The rise to preeminence of what was now a Jewish-dominated intellectual scene sealed the fate of the Puritan-descended intellectuals reviewed here. This Puritan-descended intellectual tradition was victorious against the aristocratic tradition of the Old South but proved no match for the rising Jewish elite which, even by the 1930s, had become very influential. By the 1960s this new elite had become dominant in critical sectors of American life, particularly the media, the social sciences, the legal profession, and as financial contributors to political campaigns and causes. High on the agenda of this new elite was replacement-level immigration. In 1965, America was opened up to all the peoples of the world. In the ensuing decades this cultural shift resulted in the ever-decreasing power and influence of the European-derived peoples and cultures of America.
Conclusion
The Puritan legacy in American culture is indeed pernicious because, once the Puritan-descended intellectual and financial elite had been displaced, their moral idealism and their proneness to altruistic punishment was vulnerable to hijacking by intellectual and political movements aimed at replacing the traditional peoples of the United States. The current intellectual and political left (which is a product of the post-1965 countercultural revolution) is fundamentally based on a moral critique of traditional American society that aims to eradicate the power of its European-derived majority and relegate them to a relatively powerless demographic minority. As of this writing, any group identification of Whites has been pathologized—a legacy of the Boasians, the Frankfurt School and their offshoots which have become the intellectual basis of the new elite.[708]
As someone with considerable experience in the academic world, I can attest to feeling like a wayward heretic back in seventeenth-century Massachusetts when confronted, as I have often been, by academic thought police. It’s the moral fervor of these people that stands out. The academic world has become a Puritan congregation of stifling thought control, enforced by moralistic condemnations that a Puritan minister could scarcely surpass. In my experience, this thought control is far worse in the elite colleges and universities founded by the Puritans than elsewhere in academia—a fitting reminder of the continuing influence of Puritanism in American life.
The problem with the Transcendentalists and the other nineteenth-century idealists and moral perfectionists is that they came along before their intuitions could be examined in the cold light of modern evolutionary science. Lacking any firm foundation in science, they embraced a moral universalism that is proving ultimately ruinous to people like themselves: as a consequence of the rise of Jewish intellectual movements and political and cultural influence in the twentieth century, the continuing legacy of Puritan moral universalism in the context of replacement-level multiethnic immigration has been used against the contemporary White population of America.
And because the loss of demographic and cultural hegemony being experienced by the European-derived population is so contrary to human evolved predispositions, their moral universalism needs constant buttressing with all the power of the media, the educational system, and ultimately the state—much as the rigorous rules of the Puritans of old required constant surveillance by the authorities. Indeed, as the universalistic, anti-White left assumes ever greater control, we see censorship of heterodox thought in the universities and the proliferation of police-state coercion to ensure conformity of thought and deed—highly reminiscent of Puritan Massachusetts.
Of course, the Transcendentalists would have rejected such a “positivist” analysis. One might note that modern psychology is on the side of the Transcendentalists in agreeing that explicitly held ideologies are able to exert control over the more ancient parts of the brain, including those responsible for ethnocentrism.[709] The Transcendentalist belief that the mind is creative and does not merely respond to external facts is quite accurate in light of modern psychological research. In modern terms, the Transcendentalists were essentially arguing that whatever “the animal wants of man” (to quote Emerson), humans are able to imagine an ideal world and exert considerable psychological control over their ethnocentrism and other evolved desires.[710]
Like their Puritan forebears, the Transcendentalists would have doubtlessly acknowledged that some people have difficulty controlling these tendencies. But this is not really a problem, because these people can be coerced to conform. The New Jerusalem can become a reality if people are willing to use the state to enforce group norms of thought and behavior. Indeed, the multicultural New Jerusalem cannot become a reality without suppressing the natural desires of a great many Whites for control of their own destiny.
The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very White people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural version will not be controlled by people like themselves. In the long run they will become a tiny, relatively powerless minority.
The ultimate irony is that without altruistic Whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.
7
Moral Idealism in the British
Antislavery Movement and
the “Second British Empire”[711]
_______________________________
There is no more central question in evolutionary biology than that of altruism. Altruists perform actions that benefit others without receiving anything tangible in return. In the absence of certain conditions, altruistic behavior is an evolutionary dead end. For example, research on altruistic cooperation has shown that it can evolve if altruists assort with each other[712] and exclude non-altruists on the basis of reputation[713] or if they are willing to punish non-altruists, as might occur in a military unit.[714]
This chapter discusses the affective revolution that occurred in England in the eighteenth century by focusing on the movement to abolish the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833). As discussed below, this revolution extended to many other areas of British society. Its consequences are apparent in David Hackett Fischer’s Fairness and Freedom, discussed below, which contrasts the British Empire of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth century, during the formative period of the American colonies.[715] By the 1840s, when New Zealand was populated with immigrants from Britain, there were powerful currents of moral universalism, empathic concern, and fairness in the British Empire.
This affective revolution, labeled by Hannah More the “Age of Benevolence,”[716] began in the eighteenth century. I suggest that ultimately this revolution was a long-term consequence of the egalitarian tendencies of the Puritans and their program of establishing moral communities as the basis of social cohesion—a phenomenon that was ultimately applied to the wider society, as noted in Chapter 6. By the 1780s, “the moral character of imperial authority, the ethics of British conduct outside the British Isles, started to figure in public discussions of empire with increasing frequency.”[717] In the following I will concentrate on the movement to abolish the slave trade and slavery as illustrative of this upsurge in empathic concern and fairness. The purpose is not to describe the political processes that finally resulted in abolition or even to explain why the movement happened exactly when it did, but to explore the psychology of some of the principle activists of the movement and the methods they used to make others resonate with their disgust at slavery. These activists and writers were highly principled and deeply Christian, with a powerful sense of fairness and egalitarianism. And although there was a strong background influence of the Puritan ethos described in the previous chapter—an ethos that was central to the abolitionist movement in the United States, the major activists were Quakers, joined later by other dissenting religious groups and finally the Church of England which drew its membership much mor
e from British elites.
On the face of it, these movements involved altruism. In the words of Adam Hochschild, the movements to end the slave trade and slavery itself were
the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights. … For fifty years, activists in England worked to end slavery in the British Empire. None of them gained a penny by doing so, and their eventual success meant a huge loss to the imperial economy. Scholars estimate that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the British people 1.8 percent of their annual national income over more than half a century.[718]
This movement occurred at a time when slavery was the norm in Africa, the Arab world, India, the Ottoman Empire, and, in effect, China. As Seymour Drescher notes, “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.”[719]
It should be noted that an explanation in terms of altruism is not uncontroversial. To be sure, as with any mass movement, there were doubtless a wide range of motivations, including selfish careerists who would use a movement like abolitionism to further their own fame and fortune.[720] Nevertheless, selfish motives for action do not imply that the empathy felt for enslaved Africans was not real and a spur to action for many. More importantly, at the indispensable core of the movement were Quakers for whom, as will be discussed below, imputations of selfish motives are difficult at best to support. And finally, even if elites achieved moral capital by abolishing slavery, one must ask how and why moral capital had psychological resonance—why is it that elites beginning in the eighteenth century justified themselves by drawing attention to the moral character of their policies rather than, say, relying simply on raw power or religious authority.
The point here is a narrow one—that moral idealism and unselfish motives characterized an important core of abolitionists, not that all abolitionists could be characterized in this way. To be sure, there continues to be substantial debate on the motives of those involved in the movement.[721] Even in the nineteenth century it was proposed that the campaign to end slavery avoided dealing with the exploitation of labor within England and resulted in moral capital that rationalized a far-from-perfect Empire. “By the 1970s, few academic historians cared to write about ‘selfless’ men engaged in a ‘virtuous crusade.’”[722]
The Wider Context of the Age of Benevolence
The two political parties in eighteenth-century England were the Whigs and the Tories, “descended from the two sides in the Civil War,”[723] the Puritan-based Roundheads and the Cavaliers respectively. England was prosperous and comparatively wealthy, with both rural and urban populations “visibly better off” than in Continental Europe.[724] The system was oligarchical and there were “rotten boroughs” controlled by wealthy landowners, but it was far more democratic than Continental Europe: “most constituencies had genuine electorates.”[725]
Eighteenth-century England was also far more egalitarian than the Continent:
This was a golden age for the aristocracy, yet it had no privileged legal status, unlike on most of the Continent, where feudal lordship and serfdom were the norm. Local power relationships depended on ‘deference’; but deference had to some extent to be earned, and could be withheld. … Even the poorest had legal rights, including economic assistance under the Poor Law of 1601. This gave ordinary men and women, taking turns in their parish as Overseers of the Poor, the responsibility for assisting their needy neighbors who applied to them, the cost being met by a ‘poor rate’ on the wealthiest members. By the late eighteenth century, it was unique in the world.[726]
In 1780 a German observer noted that Londoners “from the highest to the lowest ranks, [were] almost all well looking people and cleanly and neatly dressed [with] not near so great a distinction between high and low, as there is in Germany.”[727]
Relative egalitarianism was thus linked to a relatively peaceful and economically prosperous society, a society where even poor people were seen as having claims on the system. The following discusses how these phenomena were linked to an affective revolution as well, making England a kinder and gentler place and paving the way for the success of the abolitionist movement and a transformed British Empire.
Although the focus here is on abolitionism, the Age of Benevolence was not restricted to the disapproval of slavery.
Between 1720 and 1750, five great London hospitals and nine in the country were founded, and the following half century saw the establishment of dispensaries, clinics, and specialized hospitals (maternity, infectious diseases, insane asylums). An act providing nursing care in the country for the infants of paupers, and such other measures as the paving and draining of many London streets and the clearing of some of its worst slums, resulted in a dramatic reduction of the death rates, for children especially.[728]
The education of the poor became accepted as part of the new Zeitgeist:
The movement for the education of the poor thus reflected the same sensibility and ethos that inspired such other philanthropic and reform movements as the campaign against cruelty to animals, for the abolition of slavery, for prison and legal reforms, and for the establishment of a multitude of societies that undertook to alleviate a variety of social ills.[729]
It was also the period when, as seen in the work of historian Lawrence Stone, close relationships based on affection and love became universally seen as the appropriate basis for marriage in all social classes, including landed aristocrats.[730] Stone describes “a new ideal type, namely the Man of Sentiment, or the Man of Feeling, the prototype of the late eighteenth-century Romantic.”[731] Novels emphasized morality—“the sentimental novel,” such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
The new ethic transcended social class, political party, and religious divisions.[732]
[The Methodists] regenerated the Church of England. … They even had an effect on free thinkers, who subsequently refrained from criticizing Christian doctrine in order to devote themselves to political economy and philanthropy. Utilitarians and evangelicals agreed to work together for commercial freedom, the abolition of slavery, and the reform of criminal law and prison organizations.[733]
Freethinkers in association with the philanthropists of the evangelical movement would work for the material and moral betterment of the poor. In the interval, they were ‘converted’ to philanthropy through the influence of Methodist preachers.”[734]
This is not to say that the result was an ideal society. “By later standards, of course, the reforms, societies, and institutions reflecting this ethic seem woefully inadequate … . ‘The Age of Benevolence’ obviously had its underside. If it produced a generation of reformers and humanitarians, it was partly because there was so much to reform and even more to offend the sensibilities of a humane person.”[735]
By today’s standards, eighteenth-century Britain was indeed rather brutal, with executions for even minor offenses, although the actual number of executions declined by half since the 1590s. However, in general, crime rates were quite low despite the lack of organized law enforcement, and homicide rates had fallen off sharply since the late sixteenth century to rates approaching modern levels. Social welfare organizations aimed at better treatment of criminals, although social ills such as drunkenness proliferated—the latter perhaps an indication that traditional social controls in rural communities were unraveling as people sought work in urban areas.
The emphasis on reforming society went along with utopian idealism—explicit ideologies on how to construct society for the purposes of moral benefit and noted in Chapter 6 as highly characteristic of Puritan-descended intellectuals in nineteenth-century America. British abolitionists developed ideas of model communities of freed slaves. For example, Granville Sharp envisioned a utopian society in which freed slaves and Whites would be settled in Sierra Leone.[736] The community would be governed by the freed slaves with the consent of native Africans. “All this was far more idealistic than many later Utopian communities: Brook Farm in Massachusetts, for instan
ce, never invited American Indians to join.” The actual community had a flag depicting clasped Black and White hands; at least half of juries were mandated to be of the same race as the defendant; employing both Blacks and Whites. It did not end well,[737] and Sierra Leone eventually became a British colony.
The Psychology of Altruism and Moral
Universalism
There are indeed strong intellectual currents opposed to the possibility of altruism, including not only what one might term traditional evolutionary thinking centered around self-interest and encapsulated above, but also Marxist ideology which has often informed discussion in recent decades. Marxism implies self-interest on the part of all social classes and sees ideology as nothing more than a reflection of class interests. Marxists are naturally skeptical that there could possibly be a movement spearheaded by people who had nothing to gain personally and, if these efforts were successful, would result in a cost to the society as a whole. For example, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) proposed a Marxist explanation, claiming that the campaign to end slavery occurred when it was economically advantageous because the colonies had lost their value.[738] This interpretation has been rejected by recent findings that in fact the colonies retained their value well into the nineteenth century.[739]
Given that contemporary academia is decidedly on the left and is highly critical of the Empire and traditional British culture, it is therefore not surprising that the humanitarian basis of the movement is “increasingly neglected and long discredited.”[740] Nevertheless, a contemporary evolutionary psychologist need not be wedded to a psychology of inevitable self-interest. As Christopher Leslie Brown notes,
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