Steve Sailer writes: I haven’t read the book, but it sounds like another example of a widespread pattern in postwar feminism: bright Jewish daughter grows up angry (sometimes with good reason, as in Susan Faludi’s case) at at least one member of her Jewish family. But she learns that she’ll be rewarded if she generalizes and intellectualizes her resentment toward a Jewish relative into blaming her animus on Society or Men or Stereotypes or anti-Semites or whatever it is that gentiles can be badgered into feeling guilty about.
White guilt is the worry that your ancestors were too ethnocentric; Jewish guilt, as I learned from reading Philip Roth, is the worry that you aren’t ethnocentric enough for your ancestors.
Jewish guilt turns out to be more personally useful.
COMMENTS:
* Philip Roth is a good example. Just chart the progress from “Defender of the Faith” (which got him trouble with the Jewish community) to The Plot Against America. In the former, he’s mildly critical of Jewish ethnocentrism. In the latter, he’s fantasizing about about Christian America slaughtering Jews….
* I wonder if it was also at least in part an unfortunate side effect of having a larger than average crop of 120+ IQ women who weren’t going to find mothering intellectually stimulating enough *plus* a tendency toward intellectual leftism since the right was historically the more anti-Semitic side *plus* a lack of value on traditional masculinity since Jewish men didn’t engage in physical occupations historically.
I mean, feminists really do believe their own BS–they engage in behaviors repulsive to men and encourage each other not to reproduce, which doesn’t sound to me like a very evolutionarily successful strategy. It’s got to be a side product of something else. (And I doubt Kevin MacDonald’s ideas apply here, since there’s no evidence Jewish feminists spawn any more than gentile ones. Mercifully.)
* At one time I helped run an adult outdoor sports club. I have heard several stories from lapsed Jews whose families freaked out at the idea of them participating in Boy/Girl Scouts with gentile troops as children.
Oy Vey, call the Rabbi, What a Shonda!!!
Explains a lot about the ACLU’s decades long obsession with destroying the BSA.
* The dangers of inappropriate bonding and imprinting at a hormonal age are well known.
You wouldn’t want your daughter to be a coal-burner, they don’t want their daughters fornicating with cute goy boys.
That is one of the (subterranean) reasons for Birthright Israel: send ‘em to Israel in their late teens or early twenties and let them imprint on some strong, macho Israeli males. They may come back and wind up marrying some yehudon dentist, but at least they know what’s out there.
* Leftists in general, and feminists in particular, have pushed the idea that normal family life is actually a fount of sickness and cruelty, and the source of many of society’s evils. It is a view that is actually a complete inversion of reality. And it seems to stem from the personal dissatisfaction of those people with their own upbringings. The personal is political: that is to say, some people’s particular personal hang-ups become politics for the rest of us.
A sensible response to these people would be to say: Gosh, I’m sorry your childhood sucked, but mine was just peachy, so don’t ask me to turn society upside down and shake it out like a waste basket just to exorcise your personal demons.
* Sailer on the Future of Intermarriage
12:02 PM Fri 4 Jun 99
Steve Sailer here:
It’s interesting to speculate on the future of intermarriage in America. Marriages are increasingly likely to be between people of different ethnic groups but of similar IQ’s, and there’s no reason to assume this trend will stop. America’s obsession with sending everybody to college means that young people get sorted by SAT score (i.e., IQ) when they’re at their most romantic. Therefore, it’s quite possible that the top dogs in America will in future generations look different than they do now, but they probably won’t look much like the future underdogs, either. If we were to halt immigration now, continuing intermarriage along IQ lines might in many generations lead to the country being run by an IQ overclass of mostly “Jeurasians” (i.e., a genetic blend of the smarter European gentiles, Jews, East Asians, South Asians, Armenians, and possibly other Middle Easterners). In contrast, the lower ranks might consist largely of “Redblex”: a rather lumpy partial blend of redneck whites, blacks, and Mexicans.
Of course, continued immigration slows genetic and cultural assimilation. For example, right now Japanese-Americans are fading into Eurasians because of the decline in immigration from Japan (since there are no terribly poor people left in Japan) and their very high rate of intermarriage with whites (especially for Japanese-American women). Chinese-Americans, in contrast, can be expected to remain a distinct ethnic group for several generations more (despite a high rate of intermarriage), since there is no imminent shortage of poor Chinese desperate to come to America.
The Jews are another interesting case to speculate about. The next generation of the “IQ elite” (e.g., Ivy Leaguers or lawyers or media figures or frequent flyers or whatever category you think representative) may well have a lower percentage of pure Jews … but a higher percentage of part-Jews, as intermarriage between Jews and smart gentiles continues.
Would this mean the non-violent extinction of Jews (except for the Orthodox)? Possibly, but it might also imply that America’s overclass would become even more dominated by Jewish attitudes, e.g., Hitler-obsession (which has played such a major role in influencing the views on the Balkans of our Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, and their colleagues). In the future most highly articulate white Americans will be related to Jews by genes or marriage, which no doubt will impact what views are popular in society (even more than today, when a Marlon Brando is automatically excoriated for saying that Jews have lots of power in Hollywood!)
For an extreme example of how pro-Semitism can come about within an individual merely through genes alone, consider me. Although I’m Catholic, I became very pro-Semitic at the age of 13 when my powers of logic kicked in (and my hair turned curly). I quickly noticed that a high percentage of the thinkers I either agreed with (e.g., Milton Friedman) or whom I considered it a worthy challenge to argue against were Jewish. Since I was adopted, a few years later I concluded that it was likely that I was half-Jewish biologically, (which indeed appears to be the case based on evidence my wife dug up when I was 30). It’s important to understand the chain of causation: having a very Jewish-style brain (e.g., enjoying logical argument), I sought out the best logical arguers to read, very many of whom were Jewish. (You may object that my political views today don’t sound much like those of the majority of American Jews, but I was enormously influenced by Jewish neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Having gone to some lengths to expose myself to Jewish thinkers (not because they were Jewish per se, but because those who most stimulated my kind of mind more than writers from other ethnic groups), I absorbed from them a lot of typically Jewish political stances: e.g., pro-Israel and pro-immigration.
Now, my pro-Semitism came about even though I was being raised in my (adoptive) family, which has no Jewish relatives, and, in fact, has a slight anti-Semitic mindset. (I realize my case is only a single data point, so I recommend somebody conduct a formal adoption study of Jews and part-Jews adopted by gentile families.) In the future, however, most children of the IQ elite will have Jews in their extended relatives, which will make my kind of pro-Semitism even more widespread in the future.
* Steve Sailer: I’ve never taken a DNA test. As an adoptee who is a full-time professional writer, it would seem like a natural topic for a book proposal or a long magazine article. But I’ve never gotten around to taking a test. And the thought that I ought to do something serious and potentially profitable with the topic getting a DNA test has discouraged me from using up what material I already have by blogging for free about it.
But someday, I hope, I’ll get the test and write the book, along with my idea for a book about how the St. Andrews golf course inspired the theory of evolution. But a Surfeit of Events keep providing me with plenty of material to write about 350-360 days per year as it is. A Trump presidency would probably wear my typing fingers to the bone.
