[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 18 February 2020 07:32.
DAILYKENN.com—Had a 29-year-old black woman been shot to death by her white boyfriend, it would likely be national news. Had the victim been white and the suspect black, the story would be limited to local media and race would not be mentioned.
Cassia Renee Duval, 29, was seven months pregnant when she was found shot to death. Her unborn baby was also killed. Arrested is James Isaac Jones Jr. 33. Jones and Duval lived together, reports say.
Why was she killed? We can only speculate. Is it because she mated with an individual with low impulse control, low intelligence, low affective empathy, and psychopathic tendencies? We can’t say for certain.
Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects For the Future (2019) is the first book that employs an evolutionary psychological approach to explain the rise of the West — actually, it is the first book that aims to comprehend the dynamics of the entire history of the West from prehistoric to current times to explain as well the decline of the West, the ways in which the “egalitarian individualism” originated by northwest Europeans in hunting and gathering times planted the seeds of the West’s current decision to destroy its genetic heritage through the importation of masses of immigrants.
Difficult as this task may seem, MacDonald performs it extremely well. In a normal academic world in which criticism of immigration was permissible, MacDonald’s book would have been the subject of immediate debate rather than complete silence. The books currently dominating the “rise of the West” tend to downplay any substantial differences between the West and other civilizations. They talk about “surprising similarities” between the major civilizations as late as the 1750s, and argue that the West diverged only with the spread of the Industrial Revolution. Some books go back in time to the family structure of medieval northwest Europe, or to the enforcement of monogamy by the Catholic Church, or to the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. While MacDonald makes effective use of earlier arguments on Western uniqueness, including my own argument about the importance of the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of prehistoric Indo-Europeans, he believes that the starting point must be “the genetic history of the West”.
For MacDonald, the most unique trait of Europeans is their individualism, a trait manifested in two different forms, in the aristocratic individualism of Indo-European cultures, and in the hunter-gatherer egalitarian individualism of northwestern Europe. There is a genetic basis for these two forms of individualism. To understand their origins it is necessary to document how these two forms were naturally selected within populations living in particular environmental settings, as well as within the novel cultural-environmental settings they created. The egalitarian form of individualism, in MacDonald’s estimation, was the form that eventually came to dominate European culture. While the aristocratic individualism of Indo-Europeans predominated in ancient Greece and Rome, the trend in European history was for the accentuation of egalitarian individualism, with the Church playing a critical role, and then the Puritan revolution with its “moralistic Utopianism” gradually spreading in the United States.
The Jews did not invent this egalitarian individualism. They interpreted this egalitarianism into a call for a plurality of cultures and races inside the West — the “ethnic dissolution of non-Jews” — while protecting Jewish in-group solidarity and ethnocentrism. They insisted that the egalitarian values of Europeans required them to abolish their exclusive and unequal ethnic-based concept of citizenship for the sake of a truly egalitarian multiracial concept open to the arrival of millions of immigrants.
MacDonald’s emphasis on the “primordial” foundations of the egalitarian individualism of northwest hunter gatherers should not be confused with the standard observation that hunters and gatherers across the world were egalitarian. His focus throughout the book is on kinship systems, whether lines of descent were bilateral or patricentric, whether marriages were exogamous or endogamous, monogamous or polygamous, whether families were nuclear or extended, whether there was individual choice in marriage or arranged marriages, and whether individuals were inclined to establish relations outside their kinship group, with relatively weak ethnocentric tendencies, or whether they were seen as embedded to their kinship group, with relatively strong levels of ethnocentrism. His central argument is that already among northwest European hunter gatherers we can detect relatively weaker collective kinship systems, which gave room for more individual initiative and relationships outside extended families and blood lines, with individuals forming associations outside kinship relationships, as if they were in a state of equality rather than in a state of inequality between ingroups and outgroups.
It is this focus on the individualistic family systems of the West that allows MacDonald to offer a comprehensive explanation of both the rise and the decline of the West. Most scholars writing about the rise of the West today are concerned to answer why the Industrial Revolution occurred in eighteenth century England/Europe. Some emphasize the unique family structure of northwest Europe, but they trace this family structure to the Middle Ages, and none of them go back to the evolution of genetic dispositions among northwest hunter-gatherers to explain the rise of the West. I am not aware of any scholar who focuses so consistently on the weak ethnocentric tendencies of Europeans to explain both the rise and decline of the West. If meeting the scientific criteria for parsimony is valuable to you, then reading MacDonald’s book will be very illuminating indeed.
What follows is the first of nine or ten commentaries I will be writing about Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition
Three Foundational Genetic Populations of Europe
Chapter One brings up the latest research on population movements into prehistoric Europe to argue that three distinct populations came to constitute the genetic foundations of this continent:
1. A “primordial population” arriving in Europe about 45,000 years ago, which he calls “Western hunter-gatherers (WHGs),” and which developed a unique culture of egalitarian individualism in the northwest areas of Europe.
2. Early Farmers arriving from Anatolia about 8000 years ago, bringing agriculture and having the greatest genetic effect on the WHG population in the southern areas of Europe.
3. Indo-Europeans migrating from the Pontic-Steppes beginning around 4500 years ago, starting with the Yamnaya peoples and later associated with the Corded Ware culture. The greatest genetic impact of the Yamnaya and Corded Ware peoples was on central Europe and some regions in the north, with less impact in the east and south.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 27 January 2020 10:47.
Christopher Caldwell: America’s two constitutions — since the ‘60s, competing visions of a more perfect union
Christopher Caldwell, author of the book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’ says Democrats and Republicans have two different conceptions of what the country is about. Fox News, 27 Jan 2020:
Not long after he left the White House, Bill Clinton gave what is still the best description of the fault lines that run through American politics. “If you look back on the ’60s and on balance you think there was more good than harm, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said. “If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”
What could he have meant by that?
Though Americans are reluctant to admit it, the legacy of the 1960s that most divides the country has its roots in the civil rights legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was enacted in a rush of grief, anger and overconfidence — the same overconfidence that had driven Kennedy to propose landing a man on the moon and would drive Lyndon Johnson to wage war on Vietnam. Shored up and extended by various court rulings and executive orders, the legislation became the core of the most effective campaign of social transformation in American history.
This campaign was effective both for its typically American idealism and for its typically American ruthlessness. It authorized Washington to shape state elections, withhold school funds, scrutinize the hiring practices of private businesses and sue them. It placed Offices of Civil Rights in the major cabinet agencies, and these offices were soon issuing legally binding guidelines, quotas and targets. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, business and political life to direction from judges.
Americans assumed that solving the unique and extraordinary problem of segregation would require handing Washington powers never before granted in peacetime. In this they were correct.
But they were also confident that the use of these powers would be limited in time (to a few years at most), in place (to the South), and in purpose (to eliminating segregation). In this they misjudged, with fateful consequence for the country’s political system.
Civil rights law may have started off as a purpose-built tool to thwart the insidious legalism of Southern segregation and the violence of Southern sheriffs. It would end up a wide-ranging reinvention of government.
After the work of the civil rights movement in ending segregation was done, the civil rights model of executive orders, regulation-writing and court-ordered redress remained.
This was the so-called “rights revolution”: an entire new system of constantly churning political reform, bringing tremendous gains to certain Americans and — something that is mentioned less often — losses to many who had not necessarily been the beneficiaries of the injustices that civil rights was meant to correct.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions), as people rallied to one code or the other, they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink.
Civil rights became an all-purpose constitutional shortcut for progressive judges and administrators. Over time it brought social changes in its wake that the leaders of the civil-rights movement had not envisioned and voters had not sanctioned: affirmative action, speech codes on college campuses, a set of bureaucratic procedures that made immigrants almost impossible to deport, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms.
In retrospect, the changes begun in the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the pre-1964 one would frequently prove incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil-rights regime was built out.
Our present political impasse is the legacy of that clash of systems. Much of what we today call polarization” or “incivility” is something more grave. It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the pre-1964 constitution, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators, and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.
As long as the baby boom generation was in its working years, permitting the country to run large debts, Washington could afford to pay for two social orders at the same time. Conservatives could console themselves that they, too, were on the winning side of the revolution. They just stood against its “excesses.” A good civil rights movement led by the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been hijacked, starting in the 1970s, by a radical version that brought affirmative action and eventually political correctness.
But affirmative action and political correctness were not temporary. Over time they hardened into pillars of the second constitution, shoring it up where it was impotent or illogical, the way the invention of judicial review in Marbury v Madison (1803) shored up the first constitution.
Both affirmative action and political correctness were derived from the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. And this was the only civil rights on offer. If you didn’t like affirmative action and political correctness, you didn’t like civil rights. By 2013, when Americans began arguing over whether a cake maker could be forced to confect a pro–gay marriage cake, this was clear.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions) —as people rallied to one code or the other — they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink. Democrats were the party of rights, Republicans of bills. Democrats say, by 84 to 12 percent, that racism is a bigger problem than political correctness. Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, think political correctness is a bigger problem than racism. The Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010, and its political mirror image, the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2015 and 2016, were symbols of that division.
Much happened this century to bring matters to the present boil. Barack Obama, both for his fans and his detractors, was the first president to understand civil rights law in the way described here: as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be overridden or bypassed. His second inaugural address, an explicitly Constitution-focused argument, invoked “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — i.e., women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights — as constitutional milestones.
In this view, the old republic built on battlefield victories had been overthrown by a new one built on rights marches and Supreme Court jurisprudence. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 gay marriage case that was in many ways the culmination of this new rights-based constitution, he said as much.
The election of 2016 brought the change into focus. Today two nations look at each other in mutual incomprehension across an impeachment hearing room. It appears we are facing a constitutional problem of the profoundest kind.
