DIALOGUE
 |
Be Nice, or We'll Crush You |
|
| Criticizing Jews is professional suicide. | ||
 by John Derbyshire, February 28, 2007
33 comments
|
||
TAGS:
From this Dialogue
From: John Derbyshire
To: Joey Kurtzman
Subject: The flame of thoughtful conservatism burns low
All right, Joey, I will indulge your curiosity.
If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, “Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work and I think everyone should read him,” the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised.
You forget how lonely conservatives are. The flame of thoughtful, responsible American conservatism burns low, and needs constant careful attention. In the folk mythology of present-day America, conservatism is associated with Jim Crow and the persecution of racial minorities. I have not the slightest doubt that many millions, probably tens of millions, of Americans believe that, say, Pat Buchanan is a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan.
I live in an ordinary middle-middle-class New York suburban neighborh
This is Not Conservatism: American conservatives can't shake Jim Crowood. My neighbors all know I am a conservative commentator. A couple of them will not speak to me on that account. The others just think I am mildly nuts—a thing associated in their minds, somehow, with my being British-born. They regard me with a sort of amused sympathy. The nearest conservative I know lives about eight miles away.
Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly, by indirect means of course (I mean, it would be no use to just stamp “THIS IS NOT AN ANTISEMITIC MAGAZINE! WE DO NOT FAVOR THE RETURN OF JIM CROW LAWS!” in Day-Glo letters on the cover) that they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment.
And that matters. In America, persons who have, or are suspected to have, incorrect opinions on race, are low-status. Human beings are primarily social animals, and we are intensely conscious of status rankings within the groups we belong to.
The best guide here is novelist Tom Wolfe. Recall that passage in The Bonfire of the Vanities—I don’t have the book on hand so I’m working from memory here—where the young New York district attorney and his wife have hired a British nanny to look after their baby. This makes for an uncomfortable situation at first, because British people get status points in urban U.S. society just on account of being British. (Yes, of course it’s absurd, but I assure you it is the case.)
So this struggling, ill-paid young DA and his wife, both from modest backgrounds, have an employee with more status points than a domestic servant ought to have. The status structure of their household is out of joint. Then one day the nanny makes some mildly un-PC remark about Black people, and the DA and his wife fairly weep with relief. The nanny is low-status after all! Nothing to worry about!
So if National Review were to print unqualified praise (or even praise not severely qualified) of a guy who argues that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that involves the transformation—I think in The Culture of Critique MacDonald actually says “destruction”—of Gentile society, they would have done what that nanny did: dumped several status points down the toilet.
A conservative magazine simply can’t afford to do that. Its hold on the attention of the U.S. public is too precarious. A conservative magazine can’t afford to let a writer say anything nice about MacDonald without putting it under some such title as “The Marx of the Antisemites.”
There isn’t any kind of chicanery or dishonesty there. That’s just how the world is, how America is, under what Bill Buckley calls “the prevailing structure of taboos,” and the prevailing system of status perception, both of individual human beings and of easily anthropomorphizable entities like opinion magazines.
National Review wants to get certain ideas out to the U.S. public—ideas about economics, politics, law, religion, science, history, the arts, and more. To do that, the magazine needs standing in our broad cultural milieu. It needs status. That’s hard at the best of times for a conservative publication. To lose status points—to lose standing—just in order to draw readers’ attention to some rather abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college faculty member, would be dumb. Ergo, as I said, NR would reject a piece of the kind you suggested, and they would be correct to do so. I would do so if I were editor of NR.
To your next point (I am working from the bottom up again) that my professed fear of ticking off Jews is some kind of affectation or pose, I can only assure you that this is not so. Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first heard it: “Don’t f*ck with the Jews.” (Though I had better add here that I was mixing mainly with British expats at that point, and the comment came from one of them. More on this in a moment.)
Joe Sobran expressed it with his usual hyperbole: “You must only ever write of us as a passive, powerless, historically oppressed minority, struggling to maintain our ancient identity in a world where all the odds are against us, poor helpless us, poor persecuted and beleaguered us! Otherwise we will smash you to pieces.”
Though if you look up the William Cash affair I mentioned in my last post, Sobran’s quip is really not all that hyperbolic. When the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the CEO of United International Pictures, Barbra Streisand, assorted other media bigshots, and of course the ever-vigilant Mr. Leon Wieseltier, all denounce you in public, you are in pretty serious trouble.
(Since that is the second time I have mentioned the “Kings of the Deal” brouhaha, and since a great many readers will not know what I am talking about, I have put the whole thing on my website here.)
This may be characteristic only of conservative journalism—I don’t know, never having done the other kind. A person doing liberal-oriented opinion journalism surely needs no such cautions, having completely internalized all the “blank slate,” egalitarian, and victimological tenets of the majority culture, and the status-ordering precepts I sketched above. (And this is even leaving aside the high probability that a liberal commentator is anyway Jewish himself!)
The place of Jews in modern American conservatism is a deep and fascinating story, with of course the conversion of the neocons at its center. You have to bear in mind the overwhelming dominance of Jews in every kind of leftist movement in the U.S. until about 30 years ago. Yuri Slezkine has the astonishing numbers. (Did you know that of the four student protesters shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970, three were Jewish? So says Slezkine, anyway. If you take four people at random from the U.S. population, the chance that three or more of them will be Jewish, given the most generous estimate of the proportion of Jews in the population, is worse than one in four thousand.)
In any case, it was a great achievement, and a great boost, for American conservatism to have peeled off a platoon of articulate, energetic intellectual heavyweights from the great socialistic mass of American Jewry.
Generally speaking—and I certainly include myself here—American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have them on board. Not that there aren’t some frictions, particularly on mass immigration, the mere contemplation of which just seems to make Jews swoon with ecstasy (American Jews, at any rate. Israeli Jews have a different opinion…). MacDonald gives over a whole chapter of The Culture of Critique to the Jewish-American passion for mass immigration.
There is also some odd kind of bonding going on between Jewish conservatives and evangelical Christians. I say “odd” because of how, I imagine, this bonding would have looked to the grandparents of today’s Jews. The explanation I have most commonly heard is that Jewish conservatives want to be accommodating towards evangelicals because the latter are friendly to Israel. Hence you get prominent Jewish intellectuals saying nice things about nutty evangelical preoccupations like intelligent design.
The Israel explanation doesn’t seem particularly convincing to me. Don’t evangelicals want all the Jews to return to Israel so that the End Times can commence, in the course of which the Jews will be annihilated? Nevertheless, once or twice a week I read something that leaves me thinking that in the mind of this or that Jewish conservative intellectual, evangelical Christianity is “good for the Jews.”
At any rate, these minor frictions and divisions are inevitable in a movement as broadly defined as conservatism. Jews are welcome in the American conservative movement. The great energy and intelligence of Jews, and their strong sense of group identity, do, though, sometimes lead to the same kinds of pathologies in the conservative movement as Kevin MacDonald logged in the Jews’ self-created movements (such as Freudianism, Boasian anthropology, and the New York intellectuals).
In particular, they are under the same temptation to defer to charismatic intellectual “rabbis,” and to
The Rebbe of Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud was brilliant, charismatic, and authoritarian enforce rigid standards of orthodoxy, with vituperation and expulsion for dissidents. I’d emphasize that these are occasional tendencies, and I believe they are much less marked among Jewish conservatives than among, say, Freudians (or for that matter among Jewish liberals). They are there, though; and if you get on the wrong side of them, you are in deep doo-doo.
And in the larger culture, a Gentile conservative who riles up Jewish liberals is really asking for trouble. You could ask William Cash.
Let me deal with your point about the British, and the larger point about group identification.
On the Brits: You are certainly right that the correct approach here is anthropological; though I don’t think your insufferable tone of sneering moral superiority would be tolerated in professional anthropological circles today.
So far as I understand modern theories of the mind, a great deal of our brainpower is given over to processing social information. The theory that seems to me most plausible involves three different modules in the brain: a relationship module, a social module, and a status module.
The relationship module manages our one-on-one relationships with other human beings. It includes a sort of lexicon of all the persons we know, tagged by their attributes as we see them. (Not just common attributes like “fat” or “red-haired,” but me-centric attributes like “enemy” or “borrowed my copy of The Culture of Critique and never returned it.”)
A second, the social module, manages our behavior in our group, and our attitudes to our group and to outside groups. Group stereotypes, for example, which perform very valuable social-psychological functions, dwell in this module.
A third, the status module, computes our status within our group, either by objective criteria, or by attempting to “read” the entries about us in other people’s relationship-module lexicons, via those people’s external behavior. This status module has algorithms for computing status. The code of the algorithms, and the data we input to them, differs from one society to another, and from one group to another in a given society. (We all belong to several groups, of course.)
Among the Masais, a male’s status in his village is measured by the number of cattle he owns. An American academic who belongs to the groups “mathematicians,” “dedicated amateur hang-gliders,” and “opera lovers” will measure his status in the first group by how many papers he has published, his status in the second by how long he has managed to stay aloft, and his status in the third by how many donations he has given to his local opera company.
Now, in the broad and general group “respectable middle-class Americans,” one’s attitudes toward other races are very, very important criteria in determining one’s status. A person like the nanny in that Tom Wolfe novel, who reveals incorrect attitudes on race, suffers massive loss of status thereby.
As criteria for status-in-group evaluation, these attitudes are less important in Britain. In many subsets of modern middle-class British society, mildly negative remarks about black people, like those uttered by the nanny, would not lose you any status points at all.
This does not mean that Americans are morally superior to Britons; still less does it mean that Britons are more sophisticated, more worldly-wise, than Americans. All it means is that for historical reasons—mainly because the U.S. once had legal race slavery, while the British Isles (as opposed to the British territories overseas) never did—British people compute status-in-group slightly differently from the way Americans compute it. The nanny’s error was to assume that her employers’ status modules were running the same code as British people’s. Coming from Britain to the U.S., I made many such errors myself, and still occasionally do.
So far as it is possible to make generalizations about such things, British behavior in this regard is closer to the norm for modern humans than is American behavior. The critical importance of racial attitudes in middle-class American status rankings is extraordinary. This has been the case for decades. Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers was deemed unpublishable under that title by U.S. publishers even then; they changed the title for U.S. audiences. Yet the play version was being performed in provincial British theaters, under Christie’s original title, well into the late 1960s.
As I said, this is not a question of moral superiority on the part of Americans, nor of superior worldliness on the part of Brits; it’s just that our thinking is slightly different, probably as a result of different national-historical experiences. (Though as always nowadays, group genetic peculiarities cannot be ruled out. Recent studies indicate that the population of the British Isles has been very little disturbed for tens of thousands of years. The successive invasions of Celts, Romans, Teutons, and Normans only slightly altered a common Paleolithic genome, likely derived from a small, and therefore distinctive, founder group.)
The exquisite sensitivity of Americans in these matters causes no end of misunderstanding and bad feelings, as the William Cash episode shows. I am sorry to say that it often makes Americans look like hypocrites to foreigners, making rather a mockery of all our pretensions to moral superiority. House hunting in the New York suburbs in 1992, my (Chinese-born) wife and I were once sitting in the office of a realtor, an American lady, trying to spell out just what we were looking for. We had no kids at the time, but were moving to the burbs precisely to raise a family. Well, chatting with the realtor, I said that of course we wanted to be in a good school system, one with not too many black kids. The realtor’s reaction was similar to the one described by P.G. Wodehouse when he wrote: “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”
You don’t say things like that. You just do them: practically no white Americans, looking for a place where they can settle down and raise a family, will seek a school district that is majority black. In fact, that realtor, when she had thawed some, carried out what I am sure is her normal procedure of steering us well away from heavily black school districts. Patterns of housing segregation in the U.S. speak for themselves, very eloquently. This is, however, the only way in which honest speech about race in America is allowed. (I believe, in fact, that if the realtor had said: “Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time and mine by showing you properties in heavily black neighborhoods,” she would have been breaking the law. Her behavior, however, was indistinguishable from what it would have been if she had said that, and meant it.)
And if you are not raised in the U.S., you are sometimes totally nonplussed by the stuff native-born Americans come out with in this area. For example, I stared hard at the following paragraph of yours, struggling to get some sense out of it:
Like Irishman and other antiquated coinages, it suggests that ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity[….] American Jews, like other Americans, dislike that implication, and we once dealt with it by insisting on wacky constructions such as “Americans of the Hebrew faith.”
“Irishman” is an “antiquated coinage”? This is news to me. What, then, am I supposed to say this week? “Person of Irishness”? And does calling someone an Irishman really “suggest that ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity”? All it suggests to me is that the guy comes from Ireland.
And if American Jews “dislike” the notion that “ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity,” then why are we having these exchanges? And why is “Americans of the Hebrew faith” any more risible than “persons of the Hibernian ethnicity,” or whatever damn fool thing it is you want me to say instead of “Irishman”?
I once wrote a novel about Chinese people. My first-person narrator, a Chinese immigrant in America, refers to himself once or twice as “an Oriental.” The book reviewer for USA Today took me to task for that. “Oriental,” she told me sternly, was a word that could only be used for carpets and furniture. For people, the correct term was “Asian American.”
So I guess Confucius, Li Po, and Mao Tse-tung were all “Asian Americans.” And then, of course, there was that wonderful moment in the 2002 Winter Olympics when a Black American woman won a gold medal, thereby becoming the first Black woman from any country to win a winter gold. The announcer for the NBC network could not bring himself to say it as I just said it, though. God forbid anyone should think he had noticed the lady’s blackness! The only way he could bring himself to say it was: “She’s the first African-American woman from any country to win a winter gold medal.” I’m sorry, but this stuff just makes me fall around laughing.
Now to the very interesting question of whether or not ethnicity is “a fundamental feature of a person’s identity.” I think the only honest answer is that for some people, including some Jews, it surely is, at least some of the time, and for others, not.
Look: My ethnicity (white English) is part of what I am. It is one of the groups I identify with. This is not deplorable, or wicked, or exclusivist of me; it is just human, dammit. We are social animals who organize ourselves into groups. An individual in a complex modern society identifies with several groups. These identifications have different weights in his mind; in fact, they have different weights (the term of art is “salience”) in different circumstances.
I had occasion to remark recently, in a discussion elsewhere about whether or not I am a racist, that I would feel much more at ease in a room full of black African mathematicians than I would in a room full of white English soccer hooligans. In the first group my salient identification would be “mathematician,” and I would be a mathematician at ease among mathematicians.
My identification with the group “white English” would not be very salient in that group—definitely not as salient as it would be if I wandered into a bar on 125th street in Manhattan. In the second group I would be very uncomfortably aware of my membership in the group “bookish types who dislike physical violence and have little interest in sport.” That would be my salient group identification in that milieu; and as the only person in the room nursing that group identification, I would be exceedingly ill at ease.
Membership in the group “Jewish people” must be something every Jew is aware of at least some of the time, even if it is only rarely his salient group identification. Jewishness is, after all, as group identifications go—compared with “white English” for example—exceptionally well defined and historically rooted.
To draw from Slezkine’s fine book again, those Russian Jews who consciously de-Judaized themselves in the late-19th and early-20th century, and moved from the Pale into metropolitan Russia, and became such an important part of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state, suddenly found their Jewishness—which they thought they had shucked off, left behind in the shtetl!—very, very salient when Hitler’s Panzers rolled across the border. It’s situational, see.
The idea you seem to be retailing—that these group identifications, with all their inner complexities of status, and all their situational vagaries of salience is all some airy figment of our imaginations, or some relic of a barbarous era we (or at any rate, the most morally advanced of us) have left behind—strikes me as bizarre and preposterous to the furthest degree. Do you really believe that? Good grief!
The beginning of wisdom is to look at humanity as it is, with its arms and legs, its eyes and tongues, its livers and kidneys, and its brains organized into modules, in some way like I sketched above, those modules busily processing information—information about light and temperature, visual and aural information, and above all (for we are social animals) social information.
I may choose, freely choose, to treat my fellow human beings well or badly; but my interactions with them are governed by my brain, which has evolved with the ability to do some things but not others. Utter indifference to group identity is a thing the brain cannot do. The denial of human nature gets us nowhere.
Whatever we think of Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jews and their “group evolutionary strategy,” he is at least talking about a real human personality, one that I recognize when I look at myself and other people. It’s a personality that is aware of belonging to groups, that vies for status in those groups and that nurses negative feelings of various degrees to at least some other groups. Even when it wishes no harm to any other group, if given the choice between advancing the interests of a group it belongs to, versus advancing the interests of a group it does not belong to, will choose the former action nine times out of ten.
That is humanity as I know it, and as the great novelists and dramatists have portrayed it, and as the human sciences are beginning to uncover it in fine detail through such disciplines as evolutionary history. The bloodless, deracinated, group-indifferent, “blank slate,” omnisympathetic creature promoted by the merchants of Political Correctness is one I do not recognize as human. Those merchants are human, though, for all they seek to deny it. Their lofty pretensions to have risen high above us grubby group-identifying lesser beings strike me as just another form, a particularly obnoxious form, of in-group status-striving.
Best,
JD
Next: The Jewish media Goliath
 |
John Derbyshire is a columnist for National Review. His most recent book is Unknown Quantity, a history of algebra, published by Joseph Henry Press in May 2006. |
33 comments | leave a comment
- How to Avoid Ferociously Bad Relationships
Our expert rates five of the most popular.
Worst Cooks in America Winner Answers Readers Questions
How to read a Jewish fundraising letter
Is Believing in G-d a Necessary Component of Judaism?
| Advertise | Privacy Policy & Terms of Use | FAQ | |  | | Comment Policy | About Us | Contact | Submissions |
| Hosting provided by Tilted Planet | ||
Anonymous
"So if National Review were to print unqualified praise (or even praise not severely qualified) of a guy who argues that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that involves the transformation—I think in The Culture of Critique MacDonald actually says “destruction”—of Gentile society, they would have done what that nanny did: dumped several status points down the toilet."
As a Jew who has no trouble with his identity as a Jew, I agree with much of what John said above.
However, I still don't know if he agrees or disagrees with old MacDonald's thesis when he writes:
"So if National Review were to print unqualified praise (or even praise not severely qualified) of a guy who argues that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that involves the transformation—I think in The Culture of Critique MacDonald actually says “destruction”—of Gentile society, they would have done what that nanny did: dumped several status points down the toilet."
I believe that MacDonald’s thesis is demonstrably false and malicious (since if Jews have been "programmed to destroy gentile society then those societies have a right to destroy the Jews and in effect the theses argues that the Nazis were right to wage war on the Jews.) for that reason would never publish it. Is this a case of infringing on someone's freedom of speech? I don't think so.
Hence, while I have no problems with John or anyone else criticizing Jews (and Jews are experts at self criticism) I do have a problem with false criticism.
jdyer
Anonymous
The unusual frankness of this dialogue is really delightful. It also highlights how rare such candor is.
Anyone who is reflective enough to have thought about Jewish influence and the taboos surrounding it in America is also the type of person who would never feel comfortable discussing the matter, for reasons of decency or of prudence. Watching Mr. Derbyshire broach these topics, I feel the same interest and giddy fascination that would come from watching someone trying to defuse an extremely complicated bomb with minimal protective gear. I admire the skill and dexterity, but I'm still waiting for the explosion.
And I fear we will see that explosion unfold in the blogosophere -- that people will cherrypick phrases for misunderstanding Derbyshire's comments, that this will leave a Google trail defaming Derbyshire for a couple years, and that, in general, he has transgressed Derbyshire's first law much recklessly than he imagines. The first rule of taboo is it is unspoken. Yes, it violate a taboo to discuss Jewish influence. But it violates it even more severely, and produces a much more reflexive reaction, merely to discuss the taboo restriction itself!
I think this is the reason for Kurtsman's instant skepticism, and also for the character of some of the comments. For instance, to the comments of jdyer, that MacDonald's thesis is "malicious": First, if some group is "programmed to destroy" some other group, that does not justify the behavior morally -- nor it does justify retaliatory destruction by the other group. "Destroying" social groups is never justified! The scientific fact of a tendency does not imply moral sanction for it. Second, yes, tendentious phrases like "programmed to destroy" do suggest malice on MacDonald's part, which Derbyshire was at pains to flag and distance himself from. His whole point was that it would be nice to able to discuss the matter of fact, but that MacDonald's motives seem suspect.
Derbyshire's comments make up only the second time in my life that I remember someone make a comment critical of the Jews in any way. The first was from an old teacher of mine, a very civilized man. He suggested that many Jews were so absorbed in their ethnic identity that they mistook many problems which were existential and generically human for being specifically Jewish and unique to them. This worked against the general effect of their cultivation and intelligence; it tended to limit their vision, and ultimately their growth as human beings. I was so startled to hear him criticizing Jews I didin't really process it at the time, but I have come to think there is some truth in it.
Anonymous
It's a bit beside the point, but I must say that Mr Derbyshire seems to remember a Britain entirely different from the one I live in: where you could go into an estate agent, demand a school system with not too many black kids, and be greeted with smiles. But this simply isn't true. Ice would form on the British estate agent's upper slopes as quickly as on the American realtor's ... unless the remarks were suitably coded. And the stupid remarks of the British nanny in Bonfire of the Vanities would be unacceptable in most British settings, too. As the recent hoo-haa over Big Brother shows, modern Brits are as touchy over race as anyone. Whether or not this is a good thing, is of course the more interesting argument.
Anonymous
Last night we attended an Irish music sesíun (session). The only cultural group represented-- aside from actual Irish persons-- were Jews. I have observed this in many different sessions and in many different cities (including in Ireland). Again, aside from ethnic Irish, they also tend to be the best musicians (but not dancers).
We are also interested, in vast disproportion to actual numbers, in many other kinds of weird, generally way outside the pop-cultural campfire, ethnic musical traditions.
Anecdotal to be sure. Meaningless? I don't know.
Anonymous
It's a rather serious mistake to make--to claim that something is good or tolerable simply because it is natural. If it is inevitable that all of our minds will tend towards evil, that does not mean we should surrender to that tendency. Acknowledge, yes; surrender, never.
Nonetheless, outside of that error Derbyshire makes a lot of really good points. The final sentence of the letter is the most insightful. When we exclude those who practice group-exclusionism--when we cast people out as bigots, that doesn't necessarily decrease the prevalence of bigotry in the world. The danger is two fold--that reactance against such exclusion will promote bigotry, and that we new excluders ourselves will become new bigots.
And while all humans may tend to be groupist, it does seem that our groups tend to be growing wider--or at least fuzzier--as time goes on. The idea that group exclusionism is wrong wasn't invented by modern Political Correctness junkies or even by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. You'll find that idea in a number of religions, both Abrahamiac and Dharmic. That idea is as old as civilization itself.
Anonymous
As someone with extensive training in evolutionary theory, I am appalled by Kevin MacDonald's entirely wrong-headed "evolutionary psychology." It's nothing but muddle-headed group selection, and it runs entirely counter to the emphasis on differential reproduction among individuals and individual genetic lines that is the essence of selection theory. I am also a Jewish anthropologist who studied ethnicity among immigrant Jewish groups in Israel. The whole notion of a generalized Jewish ethnic strategy is laughable to anyone who has looked closely at how Jews behave among themselves. Do they all live in joyous harmony, plotting evil things to do to the Gentiles around them? Or are they as quarrelsome internally as any other human group? Guess.
Of course there is such a thing as Jewish identity, but like all identities, it's nested and situational for many if not most of us. Some of us do identify with each other, and as part of a Jewish community - but assuredly not all. I do think our religious laws and traditions have evolved as a way of keeping us together (and keeping us in line) but how many of us shuck those laws as fast as we can? Is everything I do a matter of Jewish strategizing, whether I know it or not? Are we all, wittingly or unwittingly, a part of some enormous Jewish cabal, intent on destroying Gentile society? Or do many, perhaps most of us, rush out to embrace that society as much as it will let us? The answers should be obvious to anyone with the slightest degree of intelligence or analytical ability.
Kevin MacDonald isn't much of a thinker. He does not understand evolutionary theory, and his using it as a tool to further his anti-semitic agenda should be an embarrassment to evolutionary psychologists (a field for which I have little to no respect, anyway) everywhere. I was a witness to Gould and Lewontin's attempts to combat "sociobiology" back in the seventies, and as a Jew (not a Jewess - it's not a racist term but a sexist one ) and a student of evolutionary biology I often wondered why many of the most passionate opponents of evolutionary biology were Jewish. I think now it was because they feared, at some subliminal level, the old idea that acknowledging the biological basis of much of human behavior might segue too easily into the notion that different races had different emotional and intellectual capabilities, and then quickly from that point into racism and antisemitism. I thought their objections were ridiculous then; I thought they did not understand the real implications of evolutionary biology - that all individuals were strategizing all the time, sometimes cooperatively with their kin or even with strangers (reciprocal altruism), and that this constant struggle to maximize reproductive fitness was common to all humanity, indeed to all of life. But now, thanks to MacDonald and Hartung, whose writings I also despise, I see they were right to fear this sort of slide. Lewontin and Gould, in retrospect, I salute you.
But where are the real evolutionary biologists coming to hit this turkey MacDonald on the head - not just for his antisemitism, but for his bad science?
David Lieberman
I'm the author of the "Evolutionary Psychology" entry in the Encyclopedia of Antisemitism recently published by ABC-Clio. The article is entirely devoted to MacDonald, whose writings I've read against his sources in some detail. I game a more detailed assessment of MacDonald's scholarship in paper given at the Parkes Instititue at the University of Southampton in July 2005.
Having extensively checked MacDonald's claims about the historical behavior of Jews against what his sources actually say, I can state with assurance that his arguments are consistently grounded on deliberately falsified interpretations of his source materials. He is a fraud of the highest order. Period.
David Lieberman
Anonymous
"Derbyshire's comments make up only the second time in my life that I remember someone make a comment critical of the Jews in any way. The first was from an old teacher of mine, a very civilized man. He suggested that many Jews were so absorbed in their ethnic identity that they mistook many problems which were existential and generically human for being specifically Jewish and unique to them. This worked against the general effect of their cultivation and intelligence; it tended to limit their vision, and ultimately their growth as human beings. I was so startled to hear him criticizing Jews I didin't really process it at the time, but I have come to think there is some truth in it."
A correct observation, but true not only of Jews.
It is difficult for most of us to separate the specifically cultural from the purely natural. Human problems, though, don't come with the label "this is a specifically ethnic problem," or this is a "universal human problem."
Too often the two types of problems are intertwined.
Anonymous
But just how super are the Jews? Well, it has been demonstrated recently that Ashkenazim (those who, like my father - and consequently myself - are descended from Eastern European and Russian forebearers) have significantly higher IQs than other Europeans and it has been suggested that this is a genetic, rather than merely cultural, trait. But what do we do with all of those big brains? Well, if Kevin MacDonald, a tenured professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbera is to be believed ... we undermine Gentile societies.
Anonymous
More recent than the William Cash case was the excoriation in 2003 of liberal gentile pundit Gregg Easterbrook for one innocuous sentence about Jewish movie executives on his blog at The New Republic (that viciously anti-Semitic publication!). He was widely denounced for reviving the stereotype that Jews have a lot of power in Hollywood. Michael Eisner's Disney corporation immediately fired Easterbrook from his columnist job at ESPN.com and, in an amusingly Orwellian touch, deleted all his archives. Most commentators seemed to feel he had it coming. (Easterbrook finally got his football column back at ESPN a few years later, after Eisner lost power at Disney.)
Going farther back, in the 1990s there was the hilarious Marlon Brando brouhaha, in which Brando went on the Larry King show and argued that Jewish movie executives had done a good job of pushing civil rights in the early 1960s by casting blacks in unexpected roles, and that they should do the same for Latinos today. Brando was widely denounced for reviving the old stereotype that Jews had power in Hollywood. What does Marlon Brando know about Hollywood? was the general tenor of the denunciations. He had to make a ritual humiliation of himself at a Jewish institituon to save his career.
Meryl Yourish
Here's the full quote:
"Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself."
Setting aside the blaming of Jews for all the violence in Hollywood, and then relating it to real-world violence (Jews cause terrorism! See?), Easterbrook wasn't pilloried just for the above.
He was also dumb enough to slam his boss.
I am sorry he was fired, and never sought that. But he did far more than express one "innocuous" sentence about powerful Hollywood Jews.
Anonymous
Thanks for the link to the Cash controversy. This was most enlightening.
But what should we think of the reaction of Leon Wieseltier, since 1983 literary editor of The New Republic? He seems to validate the widespread "Don't fuck with the Jews" perception in his vengeance-seeking response to Mr. Cash's article (which seemed to me quite innocuous). Even if intended as sarcasm, his letter to Cash's British editor is deeply disturbing:
"William Cash worries about 'inevitable shrieks of "anti-Semitism"' as a consequence of his anti-Semitism. Not to worry. People as powerful as us [sic!] have no need to shriek. We will bide our time and silently see justice done. Maybe before Passover. You run a filthy magazine."
So what kind of a magazine does a man with these sentiments run?
Anonymous
thats righ bitches dont mess wit da jews...esp. in da bay
Anonymous
I smell ethnocentrism...
Bennnn
He was really funny on Kids in the Hall. He was also "Denim Vest" on Seinfeld.
Neil Camberly
While MacDonald's CULTURE OF CRITIQUE left me unconvinced of a significant genetic component (beyond what impact remaining distinct in the Diaspora has had on average Jewish intelligence, and its attendant usefulness) to the Jewish destruction of Western civilization, he certainly painstakingly and irrefutably documents the latter, and *that's* what really provokes all your ire, in turn partly illustrating this certainly real, though in my view, more cultural than genetic psychological phenomenon.
Cheers to John Derbyshire for an impressive, almost redeeming article; cheers to Jewcy for occupying this more conscionable slot of Jewish intellectual honesty; and cheers to Prof. MacDonald for his plainly genuine sincerity, and for self-sacrificially sticking his neck out just in time to significantly enable a vastly more realistic public discussion of US foreign & domestic policy at a truly crucial hour. To the internet!
Bright Imperator
Group-identity is an apeish behaviorial relic from the Stone Age. Group-identification also absolves the group-identifier from personal achievement and meritorious activity in their own individual sphere. Self-esteem among human beings must correlate with PERSONALLY CONQUERED MERIT, not enslavement before artificial communal identity. Aryanists and Judaists, ethnic and racial collectivists, thus constitute a philosophically regressive species. One's spiritual race is primary. Ethnically pure Jews have become utter pariahs and vicious materialists in modernity, as have the relatively ethnically pure fair peoples of Northern Europe, to the extent of spinelessly indulging social degenerates like pedophiles and so-called "zoophiles".
To stand completely alone in the struggle of ethical self-perfection and heroically taste the winds of cosmic solitude without emotional reliance on group-identities is too Buddhistic and Nietzschean for the denizen of demagogic modernity, but that is the mark of the evoluted man of the future.
Jews must stop asking, as the main pseudo-ethical criterion in the evaluation of reality, "Is this good for Jews?" (as their ideological imitators in Naziism ask, "Is this good for Germanics?"); one must ask instead, "Does this behavior tend or tend not to the welfare and spiritual edification of the largest number of human beings and tragically benighted creatures in general?" When a person of evolved, genuinely human instincts sees a house is on fire, he doesn't ask if there are loyal Jews or pure-blooded Aryans inside; one just accomplishes the salvific task at hand.
There are only significant differences between individuals, and these are spiritual; some have not mastered the ape-residues lurking inside, and thus we have phenomena like disease-ridden sexual promiscuity, ritual abuse, commercialized vice, international organized crime. The planetary aristocracy of the future will be composed of all populations, and will include those individuals who have repressed the beast inside themselves (the neurological reptilian complex), and its martial arm will do its duty in repressing "the nameless beast" externally, a super-national chivalry of bodhisattvic Galahads.
Anonymous
We supposedly enjoy "freedom of speech" but the paradox seems to be: you have freedom of
speech, as long as you don't really use it. Because if you make use of it, social pressure will make
you regret you chose to use it.
Anonymous
This is very racist. Be nice, or we'll crush you????? That is a bunch of racist bullshit. You are no better than the nazis.
Anonymous
To the person posting before me: It would be very nice of you to read more than the headline before opening your mouth.
Anonymous
You'll have to do better than that I'm afraid. If you start yelping racist after only reading the title, you're no better than the nazis as well. They burned books based on knee jerk reactions and didn't bother to read what was in them as well. Reading the cover of the article in no way entitles you to assume you have an informed opinion about what a 5000 word essay is about. Why don't you go back and read from beginning to end like the rest of us, and them come back with more support for your theory. Not saying your right or wrong, but could you please read first? Thanks.
Lila Rajiva
"After all, Jews are well represented across the whole spectrum of political beliefs (from socialism to neo-liberalism - WSJ style - to Austrian economics to socialism). If they hold these views out of self-interest only, their self interest must then be a remarkably protean creature.
What's more, it isn't clear to me that the policies that opinion makers pursue are the ones that represent the interests of ordinary Jews either here or in Israel. Even if they do represent Jewish elite interests, it's usually also true that they represent other, non-Jewish elite interests. In which case, to what degree can any policy itself be seen as specifically or solely Jewish?
It' s not that I don't see from where S is coming...or even some one like Kevin McDonald. I do. But I tend to think that there isn't all that much to be gained analytically by going down that track -- although censoring discussion of it also doesn't do much good.
You have to differentiate between the opinions of Jews and the opinions of Jewish lobbying groups and action committees. Then too, Jews are highly represented in espousing views that are called anti-Semitic by some -- from Shahak in Israel to Finkelstein and Chomksy and Blankfort here. What does one say to that?
Or to the fact that two of the leading theorists of libertarianism were Rand and Rothbard (both Jews), both of whom paid attention to civic society. Which is exactly what communitarians want to see flourishing and which they think libertarians undermine.
Some Jewish opinion leader probably hold views - that might seem mistaken or even prejudiced to an outsider - simply from their own perceptions of obligation and affiliation that have nothing to do with intent to propagandize. In other words, they may genuinely see things that way. On the other hand, I do not think the same of some Jewish American politicians, like Douglas Feith or Richard Perle, whose actions seem more to resemble the "pursuit of group self-interest" model.
Besides, group affiliation itself is complex.
I am an Indian, but also a Christian. Isn't my Christianity (which is as old as European Christianity) less tainted by the antiSemitism of European Christianity? Or does that have to be weighed against my third-world affiliation, which with its assumed Arabism, is necessarily also anti-Semitic in some eyes? And also seen as racist in its own right?
Or, as a Jewish interlocuter on my blog, said - "Gandhi didn't like blacks"?
Is that the slur which Indians now have to juggle to survive the ideological smell test?
Can you see how convoluted these questions get?
And isn't it possible also that state policies can be enacted because of structural reasons that coincide with the group preferences of opinion makers, but are not caused by them in some simple one to one manner? Doesthere need to be intent? If so, whose specifically and how?
Aren't Jews also white...and American...and even Anglo? And doesn't the racial mongrelization that their opinion makers allegedly pursue then apply also to them?
Isn't it also true that while this and related topics are taboo in leading opinion journals and universities, they are still discussed everywhere in less prestigious outlets and that if there is censorship, quite a bit of it is self-censorship? And the self-censorship arises out of our own servility to power and prestige?
And if you don't speak up forthrightly about what you find important or truthful, whose fault is that?
And if you are afraid you might lose a job or a promotion or a review, then how deeply held and morally important are your convictions?
Isn't it also true that some part of the reason why this debate can never take place openly is not really because of the arguments themselves but because we do not trust each other enough?
That we do not really feel that we are above board in doing justice to each others' claims?
And that, in fact, we are not above aboard?
Only look at the way people debate each other - the level of vituperation. Neither left nor right is able to see each other with any degree of respect and consideration. And isn't that really the reason we resort to political correctness and other speech codes?
Who really is persuaded solely by arguments? The reason Marxism had such a hold over the third world was because its adherents often showed more concern for the welfare of ordinary people than adherents of other ideologies. People were persuaded not by the ideas alone but - at least initially - by the kind of people who held the ideas.
Isn't every debate about race and gender in this country poisoned by that lack of trust? And isn't that why we try so desperately to show our ideological purity? To prove our guiltlessness by distancing ourselves from anyone who might contaminate us, as though they were untouchables?
Isn't that really why we are afraid of ideas that are free of fashionable dogmas? They are not"pure"?
Isn't that really how propaganda works here -- by our own self censorship and weakness in articulating our own thoughts?
And would we really be afraid to be called anti-Semites, or whatever else, if we were completely free in our consciences about it?
And that when we are free of such feelings -- or at least -- are struggling at all times to be free of them, then, won't what we say carry a weight and a force that would be infectious and free us of our stifling fear?"
Lila Rajiva
http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com
Jon
John Derbyshire says a lot without saying anything. I see why his home is National Review.
ChevyNazi
I can and do understand if some Jews are angry at gentiles. I feel that anger is justified too. Jews have had to put with a lot from gentiles pretty much all of their existence. More of us gentiles need to understand things from the Jewish POV. Then we can understand and even in some cases justify the "lets pay them back" mindset of some Jewish people!
Anonymous
This is just an observation, wasn't "justification or rationalization" at the core of the Nazi movement? Gratitude, in my opinion, would be a better mindset for Jewish people (or any freed oppressed people), for were it not for our fathers and grandfathers sacrafices in WW2 this article would be on an entirely different topic. No, I'd venture to say a mind set of payback is wrong and apparently exists and seems to be at the center of the MacDonald lynching. His right to think, research and speak were paid for by the blood of better people than any of us and to deny him that right is to tarnish that scarafice. Thank you.
Anonymous
Should have proofed it. Sorry.
ChevyNazi
I was simply saying I do understand the "pay back" mindset. I don't think its all that wrong either for some Jews to have that mindset even if I don't agree with it.
naftali
in this discussion the meanings of the words 'destruction' and 'change' became tangled and matted. Yes, Jews try to change society--for the better, towards more enlightenment and peace in a manner in which everyone involved becomes stronger and wiser. I don't see a problem with this.
It's not conscious, it's not planned, and it's hard to have a productive discussion about it--even between two Jews. Nevertheless, deep inside, I believe this is what we are striving for. To take the concept of "tikkun olam" and change it to trying to destroy gentile society--well there really isn't a good way to spin that distortion.
ChevyNazi
Oh I don't mind trying to better society. I just don't like things to be taken to an extreme as what is being done say in England with the flag of St George now being deemed an offensive symbol being that it was used during the Crusades!
Now that is what I call ludicrous!:-(
alera
The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, though households can be other social groups, such as single persons, or groups of unrelated individuals. Terenuri ialomita
ChevyNazi
Took the words right out of my mouth.lol
Reimer
I came across MacDonald through reading Gutenplan's book on Lipstadt vs Irving. The simple, lucid precis Gutenplan gave on KM's schtick struck me as severely at odds with the shrill dismissal Gutenplan promptly made of it ("loony ideas") and with the subdued, reverent tone of the rest of the book. Doubtless Mr Gutenplan would offer a quizzical look if a Goy like me attempted to draw him on this, sort of a physiognomic variant on the kind of irritated rationalisations afforded here to the self-importance of a peculiar hyper-verbal Middle-Eastern people oblivious to the incongruousness of their alien ways' large-looming in territories they had no part in settling and in attempting to transform the ways of peoples they despise and are strangers to.
R
Rick
Having read the works of the most influential Zionist founders such as Hess, Herzl, Graetz, and Jabotinsky not a founder yet very influential, one will clearly see the Zionist plan is a major threat to humanity. These founders state that antisemitism is there greatest weapon of defense to shield them from their plan to rule the world. Most have not read their works yet it is the basis of Israel and the group mentality of superiority. Zionism is a racist movement with no respect for human life. MacDonald does us all justice to expose their influence and power. No wonder the outcry and the Lemmings which bow down for fear of being called antisemitic. Professor Sand's new book released in Israel and in Hebrew shares much of what MacDonald writes about Jewish group evolutionary strategy which is reflected in Sand's observations also. I find nothing antisemitic in MacDonald's works, just a bunch of scared reactionary's afraid of Zionist.