* Most human cultures show favoritism toward in-group members, and it’s not just the Jews. Look at the American Supreme Court. A hundred years ago, all of the justices were White Protestants. Now, none of them are. This has not come about because White Protestants, as a group, have become progressively more and more stupid and thus unable to become judges. It’s because they see themselves as rugged individualists and will not act collectively to defend their interests.
Rugged individualism works marvellously when everyone practices it. Unfortunately, most people in this imperfect world play by a different rule book. And it’s not just the Jews. It’s most folks. The Irish were very good at collective self-defence and self-boosting in their day.
There are different branches of Christianity. Protestantism has gone the farthest down the road of individualism and renunciation of kinship ties.
* Do you believe that Calvinism in its evolution from low-kinship and an internalization of moral and religious rules has fostered individualism in extremis to the point that it can no longer be the ground for holding a society together? In other words, demarcate radical individualism and its modern correlate that all “rules” are now personal choices — a radical relativism — and one has moral and social anarchy instead of an homogenous culture based on the internalization of a specific set of moral precepts. Has Calvanistic individualism evolved into a “universalization” that now potentially includes all rules and behaviors such that if there is still a sense of guilt associated with beliefs and behaviors, it is the sense of guilt that follows from NOT accepting that universalization?
* Psychopathy/sociopathy is the far end of a behavioral continuum. At what point on that continuum do we draw the line? How psychopathic does someone have to be before we kick him/her out? And where do we kick them?
The general thinking is that psychopathy/sociopathy is caused by a low level of affective empathy combined with a high level of cognitive empathy. In other words, a sociopath is someone who understands how other people feel, and understands how his actions affect other people, but who feels no grief if he hurts other people either on purpose or inadvertently.
I believe that the complex of behaviors we see in Northwest Europeans (high affective empathy, high guilt proneness, susceptibility to universal/absolute moralism) has its origins in the Mesolithic fisher/hunters of the North Sea and Baltic. These were unusual hunter-gatherers in the sense that they formed very large seasonal communities along the coast during the summer and then broke up into smaller hunting bands for the winter. Thus, during the summer they had to interact mostly with non-kin in a context that demanded much cooperative effort and a minimum of conflict.
I grew up in a rural, WASPy, Christian environment, and I know that culture, all the more so because my mother was a Christian fundamentalist. I know what it means to live in a high-trust society, and I like the people who create that kind of society. Nonetheless, I feel like an outsider among them. Perhaps that’s just the way I am.
From time to time, I encounter people from other cultures, often of Jewish or Hindu background, who see what is happening and ask me if I can “open their eyes” — as if I have some special power as an insider. Yet, to be honest, I don’t feel like an insider.
Calvinism is one point in a process of cultural evolution. In other words, the weak kinship and strong individualism of Northwest Europeans caused them to modify Christianity after they adopted it, thus causing it to become more based on concepts like atonement, guilt, and original sin. They thus transformed Western Christianity and eventually broke away from it via the Reformation.
Protestantism helped Northwest Europeans to pursue a path of cultural evolution that took them farther and father away from kinship and closer towards new ways of organizing social relations, notably the market economy. Eventually, Protestantism moved beyond Protestantism, just as it had earlier moved beyond Western Christianity. We’re living today in a kind of post-Protestantism — a hyper-universal, hyper-individualistic outlook that has emancipated itself from its original Christian framework.
When individualism and universalism become freed from all constraints, we get an ideology that can only be self-destructive. Almost by definition. Yet people—especially Northwest Europeans—don’t see it because these values are so central not only to the current ideological environment but also to their own predispositions.
It will take a combination of calm, reasoned argument … and “events.”
* I don’t know if sociopathy is an “illness” but I do know that most authorities consider alcoholism a disease and based on my own research which I summarized on pages 114-118 of my 1994 book Vessels of Rage (in a chapter entitled “Alcoholism Kills”) Ted Bundy was an active alcoholic during his killing years.
One intended victim who escaped told police Bundy had “smelled of liquor”; on his most murderous night, when he invaded a Florida sorority house and bludgeoned four victims, killing two of them, a witness told police he had been “drunk.” In the days before he was finally caught he was observed driving while drunk and was “drunk and disoriented” when arrested. He even continued to drink while on Death Row (the woman he had married smuggled vodka); one of his lawyer’s investigators said he was drunk during a prison interview.
Other serial killers I judged to have been alcoholics include John Gacy (who, like Bundy, was inebriated when arrested), Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, Bobby Joe Long, Gary Schaefer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. Richard Speck who killed eight nurses in a couple of hours was a mass murderer, not a serial killer, but he too was an alcoholic. Like Bundy, he continued boozing in prison.
As has been said by others, alcoholism kills the superego (or if you prefer, the conscience) which I suppose is one way of saying it causes sociopathy.
* We don’t hear much about female hysteria anymore, but we do hear about something called borderline personality disorder. Are they the same thing?
* Protestants are still performing a lot of good works without government assistance, but those good works are often poorly thought out. It’s like the nice lady who takes in one stray cat after another. She’s engaging in a kind of moral masturbation that does more harm than good.
I know a lot of non-religious philosophical Christians. In some ways, they’re worse than the fundamentalists. If you emancipate Christianity from the limitations of religion, you’re opening a Pandora’s Box whose consequences are not entirely positive.
High IQ is very demanding metabolically, so if you don’t need it, it will be selected out of the gene pool.
* A Danish couple were arrested in NYC after leaving their child in a pram outside a restaurant, a common practice in their home country.