea: Relationships of friendship and marriage are fundamentally not about altruism but about reciprocity and self-interest. Altruism is a no-go in evolutionary thinking generally because it implies unreciprocated giving. Kin selection is not about altruism because helping relatives at cost is compensated when relatives succeed. So, except in extreme situations like martyrdom or coercion (see below), no one is really talking about altruism.

Jobling’s original article is all about the limits of altruism — that there is a drop off after cousins, and beyond that natural selection could not operate to produce a module for kin altruism. All of his examples — from suicide bombing to giving food — involve giving some resource to kin or others, and then showing that beyond cousins unreciprocated giving can’t evolve.

But that is precisely where I start out —indeed he quotes me as follows: “Because the similarity-detecting mechanisms implied by [Rushton’s genetic similarity theory] assess low levels of genetic relatedness, they would not be expected to produce detectable levels of providing unreciprocated resources to others (altruism).” Exactly. I simply don’t understand how Jobling could disagree with me on this based on his original article. Quite simply, that’s exactly what his article labors to show — without the courtesy of citing me.

We agree on this, but then we draw different conclusions. He decides to completely jettison the evolutionary guts of GST — the data showing that people assort on the basis of genetic similarity and do so for evolutionarily significant reasons. And — most importantly — that preference for genetic similarity in others is heritable.  The finding that there is genetic variation for similarity preference is highly compatible with the proposal that GS mechanisms are an adaptation. Many adaptations show genetic variation, as I have argued in the personality literature (see here and here).

Instead, Jobling proposes a non-evolutionary theory of similarity seeking — Consensual Validation Theory — that your basic anti-evolutionary psychologist (and there are many of them) would love. With evolutionary theorists like Jobling, who needs Boas or Stephen Jay Gould? Minimally, one would have to unpack CVT to propose how this fits with an evolutionary perspective. What are the adaptations? How are they triggered, etc.? How do they relate to fitness in ancestral and contemporary environments?

Fundamentally, Jobling has to show that the heritability data underpinning GST are incorrect — that is, that the degree of preference for genetic similarity is not in fact influenced by genetic variation. (Unlike Jobling’s writing, Rushton published his data in Psychological Science, a top-level mainstream journal in psychology.) Given this growing body of data, it demands a theory of how it fits with evolutionary thinking. I reject the idea that it implies altruism.

Here’s a really simple way to state my argument: Attraction to genetically similar others is no different from any other kind of attraction — e.g., sexual desire, romantic love, or beauty. No one would argue that these attractions imply altruism, and each of them has an obvious evolutionary interpretation and much supporting data that they are indeed adaptations. But when it comes to genetic similarity, the conventional thinking — which is reflected in Jobling’s original article — has always seen genetic similarity as a watered down version of kin selection and then started looking for altruism.

I began from a different perspective — seeing it as a form of attraction to people that must compete with a variety of other attractions in influencing behavior. This view is not bogged down with specious arguments about altruism that Jobling falls into. Jobling writes:

MacDonald’s logic here is plainly invalid: after all, if kin selection can work at the level of the ethny, why shouldn’t it lead to adaptations for altruism among co-ethnics as well as kin? At low levels of relatedness, altruism should be attenuated, but not absent.

First of all, nothing has to evolve — as Jobling notes in his original article. But my reinterpretation was to accept the idea that the genetic relationship is so attenuated that it becomes difficult to image how evolution would be able to engineer genetic benefits when the recipients of unreciprocated benefits are so distantly related. If I make friends with another White person, say, who is slightly more correlated with me genetically than the White average, the amount of altruism toward this person warranted by our genetic overlap would be vanishingly small and it’s difficult to see how natural selection would be able to calibrate this. As Fisher and Hamilton famoulsy wrote, it would make genetic sense to give up having one of my own children in order to help my brother have two. But how much should I give up to a friend who is only slightly more genetically similar to me than the average White person? Maybe buy him a drink? Or decide not to have one of my own  children but help him have 18 more children than he would have otherwise? (Hard to do in a monogamous culture.) Or would 33 be more appropriate? 39?

There is no way that an adaptation would be able to calculate the degree of self-sacrifice warranted by this relationship. And in fact, when you look at these relationships, you see reciprocity. What is the evidence that altruism is involved?

I am arguing that although natural selection would be unlikely to be able to finely calibrate levels of unreciprocated helping appropriate for each relationship in my life, it would be able to select for self-interest in situations where there is a choice among alternatives, keeping in mind that other interests besides genetic relatedness (especially the resource value of alternatives) are involved. That is, if all else is equal (and it often is not), people should make alliances with people who are more genetically similar to themselves and they will do so because of a psychological mechanism that makes genetically similar others more attractive than average.

So imagine a choice where a woman can marry a genetically similar person or a very wealthy person from another ethnic group. (Elin Woods and Nicole Brown Simpson come to mind.) From a gene’s eye point of view, genetic similarity is one resource among several. The genes may be better off marrying the person from a different ethnic group, and at the proximal level different psychological attractions pull us in different directions. But there is no giving up of anything — no altruism. It’s completely a matter of perceived self-interest. (Elin Woods and Nicole Brown Simpson may well have behaved maladaptively, but no one can foresee the future.) In the same way, someone might weigh the benefits of allying with one’s ethnic group versus a bribe to act against the interests of one’s ethnic group.

Actually, we see a lot of this among White elites these days: Pretty much all of our White, non-Jewish media personalities and political leaders are massively rewarded for betraying their people. From a rational point of view, these people are behaving maladaptively because they are ignoring their ethnic genetic interests — Frank Salter’s argument (see below); the problem is that the emotional attachment to their people is too weak to prevent them from succumbing to the blandishments of fame and fortune.

Whereas calculating genetically appropriate levels of unreciprocated helping for a particular friendship would be next to impossible for natural selection to act on, natural selection could easily act by calibrating genetic similarity as a general attraction to similar others. In my view, this is what the data show. Rushton’s research shows that this attraction to others is heritable, meaning that partly for genetic reasons, some people are attracted to genetically similar others more than other people are. But even for people who are high on attraction to genetically similar others, within the relationship, self-interest and reciprocity are the rule — there is simply a higher cost of defection (see below). In general, people don’t go around being massively altruistic toward their ethnic group — even Jews give less than 2% of their money to charity and even less to ethnic charities. (Their giving would increase if the Jewish community was under threat — as predicted by Social Identity Theory.) But it does make people feel more comfortable with genetically similar others and trust them more (hence Bernie Madoff).

Relationships based on genetic similarity create a cost for defection — just as a relationship based on sexual attraction creates a cost of defection. Someone who is in a relationship with a sexually attractive person may want to defect — for example, if the person is self-centered or a drug addict. But the cost is the loss of a sexually satisfying relationship. Again, where’s the altruism?

In short, my approach aims to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I want to retain a powerful and important set of data and show how taking account of genetic similarity in others could evolve and be an important psychological component of human behavior.

Jobling’s rejoinder seems to grasp that I reject altruism, but he claims that “When one unpacks MacDonald’s arguments, one finds that altruism is implicit in his theory of ethnicity.” Rather than tell us exactly why this is so — difficult to do, since I explicitly reject altruism — Jobling instead states, “MacDonald is saying that, because of the genetic interest they have in each other’s well-being, co-ethnics go on cooperating even when it is in their self-interest to defect. That is, an individual will forego a benefit to himself in order to grant one to his co-ethnic cooperative partner. This is altruism.”

But that’s ridiculous. That is not at all what I am saying. I am saying that if it is one’s interest to defect (see examples above), then defect. We see it all the time. Genetic similarity is not the only game in town — it’s not the only evolved interest mediated by a psychological attraction that people have.

Actually, it’s sad that it’s not the only game in town. White people would not be in such dire straits if it were a stronger force. Our greatest difficulty right now is that all the rewards for attaining high social status, fame, and fortune for Whites lie with those who turn their backs on their people — a point I elaborate in this article.

Jobling continues:

Also, MacDonald thinks that people prefer to cooperate with co-ethnics rather than allo-ethnics because the former are more inclined to trust each other more than the latter are.

This is correct and based on a great deal of data (e.g., De Bruine’s research discussed in my academic article). This would bias one in favor of hiring a co-ethnic all things being equal. But if the job candidate is completely incompetent (hiring an English major to a computer programmer job) so that the firm would be impacted negatively, this is a bad move. Again, I don’t think that natural selection could calibrate how much loss in performance the Black CEO in Jobling’s example should be willing to incur by hiring a Black person over a more competent White person. (In in this particular case, social identity mechanisms may also be involved — the CEO may see a White person in ingroup-outgroup terms which would bias the decision even more in the direction of ethnic preference.) But I do think that all things being equal in terms of talent, he should prefer the Black person. Then if the prosperity for the company leads to biological success in its employees, the Black CEO would benefit genetically more by hiring the co-ethnic.

Perhaps this is why the most flagrant racial favoritism is typically seen in departments that have little impact on the performance of the company — human resources versus research and development. Companies accept a certain amount load because they are being watched like hawks by the affirmative action industry and shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson.

Jobling writes:

Moreover, many other passages in the article are comprehensible only on the assumption that ethnic altruism exists. For example, in defining ethnocentrism, MacDonald quotes a passage from William Graham Sumner that implies the existence of ethnic altruism.

Right. But notice that that passage where I quote Sumner is in my section on social identity theory — not GST. Jobling is oblivious to the whole point of my article — that we need to posit several different psychological mechanisms related to ethnicity and ethnic conflict. I clearly don’t think that GST provides a psychological basis for the phenomenon of ingroup-outgroup conflict or for martyrdom, but I do argue that social identity theory does provide such a theory. (My original argument is presented in Chapter 1 of Separation and Its Discontents where it forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism; a more recent (2008) review of the literature on psychological mechanisms of ethnocentrism was published in a top mainstream journal in psychology, Psychological Review. That article also mentions recent research showing racial imprinting — infants preferring their own race, typically as a result of exposure to parents and other family members. This, of course, has led to anxiety among the righteous about racist babies. It is possible that the preferences found in genetic similarity research are mediated by this imprinting process. I can imagine a future where all Whites would be required to expose their babies to non-Whites during this formative period. Orwell would love it.)

Social identity theory fills an obvious gap — one alluded to by Jobling in his original article: Most ethnic conflict is among closely related groups. (Think Israelis and Palestinians.) In my original article I challenged Jobling to state how my argument for an evolutionary basis of social identity mechanisms is incorrect, but he has not responded. He acknowledges he was incorrect in criticizing my comments on martyrdom. But that means he acknowledges that I am correct that there are psychological mechanisms that could lead to martyrdom and intense identification with an ingroup.

Jobling:

Later, MacDonald writes, “Even if all humans were equally opportunistic and fickle in their group affiliations, so that group interest was always contingent on individual self-interest, groups as vehicles of selection would still be required in order to understand the behavior of coordinated groups.”8 Here MacDonald implies that sometimes people may not be motivated by self-interest, and it seems to me that altruism is the only alternative.

This does not follow at all. My view is that explicit processing mechanisms are critical for understanding how humans are able to form effective groups. (My most recent article on this is in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.) Jobling is simply showing that he is unfamiliar with the literature on cultural group selection. Briefly, because of explicit processing, humans are able to form cohesive groups where, for example, self-sacrificing behavior is coerced via social controls or made psychologically attractive by compelling ideologies. Think of a military unit or a group evolutionary strategy (GES). And in the case of a GES, social controls can provide a selective environment ensuring that people who are most committed to group goals and most embody the group’s cultural ideals (e.g., scholarship and religious fanaticism (hyper-ethnocentrism)  among traditional Jewish groups) prosper by leaving more progeny. And that is evolution.

Jobling:

In another passage, MacDonald writes, “For individuals highly predisposed to collectivism, ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and subordinate individual goals to group goals are paramount.”9 Subordinating individual goals to the goals of the ethnic group would seem an act of ethnic altruism. MacDonald does nothing to reconcile this sentence with his earlier assertion that ethnic altruism does not exist, despite the apparent contradiction. The same is true of the other passages in which ethnic altruism is implied.

False. This is the argument for martyrdom. Since Jobling accepts that argument (see our comments on my original article), I don’t see the problem. Again, my argument is that individualism/collectivism is an individual differences dimension of social identity processes and that people extreme on collectivism do not have an algorithm that balances the costs of group membership with the benefits of leaving the group. One of my ideas about Jewish society is that the most extreme members of the group — the ones like those in medieval Germany who killed their families rather than convert — are the vanguard. These are the Jews who populate the West Bank settler movement and the forces of the racialist right both in Israel and the US.

Jobling:

MacDonald’s confusion is evident in his blog post as well. If MacDonald does not believe in the existence of ethnic altruism, then he must disagree with Frank Salter’s theory of ethnicity, to which the concept of ethnic altruism is central. Salter plainly believes that natural selection has led to the evolution of instincts for ethnic altruism.

Salter is very clear that rational choice mechanisms are required in order to calculate ethnic genetic interests. Read his book — or my review:

A basic theme of the book is that humans cannot rely on their suite of evolved modules to achieve or even perceive their genetic interests in the modern world. Many individuals do not have the same psychological motivation for their ethnic interests that they have, say, for their family. Salter’s reasoning actually reinforces arguments that there are enormous barriers to the evolution of altruism within local groups, since, as noted above, random co‐ethnics have zero ethnic kinship. Presumably this is because our evolved psychology was designed mainly for a world of small groups separated by tiny genetic differences.

To conclude: For all the political biases and other weaknesses of the academic system, it does give one a certain humility in the face of the daunting complexity of human behavior. Perhaps because he has not subjected himself to the peer review process, Jobling lacks this humility and the result is a demeanor filled with arrogance, hostility, and contempt.

The good news is that Jobling is safely ensconced in his own website where no one need take him seriously — least of all anyone who thinks of himself as developing the groundwork for a scientifically based legitimacy for identifying with White people and their interests.

Kevin MacDonald: The Myth of Pure Science

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Kevin MacDonald: The brouhaha over climate change science has prompted an op-ed in the LA Times  “Climate change e-mail scandal underscores myth of pure science.”  It’s interesting to substitute race science rather than climate science when pondering their comments. Some quotes:

The East Anglia controversy serves as a reminder that when the politics are divisive and the science is sufficiently complex, the boundary between the two may become indiscernible.

Race science is also complex — complex enough for obfuscation by politically motivated parties. It’s not like the double helix structure of DNA where someone who doubts it can be safely relegated to the Flat Earth Society.

Yet both parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If “pure” science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.

Politicians (and academics and journalists) often hide behind the idea that science has absolutely proved that IQ is not a valid measure or that race differences in academic success are due to White racism, etc.  No need to mention the political commitments of the people who have produced this “knowledge” — people like S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.

In practice, science is competitive, backbiting, venal, imperfect and, indeed, political. Science, in other words, is replete with the same human failings that mark all other social activities.

For sure. I think pretty much every scientist starts out thinking science is way purer than it is. By the end of their career, they are less idealistic. In my case, it came as a result of writing The Culture of Critique. A more recent example of my disillusion is evolutionary psychology.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it. … Better to recognize that decision-makers, depending on their political beliefs, will weigh the evidence and risks of climate change differently when evaluating policy options. Voters should evaluate the decisions on that basis, rather than on the false notion that science is dictating the choices.

The problem with this is that it’s no solution at all. We are supposed to simply accept the fact that race science is politicized and that politicians are politicized in what they say about race science. Then somehow the voters are supposed to wade through all this when they decide how to vote on issues such as anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

But voters are completely unqualified for evaluating any of the evidence. And in any case, surely voters’ politics will affect their choices in the same way politics  influences everyone else’s choices. 

Of course, the media will weigh in heavily and predictably to convince voters against race realism because we all know they are politicized. The media will be effective because when it comes to race science, the realists are completely marginalized. So in the end, clueless voters who read the New York Times or watch Fox News will end up making these decisions. 

I think that Jewish intellectuals have always known about the politicization of truth. And if truth is politicized, all that’s left is to try to establish consensus and delegitimize everything else –forcibly if need be. This is from Ch. 6 of The Culture of Critique:

A fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community.

People who dissent from the manufactured consensus are simply marginalized from polite society. So the closest we can come to truth in race science is consensus and the consensus simply reflects the politics of the people with more power.

I think a lot of race scientists have had an idealistic conception of science. Until we change the people who have the power, especially in the media, there is no chance for their ideas to become mainstream.

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