Carl Schmitt is Right: Liberal Nations Have Open Borders Because They Have No Concept of the Political

                      By Ricardo Duchesne

Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985

Before World War II liberal rights were understood among Western states in a libertarian and ethno-nationalistic way. Freedom of association, for example, was understood to include the right to refuse to associate with certain members of certain ethnic groups, even the right to discriminate in employment practices. This racial liberalism was still institutionalized right up until the 1960s. The settler nations of Australia, Canada, United States, and New Zealand enjoyed admission and naturalization policies based on race and culture, intended to keep these nations “White.”

This liberal racial ethos was socially accepted with a good conscience throughout Western society. As Robert H. Jackson has observed:

"Before the war prevailing public opinion within Western states — including democratic states — did not condemn racial discrimination in domestic social and political life. Nor did it question the ideas and institutions of colonialism. In the minds of most Europeans, equality and democracy could not yet be extended successfully to non-Europeans. In other words, these ideas were not yet considered to be universal human rights divorced from any particular civilization or culture. Indeed, for a century or more race had been widely employed as a concept to explain the scientific and technological achievements of Europeans as compared to non-Europeans and to justify not only racial discrimination within Western states but also Western domination of non-western peoples. Racial distinctions thus served as a brake on the extension of democratic rights to people of non European descent within Western countries as well as in Western colonies." [Robert H. Jackson, “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization: Normative Change in International Relations,” In Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, ed. Goldstein and Keohane, Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 135]

Even in the case of denazified Germany, governments after 1945 endorsed, as a matter of common sense, and well into the 1970s, an ethnic conception of German nationality, accepting migrants only as temporary “guest workers” on the grounds that Germany was “not an immigrant country.” European nations took for granted the ethnic cohesion of their cultures and the necessity of barring the entry and incorporation of people from different cultures categorized as a threat to the “national character.”

Why, then, did the entire Western liberal establishment came to the view that European ethnocentrism was fundamentally at odds with liberal principles a few decades after WWII?

I argued in a paper posted at CEC over a month ago (which I have withdrawn because it was flawed) that a new set of norms (human rights, civic nationalism, race is a construct) with an in-built tendency for further radicalization suddenly came to take a firm hold over Western liberal nations in response to the Nazi experience, and that once these norms were accepted, and actions were taken to implement them institutionally, they came to “entrap” Westerners within a spiral that would push them into ever more radical policies that would eventually create a situation in which Western nations would come to be envisioned as places always intended to be progressing toward a future utopia in which multiple races would co-exist in a state of harmony.

Carl Schmitt

Was there something within the racialist liberalism of the pre-WW II era that made it susceptible to the promulgation of these norms and their rapid radicalization thereafter? Why did Western leaders succumbed to the radicalization of these norms so easily? The answer may be found in Carl Schmitt’s argument that liberal states lack a strong concept of the political. I take this to mean that liberals leaders have an inherent weakness as political beings due to their inability to think of their nation states as a collectivity of people laying sovereignty claim over a territory that distinguishes between friends and enemies, who can belong and who cannot belong in the territory. Liberals believe that their nation states are associations formed by individuals for the purpose of ensuring their natural right to life, liberty, and happiness. They have an imaginary view of their liberal states as associations created by isolated individuals reaching a covenant, a contract or agreement, amongst themselves in abstraction from any prior community. They have a predilection to whitewash the fact that their liberal states, like all states, were forcibly created by a people with a common language, heritage, racial characteristics, religious traditions, and a sense of territorial acquisition involving the derogation of out-groups.

 

For this reason, in the words of Carl Schmitt, liberals have an undeveloped sense of the political, an inability to think of themselves as members of a political entity that was created with a clear sense of who can belong and who cannot belong in the community. Having a concept of the political presupposes a people with a strong sense of who can be part of their political community, who can be friends of the community and who cannot be because they pose a threat to the existence and the norms of the community.

Liberals tend to deny that man is by nature a social animal, a member of a collective. They think that humans are all alike as individuals in wanting states that afford them with the legal framework that individuals need in the pursuit of liberty and happiness. They hold a conception of human nature according to which humans can avoid deadly conflict through a liberal state which gives everyone the possibility to improve themselves and society through market competition, technological innovation, and humanitarian works, creating an atmosphere in which political differences can be resolved through peaceful consensus by way of open deliberation.

They don’t want to admit openly that all liberal states were created violently by a people with a sense of peoplehood laying sovereign rights over an exclusive territory against other people competing for the same territory. They don’t want to admit that the members of the competing outgroups are potential enemies rather than abstract individuals seeking a universal state that guarantees happiness and security for all regardless of racial and religious identity. Humans are social animals with a natural impulse to identify themselves collectively in terms of ethnic, cultural and racial markers. But today Europeans have wrongly attributed their unique inclination for states with liberal constitutions to non-Europeans. They have forgotten that liberal states were created by a particular people with a particular individualist heritage, beliefs, and religious orientations. They don’t realize that their individualist heritage was made possible within the context of states or territories acquired through force to the exclusion of competitors. They don’t realize that a liberal state if it is to remain liberal must act collectively against the inclusion of non-Europeans with their own in-group ambitions.

Hegel, Hobbes, and Schmitt

But I think that Schmitt should be complemented with Hegel’s appropriation of the ancient Greek concept of “spiritedness.” Our sense of honor comes from our status within our ethnocultural group in our struggle for survival and competition with other groups. This is the source of what the ancient Greeks called “spiritedness,” that is a part of the soul comprising, in Plato’s philosophy, pride, indignation, shame, and the need for recognition. Plato believed that the human soul consisted of three parts:

1. a physically desiring part that drives humans to seek to satisfy their appetites for food, comfort, and sensual pleasure;

2. a reasoning part that allows humans to calculate the best way to get the things they desire; and

3. a “spirited” part that drives humans to seek honor and renown amongst their people.

Liberal theory developed in reaction to the destructive tendency inbuilt into the spirited part which was exemplified with brutal intensity during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and English Civil War 1642-1651). Thomas Hobbes devalued the spirited part of man as just another appetite for power, for riches, and adulation. At the same time, he understood that this appetite was different from the mere natural appetites for food and sensual pleasure, in that they were insatiable and conflict-oriented.

State of nature according to Hobbes

Hobbes emphasized the destructive rather than the heroic character of this aspect of human nature. In the state of nature men are in constant competition with other men for riches and honor, and so enmity is a permanent condition of the state of nature, killing, subduing, and supplanting competitors. However, Hobbes believed that other aspects of human nature, namely, the instinct for self-preservation, fear of death and desire for “commodious living,” were more powerful passions among humans, and that it was these passions, the fear of death in particular, which eventually led men to agree to create a strong central authority that would end the war of competing megalomaniacs, and maintain the peace by monopolizing the means of violence and agreeing to ensure the secure pursuit of commodious living by all. The “insatiable desire and ambition of man” for power and adulation would henceforth be relegated to the international sphere.

But by the second half of the seventeenth century Hobbes’s extreme pessimism about human nature gradually gave way to more moderate accounts in which economic self interest in the market place, love of money, as calculated and contained by reason, would come to be seen as the main passion of humans. The ideal of the spirited hero striving for honor and glory was thoroughly demeaned if not denounced as foolish. By the eighteenth century money making was viewed less as avaricious or selfish and more as a peaceful passion that improves peoples’ manners and “makes for all the gentleness of life.” As Montesquieu worded it, “wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle.” Commerce, it was indeed anticipated, would soften the barbaric ways of human nature, their atavistic passions for glorious warfare, transforming competition into a peaceful endeavour conducted by reasonable men who stood to gain more from trade than the violent usurpation of other’s peoples property.

Eventually, liberals came to believe that commerce would, in the words expressed by the Scottish thinker William Robertson in 1769, “wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.” By the nineteenth century liberals were not as persuaded by Hobbes’s view that the state of nature would continue permanently in the international relationships between nations. They replaced his pessimistic argument about human nature with a progressive optimism about how humans could be socialized to overcome their turbulent passions and aggressive instincts as they were softened through affluence and greater economic opportunities. With continuous improvements in the standard of living, technology and social organization, there would be no conflicts that could not be resolved through peaceful deliberation and political compromise.

The result of this new image of man and political relations, according to Schmitt, was a failure on the part of liberal nations to understand that what makes a community viable as a political association with sovereign control over a territory is its ability to distinguish between friends and enemies, which is based on the ability to grasp the permanent reality that Hobbes understood about the nature of man, which is that humans (the ones with the strongest passions) have an insatiable craving for power, a passion that can be held in check inside a nation state with a strong Leviathan ruler, but which remains a reality in the relationship between nations. But, whereas for Hobbes the state of nature is a war between individuals; for Schmitt one can speak of a state of war between nations as well as between groups within a nation. Friends and enemies are always groupings of people. In our time of mass multicultural immigration we can see clearly how enemy groups can be formed inside a national collectivity, groups seeking to undermine the values and the ethnic character of the national group. Therefore, to have a concept of the political is to be aware, in our multicultural age, of the possibility that enemy outgroups can emerge within our liberal nations states; it is to be aware that not all humans are equally individualistic, but far more ethnocentric than Europeans, and that a polity which welcomes millions of individuals from collectivist cultures, with a human nature driven by the passions for power and for recognition, constitute a very dangerous situation.

It was Hegel, rather than Hobbes, who spoke of the pursuit of honor instead of the pursuit of riches or power for its own sake, as the spirited part of human nature, which is about seeking recognition from others, a deeply felt desire among men to be conferred rightful honor by their peers. We can bring this Hegelian insight into Schmitt to argue that the spirited part of the soul is intimately tied to one’s sense of belonging to a political community with ethno-cultural markers. Without this spirited part members of a community eventually lose their sense of collective pride, honor, and will to survive as a political people. It is important to understand that honor is all about concern for one’s reputation within the context of a group. It is a matter of honor for immigrants, the males in the group, to affirm their heritage regardless of how successful they may be economically. Immigrants arriving in large numbers are naturally inclined to establish their own ethnic groupings within Western nations rather than disaggregate into individual units, contrary to what liberal theory says.

Non-White ethnic groupings stand as “the other,” “the stranger,” to use Schmitt’s words, in relation to nations where Europeans still constitute the majority. The friend-enemy distinction, certainly “the Us versus Them” distinction, can be applied to the relation between non-White ethnic groupings and European national groupings in the degree to which the collective actions of non-European groups negates the heritage and overall way of life of the majority European population. Ethnic groupings that negate the way of life of European liberal nations must be repulsed if European nations are to preserve their “own form of existence.” To be cognizant of this reality is what it means to have a concept of the political in our current age of mass immigration. It does not mean that alien groupings are posing an immediate physical threat. Enemy groupings may also emerge as a major force through sheer demographic growth in a seemingly peaceful atmosphere, leading to all sorts of differences over voting patterns, accumulation of wealth and resources, ethnic hierarchies, divergent customs and religious practices, that become so pervasive that they come to threaten the way of life of the founding peoples, polarizing the nation into US versus Them.

The Leftist Interpretation of Schmitt is Wrong

But don’t Western liberals have enemies? Don’t they believe, at least many Republicans, that Islamic radicals, and nations openly opposed to “Western values,” are enemies of liberalism, against whom military violence may be used when necessary, even if Republicans negate the political in the sense that they want to bring about a situation in which humans define themselves as economic agents, or as moral crusaders dedicated to “democratic” causes? Don’t multicultural liberals believe that opponents of multiculturalism and mass immigration in Western countries are “deplorable” people who must be totally marginalized as enemies of humanity?

Academics on the left have indeed appropriated Schmitt to argue that right wing liberals have not negated the political but simply produced a highly effective smokescream over the West’s ambition to impose an American-led corporate order in the world nicely wrapped with human rights for everyone. They see Schmitt as someone who can teach us how to remove the smokescream of “democracy,” “human rights,” and “economic liberty” from Western hegemony, exposing the true power-seeking intentions behind the corporate liberal elites.

It seems to me that this appropriation of Schmitt is seriously flawed. Of course, Schmitt did not say that liberal nations as such are utterly devoid of any political existence, and of a concept of the political, since the very existence of a state supposes a sovereign right over a territory. A complete denial of the political would amount to a denial of the existence of one’s state. It is also true that for Schmitt “what has occurred [in liberal nations] is that economics has become political” in the enormous power that capitalist firms have, and in the way liberal states seek to augment, through non-economic means, their market share across the world. More than this, Schmitt emphasized how liberal states have “intensified” the enemy-friend distinction by ostracizing as enemies any state or political group disagreeing with their conception of humanity and conceptualizing liberal aggression against illiberal nations as final wars to end all wars.

There is no question, however, that Schmitt’s central thesis is that liberalism has no concept of the political and that it lacks a capacity to understand the friend-enemy distinction. Liberals believe that the “angelic” side of humans can manifest itself through proper liberal socialization, and that once individuals practice a politics of consensus-seeking and tolerance of differences, both inside their nations and in their relationships with other liberal nations, they will learn to avoid war and instead promote peaceful trade and cultural exchanges through commercial contracts, treaties, and diplomacy. Even though liberal states have not been able to “elude the political,” they have yet to develop theories of the political which apprehend this sphere of human life in terms of its defining aspect, the friend-enemy distinction. Rather, liberal theorists are inclined to think of the state as one pressure group among a plurality of political groups all of which lack a concept of the political in thinking that differences between groups can be handled through institutions that obtain consensus by means of neutral procedures and rational deliberation.

The negation of the political is necessarily implicit in the liberal notion that humans can be defined as individuals with natural rights. It is implicit in the liberal aspiration to create a world in which groups and nations interact through peaceful economic exchanges and consensual politics, and in which, accordingly, the enemy-friend distinction and the possibility of violence between groups is renounced. The negation of the political is implicit in the liberal notion of “humanity.” The goal of liberalism is to get rid of the political, to create societies in which humans see themselves as members of a human community dedicated to the pursuit of security, comfort and happiness. Therefore, we can argue with Schmitt that liberals have ceased to understand the political insomuch as liberal nations and liberal groups have renounced the friend-enemy distinction and the possibility of violence, under the assumption that human groups are not inherently dangerous to each other, but can be socialized gradually to become members of a friendly “humanity” which no longer values the honor of belonging to a group that affirms ethno-cultural existential differences. This is why Schmitt observes that liberal theorists lack a concept of the political, since the political presupposes a view of humans organized in groupings affirming themselves as “existentially different.”

Thus, using Schmitt, we can argue that while Western liberal states had strong ethnic markers before WWII/1960s, with immigration policies excluding ethnic groupings deemed to be an existential threat to their “national character,” they were nevertheless highly susceptible to the enactment of norms promoting the idea of civic identity, renouncing the notion that races are real, romanticizing Third World peoples as liberators, and believing that all liberal rights should be extended to all humans regardless of nationality, because they lacked a concept of the political. The racial or ethnocentric liberalism that prevailed in the West, collectivist as it remained in this respect, was encased within a liberal worldview according to which, to use the words of Schmitt, “trade and industry, technological perfection, freedom, and rationalization . . . are essentially peaceful [and . . .] must necessarily replace the age of wars.”

They believed that their European societies were associations of individuals enjoying the right to life and liberty. The experience of WWII led liberals to the conclusion that the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had finished feudal militarism, and which then led the Allies to fight a world war against the new militarism of fascism, were still “unfinished revolutions.” The liberal bourgeois nations were still not liberal enough, in their division and ranking of individuals along ethnic lines, with many individuals not enjoying the same rights that were “naturally” theirs. The project of the Enlightenment, “the universalist spirit of the political Enlightenment,” in the words of Jürgen Habermas, was not yet completed.

What Western liberals in the 1960s, the ones who dismantled immigration laws that discriminated against non-Whites, and introduce the notion that multiple cultures could co-exist within the same state, did not realize was that their sense of racial identity was the one collectivist norm still holding their liberal nations safely under the concept of the political. Once this last bastion of collectivism was deconstructed, liberal nations would be caught up within a spiral of radicalization wherein liberal nations would find it ever more difficult to decide which racial groups may constitute a threat to their national character, and which groups may be already lurking within their nations ready to play the political with open reigns, ready to promote their own ethnic interests; in fact, ready to play up the universal language of liberalism, against ethnocentric Europeans, so as to promote their own collectivist interests.

Source: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2016/10/carl-schmitt-liberal-nations-have-open-borders-because-they-have-no-concept-of-the-political.html

Is Darwin the Enemy?

                        By George Hocking

              

John G. West
Darwin Day In America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007

The concept of white nationalism didn’t exist one hundred years ago. There was no need. In 1910 it was unimaginable that an exploding non-white population could threaten white existence. Lothrop Stoddard’s early warning of such a danger didn’t come for another 12 years.[1]

By 1910 whites had created unquestioned standards of art, science, and technology and dominated most of the world. Expanding from Europe, they settled thinly-populated North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Siberia as well as vast open grasslands in southern South America and South Africa. In most of Latin America, then as now, they were at the apex of a racial caste hierarchy. In most of Africa and South and Southeast Asia they ruled directly as a thin cadre of administrators. China was then under their strong influence, and even the Middle East’s Ottoman rulers, despite Asian origins, were significantly Europeanized during a long sojourn in and near the Balkans. The only significant non-white power at the time was Japan, which Westerners often still viewed as a quaint and child-like slavish imitator of their ways despite its recent victory over Russia.

In this rapidly accelerating encounter with human biodiversity whites were intellectually handicapped by entrenched universalist religious and philosophical doctrines that for centuries Eurocentrically assumed human sameness, except for distinctions between rulers and ruled. Lay observers noted obvious differences between major races, and by the American Civil War of the 1860s tentative efforts to explain them had been made. These little influenced educated decision makers, however. Both sides in a war begun because of diverse approaches to human difference ultimately relied primarily on universalist documents like the Bible and Constitution to justify their policies.[2]

The Darwinian Revolution

Soon after the war, however, Charles Darwin’s work in England finally provided a full scientifically acceptable explanation for biological differences, including those among humans. He acknowledged different levels of human societies, wrote frequently of savages and lower races intermediate between animals and civilized people, implicitly accepted a hierarchy of humans, and wove acceptance of that into his conception of races.[3]

Darwin nevertheless did not fully dismiss the possibility that Lamarckian evolution, the belief environment can immediately improve heredity without natural selection, might work for humans. Only Darwinian biologist August Weissmann’s 1889 definitive demonstration of distinction between genotype and phenotype and thus heredity and environment finally disproved Lamarckianism.

The complementary impact of Darwin and Weissmann’s work on human biology was so great that by 1905 Paul Reinsch wrote in the American Journal of Sociology:

The last few years have witnessed a great change of mind in matters of humanitarianism. . . . The absolute unity of human life in all parts of the globe, as well as the idea of the practical equality of human individuals wherever they may be found, has been quite generally abandoned. . . . [To treat all peoples] as if they were all alike, to subject them to the same methods of government, to force them into the same institutions, was a mistake of the nineteenth century which has not been carried over into our own.[4]

Unfortunately Reinsch’s conclusion was premature.

By 1909 acceptance of such views in human biology was general but thin. At their peak between 1910 and 1915 they comprised no more than 5 percent of articles in professional social science journals.[5] They were also already under attack.

The Boasian Counter-Revolution

In the 1880s Franz Boas, a secular Jew, immigrated from the western edge of Germany to a United States where people were inordinately impressed by his accented English. Through gamesmanship and self-promotion more than scientific discovery, he had a stellar academic career, beginning as editor of Science, then and now the premier scientific journal in America, and eventually teaching at Columbia, its Manhattan publishing center’s leading university. There he acquired great power by developing a largely Jewish cult-like following. Parroting his theories brought reward and promotion, the slightest disagreement ruthless criticism and exclusion. Throughout his career he showed an obsession with racial and ethnic sameness apparently developed while still in Germany. There he identified with the Enlightenment’s radical universalism, which Napoleon had used to justify both emancipating Jews and the French conquest and subjection of Germans and other Europeans. The resultant culture war, marked by rising German patriotism that defined itself in opposition to all aspects of French hegemony, intellectual as well as political, generated a bitterness in Boas that probably influenced his American career.[6]

Boas and his followers steadily undermined the fragile edifice of Darwinian racial research by relentless nit picking and vast exaggeration of black accomplishment. His proposed program of eliminating races by encouraging their biological and cultural assimilation ultimately triumphed and remains American policy to this day, but its genocidal nature was recognized and effectively resisted by some non-whites. Boas’ recommendations, for example, supported removing Indian children from parents and tribes to boarding schools that punished them for speaking their languages and practicing their cultures.[7] Similar Australian policies created what are now called “stolen generations” of Aborigine children.[8] The strong group identities of affected tribes enabled them to eventually end such destructive policies, but since whites lack such identity, they must individually protect their children from public schools, where Boas’ policies are now universally established.[9]

By the middle of the twentieth century, Boas and his followers had achieved complete victory over Darwinian social science. This victory is attributable to social factors rather than better science or new information. Mulatto elites moving from the South to northern cities allied themselves with Jews, whose rapidly increasing political and financial power opposed British-descended traditional elites that had begun accepting Darwinism. The Great Depression simultaneously weakened confidence in the existing social order and popularized economic rather than biological explanations for inequalities. Finally, Germans began using Darwinism like the French had once used the Enlightenment, namely to justify an empire which treated even the fairest Europeans speaking non-Germanic languages as badly as, or even worse than, non-whites had been treated by European empire builders. Unsurprisingly, Darwinian social science failed to survive this perfect storm.[10]

Darwinism didn’t die in this period, however. It survived and flourished as never before, shielded by the “two cultures” barrier in academia separating humanities from hard science. The social sciences are not in the strict sense humanities, but their subject is humanity. In America and later elsewhere they developed a culture distinct from science in general and biology in particular because of the Boas cult. Just when Darwinism was being driven from social science, a “Modern Synthesis” resolving previously perceived incompatibilities between Darwinism and Mendelian genetics provided a new paradigm that created modern biology but also subjected it to the unwritten rule that all living things except people were to be explained genetically.[11]

These consequences of Boas’ influence were ultimately unsustainable, since Darwin’s great achievement was to demonstrate that people are part of nature, not separate from it. It still created an academic furor, however, when E. O. Wilson, one of the world’s greatest biologists, wrote the book Sociobiology[12] and broke the unwritten rule by simply stating we’re part of nature and subject to its laws. Path-breaking work on race[13] and ethnic history[14] eventually followed, and even the human genetic code itself was finally unraveled.[15]

West’s Religious Anti-Darwinism

Those seeking details of this intellectual history will find them in Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature and other books noted here, but not in John West’s Darwin Day in America, even though it purports to be about the same subject. Franz Boas isn’t mentioned once in 495 pages. West’s interest is elsewhere.

Most Christian denominations, including Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, have more or less come to accept that Darwinian natural selection is God’s means of creating the world’s living things.[16] Exceptions are those more attached to ancient Hebrew mythology than Creation itself. West’s organizational affiliations are with the latter,[17] but he lacks the intellectual honesty to admit it in Darwin Day. Instead he recapitulates Boas’ nit-picking methods by trying to link Darwin with as many causes unpopular with Left or Right as possible. He also tries to unlink him to a cause dear to his organizational sponsors.

In Darwin Day, West first introduces the concept of “scientific materialism.” In his first chapter, he tries to give it an intellectual history. In his second, he tries to demonstrate that Darwinism is scientific materialism. It’s soon evident, however, that West’s scientific materialism conflates three very different concepts.

The first, philosophical realism, is the view that a mind-independent reality exists, and that a statement is true if it corresponds to said reality. Its opposite, philosophical idealism, claims that reality and truth are individual or social constructions.[18] Unfortunately the view that race is socially constructed is very much alive and well in academia.[19] West is right. Darwin was a philosophical realist.

The second part of West’s scientific materialism is the view that man is not separate from nature. Its opposite is dualism, the view that man and nature are metaphysically different and even opposed to one another. Religious dualists like Augustine recommend that we escape from nature. [20] Secular dualists like Descartes recommend that we conquer and exploit it. The Enlightenment’s inordinate elevation of human reason brought a Romantic reaction and renewed appreciation of nature to Western Europe in the nineteenth century,[21] but Augustine’s pervasive influence was still evident in the American habit of naming its beautiful natural places for the Devil and Hell.[22] John Muir and others introduced the positive Romantic view of nature across the Atlantic only later in the century.[23] West is correct. Among Darwin’s achievements was giving the unity of man and nature a firm scientific foundation.[24]

The third aspect of West’s scientific materialism is reductionism, the view that wholes are merely sums of their parts and that living are things consequently just chemical machines. This view, associated with Hobbes and Descartes, is unfortunately also not unknown among scientists. Increasingly, however, they appreciate the importance of emergent properties unpredictable simply by summing up inputs.[25] The opposite of reductionism is holism,[26] and here West has it backwards. Darwin is among the first great holists.[27]

West’s concept of scientific materialism is so vast and diffuse that it can be used to attack anything he dislikes, which includes science in general and biology in particular. That set up takes 42 pages out of 495. The rest of his book is a vast factoid dump loosely organized by theme.

Crime and Punishment

Crime is the theme of chapters 3 through 5, with the first focusing on scientific efforts to explain it. He clearly hopes hereditarian explanations from the pre-Boas era will annoy the left and subsequent psychological and socioeconomic explanations will annoy the right. Even West can’t link the latter to Darwin, but he can call them scientific materialists. His prescription for crime is having criminals make better choices.

West’s next chapter departs completely from Darwin and even scientific materialism by delving into the legal history of diminished responsibility defenses like insanity. His concern again with the responsibility of criminals is out of touch with public desires for protection from them regardless of their state of mind.

The last chapter of West’s crime series is about punishment and from its beginning exemplifies his worldview’s distance from reality. Mary Letourneau, a white former teacher, internalized her school’s multiculturalist dogma and consequently had consensual sex with a large but legally underage Pacific Islander boy in her class, the kind of negative outcome occurring when races maturing at very different rates are placed together.[28] You learn none of this from West, however, who portrays Letourneau as a violent child-raping sexual predator deserving much more punitive sentencing than she got. Of course Letourneau’s culpability in race treason is no concern of either West or the criminal justice system. Later in the chapter West literally, not metaphorically, equates lobotomies with rehabilitation, which to the rest of the world means education and counseling for decreasing recidivism.[29] In West’s “through the looking glass” world, however, it’s all scientific materialism.

Wealth and Poverty

The theme of West’s next four chapters is “wealth and poverty,” but their subjects are diverse. Most of his book tries to link what he dislikes to Darwin, but chapter 6 is different. It attempts to separate him from laissez-faire capitalism, which West clearly likes, even though Darwin is often associated with Herbert Spencer, a contemporaneous defender of market economics whose ideas regarding survival of the fittest somewhat anticipated Darwinism.[30] The tradition of likening evolution to capitalism[31] may embarrass West, since a laissez-faire think tank, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishes his book and his employer, the Discovery Institute, is in the same conservative institutional galaxy.[32] ISI does publish a few books critical of markets,[33] but most reflect its Jewish founder Frank Chodorov’s[34] reductionist view of humans as automatons motivated solely by greed and fear.[35] West’s effort to distance evolution from capitalism is simplistic and unconvincing, but Darwin’s holistic view of nature and humanity may ultimately be the best antidote to the reductionist tendencies pervading economic theory from Marx to Chodorov.[36]

Eugenics

In chapter 7, West’s grand overture to the left, he rightly links Darwinism’s popularity in the early twentieth century with its contemporary dramatic rise in white racial consciousness and belief in the potential for eugenic improvement.[37] One hundred years later, however, eugenics seems a quaintly utopian vision, as self-improvement is an unaffordable luxury for a race facing imminent extinction.[38]

Psychology

West moves to psychology and its uses for engineering human behavior in chapter 8, but its main villain, despite his thesis, is the notoriously anti-Darwinian John Watson. American psychology’s founder William James was a strong Darwinist who emphasized the important influence of heredity on human behavior, but in Boas’ wake, psychological paradigms shifted to Watson’s reductionist behaviorism, which considered people to be blank slates with no innate character and susceptible to infinite manipulation.[39] West understandably doesn’t mention that behaviorist hegemony only ended, despite bitter resistance, when experimentalists like Harlow[40] as well as Darwinian sociobiologists rediscovered the innate.

Modern Architecture

Agreeing with West’s critique of modern architecture in chapter 9 is easy, but his animus is again misplaced. As in psychology, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ascendancy of Darwinism brought renewed appreciation of nature and the desire to include it in architecture, resulting in works of lasting value by innovators like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Widespread hyper-Enlightenment leftist ideology, however, inspired an International Stylewhose sterile buildings were intentionally cut off from place, race, and nature.[41] It’s a sad story with still no happy ending, as new iterations of International Style horrors continue to blight the landscape.[42]

Religion and Science

The first two in the next group of four chapters are among West’s longest and the crux of his argument. Chapter 10 claims science is anti-religious, but its evidence is just a long series of out of context quotes. Since science is a vast enterprise and does not require any religious beliefs, it understandably includes some militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. But many other scientists, including some of the greatest, are strongly religious and view science as a way of understanding God through his creations.[43] Close reading of the chapter’s quotes indicates that many are attempts to defend science from the very sort of ad hominem attacks West makes in Darwin Day.

In chapter 11, West’s long defense of Intelligent Design, it is evident he would rather be defending the Hebraic creation story but for some reason can’t. That reason, which he never reveals, is Edwards v. Aguillard, the 1987 Supreme Court decision that teaching Hebraic creation in public schools violates the separation of church and state. Intelligent Design attempts to circumvent the decision by remaining coy about its ultimate religious commitments.[44]

Imagine that an indigenous religion like Asatru was established in Europe at the end of the Roman Empire rather than one from the Middle East. Modern civilization still developed, and most Asatru priests eventually accepted electrons as better explanations for electricity than blows of Thor’s hammer. Still, a few fundamentalist holdouts claimed wires actually carry little Thor’s hammers, until courts ruled this violated church/state separation. Their solution was to claim that there are still little hammers in the wires, they just aren’t necessarily Thor’s hammers.

This is essentially the position of Intelligent Design believers like West. There is no Intelligent Design science. It is only a vehicle for attacking real science,[45] exemplified by West’s proposal for basing scientific decisions on lay public votes. Science is not democratic. Like its medical branches, it’s a craft with a long apprenticeship. Democracy has its place, but it’s not the operating room or laboratory. Since Intelligent Design can only nit-pick the work of Darwin, a scientific genius of the rank of Newton and Galileo, it is treated accordingly. Ironically, contrary to West, Darwinian natural selection is not just random but an amazingly efficient way of creating diverse organisms perfectly adapted to a diverse world,[46] which Intelligent Design claims to explain but doesn’t.

Sex and Reproduction

West’s hostility to science may make his claim in chapter 12 that Alfred Kinsey practiced “junk science” questionable, but this time he’s on firmer ground. Failure to replicate Kinsey’s findings might result from social change, but the destructive effects on society of his policy recommendations are plain. His messages that sex is more for pleasure than reproduction and that traditional morality is outmoded[47] ultimately contributed to a sexual revolution coinciding with a drastic fall in births among his predominantly white readers and their children,[48] an outcome desired by the Rockefeller Foundation funding his work.[49] West’s alternative preference for traditional morality is unintentionally quite Darwinian, since moral standards that survived were those helping their practitioners adequately reproduce. It’s ironic that many evangelical Christians attacking Darwin live more Darwinian lifestyles than their supposedly more enlightened academic cousins.

A program attacking the pesky screwworm (Cochliomyia hominovorax) illustrates the sexual pleasure principle’s potentially baleful effect. Just when ex-entomologist Kinsey was harming humans by mainstreaming his sexual theories, entomologist E. F. Knipling successfully used a Darwinian technique to eradicate screwworms because they were harming humans. He released enough sexually active but sterile males to monopolize fertile females so they had lots of sex but not enough baby screwworms for the species to survive.[50]

West finishes the section with a chapter about how American sex education mainstreamed Kinsey’s theories but fails to mention Boas’ student Margaret Mead’s contribution to the sexual revolution through her erroneous claim that cultures are sexually promiscuous in their natural state.[51]

He then detours into a brief two-chapter section on abortion, stem cells, and euthanasia before concluding. His claim here that life begins with zygotes is biologically accurate, but if they are aborted it makes a huge difference to white survival whether they result from sexually precocious blacks forcing themselves on white teen girls or white couples too busy with careers to bother reproducing. Those circumstances don’t matter to West, of course. Anything on the human side of the line, whether rape-produced zygotes, stem cells, or babies born without brains, must be saved at all costs.

He is furious at Peter Singer, though, for valuing apes with small brains more than humans with none and consequently wanting to push civil rights protections for individuals across the human-animal divide. From the perspective of conservation biology and racial survival, however, group welfare counts more than that of individuals, so West and Singer are both wrong.[52] Unsurprisingly, West, who would save every human cell at all costs (but avoids discussion of the death penalty), would only save species if the bottom line pencils out (p. 361).

West concludes by describing how Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1887 utopian fantasy of a better future, has failed to come true. He blames this on science in general and Darwin in particular. But Bellamy wrote during the first flush of Darwin’s acceptance, when white civilization was unchallenged, and it was easy to believe things would keep getting better. Franz Boas was among those working to end Bellamy’s dream, but he had lots of help, as explained by Carl Degler[53] and then by Kevin MacDonald[54] in far more detail. If West told that story, however, he’d have an enemy that, unlike science and Darwin, would put his institutional job at risk.

West and Boas have much in common in their nit-picking attacks on Darwinism and their claim that all people are the same (p. 365). Neither is good for white survival. Darwin once provided an alternative. He can do so again.

Notes

[1] Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1922).

[2] George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[3] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[4] Degler, 25.

[5] Degler, 17.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998); George Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, an Introduction(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961).

[7] Degler, 77–78; James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1999).

[8] Graeme Davison, John Hurst, and Stuart MacIntyre, The Oxford Companion to Australian History, revised ed. (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[9] Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education, the Epochal Supreme Court Decision that Outlawed Segregation, and of Black America’s Century-Long Struggle for Equality under the Law (New York: Vintage, 1977); Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

[10] Degler, ch. 8; Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: Free Press, 1994); William Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

[11] Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Degler, ch. 9; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

[12] E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

[13] J. Phillipe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1995).

[14] Kevin MacDonald, A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994).

[15] Kevin Davies, Cracking the Code: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA (New York: Free Press, 2001).

[16] David Livingstone, “Evolution and Religion,” in Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, eds., Evolution: The First Four Billion Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

[17] Eugenie Scott, “American Antievolutionism: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Ruse and Travis, 370–99.

[18] Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 386–88, 746–48.

[19] Ruse and Travis, 821–24.

[20] Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Vintage, 2005); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2003). Eastern Christianity is friendlier to nature since it is free of Augustine’s influence.

[21] Honderich, 778.

[22] George Stewart, Names on the Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

[23] Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[24] Degler, 7–11.

[25] John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading, Mass.: Helix, 1998).

[26] Honderich, 371–72, 750–51.

[27] Bowler, 321; Mayr, 66–67.

[28] Rushton, ch. 7.

[29] Franklin Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

[30] Ruse and Travis, 866–69.

[31] Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).

[32] Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey Nelson, eds., American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006).

[33] F. Roger Devlin, “The Family Way” (review of Third Ways by Allan Carlson), The Occidental Quarterly 8, no. 3 (2008): 99–108.

[34] Frohnen et al., 145–46, 436–39.

[35] Frank Chodorov, “Old and Right” (excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Society), The American Conservative vol. 8, no. 6 (2009), 22.

[36] Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back into Economics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

[37] Degler, ch. 2.

[38] George McDaniel, ed., A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century (Oakton, Va.: New Century Foundation, 2003).

[39] Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005).

[40] Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

[41] Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981).

[42] James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

[43] Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006); E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

[44] Scott, “American Antievolutionism,” 374–76.

[45] Scott, “American Antievolutionism,” 375–85.

[46] Mayr, 519–20.

[47] James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

[48] David Allyn, Make Love, not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000).

[49] John Harr and Peter Johnson, The Rockefeller Conscience: An American Family in Public and in Private (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1991).

[50] Jorge Hendrichs and Alan Robinson, “Sterile Insect Technique,” in Vincent Resh and Ring Carde, eds., Encyclopedia of Insects (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2003), 1074–79.

[51] Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984) and Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel, Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People(Lafayette, La: Lochinvar-Huntington House, 1990).

[52] Bryan Norton, Why Preserve Natural Variety?(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Sam G. Dickson, “‘Salus populi, lex suprema,’” The Occidental Quarterly 8, no. 3 (2008): 3–10.

[53] Degler, 200–202.

[54] MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, ch. 2.

Source: The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2010)

There's Nothing Wrong With Racism (Except the Name)

                     By Geoffrey Sampson

Franz von Stuck, "Sisyphus," 1920

‘Racism’ is certainly a horrible word. Words ending in -ism are normally formed from adjective roots: nationalism, specialism, communism. The correct word is ‘racialism,’ and this was the usual term until the shorter word came in quite recently, at a time when standards of education had decayed sufficiently for people to have lost touch with the patterns of English vocabulary.

But objecting to ‘racism’ as an emotion, rather than objecting to the word, is just silly. It is as silly as objecting to people’s sexual feelings, and for similar reasons.

In Victorian times, it is often said that piano legs used to be draped, for fear that the sight of naked legs, even wooden ones, might inflame men’s lusts. In time to come, the current hysteria over ‘racism’ will seem as ridiculous to us or to our descendants as horror of naked legs seems now. True, the draped piano leg story is actually an exaggerated myth — the Victorians never took fear of sex that far. But even fifty years ago, like many Englishmen of my social class at the time, I was brought up to think of the desire to get involved with women’s bodies as something utterly disgraceful and never to be admitted, even to oneself.

Once adult, though, I came to appreciate, intellectually at least, that this attitude makes no sense. The process of biological evolution ensures that organisms must normally have the patterns of behavior which lead to their genes being replicated in many copies. For a man, the most direct way to replicate his genes involves getting mixed up with a woman’s body, so biology ensures that he will want to do that. It is silly to be ashamed of feelings which are biologically so inevitable.

But evolution doesn’t care about the physical location of the genes which are replicated. The logic of the process means that organisms will have whatever reactions lead to greater numbers of the identical DNA sequences coming into existence in the world. Copying them directly through sexual activity is only one way to achieve that.

Normal people strive to advance their children’s interests, bringing them up as well as they know how, often spending large sums on their education, leaving their property after death to their own children rather than to someone else’s, and so on. Everyone recognizes this tendency to favor one’s own children over other people’s as natural, and it makes sense in evolutionary terms. One’s offspring share a relatively high proportion of one’s own genes. By advancing their interests one increases their chances of replicating their genes, and hence indirectly of replicating one’s own. Leaving your money to your children is nothing to do with taking direct copies of the DNA sequences within your own body. But, if having funds makes it easier to found a family and bring them up to adulthood (which has surely been so for most of mankind’s history, and in many parts of the world still is so), then it does mean that more copies of those sequences are likely to exist in future.

Co-operating in daily life with fellow members of a social community helps them to flourish, and hence increases the chances of copies of their genes multiplying. So, naturally, we are disposed to co-operate actively with communities of people who appear to be genetically similar to ourselves. If we can tell by looking at some people that they share fewer of our genes, we will be at least somewhat less enthusiastic about active co-operation with them; we will to some extent see them as unwelcome competitors for resources. In a word, we are racialists.

People sometimes point out, correctly, that the proportion of mankind’s entire genetic code which differs between the different races of Man is tiny, as if that destroys the logic of the argument. But biology plays the percentages. If people’s appearance implies that they share fewer of our genes, that is enough for them to be disfavored — even if they do share a lot. After all, even distant species — say horses, or even worms — apparently have a surprisingly high proportion of their DNA sequences in common with Homo sapiens; but very few people query the tendency to favor fellow human beings over other animals, when their interests clash. Another confusion within much discussion of racialism is that people suppose that racial feelings spring from mistaken beliefs that other races differ from one’s own in terms of concrete features or behavior patterns which are really the same across the species. A hundred years ago, there used to be absurd ideas, for instance about Black people not feeling pain, or suchlike. People often criticize racial attitudes now by saying things like ‘In all the important respects, people of all races are alike: so it is foolish and ignorant to prefer one’s own race to others.’

Well, in the first place, even if all races certainly do feel pain, it isn’t quite true that no socially significant biological differences exist. The case widely discussed is intelligence (IQ). There is overwhelming scientific evidence that races differ to some extent in their average intelligence levels — yellow-skinned Orientals tend to be rather brighter than Whites, Negroes tend to be rather less bright (though this is a statistical pattern only — plenty of individual Blacks are more intelligent than plenty of individual Orientals). There was a storm of controversy in 1994 when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray discussed this in their book The Bell Curve, but the findings were already long-established by then. The suggestion that these differences could merely be statistical errors created by factors such as cultural bias in IQ tests was analysed and refuted in detail by Peter Urbach in 1974 (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 25, pp. 99–135 and 235–59). For Urbach, the attempts to ‘explain away’ the IQ findings were like the doomed attempts by the 17th-century Catholic Church to explain away the evidence that the Earth goes round the Sun, by postulating ever more cumbersome special assumptions.

But this really misses the point. We don’t prefer people who share more of our genes over people who share fewer because the latter have particular outward features that we dislike. We prefer the former because they share more of our genes, and we all want our own genes to become numerous. Biology forces us to want that, which is why it forces us to want to get our bodies entangled with the opposite sex. If some politically-correct person announces ‘I have no racial feelings at all, myself,’ the appropriate response is ‘Oh, so does that mean you are asexual, too?’ That might wipe the sanctimonious smirk off his or her face.

All this does not, obviously, mean that it is all right to act oppressively to members of other races — any more than it is all right for a man to have his way with any woman who takes his fancy. Racial and sexual feelings are natural and healthy, but there have to be social mechanisms controlling how they are manifested in terms of concrete behavior.

Until very recently, we used in Europe to have an excellent mechanism: the nation state. When I was a child, England and other European nations were racially very homogeneous. Except for a small Jewish community (who don’t look much different from the indigenous English anyway), virtually everyone living in England was related to everyone else — I don’t know the maths, but two inhabitants of England chosen at random in 1950 must on average have had numerous common ancestors only a few centuries earlier. Interaction with members of distant races was mainly a matter of international trade, where it doesn’t matter what individuals’ attitudes to one another are because they are swapping goods anonymously to achieve mutual advantage.

Over the last half century, the situation has been transformed through massive immigration flows, so that now England is less like an extended family, more like a hotel. It is now very easy to find pairs of English residents who share no common ancestors for tens of thousands of years past, perhaps longer — and who know this as soon as they see each other. Our governors, by permitting large-scale immigration, have destroyed the mechanism which previously guarded against adverse consequences of natural racial feelings. But, while destroying one mechanism, with mulish stupidity they have refused to recognize the problem which that mechanism solved. No British government in my lifetime has ever said ‘We are going to change the racial make-up of the population, and here is how we are going to solve the resulting problem of racial animosities . . .’ Instead, they have introduced a series of laws and social policies whose intention seems to be to root out natural racial feelings from people’s minds.

That is like someone being given charge of a well-organized armory, where gunpowder, and metal tools that could make sparks, are stored in separate rooms, naked lights are held behind sealed glass partitions, and so forth, and saying ‘We’ll sweep away all these artificial barriers to efficient working’ — and then, when people say that will be dangerous, announcing that the tools will be given stiff lectures about the immorality of striking sparks. You simply cannot change basic biological nature by law. Of course, racial diversification is only one of the issues created by large-scale immigration. Also very significant is cultural diversification: people from distant lands bring alien assumptions, attitudes, and ways of life which are in no sense biologically innate, but result simply from distant societies having happened to develop independent and very different cultures.

In turn-of-the-millennium Britain, one hears voices advocating ‘multi-culturalism,’ meaning that all cultures should be regarded as equally worthy. In one particular respect — variety of cuisine — most of us would agree that immigration has brought a real benefit to this country. But, as an Italian has said, ‘Multi-culturalism is not couscous, it is the stoning of adulterers’ (quoted by Theodore Dalrymple, Spectator 27 Oct 2001). The fact that Britain is so attractive to migrants that they are risking death night after night trying to get in by clinging to trains heading through the Channel Tunnel is an outcome of the particular cultural assumptions which have guided the development of British life down recent centuries. If ‘multi-culturalism’ implies no longer accepting those assumptions, it is just wicked madness. Cultures can be adapted, and it is obvious that anyone who wishes to enjoy the benefits of living in Britain ought to accept a corresponding duty to adapt to British culture.

Race isn’t like that. People cannot change their racial make-up. In that sense, it is understandable and in a way admirable that many people urge the elimination of racial feelings. One can sympathize with someone who says ‘Wouldn’t it be better if people saw mankind as just one human race without distinctions?’

Perhaps that would be better. But it is like asking ‘Wouldn’t it be better if water flowed uphill as well as down?’ Possibly it would, but there is not much point discussing it. It isn’t going to happen.

If I am told I am a ‘racist’, I don’t splutter indignant denials. I borrow the response of Hove residents asked if they live in Brighton, and just say ‘Racialist, actually.’

Source: http://library.flawlesslogic.com/racism_3.htm

Why Race is Not a "Social Construct"

                         By Greg Johnson

       

Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a skull, between 1510 and 1511

Race realism is one of the intellectual foundations of White Nationalism. Race realism is the thesis that racial differences are objective facts of nature, which pre-exist human consciousness, human society, and even the human race itself—since there were different species and subspecies before mankind emerged.

Nature must be understood in contrast to conventions—like human languages and laws—which do not exist independent of human consciousness and society.

As objective facts of nature, racial differences cannot be safely ignored. Nor can natural racial differences be transformed simply by altering legal or linguistic conventions. Conventions can only alter racial realities by guiding human action to change nature itself. For instance, if we institute eugenic or dysgenic incentives, this will change the genes of future generations.

The opposite of race realism is the idea of the “social construction of race,” which holds that racial differences are not objective facts but rather shared social conventions, which may vary from time to time and from place to place, like languages and table manners.

The social construction of race is one of the intellectual foundations of racial egalitarianism, for if race is socially constructed, then so is racial inequality. This offers the possibility that racial inequality can be replaced with equality simply by altering social conventions, like laws and language.

The Basis of Race Realism

Negro from a painting attributed to Annibale Carracci, ca. 1580s

The basis of race realism is sense experience. Different races appear different from one another. Different subraces appear different from one another. Racially mixed children appear different from pure specimens. Even races that appear superficially similar—like Australian aborigines and African blacks—appear to be different on closer inspection. Careful observers do not confuse the two. Racial differences are not just a matter of “skin color,” but of morphology and behavior as well, all of which can be observed empirically.[1]

Note that I do not claim that racial realism is based in science. People were aware of racial differences long before the emergence of science. Science comes along only later, to explain observable racial differences. Scientific theories are, moreover, verified or falsified based on their ability to explain observed racial differences. Observable racial differences are, therefore, the Alpha and the Omega of racial science. Thus the foundation of race realism is sense experience, not scientific theorizing.

This is important to understand, because it implies that problems with theories of race do not in any way alter the perceptible differences between races.

It is also important to understand that race realism is the default, common-sense position of all mankind. We observe differences between races, subraces, and hybrids—human and otherwise—before we learn words to communicate and classify them, and before we create theories to explain them.

I vividly remember my first experience of a non-white: a waiter in the dining car of a train. I was 4 or 5 years old. I was especially taken by the contrast in color between the back and the front of the man’s hands. When he went away, I asked my mother what I had seen, and she told me that he was not just a white man turned brown, but a different kind of man called a “Negro.” But I already saw the differences before I was told the name and explanation. Indeed, I asked for an explanation because I saw the differences. My mother and I certainly did not construct the differences that were apparent to all.

Given that race realism is the default, common-sense position, proponents of social constructivism need to offer arguments for their claim. In this essay, I criticize four arguments for the social construction of race, which I characterize as follows: (1) the argument from the social construction of knowledge in general; (2) the argument from changing racial classifications; (3) the argument from continua; and (4) the argument from the silence of science. This is not an exhaustive list, nor is this a “scholarly” survey and critique.[2] I chose these arguments simply because they are commonly used in middle-brow online debates. I conclude by treating the thesis of the social construction of race as a social construct itself, exposing the political agenda and power relations behind social constructivism.

1. The Social Construction of Knowledge in General

Wild Men and Wild Pigs, illustration from, Le Livre et le vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre, France 1420

One argument for the social construction of race is a simple deduction from the general thesis that “All knowledge is socially constructed.” This is a philosophical thesis about the relationship between mind and reality, which holds that there is no single correct account of any aspect of reality, but rather a plurality of equally valid accounts which are relative to the contingent circumstances of different communities. For instance, there is the scientific account of the origin of the species, and there is the Biblical account, both of which are products of different communities, and there is no neutral standpoint or criterion that allows us to claim that one approach is better or truer than another.

I believe that this sort of relativism is philosophically incoherent in itself.[3] But it also fails as a justification of the social construction of race because, in a sense, it proves too much. For if everything is a social construct, the concept loses all utility. Social construction only makes sense if there is a contrast term, namely objective natural facts.

But if everything is a social construct, then we have to ask: is the social construct race more like the social construct money or the social construct gravity? Because it is in society’s power to change money, but it is not in our power to change gravity. A philosopher who defends the idea that gravity is a social construct still leaves the lecture hall by the door rather than the window because he knows that one ignores some social constructs at one’s own risk.

The social constructivist clearly wants race to be like money rather than gravity, but if everything is a social construct, he needs to offer an additional argument to prove that racial inequalities can be abolished by social fiat.

2. Changing Racial Classifications

One of the most common arguments for the social construction of race is along the following lines: (1) If racial differences are real, then racial classification schemes will not vary from time to time and place to place. (2) Racial classification schemes vary from time to time and place to place. For instance, the same mixed race individual might be considered black or white in different places and at different times.[4] Therefore, racial differences are not real. And, since racial differences are either real or social constructs, they must be social constructs.

This argument has two main problems.

The first premise is simply false because it elides the distinction between reality and opinion. Racial differences can be perfectly real, but people’s opinions about racial differences can vary widely. Since human beings are fallible, there can be many opinions about one and the same fact. But that does not make the facts any less objective. It just proves that people frequently fail to be as objective as the facts.

The oft-cited example of varying standards of blackness proves nothing about racial realities. First, the very idea of categorizing mixed-race individuals as black or white is problematic, simply because they are mixed. Given that they are neither black nor white, it is not surprising that people make different decisions if they have to classify them as one or the other. Thus it may be arbitrary social convention to say that Barack Obama is a black man. But it is an objective fact of nature that he had a white mother and a black father and is therefore half white and half black.

3. Cutting the Continuum

Another common argument for the social construction of race, and of knowledge in general, depends on the distinction between differences of degree and differences of kind, and runs as follows. (1) If racial differences are real differences of kind, then there should not be a continuum of intermediate types. (2) There are continuua of intermediate types between races. Therefore, there is only one human race, and distinctions between races are not found in nature but constructed by human beings. We carve up the continuum. Nature does not come separated into different kinds.[5]

There are two major problems with this argument.

The first premise strikes me as highly dubious: just because there are continua in nature does not mean that there are no real distinctions between parts of a given continuum. In terms of color, red may shade off into orange, and different cultures might have different words for colors and make finer or grosser distinctions between them. But does this mean that there are no real, observable differences between, say, red and blue?

Evolutionary theory posits the common origin and evolutionary continuity of all life on earth. Does that continuity mean, therefore, that there are no real differences between mammals and birds, or birds and reptiles, or nematodes and human beings? Is the difference between dinosaurs and humans merely a “social construct”? Did dinosaurs not exist before human beings were around to “socially construct” them?

If race is a social construct, is the human race as a whole a “social construct” too? What then is society? What is society made up of before the social construction of the human race? Is society also a social construct, which would seem to get us into an infinite regress (society is a social construct of a social construct of a social construct . . .)? Or is society not a social construct? Is it just a fact of nature? Is it just here? Then why can’t other things be facts of nature, like human beings and dinosaurs?

The second premise is also problematic. Anthropologists claim that all human races descend from common ancestors. But at different points in time, the five distinct human races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Congoid, Capoid, and Australoid—branched off and differentiated themselves from both their common ancestors and one another. After developing in isolation for enough time to attain distinctive traits, these races then came into contact with one another and gave rise to mixed populations.[6] But the existence of racially mixed individuals no more overthrows the real distinction between races than the existence of green paint refutes the existence of blue and yellow paint.[7]

4. The Silence of Science

Another common claim of the social constructivists is to claim that science does not give adequate support to the idea of real racial distinctions, thus social constructivism is true. The argument runs as follows. (1) If there are real racial differences, then science will explain them. (2) Science has not explained racial differences. Therefore, there are no real racial differences. Since racial differences are either real or socially constructed, race is a social construct.

This argument has four grave problems.

First, race realism is based on observed racial differences, not on scientific theories of race. Human beings perceived racial differences long before the emergence of science, and we perceive them still, even those of us who are entirely innocent of racial science (as most social constructivists happen to be). Thus the first premise is simply false: the reality of race does not depend on the success or failure of scientific theories of race. Theories may rise and fall, but observable differences remain.

As for the second premise: scientists would beg to differ.[8] We can determine the race of an individual from the morpoholgical or genetic analysis of a single bone or strand of hair.

Of course, the social constructivists are not exactly clear about what constitutes the failure of science to explain race, but they generally insinuate that science has either (1) failed to come up with a single differentiating trait possessed by all members of a race and not possessed by other races,[9] or (2) that no such theory has attained universal acceptance.

But the demand for a single essential differentiating trait for each race is arbitrary. Nature does not have to conform to our demands. And the fact that a theory does not attain universal acceptance has nothing to do with its truth, given the variability and fallibility of human opinions. Frankly, I believe that most social constructivists are intellectually dishonest. Thus no theory of objective racial differences will ever gain universal assent, no matter how well founded it may be.

Another problem with this argument is that it overlooks the fact that science is a process that unfolds over time. Thus even if the second premise were true, the conclusion does not follow, simply because science might not have come up with the correct account just yet. But wait.

A final problem with this argument is its assumption that in the absence of a scientific explanation of race, the only alternative is social constructivism. In fact, the default position is race realism based on empirical observation, which does not depend upon scientific explanation at all.

Social Constructivism as Social Construct

Social constructivists typically do not limit their thesis to race. Many claim that all knowledge is a social construct, or even that reality itself is a social construct. Thus it is fair to ask: is social constructivism itself a social construct? If social constructivism is a social construct, this has three important implications:

1. Like all social constructs, social constructivism is the product of a unique set of historically contingent circumstances.

2. Since every society is divided into the rulers and the ruled, every social construct will be marked by the agenda of those who hold power.

3. If social constructivism is a social construct, not a natural fact, its acceptance or rejection is not based on reason and nature but on social incentives: moral and political commitment for the true believers — brainwashing, greed, and fear for the rest.

Social constructivism has a long philosophical pedigree, but today it functions as the metaphysical postulate of egalitarian social engineering projects to equalize the races by revolutionizing European defined and dominated societies. Of course, this revolution cannot produce racial equality, but it can create a new racial hierarchy in which Europeans are subordinate. Social constructivism thus serves the interests of a new emerging social elite, an alliance of rootless plutocrats, non-whites, sexual minorities, and other outsiders, in which the organized Jewish community is the senior and guiding partner. Thus social constructivism is an element of what Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique”: the critique and overthrow of European civilization by Jewish-inspired and dominated intellectual movements like Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, feminism, deconstructionism, and most forms of postmodernism.[10]

These movements are characterized by pseudo-science, obscurantism, and crass ethno-political advocacy. They acquired their influence not through reason and science but through the subversion of the educational, cultural, and political institutions of European societies. They perpetuate their influence though the indoctrination of the impressionable and the suppression of dissent.

Thus social constructivism cannot be defeated merely by criticizing its astonishingly poor arguments, which in large part are merely tools of self-conscious and cynical deception. If you lop off one argument, the hydra just sprouts another.

Instead, social constructivism must be defeated on its own terms: by altering the social conditions that give rise to it; by changing who rules this society; by disempowering and silencing its advocates just as they disempower and silence their critics. In short, social constructivism must be socially deconstructed and replaced by a new cultural and political hegemony that is aligned with reason, reality, and white interests. And we can do that in good conscience, because social constructivism is a false and pernicious ideology, nothing more.

Race realism is the default position of common sense. It is, moreover, supported by the best biological science. There is no good case for the social construction of race. It would be truer to say that society is a racial construct, meaning that society is the creation of human beings, who exist as part of nature and whose biological traits shape and constrain society and culture. But once society is established, social conventions shape the underlying race by instituting eugenic and dysgenic breeding incentives or simply by legislating the extermination of entire groups. Nature comes before culture, but once culture exists, it turns back on and modifies nature.[11] Only in this specific sense can one say that race is a (partial) social “construct,” although it would be better to drop the misleading language of construction altogether.

Notes

1. An excellent basic textbook on race distinguished in terms of observable, morphological features which remains valid to this day is Carleton S. Coon, The Living Races of Man(New York: Random House, 1965). The book is particularly valuable for its many photographs illustrating typical racial, subracial, and hybrid types.

2. For a more comprehensive survey of the case for race realism and against social constructivism, see Richard McCulloch, “Race: Reality and Denial,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 4 (Winter 2002–2003): 5–26, http://toqonline.com/archives/v2n4/TOQv2n4McCulloch.pdf

3. See Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).

4. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct,’” The Atlantic, May 15, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/

5. An underlying assumption of this argument is that to truly know objective reality, the mind must be passive and reality must simply inscribe itself upon it. Thus if the mind is in any way active in the process of gaining knowledge, we no longer know objective reality but only human constructs. Ayn Rand offers a reductio ad absurdum of this argument, although she mistakenly applies it to Kant: “[Kant’s] argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them” (Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” in For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 33.

6. For an accessible account of racial evolution that remains valid today, see Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1962). See also Coon’s The Living Races of Man.

7. John R. Baker makes this point in his Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 100.

8. For a simple and compelling summary of the science of race, see J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd special abridged edition (Port Huron, Michigan: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000).

9. See Joseph L. Graves, Jr., “The Biological Case against Race,” American Outlook, Spring 2002, p. 31.

10. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).

11. For a recent and compelling account of genetic and cultural co-evolution, see Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

Evolution, Eugenics, & God's Will

                       By Marian Van Court

       

This famous scene from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has recently been interpreted in a startling new way. After it was cleaned and restored, the original details were revealed. The vehicle in which God is traveling, along with God himself, all the angels, the sashes, etc., conform remarkably well to the structures of a human brain (turned sideways, facing Adam). 

It’s long been known that Michelangelo performed dissections so that he could fully understand the human body. Instead of the old interpretation of God giving life to Adam, it seems clear that Michelangelo’s intention was to portray God giving the highest form of intellect to Adam, a uniquely human gift which is the product of the human brain (Meshberger, 1990).

This illustration is helpful, but unfortunately the brain is reversed.

This painting provides a wonderful artistic illustration for the subject of this paper. If one understands the large genetic component to our very souls — not only our intelligence, but our honesty, our kindness, our courage, our creativity, and our unique personalities — then one can immediately grasp the potential of eugenics for evolving ourselves into better people, more fully in the image of God. Francis Galton envisioned eugenics as a large-scale humanitarian endeavor, firmly grounded in science, which also contained the seed of a new religion:

The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor to further evolution, especially that of the human race. Those who enjoy a sense of communion with God can dwell on the undoubted fact that there exists a solidarity between themselves and what surrounds them, through the endless reaction of physical laws among which the hereditary influences are to be included. They know that they are descended from an endless past, that they have a brotherhood with all that is, and have each his own share of responsibility in parentage of an endless future (Blacker, 1952).

Evolution is the Crown Jewel of Creation

Evolution by natural selection fashioned creatures with conscious awareness from one-celled animals over vast expanses of time. The consciousness of human beings has evolved to such a degree that we are able to love one another, to experience joy at the beauty of nature, to create, to explore, to struggle to comprehend the nature of God, and even to manifest glimmerings of divinity ourselves. If Creation can be said to have anything resembling a purpose or destiny in a spiritual sense, the evolution of conscious beings has got to be at the very heart of it. For this reason, evolution by natural selection can legitimately be regarded as the “crown jewel” of Creation.

And isn’t “the crown jewel of Creation” a far cry from how Darwin’s theory was first greeted by the public in the late 1800s?! Christianity’s vehement rejection of the theory of evolution was understandable since it contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible. Although it was a painful process, fraught with bitterness, in the long run this conflict was healthy. Now we think of the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory, and a lovely one at that. We have sufficient understanding to welcome Darwin’s message because we recognize evolution as a vitally important key to life, to our consciousness, and ultimately to God.

All major religions say, in one way or another, that we are created in God’s image. In Genesis it is written, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” An Indian proverb (East Indian) elegantly expresses a similar notion:

Divinity sleeps in stones,
breathes in plants,
dreams in animals,
and awakens in human beings.

Consider the fact that we were created in God’s image through the process of evolution — this can hardly be an insignificant fact. The creation story in the Bible may be lovely, but isn’t the way we actually evolved into ourselves more awesome and more overwhelmingly beautiful than God merely dictating by fiat the existence of the first man and woman? Science has established conclusively that evolution is true, and this is not in doubt. But perhaps evolution could also be said to surpass the story of the Garden of Eden as being more probably true purely on aesthetic grounds (just as in physics sometimes the more beautiful of two theories is given more credence).

Dysgenics: A Cosmic Sacrilege?

The process of evolution quite naturally evokes our deepest fascination and respect, but it is the product of evolution, our consciousness itself, which is precious — one might even say “divine.” Yet the shocking fact is that today, our evolution has shifted into reverse, and our precious consciousness — acquired at such an enormous cost in suffering and death, over so many millennia — is now deteriorating. Scientific studies have shown that we, as a species, are currently evolving to become less intelligent, more violent, less healthy, and more mentally disturbed (Van Court and Bean, 1985, Lynn and Van Court, 1996; Lynn 1995; Lynn, 1996; Comings, 1996). The word for this is “dysgenics,” which is the opposite of “eugenics.” Dysgenics means human genetic deterioration. It’s difficult to imagine worse news. If evolution by natural selection is the crown jewel of Creation — having produced human beings in the image of God — then dysgenics must constitute one cosmic sacrilege.

Un-natural Selection

How did dysgenics come about? Simple. By a process that might well be called “un-natural selection,” because it is a reversal of natural selection resulting from society’s corrupting influence. In a nutshell:

1. Modern societies quite understandably take care of sickly people who previously would have died, but then these people go on to have children with a high incidence of the same illnesses, and

2. although contraception is available to everyone, it’s more consistently and effectively used by all of the “best” and the most admirable people, i.e., the smartest, most responsible, hard-working people who make a positive contribution to the larger society.

A high percentage of the “worst” and least-admirable people either don’t know, or don’t care, that unprotected sex brings babies into the world, so they have sex with little or no thought of contraception. They include: psychopaths, sociopaths, criminals, psychologically disturbed people of all varieties, alcoholics, drug addicts, irresponsible, short-sighted, and selfish people, the mentally retarded, just-plain-dumb people, and people who are too lazy to take a trip to the corner drugstore. Because of their negligence, they contribute a disproportionate share of their least-admirable genes to future generations.

Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster conducted a study in which he found that despite lengthy sojourns in prison, London criminals still managed to produce more children on average than ordinary, law-abiding citizens (Lynn, 1995). Lynn calculated the increase in crime that would be expected, given the degree to which criminal behavior is a function of heredity, and estimated the increase in crime which should result (other factors being equal) by the excess fertility of criminals. His excellent book, Dysgenics (reviewed here) is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the issue of eugenics and dysgenics to date.

Instead of implementing a eugenics program of incentives and disincentives in order to rectify the problem of dysgenics, most governments are making it worse by subsidizing the reproduction of the least-productive segment of society, and taxing heavily the most productive segment.

Farmers and breeders have utilized the principle of “select the best” for their crops, livestock, and pets, and this has given us bountiful crops of every variety, high-yield milk cows, fast, beautiful, and gentle horses. Yet we take far less care when it comes to human beings, and in effect, we “select the worst.” It would be unconscionable to breed stupid, sickly, and vicious dogs — surely it’s at least as cruel to do this to human beings.

Eugenics

It’s not necessary, nor even possible, to do away with contraception entirely because the technologies and information for preventing conception are “out,” and only a severely repressive government could keep them from the people, and then only partially. However, we can reverse dysgenics and continue the process of improving the human species by implementing a eugenics program. We can once again evolve in a positive direction with self-directed evolution. From a spiritual point of view, when we take on the mantle of eugenics, we insure that our evolution will be guided more directly by God, who lives and breathes within us.

The word “eugenics” conjures up draconian images of Nazis and death camps, but even a cursory examination of the issues shows that this association is unwarranted. Eugenics has been practiced since ancient times, and in the 20th century Sweden had a eugenics program that lasted for 40 years (Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 1996). In fact, a total of 28 countries practiced eugenics in the 20th century, and one country, Germany, committed genocide, so despite Marxist propaganda to the contrary, it’s apparent that no causal association can be drawn between eugenics and mass murder. (For a more detailed discussion of these important issues, see the review of Dysgenics.)

Critics of eugenics often argue that we will never agree upon which traits we want, so therefore, the entire enterprise is hopeless. But this argument is utterly without merit. It’s perfectly predictable that we will choose health, beauty, intelligence, talent, courage, kindness, and honesty for our children because these are universally valued traits. All over the world parents value them today, just as parents valued them a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago.

Is Dysgenics God’s Will? Three Fundamental Truths

Scientists entering the realm of theology for the first time suddenly find themselves on very shaky ground, indeed. How does one know this or that is true? Where’s the evidence? In this paper, I have assumed only that many readers believe in God. Now, given this assumption, at least it becomes possible to say, “If one accepts this statement about God, then such-and-such logically follows.”

Is the current genetic deterioration of the human species “God’s will?” I hope to address this question in a such a way that it will be applicable to Christians and devotees of other religions, as well as to most people who believe in God but don’t adhere to any particular religious creed. First I’ll state three fundamental truths about the nature of God upon which all major religions agree. Then I’ll attempt to draw inferences from them about dysgenics.

1. God loves us. All major religions hold that this is so.

2. God wants us to be kind to one another. Jesus said “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” The current Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists) says, “Be kind to one another.” Kindness to others is one of the most important — if not the most important — teaching of all religions.

3. God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. All major religions believe that human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation. In Genesis, God said, “[L]et [man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepith upon the earth.” In Hindu writings about reincarnation, people are considered the highest and most spiritually advanced creatures. No major religion teaches that we are indistinguishable from lower animals.

Now we get to the heart of the matter — namely, what inferences can we draw from these three fundamental truths? Is dysgenics God’s will? Is dysgenics contrary to God’s will? Or, is dysgenics simply irrelevant to God?

Let’s take the first statement, that God loves us. If God loves us, then he doesn’t want us to suffer unnecessarily. That certainly follows, doesn’t it? Dysgenics means that our children’s generation will be less well-endowed genetically than our generation is, and it’s inescapable that they will suffer as a result. To be sickly, to be retarded, to suffer psychiatric illness — these are all things we definitely do not want for our children, nor for anyone else we love. It hardly requires a giant leap of faith to conclude that if God loves us, he doesn’t want us to suffer needlessly.

With regard to the second point, that God wants us to be kind to one another — is it kind for us to leave the next generation genetically stupider, more sickly mentally and physically, and worse people morally? Inflicting pain and suffering on enormous numbers of innocent beings is hardly the definition of kindness. I challenge the reader: can you think of anything that is more cruel, on such a vast scale? Communism certainly comes to mind as a possible contender, but I would argue it ranks second to dysgenics. At any rate, we know what our health means to us — it means everything. And we know how much our intelligence means. Imagine what life would be like if you had been born mentally retarded — you wouldn’t even be you! These traits are profoundly important to everyone, past, present and future.

In addition to leaving our children’s generation a poorer genetic legacy, if we do nothing about dysgenics, we will also bequeath to them the same cultural taboo against eugenics which we have inherited — the taboo which has paralyzed the Western world for the past 50 years on the vitally important issue of our own biological evolution. Until dysgenics is reversed, each generation will become successively less and less capable of solving the problem of dysgenics — or any problem, for that matter.

Third, God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. Could our “distinct destiny” possibly be to evolve closer and closer in the image of God for hundreds of thousands of years — more intelligent, more loving and kind, healthier and more civilized — and then suddenly to reverse direction, to squander all the hard-won gains, and evolve backwards, less in the image of God, more like lower animals? How could this be God’s will? It’s inconceivable.

By examining three fundamental truths upon which all major religions agree, a very short and sure step of reasoning leads us, in each case, to the conclusion that dysgenics must be against God’s will.

Conclusion

Our biology and our spirituality are inextricably linked, and they evolve (or de-volve) hand in hand. From the standpoint of Christianity, it’s fascinating to realize that as we de-volve to become more criminal, more stupid, and more primitive, there will inevitably be (1) a large increase in the total amount of sin, and therefore (2) a higher percentage of people condemned to Hell! Amazing though it may seem, science has proven that Good and Evil have roots in biology, and we ignore this fact at our peril.

In conclusion, the most capable of our small, ape-like ancestors survived and reproduced in greater numbers so that our species gradually evolved larger brains, higher intelligence, and greater humanness, and the result of this extraordinary Creation is us. However, “we” aren’t the end of the story!! “Creation” is still in motion, and now we are participants in it, whether for good or for ill. We can, and we must, reverse the current process of dysgenics if we are to carry out God’s will, and if we feel any love or compassion for all those who come after us.

REFERENCES

Blacker, C. P., 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After, Gerald Duckworth & Co, London

Broberg, Gunnar, & Nills Roll-Hansen, 1996, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Michigan University Press, East Lansing

Comings, David, 1996, The Gene Bomb, Hope Press, Duarte, CA Meshberger, Frank L., 1990, “An Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy,” JAMA, Oct. 10, 1990, vol. 264, No. 14

Lynn, Richard, 1996, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut

Lynn, Richard, 1995, “Dysgenic fertility for crime,” Journal of Biosocial Science, 27, p. 405-408

Van Court, Marian, and Frank Bean, 1985, “Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982,” Intelligence, vol. 8, p. 23-32

Source: http://www.eugenics.net/papers/crown.html