Sunday, I argued with Yonasan, an Orthodox Jew in New York.
Pete*, the professional philosopher, says:
Hi Luke,
I’ve been listening to most of your streaming stuff the last few weeks. Really excellent! I especially loved the one where you were calling for a new alt right focused on spiritual and moral things. I couldn’t be entirely sure that you were serious, or how serious you were. (Is that something about your personality or persona?) But I chose to take it straight. Thought that was very inspiring. I now understand better your position within the alt right, or not within it perhaps but involved with it somehow. You have a gift for re-framing and re-orienting the alt right perspective so that it becomes far more reasonable and powerful. I’m sure it’s been helpful for people in the movement who aren’t hellbent on destroying themselves. The recent debate with that Orthodox guy in New York was interesting. For me it seemed like he was not very honest or serious–a lot of really strained reasoning from him, much of it seemed to be just for the sake of needlessly complicating or confusing matters. (Confirming some negative stereotypes about Jewish high IQ cleverness, legalism, indifference to principles and truth. Of course I know NAXALT, but…) By contrast you were a great debater: very clear, straightforward, focused, always returning back to your fundamental claims and evidence. Maybe you should do more debates?
One thing that came up repeatedly in that debate, which I wish you’d have pressed a bit more: it might be true that there is no single ‘white’ identity, or that white people historically tended to identify on national or religious grounds rather than just whiteness; but this definitely does not imply that the white race, or white identity, is not an essential important ingredient in the various national or cultural identities of white peoples (e.g., the Scots, the French, the white Americans).
Your Jewish interlocutor seemed to be arguing roughly this: since (a) whiteness alone was never sufficient for being a member of any particular culture or group that people cared about (e.g., being American) therefore (b) whiteness is not even necessary to these cultures and groups, and therefore (c) whiteness has nothing to do with American culture or national identity. At least that was my impression. But that reasoning is just illogical. From the fact that whiteness alone is not sufficient, or not the whole of any one of these white identities, it doesn’t follow that it was never necessary for such identities. (Analogy: being human is not sufficient for being French; no French person ever focused on the fact of his humanity as the essence or whole of his cultural or national identity; but it doesn’t follow that non-humans can be members of the French culture or nation!) On this point, I felt like you were letting him get away with some real bullshit, wished you’d nailed him on the basic logical issue.
It was also ironic to hear the Orthodox guy reciting SJW-type objections to the ‘construct’ of the white race. Wouldn’t all these objections apply more clearly and forcefully to the ‘construct’ of Jewishness? (For example, that some Jews are more closely related biologically to some non-Jews than to their fellow Jews, that historically Jewish communities thought of themselves as something other than just ‘Jewish’, etc.)
From 2016: Looking at some things on the ‘alt right’ lately I’m pretty disgusted. That site ‘The Right Stuff’, for example. An author saying that Jewish facial features are the result of ‘mixing with subhuman filth’, and essentially all of the commenters agreeing-and-amplifying. One or two who claim to be Jewish but sympathetic to the ‘alt right’ pathetically saying that they feel a bit lonely. Is this what it’s about now, what it’s come to so quickly? Just gutter level Nazism all around?
It seems the situation is hopeless. If I say blacks are naturally disposed to some kinds of bad behavior, and I don’t want to live around large numbers of blacks for that reason, liberals and mainstream conservatives will accuse me of thinking all blacks are subhumans and wanting to enslave them. If I say Jewish power is a problem for western societies, they’ll accuse me of wanting to murder all Jews. And now that the real right is beginning to get a bit of traction, immediately all these people come out of the woodwork who actually _do_ think that non-whites are subhumans, who actually think that every Jew is an evil parasite and who go around saying things like ‘Gas the kikes now’. Or who think it’s fun and kind of funny to talk that way, all the time, even if maybe they’re not totally serious. I want a society based on facts and moral principles and organic human relationships. I don’t want a leftist totalitarian regime like we now have, where non-whites get to degrade and harm whites simply because they’re white, and whites get the blame for their bad behavior; I don’t want a rightist totalitarian regime where whites get to degrade and harm non-whites simply because they’re non-white, and non-whites or Jews get blamed for every problem in human history. And yet my strong suspicion at this point is that, since people in the west have no religion to constrain them, they can’t settle on any kind of sane and moral position. Either they have to be insane hate-filled anti-whites or equally insane hate-filled pro-whites. Either racial masochists or racial sadists.
The west seems to be doomed no matter what. I fear the evil insane leftists are actually right: as things stand, whites just cannot take even the first steps toward racial awareness and solidarity without becoming the lowest kind of halfwit Nazi scum. Maybe white western people are just so spiritually corrupt or diseased that politics is not appropriate for them. Maybe there’s just no point in even attempting to think about politics in this society. (Why think about it if any action would lead to something just as bad as what we have now, or worse?) Grim stuff.
Sure, every side will have a dark side, every group will have its haters and its gutter. And I agree, too, that it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect ordinary people who are just waking up to race realism and the JQ to be fully rational. What I’m finding, though, is that a really vile, ugly and irrational tone has quickly become very common or even dominant within the Alt Right.
So, like you I don’t take seriously someone who refers to other people as ‘subhuman filth’. His ideas are obviously not worth considering. But I do take seriously the fact that someone who talks that way publishes articles on this apparently popular and prominent Alt Right site and gets no intelligent moral response from the commenters or other authors on the site. I take seriously the fact that such discourse seems to have gone very quickly from being pretty marginal and not very respectable, even within the dissident right world, to being common and normal and no big deal. What does that say about the whole ‘movement’, such as it is? Greg Johnson may not say things like ‘Gas the kikes’, but does he criticize people for saying it? (A real question.) My impression is that he has no problem with genocidal Nazis, and may well be one himself, but he doesn’t think it’s tactically wise to admit that. I don’t think it’s healthy or normal or acceptable for someone here and now to speak seriously (or jokingly) about gassing large numbers of ordinary decent people because of their race — including children, I assume. This doesn’t seem worrisome to you? I allow that there could be circumstances where that kind of talk would be normal and even moral. It depends. But then, I don’t think it’s healthy or normal to believe that we’re currently in that kind of situation right now. Whites in the US are not living through the siege of Stalingrad or whatever.
And I’m guessing that the people who are into the Alt Right at this stage are probably a lot more intelligent and better educated than the majority of the white population in the west. What might happen when the masses begin to turn on to some of these ideas? If the result might well be a mass resurgence of the most stupid, destructive and indiscriminate white racism, I would probably prefer the (very bad) leftist regime we have now. And I really do hate this regime we have now.
I’m aware that he has this view that race or racial development alone can serve as an ideal. I haven’t read the [Gregory Hood] book, but that seems pretty far-fetched to me. Ironically, alt rightists like Hood claim to be dealing with human nature, harsh facts about how we really are — unlike the leftist or conservative ideologues. But it just doesn’t seem to be natural for people to organize their societies around something like ‘the development of the race’. Of course, race may be seen as a means to something else, as in Judaism; but the idea that it’s the highest principle just doesn’t seem to have much appeal to humans. Most people find it unnatural to think that the purpose of their lives or societies is the development of the human species, or the development of mammalian life or life on Earth. Why should we care about the development of a sub-species, unless that’s taken to play a role in some more transcendental meaning or purpose?
Love of one’s people is probably a primal force. But if we’re talking about nation-states anything like those we’re familiar with in Europe or its colonies, I don’t know that those could be based only on a racialist love. If I love Spain or the people of Spain then what I love is not a race nor a sub-race of any race in the biological sense. Maybe Catalans love the people of Catalonia in a special way that they don’t love other Spaniards, and that special kind of love could be ‘a reasonable basis for a nation-state’. However even in that kind of case, I doubt that what they love is reducible to anything like biological race. (Although, obviously, biological race is a key part of what makes up the Catalonian people.) As far as I know, there aren’t any examples of societies based only on an ideal of ‘development of the race’ or love of one’s _racial_ people, except maybe Nazi Germany.
Hood says:
“Race is the key building block of any real community and the farthest meaningful grouping to which we can give our loyalty.”
Isn’t this just false, unless the appeal to “real community” is begging the question? Christians and Muslims and Jews have strong and durable communities that aren’t based on this ‘key building block of any real community’. I guess he could say that the Ashkenazics and Sephardics never constitute any one ‘real community’. But then is ‘real community’ here just being defined (question beggingly) as ‘a community based on race’? It also seems false that race is the farthest meaningful object of loyalty. Some people just do seem to have deep loyalty to fellow Christians or Americans or veterans or southerners regardless of race, or to other human beings just because they are human, and so on. If that’s never ‘meaningful’ loyalty does ‘meaningful loyalty’ here just mean ‘racial loyalty’?
Hood may not be claiming that racial feeling is the only basis for a state, which would be false, of course; but he does seem to claim that it’s the only legitimate or reliable basis. My point about states like Spain is that when we look at how people actually behave it doesn’t seem that they’ve ever been much inclined to organize socially or politically merely on the basis of race, i.e., it doesn’t seem natural for us to treat race as a ‘first principle’. In that sense it may be that Hood’s version of WN is just as ideological or utopian as its leftist analogues, e.g., Marxism.
I take your point about race and religion. But in white ethnostates there would be sub-groups in the same race that differ in just these ways, and which will tend not to mix — whites with low IQs and high IQs, for example. Hood doesn’t take that to rule out the possibility that a white ethnostate could be a real community though. (And I agree.) But then why can’t Jews or Christians be examples of real communities too, though they differ internally in these ways?
I thought I was just interpreting your phrase “love of one’s people” in a way that fits with Hood’s program of white racialism: one’s people, for Hood, seems to be one’s race. At least in the US context he has in mind. So love of one’s people is a racial feeling for him. And if that is meant to be a reasonable basis for a nation state, the basis is racial feeling, no?
I don’t disagree about genetic similarity. I just doubt that it’s a sufficient basis, which seems to be Hood’s view. For example, Aussie mateship isn’t just a matter of whites feeling something for other whites.
I’d be interested to know whether or how his [Greg Johnson’s] training in philosophy led him to white nationalism. Also whether he was open about his views in philosophy and whether this got him in trouble. (Did he not get a job because people knew he was a ‘racist’?) But maybe he wouldn’t want to answer that second question. Third question: You’d think that analytic philosophers, being so obsessed with logic and clarity and coherence, wouldn’t be able to stomach all the PC stuff in the universities; and yet almost all of them go along with it or even promote it. I wonder if he has any thoughts about that.
