Meritocracy as Social-Darwinist Dystopia

If you haven’t yet read Charles Murray’s piece on “educational romanticism”, do read it now. You might also be interested in Rod Dreher’s commentary on it here and here.

Dreher points out — citing Christopher Lasch – that Murray’s ideas really mean that a “meritocracy” is a social-Darwinist nightmare for many. The leaders in a meritocracy, Lasch has written, “retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.” I might be able to make it fine in a meritocracy, but the way I’ve been raised, I just think it would be deeply wrong to leave the less intelligent members of my family behind.

Earlier this week, a hit-and-run commenter left an obscene and snarky comment on my thread on “Jewish Power and Fairness”, which I deleted. Such an uncivil comment didn’t deserve to see the light of day, even if it had not violated my policy on profanity. But basically the question was, “Why don’t you just get educated and stop complaining about people who out-compete you?”

Well, first of all, I don’t know why anyone would take me as totally uneducated, but one reason is that I would like to enjoy life more than I ever would if I just made life into a ruthless competition. But more than that, I just identify with the people who don’t like the rat race, and who just want to make a decent living without being brutally competitive. My mother’s side of the family tends to be conservative, but uncompetitive and politically quietist. In a sense it continues to be agrarian in outlook, even though most of it is no longer on the farm. Many still do things like sewing their own clothes. My father’s side (with the notable partial exception of my father himself) tends to be liberal, aggressive, and competitive. My mother’s family preserves my basic values; my father’s family doesn’t. If only people like my father’s family prosper, then my values tend to die out. If society is a social-Darwinist competition, a type of person with whom I have nothing in common is going to win out.

The rat race is morally degrading, too. It legitimizes all kinds of social aggression, whereas I prefer to deal with people who aren’t constantly trying to take advantage of each other. Every social relationship is brutalized. Instead of that, I’d like to see a world where people like I can continue to live in dignity even if I lived as simply as my grandfather. Dreher’s Crunchy Cons inspired me because I saw my own family in it, as somewhat the perfect family from that kind of perspective before it became uprooted from its home. From the perspective of “simple living”, there were tens of millions of conservative Middle Americans living that way all the time, whereas few liberals made of “simple living” anything other than a romantic fantasy. One of the biggest liberal lies was that conservatives were consumerist and liberals weren’t. It was in part my realization of that lie, from reading Lasch among others, that drove me to be a traditionalist.

Hopefully that will explain why I’m not a big fan of total meritocracy, though if “meritocracy” can be used as a weapon against racial preferences, I suppose I understand why many conservatives find it appealing.

Update: More at What’s Wrong with the World.

Why Obamacons, Not Hillarycons?

Vanishing American has rebutted Richard Spencer’s weak “Obamacon” argument that relies on antiwar conservatives being thought of as a kind of “swing vote”. I thought it would be obvious that Spencer is not arguing from a truly “nationalist” or pro-white point of view, but more of an antiwar one.

If that’s not clear, one may refer to Spencer’s prior article with its categorization of “Obamacon” arguments, not all of which are as weak as Spencer’s own. In support of the argument from “White Pride Delirium”, he links to a thread at Vanguard News Network. Now TakiMag obviously doesn’t link to white nationalist sites — especially something as hardcore as VNN – for any other purpose than to say, “This is what the real kooks think.” Spencer could have linked to a somewhat more “civilized” source, like AmRen, where similar but better-presented arguments had been put forth, but he linked to VNN, where none of the commenters on the linked thread could write a correct paragraph.

Moving on, VA asks why “Hillarycons” have not been visible. Well, Hillary locks us into the same Clinton vs. Bush polarization that has gone on, where conservatives can blame all problems on the Clintons personally, while avoiding the more fundamental issues, particularly race. Obama puts a black face in front of us, day in and day out, as the representative of liberalism. True, there are “Hillarycons” who wanted Hillary to win while she still had a chance — Auster has expressed such a preference. But that isn’t really a “worse is better” argument. It’s an argument that Republicans will oppose Hillary like they wouldn’t oppose McCain.

It doesn’t take much courage to oppose Hillary, who wouldn’t help to sort out the difference between people who will be intimidated by race-baiting arguments, and those who won’t. We need the “false friends” — MSM voices who are simple Republican partisans and back down from accusations of racism – to be marginalized. That’s why it’s not true that “a better contrarian case could be made for Hillary than for Obama.”

VA continues:

I’ve said before that [Hillary] would definitely call forth a vigorous opposition from the right, and that would be healthier for the right (the real right) than an Obama presidency, since he is treated like not merely a rock star, but as some kind of avatar (in the original sense) or a Messiah.

The “vigorous opposition” that VA correctly predicts is not healthy for the real right, though. It puts our false friends back in a position where they can oppose the liberal president without actually taking a stand against PC. It gives back legitimacy to mainstream Republicans, who ought to be thoroughly discredited. It increases the chance that Hillary would be thrown out in 2012 in favor of a Republican neocon like McCain or Giuliani or Jeb Bush, who would have an impeccable record on the one “important” question (to Republican regulars) – consistent opposition to Hillary as an individual. Whereas if Obama is thrown out in 2012, it might be in favor of a more conservative candidate.

VA asks, “Do we want a President who is the object of a cult?” But this is far from a cult that encompasses everyone. Obama has received the votes of under 30 percent of white Democrats in most states with a substantial black presence. It’s hard to believe he won’t make a few more gaffes like his statement about rural Pennsylvanians “clinging” to guns and religion. I would guess that Obama’s “unfavorables” figure to be very high by the time of the general election. The myth that Obama is a “uniter” has been embraced so fervently by liberal MSM voices in a desperate attempt to make it unquestioned conventional wisdom, even though it is so obviously not true to anyone who sees the data. Obama is a polarizing figure, which is what’s led to the McGovern comparisons. Opposition to McGovernism still wins Republicans lots of debating points. The simple fact is that “cults” tend to generate intense dislike among their opponents. That’s especially true among young voters. Once Obama becomes the candidate of the Ivy League, he automatically becomes a lightning-rod for the anger of those who resent everything the Ivy League stands for.

Mechanisms of Change

Vanishing American has cast some doubt on how worse could become better in the case of an Obama election. I have a hard time seeing how the argument is not just one that things can never improve, regardless of future events. VA also makes an argument that because people haven’t come to demand major measures like a complete end to Muslim immigration, that past events haven’t made any impact on people.

First, a word about “change”. Obviously the change being sought is a change in the direction of our nation. We might visualize what’s happening in terms of Newton’s laws of motion — an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. We might define “fundamental change” as a force that changes the momentum of a rolling ball, as opposed to simple change, which is the movement of the ball itself (the continuation of current demographic trends and current levels of immigration). Stopping the ball (though with a view to soon reversing its direction) would be a fundamental change. The fundamental change we ultimately want is for whites to have a land free of recent immigrants and their descendants, and with black crime under control. Any success for particular political parties, pundits, or right-wing organizations is completely subordinate to the main goal.

It seems that VA’s argument has often boiled down to:

1. The people have shown a willingness to follow our political class down whatever harmful path it might decide to go — to vote against fundamental change. This is just the way the people always are.

2. The people who make up the political class are never going to change. For example, Chris Roach has cited statements that would seem to indicate some change on the part of Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin. But given the various financial and social pressures on people like Goldberg and Malkin, they can never openly recognize that nonwhite immigration has been a bad idea.

Now given these premises, how do we avoid the following conclusion?

3. Fundamental change is impossible.

I’m not going to say I have proof that fundamental change is possible. But if we think it’s not, why are we even blogging? Or shouldn’t we be blogging about how to adapt to the inevitable Mexicanization of Anglo-America, instead of what we’re doing?

So presuming for the moment that fundamental change is possible, let’s list some possible solutions:

A. New leadership will rise from among the people, changing the balance of forces in the political class. Premises (1) and (2) are thus correct, but the composition of the political class can change. (For these purposes, the “political class” can basically be treated as identical with the media, including bloggers and alternative media sources.)

B. The pressures on the existing political class will change, making it acceptable for mainstream pundits to realize they have been wrong, and say so openly, leading the nation on a different course. That is, premise (2) is flawed.

C. Events will transpire that will cause people to not follow the political class anymore, to distrust what they hear in the media, etc. That is, premise (1) is flawed. It has conventionally appeared true, but will not be true under every set of circumstances.

Basically, the people promoting an Obama presidency on a “worse-is-better” rationale (to be carefully distinguished from people who actually think Obama will make things better) see a mechanism for (B) and/or (C). VA seems to see a mechanism for (A), although I’m not sure what it consists of. That’s not to say one doesn’t exist — just that I have not seen it adequately explained.

If (A) is the solution, then the main thing we need is to avoid a crackdown on alternative media sources, which will allow a pro-white segment of the political class to develop more easily. However, I don’t see a path in this direction, and it’s up to those who support this solution to spell out a path. I would ask them to spell out the best-case realistic scenario, if indeed there is a scenario that makes things better without getting much worse first.

If (B) and/or (C) is the solution, then it will be helpful to try to manipulate the pressures on existing media in such a way that they lead the nation in a different direction; or make the events transpire that will get significant numbers of people to reject all the mainstream media, and start preferring non-liberal explanations for events.

I tend not to have much faith in (B), since the main mechanism for that would be for mainstream pundits to believe they could use nonwhites’ crime and misbehavior as a partisan issue. Folks like Goldberg and Malkin would probably rather the GOP lose, than have it adopt “hateful” or “bigoted” positions in order to win. They have a financial incentive to promote the interests of their primary sources of income — media organizations eager to appease open-borders advertisers. They also have somewhat of a personal incentive, since they don’t want to be seen by their families and communities as traitors to particular ethnic interests (Jewish for Goldberg, Asian for Malkin).

If (C) is more of the solution, then we need the events to happen that will undermine people’s trust in the media’s inadequate explanations. I have to disagree with VA that people have never been mobilized by disaster. I’m not sure how she can dismiss the backlash against the Sixties as not really significant, when it is in large part what got us the renewed toughness on crime that has locked away large numbers of black violent criminals. Surely backlash against the Sixties could not reasonably be expected to sustain conservatism forever. Even those who have vivid memories of forced integration are told that now race relations have improved greatly – an idea they might well believe if they have not seen firsthand, recently, that in fact, black behavior is as bad as ever. If they have not lived among Mexicans, they also may believe that Mexicans are not comparable to blacks. Roach is correct that “people… grew forgetful of why they or their parents left cities for orderly and gated suburban communities.” That doesn’t mean they never demanded that anything be done, or that they never learned a lesson, and are incapable of ever learning any lesson. They just didn’t learn the lesson that there is something innate in blacks (and Mexicans, who were hardly even around in most places back then) that requires separation of the races.

As far as the other examples VA provided, I think a lot of people did wake up as a result of various events, even if they did not draw the conclusions we would have liked them to. Take 9/11, for example. Support for a response to 9/11 was practically universal. But what, short of in-depth study of Islam, was supposed to persuade an average American, who either knew no Muslims or knew a few ”moderate” Muslims (either nominal Muslims, or sharia-supporters who put on a ”pro-American” public face), that the appropriate response to 9/11 was to essentially suspect all Muslims of supporting jihad – and shut down Muslim immigration? (For the record, I don’t agree with the people VA mentions, who say that another 9/11 would lead to the deportation of Muslims. That doesn’t mean another 9/11 wouldn’t affect people’s opinions at all.)

Race realism is probably even harder to get people to grasp than realism on Islam. It’s especially hard to sort out confounding variables that are used as alternative explanations, such as poverty, culture, and the activities of black agitators. If I had to say why I believe in biological differences among races in behavioral traits, I would have to say it’s just because it seems so implausible that there would be the obvious biological differences that we are all willing to notice, and no others. Given that there are obvious adaptations to various environmental conditions — like dark skin and the sickle-cell gene for people in the tropics, and light skin for people in polar regions — it only stands to reason that there would be differences in intelligence and self-control too. Again, people who have not studied the science may not take away the lessons from events that race realists would like them to. With Katrina, for instance, what were we supposed to learn? That New Orleans is a poor city, dependent on government, and with a lot of black thugs? We already knew that, and in fact, many whites think they would have “looted” too if they had been in the same situation. Blogger Cambria Will Not Yield has written that media voices argued after Katrina that “Anybody would have done the same thing under those conditions” — and most whites agreed. It’s unlikely that whites are going to respond dispassionately to a scientific argument, based on IQ and propensity toward crime, for living apart from nonwhites. The argument that resonates better is simply, “Races don’t get along, and tend to commit seemingly random acts of violence against each other. For whites to live near nonwhites is never safe, and under liberalism, no area is safe from nonwhites deciding to move in.”

It reminds me a bit of what Kevin MacDonald wrote in The Culture of Critique about the Frankfurt School. Jews never attempted to explain anti-Semitism in a rational fashion as the result of specific things Jews were or did. The Authoritarian Personality was an excuse to reorder society in a way that would be more beneficial to Jews, not a serious scientific investigation of anti-Semitism. For the Jews, there has tended to be a “noble lie” that anti-Semitism is just totally irrational and unexplainable. Meanwhile, the Holocaust provided an excuse to write a pseudoscientific explanation of anti-Semitism for Gentile consumption. If whites had a similar lack of interest in why nonwhites hate us, and just treated that hatred as a totally irrational phenomenon, we could turn our interest to how to protect ourselves (keeping nonwhites away) instead of trying to address the “causes” of the hatred.

A final note: I’m rather appalled that VA would suggest that those who have helped elect Obama are responsible for violence that might follow — which is what’s implied when she writes, “Are random people to be offered up as a sacrifice… ?” This seems suspiciously similar to the times when leftists blame Muslim violence in Europe on people like Geert Wilders, Pim Fortuyn, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The responsibility for violence lies with the person who commits the violence. At any rate, since anti-white hate crimes, violence, and rioting are already occurring at a significant rate, the status quo is already intolerable. Part of the reason things are getting worse is that we have not been ready to say that what has already occurred is too much. The authors of the Declaration of Independence made it clear that King George had already made war on them; they were just fighting back against unjust authority. We must say the same.

Freudians@TAC

While I’m bemoaning the sellout to modern vulgarity at paleocon publications: Does this post serve any other purpose than to promote the idea that social conservatives are, as they say, “fixated” on homosexuality? Or that “people who hate homosexuals are probably homosexual themselves”, and the pro-war conservatives at Conservapedia are spending a lot of time “hating” homosexuals, ergo neocons are homosexual?

I understand that Conservapedia is probably viewed by many paleos as a neocon project, which may be the case, but this post uses leftist premises to argue the point.

(By the way, even the liberal Wikipedia admits, “What is believed to be an automated click bot attack struck Conservapedia, driving many of their homosexuality-related articles into the top ten most viewed pages on the site.” TAC’s post is thus no more than gossip, regardless of one’s opinion of Freud’s theories.)

Elsewhere Among the Wingnuts…

Don’t miss Ehud Would’s latest post at Hearthstone. What white people would be choosing to remain in California these days? Those who absolutely would never want to have one of those awful white babies! This is the impulse toward race suicide or “self-extinction”, which is against God’s plan for us. The one most vital step to win this nation back, therefore, is a return to segregation (plus deportation of immigrants), which among other things would save us from the stupidity of having the unnecessarily high violent crime rate that we do. Another terrific post from Hearthstone!

Guy White has a great post on the way that liberals argue. Essentially they try to bully conservatives with an appeal to experts — that all the academics are on the liberal side — as well as making a big deal about whatever degree they have. Unlike traditionalists, they are afraid to let their intelligence (or lack thereof) speak for itself. (One of the most off-putting aspects of Chronicles is the pretentiousness of Thomas Fleming and some other writers, who also use their degrees to insist on deference.)

The aftermath of the recent Italian landslide for the Right is being discussed by Paul Belien and John Laughland at the Brussels Journal, which also features a second installment in Takuan Seiyo’s Europe vs. Japan series.

Gates of Vienna has a couple of great posts on why to “wargame” possible future scenarios, and the hypocrisy of those who denounce “genocide” while not recognizing Muslim genocide as such. Good comments too.

Conservative Heritage Times has lots of links on Chuck Baldwin’s campaign, including a link to this forum.

My Standards

Though I’ve been inveighing against profanity in the blogosphere, I suppose I’ve never defined what, to me, constitutes foul language. Since there seems not to be such wide agreement, I have a responsibility to do so. Let me just lay out the antiquated, prudish ways standards that I was taught, and that we’ll try to abide by. From now forward, comments that violate the rules may be edited or deleted.

1. Profanity is profanity. The common online practice of replacing certain letters with asterisks does not make it acceptable.
2. For body parts and bodily functions, use the words that a doctor would use when speaking to a patient, like “urinate”, “defecate”, and so on. In an ideal world, we would probably use euphemisms for “have sex”, but I won’t go that far for the purposes of the blog. Just don’t go any more vulgar than “have sex”.
3. If you have a reason to talk about Hell and damnation, feel free to use the words “Hell” and “damn” in their literal sense only. For any other purpose, however, they are inappropriate.
4. “Whore” and “slut” are acceptable words for a loose woman. You don’t need to use any worse words than these.
5. There are lots of ways to say something is a silly idea; it’s not necessary to say it is something that comes out of a male bovine — with or without using the name of the animal.
6. “Suck” in anything other than its literal meaning is inappropriate.
7. Though there is a place for racial and anti-homosexual epithets in a traditional society, this blog is a polite environment where we will criticize homosexuality and misbehavior of certain races and ethnic groups without using vulgar words for them.
8. When quoting from a source that contains profanity, use [expletive deleted] or something similar.
9. Thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain. Since most of us here are Christians, please abide by this rule on this blog, even if you are not Christian.

Linked blogs may not follow the same rules, of course. Back to normal blogging soon. Thank you for your patience.

A Brief Commercial Message…

OK, another advertisement for my favorite radio station (one of very few good things that come out of Harvard these days):

Featured composers for this spring’s Orgy Season (rest assured, this is a totally clean kind of orgy!) include Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Franck, and French Baroque composers in general (including the Couperin family, Lully, Rameau, Charpentier, Marais, and others). Featured performers include Mstislav Rostropovich and Vladimir Horowitz. It all starts with the “Warhorse Orgy” of monumental masterpieces from 1-10 PM on Thursday, May 1. For those unfamiliar, the “Warhorse Orgy” is a twice-a-year celebration in which the station breaks its usual practice of playing a lot of unfamiliar music, and plays nothing but the “heavy hitters” of music history. This spring’s lineup is as heavy-hitting as ever.

I should just mention that you can listen to this station anywhere in the world over the Internet, not just in the Boston area. Just click on the link at the top of this post.

How Far We Have Fallen!

Did anyone else wonder why “conservatives” such as Rod Dreher have thought it was OK to link — from their “conservative”, Christian blogs – to a pornographic picture of a “luscious” 15-year-old girl this week? I clicked the link, naively, I suppose, believing it must be to a news story about the girl, not a picture. I closed the window right away — but certainly this link is a bit like serving beans to a Jew, and then informing him there’s pork in them after he’s started eating them and suspects they’re not kosher.

Meanwhile Daniel McCarthy at TAC’s blog has linked to the disgusting, indecent publication known as The Onion. Does that mean he expects TAC readers to be comfortable with The Onion? At least McCarthy, unlike Dreher, made it obvious that the link was what it was, so that those of us offended by The Onion would not click it.

I won’t link to either of those posts, but you can find them yourself if you’re so inclined.

I thought it was commonplace for all conservative Christian churches to believe that looking at pornography is sinful. Am I wrong? Of course, the implied excuse is, “I’m just criticizing the culture, and therefore this is all about discussing what’s acceptable, which people could not do without seeing the picture in question.” In other words, it’s all about an academic quest to obtain knowledge, so the normal rules don’t apply. What nonsense!

I really regret that occasionally, in order to provide my readers with some insight, I must link to bloggers who use profanity. I would actually rather not, but at least with profanity, I tend to think the sin is with the person who says it, not the one who reads it. I trust that parents will not allow their children to read blogs until those children are old enough to cope with someone’s use of profanity — otherwise it would be almost impossible to justify linking to any blog unless I was positive that it shared the same standards.

Call me a scold, a prude, a prig, a “Christofascist”, or what have you — names won’t hurt me!

The FLDS — Us or Them?

Our friends at Kinism.net have criticized the raid on the FLDS in Texas, while Auster and Steve Sailer have justified it. It seems that people’s positions on this issue are classic identity politics. Auster is upset with the FLDS because he sees polygamy as something that the West stands clearly against — and he can’t find a defensible rationale to accept polygamy among some Americans while using it as grounds to exclude Muslims. Sailer makes a decent case against the government’s prior leniency toward the FLDS on non-religious grounds; meanwhile, his commenters are almost monolithically against the FLDS. Sailer’s mostly scientific-minded commenters reject the idea that the FLDS are “us”, and instead place them clearly in the “them” category. Meanwhile, the commenters at Kinism.net point to how much healthier the FLDS lifestyle is in many ways than the mainstream American one. For them, the FLDS story fits the script of righteous Christians defending their right to non-interference by the godless state.

I have to admit that emotionally, I tend to sympathize with the FLDS and view them as “us” in the realm of identity politics. Auster’s approach reeks of propositional nationalism, in which it is possible to declare a group with a clear genetic claim to inclusion among the American nation “un-American” based on its practice of polygamy. At least I do not see any way in which the misdeeds of the FLDS justify removing hundreds of children from their parents. Auster may be right that polygamy is “incompatible with our civilization,” but I don’t trust Auster’s motives for demanding the kind of crackdown he wants.

Basically I think Auster wants to justify the exclusion of Muslims, who occasionally practice polygamy. I don’t tend to believe that we cannot come up with too many reasons to exclude Muslims — that ten reasons are better than one good reason. The one good reason, of course, is that Islam advocates the forcible conversion of the whole world to Islam. Other reasons, like “Muslims practice polygamy,” can actually turn into a distraction.

I think it should be clear, too, that this is a real abuse of power by the government, an extension of its regular meddling in the “sexist”, “patriarchal” white Christian family. What the government ought to do — other than stop subsidizing a polygamous lifestyle — is not that clear to me. However, I would say it’s quite clear that the government would not be doing what it is, if not for being in thrall to the feminists, race-mixers, and anti-Christians.

Monday Links for April 28

I really should get back in the habit of putting up links to good posts at least once a week, especially when what you can find elsewhere is better than what’s here.

First, go and marvel at the thickheadedness of most of the TakiMag commenters on this thread. It’s as if, as soon as they saw the word “eugenics”, they erupted in horror and forgot to read the rest of the post. The point is pretty clear: trashing liberals for supposedly being anti-black racists, as Margaret Sanger was, just makes right-wingers look stupid. Sid Cundiff suggests that those outraged by this post ought to secede from Taki’s Magazine, which would be fine with me!

One writer not to miss is Takuan Seiyo of the Brussels Journal, whose latest post compares the destinies of Europe and Japan.

Meanwhile, I think Gates of Vienna will benefit from not having any stake in doing anything to appease the PC police anymore. They are officially “beyond the pale” now, from the perspective of anyone who is on decent terms with Charles Johnson — and I think they feel relieved. Boycott Pajamas Media, Grand Enforcer of PC!

Old Atlantic has a post on how genetic replacement undermines rational economic behavior — a very nice insight.

Francis Porretto has a somewhat Moldbugian post (yes, I am going to return to my consideration of Moldbug posts at some point) at Eternity Road on ways that the present Western governments are, shall we say, like cancers on society.

Pat Buchanan really puts many of the “traditionalist Catholics” to shame by being prepared to stick up for the death penalty, rather than caving in to the Vatican’s present liberal line on it. Sadly, there are no others quite like him.

Chuck Baldwin has been nominated by the Constitution Party, so we have a decent candidate to vote for.

Activity has really been heating up at the Kinism.net forum, where I hope my other readers will consider participating. Even if you don’t consider yourself a Kinist, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the Biblical basis for ethnonationalism.

A Change?

I am thinking of making some changes here.

I feel like the current name, Brave New World Watch, isn’t very accurate anymore. Sure, it conveys the anti-modern, anti-globalist idea, but I feel like my mission has become more specific than that. Besides, the old name probably gave the impression I was going to talk more about other aspects of Brave New World besides globalism and Babelism, such as technology, bioethics, and sexual behavior. I have not posted much on any of those things, and hardly feel qualified to.

Most importantly, there are ways in which “Brave New World” more accurately describes our future without Third World immigration and without economic decline. Brave New World said nothing about mixing all the races together. On the other hand, it assumed that the problem of scarcity would be solved, enabling everyone to live like our “lifestyle liberals”. Brave New World posited a continuing class divide (as in communist societies), but did not suggest, as George Orwell’s 1984 did, that high social status had anything necessary to do with enforcing deprivation on those of lower status. In Brave New World, the Deltas and Epsilons are to be just as satisfied with their position as the Alphas. Orwell understood much better the human motivations for keeping a great deal of inequality in place.

I hope I’m not deciding to limit my focus too narrowly, but it seems that consistently, the blog’s focus has tended to be on what traditional American culture and identity are, and who is interested in preserving or reviving them. I’ve thought the ideal name might be “Who Are We?” after Samuel Huntington’s book, but that would probably be a violation of Huntington’s intellectual property rights. So I’ll have to come up with something else.

I’m also sick of the pen name “John Savage”, which of course does not make much sense outside of the Brave New World theme. So I will probably change that too, once I change the blog name.

“Reuniting the Human Genome” and Other Experiments with Saletan’s Blender

Audacious Epigone has a great post that explores some of the issues I raised in my post about William Saletan’s proposal to “reunite the human genome”.

He points to an interesting paradox: In the face of massive immigration, will some sort of one-drop rule hold up indefinitely? In Latin America, those with the lightest skin still dominate, so it is hard to imagine that if America becomes deeply Mexicanized, that there will be preferential treatment for those who are mostly Amerindian, over those who are “Hispanic” but mostly white. Most fields would probably be dominated by those who are maybe 1/8 Amerindian (of Mexican ancestry), 1/8 black, and 3/4 white.

Public office might be a partial exception to that, if those who were mostly nonwhite thought a person who was mostly white was “one of them”, not “one of us”. That said, Barack Obama has not been hurt very much among blacks by being 50% white. As long as he talks about his pride in his “race” just as if he were 100% black, most blacks accept him as one who will push an agenda favorable to them. For now, it seems that blacks are flattered when a person who is only 50% or less black says how proud he is of his blackness, while “throwing his white grandmother under the bus”. The same holds for Mexicans when a mixed person boasts of his pride in his “raza”. However, if the person has some Mexican and some black ancestry, it’s an open question whether he will be rejected by either group, or both. If there is an ever-increasing Mexican population and a fairly constant black population, it’s likely that black voters would reject such a person unless he “threw his Mexican grandmother under the bus”.

Moving on, Epigone makes a “modest proposal” that it might not be a bad idea to undergo this “blending” at a strictly national level as a way of keeping the country as white as possible:

In any country where the white population is a majority but in the process of becoming a minority due to differential fertility rates, immediate interracial increases with a one-drop non-white rule for preferential treatment is, theoretically, a way to stop the trend, freezing the current total genetic profile and distributing it evenly across the population over time, so that a nation that is 80% white and 20% black moves towards becoming 100% white with a mocha tint.

Of course, this is not a likely scenario, and even if possible, probably not sustainable. The catch is that if this goal were achieved, there would still be major transnational differences in achievement, which would make the liberals very unhappy. Furthermore, the homogeneous population that is 80% white would still identify culturally and emotionally with the nonwhites. Let’s leave aside the vexing question of inter-minority conflict for a minute, and suppose that all we had at Day 1 of the experiment were whites and blacks. After a program of intermarriage at the national level, the whole population would identify (via the not-yet-abrogated one-drop rule) as simply “black”. People would all compete to express how proud they are of being “black”, even though they are genetically 80% white. This “black” country would certainly open itself up to massive black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa. Gradually it would absorb much of the population of Africa, and as long as fertility rates in Africa remained much higher, it would become blacker and blacker over time.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the “mocha” nation won’t remain racially intact unless it has a rationale to close the border. According to today’s liberals, it is supposed to identify totally with the nonwhite part of its heritage, which means it should: 1) view itself as not essentially different from people who are 100% nonwhite; 2) experience “mocha guilt” related to its greater success relative to the people of poor black countries; 3) thus accept unlimited black immigration; and probably 4) discriminate in favor of the immigrants until the population is homogenized again. (”Whiteness”, if you will, is for liberals much like the cultural equivalent of a recessive gene.) So in practice, “preserving 80% whiteness” wouldn’t be achieved by implementing Saletan’s proposal at a national level, absent some other conditions that are not likely to be obtained.

Let me turn to the likelihood of Saletan’s proposal being implemented in any recognizable form at something higher than a national level, as well as how the results are likely to turn out. Let me sketch three possible scenarios:

Scenario 1: If the whole world were ruled by a global government, allowing no area to have any restrictions on migration, then basically we would be throwing the whole world’s population into Saletan’s blender and hitting “Puree”. To give people the greatest possible incentive to miscegenate, the government would mandate preferences favoring those who were at most X% white and/or East Asian, with X being the total percentage of whites and East Asians in the world. As in Brave New World, uncooperative people would be sent to Savage Reservations, or perhaps Iceland and the Falkland Islands. That scenario is easy to predict, but unlikely as long as liberals prize the ethnocentrism of nonwhite people.

Scenario 2: For now, non-Western countries still have relatively effective border controls geared toward maintaining a certain racial composition. In this scenario, the West allows massive immigration indefinitely, but very few people are allowed into other countries. People from all countries stream into the Western world, and with an unlimited source of pure nonwhites available, the fraction of white genes in the world population trends asymptotically toward zero. The threshold for discrimination will become darker and darker, and the West will be overwhelmed by whichever race has highest fertility and is able to send the most immigrants.

Scenario 3: This starts like Scenario 2, but does not extrapolate massive immigration to the West indefinitely into the future. After a few decades, the mostly nonwhite West, with its much lowered IQ, becomes an economic basket case and ceases to attract immigrants. East Asian countries become by far the most attractive place for immigrants, but continue to refuse them. Or alternatively, the rulers of the West, having become partially nonwhite, change their minds and reject liberal principles. They decide that mixed-race people are better than the really dark people, so that they suspend the “affirmative action” and close their borders. The U.S. and Europe become like today’s Latin American countries, most of which are not keen on immigration.

That’s what I see in my crystal ball. How about my readers?

A Kinist Replies to Chilton Williamson’s Defense of the Pope

In response to my query, John Marshall at Kinism.net has addressed the question of what “universalism” means in the context of the present Roman Catholic Church, versus what it should mean for Christians; as well as the Biblical justification for ethnonationalism. I recommend you all read what he has to say.

Sorry, Kids!

Gee, my post earlier today on the Jewish Question seems to have drawn a lot of interest — more than I like.

Since discussions of the Jewish Question figure to give this blog a reputation as some vicious anti-Semitic blog, I am afraid I will have to make this the last one. But why are these threads always the ones that draw so much interest? Because this is the only place where evidence is required on both sides, instead of there being a strong presumption on one side or the other? For instance, Auster is hypersensitive to criticism of Jews, whereas some sites don’t give a fair hearing to defenses of the Jews? I can’t read your minds.

I have tried to suggest in the past that I am willing to participate in discussions at other sites where the bloggers are deeply interested in the Jewish Question. But I don’t want this site to get a reputation as a Jew-obsessed site, which it is not. My niche is primarily to define what it is we mean by traditional American culture, and point out the corruption of that culture by groups that don’t respect it. I found it worthwhile to defend Kevin MacDonald at Guy White’s site, and thought I would point out my comment for all those interested in my writing. But having my “Recent Comments” section full of comments on a post about the Jews gives people a false impression about the site, and reduces the number of people who will feel comfortable linking to it.

Sorry for having to call an end to this sort of discussion.

COMMENTS THAT ARE NOT 100% ON-TOPIC WILL BE DELETED!

Our Unpreparedness

I hope I haven’t given anyone the impression that I don’t like Rod Dreher’s blog anymore, although usually I skip the comments section. Dreher has a very nice post this week that touches particularly on the lie behind modern education. The lie is that learning what we do in college will prepare us for anything. Instead, we are prepared only “for a world of globalized commerce, a world in which they will need the skills of a vagabond or an itinerant vandal” (Patrick Deneen). Deneen asks, “What will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation?” Few graduates of modern universities are prepared to cope with such a future.

I often think the big divide in our society is between people who value the ability to do everything they need themselves (at least with a husband and wife together), and people who think that learning such skills is a waste of time. I have been shocked to find out, when living among liberals, that few of them have the slightest idea how to cook — something they see as beneath them. I suppose it’s not so weird for such people to believe there are a whole host of “jobs Americans won’t do”. My parents didn’t force me to learn all the skills I might have, but at least I appreciate what we need to know if we are not to depend on a servant class.

Jewish Power and Fairness

Since I know many of my readers don’t enjoy this kind of thing, I left my thoughts about the reasons for Jewish power in America as a comment on Guy White’s post.

I think the real divide, though, is between the individualists who think that Jewish power is completely fair if obtained by means of outstanding ability, and the “tribalists” who don’t like to see an alienated minority have a great deal of power, regardless of its ability. Guy White quotes Fred Reed to the effect that 29% of Nobel Prize winners in the second half of the 20th century have been Jews, a group constituting .2% of the world’s population. The seven million American Jews constitute almost half of those in academia, the legal profession, and the media. If indeed their success in these areas were entirely due to high IQ (and I don’t think it is), would Guy White find this fair? It seems that he might. I would not.

In theory, our society is “one person, one vote”. Since we tend to think that some are more politically astute or have a greater stake in the success of society than others, we allow them to effectively have more political power by donating to campaigns, holding rallies for candidates, and so on. This is our substitute for property qualifications or similar voting restrictions. However, it is subject to the limitation that the groups receiving more voting power not have sharply divergent interests from the people as a whole. In particular, Jews have a strong interest in open borders and a “tolerant” society that most of us do not share. We can’t let that kind of group dictate policy just because they won their high position “fair and square”. (I would suggest, too, that Jews don’t think of fairness as requiring the same things – especially when involving inter-group relations – as white Christians do.)

At any rate, I think I will withhold further judgment on issues relating to the Jews until I have had a chance to read Kevin MacDonald’s books, not merely his online articles.

Williamson’s Lame Defense of Rome’s Position on Immigration

At VDare, Chilton Williamson becomes another Catholic voice to consider the Pope’s comments on immigration. Ironically, the article is entitled ”A Practicing Catholic Considers Why ’The Church’ Is Wrong About Immigration”, whereas halfway down the page, Williamson writes:

I planned originally to title my article “Why the Catholic Church Is Wrong About Immigration.” That was before I reflected that it is not the Church that is in error on the subject but all too many of her members in public life, a largely self-selected and self-willed group I think of as “The Church”. On the formal question of immigration, as on most others, the Roman Church is in truth a model of logic and sensibility—so far, anyway, as she has expressed herself on the matter at all.

In other words, Williamson’s real purpose is to exonerate his church, and particularly the present and recent Popes, to the greatest possible extent. (So why does the article in fact bear the title it does, if “it is not the Church that is in error”? This is sloppy of VDare to publish an article whose content clearly contradicts its title.)

At any rate, Williamson’s major points are: First, that the Pope’s comments are not binding on the Catholic faithful, not falling within the bounds of ex cathedra pronouncement, which would force Catholics to regard them as infallible. That is, that traditional Catholic doctrine remains balanced on immigration, despite the pronouncements of recent Popes whose statements do not change the formal doctrine. Second, that regardless of what any Pope might have said, no papal statement made to date indicates that the Catholic Church as a whole is for mass immigration. Finally, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI respect the need for a variety of cultures that can protect their identities.

Let me address this last point first, since it is the most critical, yet seems the farthest off base. Williamson quotes John Paul II:

We have to do all we can to assume [our Western] spiritual heritage, to confirm, maintain, and develop it. This is an important task for all societies, but perhaps more in particular for those which must defend their own existence and essential identity of their nation from the risks of a destruction generated from outside or of a decomposition from inside.

Williamson comments:

In resisting immigration on a mass scale, the nations of the West are defending their peace, security, order, and stability, as well as their separate and unique identities.

Ultimately, they are defending the spiritual identity and religious belief that created their civilization and upon which Western civilization depends.

Of course, Rome has always endorsed the idea that the crucial aspect of Western Civilization is the Catholic Church. For the U.S. to resist Latin American immigration, therefore, is not, in the eyes of Rome, ”defending the spiritual identity and religious belief that created their civilization and upon which Western civilization depends,” since it hinders the growth of the Catholic Church. Williamson continues:

Preserving that religious identity is more than a human responsibility—it amounts, literally, to a sacred trust.

This trust Benedict XVI appears to understand better than did his immediate predecessors, if only because he has a better understanding of the menace the West faces from beyond its borders.

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, he argued against the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union, on the ground that that country belongs to a cultural sphere wholly incompatible with the nations of Europe. In 1996, he voiced reservations about the ability of Islam to adapt to modernity.

And it is quite impossible to imagine John Paul II quoting, as Benedict did in Germany in 2006, the assertion by a medieval writer that Mohammed introduced into the world “only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

Anyone can see that this is a deeply false analogy — the Pope is calling on Europe to defend itself from Islam, the mortal enemy of the Catholic Church, while the U.S. is defending itself from an invasion by Catholics. No amount of Latin American immigration would thus endanger anything that the Vatican holds particularly dear. There is no reason that understanding the need to protect Europe’s borders would have anything to do with wanting to protect America’s borders.

To address a related, minor point: Williamson writes, “Catholic immigrants, on their arrival in the U.S., do not become “new” members of the Roman Church, but are simply old members moved to a new place.” Of course Williamson knows that immigrant fertility replaces native fertility, and also that transfer of territory from Americans to Mexicans will support the growth of the Mexican population at the expense of the American one.

As far as the other two major points, they essentially just serve as insurance in case the last point is blown out of the water, as Williamson has undoubtedly anticipated. If the Pope is, indeed, respectful of all borders, then it is not important to the restrictionist cause whether or not his statements are taken seriously. If he disrespects national sovereignty, then Williamson is prepared to offer a last line of defense of the Roman Church by reassuring us that the Pope’s statements are not binding on Catholic believers, they don’t override tradition, and a Pope’s personal belief in open borders does not imply the statement, “The Catholic Church favors open borders.”

To that I would ask how many Catholics do listen, or should listen, to the Pope only when he is making official, binding pronouncements. The impact of any papal statement, no matter how unofficial, is quite predictable and well understood. The Pope makes statements on immigration issues in the full understanding that they will be reported a certain way in the media, and that both clergy and lay Catholics will take them into consideration when deciding how to behave each day. He has a certain authority that is not extinguished because he fails to preface a statement with something like, “I invoke my authority as Pope to ask my people to take this position.” Huge numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics alike would take an unofficial papal statement as evidence of the de facto position of the Catholic Church. As Rick Darby commented on the last post, “[Tom] Tancredo’s courage in challenging the illegitimate use of the reverence that is widely and uncritically given to the Pope is breathtaking.”

Finally, at the end, Williamson just assumes that any reasonable person would agree with his position — that mass immigration must lead to “chaos” – and Williamson doesn’t think the Catholic clergy on the whole is unreasonable, so surely the Catholic clergy will come around. And he makes an irrelevant comparison to Protestant churches – not mentioning the obvious difference that most Protestant churches are not based on obedience to a hierarchy. Liberal Protestant ministers have often found that their congregations simply will not listen to their opinions on politics. Liberal Protestant churches have been losing members for decades now; unhappy Catholics don’t believe they can abandon their church’s existing institutional structure as a response to corrupt clergy.

Williamson is trying to reconcile loyalty with the existing Roman Catholic Church with opposition to immigration — and for having it both ways, he’s done about the best one can. Fortunately, we can see right through his inconsistent argument.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the Difference Between Protestant and Catholic Nations

Although I have already expressed my displeasure with the anti-majoritarian tastes of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, I did find his comments on the nature of Protestant vs. Catholic societies very interesting. I wonder how many paleocons would care to disagree with this:

But because of its inherent dialectics, Protestantism came in subsequent centuries to occupy a stand diametrically opposed to its original position. Hence almost all Protestant criticisms levelled against Catholicism are today just the reverse of those directed against the Church four hundred years ago. No modern, liberal Protestant would accuse the Catholics of placing the accent on man rather than on God, of being swayed by the fads of their age, of being too broad-minded, easy-going and carnal. Such strictures might be passed upon them by fundamentalists or backwoods preachers, but not by the “enlightened” man in the street, who is impressed by the existence of a Legion of Decency, the efforts by Catholics to enact anti-birth-control legislation, and their rejection of divorce and euthanasia. [This was written in the 1950's, when of course liberal Protestantism was much more prominent than conservative Protestantism, whereas the Catholic Church had been liberalized far less than now.]

…

Still, the fact remains that Protestantism is essentially medieval, or, if we prefer, post-medieval. … Thus the real year of the Reformation is not 1517, but 1511, when Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar on his mission in Rome, for the first time in his life was face to face with the Renaissance. Here was a man from the backwoods of Christendom aghast at the grandiose effort toward a synthesis between Christendom and the immortal and lasting values of antiquity. The annexationist character of Catholicism had been hidden to him and the fact that the synthesis became only perfect in the Baroque he could not guess. Yet what he disapproved of was the cultural aspect of the Renaissance which said “God and Man.” From a “circle” Catholic culture had turned to an elliptic form with two foci. … But the Reformers replied to these efforts “Soli Deo Gloria!” and tried desperately to go back, back to the Middle Ages, back to some sort of imaginary catacomb Church, back to the Old Testament. Unless we are able to picture Luther wandering around in Rome as a hill-billy preacher from the Alleghanies on Broadway in New York, we do not understand the initial spark which started the 16th-century wave of Reformers.

Thus, with the exception of Melanchthon and Zwingli, there are only very minor figures among the Reformers who tried to ride the crest of the wave of Humanism. The most outstanding Humanists everywhere rallied sooner or later to the cause of the Church Universal. So did St. Thomas More, so did Erasmus, so did Reuchlin, the great anti-clerical who had fought monkish narrowness all through his life. And while Catholic culture centred around the dual focus of the Glory of God and the Glory of Man, while Catholic painters directed their interest towards the objects of this world, towards man and woman in the nude (”as God made them”), Protestantism was engaged in a new rigorism. It is a grave mistake to see in Luther a confirmed libertine, who “overvalued sex and marriage.” His concept of marriage is one of “carnality to end all carnality.” Protestantism is very profoundly anti-erotic. Thus the key to the real understanding of the Catholic cultures of the European Continent and of South and Central America is, for the Protestant as well as for the Catholic of the British Isles and North America, an understanding and appreciation of the cultural, artistic and intellectual values of Humanism, the Renaissance and the Baroque.

This is by no means an “original theory,” but a thesis alluded to by D.H. Lawrence and Everett Dean Martin, who emphasized the fact that Americans have tried to flee the Middle Ages, but never “thought themselves out of them.” (pp. 180-183)

Much of this is opposed to what seems to be the conventional wisdom about Protestantism these days — that Protestantism is particularly individualistic and libertarian. But it squares with Tocqueville’s insistence that American identity does not have a particularly libertarian character, but actually much more of a communitarian, moralistic character that’s reflected in its self-description as “Puritan”. That’s perhaps less true in much of the West, but certainly is what we are praising to the extent that we honor the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the wellspring of American national character.

Inexcusable Silence

Let’s see — almost every right-wing blog by a Protestant or secularist has denounced the Pope’s comments about immigration during his visit to America. See examples at Vanishing American, VDare, VFR, and the Inverted World. (Joe Guzzardi, who states his loss of faith in the Catholic Church, thus clearly counts as a secularist, not a Catholic.) From most right-wing Catholic blogs — absolute silence. Nothing from Taki’s Magazine or Chronicles. Certain authors at TakiMag have called for commenters to cease their attacks on Protestantism, in a half-baked attempt to win back the trust of Protestant readers. But they refuse to address the primary source of Protestant distrust for them — their total adoration of a Pope who refuses to reconsider the longstanding Vatican policy of abetting a flood of Catholic Mexican immigration into the United States.

The only Catholic blogger who has even addressed the news, to my knowledge, is Jim Kalb, who takes a position of willful ignorance, suggesting that we cannot know what the Pope really said because the anti-Christian media always twist his statements to put them in the most pro-immigration light possible. To Kalb, it is only a few rogue bishops within the Catholic Church giving a false impression that the Church as a whole — including most importantly the Pope — disrespects American borders. But the Pope knows how his statements will be taken, and he puts out statements that he knows will appear to the public as pleas for legalization. He addresses the UN in glowing terms, and speaks Spanish on American soil. As Auster writes, “[Benedict XVI] is not as liberal as his predecessor. But he’s a liberal.”

We all know there is a “Covert Coalition to Rule the World” (hat tip: VA). If the Catholic paleocons truly cared about being relevant to ordinary American nationalists, they might at least try to rebut the presumption that the Pope is part of the CCRW. (It’s partly for this reason that I wish I knew of at least one or two good sedevacantist Catholic blogs.)

Technical Difficulties

We appear to be having some technical difficulties here, as if the last couple of posts have been mangled in some way. I hope to correct the errors soon.

Update: I copied the material from today’s posts to other files, and then deleted the mangled posts. I am trying to get the posts back up above this one.

Update (1 PM): The two posts above this one are currently the repaired versions of the mangled posts. However, I cannot rule out further trouble.

Thank You!

This past Saturday this blog reached 50,000 hits (page views) combined for its two locations since July 2, 2007.

On that note I would like to extend some recognition to the people who have linked to this blog. I should single out Vanishing American for being the first to place a vote of confidence in the blog last June, and Glaivester for putting up a link to this blog as his Blog of the Week last August. Others whom I would like to thank for linking (apologies for anyone I left off): Audacious Epigone, Daniel Larison, Hibernia Girl, PRCalDude, Chris Roach, Dennis Mangan, Prozium, Old Atlantic, John S. Bolton, James Poulos, Steve Sailer, Jeff Martin, Tanstaafl, Bumper, Darrell Dow, Howard J. Harrison, Flanders Fields, Fulham Reactionary, Impractical Christian, SunKing278, Morgan Wilkins, Michael Courtman, Mark Richardson, Mark of Protestant Pontifications, Mencius Moldbug, Terry Morris, Hermes, and CabbageRoll.

I should also thank my commenters. Five who deserve special recognition for being the most active commenters in 2008 are Frank, Chris Roach, Prozium, Audacious Epigone, and Howard J. Harrison. All of my commenters’ hard work is much appreciated.

I may be posting less here this week because I’d like to get more involved in the forum at Kinism.net. You can look for my posts there as well as here.

What Has the South Learned from Its Experience of Race Relations?

Since I didn’t post Friday, I’d just like to call my readers’ attention to an interesting discussion — somewhat off topic – that started on the thread following my endorsement for governor. It concerns how Southern attitudes toward immigration have been affected by the Southern experience of race relations. Tanstaafl suggested that he would have expected Southern history to have taught Southerners a lesson about the dangers of trying to have a nonwhite servant class. I said I was skeptical, but I would enjoy seeing others join in.

I have opened a thread on this topic at Vanishing American’s Forum, where I will request that you leave any further comments.

Envisioning a Racially Dystopian Future

I was just thinking about this discussion back in November of William Saletan’s proposal to literally create “one human race” by blending all races together, wondering if indeed the attempt to make an absolutely racially homogeneous human race was already underway. Auster had suggested that following the admission of racial differences in IQ, a “global totalitarian government” would be needed to mix all the races together. But wouldn’t it be possible to achieve essentially the same outcome without such massive government intervention?

I am going to suggest that all that would be needed is sufficiently profound worldwide discrimination against people who are more than a certain fraction white (or other highly intelligent races).

The point would be to create a strong enough incentive for whites and Asians to believe their children will be better off if they have children exempt from the global program of discrimination. Say the threshold is that people who are 50% or less white are exempt from discrimination, whereas those who are at least 50.1% white are subject to profound discrimination. As a result, I can reason that my reproductive fitness would wind up being greater if I marry someone 100% nonwhite, and have children who are only 50% white and exempt from discrimination. They will have lower IQ than if I’d had white children, but if the discrimination is sufficient as to outweigh the disadvantage of the low IQ, I will be better off having children who are only half white. The 100% nonwhite person, on the other hand, will benefit (and will know it if we’re honest about IQ, as we’re assuming here) by having a smarter child than if she had married another nonwhite.

Of course, I could say, “To heck with it!” and have white children anyway, but I’d guess that most Americans, already brainwashed to think that miscegenation is better than intra-racial marriage, wouldn’t defy economic rationality and reduce their chances of having successful children.

I don’t think such a government would be exactly “totalitarian”, but it would be able to achieve its main goal almost completely. “Strange” people who wanted to preserve racial integrity might be shipped off to reservations once they were small enough in numbers.

It’s already the case, I think, that if I wanted to maximize my children’s chances of achieving certain positions, particularly President, it would probably be to my benefit to marry someone nonwhite. Even for the sake of, say, getting a child into Ivy League colleges, an average white Harvard graduate would probably do better to marry a black who had just barely gotten through Harvard as an affirmative-action admit, rather than a white who had done as well as himself. If liberals remain in control, soon mixed-race people will dominate high positions, particularly elective offices, in America. They may not be as smart as whites, but they will have the essential ability to appeal to voters of multiple races. We don’t elect the most intelligent available people anyway.

Commenter Kristor suggested that Saletan’s program was impossible, citing the evidence that countries such as Brazil or India, where interracial marriage had been common for centuries, were still not homogenized. However, to my knowledge, those countries have never had discrimination against lighter-skinned people. They still have the traditional pattern in which light skin is better. The lighter-skinned thus have no incentive to mix their blood with anyone else, any more than a supermodel has an incentive to marry a man with below-average looks. A country that truly signed on to a program of race-mixing would not face the barriers that India has had, which result from “lighter-skin supremacy”.

If my expectation of near-total homogenization sounds not feasible, I invite you to consider the powerful effect that government incentives can have. The Soviet Union, for instance, provided major financial incentives (in addition to the use of gulags) to get people to move to completely inhospitable places like Norilsk, a city located at 70 degrees North latitude, but which now has more than 100,000 people. Similar incentives were used to get ethnic Russians to move into non-Russian republics, reducing the potential for ethnically-based separatist unrest. Kazakhstan did not even have an ethnic Kazakh majority by the time it became independent in 1991 (though many Russians have since moved back to Russia). The Nazis passed laws against marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans, but what Aryan would want to have a non-Aryan child in the climate of discrimination practiced in Nazi Germany? I imagine Nazi marriage laws rarely came up for actual enforcement. Even totalitarian states did not have to micro-manage people’s lives to achieve significant national goals.

So does my dystopian vision sound plausible to my readers?

No, the West Isn’t Responsible for Third World Hunger!

Some conservatives are taking this news about food price inflation as an opportunity to ride certain hobby horses, such as opposition to global warming hype or biofuels (which are a bad idea, but are not the point here). However, I think Dennis Mangan has it right:

The accusations of various global flunkies are way off base. One could more readily ask, why is the agricultural production in the undeveloped world so low? Why do their citizens keep reproducing like… well, like Third Worlders, when their food supply is so tenuous? Do they believe, like Obama, that white people’s greed makes for a world in need?

The Third World is still in the Malthusian stage, and as long as it remains so, food aid, like most other forms of aid, is throwing resources down a rat hole.

I am not 100% opposed to foreign aid, but I think it should always take the form of buying the friendship of countries whose friendship we need for some tangible reason.

By the way, I’ll just take this opportunity to mention that Gregory Clark in his Farewell to Alms quite conclusively shows that indeed, the Third World is still in a Malthusian stage, where from the point of view of standards of living, things are actually better following wars and famines. Clark also makes the case that the English were prepared for the Industrial Revolution by many centuries of genetic change, a phenomenon that means it is hard to transplant the gains of the Industrial Revolution to other countries. However, then he very irrationally suggests that it is still good for the West to save some of the miserable Third-Worlders from the conditions there by letting them immigrate to advanced countries. What a hypocrite!

(I have posted the relevant quote from Clark’s book on the thread at Mangan’s.)

Deep Thought of the Day

One of my favorite quotes has long been, “The only things running in the rat race are rats!”

So could we also conclude, “The only things that live in rat holes are rats“?