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March 5, 2003
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
I was simply too tired yesterday to send out a timely ZGram
- which means that I must ship out two today. My second ZGram might be more
interesting to those directly following the Zundel Saga, but this one is for
the scholarly type.
I personally met Kevin MacDonald, whose book is reviewed
below, some time ago at a small private gathering in California. He struck
me at the time as someone who was quite astonished at himself having stepped
into a paint pot and was now leaving his footprints all over the place - but
his trilogy books certainly won't go away; they give birth to review after
review after review.
This book reviewer, one John Derbyshiree, reminds me of
someone who is precariously balancing on a very narrow and uncomfortable
fence - he likes it, and he likes it not, he gets convinced by Kevin's
arguments but quickly remembers his fulcrum and shifts accordingly. (Not a
bad word, folks, though it sounds a bit salacious, doesn't it?)
Be that as it may:
[START]
The Marx of the Anti-Semites
[The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald, 1stBooks, 466
pages]
One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist
in the USA, I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types
standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene,
many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not
take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I
recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in
Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner
of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read
conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional
correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome
at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was
so. "Oh," explained one of my companions, "he got the Jew
thing." The others in our group all nodded their understanding.
Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said
in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a cracked engine
block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him,
poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing. They shoot horses,
don't they?
Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational
hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally
lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved
that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get
the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of
writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing-that I am in fact a philoSemite
and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places,
none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.
If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons
unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man.
MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology at California State
University in Long Beach. He is best known for his three books about the
Jews, developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so been a
"group evolutionary strategy." The subject of this review is a
re-issue, in soft cover, of the third and most controversial of these books,
The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998. Its subtitle is, "An
evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century
intellectual and political movements." The re-issue differs from the
original mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface, which covers some more
recent developments in the field and offers responses to some of the
criticisms that appeared when the book was first published. The number of
footnotes has also been increased from 135 to 181, and they have all been
moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book. A small amount of extra
material has been added to the text. So far as I could tell from a cursory
comparison of the two editions, nothing has been subtracted.
The main thrust of this book's argument is that Jewish or
Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged in a deliberate
campaign to delegitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations -most
particularly the USA-through the twentieth century and that this campaign is
one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethnicity. In
MacDonald's own words, "[T]he rise of Jewish power and the
disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the
real topics of CofC." He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis of
six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian
movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such-thing-as-race
school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews
in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of
social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of
individual psychopathology), the "New York intellectuals" centered
on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in
shaping U.S. immigration policy.
MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary
psychology-a term that many writers would put in quotes, as the
epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate. I have a
few doubts of my own on this score and sometimes wonder whether evolutionary
psychology may eventually turn out to be one of those odd fads that the
human sciences, especially in the USA, are susceptible to. The twentieth
century saw quite a menagerie of these fads: Behaviorism, Sheldonian
personality-typing by body shape (ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph), the
parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine, the sexology of Alfred
Kinsey, and so on. I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably
on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be
improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic. Here, for example, is Kevin
MacDonald in a previous book: "The human mind was not designed to seek
truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals." This trembles on the
edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that
philosopher David Stove called "puppetry theory," and that
MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of
Critique. After all, if it is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary
psychologists are pursuing their own "group evolutionary
strategy"? And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that
there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading, any
further?
To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as
silly as that. The Culture of Critique includes many good things. There is a
spirited defense of the scientific method, for example. One of the
sub-themes of the book is that Jews are awfully good at creating
pseudosciences-elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging
systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content-and that this peculiar
talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long
pre-Enlightenment centuries, of immersing young men in the study of a vast
body of argumentative writing, with status in the community-and marriage
options, and breeding opportunities-awarded to those who have best mastered
this mass of meaningless esoterica. (This is not an original observation,
and the author does not claim it as such. In fact he quotes historian Paul
Johnson to the same effect, and earlier comments along these lines were made
by Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper.) MacDonald is very scathing about these
circular and self-referential thought-systems, especially in the case of
psychoanalysis and the "pathologization of Gentile culture"
promoted by the Frankfurt School. Here he was precisely on my wavelength,
and I found myself cheering him on. Whatever you may think of MacDonald and
his theories, there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful
objective science. The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine,
Kinsey, et al.
It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting
data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven
by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial
superiority but by a desire to stabilize the nation's ethnic balance, which
is by no means the same thing. (In fact, as MacDonald points out, one of the
worries of the restrictionists was that more clever and energetic races like
the Japanese would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social
harmony.) MacDonald's chapter on "Jewish involvement in shaping U.S.
immigration policy" is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen
discussed elsewhere. If the Jews learned anything from the 20th century, it
was surely the peril inherent in being the only identifiable minority in a
society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous. That thoughtful
Jewish-Americans should seek to avoid this fate is understandable. That
their agitation was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy
seems to me more doubtful. And if it is true, we must believe that 97
percent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of the other
three percent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the one
Shakespeare's Bianca would have said: "The more fool they."
Similarly with MacDonald's discussion of Jewish involvement
in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire and the many horrors that
ensued. This was until recently another taboo topic, though the aged
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose, has
recently taken a crack at it. I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity
here. Having posited that Jews are out to "destroy" (this is his
own word) Gentile society, he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000
years of trying, the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even
one instance, Gentiles don't actually have much to worry about. So: the Jews
destroyed Russia. Though MacDonald's discussion of this topic is interesting
and illuminating, it left me unconvinced. As he says, "The issue of the
Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex."
Paul Johnson gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party
congresses as Jewish. If the other 80-85 percent were permitting themselves
to be manipulated by such a small minority, then we are back with Bianca.
Since the notion of "group evolutionary strategy"
is central to MacDonald's case, I wish he had been better able to convince
me of its validity. For instance, I happen to be fairly well acquainted with
the culture and history of China, a nation that, like the diaspora Jews,
awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men
who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material.
Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China's history
knows that the guy who gets the girl-who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of
"secondary wives" who are thereby denied to less intellectual
males-is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded
with a District Magistrate position. This went on for two thousand years.
Today's Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence
higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean. So: was Confucianism a
"group evolutionary strategy"? If so, then plainly the Chinese of
China were, in MacDonald's jargon, the "ingroup". But then …
what was the "outgroup"?
The more I think about the term "group evolutionary
strategy," in fact, the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense.
From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for
almost any European Jew at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so have
been conversion to Christianity? Rather than learning to argue fine points
of theology, would not a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing or
Latin? Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years. The
gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries, yet their
"group evolutionary strategy" was the opposite of the Jews' at
almost every point. And the Jewish over-representation in important power
centers of Gentile host societies became possible only after Jewish
emancipation-which, like abolition of the slave trade, was an entirely
white-Gentile project! Did the genes of 12th-century Jews "know"
emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How? If they did not, what
was the point of their "evolutionary strategy"? There is a whiff
of teleology about this whole business.
Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field. There is
no disputing that we need to understand much more than we now do about how
common-ancestry groups react with each other. Group conflicts are a key
problem for multiracial and multicultural societies. Up till about 1960, the
U.S. coped with these problems by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic
dominance, very much as Israel copes with them today by asserting Jewish
ethnic dominance. This proved to be quite a stable arrangement, as social
arrangements go. It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews, and
it is not surprising that they played an enthusiastic part in undermining
it; but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall.
It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement,
characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied
by heroic efforts at social engineering ("affirmative action").
This system, I think it is becoming clear, has proved less stable than what
went before and has probably now reached the point where it cannot be
sustained much longer. What will replace it? What will the new arrangement
be?
At times of flux like this, there are naturally people whose
preference is for a return to the older dispensation. It is obvious that
Kevin MacDonald is one of these people. If this is not so, he has some heavy
explaining to do about phrases like "the ethnic interests of white
Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society."
Personally, I think he's dreaming. The older dispensation was not as bad as
liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe, but it is gone
forever and will not return. For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
And on the point of Israel having something very much like
the old American dispensation, I am unimpressed by MacDonald's oft-repeated
argument-it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and anti-Semites-that it
is hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while
wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. Unless you think that
ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws, is immoral per se-and
I don't, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn't either-it can be the foundation
of a stable and successful nation. A nation that can establish it and
maintain it would be wise to do so. The USA was not able to maintain it
because too many Americans-far more than three percent-came to think it
violated Constitutional principles. Israel, however, was founded on
different principles, and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that
country for dismantling Jewish-ethnic dominance, as there was in Lyndon
Johnson's America for dismantling European dominance. The Israelis, most of
them, are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance and intend to keep it going.
Good luck to them.
The aspect of Macdonald's thesis that I find least
digestible is his underlying assumption that group conflict is a zero-sum
game rooted in an evolutionary tussle over finite resources. This is not
even true on an international scale, as the growing wealth of the whole
world during this past few decades has shown. On the scale of a single
nation, it is absurd. These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that
The Culture of Critique is concerned with-Boasian anthropology,
psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on-were they a net negative for
America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were. Now conduct the following
thought experiment. Suppose the great post-1881 immigration of Ashkenazi
Jews had never occurred. Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003
were not the two to four percent (depending on your definitions) that it is,
but the 0.3 percent it was at the start of the Civil War. Would anything
have been lost? Would America be richer or poorer? Would our cultural and
intellectual life be busier or duller?
It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have
been lost: entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers,
publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars: not mere psychoanalysts
and "critical theorists," but physicists, mathematicians, medical
research- ers, historians, economists-even, as MacDonald notes honestly in
his new preface, evolutionary psychologists! The first American song whose
words I knew was "White Christmas," written by a first-generation
Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant. The first boss I ever had in this country was a
Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps. Perhaps it is true,
as MacDonald claims, that "most of those prosecuted for spying for the
Soviet Union [i.e., in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews." It is also
true, however, that much of the secret research they betrayed to their
country's enemies was the work of Jewish scientists. The Rosenbergs sold the
Bomb to the Soviets; but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no
Bomb to sell. Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians
attempting to crack a particularly intractable problem in analytic number
theory. A high proportion of the 200-some attendees were Jews, including at
least two from Israel. Sowers of discord there have certainly been, but on
balance I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously
better off for the contributions of Jews. Similarly for every other nation
that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens. Was
Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich? Was Spain better
off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions? "To ask the question is
to answer it."
Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social
scientist, is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works, any more
than a clinical pathologist writing about disease should be expected to
include an acknowledgment that most of his readers will be healthy for most
of their lives. I agree. A scientist, even a social scientist, need not
present any facts other than those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in
his particular narrow field. He is under no obligation, as a scientist, to
soothe the feelings of those whose sensibilities might be offended by his
discoveries. Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald's material,
however, it wouldn't have hurt to point out the huge, indisputably
net-positive, contributions of Jews to America, right at the beginning of
his book and again at the end. MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in
CofC with his own opinions on such matters as U.S. support for Israel,
immigration policy, and so on. He is entitled to those opinions, but having
included them in this book, his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of
cold scientific objectivity does not sound very convincing.
This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the
term, an anti-Semitic book. Its entire argument is that the Jews,
collectively, are up to no good. This may of course be true, and MacDonald
is entitled to say that the issue of whether his results are anti-Semitic is
nugatory, from a social-science point of view, by comparison with the issue
of their truth content. I agree with that, too: but given the well-known
history of this topic, it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald not to try to
calm the troubled waters his work is bound to stir up. From my own indirect,
and rather scanty, knowledge of the man, I would put this down to a
personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness, but I am not sure
I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct
one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald's elaborate
sociological jargon.
__________________________________
John Derbyshire ( http://www.olimu.com)
is a Contributing Editor of National Review and a twice-weekly columnist for
National Review Online. His book Prime Obsession, an account of the Riemann
Hypothesis, will be published April 18 by National Academies Press.
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