Lawrence Auster & The Jews

Less than three weeks before he died, Lawrence Auster published, on his blog, View From the Right, a chapter from an unfinished book, under the headline “Jews – The Archetypal Multiculturalists.”

The whole thing makes for quite a read. As I put it to our esteemed commenter Joe Walker, “much of it reads like Kevin MacDonald – but on steroids.”

It’s very long, though, so casual internet surfers will mostly have dismissed it at first glance: TL,DR.

Big mistake. It really is a must-read.

Auster himself suggested that the time & attention-challenged skip immediately to the final section: “How to oppose the Jewish agenda without anti-Semitism”

But, IMHO, the single best bit of many in the article is the penultimate section, entitled “Hoist by their own petard,” the first few paragraphs of which I here transcribe, fearless of copyright law, just like Mr. Auster always was:

* * * * *

Hoist by their own petard

As they work to dismantle America’s majority culture through mass immigration, diversity, the subversion of mainstream values, and the mainstreaming of countercultural values, those Jews who are waging the Kulturkampf have failed to realize that they are cutting off the civilization they are sitting on. Leftist Jews in particular are dumbfounded when the anti-Westernism they have been promoting recoils back upon themselves. Michael Lerner, for example, has repeatedly portrayed America as an evil oppressor nation—a “social system whose current distribution of wealth and power is based on the stealing of land from the American Indians, the enslavement of Blacks, the degradation of women, and the systematic exploitation of many generations of immigrants,” as he put it in a typical diatribe in his journal Tikkun. Yet elsewhere Lerner has expressed horror at the fact that nonwhite multiculturalists see the Jews as part of this oppressive white system. Blinded by his anti-majority passion, Lerner cannot understand that in contemporary America, where Jews (for their numbers) are the most wealthy and powerful group, nonwhites are hardly likely to see the Jews as an “oppressed” minority like themselves. [“Six Days Shalt Thou Work,” Michael Lerner, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 1993, p. 35.]

Similarly, Professor Susannah Heschel, writing in Tikkun, was shocked that among liberal Germans who are friendly to Jews, there is a broad acceptance of anti-Semitic ideas. It seems that these contemporary Germans view the Old Testament as the fulminating source of contemporary injustices, including Nazism, since the Jewish Bible condones authoritarianism, exclusion, racism, and genocide. But Heschel has it all wrong. She assumes that leftist Germans are asserting anti-Jewish ideas, when in fact they are only repeating the generic anti-Westernism that has been disseminated so effectively by progressive Jews such as Heschel herself. Since Germans have been taught to see the West as hegemonic, warlike, and racist, isn’t it only natural that they would also view one of [the] primary sources of the West—the Hebrew Bible—in exactly the same terms?

While the absence of self-awareness among Jewish leftists is only laughable, the blindness of the mainstream Jewish community is a serious matter. In their tireless campaign for mass immigration and cultural diversity—motivated by conscious or unconscious hostility to the white Christian majority—Jews are helping destroy the very way of life that made a happy Jewish existence in this country possible. Despite some anti-Jewish prejudice and social exclusions in the early twentieth century, Jews found in America a stable environment where they were protected, where they prospered, and where they felt fully comfortable for the first time in two thousand years. That environment was a white society with a Christian religion and an Anglo-Saxon code of conduct. As America becomes nonwhite and non-Western, will that code, and those protections, endure? As Alan Mittleman argues,

“The breakdown of a common culture and the drift toward multiculturalism, which Jews support, pose real hazards for American Jews, because they weaken the citizenship on which Jewish participation in modern society is based…. If people revert to more primordial forms of belonging, civil society will dissolve and American Jews might find themselves in what the prophet Ezekiel called a midbar hammim, a wilderness of the peoples. This would be a nightmarish denouement.” [Alan L. Mittleman, “Jews in Multicultural America,” First Things, December 1996, p. 17.]

One notable feature of this coming “wilderness of peoples,” in which Jews will lose all security, is the black racialism that is rising as the dominant white culture declines. In the lawless Third-World America of the coming century, do Jews think they will be able to count on Dominicans and Chinese and Arabs and Mexicans to protect them from black anti-Semites?

Another prospect emerging from the wilderness of peoples will be an upsurge of anti-Semitism among marginalized whites, many of whom will blame the Jews (not without cause) for the ruin of white civilization. Having acted all along on the ludicrous and hostile assumption that the white American majority is a potential neo-Nazi force that must be dispossessed, Jews will hardly be in a position to complain about real anti-Semitism when it appears among whites who have actually been dispossessed.

In failing to consider these possibilities, pro-immigration Jews are as unthinking as pro-immigration blacks. Both blacks and Jews support a policy that is leading to the end of white America, even though that will remove from power the only group that has a cultural bond or moral obligation to them…

by Lawrence Auster

* * * * *

Well, indeed. What’s left to add?

Darwinism & Final Causation II

Previously, I suggested that the gist of the late Lawrence Auster’s critique of Darwinism was that it assumed the truth of “the reigning naturalistic consensus in modern science and philosophy…according to which…ends, goals, purposes, meaning – in short, final causes – are not fundamental features of reality, but mere illusions, in need of explanation in mechanistic terms of some sort or other.” Yet at the same time, Darwinists “constantly help themselves to teleological language – i.e., the language of final causation.”

Edward Feser puts the point like this in his anti-atheist polemic, The Last Superstition:

“The point of Darwinism is to complete the mechanistic revolution that began with Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, et al., by eliminating teleology or final causality from biology. Yet contemporary Darwinian biologists, no less than their Aristotelian predecessors, constantly help themselves to teleological language in describing and explaining the phenomena with which they have to deal, and no one denies that it would be impossible for them to carry on their researches without it.” (p. 248)

Unfortunately, when it comes to evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins & Daniel Dennett, I fear that this might be an all-too-accurate summary of the “point” of Darwinism, so far as they are concerned. They really do seem to be motivated – driven, even – largely by raging anti-religious sentiment. And although the notion of final causation is of secular origin (Aristotle was not a Christian!) its emphatic adoption by the medieval church has, perhaps, irredeemably tainted it in the eyes of all true non-believers.

Feser quotes a couple of relevant passages from a recent book by one of our foremost contemporary philosophers:

“I want atheism to be true…It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want the universe to be like that…”

“Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.”

(Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, p. 131)

So far, I’m entirely on board with these critics of Darwinism. For one thing, the very ideas of “point,” “motive,” “want,” “belief,” “hope” &c seem to me to be irreducibly teleological – and I simply can’t make any sense of what’s going on with the likes of Dawkins & Dennett without using words like those. (Oh, and add “sense” to the list, while you’re at it.)

Houston, we’ve got a problem.

But here’s where I jump ship. In once sentence:

Sure, the “reigning naturalistic consensus” needs Darwinism – but does Darwinism need the “reigning naturalistic consensus?”

I don’t think so.

to be continued…

Lawrence Auster, R.I.P.

Lawrence Auster has died.

The West Needs New Elites

In the news this week

It was reported this week that pro-immigration groups have spent around $1.5 billion since 2007  to push through amnesty and increased legal immigration (more reason to give money to VDare and NumbersUSA).  Interestingly, the pro-immigration lobby is makeshift coalition of billionaires, big business, anti-white ethnic activists, and some Christian organizations (such as the Catholic Church and Evangelical groups), although the roots of the pro-immigration movement are deeper.   Although both legal and illegal immigration are driving down American wages and 74.7% of Mexican immigrants with children are on welfare, our elites seem to think mass immigration’s path to poverty a good idea.  What the West probably needs more than anything else is a new set of elites.  Easier said than done, but our current elites either view themselves as alien or are short-sighted business elites, both quite different from older WASP elites who recognized their station in society as a long-haul stewardship.

Speaking of elites, the British seem to be gaining more sense on immigration than Americans.  David Goodhart admits that the biggest mistake of the left has been the support of mass immigration.  And Ed West writes in the Telegraph about mass immigration as a type of ponzi scheme benefiting our current elites (and screwing over everyone else).

And speaking of past elites, the New Zealand writer Kerry Bolton has come out with new books, Stalin: The Enduring Legacy (reviewed here) and Revolution from Above (reviewed here).  The second title is explicitly about Western elites and how far removed they’ve become from the people they’re supposed to represent.  The former title on Stalin is interesting because, although Bolton makes no apologies for Stalin’s brutality, it provides some insight to the internecine conflict between the Stalinists (Russian nationalists) and the Trotskyites (Ashkenazi international cosmopolitans), which is pertinent to the USA since the Trotskyites are the genetic and intellectual forbearers of the neoconservatives.   Speaking of neocons, or criticism thereof, Paul Gottfried has an interesting new book on democracy, reviewed here.

95% of White Americans Have No African Ancestry

According to some recent population genetics surveys, around 95% of white Americans (European Americans) have no black (Sub-Sahara African) ancestry.  And the 5% of whites who do, seem to have only a trivial amount.

Nonetheless, the average admixture of African Americans seems to be around 80% black and 20% European.

What does this mean?

First, the USA historically has not been a hotbed of miscegenation as Cultural Marxists like to tell us.  Your eyes and common sense should tell you that if there were widespread miscegenation, there would be hardly any white Americans but rather large mestizo/mulatto-like populations such as one finds in many Latin American countries (and even there, small white upper classes still exist).

Second, the people in USA tended to cross the color line in only one direction: white —> black. Mulatto people would identify as black and then reintegrate into the black gene pool.

Which brings us to another question, why do mulattoes almost always identify as black?

The standard Cultural Marxist answer to this question is because of culture, such as the one-drop rule.  But the reality of the situation belies this half-truth.

The most straightforward answer is what Oxford zoologist Jonathan Kingdon suggested in 1996:  black looks are dominant while other looks are recessive.  Observation seems to bear this out.  A person with only 1/16th black ancestry will still often have visible black characteristics, whereas a white person with 1/16th Japanese ancestry would probably pass for 100% white.

In other words, the reason why most mulattoes identify as black is at least in part biological.  Perhaps the white phenotype really is recessive and is easily diminished.

As philosopher Nick Land succinctly formulated: White + Color = Color.

Updates:

Razib Khan:  European Americans have little African ancestry

Dienekes Pontikos: “23&Me: Less than 5% of European Americans have more than 2% either African or Native American ancestry”

Steve Sailer:  “White Americans are VERY white“

Must eugenics be intentional?

Ron Unz refers to my favorable review of his article on Chinese Social Darwnism.  He doesn’t  like the E-word and seems to think I mischaracterized his article by using “Chinese Eugenics” in the title.  He might be right.  I’m by no means an expert on eugenics.   As I said in a comment to my original post:

I was using “eugenics” very broadly to refer to ancient eugenics, Clark’s and Unz’s selection models, and Miller’s more futuristic models. Eugenics has been happening for a very long time, so I tend to think of more in terms of the Clark model of downward social mobility / downward drift in genes, than in Miller’s more intentional model.

The gist of Unz’s criticism is that he thinks eugenics must be intentional.

But I’m not certain this is correct.

Early 20th century eugenicist Frederick Osborn thought that eugenics could be unintentional.  He thought that society could be ordered in a way that it just happened.  Regarding the modern state, Osborn, according to Wikipedia,

“argued that all that was needed was to simply wait until a specific set of social structures (a consumer economy and the nuclear family) developed to a point of dominance within capitalist culture. Once these structures matured, people would act eugenically without a second thought. Eugenic activity, instead of being an immediately identifiable, repugnant activity, would become one of the invisible taken-for-granted activities of everyday life (much like getting a vaccination).”

If I remember correctly what little I’ve read on eugenics, there seems to be recognition of accidental eugenics – circumstances set up such that it just happens without anyone intending it.

But I’m no expert.  Perhaps Unz is correct.  Thoughts?

Updates:

Helmuth Nyborg, in “The decay of Western civilization: Double relaxed Darwinian Selection,” writes about dysgenic effects on society though relaxed selection pressure. There doesn’t appear to be any intentionality; I doubt most sane people would intentionally seek their own demise.

Volkmar Weiss, in “The Population Cycle Drives Human History — from a Eugenic Phase into a Dysgenic Phase and Eventual Collapse,” writes about the population structure of society bringing about eugenic and dysgenic effects.  This often doesn’t appear to be intentional.

Ron Unz responds here.

Mexico’s Diabetes Epidemic

Note:  Shortly after writing this, Mexico was declared the official fattest country in the world.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out (here, here and here), Mexico is the second fattest country in the world, next to the United States, and, according to experts, on its way to becoming most obese.  I suspect that if you were to subtract the Hispanics / mestizos and blacks from the American data and only compare European Americans with Mexicans, Mexico would already be the most obese country in the world.  As was recently reported:

“With each bite into a greasy taco and slurp of a sugary drink, Mexico hurtles toward what health experts predict will be a public health crisis from diabetes-related disease.

A fifth of all Mexican women and more than a quarter of men are believed to be at risk for diabetes now. It’s already the nation’s No. 1 killer, taking some 70,000 lives a year, far more than gangster violence.”

Mexicans are facing a diabetes epidemic, perhaps the worst the world has ever seen.  Mexico currently has the second highest diabetes rate in the world, and soon expected to have the highest.

What the causes of this rapid obesity and diabetes epidemic are, health experts are still arguing.

First, Mexican food, on average, is extremely low in nutritional value and extremely high in calories.  While traditional Mexican meals already were quite high in calories and low in nutritional value, add to these recent popular food items like the chocolate filled Twinkie-like cake called “Gansito” and you have an extremely high-calorie diet.

Second, recent wealth and more contact with the USA have increased opportunities for Mexicans to eat more Westernized foods, especially fast, junk and high-carb foods. Someone on NPR recently suggested that Mexicans’ diets have drastically changed over the last decade or two.

Yet, all of this seems to be symptomatic, not getting at the real roots, for even if Mexicans’ diets have changed, they’re eating the same garbage that whites or now many North Asians are eating, yet they seem to suffer more.

Looking at the racial demographics of Mexico, Mexico is roughly 30% Amerindian and 60% Mestizo (of whom the average admixture, at least for the lower classes, is 59% Amerindian, 34% Spaniard, and 6% black).

I wonder whether something else might be going on.

Using Dennis Mangan as a point of departure, the recent increased wealth in Mexico added to increased access to calories might be acting as supernormal stimuli.  Mexicans also might have lower impulse-control, making it more difficult for them to withstand the temptation of nearly limitless access to calories.

Another possibility, given the largely non-European ancestry of most Mexicans, is that Mexicans might not be well adapted to eat Western foods and are suffering accordingly. This would be an interesting study.  Already there have been some studies showing that different races gain and lose weight differently.

Regardless, this could have real consequences in the USA.   A recent study found that people with diabetes usually make around $160,000 less over a 40-year period because of complications.   Healthcare costs for people with diabetes are around 2.3x higher than for the non-diabetic.  Current costs for diabetes in the USA are staggering.  Add to this the rising Hispanic population in the USA of whom many will probably develop diabetes and the fact that many Mexicans will come to the USA to try to receive free treatment for diabetes, and there very well could be a healthcare crisis.

Mexicans

Update:

Mexico was just declared the fattest country in the world.

“Mexicans, fattest people on planet, at genetic risk for diabetes?”

Best miniseries ever made?

I love a good miniseries. They are often better than films, as they are more developed and move along like novels.

Some of my favorite miniseries:

Forsyte Saga (1967)  (The remake isn’t as good as the original)

Upstairs, Downstairs (1971) (More of a series. The recent sequel is very disappointing)

The Counte of Monte Cristo (French, 1998)

Das Boot (1997 miniseries, which is uncut version of 1981 movie)

Brideshead Revisited (1981)

The Pallisers (1974)

I, Claudius (1976)

Rome (BBC / HBO, 2005)

Ring Of Nibelungs / Dragon King (Germany, 2004)

 

Any others?

Steve Sailer on Human Biodiversity

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s a great video of Steve Sailer discussing biodiversity:

Here are some other noteworthy recent videos:

Norwegian documentary on political correctness (English subtitles).

Henry Harpending on reality of race.

Helmuth Nyborg: IQ, immigration and Europe’s future.

Steven Pinker on taboos and political correctness.

Christianity, HBD and Political Correctness

In reference to our post why Christians should reject Intelligent Design, the popular Catholic blogger Mark Shea has launched an attack on Occam’s Razor, calling us “blood and soil pagans” and appearing to wholly misunderstand what human biodiversity even is.   This is odd, since historically, before the rise of propositionalism, nearly all Christians would have been advocates of “blood and soil” and certainly would have believed in some sort human biodiversity (although without the nuances of contemporary genetics and sociobiology). Furthermore, many prominent Christians, like J.R.R. Tolkien, considered themselves pagans of sorts, but the subtlety here is probably beyond Shea’s powers.  As I’ve noted already, while I’m not particularly religious and as far as I know no blogger here is neopagan (although I have nothing against neopaganism), I am not anti-religion.  In fact, while I am a Darwinist, I reject the harsh “New Atheism” of Dawkins et al, as I find it unrealistic.  The idea that one can construct a wholly atheist society seems to me to be a type of utopianism, contrary to human nature, as I suspect that least 90% of the people on the planet are incapable of living without religion.  Furthermore, religion can be adaptive.  As many Darwinists have noted (e.g. E.O. Wilson, Nicholas Wade, etc.) religion can act as a glue to hold society together.  Like Cicero, I believe religion can create a positive order in society.   The biggest problem I have with Christianity today is that it has become maladaptive for Westerners.  While Christianity has become a non-Western religion in the Third world, Western Christianity is besotted with “universalism“. Western Christianity in the last 50 years seems to have absorbed many aspects of Cultural Marxism — Exhibit A:  Shea’s prattling on about “racism” — and it has suicidally internalized pathological altruism (e.g. Western Christianity’s current unhealthy obsession with non-white adoption or support of Third World immigration).  While I don’t want…nor think it even possible…to get rid of religion, I’d like to see a more masculine Christianity that hasn’t become a little chorus looking to condemn the latest politically incorrect impropriety, yelling slogans like “Darwinism is racist.”  In short, Christians have become sissies.  Shea should try to fix this instead of whining about us.

Updates:

Some of the commenters at Shea’s blog seem not to understand the reality of racial differences in IQ.

It’s interesting that while Western leftists and Western Christian Cultural Marxists are waging war on behalf of blank slatist egalitarianism, the Chinese have come to terms with reality.

Anti-evolution neocon David Klinghoffer calls Occam’s Razor “moronic” and then links to some mindless rant about Darwinism being racist, pretty much confirming my assessment of the Trotskyite origins of the Discovery Institute.

Racially Integrated Churches and Social Rejects

Have you ever noticed that  racially integrated churches often contain the most genetically defective people?

Penis Snathcing on the Rise in Africa

In other news, penis snatching is on the rise in Africa.  While Europeans have quaint hobbies like stamp collecting and bird watching, Africans have penis snatching.

Updates:

The Malleus Maleficarum reference is gratuitous political correctness, as it’s the equivalent of “Evidence of UFO’s” manual for 15th century Europe. As far as I know, there is no real evidence of widespread penis snatching in 15th century Europe.  If it truly were widespread, it would be widely documented.

There might very well be a primitive drive for penis snatching.  When a rising alpha chimpanzee overthrows a reigning alpha, he sometimes will tear off his testicles and penis.  (See here, here and here.)

Downton Abbey: Earl of Grantham maximizes inclusive fitness

I meant to write on this immediately after the recent season finale of Downton Abbey but got distracted, so here it is.  Although we do not know whether Mr. Matthew Crawley (heir presumptive of Downton) is dead (my guess: he is), what we do know is that Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, does have a new heir, the son of his daughter Lady Mary Crawley and her husband Mr. Matthew Crawley, third cousin to the Earl.

In terms of maximizing Darwinian fitness, the real payoff is reproducing with someone of the same race.   As Frank Salter calculates in On Genetic Interests, a white parent would be twice as closely related to (share twice as many genes with)  a same-race offspring than if he or she reproduced with a black person.  Going below the racial level to the ethnic and distant-cousin level, however, there are still payoffs but they become diminishingly smaller.

Nonetheless, in terms of inclusive fitness, the Earl makes out.  Not only will his grandson inherit 1/4 of his DNA (or probably even more, depending on genetic proximity of Matthew Crawley), the grandson will also inherit the Earl’s Y-chromosome (through the paternal Crawley line via Matthew) and the surname attached to it.   Although HBD Chick might not like it, if I were the Earl of Grantham, I’d be a happy man!

Crawley Family Tree

Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham

Darwinism & Final Causation I

I have been puzzling through some of Lawrence Auster’s many attacks on Darwinism:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010323.html

& it strikes me that his real beef is not with Darwinism per se, but with something much larger: i.e., the reigning naturalistic consensus in modern science and philosophy, kick-started several centuries ago by guys like Descartes & Hobbes & Locke, & still ruling the roost today, according to which Aristotle & Aquinas were wrong: ends, goals, purposes, meaning – in short, final causes – are not fundamental features of reality, but mere illusions, in need of explanation in mechanistic terms of some sort or other.

Darwin did not create this consensus. He just accepted it, and seemed to many to offer a way to explain the most recalcitrantly meaning-filled & purpose-ridden phenomenon of all – i.e., life – within its terms.

The problem, as Auster points out, over and over again, is that Darwinists constantly help themselves to teleological language – i.e., the language of final causation – while denying that teleology is real. They insist that this language can be “cashed out” in mechanistic terms – but, every time they attempt to do so, they end up using…well, a great big bunch of teleological language in the course of their attempted explanations.

Would it surprise you to learn that I, unrepentant Darwinist that I am, think that he’s got a point? A very, very serious point, which you can find expressed with more philosophical sophistication and less rhetorical overkill in the writings of Edward Feser?

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/

But, before I continue, I’d like to ask: have I characterized Auster’s views fairly? I think it’s possible that there may be a bit of overlap between our readership and his, so I want to ask that before I continue.

It’s so hard to be fair to people with whom you deeply disagree. And it’s so important to try.

A Sane Voice at CPAC

I usually don’t read Ann Coulter’s columns or watch her videos, although she’s leaps and bounds better than about 99% of the other conservative talking heads, but in the following video at CPAC (discussed here by Peter Brimelow) she really gives a great speech.  While I think she might be wrong about conservatism being the future (I have better hopes for variants of identitaire / archeofuturist movements) she is completely right about immigration, and she doesn’t shy away from mentioning that our demographic train wreck was brought by the Immigration Act of 1965, that Third World immigration is the root of many of our problems, that if amnesty passes the US will become California, that she is a single-issue voter on immigration, etc.  She really does “get it.”  Nearly every other bad policy can be reversed; immigration is usually permanent.  Bravo!  Of course, now expect the zealous neocons / Trotskyites to punish her politically incorrect impropriety, since any talk of demographics and the Immigration Act of 1965 immediately reminds them of this.

Start watching around 11 minutes into the video:

“Primer on Immigration and Human BioDiversity“