An Antidote to the Jewpill (Part I: Group Evolutionary Strategy)
So my last post, a critique of white nationalism, was republished at the Unz Review to an overwhelmingly hostile comment audience. I wasn’t expecting the repost, but the response was all too predictable.
In spaces dominated by WN – like the Alt-Right and the Dissident Right – there are unspoken rules about criticising it. It is OK to bring up the fact that it has accomplished practically nothing since the end of the Second World War. It is OK to blame bad optics (Nazi larping!), bad leaders (grifters, narcissists, feds!) and bad supporters (too hidebound, too juvenile, too reckless, too cowardly, too lumpenproletarian, too autistic!). Some very harsh missives can be written along these lines, and still be more or less accepted as ‘constructive criticism’, as long as they conclude by affirming the core ideas of the Movement and laying out some last-ditch victory plan for it.
What is not OK is to conclude, as I did, that white nationalism is built upon bad ideas; that these ideas attract bad optics, bad leaders, and bad supporters in the same way that shite draws flies; and that the Movement will never stop failing and dragging down the Dissident Right until those ideas are radically changed. This is ‘blackpilling’, a.k.a. ‘demoralising the Movement’ – and who but a ‘shill’, a ‘Jew’, or some other bad-faith actor would want to demoralise a cause that has accomplished practically nothing since the end of the Second World War?
My answer is this: someone who has not forgotten the original motive force behind the Movement, namely the defence of the European peoples and the salvation of the West.
White nationalism is meant to be a collective strategy to these ends – a means to an end, like the ancient Macedonian phalanx. It was never meant to degenerate into a self-perpetuating cult, handing down the same old practices and dogmas like a sacrosanct tradition – an end in itself, like the Christian community of the saints. Or was it? The Movement likes to think that white nationalism is about practicality, survival, Darwinian adaptation to circumstances – but none of this was in evidence when WNs took over the Alt-Right, and threw away its successful decentralised strategy in order to return to the failed Neo-Nazism of George Lincoln Rockwell.
But perhaps there is a deeper, and narrower, practicality involved here. By pretending to be a practical strategy, white nationalism gets to hold a sword of judgement – inscribed with the words “Is It Good For Whites?” – over all other ideas on the Right, from libertarian economics to Russian Orthodox Christianity. These ideas are all very well, it tells us, but the existential threat to our people demands that they be temporarily subordinated to white nationalism. Thanks to the very inability of WN to get rid of the external threat that justifies it, this cult of biological race becomes permanent – and its claim to temporary priority over other ideas becomes a permanent devaluation of them, ‘smuggled in’ as it were with the Darwinian assumption that truths and principles are tools to be judged on their practicality in the racial struggle for life.
The important point here is not practicality, but the primacy of race over every other idea. If you want first-hand proof of this, just try subjecting the Race Cult to its own ‘sword’, by making the unassailable point that white nationalism itself has failed to pass the is-it-good-for-whites test. The typical response of the cult, as evinced by those commenters, is to shout bad-faith accusations from behind the safety of its ‘shield’ – that is to say, its claim to represent white people and their best interests, which allows it to pre-emptively dismiss all opposition as ‘anti-white’.
This shows, I would say, that we are dealing with a fixed idea (the cult of biological race) masquerading as a practical strategy (white nationalism). At one level, the obssessive monomania of the Race Cult is exactly what it claims to be: a collective reaction to an existential threat. But as experience should have taught us by now, it is a maladaptive and self-defeating reaction – analogous to the blood clot or autoimmune response that brings about death, or the porn addiction of an incel, or the narcissism of a depressive, or the morbid jealousy that suffocates a love relationship.
Let’s settle on a single analogy, and say that white nationalism is a modern-day cargo cult. In this, it resembles mainstream conservatism (which also plays a similar double game of pleading practical utility when it suits it and claiming to represent inviolable abstractions when it doesn’t). Both of these cults are founded on sincere attempts by rightists to preserve the social order in the same way that leftists destroy it: by waging revolution within the liberal democratic system.
The problem is that the system is not truly open or neutral, but rigged in favour of leftism and social destruction. In light of this, the main achievement of the cargo-cults is to make sure that the kulaks and tax-serfs of liberal democracy respond to its depredations by doubling down on their faith in it. And those well-meaning people who join rightist cargo-cults end up in a worse state. Like Faust selling his soul to the Devil, in order to access the infernal powers, they must pledge troth to the religion of the Sovereign People in order to practice mass revolutionary politics.
Of course, every such activist has his chalk line – his unprincipled exception – by which he hopes to prevent this religion from reaching its logical conclusion, i.e. the granting of power and legitimacy to any cause that can rally a majority of ballot-wielding morlocks. So in white nationalism, for example, the sovereignty of the people is commanded to stop at the boundary of the white race. But like a tributary flowing into a river, this eccentric little heresy ultimately feeds into the mainstream democratic religion – in which the sovereignty of the people is universal, and whites are scapegoated as a ‘privileged’ mass-aristocracy, to be crushed between the anvil of the non-white world majority and the Western governing elites acting in their name.
Having learned from both Trumpism and Brexit that rightist political ‘victories’ are all but irrelevant to governance, dissidents should stop bidding for illusory political advantage at the price of compromise with liberal democracy. The pure wish to defend Europeans must be extricated from the white nationalist cargo cult – just as the wish for liberty and moral renewal must be extricated from the the conservative cargo-cult – and injected into a new type of anti-democratic dissidence that is at once more principled and more practical, and that has as its object the complete destruction and replacement of the liberal democratic regime. This new dissidence would seek to defend our people in much the same way that a doctor defends a patient – not by building him an altar, but by getting rid of the cancer that eats away at his life.
This will do as a restatement of my case against white nationalism. Now let’s explain why none of it can possibly persuade a committed white nationalist.
Counter-Semitism: The Negative Manifesto of the Movement
It cannot persuade, of course, because my argument so far has made no mention of the Jewish Question. This really will not do, considering the extent of the Movement obsession with the Jews. In my defence, it comes from my insistence on critiquing white nationalism as if it were any other political philosophy – such as libertarianism, anarchism, Randian objectivism, etc., all of which are assessed on their own truth-claims and positive principles and not by their opposition to anything else.
As a matter of fact, white nationalism does have a manifesto, and there is a body of deeper theoretical work in the Social Darwinist tradition that lays out its philosophy of biological tribalism. As I detailed in my last post, the racial extended family and the ethic of racial loyalty are theorised in Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests, and the dual moral code of helping the ingroup and harming the outgroup is provided with moral and practical justifications in Sir Arthur Keith’s Evolution and Ethics. But what is different about white nationalism, relative to other political philosophies, is that this core theory is given scanty attention and seems to play little role in creating new converts.
Instead, white nationalism tends to make converts by presenting itself as a natural reaction to the behaviour of other races. Take, for example, Jared Taylor’s classic article “What Is Racism?” At no point does this article resort to direct exhortation of whites, although this is clearly the intent of the argument (and it was considered so effective that it used to be appended to the front page of Stormfront). Instead, Taylor simply takes for granted the permanent anti-white race war in democratic politics, and asserts the prerogative of whites to respond in kind.
The result is a negative manifesto, in which description of non-white behaviour serves as indirect exhortation to whites:
“When non-whites advance their own racial purposes, no one ever accuses them of “hating” any other group. Blacks can join “civil rights” groups and Hispanics can be activists without fear of being branded as bigots and hate mongers. They can agitate openly for racial preferences that can come only at the expense of whites. They can demand preferential treatment of all kinds without anyone ever suggesting that they are “anti-white.” … All non-whites are allowed to prefer the company of their own kind, to think of themselves as groups with interests distinct from those of the whole, and to work openly for group advantage.”
But this sort of thing can never be more than a gateway drug. It is capable of drawing in a wide, shallow outer layer of semi-converted people, who want to defend whites at a practical political level – and are liable to quit in frustration when it becomes clear that they cannot do so by cargo-culting non-white race-hustlers. Only at the lowest reaches of white society – skinheads yesterday, ‘wignats’ today – does the Movement find people who are willing to imitate black and brown ghetto tribalism on a permanent basis.
The hard core of biological tribalists in the Movement – who hand down its dogmas like sacred traditions, believe that its victory is forever around the corner, and respond to all criticism with poison and paranoia – have been converted by a more ‘esoteric’ version of the negative manifesto. This we can call the White Nationalist Theory of the Jews – or, more colloquially, the Jewpill.
The Jewpill is simple and effective. Instead of trying to present the ethics of Keith and Salter as a positive ideal for Europeans, it simply attributes those ethics to Jews, and tells Europeans to respond in kind. The Race Cult portrays the Jews as a negative mirror-image of its own ideal for Europeans: a tribe of individual ciphers for collective interests, armed with a fake religion based on self-worship, observing the dual moral code while superficially pretending to conform to universalist principles.
Simultaneously, the Jews are identified as the ultimate motive force behind the progressive movements destroying Western culture. As experience has taught me, the only thing a Jewpiller hates more than someone who doesn’t ‘name the Jew’ is someone who does talk about Jews, but identifies higher motives and structures in progressivism to which Jewish activity is subordinate. This hatred of anything that ‘blames the victim’ or ‘minimises the guilt’ is all part of the negative manifesto: our problems must all be traced to Jewish biological tribalism, so that they can all be solved by European biological tribalism. Knowledge of higher powers than the Jews is as dangerous to the Race Cult as is the knowledge of airstrips and aircraft carriers to a cargo cult.
To use a topical metaphor, if white nationalism were a virus, then the Jewpill would be its viral envelope. When presented in the form of a positive doctrine, such as Salter’s On Genetic Interests, biological tribalism looks weird and comedic at best (“[f]or how many drowning co-ethnics is it adaptive to risk one’s life?”, OGI, p.59-60) and amoral and philistine at worst (“the major religions are…like the mutualistic gut flora that aid in digestion”, OGI, p.103). The mind generates a thousand objections out of its natural resistance to the Procrustean blade and rack of monomania. To overcome and silence them all, the doctrine must hijack the logic of competitive struggle, specifically the hostile mimicry that comes from playing an enemy at his own game.
At first, the conversion to biological tribalism may be a shallow and reluctant one. But once it becomes clear that the imitation of perceived Jewish behaviour isn’t delivering the goods – something that would, ordinarily, lead to scepticism – then it is time for the cult to rush in with its own self-serving explanations for failure. The problem is not that the strategy doesn’t work, or that something is missing in the theory of Jewish political power. No – the problem is that we Europeans are too individualistic by nature, too distracted by universalist delusions. And the solution, naturally, is to double down on biological tribalism. We must throw out Christianity and retvrn to paganism; no, we must make up a new racial religion; no, we must reinterpret all culture and mythology as racial allegory, and extend our paranoia about ‘Jewish influence’ even to Thor and Odin.
The basic gist of this purity-spiralling is that we must sacrifice anything in our culture and individuality that stands at odds with the Race Cult, until the fabled goal of Salterian ‘adaptiveness’ is reached and we can start to take it all back. If lib-prog racial disarmament resembles the Moriori Law of Nunuku, then white-nat race obsession resembles the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of Nongqawuse. Ultimately, both fold into the same general category of millennarian lunacy.
Note that the longer the Movement spends failing to launch at a practical level, the more deeply it can conquer the soul through this ever-increasing devotion to racial monomania. And it need fear no competition from truer or more practical ideologies on the Dissident Right, as long as it can Jewpill its followers into such extremes of paranoia that they never dare go anywhere else.
After all, where are dissatisfied WNs to go? Libertarianism echoes with names like (((Ludwig von Mises))) and (((Murray Rothbard))), and the recent revival of non-democratic reaction is indebted to (((Curtis Yarvin))). Of course, such names can be found everywhere outside the Race Cult itself: even Holocaust revisionism has (((David Cole))), and the founding of the Alt-Right is partially credited to (((Paul Gottfried))). All that this suggests to anyone with common sense is that Jewish intellectuals are relatively numerous these days (whether this is down to high IQ, institutional nepotism, or some combination of both is irrelevant), and are likely find their way into the ranks of major thinkers on the Right despite the fact that the vast majority belong to the Left.
But to a fully Jewpilled white nationalist, every single one of those names in triple brackets is tainted with the dreaded bacillus of ‘Jewish influence’, which he has passed to every single one of his non-Jewish fellows in his movement or school of thought. And it is not good enough to extract the truths from such a tainted source while discarding anything specifically Jewish, because every good Darwinian biological tribalist knows that ideas are just tools and weapons in the racial struggle for life. The only safe option is to reserve your trust for the one political movement that excludes all Jews on a biological basis. This logic is very convenient for the Movement, establishing as it does the only litmus test of bona fides on which its fed-ridden, charlatan-led, dysfunctional activist griftshop could possibly come out looking better than its rivals.
And this well-poisoning trick can be extended as wide as you like, because the West is a post-Christian culture that has not been free from Jewish influence since late antiquity. Every belief-system after paganism is potentially tainted, unless it has been run through the filtering system of the Race Cult and pronounced to be more Aryan than Jewish. Whether or not it is carried to its logical extreme, this sort of thinking creates an ideal mental state for dupes, paypigs and Kool-Aid drinkers: abject intellectual dependence on the cult, defended by ferocious paranoia towards everything outside it.
And with this mental isolation bubble firmly in place around the hardcore Jewpillers, there is only one direction from which dissenting voices might still reach them: the ‘exoteric’ layer of semi-converts to the Movement and fellow travellers in the wider Dissident Right. Unfortunately, these people are all too easily dismissed. If they grow exasperated with the monomania, and try to change the subject, they are accused of cowardly deference to the mainstream taboo on ‘anti-Semitism’. If they make more serious attempts to push back against it, they are accused of pushing some sort of hidden Jewish agenda – for why else would any self-respecting Aryan want to defend the Jews against any accusation at all? The Jews think the worst of you, goy, so why not just think the worst of them? And surely the worst you can think of them is that they are uniformly compelled by biology to seek their tribal interest at your expense. Once you have accepted this proposition, however, you have accepted the Race Cult.
Now, the dissident scene has clearly been devolving into crackpottery over the last few years, and the last thing I want to do is to add to the baseless suspicions wafting around it. But all the same, if Jewpillers are so quick to accuse others of bad faith, then shouldn’t those others start questioning the good faith of the Jewpillers? Sometimes dissidents really are being cowards and pretending not to notice the Jews. And sometimes Jews really are trying to badger dissidents into a philo-Semitic ‘safe space’. But when some Jewpiller crashes into a comment-thread, shrieking about his favourite subject and telling other people that they aren’t discussing it enough, he should be treated as what he is: a propagandist, a cult member, ‘one of those people’, no less than if he had barged in sperging about the Nonaggression Principle or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He should not be allowed to pretend that his negative manifesto is just an objective commentary on relevant facts.
After all, many Jewpillers are more or less aware of what they are doing, as is suggested by the following snippet from the “Daily Stormer Style Guide”:
“[P]eople will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance. So no blaming Enlightenment though[t], pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.”
Chutzpah aside – at least one part of the cargo cult is going well – this is certainly not an instruction to speak the pretty-much-objective truth. It is a sales pitch for the Race Cult and its vehicle, white nationalism: a failed strategy that has sucked up dissident energies and pissed them into the gutter for six decades, and which not five years hence commandeered a brand new rightist movement and drove it off a cliff. Those who devote themselves to this stagnant ideological fetish are not harming the Jews, any more than a bunch of OnlyFans subscribers are fucking their favourite e-thot. The only damage they are doing is to the soul and substance of the Dissident Right.
What’s Wrong With MacDonaldism?
Having said all this, at the end of the day, I’m not inclined to attribute too much conscious manipulative intent to those who propagate the Jewpill. I agree with the Movement that most ‘anti-Semitism’ originates in a response to actual misdeeds by Jews, which are magnified and universalised through the normal human tendency to react more harshly against bad behaviour by outsiders. It is a certain set of ideas that are responsible for turning this reaction into monomania, and thence into a madness that reacts not just against Jews but against most aspects of European culture as well.
Both the facts and the ideas that go into the Jewpill are exemplified in the work of Dr. Kevin MacDonald, who had no intention of taking that pill and becoming the intellectual guru of the Race Cult. He simply began to apply evolutionary psychology to the history of the Jews, and ended up writing The Culture of Critique (hereafter CofC), in which the support of Jews for progressivism is interpreted as a ‘group evolutionary strategy’ that undermines European culture to Jewish advantage.
Recently MacDonald was embroiled in a debate with Nathan Cofnas, who broke the mainstream academic taboo on his work. Much of the content of this debate is quite pedantic and niggling, and revolves around such questions as whether MacDonald overlooked Chomsky or misrepresented Freud on the subject of Zionism and Israel. But those who can be bothered to read through it will find a strong defence of Jews against a straightforward charge of practicing the dual code, in this case by promoting leftist degeneracy for Europeans and the West while reserving ‘evolutionary fitness’ for the Jewish diaspora and Israel. As Cofnas points out, Jews are neither monolithic nor always hypocritical in their opinions, and their own community is far from immune to the leftist social poisons spread by Jewish intellectuals.
But I would not say that Cofnas succeeds in explaining away Jewish leftism by his ‘default hypothesis’ – which is simply that Jews, being highly intelligent and urbanised on average, are likely to be overrepresented in any political or intellectual movement that does not drive them away with anti-Semitism. This theory treats the tendency to anti-Semitism on the Right as some sort of independent variable, like leprosy, when it ought rather to be seen as an artefact of the social-political struggle that has sorted so many Jews onto the Left. And it throws out, in the name of ‘parsimony’, an important grain of truth in MacDonald’s theory: the fact that there is little love lost between a dominant culture and a population of ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’, and that the latter are more susceptible to radical siren-songs that promise to upend that culture.
Thus, I’m prepared to grant MacDonald the factual content of CofC: the overrepresentation of Jews in socially-destructive modern leftist movements, and the existence of some vital connection between their leftism and their Jewish identity. My sole objection is to the theory into which he seeks to fit those facts. To get a handle on this theory, we must go back to the first two books in his trilogy on the Jews, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (PTSDA) and Separation And Its Discontents (SAID).
PTSDA is about the premodern Jewish religious tradition, and originates the overarching idea of the trilogy, i.e. ‘Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy’. This straightaway poses a problem, because MacDonald is writing from more or less the same frame of reference as Salter, for whom religions are “tools serving the organism” that exist to “organize adherents into ‘adaptive units'” (OGI, p.99/102). In theory, there is no reason why evolutionary psychologists should not study religion from this materialistic viewpoint, while respecting the fact that most historical religious adherents did not share it. MacDonald doesn’t manage to do this, though:
“For the Israelites, there was really only one purpose for God – to represent the idea of kinship, ingroup membership, and separateness from others. … In a very real sense, one may say that the Jewish god is really neither more nor less than Ezra’s “holy seed” – the genetic material of the upper-class Israelites who were exiled to Babylon. … Israel’s God is thus spiritual [!] and can be understood as a representation of the continuation of the kinship group…[the] oppressors [of Israel] could never destroy the Israelite God. Only the destruction of the Israelites themselves could accomplish that.” (PTSDA, pp.64-66, my emphasis)
This is a perfect inversion of the theology of the Old Testament, in which God is anterior to Man, and the reason-for-being of the Jewish people is nothing but the fulfilment of its covenant with God. In MacDonald’s view, Man is anterior to God; God is dependent on Man; and Jewish religion exists for the sake of Semitic flesh and blood. Please do not assume that any of this stands upon detailed Biblical (or Talmudic, or Kabbalic) analyses omitted by me. What you see is what you get; MacDonald, writing in the ‘Darwinian fairytale’ tradition, simply decides to project a modern and atheistic idolatry of genes onto the ancient Jews from the very beginning of his study.
But the focus of his study isn’t Jewish theology or the ancient Jews, so what does it matter? Well, I would say that this ‘interpretative framework’ – to put it as charitably as possible – consistently distorts the tissue of facts and argumentation that MacDonald goes on to bend around it. Because his core theory about the Jewish religion flies in the face of what premodern Jews actually believed, he must find serpentine calculation in things that look more straightforward from a religious point of view. His favourite recourse is to the concept of “self-deception”, which becomes the precarious linchpin of the theory by the time we reach SAID and CofC.
Take the fourth chapter of PTSDA, in which MacDonald questions whether historical Judaism was morally universalist and whether it welcomed converts. He reminds us at the start that this is an important point for this theory: “in order to qualify as an evolutionary strategy, genetic segregation must be actively maintained by the strategising group.” (p.85) Not surprisingly, he goes on to dismiss the notion that Jews tried to convert gentiles in the ancient world, and retreated into separatism after failing to attract enough adherents. Now, I can’t say whether the ancient Jews did or did not “compass sea and land to make one proselyte” (Matthew 23:15); the only thing evident to me about this question is the way in which MacDonald begs it:
“We must then suppose that only a pure sense of religious idealism prevented the Jews from abandoning this [proselytising] strategy once it failed in its universalist aims, even though failure to abandon genetic and cultural segregation resulted repeatedly in resource and reproductive competition…between genetically segregated groups. [MacDonald’s emphasis] … At a very basic, common-sense level, such a view is extremely difficult to accept. … [I]f Jews wanted to avoid resource and reproductive competition based on…genetic segregation…an obvious solution would be to adopt the religion of the host society …
“From an evolutionary perspective…one is left to conclude that this Jewish sense of moral and religious idealism, which results in genetic segregation, is in fact a mask for a self-interested evolutionary strategy aimed at promoting the interests of a kinship group that maintains its genetic integrity during a diaspora.
“[O]ne might suppose that part of this strategy would be to prohibit conversion entirely… [but] Judaism perceived a need to present itself in intellectually defensible terms. … Social identity researchers have also emphasized the point that it is often in a group’s interest to attempt to foster perceptions of group permeability even when actual permeability may be minimal or non-existent… One might therefore reformulate the ideal strategy for Judaism as a fairly closed group evolutionary strategy as follows: Allow converts and intermarriage at a formal theoretical level, but minimize them in practice.” (PTSDA, pp.94-97)
None of these conjectures make much sense except through MacDonald’s evo-psych lens, in which religious motives appear as so much insubstantial flim-flam. “Adopt the religion of the host society” – this decision is not so simple when you are strategising to get into Paradise, and have doubts as to whether the dominant religion will get you there! When a minority believes that it is right, and that the majority is wrong, then how does its decision to erect its barriers and hold to its own path contradict moral idealism or universalism? To draw a materialistic analogy, when the Kuomintang lost the Chinese mainland to the Communists and ended up creating a separate ‘Taiwanese’ country, was this some sort of teleological conclusion of their military strategy? Was it proof that they didn’t really want to control the rest of China?
When MacDonald then goes on to review the factual evidence, he employs questionable argumentation to shoehorn it into his theory. For example, immediately after interpreting an anti-convert statement in the Talmud as “indicat[ing] hostility” (p.102), he goes on to interpret a pro-convert statement as “evidence that actual Jewish attitudes towards converts were often negative so that there was a need to remind the Jewish community to be friendly towards them” (p.104). Despite this less-than-fair play, he makes a strong case to the effect that converts were subjected to ethnic discrimination in mediaeval Jewish society. But Christians of the time also held disparaging ethnic views of Jews, and subjected Jewish converts to suspicion – none of which means that this conversion was not desired, or not considered to trump racial differences in principle.
What MacDonald really lacks is proper historical attention to the nature of the Jewish religion – which tends to get lost in all his writing about endogamy, identity, xenophobia, and other evolutionary issues. Traditional Judaism demands life-consuming adherence to a complex religious law, derived from intellectual mastery of a massive corpus of writings. It stands to reason that any religious community whose claim to sanctity stood on such practices would “repulse [converts] with the left hand and draw [them] near with the right” (quoted on p.99), not out of confusion or self-deception but out of a desire to avoid importing laxity and ignorance. It would seem that the difficulty of following Jewish law has always been a major barrier to converts, which is why the ancient world contained a halfway-house of ‘God-fearers’ who believed in the Jewish religion but could not practice it.
But did the Jews insist on Jewish law as a means of maintaining ethnic purity? Or was ethnic tribalism solidified by the segregation needed to follow Jewish law? There is no answering such a question, but we might shed some light on it by turning to the seventh chapter of PTSDA, which describes the “ecological strategy” by which mediaeval Jewish society was geared to the production of intellectual elites. Why did Jews grant such reverence to scholars? Why was “an illiterate amorets (from ‘am ha-ares, meaning ignoramus…)…at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy, despised as not really being a complete Jew” (pp.273-4)? MacDonald gives no answer. But since mediaeval Jews could not have foreseen the transformation of the world into an urbanised bureaucracy, or the ascendancy of their secularised descendants within it, we must conclude that they were ‘strategising’ to fulfil religious ideals that required intellectual ability.
All of this illustrates, I think, that the word evolutionary begs the question as to the ultimate object of a group strategy. Although MacDonald gives a very wide definition of the term group evolutionary strategy (in PTSDA, p.27), what we gather from his actual usage is that the term refers to 1) a relatively genetically-segregated group with 2) a distinct group identity. The historical groups to which he applies it include the Spartans, the Indian Brahmins, the Amish, and the New England Puritans (in Diaspora Peoples, an article appended to PTSDA) before their loss of cultural segregation in the early waves of immigration to America. We get the impression early on that the term is just a convenient category into which almost any distinct group can be thrown.
But it would seem that there are hidden criteria, subtly indicated by the fact that MacDonald never attributes a distinct group evolutionary strategy to gentile elites (unless they are mirroring the ethnocentric Jewish strategy, e.g. in late-mediaeval Spain or Nazi Germany, a major theme of SAID). When he discusses alliances between Jews and gentile elites – such as the usury and tax-farming that enriched both these groups at the expense of mediaeval peasants and artisans – it is always the Jews who are ‘strategising’, whereas the gentile elites are ‘individualists’ defecting from the wider gentile group strategy. To take a typical example, he says in PTSDA (p.376) that “the Spanish and Polish nobility protected the Jews and allowed them to compete economically with the lower orders of their own people. Such behaviour is individualist in the sense that the nobility is utilising the Jews in a self-serving manner that compromises the interest of the lower orders.”
Whence comes this blind spot? Well, I would guess that MacDonald sees gentile elites and commoners as a single ethnic group, and can see no evolutionary reason for such a group to oppress itself – ergo, there must be nothing to see here but ‘muh individualism’. But to expose this reasoning to the light of day is to show how fragile it is. Elites tend to separate themselves from commoners both culturally and genetically, thus we have a distinct group; and in the form of wealth and power we surely have sufficient object for a strategy. And the argument becomes much more compelling in the event that some self-defining idea is bound up with an elite group strategy – such as Sarmatism and Golden Liberty in the case of the Polish nobility, or revolutionary secular religions in the case of modern Western elites.
None of this logic is at all beyond the ken of MacDonald, but he consistently rejects it out of hand. In CofC, he sums up the ideal Western gentile group strategy as a “social organization of hierarchic harmony” that is nonetheless “inherently unstable” (CofC, p.318). This self-contradictory language suggests to me that he is mixing up disparate elements, like oil and water, under a misperception of common identity. But perhaps it’s best to let him speak for himself:
“The most common threat to hierarchic harmony has been the individualistic behaviour of elites – a tendency that hardly surprises an evolutionist. Thus the early phases of industrialization were characterized by the unravelling of the social fabric and high levels of exploitation and conflict among the social classes. As another example, the slavery of Africans was a short term benefit to an individualistic elite of southern aristocrats in the United States [!], but it resulted in the exploitation of the slaves and has been a long-term calamity for the society as a whole. We have also seen that Western elites in traditional societies have often actively encouraged Jewish economic interests to the detriment of other sectors of the native population… Recently, writers such as Peter Brimelow…and Paul Gottfried…have called attention to an elite “New Class” of internationalists who are opposed to the nation-state based on ethnic ties and highly favourable to immigration that decreases the ethnic homogeneity of traditional societies. The self-interest of this group is to cooperate with similar individuals [!] in other countries rather than to identify with the lower levels of their own society . Although this type of internationalism is highly congruent with a Jewish ethic agenda – and Jews are undoubtedly disproportionately represented among this group, gentile members of the New Class must be seen as pursuing a narrowly individualistic agenda.” (CofC, p.319, my emphasis)
No further reasoning is provided to justify that last line; what you see is what you get. Jewpillers ought to muse long and hard on this paragraph before ever again accusing others of ignoring what is right in front of their eyes. But presumably MacDonald is just focusing too hard on the Jews, who in his perception never stop strategising, just as gentile elites never start.
Given that PTSDA describes the premodern Jewish group strategy as being consciously designed, and contained in Jewish religious texts (see chapter 8, esp. pp.394-6), the transition to the modern era in SAID and CofC would seem to present a tricky theoretical jump. How can secularised Jews, who have lost all but a vestige of the Talmud, Torah, Jewish law, etc., continue to pursue the same group evolutionary strategy? How can they pursue any group evolutionary strategy at all, at least according to MacDonald’s segregationist usage of the term, when “in the period from 1985 to 1990, 52 percent of Jews married a gentile who remained unconverted” (SAID, p.319)?
Well, in the last chapter of SAID, MacDonald sets out to square this circle by subjecting his theory to logical torture. He piles up evidence that the Jews are engaging in all the modern dysgenic behaviour that is destroying ethnic cohesion among gentile whites, while constantly assuring us that this is fine, and that the Jewish evolutionary strategy is okay with the events that are unfolding currently. There really is no substitute for reading it in full, but here are a few highlights (all from SAID, pp.320-7, my emphasis):
“Interestingly, non-conversionary marriages [i.e. in which a Jew marries a non-converted gentile] are much more common in second and third marriages…suggesting a strategy [!] in which Jews begin their reproductive careers with inmarriage to a Jewish partner followed by an outmarriage to an unconverted gentile….significant percentages of Jews are “having their cake and eating it too” by entering an endogamous marriage yielding ethnically Jewish children followed by outmarriage…
Surely it borders on self-parody to describe the breakup of Jewish families as a ‘strategy’. And the trend of subsequent outmarriage to gentiles would seem to indicate that Jews are trying, failing and eventually giving up on traditional Jewish marriage.
“Lieberman and Weinfeld also point out that low fertility amongst the most assimilated sectors of the Jewish community…is highly adaptive [!] because it is associated with high-investment parenting, upward social mobility, and wealth… Low fertility helps perpetuate middle class status for Jews… Judaism is a high-investment, high-intelligence reproductive strategy, which in the modern world implies low fertility…
So the most intelligent and successful Jews are having the fewest children, and reversing the mediaeval Jewish fertility pattern described in PTSDA as evolutionarily strategic. But this isn’t “extremely dysgenic because high fertility tends to terminate middle-class status”, it’s “highly adaptive because low fertility helps perpetuate middle class status”!
“I conclude that…Judaism may well end up retaining its ethnic coherence even in the face of high levels of intermarriage if, as appears to be the case, a high percentage of the children and grandchildren of intermarriage eventually leave Judaism either because they become completely assimilated or because they feel unwelcome in the Jewish community.”
So the seed of the Jews is being dissipated among the gentiles – but that’s okay, things are going to be okay, because only the purest and most committed Jews will be left. This is a bit like saying that an army would be strengthened by the loss of most of its men on campaign, because only the toughest elite soldiers would be left. This logic may well be ‘evolutionary’, but it isn’t very ‘strategic’, at least not for any group afflicted by low fertility and high intermarriage.
In light of all this, we can now examine the famous idea outlined in the first chapter of CofC: that Jews have a collective interest in subverting gentile power structures and diluting gentile ethnic cohesion, because a weak and loose gentile social order presents fewer dangers to themselves. This is a powerful idea because there is an unmistakeable kernel of truth in it. These words of Jewish intellectual Earl Raab expose what would seem to be a common Jewish train of thought:
“The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible…” (quoted in CofC, p.244; my emphasis)
But the more we consider this sentiment, the more we come to realise that something is missing in MacDonald’s explanation of it. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in America is one of the most philo-Semitic in history, and has surely advanced Jews much more than it has restricted them. Yet Jewish subversion works to undermine it in favour of a protean leftist coalition composed of Catholics, Muslims, blacks, East Asians, etc., i.e. peoples either hostile or indifferent to Jews. Even MacDonald says that the anti-Zionist sentiment of non-white leftists represents a “cloud on the horizon” for Jewish power, although he gives his usual rationalising explanations for why this is all part of the evolutionary strategy.
Add to this the fact that modern Jews are succumbing to all the dysgenic and multiculturalist poisons, and we begin to understand that ‘Jewish interests’ is quite a nebulous and subjective concept. Beyond a basic threshold of survival, easily attainable in the modern world, such perceived group interests are largely determined by the context of political power and religious authority. Modern Jews perceive a Jewish group interest in importing anti-Semitism, just as modern women perceive a female group interest in becoming childless drug-addled freemartins, and modern dissidents perceive a white male group interest in self-defeating thumotic masturbation. But these perceptions are not natural outgrowths of evolutionary strategies; they are determined by the power and authority of liberal democracy, which may be able to push everyone’s buttons, but ought not to be believed when it claims to be in everyone’s interest.
The Non-Democratic Theory of the Culture of Critique
In his pro-WN summary of the Cofnas-MacDonald debate, Spencer Quinn rightly concludes that the ‘group evolutionary strategy’ argument isn’t really necessary to CofC. That is to say, it may be necessary for MacDonald’s thesis; but the real value of the book to white nationalists comes from its factual analysis, which demonstrates heavy Jewish involvement in subversive leftist movements. As long as Cofnas’s ‘default hypothesis’ doesn’t explain this away – and I basically agree with Quinn that it doesn’t – MacDonald’s core theory could be entirely detonated, and the facts about Jewish subversion would simply float in the idea-space of the Dissident Right until they coalesced around a different theory.
Therefore, it is time for us to switch to a different tack, and provide that alternative theory. We don’t have to look very far, because just such a theory emerges with compelling force from the pure factual material presented by MacDonald, and links the beginning, middle and end of his trilogy in a way that his original theory does not. It’s not a theory that the Jews dindu nuffin, but it does break the link between their actions and the core presumption of the Jewpill: that biological tribalism is the only real problem and thus the only possible solution.
By way of introduction, let’s go to the “Preface to the First Paperback Edition” of CofC, in which MacDonald explains the change in his attitude to the Jews over the course of his study:
“I think there is a noticeable shift in my tone from the first book to the third simply because (I’d like to think) I knew a lot more and had read a lot more. People often say after reading the first book that they think I really admire Jews, but they are unlikely to say that about the last two and especially about CofC. That is because when I wrote CofC I had changed greatly from the person who wrote the first book. … Resource competition and other conflicts of interest with other groups are more or less an afterthought [in PTSDA], but these issues move to the foreground in [SAID], and in CofC I look exclusively at the 20th century in the West.”
Far be it from me to read the mind of an evolutionary psychologist, but I think there might be something more to it. PTSDA devotes its whole fifth chapter to “resource and reproductive competition between Jews and gentiles”, including such things as Jewish tax-farming and usury at crushing rates of interest, and anticipates at least some of the arguments of CofC (in pp.195-7, describing Jewish over-representation in the 20th-century American elite). Obviously, a certain emotional detachment is lost in the shift of focus from the premodern era to the 20th century, but that is not all. What MacDonald really loses sight of in SAID and CofC is one of the most important historical themes of PTSDA: the unequal alliance between gentile power-holders and the Jews under their protection.
Indeed, as we gather from PTSDA alone, this alliance recurs so frequently and in so many disparate cultures and time periods that it ought to have been a central theoretical pillar of CofC. MacDonald finds it in the relations of kings to Jews (“in medieval England, the Jewish population was utilised as a source of revenue for the king”, p.172), and of Jews to kings (“laws on Jewish informers generally prohibited actions that would benefit Christians. The exception, however, was the king”, p.203). He finds it in the relations of Jews and aristocrats (“[t]he Polish nobility welcomed the Jews as estate managers and toll farmers, bankers, and moneylenders”, p.185). Outside Europe, he finds it in Muslim despotisms and European colonial governments (“in the Muslim world…foreign rulers used Jews as intermediaries over subject populations”, and “in 20th century Morocco, [the Jews] formed a layer between the colonial government and the Muslim population”, p.174). Finally, he has no qualms about finding it in the modern Soviet Empire: “in the post-World War II era Jews were useful to the Soviets in establishing anti-popular satellite governments in Eastern Europe” (p.174).
When he discusses the history of anti-Semitism in SAID, MacDonald notes that these power-holders often unilaterally abrogated their alliance with the Jews, usually after beginning to suspect their loyalty or establishing more harmonious relations with the rest of their subjects. He finds that the Mongol and Ottoman dynasties disprivileged the Jews after becoming “more assimilated to the native population” (p.37), and that mediaeval kings like Philip Augustus of France “despoiled the Jews and expelled them” under the influence of the Catholic Church (p.49). In the third chapter of CofC, which addresses the Jewish role in Soviet communism, he notes that Stalin sharply reversed the Soviet policy of favouring the Jews in the 1950s (p.99) and that a similar turn against the Jews took place in Poland in the 1960s (p.100).
All of this shows, first and foremost, that the non-Jewish power-holders were the senior partners in these alliances and reserved the prerogative to throw the Jews under the bus. But it’s also possible to formulate a general principle from these facts, which might be roughly sketched as follows: an ‘alien’, ‘unassimilated’, or ‘insecure’ ruling elite will tend to utilise outsiders and foreigners as loyal agents against the resentful majority of its population. This arises purely and simply from the exigencies of mobilising people to take hostile action against others; conversely, when a ruling elite mobilises the dominant ethnic group in hostile action against foreigners, it will tend to promote an ideology of nationalistic solidarity.
It is appropriate to speak of general principles, because the Jews are not the only group in history that has found itself riding this unstable wheel of fortune turned by power. At this point we hardly need mention the mamluks in Fatimid Egypt, the janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, the Germans in Tsarist Russia, the Central Asian nomads and Muslims in Mongol China, and – for that matter – the Chinese cukong organisations in modern Southeast Asia described by MacDonald in Diaspora Peoples. The more antagonism between a government and the majority of its people, the more demand for outsiders and foreigners who can form a buffering layer between the two.
This holds true for the early Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, so often misrepresented by Jewpillers as being more Jewish than it actually was. All “formerly oppressed nationalities” excluding the Russians were privileged by the government, and in the brutal Cheka secret police, the most overrepresented group was not the Jews but the Latvians (see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p.247 and p.177). Conversely, when the later Soviet government turned against the Jews under Stalin, this followed a general crackdown on minority nationalities that involved mass deportations and execution quotas (Slezkine, p.274). All of this accords quite well with our general principle – for the communists were effectively an ‘alien’ ruling elite when they were inflicting the revolutionary secular religion on Russia, whereas by the end of the war against Germany they had largely made their peace with Russian patriotism and the social order.
At this point we can better imagine the intellectual dilemma that might have faced MacDonald when he turned to write 20th-century Western history in CofC. Having begun his study of the Jews as a true-believing democratic conservative (“a sort of ex-radical turned moderate Republican fan of George Will”, according to the aforementioned preface to CofC), he had made a disturbing discovery: that modern Western democracy, theoretically a government of the people by the people, exhibits a political mechanism much more typical of governments ruled by Oriental despots, alien ruling elites and murderous totalitarian revolutionaries.
Wat do? Well, on the one hand, he might have sidetracked his thesis into strange, nebulous, unrelated vistas of political theory, and ended up losing his faith in democracy. On the other hand, he had the option to stay on-topic and go on attributing more and more strategic omnipotence and deceptive machinations to the Jews (necessary, of course, to account for the weakness of the populist, majoritarian ideology that ought to dominate liberal democracy according to its own theory of itself), and so cling onto his pew in the democratic church at the price of becoming a persecuted heretic. Redpill or Jewpill? Obviously, he chose the latter – not the easier option, by any means, but the hard way of fidelity to his ideological Dulcinea.
This is just fanfiction, of course. But it is true to say that MacDonald has a deep attachment to liberal democracy, which he accepts as a natural outgrowth of European culture, and never subjects to fundamental questioning in the same way as Biblical religion or Jewish ‘self-deception’. Take a laugh at this graph (shown in CofC, “Preface to the First Paperback Edition”, p.xxxi):
It’s all very well to argue that democracy, republicanism and individualism (i.e. liberalism) are specific to Western culture. But MacDonald in CofC projects them onto Europeans at a racial level, despite the fact that they have not been anything like the norm for most of our history. The idea of universal-suffrage democracy is revolutionary and unprecedented, and the ongoing racial suicide of Europe is more or less coterminous with its ascendancy. If you can imagine Russians of a hundred years ago believing that communism was a benign natural outgrowth of the mir system, but that those scheming Jews and diabolical Latvians were twisting it into something tyrannical, then you can understand how hard MacDonald is coping here as he struggles to blame democracy’s evils on a suitably foreign agent.
MacDonald also seems to believe that democracy is basically what it says it is: a passive and neutral state, pulled this way and that by aimless voting blocs and volatile public opinion trends, threatened in its anarchy only by the propensity of ‘collectivist cultures’ to show up and game the system. Take his brief overview of the US political situation in the 1930s (in pages xii-xv of the “Preface…” to CofC). When he describes the Jewish effort to press for war with Germany, and the marginalisation of those who wanted isolationism or alliance with Hitler, we hear a lot about “decline of ethnic consciousness” and “change in attitude” and even “Jewish influence on the media and government” – but no hint is given that the American state might have had its own vested interest in allying with Soviet Russia and conquering Europe from the Germans, as opposed to allying with Nazi Germany and conquering Siberia from the Soviets. When he alights, oh-so-briefly, on FDR – a visionary who pulled off a power-grab comparable to that of Hitler and Mussolini, and manouevred the US into a wildly successful war of world conquest – he attributes zero personal agency to the great man, and instead speculates about malign Semitic influences coming from Jewish advisors (that he appointed!) and the Zionist lobby (which did not even have a formal state at the time).
Finally, MacDonald is just as credulous on the supposed unity of interests between white elites and commoners – which is, of course, just another aspect of liberal democratic propaganda. He says (in CofC, “Preface…”, pxx) that prior to rise of a “hostile, adversary elite” in the 1960s, “the old Protestant elite was not at war with the country it dominated” because they “saw themselves and Christians and Europeans, and…didn’t see the need for radically changing the society.” Presumably, 20th-century Protestants had fully recovered from their hostile and adversary elitism of the previous century, which led them to literally go to war with other Christians and Europeans in order to radically change the society. And this despite the fact that the ‘Reconstruction’ of the South, which took place before the late-19th century mass Jewish immigration to the North and was opposed by Southern Jews, pioneered the technique of black empowerment against whites that would later characterise the ‘Civil Rights’ movement.
What happened to all that Protestant radicalism? Well, nothing at all, except that it got more radical. By the early 20th century, progressive liberalism was in full swing among white American elites, and the Protestant churches were splitting into a retrenched conservative ‘fundamentalism’ and a victorious progressivist ‘modernism’. In our time, of course, white progressives have abandoned all but a vestige of the Christian heritage – but if Jews can abandon God, the Torah, the Talmud and almost everything else about the Jewish religion and yet remain in some sense ‘Jewish’, then there is nothing but wordplay in MacDonald’s dismissal of a native ‘Protestant’ impetus to revolution.
At least one of the books cited in CofC – The Fatal Embrace by Benjamin Ginsberg – ought to have shaken MacDonald’s faith in liberal democracy and huwhite racial unity. Ginsberg starts by laying out the history of the ‘fatal embrace’ between Jews and the state, which tends to cultivate the Jews as its own loyal agents before abandoning them to popular anti-Semitism. He then goes on to apply the model to 20th-century American history. He explains how Jewish journalists, intellectuals and politicians helped the Progressive movement establish the power of the bureaucracy (pp.92-3), and how Jewish lawyers, politicians and civil service appointees played a similar role in expanding that power via the New Deal (pp.104-8). This deployment of Jews as loyal outsiders by centralising, power-grabbing elites is entirely consistent with the historical patterns identified in PTSDA.
But it is MacDonald’s position that sets the tone for CofC – the bulk of which simply examines various strands of the New Left and points out the Jewish connections and motivations. As I’ve said, I don’t dispute any of this at a factual level; the problem lies in the assumption that all of it took place in a basically free, open political market, as opposed to a centralised totalitarian empire that was already dominated by a native revolutionary elite. If memory serves, MacDonald says nothing about the role of central government and the CIA in promoting Trotskyism and the New Left, nor about the wider international context in which the US (like Maoist China) was striving to wrest the mantle of world revolution from an increasingly conservative Soviet Empire. Even the 1965 reversal of the 1921 immigration restriction (on which MacDonald’s case for Jewish motives is strongest) has to be seen in this wider context: the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919-20, in which conservative isolationism briefly prevailed, versus the post-World War II expansionist vigour of the American Empire and its rivalry with the Soviet Empire for the allegiance of the Third World.
It is this selective blindness resulting from the ‘evolutionary perspective’ – and not any new facts about Jewish overrepresentation in the Left – that makes CofC so useful to Jewpillers pushing the negative manifesto of white nationalism. All WNs must believe in liberal democracy, even if only to the point of misconstruing it as a weak Weimar-like system that might be overthrown by conventional fascist tactics. They must believe that the white ruling class and subject populace are basically one group, divided only by individualism and Jewish influence, because a distinction between Demos and People would contradict their own dogma that identity comes from biological race. And as we know by now, they must believe that the Jews took power through a group strategy of racial tribalism, fake religion and self-serving morality, because this is a mirror-image of the white nationalist group strategy for taking power.
Postscript: MacDonald Against The Jewpill
To be fair to MacDonald, he didn’t set out to write this sort of agitprop, and his more recent work corrects a lot of his early blind spots on the deeper causes of Western degeneracy. Nothing in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is intended to contradict the previous books; one might say that, if CofC argues that Jewish influence is the ‘virus’ destroying European culture, then this book tries to explain the ‘immunodeficiency’ of that culture. But once again, the factual material lends itself to a reading that grants more agency to native Western elites.
In the first three chapters of the book, MacDonald revises his views on the racial origins of individualism, democracy, and republicanism. He divides the founding European stock into three distinct groups, and attributes “egalitarian individualism” to the oldest group: Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHGs), especially the ones in Scandinavia, who developed a kind of social organisation with relatively low emphasis on extended kinship. I found this idea quite fascinating, because it suggests that modern Western democratic and communistic movements represent a kind of atavistic decadence, akin to the old age that echoes and parodies childhood.
The rest of IATWLT discusses Western religious movements that lent helping hands to this resurgent primordial tendency: first mediaeval Catholicism, then Anglo-American Puritanism, and finally such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism that sparked off from Puritanism in the United States. Although MacDonald evidently thinks all of this is consistent with his previous work, the dissonance is never far from the surface. Here are a few brief examples:
“The [mediaeval Catholic] Church…projected the image of chastity and altruism while assiduously pursuing power over secular elites. Its power and wealth were not directed at reproductive success. Reform of the sexual behaviour of the clergy was real… Married clergy even at lower levels were exceptional during this period in England, and low levels of clerical incontinence continued into the Reformation.” (p.182; my emphasis)
Here we have a ‘tribe’ with a strong collective identity and a successful capacity to strategise, yet its activities cannot possibly be directed to evolutionary ends because all of its members are celibate. Surely the concept of ‘reproductive altruism’ is woefully inadequate to the task of understanding it, and it would be better to simply admit the possibility of non-evolutionary group strategies.
“Nineteenth-century American intellectuals tended to have what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “double consciousness” – a tendency to think of America as committed to a non-racial liberal liberal cosmopolitanism as well as a tendency to identify strongly with their Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. This fits with individualism because the ethnic tendency is to assimilate others rather than to erect strong ethnic boundaries.” (p.268)
‘Double consciousness’ in 19th-century Anglos sounds a lot like ‘self-deception’ in 20th-century Jews, a concept that MacDonald employs in CofC whenever he comes across a Jew who mixes universalism with ethnocentric sentiments. The common ground, I would suggest, is the consciousness of belonging to a race that stands in the vanguard of revolution – but revolution tends to win out whenever it comes into conflict with a racial identity that has been shackled to it. Though you may dispute that this is happening to the Jews in our own time, in this case too it would seem that “the ethnic tendency is to assimilate others”, at least if those Jewish outmarriage rates in SAID are anything to go by.
“Beginning in the late nineteenth century, WASP intellectuals began interacting and making alliance with first- and second-generation immigrant Jewish intellectuals… Ultimately, the leftist intellectual scene…became dominated by Jewish intellectuals…” (p. 282)
That may or may not be so (Dewey? Rawls? Foucault?), but in any case, whose ideas were those Jewish intellectuals propagating? If we are to understand “leftism” as egalitarianism, individualism, democracy, etc., then by MacDonald’s own lights these ideas have no basis in Jewish racial heritage at all. It was the Anglo elites in transition between Puritanism and Progressivism who converted the Jews to their religion, not the other way around.
“My view is that the moral communities observed at the origins of Western history and surfacing recurrently in later centuries tap into a pre-existing tendency among individualists to create such communities as a force for cohesion that does not rely on kinship relations. … Beginning after World War II and accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter, these moral communities have been defined by the intellectual left…to the point at which academic departments and scholarly associations…can be accurately described as “tribal moral communities” [!] in the sense of Jonathan Haidt. … The negatively evaluated outgroup need not be defined by kinship…” (pp.374-6; my emphasis)
By this point MacDonald’s argument is chafing against the whole concept of individualism as he conceives it. A moral community is nonetheless a community, just as a gas is no less a substance than a liquid. As he says, “these cultures may exert strong controls on individual behaviour to ensure conformity to the norms of a moral community” (p.455). And the identity of a moral community comes from its ideas and institutions and ideas, so it can preserve a viable ingroup while recruiting members from different biological communities (see the example of the Catholic Church, which recruited its members from all three of MacDonald’s fundamental European groups). Once the ‘Puritan-Protestant-Progressive’ tradition is identified as a more or less continuous moral community, which dominated America from its founding and which allied with (and largely converted) the Jews, then the focus on Jews as a causal agent collapses and MacDonald’s work no longer supports the Jewpill.
But the nature of that ‘moral community’ would be best explored in the language of religion, rather than in concepts and metaphors repurposed from biological evolution. And that makes it a more fitting subject for the concluding part of this post, in which we will look at a religious variant of the Jewpill.
https://www.unz.com/article/an-antidote-to-the-jewpill-part-i-group-evolutionary-strategy/
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