Rarely do I follow the news in this blog. But the recent Supreme Court decisions against Arizona and for ObamaCare—the Old United States no longer exists: those decisions were the final nail in the coffin—remind me Harold Covington’s scolding of coward conservatives:
Note of May 12, 2015: The thoughtpolice at YouTube censored this clip.
Category: American civil war
Monocausalism is the simplistic notion that all of our issues are to be laid on the feet of Jews, that “there is NOTHING wrong with us” as the commenter Helvena put it this year at Age of Treason.
The problem with those who advocate the single-cause hypothesis of our current predicament is that they have not done their homework. Who in the movement can be more knowledgeable about the Jewish Question than Professor Kevin MacDonald? At The Occidental Quarterly when this printed, scholarly journal was under the watch of Greg Johnson (Vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 2008), MacDonald wrote (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):
Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. Rather, it was homegrown, and its story tells us much about the sensibility of an important group of white intellectuals and perhaps gives us hints about why in the twentieth century WASPs so easily capitulated to the Jewish onslaught on the intellectual establishment.
Both New England and East Anglia (the center of Puritanism in England) had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—“the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches.” This record is entirely in keeping with Calvinist tendencies in Geneva.
The legal system was designed to enforce intellectual, political, and religious conformity as well as to control crime. Louis Taylor Merrill describes the “civil and religious strait-jacket that the Massachusetts theocrats applied to dissenters.” The authorities, backed by the clergy, controlled blasphemous statements and confiscated or burned books deemed to be offensive. Spying on one’s neighbors and relatives was encouraged. There were many convictions for criticizing magistrates, the governor, or the clergy. Unexcused absence from church was fined, with people searching the town for absentees. Those who fell asleep in church were also fined. Sabbath violations were punished as well. A man was even penalized for publicly kissing his wife as he greeted her on his doorstep upon his return from a three-year sea voyage.
Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.
Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as defined by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter. Altruistic punishment refers to punishing people even at a cost to oneself. Altruistic punishment is found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups, such as Jews, based on extended kinship.
Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during the Second World War for “exterminating the German people… the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”
It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominent seventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem. They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”
Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews were able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward members of their ingroup, even when the boundaries of the ingroup were expanded to include all of America, or indeed all of humanity. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of white America, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, Jews have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.
With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America.
The lesson here is that in large part the problem confronting whites stems from the psychology of moralistic self-punishment exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants, but also apparent in a great many other whites. As I have noted elsewhere:
Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms… are punished by altruistic aggression.
The Puritan legacy in American culture is indeed pernicious, especially since the bar of morally correct behavior has been continually raised to the point that any white group identification has been pathologized. As someone with considerable experience in the academic world, I can attest to feeling like a wayward heretic back in seventeenth-century Massachusetts when confronted, as I often am, by academic thought police. It’s the moral fervor of these people that stands out. The academic world has become a Puritan congregation of stifling thought control, enforced by moralistic condemnations that a seventeenth-century Puritan minister could scarcely surpass. In my experience, this thought control is far worse in the East coast colleges and universities founded by the Puritans than elsewhere in academia—a fitting reminder of the continuing influence of Puritanism in American life.
The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very white people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural New Jerusalem will not be controlled by people like themselves, who in the long run will be a tiny, relatively powerless minority.
The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.
Postscript
At Occidental Dissent, today Hunter Wallace also liked MacDonald’s article:
Kevin MacDonald has an excellent essay on Counter-Currents about the Yankee Question. This is too good to pass up.
Note: MacDonald has never been a Single Jewish Causer. He could easily write an entire book on the radical utopian movements of the nineteenth century (abolitionism, civil rights, pacifism, “strongminded womanism,” Unitarianism, Free Loveism, Shakerism, Fourierism, Transcendentalism, etc.) that plunged America into racial and cultural decline and laid the foundation for their destructive successors in the twentieth century.
(Read MacDonald’s entire article here.)
That Whites have got a loose screw is patent even in the writing of the foremost expert on how the Jews are capitalizing on it. In an article at his webzine, The Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald put it in simple terms:
My view is that moral universalism and guilt are aspects of individualism as an ethnic trait of Europeans (see here, p. 23ff). These traits are profoundly maladaptive in the modern world where they have been used as swords by the historic enemies of Europeans and their civilization. European individualist culture creates morally defined ingroups rather than ingroups based on kinship, with high levels of altruistic punishment against violators. The Puritan-Yankee culture that was so influential in shaping America is a prominent example, as in the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century. These morally defined ingroups function to prevent defection in societies not based on biological relatedness. Guilt then functions as a negative emotion motivating people to adhere to group norms. The success of the culture of the Holocaust in manufacturing guilt is testimony to the continuing success of this strategy.
The strategy of Jewish intellectual movements for destroying Europeans and their culture has been to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. Jewish intellectual movements have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment.
More technically, at The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), the academic journal for white studies, Prof. MacDonald approaches the same subject in more abstract terms (e.g., “the free-rider problem,” “altruistic punishment,” etc.) that require previous knowledge from the reader about esoteric fields of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology among humans.
In an article published last year at TOQ MacDonald wrote:
It is noteworthy that the French Revolution had pronounced egalitarian, anti-aristocratic trends, often couched in the language of moral ingroups and outgroups in opposition to the aristocracy. For example, the moral condemnation of social hierarchy by the Jacobin radicals during the French Revolution is a major theme of Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo. Thus Stoddard notes the hatred toward the White slave-owning colonists. During the height of the Reign of Terror, colonists sent home to France were greeted, in the words of one such unfortunate, with “a furious hatred… A hatred so intense that our most terrible misfortunes did not excite the slightest commiseration.” At the same time, mulatto and Black delegates from San Domingo were greeted with delirious applause.
Such sentiments recall the moral fervor of the Puritan-descended Yankee abolitionists in the period prior to the American Civil War. For example, for Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), a prominent publicist and activist, the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base” by adding to the number of slave states. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism. According to Brownson, Christians had to
bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh.
It’s interesting that whereas the aristocratic-egalitarian military groups emphasized by Duchesne produced cohesion and loyalty as a result of fealty to a successful leader (rather than on the basis of kinship), the East Anglian model for cohesion was the creation of moral and ideological bases of group cohesion (rather than on the basis of kinship). These two models are thus variants on the individualist theme. The Puritans famously imposed penalties on people who departed from the moral/ideological strictures of the society. They were also willing to incur great costs to impose their moral/ideological version of truth. Puritan “ordered liberty” was the freedom to act within the confines of the moral order. This might be called the paradox of individualism: In order to form cohesive groups, individualists have at times erected strong social controls on individual behavior that result in group cohesion.
The logic connecting these tendencies to the individualist hunter-gather model is obvious: Like all humans in a dangerous and difficult world, hunter-gatherers need to develop cohesive, cooperative in-groups. But rather than base them on known kinship relations, the prototypical egalitarian-individualist groups of the West are based on reputation and trust. Egalitarian-individualists create moral-ideological communities in which those who violate public trust and other manifestations of the moral order are shunned, ostracized, and exposed to public humiliation—a fate that would have resulted in evolutionary death during the harsh ecological period of the Ice Age—, the same fate as the derelict father who refused to provision his children.
A possible evolutionary legacy of this phenomenon is a greater tendency to engage in what social scientists term “altruistic punishment,” defined as punishment of people who depart from the moral-ideological consensus that costs the punisher. A cooperative culture derived from European hunter-gathers would be expected to be characterized by high levels of altruistic punishment directed at free-riders. This is studied in a game among strangers who donate to a common pot that is increased by a set multiplier by the experimenter and then divided equally. Free riders contribute little but get all the benefits. Altruistic punishers incur costs to punish the cheaters. This punishment is motivated by moral outrage. Because it is played among strangers, the game mimics individualistic societies. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.
The Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues, not hesitating to endure high costs in order to punish those who violated the moral norms of the ingroup. They were prone to utopian appeals to a “higher law” and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectability of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” It goes without saying that all of the great European wars of the 20th century have been rationalized in moral terms—to secure the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy, and individual rights against the state.
To conclude, my proposal is that the culture of the West as it developed in the modern era owes much more to egalitarian individualism than to aristocratic individualism. It’s interesting that all of the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involved moral indictments of the West and its history of slavery, segregation, colonialism, anti-Semitism, exclusion of Jews from the Protestant elite. Clearly the most egregious of these moral failings stem from the cultural strand of aristocratic egalitarianism, not the egalitarian individualism that eventually won out.
Nevertheless, these movements have managed to create a moral community that taps into the hunter-gatherer ethic of egalitarian individualism. As noted above, Duchesne attributes the decline of aristocratic individualism partly to “the ethical demands of modern democratic liberalism.” However, the psychological power of the ethical demands of modern liberalism themselves require explanation. The argument here is that the roots of the creation of a moral-ideological ingroup stem from the unique egalitarian-individualist strand of the culture of the West.
The general dismantling of the culture of the West, and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity, is occurring as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment and based ultimately on these evolved tendencies.
MacDonald’s long piece can be read here.