Academic Apostate Doesn't Hate His Roots

“I could see the same pattern in the many failed left-wing revolutions of Latin America and elsewhere. By combining actual travel with the historical study of socialism and revolution, I succeeded in disabusing myself of the utopian notions that fatally attract people to leftist ideas.”

Humans Made Love, Not War

New research suggests that Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals not by brutal warfare and genocide, but by carrying tropical diseases into Ice Age homes.

Betrayals of trust helped the rapid spread of human species around the world

Active colonisations of and through hazardous terrain are difficult to explain through immediate pragmatic choices. But they become easier to explain through the rise of the strong motivations to harm others even at one's own expense which widespread emotional commitments bring.

A letter to friends

Learned and freethinking gentlemen,

Sorry I haven't been in touch.  I took some time away from Maddingcrowdbook in order to hear myself think.  The herd found me anyway.  Even in the mountains I can hear them move.

Here's something of where I've uncomfortably been for the last few months.  I promise I'm not coming from a place of racism, sexism, or (worst of all) conservatism, but--

~~~

I read Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique.  He suggests that evolutionary psychology can clarify the unconscious motivations of certain ideologues, with a certain persistent tribal identification, who assert that healthy Western cultural norms are secretly pathological.

There are good historical reasons for Jews to have led the argument in favour of multiculturalism, and against European ethnic hegemony. 

This means that there actually is an internal coherence and logic to my education in the denigration of Western civilisation (post-structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory, et cetera).  It's not just that it was frustratingly mystical and pretentious; it was wrong, and it was wrong for reasons.

A little psychology and history applied to my lessons makes them appear less like a misanthropic shit test.  This recasts my failure to engage in the bad faith performance necessary for my final papers.  Of course I couldn't get my Honours!  The field of cultural studies wasn't honourable! 

The reasons for that are understandable, and not at all a conscious conspiracy by scheming Jews to undermine our culture, but the whole tenor of my studies is rendered suddenly comprehensible by this transgressive observation--that a significant portion of the people I read in university were Jewish atheists who believed in the moral exceptionalism of the Jewish people.

~~~

So I've just read in MacDonald's book--about academic theory--that immigration policies in the West were changed in the 60s and 70s against popular sentiment, and not by elected politicians, but by government officials responding to lobby groups.  Canada quietly abandoned a policy of favouring immigration from the cultures that constituted it because that's what it had to do to play ball with the UN.  It was not a democratic decision.

All of this is swirling around my head, when the biggest migration since the last world war breaks into the news, and browbeaten Swedes and Germans scramble to welcome refugees who have crossed half a dozen safe countries to get there.  What am I to make of this?

~~~

More conscious of the origins of intersectional grievance politics, I take a closer look at the works of people who got degrees like mine, but actually believed them.  Gamergate, Shirtgate, Elevatorgate; each time the media just repeated what professional victims said about the oppressive patriarchy.  That kind of talk is grounded in opaque poetical political philosophising, not any kind of science.

They have not one, but two Jewish prophets: Marx and Freud.  It's inevitable that the oppressed female proletariat will throw off the shackles of those bourgeois boys with all their unfair power.  It's clear that white people repress how hateful and unbalanced they really are (just like all men want to fuck their mothers) and your vehement denials really just prove how deeply true it is.

This is old stuff, adapted and polished for a new age, but people live and breathe it as gospel truth -- and they know the god they don't believe in is on their side.

~~~

Where have I heard this before?  But of course!

This is the "ressentiment" of slave morality.  Nietzsche was talking about Judaism by way of Christianity, but the psychological calculus tracks perfectly.

Resentment of the powerful leads to a reversal of values whereby the weak and powerless turn their lack of power into a virtue.  Where the nobles before called the things that were not great "bad," the slaves now call the things that are great "evil."  Where "goodness" before was a sense of strength and health and the power to effect one's will in the world, "goodness" in slave morality glorifies being a victim.

Nietzsche was writing about Social Justice Warriors in the fucking 1880s!

~~~

In the service of this narrative of oppression, regressive progressives have abandoned any pretense of classically liberal values.  The academy and the wider public discourse have become actively hostile to the free expression of ideas, to say nothing of facts and reason.  What passes for moral and rational is frequently a barrage of ad hominem, ab absurdo, straw man, and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments.

People think that repeating the received dogma is what constitutes thinking.  How can I be surprised?  Other than the philosophy courses I took, that was the measure of success in my seminars.

Universities are not about reading widely and learning how to assess information, the media is not about objectively reporting the facts and showing all sides, politics is not about defending the interests of the people and the land, and the agora, the marketplace of ideas, has been reduced to the exchange of instinctive feelings, recycled reasons, and decadent distractions.  2500 years of intellectual, political, scientific, and moral development have earned us the privilege of not simply neglecting those gifts, but denying their value. 

Franz Boas said that cultures are relative and can't be compared, which our radicals have taken to mean that only our culture can be criticised, and certainly not praised.  And why bother cultivating an elevated sense of possibility, if nothing we could ever accomplish would be any better than savagery?

Maybe the epidemics of mental illness and addiction and suicide in our society have something to do with the consequences of not honouring our ancestors (something codified as a religious rite by some cultures, but perhaps developing from a naïve psychological instinct for health).  We're the culture that chose to end institutional sexism, to end the most obvious forms of colonialism, to end legal slavery, and instead of pride for our self-overcoming, we accept the blame for inventing these injustices, reversing our accomplishments into a listless and demented ethnomasochism.

~~~

And then...

Those people didn't choose to bomb Syria.  They didn't colonise Algeria.  They didn't deserve it.  So why are some people--my father, for one--seemingly more interested in understanding and defending the motivations of jihadists than in deploring a dangerous ideology?

No amount of cultural relativism makes it not wrong.  Of course we shouldn't meddle with other regions.  Of course our nations have done terrible things in our name.  It's still wrong.  There's no moral equivalency that can absolve terrorism.  It's wrong without the need for a song and dance to lend context and nuance.  That's my culture.

If the people who value liberty, equality and fraternity can be gunned down for peacefully enjoying their way of life, and they shrug and say they probably deserved it, what competition can we hope to muster against a theocratic religion still in its petulant teenage years?

~~~

In Missouri, where the president of the state university was forced to resign after someone made a swastika out of poo, activists began using the hashtag #FuckParis, because those Parisians don't understand the institutional oppression of a townie driving by and shouting the n-word.

In Peterborough, the city where I got my schooling in what turned out to be cultural Marxism, someone set fire to the only mosque. 

South Africa's new human ancestor sparks racial row

The finding "seems to be calculated to affirm what apartheid and colonialists did to say that we are subhumans who develop from the animal kingdom and therefore gave us the status of subhuman beings to justify slavery, colonialism, oppression and exploitation."

Why the World's Remaining Hunter-Gatherer Societies Are Some of the Biggest Pot Smokers

"Countless rituals have developed around food that do not relate to nutrition. The same goes for sex, clothing, shelter and other utilitarian behaviors. All these behaviors are (and were) essential to survival and reproduction, but we humans have a tendency to elaborate everything. We think the same might be true of recreational drugs."

Nurture, not physical environment, explains human behavior

"Cultural inertia is not necessarily disadvantageous, the research noted. Learning from one's parent's generation could be beneficial because it allows for the accumulation of information through time. This capacity for cultural learning may be why modern humans were able to thrive in virtually every terrestrial habitat on Earth and why human societies vary to an extent unmatched in the animal world."

Aboriginal legends reveal ancient secrets to science

"Mr Reid says the relative isolation of Australia's indigenous people - living for 50,000 years more or less free from cultural disruptions - and the conservative nature of their culture could help explain why there is so much detail in their stories."

Early humans had gender equality

"There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We'd argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged."