In terms of race differences, the Love/Nurturance system is a central aspect of a slow life history strategy,[1018] with the result that it is expected that African and African-derived populations will be less prone to affectionate pair bonding and paternal investment in children, and more prone to short-term sexual relationships. Indeed, while African mothers are sensitive and responsive to babies’ needs, mother-child interactions in prototypical African cultures are devoid of the warmth and affection that are typical in European cultures.[1019] Thus Mary Ainsworth, a pioneer in mother-infant attachment research, found that Ugandan babies were quite securely attached despite the fact that their mothers rarely showed any affection toward them—a phenomenon also noted by other researchers for a different African group.[1020]
Prefrontal Executive Control (PEC). Having a reputation as conscientious and dependable is important for being accepted in a moral community. A relatively recent trend in evolution, especially in the Primate line, has been the evolution of a centralized control system able to integrate and coordinate lower-level adaptations. This top-down Prefrontal Executive Control (PEC) system enables coordination of specialized adaptations, including all of the mechanisms associated with the BAS.[1021] PEC involves explicit processing of linguistic and symbolic information and the top-down control of behavior. Unlike the automatic processing typical of the BAS, it is able to evaluate complex contexts in order to generate behavior that is adaptive in contemporary human societies with their constantly changing, highly complex environments and reward-punishment contingencies.
For example, emotional states resulting from adaptations designed to react to evolutionary regularities may place people in a prepotently aggressive state energized by anger—an emotional state that is one of the subsystems of the BAS. However, whether or not aggression actually occurs may also be influenced, at least for people with sufficient levels of PEC, by explicit evaluation of the wider context, including evaluation of the possible costs and benefits of an aggressive act (e.g., penalties at law, possible retaliation). These explicitly calculated costs and benefits are not recurrent over evolutionary time but are products of explicit processing evaluating current environments and producing mental models of possible consequences of behavior.
Individual differences in PEC are most closely associated with the personality trait of Conscientiousness.[1022] Conscientiousness involves variation in the ability to defer gratification and pleasure (both related to the BAS) in the service of attaining long-term goals, persevering in unpleasant tasks, paying close attention to detail, and behaving in a responsible, dependable, cooperative manner. Not surprisingly, Conscientiousness is also associated with academic success;[1023] indeed, higher Conscientiousness is likely the reason for the finding of sex differences favoring females throughout the school years, including college.
Conscientiousness refers to “socially prescribed impulse control that facilitates task and goal-directed behavior”[1024] and is thus central to understanding under-controlled behaviors associated with psychopathic personality.[1025] Specifically, variation in PEC is central to understanding the difference between controlled and uncontrolled aggression—i.e., the difference between an impulsive act of aggression carried out in anger because of an insult versus a well-planned attack of revenge carried out in cold blood. Variation in PEC is also central to controlling reward-oriented behavior (pleasure-seeking), another central component of the BAS.[1026] Individuals with low levels of prefrontal control are prone to impulsivity, substance abuse, and have low levels of emotional control, including relative inability to control anger, a prime motivator of some types of aggression.
Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Personality:
Whites as More Generous and Empathic than
Other Races
Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Personality provides a welcome review of the personality literature related to race differences that fits well with the material on personality discussed above.[1027] Studies from the United States have consistently found a rank ordering of races on behaviors related to psychopathic personality—highest in Blacks and Native Americans, followed by Hispanics, lower among Whites, and lowest among Asians, especially northeast Asians. The variables studied included conduct disorder, direct measures of psychopathic personality, measures of sexual promiscuity (indicating less proneness to pair bonding and being high on the BAS), Conscientiousness (Blacks vs. Whites only), criminality, school suspensions, emotional intelligence (Blacks vs. Whites only), drug and substance abuse, child abuse, and self-esteem (linked to the BAS: individuals high on the BAS are prone to high self-esteem and self-confidence.) In general, as with IQ, race differences are greatest between Whites and Blacks and much attenuated between Whites and northeast Asians.
Given the data on European individualism and its effects on mating patterns (highlighting the importance of love and pair bonding in choice of marriage partner compared to more kinship-oriented societies), I suggest that the differences between northeast Asians and Whites are best explained mainly by differences in Prefrontal Executive Control. The results for Blacks clearly indicate higher levels of the BAS, lower on Love/Nurturance, and lower on PEC.
Indeed, since the uniqueness of Western individualism is central to the present analysis, it's important to note that Whites are more generous than Asians in terms of charitable donations, thus departing from the usual rank ordering of races on IQ and PEC. This is important because, as indicated above, the Love/Nurturance system is linked to altruism and empathic concern; moreover, Love/Nurturance has been of special importance for the West because of two particular aspects of individualism:
Individual choice of marriage partner. Love Nurturance is an important criterion for both sexes but especially for men seeking a monogamous marriage with a woman high on a trait linked to nurturance of children and sexual fidelity. On the other hand, marriage in collectivist cultures is more determined by customs of marrying relatives as well by family strategizing, with parents playing a determining role.
Reputation in a moral community. Reputation in a group of non-relatives depends partly on being seen as generous, cooperative, and unselfish. Being high on the Love/Nurturance system is linked with empathy for the suffering of others. Moreover, among individualists, because of the lack of strong group boundaries and because reputation within a moral community is so critical, empathy would be expected to be directed to others outside one’s own kinship group but within one’s moral community.
Congruent with this scenario, Lynn presents data showing that Whites are more willing to contribute charitable donations than all other groups, including Asians.[1028]And again, I emphasize that this is especially noteworthy given that it departs from the usual rank ordering of racial groups based on life history differences. Empathy for suffering others was a striking aspect of the movements to abolish slavery in England and the United States (Chapters 6 and 7) and in the eighteenth-century “affective revolution” that fed into the sensibility on display in the Second British Empire (Chapter 7). Ultimately, this was an ethnic shift that brought to the fore the hunter-gatherer sensibility with its greater emphasis on egalitarianism and moral communities.
Finally, it was noted above that women are higher on Love/Nurturance and its emotion of empathy. As a result, it is not surprising that Lynn finds women are more generous than men; indeed, White women are the most generous group of all, a finding that makes sense in light of the above comments on White women being more susceptible to appeals from suffering non-Whites, refugees, immigrants, etc.
Life History Theory
Nicholas Baumard has proposed a life history theory-based account of the fact that Britain was the first to develop the industrial revolution.[1029] He points out that pre-industrial Britain was relatively wealthy compared to any other area of the world, including other parts of Europe. Although he does not attempt to explain why Britain was wealthy prior to the Industrial Revolution—usually dated as beginning around 1760, he
recruits life history theory to propose that this increased wealth had a cascading effect on a number of psychological traits, including a tendency to have a longer time horizon (less time discounting), higher optimism, and higher levels of trust in others, all of which are proposed as paving the way for innovation.
The basic idea is that in a stable resource-rich environment, people are optimistic and plan for the future rather than behave impulsively; since the struggle for subsistence is less salient, they are nicer to others and are less concerned with material goods. For example, he cites a study comparing Native American children with non-Native American children before and after a casino opened on tribal land. After the Native Americans received casino payments, there were reductions in criminal behavior, drug use, and behavioral disorders associated with poverty such as depression, anxiety, and oppositional disorders, as well as increases in the personality traits of Love/Nurturance and Conscientiousness described above.[1030] In a similar manner, Baumard proposes that increased wealth in Britain led to an increase in these traits and that these in turn led to a flowering of innovation and technological progress.
Baumard’s theory contrasts with Gregory Clark’s theory in A Farewell to Alms which proposes natural selection for bourgeois virtues like Conscientiousness beginning in the early modern period.[1031] While Baumard explicitly adopts a blank slate perspective, Clark’s theory is compatible with pre-existing genetically based variation in traits like Conscientiousness and IQ. More intelligent, conscientious people were able to rise in the new environment of the early modern period—an environment that unleashed the economic potential of individualism—and had more children, constituting natural selection for these traits.
Another theory based on selection has been proposed by Peter Frost and Henry Harpending based on the finding that penalties against violence increased dramatically beginning in the eleventh century, with up to two percent of males in each generation being subjected to capital punishment or dying in other ways related to their crimes.[1032] This culling of violent males would have reduced the numbers of males at the high end of aggression and at the low ends of Conscientiousness and Love/Nurturance.
I regard all three of these proposals as contributing factors in European modernization; however, by itself or in combination they are inadequate. Baumard’s blank slate proposal ignores the massive data on genetic variation in personality traits and intelligence. Frost and Harpending’s thesis would not explain why strong states in areas like China and Eastern and Southern Europe would not have had similar selective effects on these traits, so they cannot explain the uniqueness of northwestern Europe—its individualism, the vastly disproportionate number of discoveries and inventions, and its exploring and colonizing the planet. China’s penalties for serious crimes were particularly draconian, punishing entire families of the alleged perpetrator beginning in the eighth century.[1033]
Moreover, none of these theories discuss individualism as a necessary condition for European modernization, including the Industrial Revolution. As presented in Chapter 4, northwest Europe had a long history of individualist family structure long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, its origins are lost in prehistory and I argue they are ethnically based. However, the creativity, innovation, and enterprise that would be the natural product of the individualism of northwestern European peoples was throttled by a non-meritocratic aristocratic social system until the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century and the gradual overthrow of aristocratic culture (Chapter 6).
As noted in Chapter 4, the individualist family pattern required greater planning and self-control (Conscientiousness) prior to marriage and resulted in a greater likelihood to exhibit what psychologists label “internal locus of control” (i.e., the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to a fatalistic perspective resulting from external forces beyond their control.) It’s no accident that the English word kismet has Arabic roots.
Individualist marriage also emphasized individual choice of marriage partner based on the personal characteristics of the spouse, including intelligence, Conscientiousness, and affection (Love/Nurturance). These traits are deemphasized when marriage is embedded within extended kinship networks where marriage is typically entered into with relatives and often determined by parental choice. In individualist culture, reputation in a moral community rather than a kinship-based community was critical, resulting in trust of non-relatives.
The Protestant Reformation, which succeeded only in northwest Europe, is critical. In particular, the English Civil War of the 1640s, which saw the triumph of egalitarian individualism and the beginnings of the end of aristocratic culture based on agriculture, a rigid status hierarchy, and inherited (non-meritocratic) status with very limited opportunities for upward mobility. This upheaval ultimately resulted in relative egalitarianism, the development of a market-oriented economy, industrialization, and opportunities for upward mobility and reproductive success for the intelligent and conscientious, as described by Clark’s A Farewell to Alms.
Baumard supposes that increasing wealth in China and Japan (neither of which ever developed anything like European individualism) would have resulted in an industrial revolution. This is conjecture, and does not take account of greater levels of conformity and relative lack of creativity and innovation in these cultures, despite increased wealth and continuing into the present.[1034] As discussed in Chapter 3, Westerners are WEIRD people differing in a large number of psychological characteristics from people in collectivist cultures. As with the data on the individualist family, these findings are compatible with an ethnic interpretation of northwestern European uniqueness.
Finally, given that there has always been an affluent class in Europe and in other societies, in order to be plausible, Baumard’s theory that increased affluence is critical must argue that this process is essentially the result of an increased number of people who are affluent. This is conjecture. My view is that the destruction of aristocratic culture, by allowing the inherent egalitarian individualism of northwest Europeans to come to the fore, was the critical factor.
Psychological Challenges to Developing an
Explicit Culture of White Identity and
Interests
The foregoing has discussed psychological mechanisms underlying the power of human cultures to influence behavior and attitudes. Clearly, the wider culture of the West, now dominated by the anti-White left, poses a major obstacle to developing an explicit culture favorable to White identity and interests. In the absence of changes in the explicit culture on issues related to the legitimacy of White racial identity and interests, Whites will simply continue to retreat into implicit White communities.
There are obviously a great many obstacles to developing such a mainstream culture, the main one being opposition by elites in the media, academia, business, and political cultures. However, there are other mechanisms that have come into play which make it difficult to create such a culture.
Self-interest and the Anti-White Infrastructure
A large part of the problem is that these elites have created a very elaborate infrastructure so that, for the vast majority of individuals, economic and professional self-interest coincides with support for anti-White policies. Particularly egregious examples are individuals and companies that directly benefit from immigration via cheap labor, or companies, such as First Data Corporation, that benefit from remittances sent by immigrants to relatives in other countries.
Noteworthy examples are university presidents, many of whom earn seven-figure salaries. For example, Mary Sue Coleman earned over $1,000,000/year before resigning as president of the University of Michigan in 2014. She had been a leader in attempting to preserve racial preferences for non-Whites and in promoting the (non-existent) educational benefits of diversity.[1035]
Similarly, when three White lacrosse players at Duke University were accused of raping a Black woman, faculty and admi
nistrators issued statements assuming their guilt.[1036] Because the leftist political cultural of the university has become conventionalized, statements deploring the racism and sexism of the players could be counted on as good career moves, even when they turned out to be groundless. Adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity is a sine qua non for a career as a mainstream academic (particularly an administrator), a public intellectual, or in the political arena.
Consistent with the importance of self-interest in supporting explicitly White policies and politicians, a 2017 study found that high-income Whites were less likely to support politicians who strongly identify as White if they think the racial hierarchy is unstable. In other words, Whites who have the most to lose are most likely to be unwilling to “rock the boat” by provoking minorities if they think that the racial hierarchy could change because of demographic shifts.[1037]
As Frank Salter has pointed out, Whites who fail to attend to the interests of their wider kinship group benefit themselves and their families at the expense of their own wider ethnic interests.[1038] This is especially true for elite Whites—people whose intelligence, power, and wealth could make a very large difference in culture and politics. They are in effect sacrificing millions of ethnic kin—for example, by turning their backs on the White working class who are well known to suffer most from non-White immigration and the multicultural regime—for the benefit of themselves and their immediate family.
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