Judaism As A Group Evolutionary Strategy

According to Wikipedia:

Kevin B. MacDonald (born January 24, 1944) is a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), best known for his use of evolutionary theory to support his claim that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.”

MacDonald’s most controversial claim is that a suite of traits that he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentricism, have eugenically and culturally evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. MacDonald believes this advantage has been used by a number of Jews to advance Jewish group interests and end potential antisemitism by either deliberately or inadvertently undermining the power and self-confidence of the European-derived majorities in the Western world.

I talk to Kevin MacDonald by Skype Friday afternoon. (In 2018, Nathan Cofnas published important critiques of MacDonald’s work.)
Luke: “What have you learned from all that controversy and media attention?”
Kevin: “I lost the feeling of being at home in my job. I’m rejected. People don’t want to talk to me. A general lack of collegiality. That’s about it. I’ve gained other friends. I don’t worry about what I’ve lost.”
“The main thing the mainstream media has done is to ignore me. That’s what they do when they don’t want to talk about these things. I’ve been attacked by activist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. They’ve made my life difficult at the university. It’s hard because it’s a face to face world that you work in. I’d get all these emails that were quite hostile. That was hard. You have to have a thick skin. I have a thicker skin now that when I started out. It used to be very difficult but now it is a lot easier. You get tougher.”
Luke: “I notice your ideas getting distorted in the media. For instance, in one of your books, you said that if America became more balkanized by ethnicity, there might theoretically be steps taken such as to tax Jews more or to restrict Jewish admission to universities, and you were accused of advocating this.”
Kevin: “Exactly. That was part of the Southern Poverty Law Center attack in 2006, just a complete distortion. I’m just trying to say that when you have a balkanized society with strong in-groups and out-groups, you’re going to have that kind of thing. Growing up in Wisconsin, we didn’t have that. It was a homogenous white community. There were Protestants and Catholics but nobody felt that these religious groups were impermeable, but these ethnic groups are a different ballgame. We say around the world that it is hard to contain ethnic conflict and we seem to encourage it.”
Luke: “What do you think of the groups that want to destroy you?”
Kevin: “I think of them as evil. They don’t have any intellectual integrity. As you said, the way they phrased my argument is completely dishonest. I see that over and over again. You start to feel that you are being victimized, that you’re the good guy and they’re the bad guys, and that helps. It always helps to feel that you are on the side of truth, justice and freedom. I don’t see how those organizations can see themselves as taking the high road when there’s such history of dirty politics.”
Luke: “Do you take any personal comfort in your theories that these groups are acting in their evolutionary interest by trying to destroy someone who questions them?”
Kevin: “What they’re doing is perfectly understandable and I guess it is what I would do too. I wish ideas like mine were part of the mainstream conversation, but that’s a ways off. It’s obvious that the mainstream media is intensely policed to keep views like mine out.”
Luke: “You were raised a Roman Catholic. Are you still a religious man?”
Kevin: “I’m not religious at all. I lost my religion when I went away to college. My basic worldview is evolutionary biology.”
Luke: “At what point in your life did you come to identify as a white nationalist?”
Kevin: “It took a while. When I started these books on Judaism, I certainly wasn’t there. I started out in the 1960s on the far left and gradually got more conservative. I voted for Reagan.
“It was in reading and writing these books on Judaism, that it made me much more conscious of my own ethnicity and situation. I started to develop the idea that these Jewish intellectual movements and activist Jewish community, the ADL and so on, were taking positions that were against the interests of people like me and it provoked a sense of identity in myself. It wasn’t really something that was there. Even now the vast majority of people in America don’t have a sense that they are a white person with interests in some kind of a racial struggle or something like that. I developed that because Jews see themselves, these activist Jews, the organized Jewish community see themselves as in a struggle and they see these out-groups as enemies. They see Christianity as an enemy. They see European civilization as an enemy. That’s the perspective I noticed and it affected my sense of what am I doing? I’m just going to sit and record these things. I became an active participant at some point, probably in the 1990s. In writing those last two books, Separation and Its Discontents, and The Culture of Critique. One of the big themes is reactive anti-Semitism. There’s a competition between groups and this provokes animosity in the out-group. I felt that myself. For example, I read about the [1965] immigration law and Jewish motivations to change the immigration law in America from a bias in favor of western European people. That was implicitly saying the United States was a white country and should stay that way. Jews hated that idea. And so I’m thinking, I’m a western European white person. That opposes my interest. I have to be hostile to that. In the same way that they have a sense of their own interest, they pursue them, someone like me has to do that as well or we will lose. The thing about evolution is, you can always decide not to play the game, but you will lose. That’s what’s going on now. White people have decided we’re not going to play that game. We want these universal rights. We want to be morally praiseworthy but they don’t want to win. They don’t want to see the game for what it is. The thing about these activist Jewish organizations — they see the game for what it is. They’ve been struggling for centuries and they understand the importance of winning a conflict.”
Luke: “I only came out this week as a [Jew friendly] white nationalist and I had great trepidation doing it because the rest of society looks at you as a Nazi. Did you have any trepidation?”
Kevin: “I’ve been called that so many times it is beyond count. It is completely one-sided. Jews strongly identify as Jews, blacks as blacks. They’re encouraged to have organizations that defend their interests. For whites, it is a pathology. I feel sorry for you. I know it’s very hard. It’s easier now. But going back a few years, it was difficult getting those names thrown at me.”
Luke: “Did you have any idea at the time of the repercussions to you personally and professionally?”
Kevin: “I think I did, although at first I fooled myself that this would be really interesting and people would want to discuss it. It would be an intellectual bomb, but you realize after a while, that’s not going to happen. The main strategy used against me is not to vilify me, except locally at my university and some media, but the main track has been to ignore me, to just marginalize, so people don’t talk about it, don’t think about it. They don’t want to talk about this. There’s never been a thorough review of my book The Culture of Critique by somebody who’s critical of it. You would think that this book, which has gotten a certain cult status, you’d think that some mainstream Jewish intellectual would go after it and write something sensible, academic, critical, well-referenced. But it is not part of their world. It’s not kosher.”
Luke: “I was impressed by George Michael’s summary of your ideas.”
Kevin: “He’s written some good stuff. He published that in an academic outlet but it didn’t have much impact. He’s honest. He presented my ideas well. But like so many academic papers, they’re just out there and they’re not referenced. There’s just a pall over any discussion of these ideas.”
To publish papers in mainstream psychological journals, MacDonald has to avoid the topic of Judaism. “I’ve published regularly, one or two papers a year, but it is harder and I have to avoid things related to Judaism. That’s the price you pay. Psychology is still strongly a science. There’s a real peer-review system, but certain topics, like social psychology, are political. They do police these things. They consider themselves an arm of social activism on the left. Same with anthropology and other social sciences.”
Luke: “How many peers in your department have stayed on friendly terms with you?”
Kevin: “A couple of guys have but it’s under the table. We don’t hang out like we used to hang out, go to lunch on campus. If I were to go to lunch or dinner with somebody, it would be off-campus and nobody knows about it. It’s a pervasive social ostracism thing. It was hard to take at first.”
Luke: “When did you realize that race was more than a social construct?”
Kevin: “Coming up in my graduate studies in evolutionary biology, it always seemed common sense. You have different races and biologically they’re different. You can chart how far apart genetically these groups are. Races are simply biological descent groups… Medical science has to deal with race because some races are more prone to disease than others. They react differently to medication… It’s only this politically motivated campaign that these cultural marxists have had to destroy this concept of race. They get the media and have prestigious academic institutions on their side.”
Luke: “Would most of your peers in evolutionary psychology understand these basic differences?”
Kevin: “Evolutionary psychology is part of the mainstream academic world. What happened there is that at the beginning, you had E.O. Wilson and his famous book SocioBiology. That got a lot of hostility from Stephen Jay Gould and those people.
“In the late 80s and early 90s, you had the development of evolutionary psychology, but they divorced themselves from the sociobiology thing and made up this story there were no differences between humans and they would only study those adaptations that were universal to everyone. The science of evolutionary psychology specifically avoided any talk about differences, any talk about genetic variation. They didn’t want to talk about intelligence. They have a whole theory that intelligence can’t exist. Evolutionary psychology has been dominated by this political correctness. They’ve managed to get rid of the legacy of behavior genetics, eugenics, sociobiology and carve out a narrow evolutionary psychology.”
“I was friends with J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn and people like that. Frank Salter. Those guys are strong race realists. We managed to have a group of people. When I went to conferences, I could always seek out someone like Phil Rushton. We could talk and have dinner and catch up… He was always complaining about this. Phil Rushton’s an interesting case. He published all this stuff. He was just a workaholic. He published hundreds of things. Books. Any number of scientific papers. And he remained. He published in the journal Intelligence. It’s an outlier. It publishes stuff on IQ that is really scientific.
“Phil Rushton always felt that his work on race differences would be very mainstream and he would get a lot of acclaim for that and he would be invited to give addresses at Harvard and stuff. But it never happened. And he died last year. The Bell Curve came out and he was very optimistic about the effects of that but that did not happen.”
Luke: “What did you think of his book, Race, Evolution and Behavior?”
Kevin: “It’s a very important book. He brings all this stuff together. It’s not just IQ. The subtitle of that book is, ‘A Life History Perspective.’ He’s putting it into the wider context of life history theory. The idea that some species have a shorter life span. Among humans, individuals with a shorter life span hit puberty earlier, have babies earlier, have lower intelligence, and so on. To this day, I can’t find anything wrong with it. When people like Stephen Gould criticize it, all they do is say he looked at penis size and they criticize him for that and laugh at him for that without taking him seriously. There are these differences and they are correlated. That’s what a good theory does. It brings together disparate data like brain size, when did you get your first teeth, when girls menstruate for the first time, all these things are brought together into one theory and that’s an awesome achievement. But you don’t see it discussed. You’re excluded.”
Luke: “Charles Murray said he went into a clinical depression for six months after The Bell Curve came out because he took such a shellacking.”
Kevin: “It was a great book. It was a brave book.”
Luke: “Arthur Jensen in his book G notes… that IQ differences in and of themselves account for the different crime rates [by race].”
Kevin: “Crime and IQ. Why do those go together? Again, with Rushton’s life history strategy theory, they all mesh with one way of dealing with the world. It’s a theory in the back of my mind for how to see the world. I’ve never seen anyone refute that theory.”
“The education establishment is tone deaf on [IQ]. All kids are equal. But they can’t close these gaps.”
“It’s a story of suppressing the truth in the interest of this egalitarian ideology.”
Luke: “Now your first book on Jews [A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994)] received a positive reception. By the time of Culture of Critique, that seems to be where you left the mainstream. Did you realize when you were writing that you were leaving polite society?”
Kevin: “That and Separation and Its Discontents (1998), I knew would be much more difficult for people to get into. I had quite a few reviews, all positive, of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. It was basically descriptive. I was going on mainstream Jewish history and just plugging it into this theoretical framework based on evolutionary biology. It wasn’t controversial. But when you get to Culture of Critique, then all of a sudden, people won’t review it anymore. I’ve had one real review in the academic literature — by Frank Salter. People don’t want to talk about it. If they could come up with a valid critique of it, they would have. That’s what they did with Rushton, with the Bell Curve. The Bell Curve was too big to ignore. They had this big public discussion. And ten years later, what do we have? We have nothing. There is no influence of The Bell Curve on public policy anywhere in this country.”
Luke: “I notice that in your books, many of the points you make have been made before, including by Jewish scholars, and therefore should not be controversial. It’s either the spin you put on the points or the rhetoric or where you break new ground. What is it?”
Kevin: “Yes. For example, it was easy enough to find Jewish scholars who said the Frankfurt School was a Jewish cult, that psychoanalysis was a Jewish movement and even Boasian anthropology. These individual Jewish scholars are not bringing it all together and finding these patterns. It’s one thing to say psychoanalysis is Jewish, I think everybody sort of knows that, but when you put that in context with other intellectual movements and they’re also Jewish and they’re all on the left, and they’re all motivated by ending anti-Semitism, and you also say they’re very unscientific and they all work by establishing a consensus among an elite as opposed to any kind of empirical reality, then you are really saying something. I would quote Jewish scholars to make points along the way but the big synthesis was something they never did and would probably be horrified by.”
To back up my assertion that many of MacDonald’s critical points about Jews have been made by reputable Jews without harm to their reputations, here are highlights from a 2005 column by Dennis Prager:

* Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well.

* Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right-wing—such as the words “right-wing” and “conservative.”

* Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion—especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity—with anti-Semitism.

* Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every “ism” of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion.

* The Jews’ religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

* Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews’. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as “world citizens”; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.

Lawrence Auster, a Jew who converted to Christianity, responded:
“As Prager describes it, the overwhelming majority of Jews oppose, fear, and regard as evil everything that our society is based on: conservative values, free enterprise, religion, Christianity, even nationhood itself, and they are compelled to these anti-American views by what they see as their religion.
In their 1982 book, Why The Jews? The Reason For Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin wrote a chapter on “Non-Jewish Jews and Antisemitism.”

Among non-Jewish Jews there have been some who, in addition to their alienation from Jewish roots, have not felt rooted in the non-Jewish society in which they lived and who in the course of the last century have helped to cause intense Jew-hatred. These are radical and revolutionary Jews. It must be understood that the reasons for the antisemitism they engender are unique. First, their challenges to non-Jews do not come from within Judaism. Second, they not only challenge the non-Jews’ values, but the non-Jews’ national and religious identity as well. Third, they are as opposed to Jews’ values and identity as to non-Jews…
The association of Jews with revolutionary doctrines and ideological social upheaval has not, unfortunately, been the product of antisemites’ imaginations. The names Marx, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoview, Luxemburg, Bela Kun, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Noam Chomsky, and others come immediately to mind. The phenomenon of the utterly disproportionate role played by Jews in Leftist revolutionary causes has often been commented upon…
First, these Jews have inherited a tradition of thousands of years of Jews challenging others’ values…
Second, and most important, radical non-Jewish Jews are rootless. They do not feel rooted in either the Gentiles’ religion or nation or the Jews’ religion or nation, and they may very well have become revolutionaries in many instances precisely in order to overcome this rootlessness or alienation. Since they refuse to become like the non-Jews through identification with their traditional religious or national values, they seek to have the non-Jews become like them, alienated from traditional religious and national values…
As a consequence of their lack of rootedness many non-Jewish Jews have felt it necessary to turn radical and work to tear down traditional and national values and institutions in the name of “universalism.”

Luke: “Is it fair to say that most of the points you make in your books have been made by completely accepted Jewish scholars?”
Kevin: “Hmm. I would say a lot of it. For example, Paul Johnson. One of the first things I did when I decided to write these books was to read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. He’s a British historian. Not Jewish. He talked about this Jewish intellectual blossoming after the enlightenment and Jewish intellectual domination. That got me the idea. People are aware of this. You’ll see Jews in Commentary and elsewhere with a huge sense of pride that Jews came out of the ghetto and dominated the West. It’s not hard to find Jews who talk about Jewish intellectual domination. I take it for a different spin, that these movements are conflictual. There are conflicts of interest over how you construct culture. These people are constructing culture in a way that benefits them and disarms the white majority. Think of Boasing anthropology. The ultimate end point of this is that race does not exist. That disarms anyone who says that the United States should be a European derived society as it was originally. These ideologies have been used to combat the interests of Europeans. That’s what I get into and these Jewish scholars never do. They wear it as a badge but they don’t see the downside of it from the standpoint of Europeans.”
Luke: “Do you think that if you had made all of the same points but given them a pro-Jewish spin, then you wouldn’t have had this campaign of destruction against you?”
Kevin: “That could be true. You think about Paul Johnson. There are other people like that. They’re just in awe of Jews. And then it’s OK. If I had just talked about this as an element of Jewish IQ and Jewish accomplishment, and never talked about the practical consequences for conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews, then I would have been fine. Who knows? Maybe I’d be writing for Commentary.
“My whole awakening came when I began seeing these groups as having conflicts of interest with people like me and that even asserting this was viewed as anti-Semitic, as evil, and a Nazi. The ADL at one point said that MacDonald is resurrecting themes of anti-Semitism that were common in the early 20th Century. And that’s true. I was reading [Immanuel] Kant, the philosopher, and he had this view of Jews as a nation, not really a religion, and that they pursue worldly goals. If you look at anti-Semitism in the early 20th Century, there were a lot of complaints about Jewish involvement in the media. A lot of complaints about Jewish involvement in financial scandals and in Communism. When the Bolshevik revolution happened, the role of Jews was a huge topic on the right in Europe and that fed into National Socialism. I’m resurrecting some of those things. Absolutely. A lot of my writing isn’t original. It’s resurrecting ideas and applying them to the contemporary world right now because Jewish involvement in the media is still an issue. Political pressure for a war in Iraq and a war in Iran are all with us right now.”

MacDonald’s words reminded me of what Steve Sailer wrote in 2010:

To quantify the statement that “Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration,” in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.
Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.

Joel Stein of the LA Times found in 2007 that people of Jewish background hold a large majority of the most powerful positions in Hollywood.

This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.

Luke: Jews in the media disagree about many things but there are certain things they agree on and they do act on those interests.

Kevin: “That’s right. They’re totally in agreement in things like immigration, refugee policy, Church and State. There’s no mainstream Jewish organization opposed to immigration. Opposition to immigration has almost disappeared from the mainstream media. Things like VDare are about the only things available. Peter Brimelow says we have to do this because mainstream journalism is completely asleep at the switch. They don’t care. There are all these stories about immigration that do not appear in the media because of Jewish influence.”

Luke: “What do you see as the original contributions of your books on Jews?”

Kevin: “In the first book, the big deal there was to simply talk about groups. When I wrote that book, groups were on the outs in evolutionary biology. The whole thrust of sociobiology and E.O. Wilson was that evolution works at the individual level. My argument was that that might be true of animals, but humans are different. We can police groups. We can get rid of people who are cheating and dissenting. One of the big themes of my first book was how Jews police their own groups and how they got rid of people who were not on board. Someone who didn’t go along with Jewish business practices between other Jews or didn’t pay their taxes or married a Gentile, they’d be excluded.

“The Culture of Critique is the most important book. It has a conflict theory of culture that I haven’t seen anyone else come up with, where you see these various intellectual movements as ethnically motivated and conflicting with the interests of other people. I’ve managed to publish that as a theoretical thing in the evolutionary literature, but I did not include Jewish intellectual movements as examples. I included other examples of conflict over the construction of culture. The role of Jews is off the table and cannot be discussed in polite society. That is a true index of their power.”

About 15 years ago, I got a lot of heat for my essay on the role of Jews in the pornography industry. I then used similar tools in my book-length analysis of Dennis Prager’s life and thought.

Luke: “Many of the points you make are also in Ernest van den Haag’s book The Jewish Mystique, including Jewish eugenics.”

Kevin: “Right. When I first started to write, people told me about that book. I read it. The other big one is John Murray Cuddihy‘s book, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity, was a preliminary version of The Culture of Critique.”

According to Wikipedia:

Cuddihy has been described as a “Catholic atheist,”, and “a brilliant yet eccentric critic of contemporary American Jewry”…

In The Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy explicates the wrenching process of adjusting to modernity experienced by the shtetl Jews of the Pale in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had to adapt quickly from a tribal culture to a modern Protestant civil culture rather than slowly adjusting over the centuries. It is in this context that he locates the efforts of Jewish intellectuals, such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss to facilitate the transition by providing a cohesive narrative that attempts to universalize the experience and thus provide an apologia to both the ingroup of Jews and the outgroup of gentiles.

Luke: “Where would you like to see whites become more like Jews?”
Kevin: “Having a strong sense of their group interest and having a stronger sense of ethnicity. That’s what’s really missing. With Israel, it’s not like South Africa. The American Jewish community is digging in, particularly the people with money like Sheldon Adelson. They have this strong sense of ethnicity and group interest and whites on the other hand, are afraid of their shadows. They’re afraid to be seen as ‘racists’. They’re afraid to be seen as immoral. They’re running around with their tail between their legs. You never see Jews like that. Jews are very aggressive and very assertive. If they lose something, like if an academic society makes a resolution against Israel, they’ll just go after the academic society. They’ll go after universities to prevent funding for that society. They’ll go after state legislatures to prevent state universities from having faculty travel to those societies. It’s just wall-to-wall activism. They’re tough. They’re good at what they do. And we’re not. We’re just completely divided. Whites have all these ideologies. Christian fundamentalism where they love Israel or they think abortion is the biggest issue of the day or they’re worried about gay marriage. That that’s really the problem that society faces. Well, the problem they face in the long run is that they are going to become a minority. That they are going to be victimized. That they are going to lose political power. But they can’t even talk about that. We have to get stronger and stand up. After my three books, I wrote something about Jewish aggressiveness. In your face, but it’s very adaptive. I can’t fault someone for aggressively pursuing their interests. They have a way of morally condemning anybody who disagrees with them.”
Luke: “I grew up a WASP. I converted to Orthodox Judaism. It seems to me that Jews have a higher quality of life.”
Kevin: “Yeah.”
Luke: “When I joined Orthodox Judaism, I joined a people who were smarter, more educated, more sophisticated about applying political pressure, more cohesive, a group that had more cultural and economic influence…”
Kevin: “Interesting. Do you feel at all estranged? Do they completely accept you as a convert?”
Luke: “No, they do not completely accept me as a convert. Much of that has to do with my writing. It’s disturbing. I write a lot about scandals in the Jewish community. That does not go over well… I get in trouble for writing negative things about Jews. I’ve never married, which makes me a freak in Orthodox Judaism. I’ve always been poor because I’ve devoted myself to blogging. If you are poor, you can’t fully participate in Jewish life. I’ve been told in synagogue, ‘We will never accept you.’ But other converts have become Orthodox rabbis and achieved a much greater degree of acceptance. They’ve married. They’ve had children. They’ve sent their children to Jewish schools. There are Jewish laws that a convert should not be in a leadership position.”
Kevin: “What you’re saying about Jews having certain positive qualities is one of the reasons that Judaism is so powerful among Jews, that they have such strong allegiance. They have such a strong sense of pride in their tradition. They think of all these famous Jews, wealthy Jews, Jews who own media, and there’s a sense of pride there. I can understand it. The problem is you have to understand conflicts of interests. They don’t understand the interests that non-Jews have.”
Luke: “When I go to synagogue, I mix with people who direct movies, write novels, people who’ve helped run presidential campaigns. It’s just a far more interesting and influential group of people than I encountered when I was not Jewish.”
Kevin: “I bet.”
Kevin has a long review of Yuri Slezkine‘s book The Jewish Century. “I liked it. He has one of the best descriptions of Jewish dominance in the early 20th Century throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria. His descriptions of Jews as elites in the Soviet Union is refreshing.”

I bounce my theory of the Torah Corral off Kevin. “God chose the Jews to be the MasterRace of mankind. However, He soon realized that this had cruel consequences for the less intelligent goyim of creation, so to protect them from the depredations of the Jews while still providing free will to one and all, he gave the Jews the Torah (both written and oral) by which they might be fenced in. Rest assured that those Jews who today live on the Torah Corral are no threat to the gentle gentiles of the world. It is the secular liberal Jew, with his notions of Marxism, tolerance of the sodomite and the transgendered, creator both of socialism and feminism, who is the mortal enemy of the gentile world.”
“What do you think about the idea that there is a different threat presented by the secular leftist Jew compared with the traditional insular Orthodox Jew?”
Kevin: “I agree with that. If all the Jews were living in Williamsburg in a tight community. They don’t even educate their children to know about the external world. They don’t have them go to college. If you are insular, you are not going to be influencing public policy. That is very different from the mainstream Jewish community. Paul Gottfried has emphasized the distinction, and I agree with him, between the East European Jews and the German Jews. The East European Jews were just much more aggressive. They were much more hostile to traditional western culture. The German Jews who came to America were an elite. They didn’t have huge social activism. They tried to keep the immigration door open to the East European Jews and were quite successful at that until 1924. The point is German Jews aren’t as hostile and aren’t as aggressive. Paul Gottfried comes from a German-Jewish family. He didn’t have any of that in his family. His father could never understand how the mainstream Jewish community had these views on immigration.”
“There are different Jewish groups and the more Orthodox Jewish groups are more disengaged. They’re not as, shall we say, dangerous to the rest of society.”
Luke: “I go to a traditional Orthodox synagogue. It’s all very right-wing. Nobody there is agitating for gay rights. Nobody there wants more immigrants. Nobody there is friendly towards Muslims. Nobody there wants Freudian analysis. Nobody there supports Boasian anthropology. It’s an insular focus on performing the minute rituals of the Torah.”
Kevin: “I agree with that.”
Luke: “The Jewish community is becoming more insular and Orthodox with every year that goes by.”
Kevin: “I’ve seen statistics that in the future, the vast majority of Jews will come from Orthodox families. Secular Jews are not reproducing themselves. There’s a falling away from [Orthodoxy] too, that every generation of Orthodoxy, some of the children don’t follow Orthodoxy. They become much more liberal. They go to college. I see the Orthodox community as the demographic wellspring of the Jewish community.”
Luke: “Where do you see signs of hope for white America?”
Kevin: “It’s hard to find hope right now… I used to go to conferences and you’d find all these middle-aged guys who’ve been around for a long time and used to being completely marginalized but now you see a lot of young guys and they’re on board and they’re smart and they’re educated and they’re committed to this. They often reject the old people as insufficiently radical. They’re forming their own groups and networks. I’m finding some good young writers with PhDs writing for me under pseudonyms. We are developing an intellectual network. People are going to see that we have a strong intellectual basis for developing a white advocacy movement in America.”
Luke: “How much hope do you have for success? Perhaps even create a white ethno-state?”
Kevin: “It’s a ways off. Things have to be a lot more intense than they are now. We do see signs of it. The Republican party is becoming the party of white America. That includes people of all social classes… When I was growing up, you had class-based politics. Working class whites voted Democrat. Now pretty much all whites are voting Republican because of racial identity. That’s going to sharpen as white America gets on the ropes. If Republicans don’t get a tsunami of whites votes in 2016, whites might say, we can’t win anymore and they might wake up and do something.”
“We need one white billionaire who’s really on board with these ideas. The Koch brothers are not there yet. In British politics, one billionaire got behind the UKIP.”
Luke: “Why aren’t whites better at organizing in their group interest?”
Kevin: “Right now, they’re intimidated. When you talk to them about this, they become ashamed. When they think of whites, they think of slavery and racism. We’re so used to being painted as the bad guy. The average white person is horrified at the thought of organizing on the basis of racial interests. A certain amount of what is going on in the Republican party is implicitly white but they can’t mention race because they’d be excoriated in the mainstream media. They’d be vilified. That’s like the third rail. That is so strongly policed that any politician who wanted to get ahead would be completely put off by that.”
Luke: “I have a sense that millions of white Americans, perhaps tens of millions, don’t particularly like black people and most of them vote Republican and yet Republicans will never campaign on race. They’ll campaign on states rights and cutting welfare and lowering taxes, which are implicitly white issues but they won’t be explicit about what they’re doing.”
Kevin: “That’s right. I think there’s some anxiety in white America about blacks. Even though the media does not talk about IQ differences and often times does not portray the true perpetrators of crime, they’ll talk about a gang of youths that attacked some people, but they won’t say they’re black youth, but people watch TV. They get it. They understand that blacks are way more prone to criminality. In white America, we have a stereotype that blacks are prone to criminality. That they’re not very smart. They’re prone to using the welfare system. That huge percentages of black males are not looking for work. That’s the perception and it’s based an awful lot on reality. White Americans believe those things but they can’t talk about them so instead they’ll talk about Obamacare. We’re opposed to Obamacare because it’s an intrusion on personal liberty. What they’re really saying is that we don’t like the idea that all these poor people are going to sign up and we don’t want to pay for it.”
Luke: “Are there any people on the white nationalist right you find scary or do you see them all as allies?”
Kevin: “I try my best to see people as allies. I have eschewed identification with some but I never get public about it. I try to make alliances whenever possible. That’s not easy. I’ve gotten vilified for making friendships with certain people. Tough luck. I see these people doing good things. I know David Duke is vilified all over the place. He’s like a code word for evil, but if you look at his rhetoric, if you look at what he’s doing, the vast vast majority of it makes sense. Greg Johnson in San Francisco with Counter-Currents is doing good things. Why would I want to oppose someone like that? We are on the fringe right now, which attracts a certain kind of personality.”
Luke: “Where do you see similarities and differences between the white nationalist movement in America and Nazism?”
Kevin: “Both were movements of ethno-nationalism. The white advocacy movement as I see it is not going to exterminate anybody. It is simply going to assert our interests within the democratic form of government we have. It may advocate for separate areas that whites may be able to live in homogenously. It is not going to advocate lebensraum. It doesn’t advocate conquering Mexico. There are a lot of differences. It is a very effective smear tactic. Any similarity with National Socialism is anathema.”
“Whites have an identity. The Germans had a sense of racial identity and national identity. That’s sort of what we are advocating, that whites have to have a racial identity.”
Luke: “Is there anything you want for whites that you wouldn’t want for any other racial group?”
Kevin: “No. The main message is universal nationalism… I guess I’m horrified by Israel but Israel is doing what many nations and ethnic groups have done over the centuries. That’s life. I’m an evolutionary biologist… I believe that Koreans have a right to be Korean and restrict immigration and maintain that. Chinese, Japanese, Africans.. The only people in the world for whom that is not appropriate, for whom that is viewed as moral depravity is white people. That’s absurd. It’s idiocy that this is internalized by most whites. It is wrong for whites to want to do anything as whites.”
Luke: If you became president?
Kevin: “I would move to end immigration by non-whites. I’d move to repatriate the non-whites who are here. I’d give them incentives to move out. And consolidate our [white] power. It may not be pretty. Carving out white areas and maybe do some population transfers. After World War II, there was a lot of ethnic realignment in Europe… There are a lot of things that can be done short of gas chambers and genocide. That is not something that I would want.”
“Throughout the white world, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada, none of these things [mass immigration by non-whites] were voted on by the majority of the population. Every effort was made to not publicize what was happening. It was illegitimate. Repatriation is not the end of the world.”
“I don’t criticize Israel for [ethno-nationalism]. What I criticize is the hypocrisy of the American Jewish community for on the one hand, [being] gung ho for Israel and ethnic cleansing and apartheid and the settlements and all that, and on the other hand, complaining about any little glimmer that white people might have an interest in controlling the population of their country.”
Luke: “What would be the place for Jews in a Kevin MacDonald society?”
Kevin: “I’d love it if they were Orthodox Jews and sort of kept to themselves. Jews in a democratic society have the right to support their interests. That would be OK if we could really assert our interests and we could have the mainstream media on our side. It’s just not fair the way it is now. We don’t have any voices and the voices we have are marginalized. If someone talks about Jewish influence, like Rich Sanchez mentioned Jewish influence in the media, well, he got fired the next day. We ought to be able to talk about those things. It’s not fair that we can’t talk about the power and influence of other groups.”
Luke: “What would be the role, if any, for Muslims in a Kevin MacDonald America?”
Kevin: “I would do my best to repatriate Muslims. They don’t have any historic claim to the society, or have parts of America be multi-cultural and parts of America be white.”
Luke: “Do you think the practice of Islam is compatible with First World living?”
Kevin: “Not really. The Arabs are hopelessly backward. When they come into European societies, they produce blocks of unassimilable people who really hate Christianity and the West.”
Luke: “What will the continuing diversification of America do to the Jews?”
Kevin: “Jewish organizations have advocated this. Their program is to make these groups housebroken… Jewish organizations in Europe and the United States have been strong proponents of Muslim immigration. They see it as part of the whole multi-cultural thing. They don’t like white Christian society in America and Europe. They see this as good for the Jews but they want to be able to control that. They want a housebroken Islam, which is illusory.”
Luke: “Islam reformed is no longer Islam.”
Kevin: “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in France right now and almost all of it is Muslim. This will happen elsewhere. Jews have been picked on in Sweden by Muslims. that may happen in a lot of places. Jews [Jewish activist organizations] still advocate Muslim immigration. They see the West as an enemy, more than Islam. They don’t take seriously that these people are very competent and a strong threat.”
Luke: “What do you think of the Scandinavian peoples asking strangers to live among them?”
Kevin: “Their descendants will curse them. This is a northern European pathology… These people do not make good immigrants. They have low IQs. They’re prone to crime.”
Luke: “Are Jews perfidious to their core or do you think you could make common cause with fellow white nationalists who happened to be Jewish?”
Kevin: “You could. I would advocate making common cause with anybody who’s on board with the interests of white America. If they’re Jewish, that’s fine. I can see why Jews would accept that. They might fear the future of multi-cultural America. You will have groups who are not sympathetic to Jews. Abe Foxman is worried that these hispanic groups are not going to be concerned about the Holocaust, are not going to be as prone to guilt, they’re not going to be as empathic about the suffering of Jews. You’ve got Muslims coming in who have a big history of conflict with Israel.”
“The organized Jewish community as far as I can see is 100% opposed to a white state anywhere. One of the themes of Culture of Critique is the development of the idea of America as a proposition nation with no ethnic basis. All we are is a democracy. We’re about human rights. There is no ethnic basis to America. That was the result of Jewish intellectuals. At the same time, the Jewish community is gung ho for an explicitly Jewish state… I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with the hypocrisy. They don’t accept the right of any white group to have a state. They wouldn’t even accept the idea that Sweden or England should be a white Christian state… I have to see the activity of Jewish organizations in this country as absolutely opposed to my interests.”
“When I grew up, America was 90% white Christian people, that’s a higher percentage than Israel is Jewish… Why couldn’t America have insisted that we are a white state? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to have the same thing you have for yourselves?”
Luke: “All things being equal, including IQ levels, Jews are going to out-compete you much of the time?”
Kevin: “Correcting for IQ, there’s also ethnic networking… There’s something else going on there… This is keeping people out and not distributing their movies…”
Luke: “Jews way out-perform their IQs. Latinos way under-perform their IQs. We out-perform because we have more drive for social and economics success than people with similar IQs. And we’re better at it because Judaism is a this-worldly focused religion while non-Jews such as Christians have a lot of beliefs about Heaven.”
Kevin: “There’s some truth in that.”
Luke: “Some of it is that the Jewish way of life is craftier. When I became Jewish, I saw how the world worked in a more realistic fashion than the naive way I was raised. Jews are much more comfortable, for example, with the natural passions such as ambition and sexuality.”
Kevin: “I think you’re right… To the extent that anybody has Christian religious beliefs at the center of their life, they’re going to be dysfunctional. They’re not going to be able to compete. Jews cut to the chase. They go right to what is in their interest. So many Christians are dominated by [concerns that don’t benefit them]. Christian Zionism is a perfect example. This does not benefit them in any way… No Jew would do that. Jews see that and say, ‘Let’s take these guys to the bank.’ And why not? That’s what makes Jews such a tough competitor because they do see the world more realistically.”
Luke: “Jews are much more ready to write a check to solve a problem when the non-Jews I grew up amongst would [look] askance at anything that looked like bribery.”
Kevin: “Right. We talk about this in white advocacy. Whites are very timid about asking for money. Jews are not timid. We talk about that.You go into a synagogue. I’ve never been in a synagogue, but I hear they say, we’ve got to have some money for this cause and they’ll hit on people and they’ll shame you if you don’t contribute and they’ll be blatant about it. We’re so polite and we don’t want to get on people’s nerves. Jews are not like that.”
Luke: “If someone is causing us trouble, we’ll write a check. That’s the way the world works.”
Kevin: “I imagine they’ve had enemies they’ve bought off like that. The other thing that Jews are so good at is creating this infrastructure. Neo-conservatives have all these think tanks. There are all these career opportunities for going along with the neo-conservative line. You want a job? You want a nice career? You’re going to be on the op/ed page and get a job with the government, all these things are available to those who go along with them.”
Luke: “The most comprehensive sex survey in America was done by the University of Chicago. It was released in 1994. It found that Jews had more sexual partners than any other group. In my experience, Jews have fewer hang-ups and inhibitions about enjoying a wide sex life without the pathologies associated with black promiscuity.”
Kevin: “Jews are more liberated. When I was growing up, I had all these inhibitions about sex because I was a serious Catholic… Jews are also more extroverted. That’s linked to aggression. Being in your face. That’s linked to sexuality.”
Kevin writes, “Is Immigration really a Jewish value?”
Chaim Amalek writes:

Kevin needs Jewish advisers, as do most who would advance White interests. You see, we are experts in what you need to do, starting with the need to advance something akin to what the Jews call “Ohavat Yisroel”, or “Love of Your Fellow Jew, even if he is a fag or eats pork.” The goyim have nothing like that. They bifurcate themselves issue-by-issue, until they are mere social atoms, morsels of meat for the hungry dark predators of the world to eat up. Jews could teach you goyim how to act more like Jews. In fact, Luke and I are considering opening a special training academy for goyim, in which your leaders are trained to act like us.
If you were a fifth as animated as the average Jew is with respect to making money you would take more of my advice and be rich. Why not start a training academy by which you could be a light unto the nations of the world who are white and in need of saving? Teach them how the Jews do it. “Secrets of the Jews” — a book for the Yellowman. Classes for the angry but clueless White. Teach the goyim how to fight with their tongues and with their lawyers. This can only be done in person. Not via blogging, which offers no possibility of wealth for you, and hence no sex, either.

Posted in ADL, Anti-Semitism, Charles Murray, IQ, Israel, Jews, Kevin MacDonald, Phil Rushton, Whites | Comments Off on Judaism As A Group Evolutionary Strategy

Marriage Of Ramirez

Court of Appeals: Jorge L. Ramirez (Jorge)[1] appeals from a judgment annulling his second marriage to Lilia Llamas (Lilia), following a bifurcated trial in which the court found the marriage void due to fraud. The trial court found the first marriage between Jorge and Lilia was a void attempt at a Mexican marriage performed in California. It found the second marriage void because of fraud, relating to the fact Jorge married Lilia even though prior to the second marriage he had begun a love affair with Lilia’s sister that he intended to continue. Jorge appeals the judgment of nullity, and the finding that Lilia was a putative spouse. We affirm.

Jorge, an immigrant from the State of Michoacán, Mexico, lived in the United States and sought legal residence here. His mother was a permanent resident and sponsored Jorge in his application for that status. He began his application process in 1994 or 1995 but because his mother was not a citizen herself, the process took many years.

In 1999, Jorge and Lilia were married in a religious ceremony in Moreno Valley, California. The ceremony was performed by a priest or other official from the State of Jalisco, Mexico, and an “Acta de Matrimonio” was issued. No marriage license was issued by the State of California. In 2001, Jorge and Lilia became aware that the 1999 marriage was invalid because Lilia’s prior divorce had not been final for 300 days prior to the marriage. Additionally, because it was made to look as though the parties were married in Mexico, the Mexican marriage certificate would prevent Jorge from getting his green card because it would make it appear that he had not been in continuous residence in the United States.

The parties were remarried in 2001 and obtained a confidential marriage license. After the death of Jorge’s mother, Lilia assumed the position as Jorge’s sponsor to pursue his application for permanent residence and citizenship. In 2004, after she signed a document related to his immigration status, Jorge informed Lilia that it would be the last one. Two weeks later, in May 2004, he took Lilia out to dinner and asked for a divorce because he was in love with someone else and always had been. In June 2004, Jorge moved out.

That same month, Lilia found out who the other woman was when she overheard a conversation between Jorge and Lilia’s sister Blanca. Jorge had begun an affair with Blanca prior to the 2001 marriage, and it lasted until 2005. The intercepted conversation occurred in 2005. Lilia asked her teenaged son Victor to call Blanca, who babysat for Jorge and Lilia’s daughter, on her cell phone to inquire if she would be joining them for lunch with the child. Blanca, at a restaurant with Jorge, had the cell phone in her purse. Instead of pressing the stop key, she pressed the button to answer the call, so the conversation she was having with Jorge was overheard on Victor’s cell phone, which Lilia and Victor listened to by activating the loudspeaker. In this conversation, Jorge professed his love for Blanca, assured her that they would be together once he got his share of money and property from Lilia, *755 and told her that he had only married Lilia to gain permanent resident status. This conversation occurred after Jorge had moved out…

The court also found the second marriage was void because Jorge perpetrated a fraud on Lilia by carrying on an extramarital affair with Blanca. The court found that Jorge did not marry Lilia because he was worried about his immigration or work status; instead, the court found Jorge made false statements to Blanca about his reasons for marrying Lilia, including a need for a green card, to string her along and to delay having to make a commitment to her. Thus, the fraud related to Jorge’s marrying Lilia while carrying on a sexual relationship with Blanca which he intended to maintain. The court concluded Jorge wanted to “have his cake and eat it too” by carrying on sexual relationships with both women at the same time.

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Hollywood Gedolim!

Chaim Amalek writes: “HOLLYWOOD GEDOLIM! Just think how much less expensive it would have been for all concerned had the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts found a place for one more student a century ago, a lad from Linz. A similar opportunity confronts you now.”

Posted in Chaim Amalek | Comments Off on Hollywood Gedolim!

Orthodox Jews, Muslims Oppose Gay Marriage

Chaim Amalek: Religious Jews and Muslims have an important role to play in preserving traditional notions of marriage because in each case, the orthodox among them 1. condemn homosexual conduct because their sacred texts condemn homosexual conduct, offering no wiggle room on the topic; and — this is the key thing — 2. each group is politically untouchable in America. Religious Jews are untouchable because they are Jews, and the Jews who have so much control over our media and culture dare not permit criticism of fellow Jews, not even over this issue. Muslims are untouchable because they are Muslim, and because they generally have brown skin. So let religious Jews and Muslims get together to fight Hollywood and those who would overthrow 6,000 of precedent. Otherwise, we shall soon see the rise of polygamy here.

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The Thru-Line From National Review To Revilo Oliver To William Pierce

Robert S. Griffin writes in his biography of William Pierce: Revilo Oliver was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society and wrote a number of pieces for William Buckley’s magazine National Review in its early years. Oliver and the Birch Society parted company when Oliver’s publicly stated racial views made its leadership uncomfortable. Oliver was said to have made an observation in a speech he gave to the conservative Daughters of the American Revolution to the effect that the pre-Castro Cuban government under General Batista was probably as good as one could reasonably expect in an island largely populated by mongrels.2 Oliver’s overt anti-Semitism made him similarly persona non grata at the National Review. At one public meeting, Oliver reportedly referred to the thought of the “vaporizing” of the Jews as a “beatific vision.”3

Oliver’s writings have been collected and published in a book called America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative.4 The book was published in London. It is doubtful that what Oliver has to say in the book would be acceptable to the publishing and distribution industries in this country. In the introduction to the collection, Sam Dickson, an American lawyer and revisionist historian (on the far right, the term “revisionist” refers to someone who is bucking what they see as the official Jewish liberal party line on World War II in general and the Holocaust in particular) refers to Oliver as a “leader of the racial nationalist movement.”5 Dickson makes the point in his introduction that Oliver focuses on racial self-love among whites rather than animosity toward blacks or Jews. Dickson says that Oliver believes that whites would do well to emulate the loyalties that Jews demonstrate toward their own people and traditions.6

In order to understand racialists such as Oliver and Pierce, one must keep in mind that they look upon the human being as an animal like any other animal in nature. To them, the human being is a species of animal, with the races being sub-species or breeds. That is to say, they don’t see simply one human race. They see one human being, or human animal, and a number of human races. Oliver writes: “Liberals are forever chatting about ‘all mankind,’ a term that does not have a specific meaning, as do parallel terms in biology, such as ‘all marsupials’ or ‘all species of the genus Canis,’ but the fanatics give to the term a mystic and special meaning… [that imposes a] transcendental unity on the manifest diversity of the various human species.”7 Liberals, Oliver argues, engage in “frantic and often hysterical efforts to suppress scientific knowledge about genetics and the obviously innate differences between the different human sub-species and between the individuals of a given sub-species.”8

“I reached the conclusion,” Oliver reported in one of his writings
included in America’s Decline, “that our race [those of northern European background], including specifically the Americans, was a viable species, and that therefore, like all viable species of animal life, it had an innate instinct to survive and perpetuate itself.”9 He believed that those of his race do not realize their precarious status on this planet: “Aryans [Indo-European, Nordic, non-Jewish] are a small and endangered minority on this planet, but how many members of our race seem to have even an inkling of that fact?”10

Are Aryans superior to other races of men? It depends on what
values you bring to answering the question, said Oliver. “We must
understand,” he argued, “that all races naturally regard themselves as superior to all others….We are a race as are all the others. If we attribute to ourselves a superiority–intellectual, moral, or other–in terms of our standards, we are simply indulging in a tautology. The only objective criterion of superiority among human races, as among all other species, is biological: the strong survive, the weak perish. The superior race of mankind today is the one that will emerge victorious whether by its technology or its fecundity–from the proximate struggle for life on an overcrowded planet.”11 Oliver contended that the quality of human beings cannot be judged by the intelligence, academic record, or proficiency in a profession alone. He pointed to “mattoids,” as he called them, to make his case. These are individuals who are geniuses in some areas and imbeciles in others. Examples of mattoids Oliver listed were Shelley, Einstein, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao.

Posted in National Review, Politics, Race, William Pierce | Comments Off on The Thru-Line From National Review To Revilo Oliver To William Pierce

The Way Forward On Marriage

F. Roger Devlin wrote:

Within the family, the provider must control the allotment of his wealth. The traditional community of property in a marriage, i.e., the wife’s claim to support from her husband, should again be made conditional on her being a wife to him. She may run off with the milkman if she wishes—leaving her children behind, of course (a woman willing to do this is perhaps an unfit mother in any case); but she may not evict her husband from his own house and replace him with the milkman, nor continue to extract resources from the husband she has abandoned. Until sensible reforms are instituted, men must refuse to leave themselves prey to a criminal regime which forces them to subsidize their own cuckolding and the abduction of their children…
Harassment accusations should be a matter of public record. This would make it possible to maintain lists of women with a history of making such charges for the benefit of employers and, far more importantly, potential suitors.
Women might eventually reacquaint themselves with the old-fashioned idea that they have a reputation to protect.
Universal coeducation should be abandoned. One problem in relations
between the sexes today is over familiarity. Young men are wont to assume that being around girls all the time will increase their chances of getting one.
But familiarity is often the enemy of intimacy. When a girl only gets to socialize with young men at a dance once a week, she values the company of young men more highly. It works to the man’s advantage not to be constantly in their company. Men, also, are most likely to marry when they do not understand women too well…
Traditionally, a man has been expected to marry. Bachelorhood was positively forbidden in some ancient European societies, including the early Roman Republic. Others offered higher social status for husbands and relative disgrace for bachelors. There seems to have been a fear that the sexual instinct alone was inadequate to insure a sufficient number of offspring. Another seldom mentioned motive for the expectation of marriage was husbands’ envy of bachelors: “Why should that fellow be free and happy when I am stuck working
my life away to support an ungrateful creature who nags me?”

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Why Are Modern Orthodox Rabbis Lining Up Behind A Sex Offender?

From FrumFollies:

As bad as Zauder’s crimes were, perhaps, more disturbing for the community, is that when it came to the sentencing, many Modern Orthodox leaders lined up to write personal pleas for leniency. Major figureheads, including senior leaders of Yeshiva University, were keen to support an egregious Orthodox sex offender. They include:

Rabbi Kenneth (Kenny) Brander, Yeshiva University Vice President

Dr. David Pecovitz, Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus Chair in Psychology and Jewish Education at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University. He is also special assistant to President Richard M. Joel.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, Rabbi, Congregation Bnei Yeshurun or Teaneck New Jersey (Exhibit 34)

Rabbi Ezra Schwartz, Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshiva University (Exhibit 36)
Rabbi Reuven Taragin, Dean Yeshivat HaKotel (Exhibit 42)
Rabbi Baruch Taub, Rabbi Emeritus of Beth Avraham Yosef of Toronto Congregation

Posted in Abuse, Modern Orthodox | Comments Off on Why Are Modern Orthodox Rabbis Lining Up Behind A Sex Offender?

Parenting From The Inside Out

From Daniel Siegel’s book:

1. What was it like growing up? Who was in your family?

2. How did you get along with your parents early in your childhood?
How did the relationship evolve throughout your youth and up until
the present time?

3. How did your relationship with your mother and father differ
and how were they similar? Are there ways in which you try to be
like, or try not to be like, each of your parents?

4. Did you ever feel rejected or threatened by your parents? Were
there other experiences you had that felt overwhelming or traumatizing in your life, during childhood or beyond? Do any of
these experiences still feel very much alive? Do they continue
to influence your life?

5. How did your parents discipline you as a child? What impact
did they have on your childhood, and how do you feel it affects
your role as a parent now?

6. Do you recall your earliest separations from your parents?
What was it like? Did you ever have prolonged separations from
your parents?

7. Did anyone significant in your life die during your childhood,
or later in your life? What was that like for you at the time, and
how does that loss affect you now?

8. How did your parents communicate with you when you were happy
and excited? Did they join with you in your enthusiasm? When
you were distressed or unhappy as a child, what would happen?
Did your father and mother respond differently to you during
these emotional times? How?

9. Was there anyone else besides your parents in your childhood who
took care of you? What was that relationship like for you? What happened to these individuals? What is it like for you when you let
others take care of your child now?

10. If you had difficult times during your childhood, where there
positive relationships in or outside your home that you could depend on during those times? How do you feel those connections
benefited you then, and how might they help you now?

11. How have your childhood experiences influenced your relationships with others as an adult? Do you find yourself
trying not to behave in certain ways because of what happened to you as a child? Do you have patterns of behaviors that you’d like
to alter but have difficulty changing?

12. What impact do you think your childhood has had on your adult
life in general, including the ways in which you think of yourself
and the ways you relate to your children? What would you like to change about the way you understand yourself and relate to others?

Posted in Daniel Siegel, Psychology | Comments Off on Parenting From The Inside Out

My Famous Irish-Australian Rebel Ancestor – Michael Dwyer

My famous Irish-Australian rebel ancestor was on my mum’s side. The Ford side comes from a bloke who stole a coat in 18th Century England and his Royal Majesty was so concerned about this guy’s health that the thief was sent to the temperate climes of Australia for his crime. I understand that Protestants spell it “Ford” and Catholics spell it “Forde” so my ancestors are Protestant Australians for at least six generations (not sure about the religious leanings of my great-grandfather on my dad’s side who was Chinese, he got buried with the Jews and other unbelievers in Townsville).

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Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences

On Oct. 23, 2013, Dennis Prager said to his guest, John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University, is one of three authors of this new book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences: “Isn’t that a risky thing that you undertook to argue that there biological bases for political positions?”

John says: “One of the nicest examples of the physiological finding is dealing with perception of threat. Conservatives physiologically respond much more quickly and much more dramatically to threat, even if the threat is as abstract as a burst of white noise, a startle. The startle response of conservatives is much stronger. Conservatives are much more responsive to and attentive to threatening pictures. Liberals don’t physiologically respond much more to a picture of a snake than a picture of a rabbit while conservatives attend much more quickly to the picture of the snake and respond to it.”

“It fits with a stereotype that conservatives have of liberals, that they just don’t get it. It’s like Obama saying we’re going to Cuba because we don’t know that Castro is an enemy.”

Here are some excerpts from this book:

* In this book we aim to explain why people experience and interpret the political world so very differently. We want to provide liberals with a better appreciation for the conservative mindset;conservatives with a better appreciation for the liberal mindset; and moderates with a better appreciation for why those closer to the extremes make such a big fuss.

* A few years ago, we published a study showing that liberals and conservatives experience the world differently and suggested that it might be unproductive and slightly inaccurate to view either side as irredeemably malevolent—or unremittingly beneficent. Media coverage of this study led to us to receive numerous emails. Some of these were decidedly caustic, but the most memorable was more plaintive than judgmental. Its key linewas “don’t do this to me: I NEED to hate conservatives.” Clearly, for some it is deeply rewarding to denounce political adversaries, preferably at high volume.

* “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” goes the old saying. We disagree. Outrage does not solve challenging issues of governance and it is possible for people to pay close attention to politics without losing emotional control. A more productive, if less viscerally satisfying, response to political difference is to try to understand the source of the views of those who disagree with us so fundamentally.

* To illustrate the value of entering the mindset of the other side, consider the following. One of our children was given to horrible nightmares. He would cry and shout as monsters circled in his sleep. Words from the awake world (“there is no monster under your bed”) could not disabuse him of the fears that were so real to him. Weeks into this unpleasant pattern, due more to desperation than inspiration, his parents’ strategy changed. Instead of telling him how silly and outrageous he was being, they entered his dream world. “Yes, there is a monster. Oh, he’s an ugly one—mean, too—and he’s coming this way. But wait, he just spotted some monster friends of his and he’s moving off in another direction— way off.” By imagining the world he was in and by letting him know that others understood the nature of that world, it became possible to work through the attending issues. Blissful sleep—for parents and child alike—soon descended where monsters had lurked only moments before.

* In this book we make the case that political variations are part of an incredible range of differences in the way people respond to the world. Just to give you a brief teaser, it turns out that liberals and conservatives have different tastes not just in politics, but in art, humor, food, life accoutrements, and leisure pursuits; they differ in how they collect information, how they think, and how they view other people and events; they have different neural architecture and display distinct brain waves in certain circumstances; they have different personalities and psychological tendencies; they differ in what their autonomic nervous systems are attuned to; they are aroused by and pay attention to different stimuli; and they might even be different genetically. At least at the far ends of the ideological spectrum, liberals and conservatives are emotionally, preferentially, psychologically, and biologically distinct. This account is not just based on casual observation or armchair analysis. Science—both social and biological—is our co-pilot.

Liberals and conservatives often are reluctant to accept that their differences are rooted in psychology, let alone biology. Their own political beliefs seem so sensible, rational, and correct that they have difficulty believing that other people, if given full information and protected from nefarious and artificial influences, would arrive at different beliefs. Liberals are convinced the existence of conservatives can be written off to Karl Rove’s treachery, the Koch brothers’ fortune, the bromides of Fox News, and a puzzling proclivity to think simplistically. Conservatives are equally convinced the existence of liberals is attributable to the “lamestream” media, indoctrination by socialist university professors, the sway of Hollywood, and a maddening tendency to disengage from the real world. Yet political differences are grounded not in a duplicitous conspiracy or an irrational disregard of logic and truth but rather in variations in our core beings. Conservatives are not duped liberals and liberals are not lazily uninformed conservatives.

* Compared to people (not just judges) with full stomachs, those who have not eaten for several hours are more sympathetic to the plight of welfare recipients. Americans whose polling place happens to be a church are more likely to vote for right-of-center candidates and ideas than those whose polling place is a public school. People are more likely to accept the realities of global warming if their air conditioning is broken. Italians insisting they were neutral in the lead-up to a referendum on expanding a U.S. military base, but who implicitly associated pictures of the base with negative terms, were more likely to vote against the referendum; in other words, people who genuinely believed themselves to be undecided were not. People shown a cartoon happy face for just a few milliseconds (too quick to register consciously) list fewer arguments against immigration than those individuals who were shown a frowning cartoon face. Political views are influenced not only by forces believed to be irrelevant but by forces that have not entered into conscious awareness.

* The fact that extraneous forces that may not have crossed the threshold of awareness (sometimes called sub-threshold) shape political orientations and actions makes it possible for individual variation in nonpolitical variables to affect politics. If hotter ambient temperatures in a room increase acceptance of global warming, maybe people whose internal thermostats incline them to feeling hot are also more likely to be accepting of global warming. Likewise, sensitivity to clutter and disorder, to smell, to disgust, and to threats becomes potentially relevant to political views. Since elements of these sensitivities often are outside of conscious awareness, it becomes possible that political views are shaped by psychological and physiological patterns.

It is important to recognize that predispositions are not fixed at birth. We cannot emphasize enough that we are not making a nature versus nurture argument. Innate forces combine with early development and later powerful environmental events to create attitudinal and behavioral tendencies. These predispositions are physically grounded in the circuitry of the nervous system, so once instantiated they can be very difficult, but far from impossible, to change. Altering a predisposition is like turning a supertanker; it usually takes concerted force for an extended period of time, but it can be done. Just like those heavy clipboards, a variety of predispositions nudge us in one direction or another, often without our knowledge, increasing the odds that we will behave in a certain way but leaving plenty of room for predispositions to be contravened and also for the predispositions themselves to be modified.

* Psychologists frequently refer to a “happiness set point.” Events throughout a lifetime make people happier or sadder for a time but most individuals are generally oriented toward being upbeat or not and the effects of various events typically lead to modest and temporary deviations from the set point. Several months after experiencing even major life events such as an amputation or winning the lottery it appears that most people have returned to a degree of happiness with their lives surprisingly similar to that present before the major event.

Politically relevant predispositions are similar: malleable but also resistant to change. This conclusion squares with a growing body of evidence documenting the long-term stability of people’s political orientations. Most people know someone who has done a political 180-degree turn, but these individuals stand out because they are relatively rare and do not pose a challenge to the core idea of predispositions as physically instantiated inclinations (remember, think probabilistically). We believe the reason for this relative stability is the existence of an ingrained emotional and therefore physiological response to stimuli that ends up being relevant to politics. It takes quite a bit for such habituated emotional responses to be eliminated, let alone reversed. Once they are there, they tend to be there for the long haul. As one study concludes, “[W]hen it comes to politics you’ve either got it or you don’t.”

Predispositions, then, can be thought of as biologically and psychologically instantiated defaults that, absent new information or conscious overriding, govern response to given stimuli.

* Just as the content of the predisposition varies from person to person, so too does the degree to which a predisposition is present at all. Being politically predisposed is not a requirement for membership in the human race. Like most everything else, the presence of predispositions should be thought of as operating along a continuum. Certain people are in possession of powerful political predispositions and politically relevant stimuli set off easily measurable psychological, cognitive, and physiological responses. Perhaps the nature of the political predisposition points in a liberal direction, perhaps in a conservative direction, or perhaps in different directions depending upon the particular issue. Other people have much weaker political predispositions. For them, politics is mostly irrelevant and they do not have much in the way of a preexisting, physiocognitive basis for their political behavior and attitudes. These individuals are often puzzled by all the fuss about politics.

* The central thesis of this book is that many people have broad predispositions relevant to their behaviors and inclinations in the realm of politics. These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators. Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. Given this, it is not surprising to find they approach politics as though they were somewhat distinct species.

* Social scientists of various stripes have spent a good deal of time examining who tends to form mate pairs with whom in order to obey a biological imperative to have kids, get a mortgage, and buy a minivan. What is crystal clear from this research is that people do not generally pair off with those who are similar to them in terms of personality traits—good news for us scholarly introverts. Some matching occurs on the basis of shared physical traits (height, weight, attractiveness) but even here the correlations are weak. If not personality and physicality, on what variables are mate pairs the most likely to be matches? Easy. The top three variables on the “what traits do mate pairs most match up on” list are drinking, religion, and … drum roll … politics. (Education level is fourth.)

* A comparison of the political similarity of couples married a short time and those married a long time indicates virtually no increased political similarity for longer marriages.

* While the deep and fundamental nature of politics brings us together, it also splits us apart. Political beliefs lead to astonishing acts of collective action for the sole purpose of punishing people with different political beliefs. It turns out that the primal urge driving William Buckley’s publicly announced desire to sock Gore Vidal in the kisser is illustrative of an extremely powerful motivator of human social behavior. In Aristotle’s day, for example, a polis would periodically band together with another polis or two to beat the bejeezus out of the next polis over. We humans are really big on trying to exterminate, or at least seriously annoy, another group because its members have different ideas about politics.

* Politics does not divide us only on the mass-scale, but also on a much more personal level. Politics and its running mate, religion, tend to get people worked up to about the same pitch—which, to say the least, is high. This is why politics and not the pros and cons of extroversion is a taboo subject at many social gatherings. We can get sideways with people we love over things that may not have any meaningful relevance to either of our lives. Uncle Crusty might not know any gay couples but that does not stop him from ruining Aunt Sally’s family reunion by denouncing them, veins bulging, at full volume.

Politics is deep and fundamental to humans; it defines us as a species and is likely, quite literally, in our DNA. Accepting that we are political animals, though, does not necessarily mean that politics is universal and stable across time and space. As Aristotle pointed out, a polis is not a natural form of social organization. It is a cultural construct, and while all polities are political, the particular issues and ideologies that animate alliances and divide families often seem to have little in common. The political beliefs that separated Athens from Sparta, Alcove No. 1 from Alcove No. 2, and Aunt Sally from Uncle Crusty are clearly very different. What could possibly connect these different political beliefs over the eons and around the globe?

* Job applicant resumes reviewed on heavy clipboards are judged more worthy than identical resumes on lighter clipboards; holding a warm or hot drink can influence whether opinions of other people are positive or negative; when people reach out to pick up an orange while smelling strawberries they unwittingly spread their fingers less widely—as if they were picking up a strawberry rather than an orange.17 People sitting in a messy, smelly room tend to make harsher moral judgments than those who are in a neutral room; disgusting ambient odors also increase expressed dislike of gay men.18 Judges’ sentencing practices are measurably more lenient when they are fresh and haven’t just dealt with a string of prior cases.19 Sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair leads people to be less flexible in their stances than if they are seated on a soft, comfortable chair, and people reminded of physical cleansing, perhaps by being located near a hand sanitizer, are more likely to render stern judgments than those who were not given such a reminder.

* Across a range of topics, the mean responses of liberals consistently favored the new experience, the abstract and the nonconforming. Conservatives just as consistently favored traditional experiences that were closer to reality and predictable patterns. Conservatives, for example, preferred their poems to rhyme and fiction that ended with a clear resolution. Liberals were more likely to write fiction or attend a music concert. Experimental, arrhythmic verse, amorphous story lines, and ambiguous endings just do not trip the triggers of many conservatives and, perhaps relatedly, they are less likely to be performers…

People who score high on openness [liberals], for example, tend to like envelope-pushing music and abstract art. People who score high on conscientiousness are more likely to be organized, faithful and loyal…

A liberal likely sees a moral wrong when an individual is being, say, socially ostracized. A conservative is more likely to take into account communal considerations in formulating a moral judgment. Is that guy being ostracized because he is not one of us? Because he was disloyal? Because he broke the rules or thumbed his nose at the accepted way of doing things? If the answer to these sorts of questions is yes, maybe he had it coming.

Liberals wanted dogs that were gentle and related to their owners as equals. Conservatives wanted dogs that were loyal and obedient…

The left is characterized more by a desire for the new and novel, a commitment to individual expression, and a tolerance of difference; the right by a desire for order and security, a commitment to tradition and group loyalty.

* Labels and issues are just waves on the surface; they can be whipped up and blown every which way by the winds of history and culture. What they are all created from, though, is the same basic set of underlying currents. These dilemmas have been tacitly recognized as the basis of politics in mass scale societies for at least two thousand years. In Politics, Aristotle tackles a wide-ranging set of preferences for the structure and organization of the polity; he specifically undertakes an analysis not just of Athenian but of Spartan, Cretan, and Carthaginian approaches to running a polity and notes big differences in preferences for the structure and organization of mass-scale social life. Athens was run through a direct democracy where citizens, or at least well-off men, voted directly on issues. Sparta was more authoritarian, with hereditary monarchs and an elected-for-life council. Differences also appeared in resource distribution, social structure, and expected and enforced social behavior, as well as in differing sets of institutions. Viewed from the perspective of bedrock political dilemma, Sparta is to conservative as Athens is to liberal.

* If our argument for the universality of politics is correct, we should, at least in theory, be able to measure preferences on bedrock dilemmas and these preferences should line up with political attitudes and beliefs in any given historical or cultural context. Historically speaking, we can certainly dig up some anecdotal evidence to support our argument. Aristotle was kind enough to provide some of this sort of thing, pointing out that city states like Sparta and Athens differed crucially in their preferences for leadership styles and collective decision-making, resulting in differing institutions (a monarchy, the assembly), that in turn perpetuated advocacy for those preferences. Such differences did not just show up between ancient polities, but also within them. The late Roman Republic (circa the century before the birth of Christ) was marked by an ideological divide over bedrock dilemmas. The sides were not called conservatives or liberals, but optimates and populares. The optimates (“best men”) wanted to preserve the republic’s traditional values and way of doing things, which for practical purposes meant keeping power concentrated in the hands of a wealthy elite and avoiding rule by noisome Julius Caesar dictator types and, especially, rule by even more noisome commoners. The populares (“favoring the people”) came from the same aristocratic class as the optimates but were basically populists, supporting welfare programs (subsidized grain for the poor), limitations on slavery, and expanded citizenship rights.21 Sound familiar? Teddy Kennedy would have looked good in a populare toga. For all intents and purposes, we probably could call optimates conservatives and populares liberals.

Ultimately, what divides Athenian and Spartan, Imperialist and Republican, Roundhead and Cavalier, Federalist and anti-Federalist, monarchist and revolutionary, Bolshevik and Menshevik, partisan and Fascist, Alcove No. 1 and Alcove No. 2, Buckley and Vidal, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, Jean-Marie Le Pen and François Hollande, Western democrats and Islamists seeking a new Caliphate are different perspectives on the proper way to design, structure, and maintain society. The underlying tectonic plates may go by different names, but the fault lines between them are uncannily similar.

* Even without a tumor pressing on their orbitfrontal cortex, individuals have varying densities of chemical receptors at key areas in the brain, differently shaped neural organs, and neurotransmitter levels in synapses that are highly variable. The effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac makes it clear that decisions and behaviors are biological. If artificially adjusting chemical levels in the brain affects attitudes and actions, naturally occurring variations would have the same effect…

The only way for society to function may be with a legal system that, except in the most egregious of cases, denies it is biologically more challenging for some people “to do good” and that asserts that all nonclinical people are the same in terms of their ability to know right from wrong.

* Even the spatial metaphor—left and right—runs deeper than typical accounts aver. Most humans are right handed and lefties were viewed with suspicion for a very long time. As a result, the left-right opposites metaphor was readily available as an organizing device for social relations. For millennia and in most cultures, the right has been associated with religious and social orthodoxy, the just, and the good, while the left has been associated with the opposite. There is a reason we seek to be righteous and not lefteous. The seating arrangements at the Estates-General were not arbitrary after all, and it is no big mystery why the upper crust was on the king’s right.

* Humans have always brought order to their world by thinking in terms of opposites—light and dark, hot and cold, good and bad, tall and short. All known human societies have used these sorts of classifications and even the most primitive cultures have structured their social relations by thinking in terms of opposites.29 Sometimes this duality is contrived, but in the case of politics it is not. The division is real and it is unavoidable, and it centers on distinct orientations to mass-scale social life that are typically called ideologies. Ideology is not, as the “end of ideology” school asserted, a concept that just popped out fresh and new from Renaissance thought, only to fade from sight with the end of the Cold War.30 Ideology is not, as Converse and his many followers claimed, merely the ability to describe currently popular labels or to endorse clusters of positions that meet with the approval of political scientists. Ideology is us. It could no more “end” than could personality. It could no more be restricted to societal elites than could interpersonal communication. Context-specific issues and labels often consume attention and energies to the point that we are blinded to the underlying bedrock principles involved. Debates about capital punishment are context specific; debates about the appropriate treatment of in-group members who have violated social norms are as enduring as bedrock.

* The tradition of dismissing meaningful individual-level human variation is not restricted to philosophers, Communists, and devotees of the noble savage concept. It can also be found on modern best-seller lists. Take, for instance, the work of Malcolm Gladwell.28 In one book, Gladwell says he wants to go “beyond the individual” in explaining why some people are successful and some are not. He writes of “hidden advantages,” “extraordinary opportunities,” “cultural legacies,” and “hard work,” and says the keys to success are luck and diligence. Want to be the next dominant hockey player on the planet? Then your best strategy is to have a birthday just after the age cutoff used to classify youth teams. That way you are more likely to be the oldest and most physically mature specimen on the squad, thus increasing your chances of developing confidence, being selected for the traveling squad, getting to refine your skills even more, and going on to be the next Wayne Gretzky. Hockey not your thing? Never fear, the basic principle applies to doing sums, playing soccer, and strumming a guitar.

Gladwell does offer hope for those whose birthdays do not fall at the right time of the year but it has little to do with natural aptitudes and core individual differences. If you want to succeed, all you need to do is practice. Not just practice a little but practice a lot—a minimum of 10,000 hours. TheBeatles, Gladwell claims, made it big not because of any particular musical talent but because when they were fledgling musicians they packed themselves off to perform in Hamburg dives where they refined their skills by playing extended shows in front of tough crowds night after night. But so did Tony Sheridan and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and not many people have heard of them, though they have probably heard of the Hurricanes’ drummer. His name is Ringo and the Beatles poached him after they gave Pete Best the boot. Perhaps Pete slacked off and only practiced 9,999 hours. Importantly, Gladwell treats the capacity to dedicate yourself to a punishing practice regimen as something that is purely a matter of individual will. The assumption seems to be that any one of us could be the next Paul, John, George, or Ringo because we all possess the willpower to put in 9 to 10 hours every single day for three years on our Stratocasters. That’s a pretty big assumption, since the required dedication to practicing a craft simply is not something everyone has. People who do not put in 10,000 hours mastering a single skill, we want to emphasize, are not slackers. Spending all that time in the gym, at the library, or practicing chord progressions to a Merseyside beat means you have to sacrifice a lot. Not everyone has an inner drive so strong they are willing to live potentially unbalanced lives to nurture it. Gladwell’s message seems to be, “You too can be great if you just work at it.” Our message is that most people are not predisposed to work at it to the degree required to become great. They are not necessarily lazy but physiologically, cognitively, psychologically, and perhaps genetically different from those who are willing to dedicate themselves in this fashion.

* The effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac makes it clear that decisions and behaviors are biological. If artificially adjusting chemical levels in the brain affects attitudes and actions, naturally occurring variations would have the same effect. Still, the courts do not recognize such variations. Just as laziness must be the cause of not working hard, a criminal lack of discipline must be the reason someone who is mentally capable of discerning right from wrong would not do right. Such thinking ignores the growing neurological evidence that some people, for reasons not fully under their control, have to struggle very hard to do what is right or what is sensible even though they do not qualify for the label “intellectually disabled.”

* The only way for society to function may be with a legal system that, except in the most egregious cases, denies it is biologically more challenging for some people “to do good” and that asserts that all nonclinical people are the same in terms of their ability to know right from wrong. This, however, does not mean we need to convince ourselves that they actually are. Pretending that all people have identical behaviorally relevant biological dispositions is intellectually dishonest and contradicts much empirical evidence.

* Is sexual orientation a biological predisposition or is it just a choice that is made, rather like choosing which car to buy? People have predispositions in all areas of life, from personality to occupation and from politics to leisure pursuits. Given this, it should not be surprising to find predispositions regarding sexual partners. Such predispositions make it difficult to casually trade one sexual orientation for another. As with all the other areas we have been discussing, however, one of the major barriers to rational thought is the desire to dichotomize. The truth is not everyone is either gay or straight. Some only lean gay; some only lean straight; some are bisexual; some are asexual; and some have preferences that cannot be described in a PG-13 popular science book. People not as deeply predisposed in one sexual direction or the other probably could be influenced by their environment, but just because some people’s orientations are plastic does not mean everyone’s are. Efforts at conversion via boot camp have resulted in formerly gay people operating as heterosexuals, but these occasional “conversions” should not be taken as evidence that everyone is equally convertible. For many, no amount of environmental manipulation is going to change their sexual orientation.

* Accepting such dispositional differences calls into question the assumption that down deep people are really all the same, except for those who suffered some trauma or malady that has left them abnormal, disordered, or unable to tell right from wrong. Dispositional differences suggest that the standard academic practice of exposing two groups of randomly assigned people to different stimuli, computing the average difference in behavior between the groups, and then declaring that the situation causes people to be generous or subservient to authority figures misses a critically important part of the story: the remarkable variation that exists around those averages. Dispositional differences suggest that behaviorists, evolutionary psychologists, classical microeconomists, experimental social psychologists, political theorists, Communists, social engineers, popular commentators, standard social scientists, legal authorities, diagnosticians, and fans of the noble savage theory all miss the same important part of the story.

* When it comes to food, liberals are more likely to seek out the new, the novel, and the exotic while conservatives are more likely to stick with the tried and true.

* Across a range of topics, the mean responses of liberals consistently favored the new experience, the abstract, and the nonconforming. Conservatives just as consistently favored traditional experiences that were closer to reality and predictable patterns. Conservatives, for example, preferred their poems to rhyme and fiction that ended with a clear resolution. Liberals were more likely to write fiction and paint, or attend a music concert. Experimental, arrhythmic verse, amorphous story lines, and ambiguous endings just do not trip the triggers of many conservatives and, perhaps relatedly, they are less likely to be performers, a fact that is all too apparent from the announced political affiliations of comedians, rock stars, and Hollywood actors. Differences in art preference also are clear, with conservatives more likely than liberals to avert their eyes from colorful, abstract work in order to look at realistic landscapes.

* They found that tastes and preferences not only correlated with political orientation, but were manifested in people’s personal living spaces. For example, conservatives were more likely to have items associated with organization and neatness, such as laundry baskets, postage stamps, and event calendars, while liberals were more likely to have art supplies, stationary, and a broad variety of music CDs. Carney’s wide-ranging study concluded that political orientation seems to reflect everything from behavioral patterns to travel choices to the way we “decorate our walls, clean our bodies and our homes, and … choose to spend our free time.”9 Other studies show that particular leisure pursuits (soccer vs. NASCAR) and career paths are more attractive to liberals than conservatives and vice versa. Academics, for example, are well known to be a left-leaning lot.

* A partisan divide is clearly evident in car ownership.11 At the high end, Republicans tend to favor Porsches (nearly 60 percent of Porsche owners identify as Republicans), while Democrats favor Volvos. At the lower end, Republicans tend to like American-made cars; Democrats prefer Hyundais. Republicans tend to show more loyalty to a particular car brand while Democrats shop around more. In other words, Republicans seem to favor established, traditional automobile manufacturers and stick with them. Democrats have weaker brand loyalty and are more willing to check out alternatives.

* The traits correlating with political attitudes tend to be those that involve attraction to the new, the novel, and the abstract or those involving a sense of duty, order, and loyalty.

* two of the Big Five dimensions consistently correlate with political orientations: openness and conscientiousness. Openness means openness to experience and information and refers to people who are curious, creative, and arty, those who enjoy and seek out novel experiences and are more likely to adopt unconventional beliefs. Conscientiousness means a tendency to be dependable, dutiful, and self-disciplined. On standard Big Five personality tests, openness is assessed by asking people to rate themselves on things like their interest in abstract ideas and whether they have vivid imaginations. Conscientiousness is assessed with ratings on things like paying attention to details and getting chores done.

* The connection between conservatism and conscientiousness is consistent with a substantial body of research indicating that people with a great desire for what is known as “cognitive closure” are more likely to be politically conservative. For two decades, scholars have employed a collection of survey items such as “I think that having clear rules and order at work is essential to success,” “I do not like situations that are uncertain,” “I like to have friends who are unpredictable,” and “Even after I’ve made up my mind about something, I am always eager to consider a different opinion.”27 Higher values indicate a stronger preference for closure (a dislike of uncertain situations and less interest in entertaining alternative viewpoints, for example). Comparing political orientation to scores on these items reveals that in a variety of countries, individuals who are fond of closure also tend to self-identify as conservative, vote for traditional parties, and favor conservative positions on both social and economic issues.28 Perhaps not surprisingly, a fondness for closure also correlates with religious fundamentalism.

* Moral foundations theory, developed primarily by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, argues that moral universals are rooted in “intuitive ethics.” This is the notion that all humans come equipped with a set of innate psychological mechanisms that automatically trigger emotionally based moral responses to the situations we encounter in our physical, psychological, and social environments.

* liberals tend to place their emphasis on the foundations relating to the unjust treatment of individuals (harm and fairness) while conservatives are likely to rely more heavily than liberals on concerns for loyalty, authority, and purity. In other words, when it comes to deciding what is the morally correct course of action, liberals are particularly sensitive to the way in which an individual is being treated, while conservatives are more likely to factor in group considerations.

* Liberals wanted dogs that were gentle and related to their owners as equals. Conservatives wanted dogs that were loyal and obedient.

* conservatives are more likely than liberals to perceive the country as having policies that tolerate new lifestyles, do little to protect against outside threats, mollycoddle criminals, and benefit the poor even if they are not making the effort. In particular, the difference with regard to the perceived treatment of the rich and the poor in the current United States was huge. In other words, it is not just that liberals and conservatives prefer different policies; they see different policies currently in place. Liberals see current policies benefiting the undeserving rich. Conservatives look at those same policies and situations and see the undeserving poor with their snouts in the public trough.

* Faces are the visual Twitter accounts of our nervous systems, able to distribute information about psychological states quickly and succinctly, and to many people at the same time.

* Perhaps people are able to discern personality traits and therefore political orientations from images (most of the studies use pictures of males) because stoic, less expressive faces (think Clint Eastwood) signal traits associated with conservatism and sensitive, more expressive faces (think Alan Alda) signal traits associated with liberalism.

* People who support greater military spending, harsher punishment for criminals, and restrictive immigration are not doing so just to infuriate liberals but because they are more physiologically and psychologically attuned to negative eventualities.

* [Jim] Weaver sees these underlying differences in political temperament as products of “different sets of emotion” that are visible throughout human history and fiction and that are readily apparent to any “political novitiate.”9 As a politician Weaver felt so “knocked around” by these “antagonistic creatures” that he became “bound and determined to find out who they were and how they came to be.” Weaver theorizes that the core distinction between ethnocentric hawks (conservatives) and empathic doves (liberals) is attitudes toward out-groups.

* Conservatives, argues [George] Lakoff, frame their arguments in the language of the “strict father,” a metaphor for their preferred relationship between government and the governed. Liberals, on the other hand, use the language of the “nurturing parent.” Lakoff contends that their different languages make it difficult for conservatives and liberals to comprehend each other. He also argues that the conservative strict father approach resonates more with the broad electorate, which is why conservatives (at the time he was writing) were doing a better job capturing the support of middle-of-the-road voters.

* Given the recentness of mass-scale society, the core traits would have to apply to small-group,
hunter-gatherer life because people have not been able to meaningfully express their political views
for very long. Since the establishment of mass scale polities maybe 10,000–15,000 years ago, democracies have been rare and recent. The brief fling in Athens was an aberration, and as late as 1945 only 20 democracies existed; many of the largest countries from a population point of view (e.g., China) were not democratic then or now. In the history of the world, only a fairly small number of people have ever lived within a mass-scale democracy, so we as a species simply have not had much practice living in this sort of social environment. Even if Cochran and Harpending are correct, and they are, that natural selection can occur much more rapidly than previously thought, selection pressures for a mix of liberals and conservatives in mass polities simply have not had enough time to work.54 The pressures we describe must have been for diverse social predispositions in small-scale bands, predispositions that later manifested themselves as liberals and conservatives or progressives
and traditionalists when mass-scale democracies came on the scene.

We believe that traits such as orientation toward out-groups, openness to new experiences, and a heightened negativity bias fit more naturally with social than economic issues, and we tend to agree with Congressman Weaver that economic positions are typically secondary. He points out that “ethnocentrics do not give a fig for individual rights” and sees the connection between conservatism and free market principles as a relatively recent development. Similarly, he does not view Marxism as connecting to the deeper forces shaping empathics and believes that accounts that do make this connection “totally ignore our biological origins.”55 The deep forces that shape political predispositions likely do not act directly on controversies over the role of government in society (after all, for how long in evolutionary time has the size of government been an issue?) or, relatedly,
on controversies over the glories of the free market relative to the social welfare state. But if the issue
becomes whether or not to open up a country’s social welfare system to recent or future out-group members (that is, immigrants), deeper forces quickly come into play. Economic issues are certainly crucial in modern politics—sometimes the most crucial—but this does not mean fault lines on these issues are as biologically rooted as social issues.

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