The Relationship Between Race, Culture, and a Libertarian Social Order
By Eli Harman
July 30, 2017
What is Race and Why Does it Matter?
Some people maintain that there is no such thing as race, that race is a “social construct” or that there is “one race, the human race.”
These people are not serious, but in fact are ideologically motivated liars with either a malicious or parasitic agenda (or both.)
First of all, taxonomic classification schemes are always somewhat arbitrary. They involve drawing lines where they may not exist, or may only seem to. Organisms exist. Categories; we create, and sort them into. Taxonomy is the map, not the territory. The worth of such labels or categories is measured in their utility for the purpose of mapping the territory.
Human races or ethnicities meet the criteria for subspecies that we apply in at least some other cases. That is, there are reproductively isolated sub-populations that have distinctive features which are the result of divergent evolution or genetic drift. There are good reasons why we might want to draw racial distinctions. They may be useful distinctions to draw. In any case, people draw those distinctions informally, regardless of whatever the scientific dogma maintains, and they will go on drawing them no matter how many normative injunctions are duplicitously issued in the guise of empirical science, that they ought not to. The only thing one accomplishes by issuing such injunctions with the imprimatur of “science” is diminishing the integrity and credibility of science.
The decision NOT to draw those distinctions is just as arbitrary, if not more arbitrary, than any decision to draw them. The map, to be of most use, must mark features of the territory which are of import to us, and those distinctions are of import to us.
Pointing out past errors or inadequacies in how those demarcations have been made is straw man, conflation, and throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The fact is that there is remarkable consistency and repeatability in colloquial understandings of “race” and population geneticists and forensic anthropologists can map these popular conceptions with great accuracy to a variety of objective features which are much more than “skin deep” (genetic markers, bone structure, etc…)
Racial and ethnic demarcations are actually about kinship and relatedness, defining extended human families that share some degree of kinship. Why is this important? Kinship altruism is the norm throughout the animal kingdom, though altruism is rare in other contexts. The main reason is that kinship makes altruism, and its reciprocity, more evolutionarily stable and self enforcing.
When kinship is close, genes which code for altruistic behavior have a reasonable certainty of helping, and therefore proliferating, other instances of themselves. Altruism, in this context, is an evolutionarily stable strategy, it is adaptive behavior. On the other hand, individuals who take advantage of the altruism of kin, by defecting against it, or nonreciprocation, thereby punish their own genes reducing their fitness and prevalence, even if they themselves benefit. This makes kinship parasitism a self-limiting and self-defeating strategy.
Trust is one form of altruism. Trust can be abused. This means there is always a risk and a cost to extending trust, and no guarantee that trust will be reciprocated either with trustworthiness or trust in return. But the likelihood of trust being honored and reciprocated increases with kinship, just as the likelihood of any altruism being reciprocated increases with kinship, because kinship makes altruism and reciprocity more evolutionarily stable and self-enforcing.
The lesser the degree of kinship, on the other hand, then the fewer natural downsides to parasitism, defection, or untrustworthiness, and the more proactive measures must be undertaken to ensure reciprocity thus making for higher transaction costs. One can deliberately undertake such measures, but he must understand when and why they are necessary, and he must pay higher costs (in monitoring, accounting, and enforcement) to enact and maintain them.
In a nutshell that’s why race is important, because race is a close proxy for kinship and trust is always higher and transaction costs lower with people who are more akin, along any number of dimensions, but especially genetic. Thus racial and ethnic criteria are sound, rational, and adaptive criteria for ingroup/outgroup identification.
This is why ethnocentric cooperation evolved a.k.a in-group preference. This always evolves under a wide variety of conditions and assumptions provide only that reproduction is local (offspring are not randomly distributed geographically but emerge in proximity to parents) and traits are at least somewhat heritable. [1]
Who and what are white people?
White people are European and European descended people. The modern day population of Europe and their descendants are defined by three ancient waves of migration.
First, were the hunter-gatherers who arrived following the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age.
Second, were neolithic farmers from the near east and caucasus who brought agriculture. There is some dispute about the exact nature of this second migration. Some think that the neolithic farmers conquered or displaced the earlier hunter-gatherers, at least on the most fertile agricultural lands. Others think that neolithic practices and technology diffused culturally. Still others hold to a hybrid model, with neolithic farmer pioneers settling deep in hunter-gatherer territory and experiencing population growth from superior technology before their cultures and technology diffused to the surrounding populations as well.
Finally, a third wave of semi-nomadic, chariot-riding, pastoralists spread throughout Europe from the Pontic steppes, in what is now Ukraine, early in the bronze age (according to the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis.) These people were the proto-Indo-Europeans (or Aryans) who conquered the old Europeans consisting of the descendants of hunter gatherers and neolithic farmers, bringing with them Indo-European culture, religion, and language. A competing hypothesis, the Anatolian hypothesis, holds that the Indo-Europeans arose earlier in what is now Turkey and spread more gradually and less violently throughout Europe.
Some features of proto-Indo-European culture and religion can be inferred from comparative linguistics, since there are many Indo-European languages to compare (all modern European languages except Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and a few even more obscure ones.)
For example, words for give and and take in different indo-European-languages are often cognate, suggesting they evolved from the same root. (“Give” and “take” were represented by the same word in Proto-Indo-European.) One possible explanation was a culture of reciprocal gift-giving, where “give” and “take” were considered as necessary and inseparable aspects of each transaction or interaction. If true, this would provide a strong basis for the later development of exchange economies.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ErXa5PyHj4I%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26fs%3D1%26autohide%3D2%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26wmode%3Dtransparent
Another central theme of Indo-European culture and mythology was what the Greeks called “kleos” or “glory” and which has been reconstructed in proto-Indo-European as “*ḱlewos *ndhgwhitom”, or “the fame that does not decay.” This quest for undying glory runs through 6000 years of Aryan mythology, history, and prehistory. This is the ethos and mythos of free and independent men, out to make names for themselves and acquire fame and fortune by acts of daring and adventure.
The characteristic social and political system of Indo-Europeans is what Ricardo Duchesne calls “aristocratic egalitarianism” headed by an aristocracy of peers. These are sovereign self-owners (one German word for Baron, Frieherr, literally means “free lord” or “free man”) who confederate behind elected leaders for purposes of attack and defense. It must be said, however, that this self-ownership did not extend to all. The aristocracy, or martial elite, exercised dominion over slaves, women, peasants, and commoners subject to them. It was “egalitarian” in the sense that these aristocratic peers were equal before the law, and subject to it all alike, though they could and did vary in personal fortune, status, station, authority, or repute.
This is very different from oriental despotism, where all authority springs from the emperor, and society and state are organized in a rigid, pyramidal hierarchy with an absolute authority at the top. In contrast, hierarchy within an aristocracy is organized from the bottom (of the aristocracy) up, with the king selected from among the aristocracy as a sort of “first among equals” for his leadership qualities. His authority is founded upon reciprocal loyalties to and from subordinates, with the latter retaining legal rights and protections. Hereditary and absolute monarchies were later innovations. However, there is some evidence that hereditary rule generally offers benefits in the form of long time horizons and regime stability sufficient to offset the cost and risk of sub-optimal leadership.
Later developments like democracy, egalitarianism, and libertarianism are merely attempts to extend this ethos of the ruling western aristocracy, or some aspects of it, further and further down the socio-economic-political scale, which have been met with mixed and varying results.
Eugenics
In more recent recorded history, white people have been beneficiaries of and heirs to a legacy of cumulative eugenic reproductive practices.
First, there was the practice of marriage, and monogamy. The introduction of female sexual exclusivity was important following the agricultural revolution and the invention of private property for establishing paternity and for purposes of inheritance. Uncertain paternity discourages paternal investment in offspring, since there is no guarantee that the investments are benefiting biological offspring. In some cultures, the Mosuo of China for example, which practice looser or shorter-term mating strategies called “walking marriage” a woman’s brothers are expected to invest in her offspring, their nieces and nephews. However, nieces and nephews are only half as related to a man as his own children, so this arrangement does not encourage as much paternal investment as found in monogamous cultures and men are not as productive because they have less incentive to acquire resources to invest in children.
Monogamy is eugenic because it establishes minimum requirements for marriage and reproduction. In English, the word “husband” literally means “home owner.” Traditionally, a man couldn’t marry until he had his own home. Under monogamy, if some men never satisfy the preconditions for marriage, then some women, also, can never marry, because a marriage is defined as one woman and one man. This suppresses the reproduction of underclasses, both male and female. In western European societies, a high rate of non marriage was historically the norm, accounting for 10% to 20% of adults.
Those who do marry, marry by assortative mating, the most desirable females with the most desirable males, and so on down the scale.
Polygamy, on the other hand, is dysgenic because even though it allows elite males to become more reproductively successful, in terms of sheer numbers, it also allows lower quality women to be more reproductively successful, by mating with higher status males. Eugenic reproduction occurs by differential reproduction of men AND women, according to quality, which translates into the suppression of the reproduction of underclasses. If there is high reproduction across the board, from low quality to high, (even just of females) then there can not be (as much) eugenic selection.
Other effects: whereas monogamy enforces assortative mating, the best women pair off with the best men, polygamy increases the competition for women and causes elite men to mate lower on average – even if they are mating more – with women less suitable for the transmission of elite traits.
Furthermore, under polygamy, elite women cannot gain exclusive access to the resources of elite males, and so have fewer children and receive less paternal investment for them than under monogamy. Altogether, the dysgenic effects appear to be larger than the eugenic ones.
The Greeks and Romans were monogamous by law and custom, though not always in practice, and Tacitus records that the Germans were as well, save for a few of the higher nobility. Thus, monogamy is a long-standing custom, and anyone who wishes to challenge its normativity must first account for its rise, the success of monogamous societies, and its persistence in the conflict and competition between different societies following different reproductive strategies. Anyone who will not provide such an accounting is seeking to advance their own personal interests, as they see them, without taking note of the costs or risks they may be imposing on others and/or future generations.
In the medieval era, manorialism was a potent mechanism for eugenic selection. The land was divided into manors, and each manor had a lord of the manor, who would subdivide his land among peasant tenants. Obviously, the lord would wish his land to be as productive as possible, since he was entitled to a share of the produce. Therefore he would give preference in the allotment of lands to the sturdiest and most industrious peasants. He was not giving land to the town drunk or the village idiot. If they did not have land, they would have nowhere to build a home and could not marry. This tended to improve the quality of the peasantry over time. The commoners were fortified still further by a constant flow of downwardly mobile second sons of the aristocracy, i.e. those who did not inherit lands and titles from their fathers and had to make their own way in the world on their own terms.
Some other eugenic customs included the practice of rich women hiring wet nurses for their children. If they ceased breastfeeding earlier, they would resume menstruating sooner and be able to have more children, while the poor women they hired, for whom breastfeeding was prolonged, would have their menses delayed and the total number of their children reduced.
Gregory Clarke in A Farewell to Alms documents a persistent tendency for the nobility and the most successful commoners to have the most offspring, while the underclasses had the fewest. Those with more means could marry earlier, and more of their offspring would survive to childbearing age themselves because of better care and nutrition. The lower strata, on the other hand, were consistently failing to make replacement fertility and dying off, to be replaced by downwardly mobile descendents of the middle and upper classes. This resulted, according to him, in the highest quality population in the world and is the main reason why the industrial revolution occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
Helping still further were cold winters, which weeded out the indigent, the criminal, and the untrustworthy.
Idiocracy
Many of these hard-won historical gains, however, have been lost in the 20th century, with the introduction of birth control, which disproportionately suppressed the reproduction of the upper classes, and socialism or welfare state redistribution, which subsidized the expansion of the underclasses.
Consequently, white western people have lost about 15 points of actual raw IQ on average in a little over a century. This is in spite of the Flynn effect, which shows a rise in measured IQ over that time period, hypothesized to come from decreased malnutrition and widespread training in scientific, mathematical, or abstract reasoning. [2]
If this trend isn’t turned back around, idiocracy is a real threat. This threat is further compounded by mass immigration of low performing and low potential foreign underclasses.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26fs%3D1%26autohide%3D2%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26wmode%3Dtransparent
Inbreeding and Outbreeding
One popular stereotype or slur is of rural whites, especially, as “inbred hicks.” But the truth is that whites are among the least inbred people on Earth.
Beginning around the 9th century, the Catholic Church began to aggressively prohibit inbreeding in Europe. Under Roman Civil law, inbreeding was prohibited within four degrees of separation, measured from one individual, to the common ancestor, and back to the other. (So a first cousin would be off limits because it’s two degrees of separation back to the grandparent and two back to the cousin, four degrees in total.) But in the 9th, century, Canon law was changed to prohibit inbreeding within 7 generations, measured to the common ancestor, but not back. [3]
It’s possible this was done by the Church in an attempt to break up noble estates and put more land on the market that they could buy up, but it had vast and far reaching consequences.
Mandating outbreeding and prohibiting inbreeding mixed up the clans and tribes and made European nations more homogeneous.
Whereas in Lebanon or Afghanistan, people in adjacent mountain valleys may be reproductively isolated clans and bitter enemies for hundreds or thousands of years, with strong in-group/out-group boundaries between them, European nations became big, relatively harmonious, extended families.
When people are permitted to inbreed, they will, primarily to keep property and wealth within the family. However, this fragments society into very distinct clans and tribes that are intensely rivalrous. The Bedouin have a saying “I against my brothers, my brothers and I against my cousins, my cousins and my brothers and I against the world.” In this moral universe, the good is particular. What’s good is what’s good for me, for my family, and for my tribe. If my cousin steals from another tribe, I will back him up, because that’s good for ours. Conversely, if populations are homogeneous then this moral reasoning becomes less tenable. If my cousin steals from someone, it’s probably just a slightly more distant cousin. Thus, moral rules become universalized. “Hey, how about no one steal from anybody, OK?”
Christians and Muslims both call each other things like “brother” and “sister.” This is an explicit attempt to universalize kinship trust and kinship altruism through language and belief. These are supposed to be extended, faith-based, families. The difference though, is that Christianity actually prohibited inbreeding to a very large extent, becoming, in reality, an extended family (or a few large extended families) that much more easily and completely COULD universalize kinship trust and kinship altruism, while Islam permitted inbreeding and to this day remains riven by much more faction and violence, and less trust. Efforts to extend kinship trust are aided by actual kinship, which, as previously mentioned, makes altruism, reciprocity, and trust evolutionarily more stable and self-enforcing.
If one visits third world countries, he may see constant reminders of the cost of low trust: armed guards, locks, bars, gates, fences, dogs, walls, barbed wire, etc… These are costs, and they also reduce the volume and velocity of trade. The opportunity costs are tremendous. When one attempts to buy or sell, he must haggle, because people will not charge a competitive price if he doesn’t. This is hassle and time, which are also costs, and leads to even more lost opportunity. Sales are final, return policies are non-existent. Fraud, corruption, and nepotism are rampant. People rely as much as possible on family networks to obtain the goods and services that they need. If one wants something, then he better hope to have an uncle or a cousin who can get it for him, or he is probably going to be ripped off. In parts of the first world that have experienced heavy 3rd world immigration, these patterns are beginning to replace the more typical, high trust, first world ones.
Efficient markets and institutions in predominantly white, western, nations are a consequence, in large part, of the universalization of kinship trust and kinship altruism, which are a consequence of normative outbreeding and prohibited inbreeding. However, this will only be the case up to a certain point, up to a certain scale, because they still depend on actual kinship. Thus, mandating interbreeding on a global scale is unlikely to bring further benefits, and highly likely to disrupt or dilute the eugenic gains concentrated in certain populations over many centuries or millennia.
Nuclear Families
The nuclear family (which is the American ideal) is found in Northern Europe, particularly Britain, the low countries, and Scandinavia, as well as parts of France.
In “The Explanation of Ideology” Emmanuel Todd documents the relationship between family structures and institutions.
The communist revolutions in Russia, Cuba, China, and various other countries, Todd contends, were explicable in terms of family structures that habituated individuals to egalitarian, collectivist, and authoritarian values from an early age. In these countries, large extended families typically live together, under the strict authority of a head of household. Resources and inheritance are apportioned equally, but because of normative outbreeding, this extended family is not wholly self-contained, but accustomed to dealing with others, and with outside authorities (bureaucracy.) People in such countries, with such family structures, took to communism easily, because it matched their moral intuition and experience. In this view, political ideologies and institutions are both shaped and constrained by people’s family lives and values.
In contrast, nuclear families, where a married couple live alone together with their children, but expect them to leave home when they come of age, are an extremely individualistic family structure, which inculcates independence as a value and an expectation from an early age. Nuclear families don’t have large extended family networks to rely upon, and so production and exchange are pushed into the marketplace, where efficient and trustworthy norms and institutions must arise by necessity. Nuclear families produce highly mobile labor forces, as kids leave home to strike out on their own, or whole families, unencumbered by extensive networks of relations, pick up and move to follow economic opportunity. This is one reason why the industrial revolution began in England, a nuclear family country: because labor could pick up and move to urban accumulations of capital. Nuclear families societies are extremely productive, because they enforce the standard of financial independence before reproduction, and are eugenic because not everyone attains that standard. For all their advantages, nuclear families are a slow reproductive strategy, and thus are subject to being overwhelmed by faster, dysgenic, reproductive strategies, if they permit practitioners of those to come and share in the many benefits that nuclear families create.
No communist party or movement has ever attained more than low single digit support in a nuclear family country, and that is why communists, and their successors cultural-marxists, have been so determined and persistent in their efforts to undermine and destroy the nuclear family.
Todd further documents that in France there is a correlation, department by department, between the prevalence of nuclear families and classically-liberal voting patterns, and between more Mediterranean style extended families with socialist voting tendencies.
When conservatives say that families are the building blocks of a free and prosperous society, this is what they mean, and they usually mean nuclear families. In contrast, welfare dependent single mothers are most assuredly NOT the building blocks of a free and prosperous society.
Race mixing.
You’ve all seen the predictions in various supposedly-serious magazines, of “what the average American will look like in 2050.” The prediction is just flat wrong. Only 7% of whites intermarry. (Although miscegenation could be more common among the unmarried.) [4]
What is happening is this sort of motivated propaganda is being pushed in advertising, magazines, television, and movies, as part of an agenda. Unfortunately, attempts to investigate such agenda (atleast publicly) are deterred by the prospect of punitive sanctions (job loss, social sanction, etc…).
This propaganda is having an effect, at least on attitudes, if not necessarily behavior.
Of course, 2050 is too short a time frame for whites to be erased by mixing. Whites will, however, become a minority in America due to low birth rates and immigration, primarily of Asians and Hispanics.
That’s problematic because in a multicultural democracy, people don’t vote their values or ideology, they vote their race and religion. Nearly 90% of blacks, and 2/3’s of Asians and Hispanics voted Democrat in the 2016 election to advance their ethnic interests. [5]
Into this world of polarizing ethnic tension and strife, a world deliberately chosen, a world deliberately created, by meddlesome ideologues and intellectuals, it’s not clear where mixed race individuals fall. They’re not necessarily going to align, nor identify with any existing camp nor be accepted by them. They’re not necessarily going to align with each other. While distinct races with historical and geographical continuity have distinct clusters of characteristics and traits, distinct values, dispositions, and personalities, mixed race individuals can be all over the map. Even individuals from the same backgrounds can inherit different mixtures of traits, thus the alienation and identity issues are likely to be significant.
Little known fact: Polar bears and grizzly bears can actually interbreed, and the hybrids are reproductively viable. There are 2nd generation hybrids. But there is no long term population of these hybrids because they don’t fill any evolutionary niche better than their parents. Polar/grizzly crosses haven’t taken over because they are not better polar bears nor better grizzly bears than the originals. [6]
Why should we expect any different for human beings? Humans inhabit environments and face challenges too, and our environments are largely social and cultural. Moreover, culture has a huge impact on who, within it, lives, dies, thrives, or languishes. Thus, culture determines the transmission of biological traits and shapes individuals and populations. The populations adapted to western civilization, by thousands of years of selection, are white people. White people made western civilization and western civilization made white people.
As America gets less white, its culture gets less western.
Race mixing is likely to prove a monumental folly. A little bit around the margin is probably no big deal, but the wholesale and indiscriminate uprooting, relocation, and mixing of populations is highly unlikely to produce long-lasting improvement in any of them, and highly likely to produce confused and ill-suited individuals for the contexts in which they happen to find themselves, compared to populations co-evolved by long history to those contexts specifically.
Conclusion
Many people disdain ethnocentrism, and say that they prefer to identify as individuals, or with other individuals who share their cultures and values.
Yet, western cultures and values, like white western people, are products of particular historical processes, reproductive strategies, family structures, and accumulated collections of hereditary traits.
Western cultures and values (including markets, individualism, rule of law, self-ownership, high trust, etc…) are deeply linked to white, western peoples.
Whether you look at it from the standpoint of race, or the standpoint of culture, it’s pretty much the same. Why would white people want to lose either their race or their culture? Why would they want to lose their sense of identity, belonging, community or history and become just another rootless and embattled minority? Why would they want to give up their social trust, capital, and cohesion? Why would they not want to bequeath the harmony and commonwealth enjoyed by their ancestors?
Like it or not, the fate and fortune of western civilization and of western cultures and values, are tied to the fates and fortunes of white, western, peoples. White people are currently under threat, from collapsing birth rates, from skyrocketing immigration, from a concerted and deliberate attempt to encourage wholesale race mixing, from multiculturalism, from feminism, and from a host of other pernicious and hostile ideologies.
Resources:
- Hartshorn, Max, et al. “The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation.” Jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk, Journal Of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 30 June 2013, jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html.
- Woodley, Michael A, et al. “Were the Victorians Cleverer than Us? The Decline in General Intelligence Estimated from a Meta-Analysis of the Slowing of Simple Reaction Time.” Science Direct, Elsevier, 2013, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000470.
- Bouchard, Constance B. “Consanguinity and Noble Marriages in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries.” Speculum, vol. 56, no. 2, 1 Apr. 1981, pp. 268–287. JSTOR, JSTOR.
- Wang, Wendy. “Interracial Marriage: Who Is ‘Marrying out’?” Pew Research Center, 12 June 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/12/interracial-marriage-who-is-marrying-out/.
- “Exit Polls 2016.” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls.
- “Grizzly–Polar Bear Hybrid.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 July 2017, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid.
Eli Harman
Latter day barbarian of the far north. #newright #nrx #propertarianism #aristocracy
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