Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

by Kevin MacDonald

  Research on racial differences is relevant to fairness because I would argue, as many have, that affirmative action policies that discriminate against Whites are inherently unfair to Whites because they limit career opportunities for Whites who cannot be blamed for the failures of other groups. Critically, advocates of such policies do not take into account real differences in ability between the races and, without any evidence, they attribute the relative success of Whites to the murky notion of “White privilege”—even as some non-White groups (e.g., Chinese) perform better on average than Whites academically and have occupations and incomes that place them above the White average. From this perspective, banning free speech on race on the basis of fairness to some groups fails to consider unfairness to members of the White majority.

  Waldron’s call to restrict speech in the name of fairness reinforces Fischer’s thesis, given that Waldron is from New Zealand and values what he thinks of as fairness far more than individual freedom. But it also illustrates the point that in some cases at least there is a very real conflict between fairness and freedom that continues to play out in the contemporary world. There is indeed a strong tradition of free speech in the U.S., but there is no reason to suppose that this will continue into the future. This is particularly obvious given the racially polarized environment that has resulted from massive non-White immigration and the fact that non-Whites are clients of the left which is now actively promoting censorship on issues related to race and immigration. And in any case, as noted above, banning utterances about race in the name of fairness is internally inconsistent given that such utterances are likely to result in policies that are unfair to Whites.

  The Affective Revolution in England: An Ethnic Hypothesis

  An ethnic hypothesis proposes that the eighteenth century saw the emergence of an ethos of egalitarianism that reflected the evolutionary past of important segments of the British population: the genetic heritage of primordial hunter-gatherers, and quite possibly selection after the incursions of Yamnaya-related ancestry deriving from the Pontic Steppes (reviewed in Chapter 1–3). As noted in Chapter 3, egalitarianism is a notable trait of hunter-gatherer groups around the world. Such groups have mechanisms that prevent despotism and ensure reciprocity, with punishment ranging from physical harm to shunning and ostracism.[918] In the present chapter, the strong egalitarian trends that typified the eighteenth-century affective revolution were emphasized as well as David Hackett Fischer’s description of the strong trends toward an egalitarian ethic in New Zealand during the “Second Empire” in the nineteenth century. As noted in Chapter 3, hunter-gatherer societies are moral communities in which people are closely scrutinized to note deviations from social norms; violators are shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized—an important characteristic of Puritan culture described in Chapter 6. Decisions, including decisions to sanction a person, are by consensus. Adult males treat each other as equals.

  These features are characteristic of Quakers and other groups discussed here. The hunter-gatherer ethic implies that one’s moral reputation becomes the most important aspect of ingroup status. Individuals maintain their position in society by subscribing to its moral norms and not dissenting from the group consensus. Fundamentally, the movement to end slavery operated by defining the abolitionist movement as a moral ingroup psychologically analogous to the moral communities of hunter-gatherer ingroups discussed in Chapter 3. Those who continued to advocate the slave trade and slavery were shunned as moral pariahs. The moral basis of the antislavery ingroup was firmly grounded in genuine empathic responses to the suffering of the slaves. These natural reactions to the suffering of others by a substantial percentage of the population meant that the moral ingroup was far more than an artificial or arbitrary creation; an arbitrary ingroup would not have been emotionally compelling. It is interesting in this regard that, as noted above, proponents of slavery routinely paid homage to the moral imperative of abolitionism. Unable to create a plausible moral ingroup, they opted for arguments based on necessity or the good of the Empire.

  The logic connecting these tendencies to the egalitarian-individualist hunter-gather model is that like all humans in a dangerous and difficult world, hunter-gatherers (or the groups resulting from selection in northwest Europe) need to develop cohesive, cooperative ingroups. But rather than base group cohesion on known kinship relations, the prototypical egalitarian-individualist groups of northwest Europe are based on moral reputation, trust, and ingroup consensus. Egalitarian-individualists create moral-ideological communities in which those who violate public trust, ingroup consensus, and other manifestations of the moral order are shunned, ostracized, and exposed to public humiliation—a fate that would have resulted in evolutionary death during the harsh ecological period of the Ice Age.

  Like the Puritans, the Quakers stem from a distinctive, ethnically based British sub-culture originating in Scandinavia.[919] The predominant region for Quakers in England was the North Midlands colonized by Viking invaders beginning toward the end of the eighth century. They prized individual ownership of houses and fields, and were seen by others as independent and egalitarian, dressing alike and eating together. “Their houses were sparsely furnished, and their culture made a virtue of simplicity and plain speech.[920] They tended to be relatively poor farmers working poor, rocky soil. Historically, they were dominated by an oppressive non-resident elite; they made virtues of simplicity and hard work in a harsh environment.[921]

  The Ethnic Origins and the Decline of the Aristocratic

  Ethos in Britain

  Finally, while an egalitarian ethic became firmly entrenched in the eighteenth century, prior to this time aristocratic elites dominated British society with elitist, hierarchical values; this system was still largely entrenched politically, with the result that popular attitudes on slavery did not result in passage of legislation ending the slave trade until 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. The decline of this social structure began in the seventeenth century with the rise of the Puritans; the purpose of this chapter has been to describe the rise of the egalitarian consciousness and morally defined ingroups in the eighteenth century.

  Fischer claims that the aristocratic culture that was in the process of being displaced also appears to have its roots in the ethnic subculture of the German West Saxons reflecting the aristocratic individualist strand of European cultural influence.[922] This group immigrated to Southwestern England in the sixth century where they became an endogamous, intermarried elite. Elites had large estates with lower-middle class servi and villani—essentially slaves, dating at least from the ninth century. They reproduced this aristocratic culture in the American South: it was characterized by “deep and pervasive inequalities, by a staple agriculture and rural settlement patterns, by powerful oligarchies of large landowners with Royalist politics and an Anglican faith.”[923] Relationships were relatively egalitarian within the group (aristocratic individualism), but the society as a whole was highly hierarchical.

  The differences between the south of England and the industrial Midlands persisted well into the nineteenth century, with “Tory England” in the south devoted to agriculture, while “Nonconformist and usually Liberal England” in the south-west and industrial Midlands was characterized by “more diverse and competitive economic conditions, non-agricultural employment, immigration (especially from the ‘Celtic fringe’), rapid population growth, and urbanization.”[924]

  While Fischer’s analysis convincingly portrays an aristocratic culture centered in southwest England, this culture may well also have been influenced by the Norman invaders of the eleventh century given that “the Conquest annihilated England’s ruling class, physically and genetically. Some 4000–5000 thegns were eliminated by battle, exile or dispossession in the biggest transfer of property in English history. … The last English earl, Watheof, was beheaded in 1076. … Most simply sank in society.”[925]

  Nevertheless, the Normans, although originating in Scandinavia, clearly instituted a
similar aristocratic culture in their new domains—oppressive and hierarchical, and far more centrally controlled than the culture of the Saxons. “Conquest meant wholesale national degradation.”[926]

  Conclusion

  There is a clear continuity between the moral communities that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the contemporary world. The logic of moral universalism based on empathic concern is now ubiquitous, rationalizing everything from wars of liberation against oppressive dictators in far off lands to alleviating the suffering of impoverished Third-World migrants and animals. Empathic concern is a lynchpin for immigration and refugee policy, ethnic relations, poverty, and much else.

  Although these tendencies toward egalitarianism and moral universalism were presumably adaptive within the small societies that northwestern Europeans evolved in (what evolutionists term the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”), they are proving to be maladaptive in the modern world where empathy and altruism can be manipulated by powerful elites to serve their own material interests.

  A particular feature of the modern world bears mentioning in this regard: although the antislavery movement beginning in the late eighteenth century certainly took advantage of newspapers to spread their message, the reach and power of the mass media are far greater today. Because of the power of explicit processing, media messages can be used to frame events in a way that evokes empathy and therefore rationalizes actions that may cynically serve the interests of those who control media corporations.

  For example, in the run-up to the war in Iraq which began in 2003, there were many news presentations and opinion pieces which presented Saddam Hussein as an evil villain, oppressing his own people, gassing the Kurds, engaging in bloody reprisals against the Shiites, and poised to use weapons of mass destruction on the United States. The empathy evoked by this media promotion of suffering Iraqis and endangered Americans may have been real, but it is highly doubtful that empathy was the guiding emotion of the neoconservatives and other pro-Israel Lobbyists most responsible for promoting the war in the media and in the halls of Congress and in key parts of the national security establishment.[927]

  The manipulation of the culture of empathy to attain goals of power and money is always a real possibility. But the evidence presented here is that the antislavery movement as it developed in the late eighteenth century certainly did not in general have such ulterior motives and that the individual actors exhibited genuine altruism motivated by empathy (influenced at the level of individual differences by standing on the personality trait of Love/Nurturance), by published images of suffering slaves, and ideologies of moral universalism.

  8

  The Psychology of Moral

  Communities

  _______________________________

  Human rationality consists largely of separating intellectual argument from personality attributions about moral character. Our difficulty in making this separation suggests that political, religious, and pseudo-scientific ideologies have been part of moralistic self-display for a very long time.

  Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind[928]

  This book has emphasized that the liberal strain of Western culture stems ultimately from European individualism which in turn can be found at the very origins of the European peoples. As noted in several places, a fundamental aspect of individualism is that group cohesion is based not on kinship but on reputation—most importantly in recent centuries, a moral reputation as capable, honest, trustworthy and fair. Reputation as a military leader was central to Indo-European warrior societies where leaders’ reputations were critical to being able to recruit followers (Chapter 2). And the northern hunter-gatherer groups discussed in Chapter 3 developed egalitarian, exogamous customs and a high level of social complexity in which interaction with non-relatives and strangers was the norm; again, reputation was critical to remaining in the group.

  The reputation-based moral communities of the West thus have deep historical roots both in Indo-European culture and in hunter-gatherer culture. In Chapter 5 I noted that Christian Europe had become a moral community based on Christian religious beliefs rather than ethnic or national identity. Moreover, the abbots and prelates of the medieval Church, the Puritan and Quaker religious leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth centuries discussed in later chapters carried on the primeval tendency to create moral communities as a source of identity. Finally, as discussed below and in Chapter 9, such moral communities have come to define the contemporary culture of the West.

  These moral communities are indigenous products of the culture of the West—products of Western culture in the same way that kinship-based clans, cousin marriage, sequestering women, and the harems of elite males are products of the people of the Middle East.

  My view is that the moral communities observed at the origins of Western history and surfacing recurrently in later centuries tapped into a pre-existing tendency among individualists to create such communities as a force for cohesion that does not rely on kinship relations. Particularly important since the seventeenth century have been the egalitarian moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer ethic whose evolutionary origins are discussed in Chapter 3. Beginning after World War II and accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter, these moral communities have been defined by the intellectual left which is bent on dispossessing European-derived peoples from territories they have dominated for hundreds, or in the case of Europe, many thousands of years.

  Moral communities are pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West; however, because of their widespread influence, moral communities are particularly noteworthy in the media and the academic world. For example, whereas mainstream social science had been relatively free of morally based ingroup-outgroup thinking prior to World War II, such thinking has had dramatic effects on the social sciences and humanities in later decades, to the point that academic departments and scholarly associations in these areas can be accurately characterized as “tribal moral communities” in the sense of Jonathan Haidt.[929] This is most obviously the case in areas such as social psychology, sociology, and ethnic and gender studies.

  The result has been that academic research communities and the media rigorously police research and commentary that conflict with racial egalitarianism or promote the interests of European-derived peoples, and these attitudes have been internalized by a great many White people. Researchers such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, and Ralph Scott who attempt to publish findings on race differences or on public policies related to race find themselves socially ostracized, and they quickly learn that there are steep barriers to publication in mainstream academic journals and no mainstream grant support for their research.

  For example, when scholarly articles contravening the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors suddenly become extremely “rigorous”— demanding more experimental controls and other changes in methodology. Such “scientific skepticism” regarding research that one dislikes for deeper reasons was a major theme of The Culture of Critique in discussions of the work of Franz Boas, Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and the Frankfurt School, to name a few.[930]

  One result of this academic reign of terror has been that conservatives often self-select to go into other areas that are not so compromised, such as the hard sciences or computing; there is also active discrimination against conservative job candidates and Ph.D. applicants.[931] The system is therefore self-replicating.

  Social Identity Processes as an Adaptation for

  Moral Communities

  In previous work I have argued for an evolved basis for social identity processes.[932] People are prone to creating positively valued ingroups in which the outgroup is negatively valued—a human universal. The negatively evaluated outgroup need not be defined by kinship—cultural categories, such as “likes modern art” vs. “hates modern art” or if groups have d
ifferent-colored uniforms (as at sporting events) are able to produce positive attitudes towards ingroup members and negative attitudes toward outgroup members. Because social identity processes are not necessarily defined by kinship, Western peoples are particularly prone to these processes.

  William Graham Sumner was a Darwinian anthropologist whose work was mentioned in Chapter 6 as typical of the intellectual elite of the late nineteenth–early twentieth century that fed into the movement for ethnic defense leading to the 1924 immigration restriction law. He expressed the essentials of social identity processes as they play out in tribal societies as follows:

  Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. … Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.[933]

  The only difference from contemporary research into social identity is that the references to ancestors of the ingroup and the outgroup need not apply. Sumner’s quote would thus not apply to the West where the important historical groups discussed here are not based on ancestry but on being a member of a moral community.