ZGram - 03/05/2003 - "He's got the Jew thing"

irimland@zundelsite.org irimland@zundelsite.org
Fri, 07 Mar 2003 15:41:48 -0500


ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

March 5, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

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. =20

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: =20

[START]

The Marx of the Anti-Semites=20

[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 =85 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.=20

__________________________________

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.=20