Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Industrial Success, Dysgenic Failure

Earlier this year, I read Richard Lynn’s Dysgenics. Unfortunately, I don’t remember all that much from it, in part because it was just retelling a lot of history that I was already aware of from a separate perspective.

The push-back against Darwin by secular thinkers has been far more wide-ranging and successful than the reaction against it by religious thinkers ever was. I remember seeing a performance with Brian Dennehy some years ago of Inherit the Wind, and I think that’s still the extent to which the urban left views evolution: it’s a brickbat to thwack the Williams Jennings Bryans of the world, rather than a theory that describes human evolution as well as it does for other species.

The same people who will snicker at Texans and Kansans for being hicks who don’t believe in evolution will accuse you of being an evil bigot for believing in human evolution.

One of the reasons that this might be is that, politically, it’s difficult to suggest that the consequences of the Green and Industrial revolutions may not have been entirely benign. By weakening selection pressures on the species, we have been deteriorating ourselves in terms of genetic quality.

Shutting off this inquiry has likely lead to an enormous number of health problems in the general population. Making evolutionary thinking unpopular is one of the reasons why sensible dietary advice and research has had to go underground, until recently becoming successful with such buzzwords like ‘paleo diet’ gaining currency, with a backing in evolutionary theory.

The idea of human evolution is also quite threatening to the pretensions of the egalitarian left, which holds that anyone can be remade into anything with the right education. If it in fact takes generations for major changes to happen in generations, absent strokes of fortune, then many egalitarian pretensions must also fade away, and traditional emphases on family, family quality, and child-rearing become more readily understandable.

In particular, with knowledge of evolution, which is not entirely out of step with traditional emphases on blood and family honor, feminism turns from an important moral initiative into something that’s easier to perceive as a dire social problem. To the extent that you encourage the smartest women from the best families to turn themselves into dissolute corporate strivers, you also encourage the race if not the species to destroy itself in terms of quality.

The push to get more women into more high-performance career tracks at the expense of having children stops looking like a noble, heroic advancement of the species, and more like the cannibalization of the world’s genetic cream to try to squeeze out a few percentage points of greater output temporarily before an enormous crash. The demographic collapses in Japan, Germany, the rest of Europe, and even the United States are coincident with high rates of female education and serious workforce participation outside the home.

You have these goofy initiatives about ‘teaching women to code,’ in the present, instead of teaching them to bear sons who will learn to code in 15 years, and will be better at it and be more capable of sticking with it than the women are. Such initiatives are aimed at producing greater profits for companies in a few years, but what happens in 30 years when those same women barely succeed at reproducing themselves effectively?

Sure, you can try to replace a single bright white person with 50 mestizos, but the type of output that you’re going to get from the replacements is not going to be the same, and the culture is not going to be the same either.

Further, encouraging later births also encourages greater birth defects, which further damages the ability of the best and brightest to reproduce itself effectively.

These sorts of programs to deal with dysgenic consequences of inane policies tend to dance around the root causes, because the root causes are the people who shape the policies, and the societies that have forsaken in the future in favor of the present.

[Update, 2:23 pm]

The archive.org version of the Richard Lynn book contains many broken tables and other issues in .epub. Because this book is out of print, it’s only available at a relatively high price as a hard copy. You can find it in print at the link below, or download it for free through the previous link.

 

Filed Under: HBD

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Left-Liberals and Right-Liberals on Race

Among modern republicans (small r), there are two politically acceptable views on race.

They both hold the view that race is not a biologically important reality beyond physical appearance. Further, they both agree that physical appearance has no bearing on any genetic trait with moral weight or an impact on ability.

Left-republicans believe that, despite these facts, white people should be made materially equal with people of other races. The racial divide in terms of wealth and status must be leveled by any means necessary — even murder, mass surveillance, property destruction, and theft are permissible. This is essentially the responsible center-left position of today, ratified by publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, and the Atlantic, the last of which published an extensive article arguing specifically for slavery reparations for blacks paid for mostly by white citizens.

Right-republicans affirm that race is not a biological reality, but holds that any observed differences between the behaviors and life outcomes for people of different races are due to some combination of moral deficiency and bad fortune. Right-republicans also endorse Civil Rights law without reservations, which calls for equal outcomes, but they tend to blanch from the full implications of what has been passed into law, arguably in a hypocritical way. For example, it makes no sense at all to hold a position that the existing civil rights law is good and affirmative action in education and business is bad. Affirmative action is just a means of ensuring that more of the institutions legally obligated to comply with civil rights legislation do so in a predictable manner.

When voting, a person has a choice between two positions: they can choose the logically correct, but morally monstrous position of the left, or they can choose the logically invalid but humane position on the right.

Of course, the better position is to choose a set of policies that is both logically valid and humane — that which takes into account the reality of human biodiversity, and structures the law accordingly.

Filed Under: HBD

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Dreher and Noble Lies

Nick Land and Occam’s Razor have posted their reactions to Rod Dreher’s post in the American Conservative that stated that acknowledging biology is politically dangerous.

While I disagree with Dreher’s position, I think that he’s correct in saying that, were the USG to admit that much of its post-WWII domestic and international policy have been built upon shams, and that much of the social science staff throughout the West consists of sham artists, that there would be stunning levels of political disruption, which would probably spiral into civil conflict, perhaps even civil war.

Rarely do people involved in maintaining a major political lie admit that is what they’re doing. Writers like Dreher consciously suppress conflict in the present by concealing valid information, but by doing so, they guarantee a far worse ‘correction’ of the social structure later. Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile explores this theme, and comes out against the maintenance of shams, because it’s a highly destructive practice in the long run.

The ‘Austrian economic calculation problem’ method of thinking also impugns this strategy as a sort of method of intellectual price-fixing — doomed to fail, certain to cause errors to multiply, and to spark deadly conflict in the future.

Land makes light of Dreher’s fears, and Occam attempts to calm his anxiety. Pretending as if the breakdowns of the various progressive lies will be largely benign for everyone involved isn’t a realistic prediction.

While forbidden knowledge doesn’t directly result in ‘genocide’ (a recent term that only entered wide use post-war), the retaliatory rage and political dysfunction that results from the unwinding of countless lies does often result in political dissolution and war.

The result is not likely to be Auschwitz redux, however. The term ‘genocide’ and the United Nations diplomatic framework put in place to freeze in place American hegemony for-ever-and-ever only came into being after a series of genocides all over Europe perpetrated by all sides of the war that created all the homogeneous nations west of the iron curtain.

That Hitler was able to conquer the liberal Weimar Republic, sympathetic as it was to the ideals of 1789, is more an argument against the ideals of 1789 than it is against anything that might threaten the preservation of those ideals. The modern American state is probably closer to the revolutionary idyll than Weimar was, so I understand Dreher’s hitlerexia nervosa. Building a social order that’s resilient to Hitlers seems more sensible than attempting to deal with every little corporal that decides to declare himself first among brothers in a nation of brothers. The 1789 way of doing things is demonstrably vulnerable to such degenerative modes, as was broadly understood in the West since antiquity.

As soon as a clear and permanent majority develops under democracy, some variant on Napoleon/Hitler/etc. is inevitable. This is one of the reasons as to why we see such a scramble by minority groups in democracies to hamper majority populations and to ally with other minorities — they know that permanently losing the kulturkampf means permanently losing the kampf proper.

Majority rule so often means minority expulsion or mass-murder that it’s practically axiomatic; derivable via first principles or plain observation.

This is the situation that the former American majority finds itself in, and why the Dark Enlightenment finds purchase now and not ten yeas ago, whereas the other mind-virus strains from which its thinkers have synthesized it could not infect more than a small portion of the population, most of whom were cranks with compromised mental immune systems anyhow. Now that the stakes are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, politics looks less like sport and more like a battle for survival.

It’s a pathetic accident of history and low education standards that ‘democracy,’ which confers power to the majority, has been somehow identified with friendliness to minorities.

To the extent that the Dark Enlightenment dismantles popular lies at a faster rate than was possible before, it’s not a benign force — from the perspective of the people who make comfortable livings off of those lies, like most of the people living in Washington DC. It may even be dangerous to the millions of upstanding, productive people who have adapted to a high parasite load, even if they don’t enjoy all the squirming tapeworms sharing their intestinal tract.

The Dreher position, which is more widely shared than most will admit, is ‘responsible’ to the present, but destructive to the future of more than 20 years from now, in the same way that the lies of the ’68ers caused immense destruction as those ideas hardened into opportunistic demotic policy.

In this, the superior position is the one which accepts a temporary period of strife to make more durable and organic orders possible. While yes, this will devastate the lives of millions of people (just as the implosion of the USSR hollowed out millions of sad lives), it’s preferable to the alternative of catastrophic collapse.

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