BretLudwig
December 2nd 08, 05:10 AM
((Like most of the successful Ashkenazim, Ben Stein is extremely
intelligent, particularly in the verbal sphere, and knows full well
creationism is horse****. So, why did he make this dreckumentary? Of
course for good reasons....but not ones that are immediately obvious to
the goyim, even the bright ones (of which I do not presume to include
myself, I am not in the league of Dr. MacDonald, much less a real genius
like Dr. Oliver.) But RPO is in Valhalla playing baccarat with...well, who
knows?..and we are here. Bret.))
Ben Stein's Expelled: Was Darwinism a Necessary Condition for the
Holocaust?
Kevin MacDonald
December 1, 2008
In my previous column, I noted the Stalinist tendencies of the leftists
that are so entrenched in the academic world. The fact is that the
academic left has never been concerned about truth. This is the
fundamental message of my book, The Culture of Critique where I trace the
involvement of Jewish intellectual activists in producing a leftist
academic culture that promoted specifically Jewish goals, including
lessening the political power and cultural influence of European-derived
peoples and the eradication of anti-Semitism.
Chief among the bogeymen of these Jewish intellectuals is Darwinism. The
war against Darwinism is a major theme of The Culture of Critique, and it
persists as a constant drumbeat in our culture—from the cultural
Marxists who are in charge of socializing our college students to a great
many examples in popular culture.
Consider Ben Stein's film Expelled. Stein depicts Darwinism as a stifling
orthodoxy that suppresses free inquiry into how things got this way. And
in particular, the triumph of Darwinism has meant that the theory of
intelligent design has been banished from the realm of reasonable
discourse in the academic world.
Of course, intelligent design is not a reasonable alternative at all, but
a highly motivated effort to legitimize a religious world view in the
sciences. But why would Ben Stein produce a movie that panders to
religious conservatives? It would doubtless be pretty hard to find anyone
in the Jewish intelligentsia who in the privacy of their innermost
thoughts believes in God.
Indeed, it's fair to say that the mainstream Jewish community regards
Christian religious sentiment with fear and loathing. For example, Elliott
Abrams, whose title in the Bush Administration (Deputy National Security
Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy) sounds like a neocon wet dream,
acknowledges that the mainstream Jewish community “clings to what is at
bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism
and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” According to Abrams,
because of this vision, Jews have taken the lead in secularizing America.
In fact, the key role of Jewish organizations in shaping the
Constitutional law on Church/State relations is well known.
The deep structure of Expelled can be inferred from another comment by
Elliott Abrams. Abrams thinks that a strong role for Christianity in
America is good for Jews:
In this century we have seen two gigantic experiments at postreligious
societies where the traditional restraints of religion and morality were
entirely removed: Communism and Nazism. In both cases Jews became the
special targets, but there was evil enough even without the scourge of
anti-Semitism. For when the transcendental inhibition against evil is
removed, when society becomes so purely secular that the restraints
imposed by God on man are truly eradicated, minorities are but the
earliest victims.
I think Abrams and Stein are on the same page. I make this inference
because in his film promoting intelligent design Stein argues that
Darwinism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. In making a movie
that attempts to legitimize “Creation Science” in the academic world,
Stein is thinking not so much about intellectual honesty or the relative
adequacy of Darwinism and Creation Science in producing testable
hypotheses and mountains of supporting evidence. He is asking an age-old
question: “Is it good for the Jews?” If Darwinism is not good for the
Jews, then so much the worse for Darwinism.
In mounting a war on Darwinism or at least attempting to control it, Stein
is entirely within the mainstream of Jewish opinion, at least for the last
100 years or so. The triumph of the Boasian school of anthropology over
Darwinism in the early years of the 20th century was a watershed event in
intellectual history of the West — in effect more or less obliterating
what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu. This era of
Darwinian domination of the social sciences included several well-known
Jewish racial Zionists, such as Arthur Ruppin, who were motivated by the
fear that Diaspora Judaism would lose its biological uniqueness as a
result of pressures for intermarriage and assimilation.
Among the Zionists, the racialists won the day. Ruppin’s ideas on the
necessity of preserving Jewish racial purity have had a prominent place in
the Jabotinsky wing of Zionism, including especially the Likud party in
Israel and its leaders—people like Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and
Yitzhak Shamir. (Here’s a photo of Sharon speaking to a Likud Party
convention in 2004 under a looming photo of Jabotinsky.) Jabotinsky
believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people
and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the
natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish, stating, for example:
“These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are
impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the
differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently
pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s]
conscious heirs.”
But it was the Boasians who won the day in the academic establishment of
the West. Whereas Jewish intellectuals played a bit part in the wider
movement of racial Darwinism, the Boasian revolution which triumphed in
academic anthropology in the West was overwhelmingly a Jewish intellectual
movement.
And besides the Boasians, a great many Jewish social scientists of the
period were also attracted to a thriving cult of Lamarckism — the view
that evolution works via the inheritance of acquired characteristics
rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Indeed, Lamarckism
became official ideology in the Soviet Union because of its easy
compatibility with Marxist visions of utopia: Creating the socialist
society would biologically alter its citizens.
Both theories combated racialist theories of Judaism that depicted it as
having a biological uniqueness. (Actually, Boas’s approach is more an
anti-theory because it cast doubt on general theories of human culture
common among Darwinian anthropologists of the period, emphasizing instead
the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human cultures, as well as the
relativism of standards of cultural evaluation.) For example, based on
skull measurements and IQ testing, racial scientists, including some
racial Zionists, concluded that Jews had evolved to have higher IQ, but
this was often linked with a tendency toward psychopathology—the
“nervous Jew.”
The Boasians and the Lamarckians countered with the view that Jewish
traits had resulted from historical conditions. As historian Mitchell B.
Hart notes, “the positions taken by Jewish researchers [i.e., the
Zionist racialists, the Lamarckians, and the Boasians] were driven in
large measure by ideological commitments and political goals.” Three
different groups of Jewish social scientists, three different ideological
agendas stemming from their different views on how social science can best
serve Jewish interests.
Boas’s famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a
result of immigration from Europe to America was a very effective
propaganda weapon in this cause of the anti-racialists. Indeed, it was
intended as propaganda. Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data,
physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz do not accuse Boas
of scientific fraud, but they do find that his data do not show any
significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of
immigration. They also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a
desire to end racialist views in anthropology:
While Boas never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on
anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal
agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States.
In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and
U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his
point.
This view certainly dovetails with my research. Boas can now be officially
grouped with his student and protégé Margaret Mead as using social
science to further a leftist, anti-Darwinian political agenda.
Concerns about scientific fraud have also dogged Larmarckism. Lamarckism
was a pillar of the intellectual left in the West during the 1920s but
declined rapidly after its major scientific proponent, Paul Kammerer,
committed suicide shortly after an article appearing in the prestigious
British journal Nature accused him of scientific fraud. Kammerer, who was
half Jewish on his mother’s side, was a staunch socialist. He wrote that
Lamarckian inheritance offered hope for humanity through education, and he
became a hero among committed Socialists and Communists. Despite
Kammerer’s disgrace, Lamarckism lived on in the Soviet Union under
Trofim Lysenko, with disastrous results on agricultural policy.
Interestingly, Boas, who was also a political radical, continued to accept
Lamarckism up until his death in 1942 — long after it had been
discredited by accusations of scientific fraud. The moral seems to be that
people who use science to advance their political agendas are unlikely to
reject politically attractive theories for trivial reasons like lack of
evidence and a history of cooked data. Isn’t that how science is
supposed to operate? Not surprisingly, that other pseudoscientific
charlatan, Sigmund Freud, also continued believing in Lamarckism long
after it had been scientifically discredited.
Ben Stein’s brief for intelligent design is therefore in the long line
of movements, beginning with Boas and Lamarck, that have attempted to
undercut Darwin as a pillar of Western science. Each of them is mistaken
(to be generous) and each was highly motivated. Among Jewish participants,
the motives can be quite straightforwardly related to their Jewish
identity.
But we still must ask what to make of Ben Stein’s claim that Darwinism
was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. John Derbyshire characterizes
the charge as a “blood libel on our civilization” which indeed it is.
Nevertheless, such a claim should not be taken lightly. For example, it is
common among historians to hold views similar to Michael Hart’s statement
that “it is impossible to understand the Holocaust without comprehending
the degree to which racial science and a medicalized racial ideology
occupied central positions in Nazi thought and policy.”
By the same token, I suppose, one could argue that the Palestinian
catastrophe is the result of the triumph of the racial Zionists and their
Likudnik descendents in Israel. Or one could argue that Darwinism does not
necessarily lead to the specific views attributed to the National
Socialists.
And one could certainly note that genocides occurred long before World War
II and they have continued to occur without any specific Darwinian
ideology. Indeed, as noted above, Elliott Abrams places Communism in the
same category as Nazism when it comes to the ill effects of removing a
religious world view. Just recently, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko petitioned the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
to recognize the 1932–1933 Ukrainian famine as an act of genocide—a
genocide carried out by an avowedly Marxist government at a time when Jews
formed an elite within the Soviet Union. Indeed, it has been estimated that
Communist governments murdered over 90,000,000 people in the 20th century,
including 25,000,000 in the USSR. These murders were certainly not carried
out under a Darwinian ideology.
And genocides have been carried out under religious ideologies as well.
Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Warriors series certainly shows that
religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of fanaticisms, from
Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement (including both its
Christian and Jewish supporters). (The Christian and Muslim segments are
still on You Tube. But the Jewish segment has been removed, presumably by
the same Jewish fanatics featured in the segment. But you can still see
two rebuttals put out by the pro-Zionists: Part I and Part II. )
Ben Stein is wrong. There is no reason at all to suppose that adopting a
religious world view immunizes against genocide. Perhaps he and Elliott
Abrams are simply expressing their belief that present forms of
Christianity would not lead to a Holocaust even if they achieved a great
deal more power over public policy. This was the view of neocon guru Leo
Strauss who is quite possibly the inspiration for both Abrams and Stein.
They could be right about that, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
But let’s not be naïve. Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea. In the
same way that the evolutionary theory of sex has illuminated the deep
structure of the human mating game, evolutionary theory points to the deep
structure of genocide as a particularly violent form of ethnic competition.
But ethnic competition is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an
orgy of violence, or by forcible removal of people from land on the West
Bank by Jewish settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans during
the 19th century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement of whites
via current levels of immigration into Western societies.
From a Darwinian perspective, the end result is no different. The genetic
structure of the population has changed. Darwin, of course, understood
this. Notice, for example, the subtitle of his masterpiece: On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life.
We all have an implicit understanding of human sexual politics. What
Darwin did (with the help of Robert Trivers) is to produce an explicit
theory which explains sexual politics. But sexual politics and genocide
existed long before Darwin came along. And it is at least questionable
whether the occurrence of future genocide would be more or less likely if
most people had an explicitly Darwinian theory. Humans seem to be able to
commit mass murder under multiple ideological umbrellas.
And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian perspective
would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by understanding that
ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence of our evolutionary
psychology, we could at least build societies that, unlike the Soviet
Union, are not likely to commit genocide on their own people. Nor would we
be saddled with a multicultural cauldron of competing and distrustful
ethnic groups. And, as noted in a previous article, societies based on
ethnonationalism would have other benefits as well: Greater openness to
redistributive policies; greater trust and political participation; and a
greater likelihood of adopting democratic political systems based on the
rule of law.
So three cheers for Darwin and for science. Long may they live. And
please, no more Ben Steins trying to send us back to the Dark Ages."<<
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html
Kevin MacDonald Archives
--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html
intelligent, particularly in the verbal sphere, and knows full well
creationism is horse****. So, why did he make this dreckumentary? Of
course for good reasons....but not ones that are immediately obvious to
the goyim, even the bright ones (of which I do not presume to include
myself, I am not in the league of Dr. MacDonald, much less a real genius
like Dr. Oliver.) But RPO is in Valhalla playing baccarat with...well, who
knows?..and we are here. Bret.))
Ben Stein's Expelled: Was Darwinism a Necessary Condition for the
Holocaust?
Kevin MacDonald
December 1, 2008
In my previous column, I noted the Stalinist tendencies of the leftists
that are so entrenched in the academic world. The fact is that the
academic left has never been concerned about truth. This is the
fundamental message of my book, The Culture of Critique where I trace the
involvement of Jewish intellectual activists in producing a leftist
academic culture that promoted specifically Jewish goals, including
lessening the political power and cultural influence of European-derived
peoples and the eradication of anti-Semitism.
Chief among the bogeymen of these Jewish intellectuals is Darwinism. The
war against Darwinism is a major theme of The Culture of Critique, and it
persists as a constant drumbeat in our culture—from the cultural
Marxists who are in charge of socializing our college students to a great
many examples in popular culture.
Consider Ben Stein's film Expelled. Stein depicts Darwinism as a stifling
orthodoxy that suppresses free inquiry into how things got this way. And
in particular, the triumph of Darwinism has meant that the theory of
intelligent design has been banished from the realm of reasonable
discourse in the academic world.
Of course, intelligent design is not a reasonable alternative at all, but
a highly motivated effort to legitimize a religious world view in the
sciences. But why would Ben Stein produce a movie that panders to
religious conservatives? It would doubtless be pretty hard to find anyone
in the Jewish intelligentsia who in the privacy of their innermost
thoughts believes in God.
Indeed, it's fair to say that the mainstream Jewish community regards
Christian religious sentiment with fear and loathing. For example, Elliott
Abrams, whose title in the Bush Administration (Deputy National Security
Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy) sounds like a neocon wet dream,
acknowledges that the mainstream Jewish community “clings to what is at
bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism
and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” According to Abrams,
because of this vision, Jews have taken the lead in secularizing America.
In fact, the key role of Jewish organizations in shaping the
Constitutional law on Church/State relations is well known.
The deep structure of Expelled can be inferred from another comment by
Elliott Abrams. Abrams thinks that a strong role for Christianity in
America is good for Jews:
In this century we have seen two gigantic experiments at postreligious
societies where the traditional restraints of religion and morality were
entirely removed: Communism and Nazism. In both cases Jews became the
special targets, but there was evil enough even without the scourge of
anti-Semitism. For when the transcendental inhibition against evil is
removed, when society becomes so purely secular that the restraints
imposed by God on man are truly eradicated, minorities are but the
earliest victims.
I think Abrams and Stein are on the same page. I make this inference
because in his film promoting intelligent design Stein argues that
Darwinism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. In making a movie
that attempts to legitimize “Creation Science” in the academic world,
Stein is thinking not so much about intellectual honesty or the relative
adequacy of Darwinism and Creation Science in producing testable
hypotheses and mountains of supporting evidence. He is asking an age-old
question: “Is it good for the Jews?” If Darwinism is not good for the
Jews, then so much the worse for Darwinism.
In mounting a war on Darwinism or at least attempting to control it, Stein
is entirely within the mainstream of Jewish opinion, at least for the last
100 years or so. The triumph of the Boasian school of anthropology over
Darwinism in the early years of the 20th century was a watershed event in
intellectual history of the West — in effect more or less obliterating
what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu. This era of
Darwinian domination of the social sciences included several well-known
Jewish racial Zionists, such as Arthur Ruppin, who were motivated by the
fear that Diaspora Judaism would lose its biological uniqueness as a
result of pressures for intermarriage and assimilation.
Among the Zionists, the racialists won the day. Ruppin’s ideas on the
necessity of preserving Jewish racial purity have had a prominent place in
the Jabotinsky wing of Zionism, including especially the Likud party in
Israel and its leaders—people like Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and
Yitzhak Shamir. (Here’s a photo of Sharon speaking to a Likud Party
convention in 2004 under a looming photo of Jabotinsky.) Jabotinsky
believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people
and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the
natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish, stating, for example:
“These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are
impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the
differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently
pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s]
conscious heirs.”
But it was the Boasians who won the day in the academic establishment of
the West. Whereas Jewish intellectuals played a bit part in the wider
movement of racial Darwinism, the Boasian revolution which triumphed in
academic anthropology in the West was overwhelmingly a Jewish intellectual
movement.
And besides the Boasians, a great many Jewish social scientists of the
period were also attracted to a thriving cult of Lamarckism — the view
that evolution works via the inheritance of acquired characteristics
rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Indeed, Lamarckism
became official ideology in the Soviet Union because of its easy
compatibility with Marxist visions of utopia: Creating the socialist
society would biologically alter its citizens.
Both theories combated racialist theories of Judaism that depicted it as
having a biological uniqueness. (Actually, Boas’s approach is more an
anti-theory because it cast doubt on general theories of human culture
common among Darwinian anthropologists of the period, emphasizing instead
the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human cultures, as well as the
relativism of standards of cultural evaluation.) For example, based on
skull measurements and IQ testing, racial scientists, including some
racial Zionists, concluded that Jews had evolved to have higher IQ, but
this was often linked with a tendency toward psychopathology—the
“nervous Jew.”
The Boasians and the Lamarckians countered with the view that Jewish
traits had resulted from historical conditions. As historian Mitchell B.
Hart notes, “the positions taken by Jewish researchers [i.e., the
Zionist racialists, the Lamarckians, and the Boasians] were driven in
large measure by ideological commitments and political goals.” Three
different groups of Jewish social scientists, three different ideological
agendas stemming from their different views on how social science can best
serve Jewish interests.
Boas’s famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a
result of immigration from Europe to America was a very effective
propaganda weapon in this cause of the anti-racialists. Indeed, it was
intended as propaganda. Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data,
physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz do not accuse Boas
of scientific fraud, but they do find that his data do not show any
significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of
immigration. They also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a
desire to end racialist views in anthropology:
While Boas never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on
anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal
agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States.
In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and
U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his
point.
This view certainly dovetails with my research. Boas can now be officially
grouped with his student and protégé Margaret Mead as using social
science to further a leftist, anti-Darwinian political agenda.
Concerns about scientific fraud have also dogged Larmarckism. Lamarckism
was a pillar of the intellectual left in the West during the 1920s but
declined rapidly after its major scientific proponent, Paul Kammerer,
committed suicide shortly after an article appearing in the prestigious
British journal Nature accused him of scientific fraud. Kammerer, who was
half Jewish on his mother’s side, was a staunch socialist. He wrote that
Lamarckian inheritance offered hope for humanity through education, and he
became a hero among committed Socialists and Communists. Despite
Kammerer’s disgrace, Lamarckism lived on in the Soviet Union under
Trofim Lysenko, with disastrous results on agricultural policy.
Interestingly, Boas, who was also a political radical, continued to accept
Lamarckism up until his death in 1942 — long after it had been
discredited by accusations of scientific fraud. The moral seems to be that
people who use science to advance their political agendas are unlikely to
reject politically attractive theories for trivial reasons like lack of
evidence and a history of cooked data. Isn’t that how science is
supposed to operate? Not surprisingly, that other pseudoscientific
charlatan, Sigmund Freud, also continued believing in Lamarckism long
after it had been scientifically discredited.
Ben Stein’s brief for intelligent design is therefore in the long line
of movements, beginning with Boas and Lamarck, that have attempted to
undercut Darwin as a pillar of Western science. Each of them is mistaken
(to be generous) and each was highly motivated. Among Jewish participants,
the motives can be quite straightforwardly related to their Jewish
identity.
But we still must ask what to make of Ben Stein’s claim that Darwinism
was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. John Derbyshire characterizes
the charge as a “blood libel on our civilization” which indeed it is.
Nevertheless, such a claim should not be taken lightly. For example, it is
common among historians to hold views similar to Michael Hart’s statement
that “it is impossible to understand the Holocaust without comprehending
the degree to which racial science and a medicalized racial ideology
occupied central positions in Nazi thought and policy.”
By the same token, I suppose, one could argue that the Palestinian
catastrophe is the result of the triumph of the racial Zionists and their
Likudnik descendents in Israel. Or one could argue that Darwinism does not
necessarily lead to the specific views attributed to the National
Socialists.
And one could certainly note that genocides occurred long before World War
II and they have continued to occur without any specific Darwinian
ideology. Indeed, as noted above, Elliott Abrams places Communism in the
same category as Nazism when it comes to the ill effects of removing a
religious world view. Just recently, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko petitioned the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
to recognize the 1932–1933 Ukrainian famine as an act of genocide—a
genocide carried out by an avowedly Marxist government at a time when Jews
formed an elite within the Soviet Union. Indeed, it has been estimated that
Communist governments murdered over 90,000,000 people in the 20th century,
including 25,000,000 in the USSR. These murders were certainly not carried
out under a Darwinian ideology.
And genocides have been carried out under religious ideologies as well.
Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Warriors series certainly shows that
religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of fanaticisms, from
Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement (including both its
Christian and Jewish supporters). (The Christian and Muslim segments are
still on You Tube. But the Jewish segment has been removed, presumably by
the same Jewish fanatics featured in the segment. But you can still see
two rebuttals put out by the pro-Zionists: Part I and Part II. )
Ben Stein is wrong. There is no reason at all to suppose that adopting a
religious world view immunizes against genocide. Perhaps he and Elliott
Abrams are simply expressing their belief that present forms of
Christianity would not lead to a Holocaust even if they achieved a great
deal more power over public policy. This was the view of neocon guru Leo
Strauss who is quite possibly the inspiration for both Abrams and Stein.
They could be right about that, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
But let’s not be naïve. Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea. In the
same way that the evolutionary theory of sex has illuminated the deep
structure of the human mating game, evolutionary theory points to the deep
structure of genocide as a particularly violent form of ethnic competition.
But ethnic competition is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an
orgy of violence, or by forcible removal of people from land on the West
Bank by Jewish settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans during
the 19th century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement of whites
via current levels of immigration into Western societies.
From a Darwinian perspective, the end result is no different. The genetic
structure of the population has changed. Darwin, of course, understood
this. Notice, for example, the subtitle of his masterpiece: On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life.
We all have an implicit understanding of human sexual politics. What
Darwin did (with the help of Robert Trivers) is to produce an explicit
theory which explains sexual politics. But sexual politics and genocide
existed long before Darwin came along. And it is at least questionable
whether the occurrence of future genocide would be more or less likely if
most people had an explicitly Darwinian theory. Humans seem to be able to
commit mass murder under multiple ideological umbrellas.
And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian perspective
would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by understanding that
ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence of our evolutionary
psychology, we could at least build societies that, unlike the Soviet
Union, are not likely to commit genocide on their own people. Nor would we
be saddled with a multicultural cauldron of competing and distrustful
ethnic groups. And, as noted in a previous article, societies based on
ethnonationalism would have other benefits as well: Greater openness to
redistributive policies; greater trust and political participation; and a
greater likelihood of adopting democratic political systems based on the
rule of law.
So three cheers for Darwin and for science. Long may they live. And
please, no more Ben Steins trying to send us back to the Dark Ages."<<
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html
Kevin MacDonald Archives
--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html