These egalitarian social movements had an obvious appeal in such an environment, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, they became focused on improving the often-appalling conditions of labor and ending slavery.
Nevertheless, the aristocratic-egalitarian tradition per se has certainly had many positive attributes. In the ancient world, this tradition was firmly grounded in the idea that society should be dominated by those with natural superiority. Theodor Mommsen, the great historian of Rome noted that
the senatorial aristocracy had guided the state, not primarily by virtue of natural right, but by virtue of the highest of all rights of representation—the right of the superior, as contrasted with the mere ordinary man.[1115]
Whatever could be demanded of an assembly of burgesses like the Roman, which was not the motive power, but the firm foundation of the whole machinery—a sure perception of the common good, a sagacious deference to the right leader, a steadfast spirit in prosperous and evil days, and, above all, the capacity of sacrificing the individual to the general welfare and common comfort of the present for the advantage of the future—all these qualities the Roman community exhibited in so high a degree that, when we look to its conduct as a whole, all censure is lost in reverent admiration.[1116]
One can certainly admire such an aristocracy, and in later periods of European history there certainly were instances where aristocracies served the interests of the community as a whole. King Louis IX of France (St. Louis), mentioned in Chapter 5 as promoting the economic interests of the entire community rather than maximizing his own wealth, comes to mind; the many military campaigns against Muslim invaders led by aristocratic heroes such as Charles Martel should also be mentioned. But such cannot be said in general, and it certainly cannot be said of the elites dominating the West today where shortsightedness, opportunism, greed, and pursuit of narrow individual and ethnic interests predominate. The path to creating such an aristocracy seems essentially utopian in the current milieu.
The egalitarian trends that began their ascent to power in the seventeenth century unleashed enormous creativity and innovation as inherited social status declined in importance in the new meritocratic context in which upward mobility was possible and individual initiative and talent rewarded. There was a tremendous flowering of science, technology, inventions, and the arts, to the point that, in comparison to all other areas of the world, almost all (97 percent) of the major figures in these fields have been males of European background, particularly northwestern Europe. Indeed, Charles Murray’s map of the “European Core” that gave rise to this inventiveness coincides to a remarkable extent with the geographic area described in Chapter 4 as the area of moderate individualism—including the Germanic areas of northern Italy but excluding Scandinavia (except for Denmark, which, as noted in Chapter 1, has more genetic commonality with Germany than with the rest of Scandinavia) and southern Europe (including southern France and southern Italy.[1117]
Further, while the accomplishments of Western science in the ancient world are without parallel elsewhere (in my opinion, Aristotle was the greatest intellect of all time), this efflorescence began in the seventeenth century and coincides with the rise of egalitarian individualism (Chapter 6).
Individualism as a Precursor of Science and
Capitalism
Individualism as Precursor of Science
The Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) people discussed in Chapter 3 developed scientific and scholarly associations in the post-medieval West which assume groups are permeable and highly subject to defection—that there is a marketplace of ideas in which individuals may defect from current scientific views when they believe that the data support alternate perspectives. On the other hand, collectivist cultures create group-oriented intellectual movements based on dogmatic assertions, fealty to group leaders, ethnic networking, and expulsion of dissenters.[1118]
Ricardo Duchesne highlights disputation as a critical component in Western intellectual discourse, analyzed in terms of the Indo-European cultural legacy of personal striving for fame.[1119] Beginning in ancient Greece, intellectual debate was intensely competitive, and individuals were free to defect from a particular scholar if they found another more appealing.[1120] Intellectuals sought followers not by depending on pre-existing kinship or ethnic connections, but rather by their ability to attract followers in a free market of ideas in which people were free to defect to other points of view. Just as members of a Männerbund were free to defect to other groups with objectively better prospects for success, the free market of ideas would naturally default to arguments and ideas that can appeal to others who are free to defect from the group and where groups are highly permeable. In a social context consisting of others who are similarly free to defect, logical arguments and predictive theories about the natural world would come to the fore.
Disputation implies that people are free to disagree. Scientific movements are highly permeable groups whose members are prone to defection if they find a better theory or if new data are uncovered. A fundamental issue in the philosophy of science is to describe the type of discourse community that promotes scientific thinking in any area of endeavor. As phrased by Donald Campbell, the question is “which social systems of belief revision and belief retention would be most likely to improve the competence-of-reference of beliefs to their presumed referents?”[1121] Scientific progress (Campbell’s “competence-of-reference”) depends on an individualistic, atomistic universe of discourse in which each individual sees himself or herself not as a member of a wider political or cultural entity advancing a particular point of view but as an independent agent endeavoring to evaluate evidence and discover the structure of reality.
As Campbell notes, a critical feature of science as it evolved in the seventeenth century was that individuals were independent agents who could replicate scientific findings for themselves.[1122] Scientific opinion certainly coalesces around certain propositions in real science (e.g., the structure of DNA, the mechanisms of psychological reinforcement), but this scientific consensus is highly prone to defection in the event that new data casts doubt on presently held theories. Arthur Jensen summarizes this view well when he notes that “when many individual scientists ... are all able to think as they please and do their research unfettered by collectivist or totalitarian constraints, science is a self-correcting process.”[1123]
Rational arguments appeal to disinterested observers and are subject to refutation. They do not depend on group discipline or group interests for their effectiveness because in Western cultures, the groups are permeable and defections based on individual beliefs are far more the norm than other cultures.
Moreover, as noted in Chapter 3, WEIRD people tend more toward analytical reasoning (detaching objects from context, attending to characteristics of the object and developing rules for explaining and predicting phenomena) as opposed to holistic reasoning (attending to relationships between objects and surrounding field). Westerners tend to categorize objects on the basis of rules that are independent of function and hence more abstract whereas non-Westerners are more likely to categorize on the basis of function and contextual relationship. Science is fundamentally concerned with creating abstract rules independent of context and developing explanations and predictions of phenomena in the empirical world. Such traits, which can be seen even in the ancient Greco-Roman world of antiquity, clearly predispose to scientific thinking.
In this regard, it’s interesting that being high on general intelligence (IQ) facilitates solving novel problems by decontextualization and abstraction. Decontextualization is also an aspect of Jean Piaget’s formal operational thought, “the independence of its form from its reality content.”[1124] This is because both general intelligence and Piaget’s formal operational thought are able to inhibit the default mode of human cognition, which is to process information in a highly context-sensitive and automatic manner. We have “automatic heuristics”—unconscious “rules o
f thumb”—that allow us quickly to process information in our environment, making inferences, judgments, and decisions.[1125]
People automatically tend to contextualize problems in terms of their personal experience, especially social experience. For example, many people are influenced by vivid but unrepresentative personal experience (e.g., narrowly escaping death in an airplane mishap) more strongly than by valid statistical information (showing that airline travel is safer than traveling by automobile). As a result, unless they inhibit these tendencies, they make mistakes on problems that are completely formal, such as logical syllogisms, geometry and math problems, or the kinds of problems found on a culture-fair IQ test such as the non-verbal Raven’s Progressive Matrices.[1126] Decontextualization results from inhibiting and thereby controlling these automatic processes; it thus enables one to deal with problems of formal logic or mathematics that are devoid of any social or personalized context.
IQ researchers are well aware of the centrality of decontextualization for thinking about intelligence and its relation to science. Arthur Jensen:
One of the well-known byproducts of schooling is an increased ability to decontextualize problems. In almost every subject … pupils learn to discover the general rule that applies to a highly specific situation and to apply a general rule in a wide variety of different contexts. The use of symbols to stand for things in reading (and musical notation); basic arithmetic operations; consistencies in spelling, grammar, and punctuation; regularities and generalizations in history; categorizing, serializing, enumerating, and inferring in science, and so on. Learning to do these things, which are all part of the school curriculum, instills cognitive habits that can be called decontextualization of cognitive skills. The tasks seen in many nonverbal or culture-reduced tests call for no scholastic knowledge per se, but do call for the ability to decontextualize novel situations by discovering rules or regularities and then using them to solve the problem.[1127]
Thinking evolved in a social context, and contextualization processes usually work quite effectively in everyday situations; contextualization processes are automatic (i.e., they are psychological reflexes that do not require thoughtful consideration); they occur quickly and effortlessly, whereas decontextualized thinking is relatively slow and requires effort—which is why children in educational settings must concentrate and apply themselves to the task at hand. However, apart from IQ tests, there are many real-life situations in which decontextualization is called for—where people must solve problems in novel situations, and in general, people with higher general intelligence are better able to reason logically on such tasks.[1128]
The finding that WEIRD people tend toward scientific, logical reasoning thus demystifies the origins of science as a uniquely Western phenomenon. Beginning in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, logical argument has been far more characteristic of Western cultures than any other culture area. As Ricardo Duchesne has pointed out, although the Chinese made many practical discoveries, they never developed the idea of a rational, orderly universe guided by universal laws comprehensible to humans. Nor did they ever develop a “deductive method of rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms.”[1129]
Such universal, generalized laws and geometrical or mathematical theorems derived from axioms are decontextualized rules—i.e., rules about perfect triangles or frictionless motion which nevertheless have many uses in the real-world. This is the essence of scientific reasoning. Galileo’s concept of frictionless motion, e.g., fails to predict the precise rate at which an object will move down an inclined plane, because there will always be friction in the real world. However, his concept has been very useful in real-world predictions and in designing a wide range of artifacts, ranging from engines to roads.
The discussion of WEIRD people in Chapter 3 emphasized the social embeddedness of collectivist cultures regarding moral reasoning versus the Western tendency to create abstract moral rules that apply to everyone. For collectivists, moral reasoning involves taking account of the social context, which is fundamentally centered on fitting into and strengthening a kinship group. For individualists, the social world involves a greater need to interact with strangers and to consider their reputation for respecting impersonal rules.
I propose that the individualist cultures and genetic heritage of the West predispose Westerners to abstract their judgments from the social context, and that this then predisposes the West to scientific, rational thinking as well as unique methods of moral reasoning. Individuals are evaluated as individuals on traits—e.g., honesty, intelligence, military talent, and the logic and usefulness of their arguments—in abstraction from their (relatively weak) kinship connections. Moral situations are evaluated in terms of abstract concepts of justice that apply to all individuals rather than being vitally concerned with social obligations to particular people enmeshed in a particular extended kinship network. When confronting the natural world, individualists more easily abstract from social context and personal experience, seeking out and applying universally applicable laws of nature.
Individualism as Predisposing to Capitalism
Besides science, capitalism also flourished in this new, post-seventeenth-century culture of egalitarian individualism, eventually eroding aristocratic cultures based on inherited status. By the twentieth century in Britain, ancient landed families with pedigrees going back to the Middle Ages—families that looked down on success in business—were going bankrupt and selling their estates to wealthy capitalists whose ancestors were farmers, tailors, and petty tradesmen; or they were marrying their children to the children of wealthy capitalists in order to retain their estates.
The social context in which aristocratic culture declined and in which people were freed from obligations to lords unleashed the acquisitive drives of individuals and a capitalist culture. This resulted in large differences in economic success.[1130] As argued by Gregory Clark in his Farewell to Alms, this in turn led to natural selection for industriousness and intelligence in the pre-nineteenth century context where wealth was positively correlated with number of children.[1131]
The transformation of the West was complete. It is true that the Industrial Revolution was extremely disruptive—“the suffering and dislocation experienced in England between 1790 and 1850 count among the worst in its history,”[1132] and the same can be said about the industrialization process elsewhere in the West. However, in England “living standards for most people rose markedly in the second half of the [nineteenth] century.”[1133] Western societies that were not only unprecedentedly wealthy, but also had created more-than-adequate living conditions for the working class and upward mobility for the talented and ambitious.
Over the span from the mid-seventeenth century up to 1960s the West benefited from these movements and was in the process of creating not only wealthier but fairer and more equitable societies. In the United States in the 1950s there were already strong trends toward increasing fairness to African-Americans. The West had shed its colonies after bequeathing self-government and substantial infrastructure and educational institutions to much of Africa and Asia.[1134] In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the West as unrivaled hegemon.
What Went Wrong? The New Elite and Its
Loathing of the Nation it Rules
So, what went wrong? Why, little more than a half century after the countercultural revolution, is the West on the verge of suicide, everywhere inundated by other peoples—peoples that are typically far more clannish, far more prone to corruption (an endemic problem in much of the Third World where relationships are based primarily on kinship rather than individual merit and trust of non-kin), and often of demonstrably lower intelligence. This has continued to the point that Western peoples are on the verge of becoming minorities in areas they have dominated for hundreds or, in Europe, thousands of years. Ultimately, if present trends continue, their unique genetic heritage wil
l be lost entirely. One need only look at the demographic trend lines in all Western countries, steady declines in the White percentage of the world population, and generally below-replacement White fertility in the context of massive immigration of non-Whites. Extinction, after all, is just as much a part of the story of life as the evolution of new life forms.
This ongoing disaster for the traditional people of America is the direct result of the rise of a new elite as a result of the 1960s countercultural revolution. This new elite despises the traditional people and culture of America. David Gelernter:
The old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms. The public went to church and so did they. The public went into the army and so did they. The public staged simpler weddings and the elite put on fancier ones, but they mostly all used the same dignified words and no one self-expressed. They agreed (this being America) that art was a waste, scientists were questionable, engineering and machines and progress and nature were good. Some of the old-time attitudes made sense, some did not; but the staff and their bosses basically concurred. …
Today’s elite loathes the nation it rules. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the feeling is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in a scorching geyser. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the fall ’96 Dole presidential campaign: “The crowds flip the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’” The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd—an even match-up, except that the reporters wield power and the crowd (in effect) wields none.[1135]
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