Medieval Europe: The Reality of Race

In the past couple days, “medievalist” Karl Steel and some of his friends, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (and other Cathedral mouthpieces), have been “attacking” HBD and the Dark Enlightenment on Twitter, including a blog post.  N.B. by “attacking” I don’t really mean attempting to discredit but pointing and sputtering.  And I put “medievalist” in quotes because unlike traditional medievalists who had deep philological understandings of classical and medieval languages (such as Latin, Old High German, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, etc.) this group is representative of a new trend, “scholars” short on traditional philological skills but long on the latest pomod theories, which  results in applying the latest lit-crit “theory” to an English translation of a text.  Yes, Idiocracy, has consumed literary studies.  Oh yea, many of them also seem to detest logic and reason (ruses of the white man).

Anyway, browsing through some of their writings, you find the latest fashionable nonsense, like Jeffrey Cohen’s “On the nonexistence of race,” which is all quite comical.  It’s trendy these days to claim that race was “invented” in the Enlightenment, although Sarich & Miele easily refuted this claim in the “Ancient Concept of Race“.  These Dorothys can keep their eyes closed and continue to click their heels saying “race doesn’t exist,” but it simply won’t change reality.  In fact, modern science is showing that no only does race exist but genetic racial divisions are much deeper than previously imagined (see here).  Regardless, although these “medievalists” claim race doesn’t exist, I saw one person (now I’ve lost the source) speaking of miscegenation among the Medieval British.

Regarding the last point, “miscegenation among the Medieval British,” these people apparently are ignorant of Bryan Sykes landmark genetics study Blood of the Isles, where Sykes shows how remarkably ethnically homogenous the British Isles are at the genetic level.  Steve Sailer writes:

From his database, Sykes concludes that the majority of the genes of the peoples of the British Isles are descended from the oldest of the modern inhabitants: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, who began arriving 10,000 years ago from Continental Europe after the end of the last Ice Age, as soon as the islands became habitable again.

Regarding the Irish, see the “Ignatiev Fallacy“.

Still, there are different ethnic groups among Europeans.  Everyone knows this (and there are HBD differences between ethnic groups).  However, the current meme of emphasizing ethnic groups at the expense of larger racial groups hides how closely related many ethnic groups are to each other.   What’s remarkable in this instance is how closely related European ethnic groups are to each other vs Non-Europeans.  Regarding Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza‘s research on the genetic distances between racial groups, Sailer writes:

Cavalli-Sforza’s team compiled extraordinary tables depicting the “genetic distances” separating 2,000 different racial groups from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then, Cavalli-Sforza has found, the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danish, and the Japanese 59 times greater. Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus (the main group of sub-Saharan blacks) is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish.

Clearly these ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to non-Europeans.

And let’s forget that concepts like “blue blood” (stressing white, fair skin) were very popular in Medieval Europe, as a way to separate fair-skinned upper-class Europeans from the swarthier Moors.

And let’s not leave out eugenics (which the Ashkenazis have been practicing for the past 1,000 years) in Medieval Europe.  Eugenics, first popularized by Plato and Aristotle, was alive in Medieval Europe with concepts such as “blue blood” or gentillesse (refinement and courtesy resulting from good breeding).  Gregory Clark has demonstrated that the children of the upper-classes among Medieval English had a 2:1 survival rate over the poor and that there was much downward mobility, which resulted in the downward drift of genes from the upper-classes to the lower classes, resulting in a general increase in IQ and decrease in violence.

Still, don’t let any of these inconvenient facts get in the way of our current “medievalists” where the Medieval World for them is but a blank canvass on which they can paint the most fashionable and latest lit-crit theory.

Related:

“The Ancient Greeks & Romans, Beauty and Human Biodiversity”

“Tolkien, HBD and German Romanticism”

Global Genetic Distances Map and Reality of Race

Updates:

Although I may seem a little hard on Karl Steel above, I will say this:  From what I’ve seen, Karl Steel seems more intelligent and perhaps one day able to think “outside the Cathedral box” than the ever hysterical Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

Wesley Morganston: Karl Steel on Human Biodiversity: “Let’s Not Face Facts”