Those Who Can See

Mulatto History Month

2012-02-29T23:56:00.011+01:00

Mulatto historian Carter G. Woodson, an attendee at Chicago's 1915 'Exposition of Negro Progress' (celebrating 50 years of Emancipation), was so inspired by the crowds' enthusiasm that he went on to promote the first 'Negro History Week' in February 1926. A roaring success, this yearly event was expanded to an entire month in 1976, when President Gerald Ford urged all Americans to 'seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.'

But what is a Black American?

Let us take a moment to gaze upon the visages of those individuals held up as most honorable and praiseworthy during this month. First, 'Negro History Week's' creator, Mr. Carter G. Woodson himself:

POLITICS

Our first 'black' president needs little introduction, but what of our first 'black' Secretary of State?:

Our first 'black' female Secretary of State:

First 'black' Attorney General:

First 'black' Cabinet Member (HUD):

First 'black' State's Attorney General:

First 'black' elected Congressman:

First 'black' governor:

First 'black' elected governor:

First 'black' mayor:

First 'black' elected mayor:

THE MILITARY

First 'Black' to command a U.S. ship:

First 'Black' to graduate from West Point:

First 'black' colonel:

First 'black' general:

First 'black' four-star admiral:

First 'Black' to be awarded a Medal of Honor:

First 'black' Secret Service agent:

First 'black' female pilot:

First 'black' woman in space:

ACADEMIA

First 'black' man to earn a B.A.:

First 'black' woman to earn a B.A.:

First 'black' man to earn a Ph.D.:

First 'black' woman to earn a Ph.D.:

First 'Black' to graduate Harvard:

First 'black' female college professor:

First 'black' Ivy League president:

LAW

First 'black' licensed lawyer:

First 'black' federal judge:

First 'black' circuit court chief justice:

First 'black' Supreme Court Justice:

First 'black' female State Supreme Court justice:

First 'black' female federal judge:

First 'black' female judge:

DIVERSE

First 'black' president of the American Psychological Association:

First 'black' Roman Catholic bishop:

First 'Black' to conduct a major symphony orchestra:

First 'black' woman to earn a U.S. patent:

First 'black' female bank president:

Nor must we forget some of Black History's greatest pioneers. Again, its creator, historian Carter G. Woodson:

Legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass:

'The Great Accommodator' Booker T. Washington:

Sociologist and historian W.E.B. Dubois:

When the white-ordered 'one-drop rule' held sway, Mulattoes were forbidden from claiming their European heritage. Today, in a perfect inversion, the Afro-American community has seized hold of this same 'one-drop rule' in order to label even those octoroons with no visible African admixture 'Black.'

Fashion, too, has changed. Once, nearly anyone who could 'pass' for White did; today it has become well-considered to possess any and all DNA other than European. But in many places and times, Mulattoes have functioned as a separate caste, proud of their difference, proud to be Something Else. Alice Walker's daughter Rebecca, on our current president:

"Of course Obama is black. And he's not black, too," Walker said. "He's white, and he's not white, too. Obama is whatever people project onto him ... he's a lot of things, and neither of them necessarily exclude the other."

Christopher Hitchens, on Nov. 4, 2008:

"We do not have our first black president. He is not black. He is as black as he is white."

The identity of 'Mulatto' has fallen out of fashion in the U.S.; this blog does not see why it should. From his nearly 400-page 1918 investigation of 'The Mulatto in the United States', E.B. Reuter came to the following conclusion:

According to the strictness or the looseness of the definition of full-blooded Negro that is used, and the high or low degree of superiority that is accepted as the test, the twenty per cent of mixed-bloods among the American Negroes have produced eighty-five per cent or upwards of the race's superior men.

Our quick visual perusal of 'Black History Month's' great men and women may or may not lead us to a similar conclusion. But it is worth remembering that 'biracials' or 'mulattoes' have been discouraged for many years now from celebrating or even acknowledging their European blood and heritage. This blog takes the position that that is an unfortunate state of affairs. Sane racial policy would come back to a more finely-graded categorisation of the ethnic groups in America. We shall leave Mr. Reuter with the final word:

In any study and discussion of the race problem, scientific accuracy as well as a decent regard for simple truth requires that the writer indicates whether his discussion has to do with full-blooded Negroes or with the men of mixed blood. The failure to make this simple and elementary distinction, more than any other one thing, has made the vast bulk of the literature relating to the Negro in America either worthless or vicious.

Who's Fleeing Whom?

2012-02-21T15:06:00.007+01:00

Michigan's largest city, Detroit, has been in the news of late due to its imminent bankruptcy and takeover by the state. We have considered its demise (as have others) in light of dysfunctional Afro governance and a misbehaving Afro populace (83% of the citizenry).

Though Afro criminality in North America has always surpassed that of Euros, and the latter have known it, separating oneself from Black neighbors was not difficult for the first 350 years of British North America / the United States. Even in the North, segregation in housing was permitted de facto where it was not de jure.

The 'Great Migration,' waves of Afros moving from the South to the North, began in earnest in 1910, with its second wave after WII (1945).

However, the flight of Euro-Americans out of the cities did not truly begin until Blacks were free to live where they pleased-- the 1960s. Since then, a sort of merry-go-round has ensued: Whites, suffering under Afro dysfunction, flee to suburbs, only to be pursued by the Talented Tenth fleeing same. The latter are followed, as night follows day, by the Untalented Nine-Tenths, who promptly re-create the urban hellscapes they left behind. Euro-Americans are forced to pack up, and the musical chairs begin again. Section 8 vouchers have revved this carousel up to warp speed.

Instructive, perhaps, to watch the flight unfold before our eyes via U.S. Census numbers.

We give the figures from 1960, just before Segregation ended. We then fast-forward twenty years to 1980 to see what the first wave of 'White Flight' has wrought. Finally, we give the most recent figures (2010), which contain some surprises, especially re: Hispanics, who did not even exist as a census category two generations ago. For selected cities, we have also given the figures from 1910, before the Great Migration got underway. Asians have been included where their historic presence has been strongest.

So: Who's fleeing whom?

We start with the Midwest, industrial center and destination of choice for the Great Migrators:

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Detroit       White   Black   Hispanic
2010       7.8   82.7   6.8
1980           33.4   63.1   2.4
1960           70.8   28.9   n/a

1910           98.7       1.2     n/a

(Detroit is the largest American city to be over 80% Afro.)

Cleveland       White     Black   Hispanic
2010                33.4      53.3   10.0
1980                52.3      43.8      3.1
1960                71.1      28.6      n/a

1910                98.4      1.5       n/a

Chicago   White   Black    Hispanic
2010           31.7      32.9       28.9
1980           43.2      39.8       14.0
1960           76.4      22.9       n/a

1910           97.9       2.0       n/a

Milwaukee    White     Black   Hispanic
2010              37.0      40.0   17.3
1980              71.3   23.1      4.1
1960              91.1      8.4       n/a

1910 99.7 0.3 n/a

(Chicago and Milwaukee appear, say some observers, to be reaching some sort of tipping point.)

Indianapolis     White     Black   Hispanic
~~2010                  81.5      9.1       6.0~~
2010 58.6 27.5    9.4
1980                  76.6   21.8      0.9
1960                  79.3   20.6      n/a

1910                  90.6       9.3      n/a

(A surprisingly ethnic-Euro large city in this region.)

St. Louis        White     Black   Hispanic
2010                42.2        49.2   3.5
1980                52.8        45.6   1.2
1960                71.2        21.6   n/a

1910                93.5        6.4     n/a

Kansas City (MO) White     Black   Hispanic
2010                      54.9        29.9   10.0
1980                      68.1        27.4       3.3
1960                    82.3        17.5       n/a

1910                       90.5        9.5       n/a

Des Moines     White    Black   Hispanic
2010                 70.5   10.2   12.0
1980                 89.4       6.8       1.8
1960                 94.9       4.9       n/a

1910                 96.6       3.4       n/a

Minneapolis    White   Black   Hispanic
2010                60.3   18.6      10.5
1980                86.7     7.7        1.3
1960          96.8       2.4        n/a

1910          99.1       0.9        n/a

(Des Moines and Minneapolis, two reputed 'Whitopias.' Will they stay so?)

The great cities of the East Coast tell us their demographic story:

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New York City    White     Black   Hispanic
2010                      33.3      25.5      28.6
1980                      51.9      25.2      19.9
1960                      85.3      14.4       n/a

1910                      98.0        1.9       n/a

(~~A gentrifying trend in the Big Apple?~~)

Philadelphia    White     Black   Hispanic
2010                 36.9       43.4      12.3
1980                 58.2       37.8        3.8
1960                 73.3       26.4       n/a

1910                 94.5     5.5        n/a

(Some argue a tipping point has been reached in Philadelphia as well.)

Newark   White   Black   Hispanic
2010          11.6   52.4      33.8
1980          22.1   34.1      18.6
1960          65.6   17.1      n/a

1910          97.2       2.7      n/a

(One of the least-white big cities in the nation.)

Boston      White   Black   Hispanic
2010          47.0   24.4      17.5
1980          67.9   22.4      6.4
1960          90.2       9.1        n/a

1910          97.8       2.0       n/a

Baltimore White    Black    Hispanic
2010         28.0       63.7        4.2
1980       43.4      54.8        1.0
1960           65.0      34.7        n/a

1910           84.8      15.2        n/a

(Baltimore's reputation precedes her; Mencken's city is long gone.)

Washington, D.C.     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                           34.8     50.7   9.1
1980                           25.7        70.3     2.8
1960                           45.2        53.9     n/a

1910                           71.3        28.5     n/a

(Another city where Euros are coming back?)

We've included two far north-eastern cities, considered some of the 'whitest' in the country. Will these enclaves stay that way?

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Burlington, VT     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                94.3       1.0       1.5
1980                      97.9       0.6       0.8
1960                      99.6       0.3       n/a

Portland, ME     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                     83.6      7.1       3.0
1980                     97.6        0.9       0.6
1960                     99.4        0.5       n/a

The South has lived a different racial story since colonial times. Home to plantation slavery and thus to most of the U.S.'s Blacks before 1910, she lost millions in the following decades to the industrial centers of the North.

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Atlanta   White     Black   Hispanic
2010        36.3        54.0       5.2
1980        31.9          66.6       1.4
1960        61.7          38.3       n/a

1910        66.4          33.5       n/a

(Paul Kersey has well covered the racial merry-go-round between city and suburbs in this 'city too busy to hate.')

Charlotte      White     Black   Hispanic
2010               45.1      35.0   13.1
1980               66.9      31.0       1.1
1960               72.0      27.9       n/a

1910               65.4      35.6       n/a

Memphis     White     Black   Hispanic
2010             27.5      63.3   6.5
1980             51.3      47.6   0.8
1960             62.9      37.0     n/a

1910             59.9        40.0     n/a

Nashville     White     Black   Hispanic
2010               56.3      28.4   10.0
1980               75.2      23.3      0.8
1960               62.1      37.8      n/a

1910               66.9      33.1      n/a

(The demographic [and crime] differences between the above two Tennessee cities have been remarked upon.)

Birmingham     White    Black   Hispanic
2010                   21.1      73.4 3.6
1980                   43.6        55.6      0.8
1960                   60.3      39.6      n/a

1910                   60.6      39.4      n/a

(Birmingham is currently undergoing the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.)

New Orleans     White     Black   Hispanic
2010           30.5        60.2        5.2
1980                   40.3        55.3        3.4
1960                   62.6        37.2 n/a

1910                   73.6        26.3    n/a

(New Orleans' racial history is unique in the nation, do read up on its old 'creole' [mulatto] caste, which lived a separate life from the 'Negro' masses.)

Miami        White     Black   Hispanic
2010             11.9      19.2     70.0
1980             19.4      25.1     55.9
1960             77.4      22.4      n/a

1910             58.7      41.3      n/a

(The white Spanish Cubans who make up so much of this city--'Hispanic' in the same way as the Mestizo Mexicans pouring over our southern border?)

Home to some of the last real 'Whitopias' in the country, the Great Basin states are nonethless diversifying in their way:

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Omaha     White     Black   Hispanic
2010          68.0      13.7     13.1
1980          84.3      12.0       2.3
1960          91.3        8.3       n/a

1910          96.4        3.6       n/a

Billings, MT    White     Black   Hispanic
2010                 86.9       0.8       5.2
1980                 93.7       0.4       3.1
1960                 98.8       0.4       n/a

Boise     White     Black   Hispanic
2010       85.2         1.5      7.1
1980       96.8         0.5      2.3
1960       98.9         0.6      n/a

Salt Lake City     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                  80.4          1.1          13.0
1980                  86.4          1.5           7.6
1960                97.9          0.8           n/a

Denver      White     Black   Hispanic
2010         52.2       10.2    31.8
1980       66.3       12.0   18.8
1960       92.9         6.1       n/a

1910       97.0         2.5     n/a

(How far will the hispanifying of Denver go?)

The Southwest is of course under demographic pressure from Latin America. This region lives its own story, with parts of Anglo-America perhaps already extinct here. (As the 'Hispanic' census category did not exist then, all pre-1980 'White' figures must be assumed to contain Hispanic presence.)

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Dallas    White     Black   Hispanic
2010       28.8        25.0   42.4
1980       56.9        29.4     12.3
1960       80.7        19.0       n/a

1910       80.4        19.6       n/a

Houston     White     Black   Hispanic
2010         25.6      23.7     43.8
1980             52.3      27.6     17.6
1960             76.8      22.9      n/a

1910             69.6      30.4      n/a

Albuquerque     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                   42.1        3.3       46.7
1980                   60.1        2.5       33.8
1960                   97.1        0.8        n/a

1910                   97.4    2.2        n/a

Phoenix     White     Black   Hispanic
2010           46.5         6.5      40.8
1980           78.1         4.8      14.8
1960           94.2         4.8       n/a

1910           95.3         2.9       n/a

Las Vegas           White     Black   Hispanic
2010                 47.9    11.1     31.5
1980                   76.5       12.8       7.8
1960                   84.2       15.0       n/a

1940 (1910 n/a) 97.3         2.0       n/a

The West Coast is home to a centuries-old Asian presence which seems to have jumped after the 1965 Immigration Act. What will be the fallout if current trends continue?

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Los Angeles     White     Black   Hispanic   Asian
2010                 28.7         9.6       48.5        11.3
1980                 47.8       17.0       27.5          6.6
1960                 83.2       13.5        n/a          3.0

1910                 95.6         2.4        n/a          1.9

(Will the ethnic cleansing of L.A.'s Blacks by its Hispanic gangs continue apace?)

San Francisco     White     Black   Hispanic   Asian
2010                 41.9          6.1      15.1         33.3
1980                     52.3        12.7      12.3         21.7
1960                     81.6        10.0       n/a      7.9

1910                 95.9          0.4        n/a       3.6

San Jose     White     Black   Hispanic   Asian
2010             28.7       3.2       33.2       32.0
1980             63.8       4.6       22.3         8.3
1960             96.7       1.0        n/a         2.1

1910             96.9     0.6        n/a            2.4

(San Francisco and San Jose: Headed for a Euro-Asian overclass and an Afro-Hispanic underclass?)

Oakland     White     Black   Hispanic   Asian
2010           25.9      28.0     25.4        16.8
1980         34.8      46.9       9.6      7.8
1960             73.6      22.8        n/a 3.2

1910           94.5        2.0        n/a         3.4

Portland     White     Black   Hispanic Asian
2010         72.2       6.3       9.4      7.1
1980             85.3       7.6       2.1          2.9
1960         94.4       4.2       n/a         1.1

1910             96.0       0.5       n/a         3.5

Seattle     White     Black   Hispanic Asian
2010        66.3      7.9       6.6           13.8
1980      78.4      9.5       2.6             7.4
1960        91.6      4.8        n/a            3.1

1910          96.0      1.0        n/a           3.0

A nation is not a stretch of ground; it's a people. The demography of the urban U.S. is changing faster than it ever has. Housing policy, criminal justice, immigration policy have all brought us here. Will the face of the nation change irrevocably in this century?

Déménagement

2012-02-13T23:06:00.002+01:00

It's moving time in this neck of the woods, so we will be sans internet for a bit.

Catch up on some old-school HBD-reading with...

* Races and Immigrants in America, by John R. Commons (1907). (We have looked before at this fine, clear-eyed analysis of the immigrant waves from southern and eastern Europe flooding into the U.S. in the 19th century. Was turning off the tap in 1924 the wise choice?)

Why not peruse some of the original race scientists? You've been told they're bogeymen, imbeciles, génocidaires. Nonsense. Have a look.

* The Races of Europe, A Sociological Study, by W.Z. Ripley (1900)

* The Racial Basis of European History, by Madison Grant (1921)

* The Races of Europe, by Carleton Coon (1939)

Some old-school thoughts on Ancient Rome:

* The Grandeur That Was Rome, by J.C. Stobart (1912)

* Race Mixture in the Roman Empire, by Tenney Frank (1916)

Thoughts on the Afro question:

* The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois's exhaustively-researched contribution to the 19th century corpus on 'the Negro question.' (1899)

* Lynching: History and Analysis, Dwight Murphey's thought-provoking monograph on the controversial practice. Recommended reading for Black History Month. (1995)

The female question:

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* Sexual Utopia in Power. F. Roger Devlin in simple, colorful terms explains the Sexual Revolution as to a visitor from another realm. Very highly recommended. (2006)

* If you haven't yet perused the HBD Reading List website, don't hesitate. A one-of-a-kind online resource with links to works on every HBD-related topic under the sun, from Aristotle to Arthur Jensen.

* An entire website with hundreds of old-time travelogues. (17th-20th centuries) A treasure trove of observations on the world's peoples, from the time when people could speak plainly. We especially recommend Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, by Rudyard Kipling. From Seattle to Yokohama to the Nile, reading as pure pleasure.

Finally, for a smile, why not see Charles Dickens' rather curmudgeonly 1853 take on the vaunted Noble Savage so à la mode in his day?

TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. [...] I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives.

Hope to be back online shortly. Thank you for stopping by and good luck on your journey.

The Voice of the People II: Arab Democracy

2012-02-07T02:49:00.003+01:00

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We have wondered, will any democracy taken up by Arab Muslims inevitably become authoritarian?

One might well ask it of Russians. Twenty years after the wall crumbled with a whimper and the West's Democracy 101 knights rode in, where are they?

[International observers of the 2008] elections concluded that they were "not fair and failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections." [...] Frequent abuses of administrative resources, media coverage strongly in favor of United Russia, and the revised election code combined to hinder political pluralism.

[...] A law enacted in December 2004 eliminated the direct election of the country's regional leaders. Governors are now nominated by the president [...] The judiciary is not independent, is often subject to manipulation by political authorities,...

... The government uses direct ownership or ownership by large private companies with links to the government to control or influence the major media outlets, especially television, [...] Unsolved murders of journalists have increased the reluctance of journalists to cover controversial subjects...

The Economist Intelligence Unit's World Democracy Index (1 - 10, 10 being 'most democratic') lists four categories--'Full democracy,' 'Flawed democracy,' 'Hybrid regime,' and 'Authoritarian regime.' Cut-off for this fourth category is a score of 4.00 or lower; Russia misses it by a hair at 4.26.

Perhaps not exactly what Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

But little matter.

Moscow street protests seen round the world (thank you Facebook) have roused the true believers from their slumber. English Liberal Democracy is coming to Russia, for real this time, after twenty years of Some Other Kind of Democracy. Just as it has come to the Middle East in 2011, after sixty years of Some Other Kind of Democracy.

Or is it.

In 1915 Nikolai Berdyaev wrote,

The Russian people does not want to be a masculine builder, its nature defines itself as feminine, passive and submissive in matters of state, it always awaits a bridegroom, a man, a ruler. ... The state ruling authority always was an external, and not an inward principle for the non-statist Russian people; it was not created by her, but the rather came as it were from the outside, like a bridegroom to the bride.

And so often therefore the ruling power has provided the impression of being foreign, ... the state -- is "they" and not "we".

'They' and not 'we.'

Whither the demos?

. . .

David S. Reher (among others) has argued that the English's passion for forming clubs and associations of all kinds comes from their strangely weak family system. English Liberal Democracy is supposed to have sprouted from this same root. The sense of belonging which other peoples drew from their family circle, the lonely English got by fraternizing with perfect strangers. Among the earliest and most vigorous out-breeders in Europe, whose children married late and rarely stayed on the family land, the English early on formed a type of corporate life unknown and unthinkable in the 'strong-family' parts of the world. It so happens that before the 20th century, the 'strong-family' parts of the world were the world. English were the odd men out.

Emmanuel Todd has argued that our government systems are nothing but our family systems writ large. Perhaps, perhaps not. But if we indulge him, then the question becomes: If the English family is conducive to English-style liberal democracy, then to what type of government is the Arab family conducive?

In 1929 Salvador De Madarigara said the following about his country:

Spanish collective life counts thus on two forces which give it a certain amount of external, superimposed cohesion, such as the shell gives the tortoise: one is the Army, the other, the Church. ...

These institutions are the two best organized communities in a country in which most collective life is lax, and therefore weak--and, moreover, they owe their better organization to the fact that they possess a collective life of their own based on passions which appeal strongly to the Spanish soul: honour, the fundamental passion in the Army; and religion, the fundamental passion in the Church. While the rest of the nation lacks cohesion, the Army and the Church hold together. Hence their power.

One may be forgiven for replacing 'Spanish' with 'Arab' and 'Church' with 'Mosque' and feeling sure the text is describing the Middle East in 2012.

The Army and the Mosque: Tunisia and Egypt are both home to a conflict playing out in slow motion between just these two parties.

But why?

To what type of government is the Arab family conducive?

Anthropologists Robert F. Murphy and Leonard Kasdan:

Patrilateral parallel cousin marriage is, we maintain, an essential factor in the structuring of Arab society.

Cousin-marriage, it must be admitted, was the norm in human history and is still practiced by many.

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What makes Arab cousin marriage special, even for cousin-marriers, is that 'ego' usually marries his father's brother's daughter (FBD). This is considered 'incestuous' by other consanguineous groups, who practice MBD (mother's brother's daughter) marriage. MBD, over time, looks like this (Images by HBD Chick):

FBD, the Arabs' preferred system, looks like this:

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Murphy / Kasdan:

Parallel cousin marriage may well contribute to the temporary unity of minimal segments, but it is also effective in inhibiting the formation of corporate groups on higher levels of segmentation. It follows then that parallel cousin marriage [FBD] has the opposite effect of cross-cousin marriage [MBD], which is generally considered to be a means by which kin groups interrelate and thus become integrated into the larger society.

How does it work?

The father’s brother’s son is considered to possess marital rights over his cousin, and, in cases in which he does not take her as his bride, his permission is nonetheless necessary for her marriage to another.

As patrilineal sections segment, the preference for the closest female relative (barring sisters) in the line deepens the gulf between collateral branches by turning affinal bonds inward. Since Bedouin society is based largely upon ties of kinship, each minimal-sized agnatic unit becomes virtually self contained and encysted.

Whence this marriage system? Anthropologist Brian Schwimmer:

This practice is usually associated with the need to maintain property within the family line and avoids dissipation of assets through affinal exchanges or female inheritance. Lineage endogamy is most frequently found in pastoral communities, in which the continuity of domestic herds forms a primary concern.

The Bible offers an extensive demonstration of lineage endogamy among the generations of the Hebrew patriarchs. [...] It also stresses the need for parallel cousin marriage to preserve the patrilineal inheritance of property in general situations in which a man has only daughters. If they marry their father's brother's sons, their family property can be transmitted to their sons and remain within the patrilineal group (Numbers 36).

Bedouin camel herding is like no other. Far from transhumance herding in the luxuriant Alps, where the shepherd only moves once a year from winter lowland to summer upland, the desert herder is in constant motion. Anthropologist Louise Sweet:

But camels mature slowly and reproduce slowly as compared with ... sheep and goats. A female camel produces only once in two years a single offspring. ... The female gives milk for 11 to 15 months .... the yield per animal, however, is small, varying from 1 to 7 litres per day. [...] The capacity of camels to tolerate extremes of heat and lack of water, to thrive on desert plants beyond the capacities of other domesticated animals, and to cover great distances in the course of nomadic grazing supports Bedouin life in the outer ranges of the ecological niche of desert pastoralism.

A pastoral society of atomistically fissioning lineages, uncommitted to any scale of corporate organization or structure other than the tribe, accords well with the mobility required under desert conditions.

Eking out a living from camel's milk in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, where one's wealth (herds) is both self-multiplying and can walk off at any moment, lent itself to this peculiar agnatic system. Sweet:

Everywhere, however, in accounts of the society or in contact with the people themselves, the 'individualism' of the Bedouin is noted. When a man has acquired camels, a tent, and a wife, he is not obliged to remain with his father's or brother's or uncle's cluster--an attitude which he expresses assertively--but may independently move with others.

Murphy / Kasdan:

There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that Arab society is based on the patriarchal authority of the father over his sons; on the contrary there is no part of the world where parental authority is weaker than in the desert. . . .

The peasant lays his head where his farm is. The desert herder lays his head wherever his grazing may take him:

The above described lack of solidarity in the Bedouin family is abetted by the inheritance system, according to which the estate is divided among the sons in equal parts, daughters being commonly disinherited. [Pre-Islam, which did impose female inheritance.] In its ideal form this should not be a source of conflict, but special provisions for the eldest son and for sons who remain under the paternal roof until the father’s death frequently cloud issues and result in dispute within the family.

The harmony of the family is further disturbed by the efforts of the sons to claim their share of the inheritance--and, consequently, independence--from the father before his death. Jaussen (1908:22) notes of the Arab family in general: “Among the nomads, as among civilized peoples, discord occasionally bursts out within the family.” Thus, in a system where every male sibling is a potential point of segmentation, and therefore a significant political role player, even the interests of brothers or of sons and fathers are not necessarily convergent.

So what of cooperation and trust, the precursors of Liberal Democracy? Military trainer Norvell de Atkine:

First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs in anyone outside their own families adversely affects offensive [military] operations.

When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets strongly reinforced their clients’ own cultural traits. Like that of the Arabs, the Soviets’ military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer class’s contempt for ordinary soldiers and its distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.

... Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them.

Author David Pryce-Jones:

[Arab politics is] a reality which defies all but the greatest novelists: a lifelong questing for power, the gradual sensing and probing for potential allies of similar ambition, the conspiracy into which crucial friends are admitted and from which others have to be excluded, and ever-present awareness that the trusted friend is best placed as a mortal traitor, double-crossings and feints and denunciations, calculations over the smallest matters of promotion and demotion, the scrutiny for those imperceptible details of manner of facial cast which may reveal someone's inner purpose,...

Murphy / Kasdan:

“Authority is distributed at every point of the tribal structure and political leadership is limited to situations in which a tribe or segment of it acts corporately.” In its underlying principle, the process of segmentary opposition between patrilineal sections corresponds closely to the Arab proverb: “Myself against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin, my brother and I against the outsider.” In this system, it is almost impossible to isolate a solidary ingroup, and groupings are continually being activated or redefined through struggles that may even pit members of the nuclear family against each other.

The English are famously individualist and atomized. Yet their individualism seems to have led to a strong commonweal-orientation, corporate life, and representative democracy.

The English are also, it must be noted, famously out-bred. From at least the 16th century, they routinely sent out their children to work as domestic servants in far-away villages, where the youngsters saved up their wages until they could afford to marry and set up a home. These formative years spent far outside the family circle, as well as marrying distant villagers instead of close relatives, seems to have broken the clan bonds and led to famously atomized England.

Bedouin Arabs, however, did just the opposite, preferring to marry the closest relative possible who wasn't a sister.

What behaviors related to democracy could be affected by such a state of affairs? Genetics blogger HBD Chick:

It seems to me to be the father-of-the-bride ["C" in chart below] who really wins out here genetically speaking (which is all that matters, right?). the father-of-the-bride gets to “reunite” his y-chromosome (that he shares with his nephew, his brother’s son) with a quarter of his autosomal dna (his daughter carries half of his autosomal dna) in any male grandkids that he has. What other grandfather gets to do that?:

Image source

I also think it’s not a coincidence that, in these societies where FBD marriage exists, you also get these extremely paternalistic societies where women are shrouded in burkas or aren’t allowed to drive or whatever. Also, the whole honor killing thing. like RS said here, the males in such societies become “super homies” with each other. Exactly! Why? ’Cause they are really closely related genetically.

The 'super-homies', also known as the 'band-of-brothers' phenomenon. For English Liberal Democracy to work, a certain balance between the feminine and the masculine is needed. Cooperation, consensus-seeking, compromise--typically female pursuits--must have their place. And among Arab Muslims? Nicolai Sennels, Danish prison psychologist, on the country's Muslim immigrants (Arabs and others):

My own experience is that Muslims don’t understand our Western way of trying to handle conflicts through dialogue. They are raised in a culture with very clear outer authorities and consequences. Western tradition using compromise and inner reflection as primary means of handling outer and inner conflicts is seen as weak in the Muslim culture. To a great extent they simply don’t understand this softer and more humanistic way of handling social affairs.

Expressions of anger and threats are probably the quickest way to lose one's face in Western culture. In discussions, those who lose their temper have automatically lost, ... In the Muslim culture, aggressive behavior, especially threats, are generally seen to be accepted, and even expected as a way of handling conflicts and social discrepancies. If a Muslim does not respond in a threatening way to insults or social irritation, he is seen as weak, as someone who cannot be depended upon and loses face.

And what of that self-starting, self-ruling spirit that drove, for example, the U.S.'s English founders? Psychologists Helen A. Klein and Gilber Kuperman:

In the Middle East, planning discussions are regularly punctuated by Inshallah—“if Allah wills it.” The status of a person’s health, wealth, and safety are believed to be inevitable. Arabs tend to invoke luck and conspiracy theories instead of expecting human actions to make a difference. Interviewees reported, “We don’t plan ahead,” “We only act when a catastrophe happens,” and “If it’s going to come, then it will come.”

Sennels:

The locus of control is central to our understanding of problems and their solutions. If we are raised in a culture where we learn that "…I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul," as William Ernest Henley wrote in his famous poem Invictus in 1875; we will, in case of personal problems, look at ourselves and ask: "…What did I do wrong?" and "…What can I do to change the situation?" People who have been taught throughout their entire lives that outer rules and traditions are more important than individual freedom and self reflection, will ask: "Who did this to me?" and "Who has to do something for me?"

What we have to understand is that we are dealing with people who grew up in cultures with an "outer locus of control." Self reflection and self responsibility have much less importance to them.

In a word, someone else must rule me, because I am incapable of ruling myself. But at the same time, I have an intense desire to not be ruled by anyone else. A seeming paradox.

This uber-masculinized culture can also lead to what Pryce-Jones calls the 'shame-honor reflex', where any perceived slight must be met with violence. The self-effacing English have always delighted in poking fun at themselves and at the powerful. This is one leg of their legendary governing system (no free press can exist without it). Can it sprout among the Arab Muslims? Pryce-Jones:

Shame-honor ranking effectively prohibits the development of wider, more socialized types of human relationship. Status considerations of the kind are impervious to Western concepts of contractual relationships.

To take the everyday matter of wanting to obtain a job, a young man approaches the head of his family or clan, his patron. The head of the family is under obligation to do his very best to make sure that his kinsman is given what he asks for. The honor of the whole family is at stake...In the event of the job going to someone else, the patron becomes the object of shame, and his standing is under threat... Whether or not the young man deserved the job is no kind of consideration. Civic spirit, the good of the community, or mere consideration of who could best perform the job in hand has no part in these proceedings.

Philip Carl Salzman:

In the Middle East, all honor goes to the victor; the vanquished is dishonored. There is no honor in "playing fairly," "doing your best," or "upholding the rules."... Applied to stated governance, this spirit advises monopoly of power, ruthless suppression of opponents, and accumulation of benefits. In short, it is a recipe for despotism, for tyranny.

Sennels:

Unfortunately the Muslim culture tells its men that criticism must be taken completely personally and met with childish reactions.

If you had ever spent time in a Muslim community you experience this very clearly. You would find yourself constantly trying not to offend anyone and you’d treat everybody like a rotten egg. Jokes, irony and, especially, self-irony is as good as non-existent. It creates a superficial social environment where unhealthy hierarchies appear everywhere because nobody dares to, for instance, point out the weaknesses of childish men and make fun of the powerful.

There is an old Danish fairytale about a little boy that points out the nakedness of the King; "He has no clothes on!!” embarrassing the proud King wearing his non-existent magic clothes, which are only visible to "good people" (actually, the King was just naked - because the tailor had cheated him!). Such a story could never have been written in a Muslim culture.

A study in paradox, The Bedouin Arab: Individualistic, like the Englishman, but unlike him, intensely suspicious of all others. Weak paternal authority, like the Englishman, but possessed of a hyper-masculine culture in which cooperation is a fatal weakness. Loathe to submit to a central power, like the Englishman, but unable or unwilling to take responsibility for his own destiny.

But one may argue that after all, the Bedouin Arab Muslims conquered the Middle East centuries ago. Their genetic contribution to many modern 'Arab' countries is minimal. True. But they did export their marriage system wildly successfully:

In the seventh and eighth centuries, an explosive diffusion of this [FBD marriage] pattern took place when Arab tribes, backed by Islam, spread throughout the whole of the Omayyid Khalifate.

How deep has been the Arab penetration of the Middle East, on the level of culture? Of religion? Of genetics? To answer these may be to answer our original question:

To what form of government is the Arab family conducive?

American taxpayers may or may not approve of Arab Democracy Promotion as a legitimate use of their tax dollars. But the least one could do would be to make an honest assessment of the likelihood of English Liberal Democracy taking root in lands where:

Honor is accorded to the man who succeeds in capturing the state because he has truly proved his mastery, he has displayed ruthlessness beyond the imagination and capacity of the ordinary man. [...] Public welfare is a concept without meaningful application; there is no common good. ... Generosity is suspect as a ploy for advantage. Idealism and sincerity are penalized. Self-sacrifice is akin to lunacy or martyrdom.

Contributors to the public purse should demand it.

REFERENCES

De Atkine, Norvell B., 'Why Arabs Lose Wars,' Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2.

Pryce-Jones, David, A Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Murphy, Robert F. and Kasdan, Leonard, 'The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage', American Anthropologist, 61 (February 1959), pp. 17-29.

Salzman, Philip Carl, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2008.

Sweet, Louise E., 'Camel raiding of North Arabian bedouin: a mechanism of ecological adaptation,' American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1132–50.

Previously: The Voice of the People,

Jasmine Revolution

The Voice of the People

2012-01-30T00:39:00.009+01:00

Image source

The Arab Spring one year on: Switzerland on the Sahara and Norway on the Nile have yet to materialize.

“I remind all media that they have to be accurate; we are not celebrating the first anniversary of the revolution; we are reviving the revolution in its first anniversary,” tweeted well-known writer Ayman El-Sayyad.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians thronged Cairo's Tahrir Square Wednesday morning, renewing the atmosphere of mass protests witnessed in the country a year ago, Ahram online reported.

“Down, down with military rule,” they chanted.

Though the house of Mubarak was no more, the shadow of his legacy still lives on in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took power after Mubarak’s resignation, pro-democracy protesters say.

But materialize they shall. Thomas Friedman says so. So does The Council on Foreign Relations. So does Hillary Clinton--and she's ready to put your money where her mouth is:

Three weeks ago, the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative sent Congress what's known as a "congressional notification," requesting permission to shift $29 million in funds from other programs in the region. State wants to shift $20 million to democracy promotion efforts in Tunisia and around the region. Another $7 million would go supporting rule of law and political development programs in the Middle East. $1 million would go to youth councils in Yemen.

Spending our hard-earned dollars on 'democracy promotion' has always had its fans. Traditionally, U.S. policy has been to push democracy where it serves her strategic interests, and to crush it where it does not. The Middle East, your blinking gas gauge reminds you, falls under door #2. But throngs pouring into the streets over a young Arab who had immolated himself in despair could not be ignored, and the about-face was total: Out with dear friends Mubarak, Gaddafi, and Ben Ali; in with...

...democracy?

But democracy, we soon forget, has existed in the Middle East for generations. In the same way it's existed in Liberia, and in Mexico, and in the Philippines. A trend such as blue jeans can be exported anywhere in the world and look more or less the same.

Idem English liberal democracy?

A governing system that evolved slowly, organically, over centuries, born of the particular temperament and desires and abilities of a certain people: Can it be yanked from a container-ship on the other side of the world and slipped on intact like a pair of trousers?

Again, our memories vis-a-vis the Middle East are short. 'Democracy promotion' by Europeans has a long pedigree here. As Ablo Baaklini et al. recount, once the Ottomans were toppled in WWI, the British and French swooped in to shepherd these newly minted 'states' to Democracy. Parliaments were established, political parties invented, elections held. The 1920s and 1930s under European mandate, o great paradox, may have been the most 'democratic' years these countries knew.

As Baaklini puts it,

Had circumstances been different, these parliaments might have developed their institutional capacities and asserted their political influence, thus contributing to the emergence of democratic political systems in the region. Shortly after a number of [Muslim*] Arab countries became independent, however, their parliamentary systems were replaced by authoritarian, one-party regimes.

[*The qualification matters. Lebanon, the only country even resembling a functioning liberal democracy in the Arab world, also has the distinction of the being the only Arab nation to be majority Christian at independence.]

In other words, once the Europeans skedaddled off in the 1950s and Arab Muslims were left to their own devices, they created (as many peoples have) their own special brand of democracy. Not quite Cuban-style elections, not quite Putin-style, still a long way from Swiss-style.

Should this worry the West?

. . .

Logic would suppose that the more a given people resembles the English, the closer their version of 'liberal English democracy' should be to the original. Dutch democracy functions quite like its English cousin, for example. Italian democracy a bit less so. Indian democracy much less so. And Arab Muslims?

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains the most repressive region in the world—16 out of 20 countries in the region are categorised as authoritarian [most repressive category out of four].

The Arab Spring will soon put an end to all this, pundits tell us, and thus American taxpayers should pour millions of dollars into 'democracy promotion' efforts. Results guaranteed--you can bank on it.

Image source

Or can you.

To believe that, one must believe that the authoritarian governments ruling over Arab Muslim lands these last fifty years were in no way a product of their own people, culture, mores, or desires. Soviet tanks rolling down the streets of Prague may help explain forty years of Czech Communism; what comparable outside force can explain fifty years of authoritarianism among Arab Muslims? UFOs did not drop these leaders here. They are home-grown products, just as England's prime ministers or Switzerland's federal counselors.

And lest we forget, many of today's Arab presidential regimes were originally the product of revolts against hereditary heads-of-state seen as foreign-imposed (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Yemen). But surely it's the West's fault these governments have stayed in place so long? A guarantee of pesky Islamists kept on a leash + access to black gold? Perhaps. The West was happy to deal with these secular strongmen, no doubt, but how to explain the authoritarianism in Arab countries with regimes long hostile to the West (Syria, Iraq pre-2003, Libya pre-2004) ?

As we have seen before, observers have long remarked upon the ways in which Muslim Arabs do not resemble the English. Could these be potential bumps on the road to their Liberal Democratic hopes?

David Pryce-Jones:

Shame-honor ranking effectively prohibits the development of wider, more socialized types of human relationship. Status considerations of the kind are impervious to Western concepts of contractual relationships.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French social anthropologist, has pointed out that no dishonor attaches to such primary transactions as selling short weight, deceiving anyone about quality, quantity or kind of goods, cheating at gambling, and bearing false witness. The doer of these things is merely quicker off the mark than the next fellow; owing him nothing, he is not to be blamed for taking what he can. (1)

Philip Carl Salzman:

In the Middle East, all honor goes to the victor; the vanquished is dishonored. There is no honor in "playing fairly," "doing your best," or "upholding the rules." [...] Applied to state governance, this spirit advises monopoly of power, ruthless suppression of opponents, and accumulation of benefits. In short, it is a recipe for despotism, for tyranny. (2)

Novell de Atkine:

Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority. They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or social position. The same applies within the military; a powerful chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable. (3) [all emphasis ours]

But such observations are just that. Is there any way to quantify them?

One could peruse the 2010 Democracy Index in its entirety (Muslim Arab states in red, Middle Eastern states which are non-Arab or non-majority Muslim in orange):

One could consider the 2010 Freedom House Index for the region 'Middle East and North Africa.'

One could study the World Values Survey to compare their level of civic engagement with that of other regions:

Graph by HBD Chick

Or one can look at the scores from the GLOBE study on In-Group Collectivism and Societal Collectivism (1992-1995 data wave):

One could even browse a selection of the findings from the Pew Research Center's 2010 global opinion survey:

[We have presented the thoughts of an Arab Muslim country, an Arab country which was majority-Christian at independence (the only), and a Muslim country which is not Arab.]

[Number = percentage of those surveyed who agree.]

Islam's role in politics is positive:

Egypt 85 Lebanon 58 Turkey 38

In the struggle between modernizers and fundamentalists, I identify more with the latter:

Egypt 59 Lebanon 15 Turkey 11

I favor gender segregation in the workplace:

Egypt 54 Lebanon 13 Turkey 11

I believe adulterers should be stoned:

Egypt 82 Lebanon 23 Turkey 16

I believe those who leave Islam deserve the death penalty:

Egypt 84 Lebanon 6 Turkey 5

Democracy is prefereble to any other kind of government:

Egypt 59 Lebanon 81 Turkey 76

Whether English-style liberal democracy can arrive in the Arab Muslim world is debatable. It is by no means agreed upon whether it should arrive there. Either way, the above would seem to indicate that these populations interact with their own members in a way that is fundamentally differently than the English. Pryce-Jones:

Western vocabularies of appeals to public opinion and national rights of course have no foundation in a power-challenging society. [...] The spoils for the successful careerist are irresistible. 'Public welfare' is a concept without meaningful application; there is no common good. Generosity is suspect as a ploy for advantage. Idealism and sincerity are penalized. Self-sacrifice is akin to lunacy or martyrdom. (1)

Fertile ground for democracy promotion?

Our next task shall be to dive into the history, and, following Emmanuel Todd, the family structure of these peoples in order to search for clues as to the durability of their special traits. Will such differences, as Francis Fukuyama predicted, be swept away by the inevitable tide of history? Or are their roots even deeper than the most skeptical of observers could imagine? To be continued...

REFERENCES:
(1) Pryce-Jones, David, A Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
(2) Salzman, Philip Carl, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2008.
(3) De Atkine, Norvell B., 'Why Arabs Lose Wars,' Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2.

Previously: Democracy Promotion and the Jasmine Revolution

The Blind Leading the Blind, Part II

2012-01-23T02:53:00.022+01:00

Image source

We have considered Detroit's demise in light of Afros' seeming inability to capably take over the reins of Euro-created government, be it in Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, or Birmingham.

But it takes two to tango. Inept city leaders can do harm, but an inept population can double the damage. Consider Orange County's surprise bankruptcy in 1994. Referendum-loving Californians having made it nearly impossible for local government to raise taxes, county treasurer Bob Citron began to invest what little they could raise into ever-riskier securities. November 1994: The bomb dropped, with $1.7 billion up in smoke, also known as Citron's Barings Bank moment.

Or see New York City's famous near-bankruptcy in 1975 ('Ford to City: Drop Dead'), when the Big Apple was humiliatingly taken over by New York State. In addition to the oil shock, stubborn unions, and shoddy bookkeeping, the city had recently seen a sudden flight of net taxpayers and an inflow of the government-dependent:

The 1970s saw New York lose more than 800,000 residents, almost all of them non-Hispanic whites. This was the first significant population decrease in more than 150 years.

Residents with household incomes below federal poverty standards increased by 25 percent from 1970 to 1980, while all other income groups diminished in number. Whereas the number of impoverished white residents decreased by 12 percent, the number of poor blacks increased by 40 percent, and poor Hispanics by 52 percent.

Rona Stein opines that

There is some evidence that New York City and other industrial regions may have unintentionally encouraged the poor to move in by offering relatively generous levels of welfare benefits.

Perhaps, but the post-war boom that had made sure everyone who wanted a job had one was already waning in the 1960s. Afro-Americans were now, as they had been after the Civil War, thrown into sudden competition with other ethnies. W.H. Collins in 1918 had bemoaned the newly freed blacks' reticence to work, predicting:

However, when the population of the country reaches 150,000,000 or 200,000,000 then labor will likely be as plentiful here as it is now in Europe. Then, the labor of the Negro will hardly be solicited, rather otherwise. The white man's sympathetic attitude toward the Negroes' many shortcomings is fast passing. When the Negro is required to measure up to the white man's standard and is found wanting, what remains for him?

Then what will become of the Negro when he shall have to compete with the thrifty hard-working Poles, Bohemians, and native [Euro-] Americans from the North and the West? [...] In Chicago "there is now scarcely a negro barber in the business district. Nearly all the janitor work in the large buildings has been taken away from them by the Swedes. White men and women as waiters have supplanted colored men in nearly all the first-class hotels and restaurants. Practically all of the shoe polishing is now done by Greeks."

He attributes this to blacks' 'racial traits', which he defines as:

a happy-go-lucky disposition, indolence, shiftlessness, laziness, indifference, lack of mental stamina and ambition, and strong criminal tendencies.

(We have seen some of the reasons for this, rooted in natural selection in the tropics and worth recalling before we are too tempted to moralize.)

Deindustrialisation in the 1960s hitting the least able first: Afros. The most criminal element of society in many northern cities kept in de facto segregation: Afros. The result? Mass violence:

Consider the wave of race riots that swept the nation's cities. From 1964 to 1971, there were more than 750 riots, killing 228 people and injuring 12,741 others. After more than 15,000 separate incidents of arson, many black urban neighborhoods were in ruins.

A numbing list of them can be viewed here.

Detroit's 1967 riot left the city with

2,509 stores looted or burned, 388 families rendered homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burned or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from arson and looting ranged from $40 million to $80 million [$261 to $522 million today].

In addition to the long list of Afros shot while looting, Wiki helpfully informs us that the dead included

Krikor “George” Messerlian-- A 68 year-old Armenian immigrant, beaten to death by a group of black youths.

Sheren George-- Shot while in the car driven by her husband (Ross), as they tried flee from a mob of black youths beating a white man.

And, no surprise to those familiar with 2005's Hurricane Katrina,

Carl Smith-- A firefighter; shot by a black male while attempting to organize firefighter units to fight several fires at Mack and St. Jean.

Larry Post-- Post was a Sergeant in the National Guard. After an exchange of gun fire between National Guardsmen and a car with three men, Post was found with a gunshot wound to the stomach.

In addition,

~~The National Guard and the Army troops engaged in firefights with locals~~ [Post-Katrina, we feel reasonably sure this can be changed to: 'Locals engaged in firefights with the National Guard and the Army troops'], resulting in deaths to both locals and the troops. [...] Tanks and machine guns were used in the effort to keep the peace. Film footage and photos that were viewed internationally showed a city on fire, with tanks and combat troops in firefights in the streets.

The 'Paris of the West' was left thus:

After such a demonstration by the city's Afro population, the question is not, as most Right-Thinking People seem to assume today, 'How could whites possibly have fled such a place?', but rather, 'What on earth would have possessed them to stay?'

Race riots had occurred in America before, but never in this context. Suddenly, so declared the federal government, this apparently very dangerous group of people were going to be free to frequent any entertainment venue, sporting event, or means of transport that Euro-Americans did. Their children would be free to roam the halls of white schools. Any neighborhood they desired to live in, they now could. And no longer could anyone infringe upon their right to vote into office people exactly like themselves.

If this slew of measures left any lingering doubts in the minds of Whites considering Flight, the 'War on Poverty' surely crushed them. Giving the least able blacks cash pay-outs, free housing, and free food in exchange for blessing us with as many low-ability illegitimate children as they possibly could (who would become low-ability adults) signed the death warrant of urban America.

In New York City, violent crime rates more than doubled between 1965 and 1975.   In Detroit, the homicide rate tripled from 1960 to 1980; the robbery rate sextupled. Afro violence was unleashed as never before seen on American soil. And Euros did what any sensible group of people would-- they ran.

The numbers tell the tale:

Philadelphia     White     Black   Hispanic
2010                  36.9       43.4      12.3
1980                  58.2       37.8       3.8
1960                  73.3       26.4       n/a

Baltimore        White      Black    Hispanic
2010                 28.0       63.7       4.2
1980                 43.4       54.8       1.0
1960                 65.0       34.7        n/a

Chicago          White    Black    Hispanic
2010                31.7      32.9       28.9
1980                43.2      39.8       14.0
1960                76.4      22.9       n/a

Detroit is of course on the same road; she has merely traveled further:

Detroit     White   Black   Hispanic
2010               7.8   82.7   6.8
1980             33.4   63.1   2.4
1960             70.8   28.9   n/a

She is joined there by a few others:

Newark   White    Black   Hispanic
2010          11.6      52.4      33.8
1980          22.1      34.1      18.6
1960          65.6      17.1      n/a

Gary       White    Black   Hispanic
2010            8.9      84.8      5.1
1980          21.8      70.8      7.1
1960          61.1      38.8      n/a

But are many aware that the trend creeps even into erstwhile 'Whitopias'?

Minneapolis    White   Black   Hispanic
2010           60.3   18.6      10.5
1980           86.7       7.7        1.3
1960           96.8       2.4        n/a

Boston        White   Black   Hispanic
2010               47.0   24.4      17.5
1980               67.9   22.4       6.4
1960               90.2       9.1       n/a

As Paul Kersey has covered in-depth, the unleashing of a huge welfare-subsidized Sub-Saharan African population upon a North European one, with no constraints on their movements, lodging, or employment, has been a disaster for urban America. The White Flight outlined above should come as little surprise, seeing as the population from whom the whites are fleeing have higher rates of murder, robbery, assault, interracial rape, juvenile delinquency, high school drop-outs, illegitimate children, sexually-transmitted diseases, unemployment, as well as use of food stamps and subsidized housing.

Detroit, through a mix of poor Afro governance and a poorly-behaved Afro populace, has chased out nearly all its productive citizens. It happens that a large number of these are ethnically Euro.

J.A. Tillinghast wrote in 1902, not forty years after Emancipation:

No longer controlled by external force, the Negroes have depended for a generation past upon their own self-command. But from time immemorial they have been weak in self-command, they have been dominated by impulse, [...]

Thus they have lost the stimulus of example, as well as the direct training and discipline, given by the superior [European] race. The strain required to maintain life on the level of the whites is driving the Negroes to develop a society of their own, with easier moral standards, better fitted perhaps, to their peculiar temperament. This movement is symptomatic of a dangerous weakness, while at the same time directly contributing to aggravate it.

Of the younger generation of free blacks, he says they appear

...restless, unsteady at labor, and impatient of restraint ; that they are yielding place to the whites in many of the better paid employments, and that they are excessively fond of spending for display or other economically unsound purposes.

It also appears that in their sexual and family relations there is increasing looseness and instability. Their imperfect socializiation is revealing itself in their criminality, which is increasing at a much greater ratio than the [global] Negro population.

His conclusion?

Confronted by these facts, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the heavy task laid upon the American Negro, after liberation from slavery, has proved too much for him, and that this people, considered as a whole, is slowly but surely tending to revert.

Seized and transplanted unwillingly, forced sharply into new and severely exacting habits of life, held for a time in this condition of strain, and then suddenly released, the Negro finds it surpassingly difficult to suppress the hereditary instincts that do not harmonize with American social organization.

Can we be blamed for imagining Tillinghast penned these lines just last week?

His final words ring, one hundred and ten years later, like a thwarted prophecy (emphasis ours):

There is nothing in this conclusion to surprise the student of evolutionary phenomena. But no right-minded citizen can help deploring it, and hoping that some means may be found of preventing reversion with its inevitable consequence-- elimination.

Far from 'eliminated,' Afros remain among us at rather their historic rate-- a bit more than ten percent (12.5). But Tillinghast could not have foreseen the sort of pseudo-slavery into which so many have fallen: Sustained by a bevy of taxpayer-funded food, housing, and health care programs for the least able; hired en masse into the civil service for those who are more able but for whom the private sector has no use; and ramrodded into colleges and professions far outside their capabilities for the most able, through a state-enforced quota system.

Detroit is a shock, and a harbinger. The residents of Minneapolis or Boston should not flatter themselves that 'it can't happen here'-- it already is-- nor those of the Whitopias of Portland or Seattle. Urban America is gravely ill: Misguided post-war racial policy has brought us here. What visionary policy-maker shall bring us out?

REFERENCES:
Collins, Winfield H., The Truth About the Negro and Lynching in the South. NY: Neale Publishing Co., 1918.
Tillinghast, J.A. The Negro in Africa and America. NY: Negro Universities Press, 1902.

Previously: The Blind Leading the Blind, Our Crimes, Ourselves II,

Provisioning...or Mating?, Ethnic Coexistence, Yesterday

The Blind Leading the Blind

2012-01-15T04:11:00.014+01:00

Image source

Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, is about to join its sisters Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and Ecorse in being stripped of its municipal authority and ceded to an 'emergency manager.' Well-covered by commentators who can see, the story has also attracted observations such as:

“How come all of the jurisdictions put under emergency management are majority African American? Has anybody noticed that?” asked Rep. John Conyers (D), who has represented Detroit for 47 years.

How come indeed.

As Congressman Conyers implies, majority-Afro cities tend to elect majority-Afro city governments. As the average Afro is less well-endowed than other ethnies in future-time orientation, commonweal-orientation, industriousness, and logical aptitude, majority-Afro governments tend to govern poorly.

. . .

Haiti, the world's first Black Republic, stunned the planet in 1804 by driving out her European masters and embarking upon true self-government. A century later, adventurer and journalist Hesketh Prichard ambled from one end of the island to the other, to report on what one hundred years of freedom had wrought.

On the capital city:

At first sight Port-au-Prince looks fair enough to be worth travelling 5,000 miles to see; once enter it, and your next impulse is to travel 5,000 miles to get away again. [...] you walk through its cobbled streets with circumspection, for they are ankle-deep in refuse. No smallest effort is made at sanitation; the street-drains with all their contaminations flow down and help to fill up the harbour.

On the police:

The police are merely soldiers told off casually for the maintenance of the public safety. Their pay is ordinarily in arrears, and when remitted to someone in authority for distribution, reaches them in an attenuated form. In addition to this, they have to "keep themselves," but the administration has invented an ingenious method by which a truly zealous officer can manage to stave off starvation very well indeed.

In some towns, at any rate, they receive a capitation fee of fifty centimes -- a fluctuating sevenpence-halfpenny according to the exchange -- for every man they arrest. Fortunately, living is cheap, so that when hunger bears too hardly upon them the remedy of a timely prisoner is easily come by. There need be no superfluous scruples, such as waiting until a man commits an offence against the law. Pick a quarrel with any stray passer-by or pounce down upon him unawares.

On the military:

The Haytian, in spite of his huge pretensions, is, however, not naturally a soldier. Drill and discipline and the art of war are mere empty sounds to his ear. From his point of view they are entirely beside the question. What he cares for is to play at being a soldier ; he loves the accoutrement, the uniforms, the gold lace, especially the gold lace. He has a passion for military titles, military bombast, military display.

On hospitals:

In course of time, I visited the Military Hospital, a place chiefly distinguished by the absence of everything that goes to make a hospital--cleanliness, comfort, nurses. In the dreary shed which goes by that name patients and attendants were represented by a man lying on the earthen floor, suffering from a broken leg, and a negress smoking a pipe on an upturned tub by the doorway.

On the prisons:

Moreover, the condition of the prisons all over the country is almost incredible when one considers that they exist in the midst of a community that calls itself civilised. [...] Doorless cells were round the walls, with straw upon the earth as in cages for wild beasts. Some prisoners were practically naked; a few had converted worn-out jackets into loin-cloths; all were in the last stage of destitution. Men, in iron anklets with a short chain between, stood or squatted round. All shades of colour were there, from yellow ochre to coal black, and everyone looked half-starved. Not a few had gaping wounds, and others were wearily ill, their backs furred with sickness and neglect.

On Haiti's second city, Cap-Haitien:

Go in whatever direction you like; the sights that meet you are the same. Ruined houses, ruined aqueducts, ruined fountains of stone, ruined walls, ruined forts. She bears upon her the indelible impress of the tremendous earthquake of 1842. [57 years earlier]

On the subject of the earthquake, he relates this anecdote:

Half the hillside was torn away by the shock which annihilated the city [in 1842]. The dread earthquake shook down or seriously injured almost every house, two-thirds of the inhabitants were buried beneath the fallen masonry ; bands of blacks rushed in from mountain and plain, not to aid in saving their wretched countrymen, whose cries and groans could be heard for two or three days, but to rob the stores and houses, while the officers and men of the garrison, instead of attempting to keep order, joined in plundering the small remnants of what the surviving inhabitants could save from the tottering ruins.

On the government:

As to the negro's position in the Government, there are in the Cabinet some capable men of African race, but sandwiched in amongst them are others who are mere caricatures -- men whose deserved place, I really do not think I am unjust or unfair in saying, ought to be rather the stoke-hole of a steamer.

One of the strongest tendencies in the Republic of to-day is the desire to keep the coloured [mulatto], as opposed to the black, man from office and emolument. [...] The personnel of the present Government is black enough to delight the heart of the most advanced negrophile. President Sam is of the ultra-negro type, and all the higher posts around him are filled with men of his own race. "Hayti for the Haytians," that war-cry of the people of the Republic, means really Hayti for the negro -- no mulatto need apply.

On governance:

The black man can no more govern his black brother successfully without tyranny than you can reach a blind man's sense without touch or speech. No appeal is made to his reason; he is coerced by solid fear.

It seems impossible under black government for any undertaking or institution to be cared for, or kept up, or carried on. Some individual, in an ambitious moment, makes a start, but the beginning of any enterprise whatsoever is also the end; no one bothers to go on with it.

After two hundred and seventy-six pages of such observations, Prichard poses the burning question of his day:

Can the negro rule himself? Is he congenitally capable?

Inheriting a fully-functioning European-built infrastructure one hundred years before, what in fact had he made of it?

He has had his opportunity. That opportunity has lasted for a hundred years in a splendid land which he found ready prepared for him. Yet to-day we find him with a Government which, save in the single point of force majeure, has degenerated into a farce; and as for the country itself, houses and plantations have disappeared, and where clearings once were there is now impenetrable forest. Certainly he has existed through one hundred years of internecine strife, but he has never for six consecutive months governed himself in any accepted sense of the word. Today, and as matters stand, he certainly cannot rule himself.

Modern connoisseurs of Haiti need not be told that one hundred years on, Prichard's words ring as true as if the ink on them were still fresh.

. . .

Euro-built governments handed over to Afros have not generally fared well. Those unfazed by the Western media black-out on South Africa know all about its current slow implosion:

The central problem of writing about South Africa is that it is almost impossible to explain the country's slow-motion catastrophe in terms that make sense to foreigners. Consider these headlines, culled from just a fortnight's newspapers: Failed Billion-Dollar Education Program; Whistle-Blower Murdered, Wife of NIA Chief on Trial for Smuggling Cocaine, the NIA being our CIA.

In the West, scandals of this magnitude would topple governments. Here, they are almost meaningless. [...] In a week or two, these stories will be blown off the front pages by equally hair-raising scandals, most of which will also just fade away. It's been like this for years, and there comes a time when you stop paying attention lest the drumbeat of bad news drive you mad.

Or that of the D.R. Congo:

[The Belgians] introduced health care, water projects, education, telephones and power lines, helping to turn this once isolated village into one of the most affluent and best-tended cities in the core of equatorial Africa.

Today, the legacy of Kikwit's [Zaire] colonial past is swiftly disappearing. "Civilization is coming to an end here," said Rene Kinsweke, manager of Siefac, a chain of food stores. [...] "We're back where we started. We're going back into the bush."

It is difficult to exaggerate the dizzying pace of decay in this city of nearly 400,000 people. [...] Entire families now camp on sidewalks, in parks and even in cemeteries. Streets and backyards are littered with indescribable filth, and toward the edges of the city the roads crumble into dirty sand and then disappear altogether.

Or of Birmingham, Alabama:

Birmingham is 73 percent Black, home to some of the scariest neighborhoods in America. After a horrible Black-on-white rape incident back in the 1970s, Birmingham Southern College had to erect a fence around the school to keep out unwanted elements of the Black Undertow. [...] Let’s not forget that Birmingham was once home to six Fortune 500 companies (as late as 1999), but now only is home to one.

Now with the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, Jefferson County [seat of Birmingham] offers frightening proof of the overwhelming power of Black-Run America (BRA) and what happens when the Black Undertow takes control of a city’s destiny.

[Birmingham in 2010 = 22% White, 73% Black.
Birmingham in 1950 = 60% White, 40% Black.]

Or of Camden, New Jersey:

If you get into a car accident in Camden, the city’s chief of police has this advice: Don’t bother calling the cops unless there are injuries or blocked traffic. Likewise, don’t call about vandalism. Or minor thefts.

Thanks to the city’s budget crisis, 168 officers — almost almost every one hired since 1998 — were shown the door today. That leaves about 200 officers to police one of the country’s poorest and most dangerous cities.

[...] Since 2005 the school system and police department have been operated by the State of New Jersey; the takeover will expire in 2012. In 2008, Camden had the highest crime rate in the U.S. with 2,333 violent crimes per 100,000 people while the national average was 455 per 100,000.

[Camden in 2010 = 18% White, 48% Black, 47% Hispanic or Latino of any race.
Camden in 1950 = 86% White, 14% Black, "N/A" Hispanic or Latino (not applicable).]

...or of many others.

'Give them time,' we are often told of America's Afros, 'they have just shaken off the shackles of segregation.' 'They'll begin functioning like Euros any moment now.' Today, fifty years after the end of Jim Crow, we may believe it. But such arguments have expiration dates. Looking at our free, self-governing Afro island neighbors to the south, can we be blamed for knitting our brows and wondering if we have one hundred and fifty still to wait?

In 1918 W.H. Collins wrote,

Negroes, with some exceptions, at that time [of Emancipation] were no more fit for the ballot than seven-year-old boys. Nor was it any more reasonable to expect them to act the part of men in using it, or in political affairs, than to expect it from seven-year-old boys. They were, and to a large extent are yet, a race in its childhood.

Revolting as it may sound to pronounce such words, what should matter to policy-makers is not Is it revolting, but rather Is it true. If it was true then, and still is true, then the consequences for Euro-American policy-makers are vast. Except for the brief disaster known as Reconstruction, the great experiment of putting municipal government into the hands of Afro-Americans is still young. The results thus far have ranged from worrying to calamitous. Bringing in ethnically Euro managers from the outside to save these cities from themselves may be the only answer, as unhappily this 'race in its childhood' shows time and again that its adulthood lies somewhere in the future.

REFERENCES
Prichard, Hesketh, Where Black Rules White : A Journey Across and About Hayti. Westminster : A. Constable & Co., 1900.
Collins, Winfield H., The Truth About the Negro and Lynching in the South. New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1918.

A German by Any Other Name...

2012-01-07T01:58:00.013+01:00

Image source

The Maastricht treaty, indeed the whole idea of the E.U., is based on the principle that 'People are people.' Also known as the Late Twentieth Century Delusion. As we have seen, the Think-Tankers who cook up international policy are in utter thrall to it. No reason, say they, why a semiconductor industry such as flourishes in Japan couldn't do the same in Angola. No reason at all. All that's missing are the right incentives, the right institutions, the right...

...Shhh. Don't say 'people.' Crimethink.

It has become obvious that the Eurozone will survive in present form only if the Germans keep paying the debts of the Greeks. Talk of new 'institutions' and 'treaties and 'incentives' is silly. The incentives and treaties and institutions have been in place for ten years; they have not yet been able to turn Greeks into Germans. Nor will they.

Why not? What makes a German a German, and a Greek a Greek? Couldn't we switch out the populations of these two countries and just assume that Greek-Germany and German-Greece would continue to function as they always have?

* * *

Though it has become terribly unfashionable, there is little as satisfying as reading old-time authors' stout observations of other peoples, untouched by today's feminized hive-mind and its cries to not hurt anyone's feelings. It was once taken for granted that a German was not a Greek. Would today's Eurozone decision-makers come back to this distant wisdom, they might yet come up with some policy worth the name.

So-- a 2012 currency zone containing both a Germany and a Greece will not function, and we need writers from before the Wars to give us a hint as to why:

Albert Gehring, music enthusiast and writer, in 1908 fancied putting to paper the 'Distinguishing Traits of the Graeco-Latins and Teutons':

Though resembling one another in many respects when compared with non-Aryan peoples, these races exhibit striking differences of character and institutions when contrasted inter se. The Greeks and Latins are talkative, vivacious, and quick in their actions, the English and Germans taciturn and deliberative. The latter are passionate lovers of nature, the former evince but little enthusiasm for the glories of Pan.

Indeed, it was once acceptable to notice difference, and sweeping generalizations were understood to be just that-- a broad brush, hiding many exceptions.

Gehring was full of musings, and his goal was ambitious:

Romanticism, classicism, religiousness, gaiety, depth of thought, are complex qualities, which, like the concrete phenomena of material nature, must be reduced to simpler factors. Is it not possible to discover a few elementary distinctions, on which many or most of the picturesque differences between Græco-Latin and Germanic life may be found to rest? [...] So it is conceivable that the vast differences in national activities and institutions are the result of insignificant divergences of mental structure.

He was convinced the Teutonic mind was truly different:

Just as the Teuton has a greater wealth of material presented to him in his dramas, cathedrals, and musical compositions, so his mind is normally, in everyday life, filled with a larger and more involved number of objects. Since, however, it is possible for only one, or at most very few things, to stand forth with precision in the foreground of attention, it follows that we must be conscious of all others in a vague, indefinite way. These others form a "penumbra" or "fringe" around the foremost objects of attention. The statement, therefore, that the Germanic mind grasps more objects than the Græco-Latin, might better be put, that it has a richer "fringe."

Plausible? Perhaps, perhaps not.

The Germanic mind, then, is characterised by a more prominent "fringe" than the Græco-Latin. It delights in the unresolved, mysterious residues of experience, in the buzzing backgrounds, the contrapuntal play of side-theme and pedal point. The Græco-Latin mind, on the contrary, loves clearness and precision. The world which it reflects is plotted off in neat conceptual charts. It progresses along a straight line, in a single dimension; the Teuton's advance, on the other hand, is broad and bi-dimensional, -- harmonic and contrapuntal rather than melodic.

Only a theory. His evidence?:

There is a deliberation and hesitation about the actions of Germanic people which contrasts sharply with the vivaciousness of their southern cousins. The peasant from the north may stare at you vacantly before he answers your question. Thought translates itself into motor results but slowly; often, indeed, there are no results at all. Hamlet, with his indecision and vacillation, is a type of this species of mind. The fiery Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, represents a class that is common among Latin races -- lively, quick-tempered, ebullient individuals.

Accompanying the slowness of the Teutons, we meet with a certain tenacity and persistency of effort. The people of this race are patient, plodding, persevering. Hence the great material results they have achieved.

The Germanic races manifest a tendency toward brooding and melancholy. The English are known as hypochondriacs; no nation bemoans so many suicides as the Germans.

And what of religious temperament?

We have already remarked that the Græco-Latins are inclined to be worldly, while the Teutons exhibit a religious bias. The Greeks were children of the moment. They believed in an after-life, to be sure, but the belief made little impression on their conduct. The occurrences of the day, their mundane fortunes, exhausted their thoughts and left but little room for hopes or fears regarding an unseen existence. The Latin races resemble the Greeks when contrasted with the nations from the north. It was among the latter that the great religious struggles of the Reformation originated. Wycliffe, Luther, and Zwingli were Teutons. Mysticism also finds its home in the north, the Latins inclining toward rationalism.

A pronounced ethical and religious tone characterises Germanic literature: Milton, Schiller, and Wordsworth bear witness, and in Puritan New England it forms the keynote, stamping the writings of Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Hawthorne, and most of their numerous followers.

He even comments on their style of homes:

Germanic taciturnity and love of nature may account in part for the isolated dwellings in the north, for the country-life of the English nobility, and the lonely habits of German scholars;

Tacitus' 'Germania' (1st century AD) comes to mind:

It is well known that the nations of Germany have not cities, and that they do not even tolerate closely contiguous dwellings. They live scattered and apart, just as a spring, a meadow, or a wood has attracted them. Their village they do not arrange in our fashion, with the buildings connected and joined together, but every person surrounds his dwelling with an open space, either as a precaution against the disasters of fire, or because they do not know how to build.

Gehring again:

[...] the opposite tendencies among the Græco-Latins would serve to explain their abhorrence of solitude, their early building of cities, the social habits of their philosophers, and, as mentioned, their congregation in gymnasiums and salons.

He goes much further:

The celerity of action in the south throws light on the frequency of assassination in Latin countries; it enables us to understand the enthusiastic support received by victorious generals and the speedy disgrace awaiting defeated ones; it explains many episodes in the revolution of 1789, and furnishes the reason for the general instability of governments among the Romance races.

Gehring remarks upon essential differences, a vital exercise, but what of the character traits which count for policy-makers today? Amusing as may be the thoughts of ethnographers of yore, now we demand figures. Statistics. Empiricism. So another way to ask the question, What is a German? is to look at self-reported values surveys. Geert Hofstede was a 20th-century pioneer in such studies, but we far prefer his successors, the GLOBE study team under Robert J. House at the Wharton School (data wave taken in the 1990s). A sampling [Germanics in bright blue, Anglos in purple, Nordics in dark blue, Mediterraneans in red, East Asians in light green]:

Future time orientation, as measured by the GLOBE study and the Wang et al. study:

The difference between In-group Collectivism levels and Societal Collectivism levels, according to GLOBE:

The levels of Uncertainty Avoidance (strong preference for rules and order) and Performance Orientation (strong drive to succeed), again from the GLOBE study:

Those who prefer the empirical to the anecdotal can of course find much more:

GDP per capita,

IQ levels,

Perceived corruption levels,

Democracy index,

Human development index,

Civic engagement,

World Values Survey,

Traditional family systems,

and a host of other indicators that may or may not help us understand why a German is not a Greek. In this blog's opinion, the key character traits preventing these two peoples from functioning in the same monetary union would be their levels of future-time orientation, commonweal-orientation, and work-esteeming, which the careful eye will be able to pick apart from the indicators given thus far.

But what interest for policy makers?

To embark on a currency union with a medley of sovereign states is no small thing. If all members behave rather as we do, it can work. But one doesn't let featherweights play against heavyweights for a reason. Among the other destruction it has wrought, the Late Twentieth Century Delusion's mantra 'People are people' is now on the verge of throwing Europe into its worst crisis in sixty years.

A European by any other name... can be a Greek. Or a German. But he cannot be both.

Previously: More Able and Less Able,

Comparing Peoples--References,

Letting Things Slide

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2011-12-22T15:29:00.002+01:00

Photo source

You may have missed...

Economic analysis from the clear-eyed, the watchful, with a minimum of bollocks...

Geopolitical musings that would make the Pentagon spit out its coffee...

Immigration stories one is unlikely to read in the corporate-owned or government-owned press...

Social issues boiled down to their biological essence...

Racial co-existence analyzed without the sugar-coating...

Behavior and genetics from a scientific perspective...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all-- to those who can see, to those who cannot, and to those whose eyes are just barely beginning to open.

Ghost in the Machine?

2011-12-12T20:38:00.002+01:00

(from the archives...)

Image source

'Hope springs eternal.'

Truer words were never spoken of the inner workings of the Human Mind.

Polite fictions get us through the day.

'I'm still attracted to my spouse.'

'I enjoy my job.'

'I love all my children equally.'

'I'm special.'

We tell polite fictions to our children.

'With hard work, you can be anything you want to be.'

'You'll find true love. There's someone for everyone.'

'When you die, you go... to a nice place.'

And so forth.

John Calvin was not a man given to polite fictions:

When we attribute foreknowledge to God, we mean that all things have ever been, and perpetually remain, before His eyes, so that to His knowledge nothing is future or past, but all things are present. […] And this foreknowledge extends to the whole world and to all the creatures.

Predestination we call the eternal decree of God, by which He hath determined in Himself what He would have to become of every individual of mankind. For they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others.

Since the beginning, Christian theologians have been arguing over it. Free will or predestination? Do we choose our actions, or are we just pawns on a Great Chessboard, bandied about by the hand of Another?

And Christians aren't the only ones. Many religions born in India have been forced to think about the same question. (Some have gone so far as to pin Cambodians' passive submission to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge on their fatalistic Buddhist beliefs.)

Predestination has even wormed its way into science. Atomism was already old news when Darwin published his masterwork in 1859, and ever since scientists have been chasing down a biological basis to every trait under the sun, from to religious belief to alcoholism to left-handedness. The 'ghost in the machine' was perhaps never there at all. It was all machine, no ghost.

'Hope is a waking dream.'

--Aristotle

But without hope, I cannot get out of bed in the morning.

If you tell me my group is biologically determined to be unintelligent, or violent, or bad future planners, then you've robbed me of my hope. I don't get up. I lay there glued in place, staring at the ceiling, weighing the possibility of throwing myself out the window.

I can't be just my genes. I've got to have a choice. Don't I?

'Where there's life, there's hope.'

--Cicero

The Calvinist doctrine of 'predestination' has wracked believers' souls for centuries, and continues to do so to this day. The idea that God has marked out each one of us for eternal joy or eternal torture has driven people to depression, madness and even suicide.

And at the end of the day, is it really any different from 'biological determinism'? The notion that your every act, every gesture, every desire, is already fated? Decided, as it were, by the composition of your genes? Every person is destined to Heaven or to Hell--isn't that just saying that some of us are destined to fruitful, happy lives, and some of us destined to sorrow?

By our DNA?

Hell or Heaven is, in fact, nothing but our biological destiny?

Either way, it's hopeless.

'True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.'

--Shakespeare

At some point, most parents stop telling their children a fat jolly elf in a red fur-trimmed suit leaves them gifts on the carpet once a year. Why do they stop?

Why did they start in the first place?

I've long suspected there's a little smug joy in that 'Junior, there's no Santa Claus' speech. Just a touch. A perverse pleasure in bursting that bubble, of bringing the blissfully innocent into the clubhouse of the knowing. The knowing and miserable. But maybe that's Dad's joy more than Mom's.

Today we tell each other so many polite fictions and Santa Claus stories that we've forgotten what truth looks like. It was not always so, but somehow Dad's stern buck-up remonstrances have given way to Mom's soothing just-so stories. On a planetary scale.

'Everyone's got something equally important to contribute.'

'With a little effort, you can be anything you want.'

'Keep trying, you'll be functioning at first-word level soon!'

Mom loves all her children, and is sure they'll go on to do great things, even the little ne'er-do-well who just can't seem to keep up with the others. And don't try to tell her any differently.

'He that lives upon hope will die fasting.'

--Benjamin Franklin

I don't want to be told my group can't cut it on our own. Don't try to convince me; it'll kill my hope. How do you expect me to get out of bed in the morning?

How indeed.

If there were a way to reconcile predestination and hope, presumably it would have been found by now. It has not. HBD is a fundamentally hopeless idea.

One is thus presented a choice:

Do I believe what I know to be true, even though it robs me of my hope?

Or do I continue to tell myself polite fictions, because that's the only way to get through another day on Planet Earth?

No one can answer that question for anyone else. Don't tell me there's no Santa Claus. Don't do it.

Not until I'm ready to hear it.

I beg you.

Our Crimes, Ourselves, Part II

2011-12-04T23:59:00.008+01:00

As we have seen, white people's criminality has varied greatly over time and space. W.A. Bonger in the 1940s walked us through Jewish, Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic, Ugro-Finn, and Dinaric (Slavic) crime rates from his time period. Such differences, we've argued, are nothing to wring one's hands over, but a simple reality for policy-makers to take into account.

Similarly, for as long as Africans and Europeans have co-existed on North American soil, these two admittedly large and diverse groups have, in the aggregate, shown markedly different criminal tendencies. The differences seem to be getting more and more marked, and it has become conservative dogma that post-1960s Great Society programs are to blame.

This is true to a point. As we've seen, any human can be incentivized to be parasitical, be he the son of West Africans or Albion's seed.

But long before public welfare handouts were even a twinkle in LBJ's eye, Afros and Euros committed crime differently in America. How differently?

Dutch sociologist W.A. Bonger gives us a snapshot of the situation in 1910:

PRISONERS AND YOUTHFUL DELINQUENTS, U.S.: 1910

	Total per Jan. 1		Sentenced during 1910
Race	Number	Per 100,000 pop.	Number	Per 100,000 pop.

*Whites*	93,841	114.8	382,052	467.4

*Negroes*	41,729	424.6	108,268	1,107.7

Other colored	902	218.6	3,614	876.0

Total	136,472	148.4	493,943	537.0

E.B. Reuter provides us a regional breakdown of the same year:

PERCENTAGE OF NEGROES IN U.S. PRISON POPULATION: 1910

In Total Population Among Prisoners

(Enumerated (Committed

Jan. 1, 1910) During Year)

United States 10.7 30.6 21.9

The South 29.8 70.1 58.9

South Atlantic 33.7 72.0 61.6

East South Central 31.5 73.1 63.6

West South Central 22.6 62.4 46.0

The North 1.8 13.1 9.6

New England 1.0 4.6 2.6

Middle Atlantic 2.2 12.8 9.4

East North Central 1.6 14.7 11.0

West North Central 2.1 20.8 14.4

The West 0.7 5.9 3.2

Mountain 0.8 7.8 4.4

Pacific 0.7 4.6 2.5

U.S. Penitentiaries – 31.3 24.6

Bonger then shows us the numbers for the inter-war years, for both male and female:

TERMS BEGUN IN U.S. STATE AND FEDERAL PRISONS (PER 100,000 POPULATION OF 15 YEARS AND OVER), 1929-1935


                             Men                                             Women

Years        Whites      Negroes                    Whites             Negroes

1929        113.4      385.1                   6.5               30.7

1930            124.0         416.3                         5.8                25.2

1931         136.2        478.8                          5.8               26.7

1932        128.0        483.8                          5.6                27.2

1933        117.0        447.0                              ?            ?

1934          107.1         436.4                          5.3                25.6

1935          113.4         473.5                          5.4                28.9

Bonger provides a brief breakdown of specific crimes for this period as well:

SURVEY OF MEN IN PRISONS, PER 100,000 U.S. POPULATION:
AVERAGE FOR THE YEARS 1926-34

Crimes                                 Whites                    Negroes

Manslaughter
(both homicide
and by negligence)                    3.9                      32.8

Felonious assault                        2.7                  28.9

Rape                                            3.1                       6.2

Theft (including
that of autos)                           24.9                     64.1

Burglary                                     20.5                     76.1

Robbery                                 12.0                    31.2

Back into the 19th century, comparative studies at the city level exist. W.E.B. Dubois's The Philadelphia Negro gives the most detailed such compilation known:

"Some actual figures will give us an idea of this, the worst period of Negro crime ever experienced in the city. The Eastern Penitentiary [Philadelphia] was opened in 1829 near the close of the year. The total number of persons received here for the most serious crimes is given in the next table [for 1829-1854]. This includes prisoners from the Eastern counties of the State, but a large proportion were from Philadelphia:"

Years	Total Commit- ments	Negroes	Per Cent of Negroes	Per Cent of Negroes of Total Population
1829-34.......... 1835-39.......... 1840-44.......... 1845-49.......... 1850-54..........	339 878 701 633 664	99 356 209 151 106	29.0 40.5 29.8 23.8 16.0	8.27 ( 1830) 7.39 ( 1840) 7.39 ( 1840) 4.83 ( 1850) 4.83 ( 1850)

"A better measure of the normal criminal tendencies of the group would perhaps be found in the statistics of Moyamensing [Prison, Philadelphia], where ordinary cases of crime and misdemeanor are confined and which contains only county prisoners. The figures for Moyamensing prison [1836-1855] are:"

Years	Total Commit- ments	Negroes	Per Cent of Negroes	Per Cent of Negroes of Total Population
1836-45.......... 1846-55.......... Total........	1164 1478 2642	1087 696 1783	48.29 32.01 ...	7.39 ( 1840) 4.83 ( 1850) .....

"The character of the crimes committed by Negroes compared with whites is shown by the following table, which covers the offences of 1359 whites and 718 Negroes committed to the Eastern Penitentiary [Philadelphia], 1829-1846. If we take simply petty larceny we find that 48.8 per cent of the whites and 55 per cent of the Negroes were committed for this offence."

Kinds of Crime	Whites		Negroes
Kinds of Crime	Number	Per Cent	Number	Per Cent
Offences vs. the person....... Offences vs. property with violence . Offences vs. property without violence Malicious offences vs. property... Offences vs. Currency and forgery.. Miscellaneous...........	166 191 873 22 167 40	11.4 13.1 59.8 1.5 11.5 27.0	89 165 432 14 7 11	12.4 22.9 60.2 2.0 1.0 1.5
All Offences.........	1359	718	100	100

On a diverse planet, it is to be expected that our environment pushes us down different behavioral paths, be they for mating, sport, communication habits, or doing each other harm. Clear-eyed policy-making on such a planet would have less to do with fretting about what one would like to be the case, and more about dealing effectively with what is the case.

REFERENCES:
Bonger, W.A. Race and Crime. Trans. Margaret Mathews Hordyk. NY: Columbia University Press, 1943.
Reuter, E.B. The American Race Problem: A Study of the Negro. Ed. Seba Eldridge. NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1927.
DuBois, W. E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1899.

Our Crimes, Ourselves

2011-11-26T23:48:00.004+01:00

Part of the Late Twentieth Century Delusion is an aggressive (but selective) blank-slatism that assumes each ethnic / gender group should show up in prisons, universities, and space shuttle missions in precise proportion to its percentage in the general population. (The U.S.'s billion-dollar sports industry excepted.)

Prisons in particular have vexed affirmative-action policy-makers, as they stubbornly refuse to fill up with 72% Euros, 12% Afros, 12% Hispanics, and 4% Asians (to say nothing of 50% male / 50% female). In more sensible times, social scientists noticed that different groups committed different amounts and types of crimes, and imagined possible reasons why.

"Non-hispanic white", that U.S. Census monolith, is itself a racial stew whose components have long fascinated ethnographers. Dutch sociologist W.A. Bonger combed through a great many studies on ethnic European criminality and presented his findings in the 1943 tome Race and Crime. Clearly ill at ease with the determinist worldview and openly derisive of German race science, Bonger was still a man of his age, allowing himself speculations on ethnicity that would ban him from today's academia. (To say nothing of the title of his book.)

What did he find?

The full pall of WWII not having yet descended on academia, the question of "Jewish criminality" was still on the scientific table. Bonger presents tables of Jewish criminality between 1882 and 1933 in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the Netherlands.

The same pattern repeats in each place: Violent crimes (rape, felonious assault, murder, manslaughter) trail far behind for the Jews vs. the non-Jews. Economic crimes (embezzlement, forgery, fraud)? The contrary: Jews show themselves more apt to commit these than non-Jews, with "fraud" the biggest stand-out, up to 2-to-1 more likely among Jews than Gentiles. Here are the numbers for Germany:

	CONVICTED PER 100,000 POPULATION IN THE YEARS:

	1909-1910		1915		1916

Crime	Jews	All others	Jews	All others	Jews	All others

Theft	71.1	178.3	40.6	122.0	49.0	163.0
Embezzlement	47.8	45.3	23.5	25.4	19.0	24.0
Receiving stolen goods	14.5	14.0	9.5	13.0	15.6	18.0
Fraud	93.4	43.0	44.9	21.1	39.8	20.8
Forgery	27.4	11.1	10.3	6.6	10.3	8.4
Rape, etc	4.4	8.2	3.7	4.7	2.9	3.6
Insult	130.2	92.2	53.8	39.5	51.7	35.5
Malicious mischief ...	5.6	30.4	3.0	14.6	2.1	13.9
Felonious assault	72.3	191.9	18.7	49.2	19.8	41.6
Murder, manslaughter	0.2	0.7	0.2	0.5	0.0	0.5

After insisting on the evils of anti-Semitism and criticizing German social scientists at length, Bonger does deign to include the following:

In his Soziologie der Juden, Ruppin describes the Jewish spirit as follows:

"When we consider their intellectual talent, we may best call it invention, perception, organization, ambition in practical things, as well as intellectual liveliness or facility in grasping theoretical things, and rationalism in religious things. Probably all these qualities flow from the same source, from a capacity for quick association of ideas."

Leydesdorff (1919): "The mobility, as well as the activity and the impulsivity of the Jews is greater, the emotionality is quite considerably higher, than is the case with other races. Their intelligence stands at the top in a mixed group, their pride also. Greed for gold, dishonesty, but also generosity and helpfulness are strongly to the fore in Jewish character—also an inclination to exaggerate (extremism)."

The classification of the Jews according to temperament shows a greater percentage of nervous, sentimental, and passionate types, and a lesser percentage of neutral and phlegmatic types. Nervous diseases, such as hysteria and neurasthenia, are more prevalent among the Jews than among the rest of the population. (pp. 62-64)

Bonger goes on to consider the different European "races" one by one: Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic, Ugro-Finn, Dinaric (Slavic). He presents us this table (from his earlier work Criminalité et conditions économiques):

Countries	Years	Murder, Manslaughter, and Assault Where Death Results (Per Million Inhabitants)

Italy	1880-84		70.0

Spain	1883-84		64.9

Hungary	1876-80		56.2

Austria	1877-81		10.8

Belgium	1876-80		8.5

Ireland	1880-84		8.1

France	1880-84		6.4

Scotland	1880-84		4.4

England	1880-84		3.9

Germany	1882-84		3.4

Netherlands	1880-81		3.1

As well as the following, from Hacker, "Statistique comparée de la criminalité," Revue Internationale de Droit Penal, XIII (1936):

		CONVICTED PER 100,000 OF ADULT POPULATION
			Murder and Manslaughter
Countries	Years		Murder and Manslaughter	Assault

Bulgaria	1929-30		22.3	1.5

Lithuania	1929-31		13.9	4.1

Latvia	1929-32		11.0	2.6

Esthonia	1927-28		10.0	9.0

Greece	1929-31		8.7	1.1

Poland	1932		7.3	?

Portugal	1929-32		5.6	?

Finland	1929-31		5.1	1.2

Hungary	1928-31		4.1	5.3

Roumania	1929-32		3.9	9.1

Italy	1926-27		3.8	3.3

Austria	1929-32		2.0	?

France	1925-28		1.6	1.2

Czechoslovakia	1929-31		1.4	2.2

Germany	1929-31		0.9	10.5

Switzerland	1927-32		0.9	1.2

Ireland	1929-31		0.8	0.1

Belgium	1928-31		0.7	6.8

Netherlands	1929-31		0.5	0.8

Denmark	1929-32		0.3	0.4

Sweden	1929-31		0.3	0.2

Norway	1929-32		0.2	0.5

England and Wales	1927-31		0.2	0.1

About "Mediterraneans," he offers this:

Fischer's characterization is the following:

"From the mental point of view, the North and Central European is struck by the vivacity and instability of the Mediterranean race. A certain savageness and cruelty is theirs; little foresight, great capacity to imitate and let themselves be influenced. The intelligence is not high, and the fantasy not at all so developed as with the Nordics, the musical talent considerably higher."

Kretschmer says in Geniale Menschen (1929) that "The impulse to cruelty and rashness, wild bursts of passion, is a common stigma of all Mediterraneans and mixed Mediterranean peoples." (p. 74)

As for "Alpines," he says:

Günther, in his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes asserts that the Alpine race, which he calls "östische Rasse," is characterized by patience, industry and slowness of mentality. The Alpine is a real "Spiessbürger." Easy-going, friendly, and, when intoxicated, "friendly to the point of being obtrusively clinging." He does not quickly become violent, he scolds (!) sooner. In general he does not incline to law-breaking (!). Thus the "portrait parlé" of the Alpine according to the admirer of the Nordic race.

Gault describes the Alpine race as follows: "They are attached to the soil; conservative, peaceful, respectful toward authority, patient, painstaking and democratic. Like the Nordics, they are strongly attached to religion, and are somewhat more liable than they to emotional expression."

Ripley says the following: "A certain passivity, or patience, is characteristic of the Alpine peasantry." "As a rule ... this Alpine type makes a comfortable and contented neighbor, a resigned and peaceful subject." (p. 84)

Vexed that the sources he has quoted so liberally in his work "become positively lyrical when they begin to describe the Nordics," Bonger downplays the supposed low-crime tendencies of this group. But as the numbers he has himself presented bear them out, he is forced to admit sulkily, "Among the blonds is a larger percentage of quiet, slow men of non-violent reaction than among the darker people. That is all." (emphasis his)

This table, on criminality in immigrants to the U.S., he takes from Prisoners and Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1910, p. 131:

	IMMIGRANTS TO THE U.S.
	CONDEMNED, BY COUNTRY OF BIRTH, PER 100,000 OF POPULATION IN 1910

Country	Assault	Murder	Manslaughter

Mexico	109.6	5.0	11.8

Austria	70.4	1.2	4.0

Italy	67.2	2.3	8.0

Poland	51.9	0.4	1.2

Hungary	49.0	1.2	2.2

Ireland	38.2	0.4	0.8

Russia	36.6	0.1	1.4

All countries	35.5	0.8	2.2

Canada
(French)	27.5	0.3	1.0

Scotland	19.9	1.1	0.8

Canada
(English)	18.2	0.1	0.7

France	16.2	0.0	2.6

Germany	14.8	0.3	1.0

England
and Wales	14.8	0.3	1.5

Sweden	14.4	0.3	0.5

Norway	11.9	0.2	0.7

Denmark	11.6	0.0	1.1

Switzerland	11.2	0.0	1.6

As far as the "Ugro-Finns," Bonger remarks on the much higher criminality observed in Estonians and Finns than in Swedes and Norwegians:

Finally, the most distinguished Finnish criminal statistician, Verkko, in his Verbrechen wider das Leben und Körperverletzungsverbrechen informs us that the figure for murders in Finland is about 20 times as high as in the Scandinavian countries. In Finland itself, where about 10 percent of the population speak Swedish, the relative aggressive criminality (manslaughter and assault with resulting death) of the Finnish-speaking part is two or three times as great and, in the case of criminal assault, even four times as great. (p. 93)

He quotes several authors who attribute this fact to the extremely low tolerance of Finns for alcohol. It has been since postulated, by Harpending and Cochran among others, that peoples who came to agriculture later in history never developed a real tolerance for alcohol, although the subject remains debated.

The following table, charting misdemeanors while drunk in immigrants to the U.S., Bonger takes from Monatsschrift für Kriminalbiologie, XXIX:

NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS TO U.S. CONVICTED, BETWEEN JAN. I AND JUNE 30, 1923, FOR MISDEMEANORS WHILE DRUNK; IN PRISON BECAUSE THEY WERE UNABLE TO PAY THE FINE



	Absolute Total	Per 100,000 of Each Group

Finland	733	489.2

Ireland	2,528	243.7

Norway	703	193.2

Sweden	1,107	117.0

Scotland	313	123.0

Mexico	529	110.6

Austria	521	90.5

Poland	878	77.1

Canada	790	70.7

Russia	619	44.2

Hungary	169	42.5

England
and Wales	351	39.9

Germany	290	17.2

Greece	25	14.2

Italy	208	12.9

About "Dinaric" (Slavic) criminality, Bonger offers this:

Verkko in his work previously mentioned [...] gives figures on the criminality in Russia for the period 1899- 1914. From this it would appear in the first place that aggressive criminality in Russia is great, in a general comparison with the surrounding countries, including Finland, and therefore should have a place at the top of the list in Table XIV. In the second place, that the great amount of aggressive crime in Asiatic Russia, where numerous other peoples and races live under quite different conditions, is far greater than in European Russia.

If one divides European Russia, in the customary way, into three great sections: Russia proper, Russian Poland, and the Caucasus, then the last named territory has the maximum of serious aggressive crime (five or six times greater than Russia proper), Poland follows, and the minimum is found in Russia proper. (p. 98)

This table, on criminality in Russia, he takes from Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform, XXIX (1939):


Nationalities (per 100,000 of population)	Crimes against Human Life, 1908-12	Assault, 1908-1912




Armenians	16.0	4.6

Caucasian
mountain people	14.8	4.8

Georgians, etc	10.4	4.6

Turk-Tartars
	6.0	3.0

Russians	4.0	6.2

Poles	3.8	12.2

Lithuanians
and Letts	3.4	5.4

Germans	2.0	2.4

Jews	1.4	2.4

A varied tableau indeed. If this illusory group called "whites" can show such criminal differences through time and space, should it really come as a surprise to policy-makers that groups as varied as Amerindians, Sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians could do the same? Any sensible purveyor of sound criminal policy should concur that "color-blind" justice should be just that, and let the chips fall where they may.

Provisioning...or Mating?

2011-11-19T22:34:00.007+01:00

Morality or Biology? Those engaged in the culture wars tend to focus on the first; those combing through the genome, the second. In 'Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations,' Edward M. Miller offers us tantalizing insight into the why of some of our African brethren's puzzling behavior. An exercise of historical interest, perhaps, to compare his conclusions with the anthropological observations of those who've gone before us.

Says Miller [all emphasis ours]:

'In some species, males devote more effort to seeking mating opportunities. In other species, they devote more effort to assisting their offspring. In each species, males evolve to use the strategy that most promotes their fitness.

'[...] In warm climates, females typically can gather enough food for themselves and their children. In cold climates, hunting is required to survive winter, and females typically do not hunt (other than for easily captured small game). Hence, offspring survival requires male provisioning in cold climates. Thus, cold climate males were selected to devote more efforts to provisioning, and less to seeking matings. In warm climates, such male provisioning was not essential, even if desirable.'

A pure Negro, about thirty-five years of age, a few years ago, purchased about half an acre of land on the bank of a "branch" near a small village in Maryland. [...] This Negro has been living in it for years and seems perfectly contented. His family consists of himself, wife and three daughters eleven to seventeen years of age. The surrounding country is one of the best tomato growing sections in the United States and during about six weeks of the tomato season tomato pickers are in great demand and make good wages.

During this time the Negro man and his family usually work hard; for they pick by the basket and make in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars. This is practically their year's work. The remainder of the year they do but little. They have a garden, pigs, and chickens. It would be an easy matter for this family to get ahead in the world ; but they prefer the easy life of comparative idleness. (W.H. Collins, 1918)

'Thus, warm climate males who devoted more efforts to seeking mating opportunities, and less to provisioning, left more offspring. This theory can explain many of the known racial differences.'

Fouillée asserts that the dominant characteristics of the Negro are: Sensuality, a tendency to servile imitation, lack of initiative, horror of solitude, instability, inordinate love of singing and dancing, and unconquerable taste for glitter and ornament. He is a person of pleasure, light, gossipy, improvident, lazy.

[...] If one would express the general impression of those who know the North American Negro, then one would say: He is childlike. He does not look very far ahead, he is not very accurate, he is fond of bright colors and finery, is easily distracted. These characteristics may, naturally, be inherent, but this is not necessarily so. (W.A. Bonger, 1943)

'Under some conditions males leave more descendants by devoting more energy to seeking copulations (an endeavor that often includes prestige seeking), and relatively less to provisioning their offspring. In these conditions, selection will be for such characteristics as high sex drive, aggression, a mesomorphic body build, and large testes.'

All who know the Negro recognize, however, that the chief and overpowering element in his make-up is an imperious sexual impulse which, aroused at the slightest incentive, sweeps aside all restraints in the pursuit of physical gratification. We may say now that this element of Negro character constitutes the main incitement to degeneracy of the race and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting. (W.H. Thomas, 1901)

'Barnard and Woodburn (1988) noted that, "In all known hunter-gatherer societies, with immediate return systems, and in many but not all, hunter-gatherer societies with delayed return systems, people are almost always able to meet their nutritional needs very adequately without working long hours." [...] Most tropical hunter-gatherer societies are immediate return ones.'

This is also one of the main reasons, no doubt, for the great increase in Negro tenant farmers, especially that of share tenants. The latter class increased about thirty-six per cent between 1900 and 1910. Many of these seldom work a full day at a time. As they usually put off cultivating a crop to the last moment, if a wet season happens to set in, it is soon greatly damaged by a growth of grass. As a tenant farmer, the Negro realizes that he is more independent, his time is his own, and that he can usually work when he pleases. A great part of his time is given to various Negro recreations, such as visiting, riding and driving, crap-shooting, preaching, attending revivals, and camp-meetings. (W.H. Collins, 1918)

It was the impossibility of getting the Negroes [in Jamaica] to do any regular work that led to the importation of the Chinese and the Indian coolies. (J.A. Froude, 1900)

'Gardner (1972, p. 414), in describing the Paliyans, a foraging people of India, has pointed out that, "In normal times Paliyan men and women spend a bare three to four hours a day obtaining food and evidence no anxiety whatsoever about its supply." [...] Not surprisingly, with the parties not needing each other economically, "the usual situation is one of fragile, often serial, unions, terminated quickly by the offended party when conflict arises" (p. 419).'

Huffman says that in 1894 more than one-fourth of the colored births in the city of Washington were illegitimate. Many prominent Negroes admit that above ninety per cent of both sexes are unchaste. A negro may be a pillar in the church and at the same time the father of a dozen illegitimate children by as many mothers. (W.H. Collins, 1918)

'Lee and DeVore's famous Man the Hunter is often summarized as showing that most calories come from gathering, not hunting, that most gathering is done by females, and that hunter-gatherers need spend only a relatively small part of their time in gathering. Taken together, these facts imply that a woman can feed her family with little male assistance. This suggests that males would leave more descendants by focusing their efforts on mating rather than on provisioning.'

[In Philadelphia] the number of deserted wives, however, allowing for false reports, is astoundingly large and presents many intricate problems. A very large part of charity given to Negroes is asked for this reason. The causes of desertion are partly laxity in morals and partly the difficulty of supporting a family. [...] There can be no doubt but what sexual looseness is to-day the prevailing sin of the mass of the Negro population, and that its prevalence can be traced to bad home life in most cases. Children are allowed on the street night and day unattended; loose talk is often indulged in; the sin is seldom if ever denounced in the churches. (W.E.B. DuBois, 1899)

'In particular, males frequently have the opportunity to father children through extramarital relationships or rape. High impulsivity individuals would be expected to more often act on these opportunities than would low impulsivity individuals. Thus, impulsivity would be selected for where a high mating effort contributed to fitness.'

In the city of Philadelphia the increasing number of bold and daring crimes committed by Negroes in the last ten years [1889-1899] has focused the attention of the city on this subject. There is a widespread feeling that something is wrong with a race that is responsible for so much crime, and that strong remedies are called for. One has but to visit the corridors of the public buildings, when the courts are in session, to realize the part played in law-breaking by the Negro population. [...] Judges on the bench have discussed the matter. Indeed, to the minds of many, this is the real Negro problem. (W.E.B. DuBois, 1899)

'Survival through the winter may require not only storing food, but also storing fuel, making clothing, and building shelters. These activities require resisting impulses to divert energy to activities with shorter term returns (gathering non-storable food, drinking, or even flirting). Thus, there are other reasons why seeking immediate gratification and impulsivity would be selected against in cold climates.'

We must acknowledge that the solid basis of the virtues is thrift. The improvidence of the negro is notorious. His neglect of his horse, his mule, his machinery, his eagerness to spend his earnings on finery, his reckless purchase of watermelons, chickens, and garden stuff, when he might easily grow them on his own patch of ground, -- these and many other incidents of improvidence explain the constant dependence of the negro upon his employer and his creditor. (J.R. Commons, 1907)

'Sociability assists in learning of, and exploiting, mating opportunities. However, time spent socializing reduces the time available for gathering food and for other parental investments. Sociability often involves remaining near the camp where others are located, while provisioning requires leaving to forage. Thus, selection for provisioning will reduce sociability.'

[The Negro] will spend hours in talking about the most trivial things concerning himself and others. This disposition to chatter consumes an amount of time of the value of which he has not the slightest idea. Prattle is a source of infinite mischief to the freedman, for it leads him to be very inquisitive about persons; though it may be said, that, were he to expend half as much energy seeking to know the why and wherefore of things, as he employs in prying into the personal affairs of others, he would speedily become an intelligent and self-reliant being. (W.H. Thomas, 1901)

'If those selected for mating effort have higher levels of aggression, lower behavioral restraint, and higher sex drives, it would be predicted that rape rates would be higher.'

It is a fact, which no one will deny, that the crime of rape was substantially unknown during the period of slavery, and was hardly known during the first years of freedom: it is the fatal product of new conditions. Twenty-five years ago women in the South went unattended, with no more fear of attack than they have in New England. To-day, no woman in the South goes alone upon the highway out of sight of white men, except on necessity, and no man leaves his women alone in his house if he can help it. Over 500 white women and children have been assaulted in the South by Negroes within that time. (T.N. Page, 1904)

'Sexual restraint is the ability to resist opportunities for copulation. Males that devote their energies to paternal investment have less energy left for seeking additional matings.'

[In Haiti] the blacks, who form the peasantry of the country, are peaceable, kindly, and hospitable people. [...] Their sex relations are of a frankly natural sort. Marriage is neither frequent nor legally prescribed. Polygamy is openly practiced and the African dances lead to a more or less wholesale and promiscuous sexual indulgence.

[...] The marriage rate [in Jamaica] is not only low, but tends to decrease, and with its decrease rises the percentage of illegitimate births, which now stands at the figure of sixty-five children out of every hundred. (H.H. Johnston, 1910)

'Where males are more aggressive, one would expect females to need to be more aggressive in order to deal with their mates successfully. Where devoting energy to provisioning is not in the male's reproductive interests, females who aggressively assert their rights might be more successful than those who are more passive.'

Also, the proportion of women criminals is higher among Negroes. 19.1 per cent of the Negro criminals committed in 1910 were women, and 7.2 per cent of the whites were women, or one out of every five Negro criminals was a female, one out of every thirteen white criminals was a female. (W.D. Weatherford, 1911)

Theorizing without observation gives only one piece of the puzzle; ditto observation without theorizing. When the two come together so forcefully, it gives pause.

It is tempting to moralize, but from a policy-making perspective, what ought to be is less important than what is. Which ethnic and gender groups live within our borders, and how are they likely to behave with strong constraints? With only limited constraints? With none at all? This is a line of questioning which for a wise policy-maker might bear real fruit.

REFERENCES:
Bonger, W.A., Race and Crime, Trans. Margaret Mathews Hordyk. NY: Columbia University Press, 1943.
Collins, W.H., The Truth About Lynching and the Negro in the South, NY: Neale Publishing Co., 1918.
Commons, J.R., Races and Immigrants in America, NY: MacMillan, 1907.
DuBois, W. E.B., The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1899.
Froude, J.A., The English in the West Indies, NY: C. Scribner & Sons, 1900.
Johnston, H.H., The Negro in the New World, London, Methuen & Co., 1910.
Page, T.N., The Negro: The Southerner's Problem. NY: C. Scribner's Sons, 1904.
Reuter, E.B., The American Race Problem: A Study of the Negro, Ed. Seba Eldridge. NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1927.
Thomas, W.H., The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing, NY: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1901.
Weatherford, W.D., Negro life in the South: Present Conditions and Needs, NY: YMCA Press, 1911.

'Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant'

2011-11-12T23:57:00.013+01:00

Image source

      'Yes, Zeus made this the greatest pain of all:
                             Woman.
                            A man who's with a woman can't get through
      a single day without a troubled mind.'

Semonides of Amorgos, 'Woman,' 7th century B.C.

           Receptionist, to novelist Melvin Udall:   'How do you write women so well?'
        Melvin Udall:   'I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.'

                                         Mark Andrus, 'As Good As It Gets,' 1997 A.D.

Those born and raised amid the Late Twentieth Century Delusion were force-fed many lies. 'Race is only skin-deep,' for one. 'Anything unpleasant happening anywhere on the planet is somehow attributable to Europeans'-- We've all heard that one. But perhaps the most insidious?

'There are no real differences between women and men.'

How silly it sounds, and yet how thoroughly this bêtise has seized the spirits of our educated classes. Denying it can cost you your professional reputation, the respect of your peers, even your plum job as president of Harvard.

But reaction has set in. The radical (for our days) notion that women are not the same as men has found eloquent defenders, from the unsentimental Chateau Heartiste to the optimistic Dalrock. Perusing such sites could prove demoralizing for woman weaned on Late Twentieth Century Delusion. Yet it is often the case that in criticism lies truth. Disagreeable truth, but isn't much truth disagreeable?

In this realm as in many others, men who came before us had things to say, though they are today considered high heresy. When a group we belong to is criticized, our first reaction is to shift blame. The problem lies not with us, no, it lies with you, you hater of the feminine, you misogynist. And yet... Looking at ourselves through the eyes of this Other Tribe, these Men, could tell us much. Dare we meet these dead men's gazes unflinchingly?

Scholars Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus have been bold enough to gather a tome of texts--pamphlets, guides, correspondence--about women in Renaissance-era England. (1) (With which to decry misogyny, but little matter.)

Some men in that far-off time, burnt by unpleasant encounters, let fly with a candor that will not be unfamiliar to readers of either website cited above. Joseph Swetnam in The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward [contrary], and unconstant women (2) (1615), for example:

Women are all necessary evils and yet not all given to wickedness; and yet many so bad, that in my conceit if I should speak the worst that I know by some women, I should make their ears glow that hears me, and my tongue would blister to report it.

Moses describeth a woman thus: 'At the first beginning,' saith he, 'a woman was made to be a helper unto man.' And so they are indeed, for she helpeth to spend and consume that which many painfully getteth.

After the comedy, things get serious:

For women have a thousand ways to entice thee and ten thousand ways to deceive thee and all such fools as are suitors unto them: some they keep in hand with promises, and some they feed with flattery, and some they delay with dalliances, and some they please with kisses. They lay out the folds of their hair to entangle men into their love; betwixt their breasts is the vale of destruction; and in their beds there is hell, sorrow, and repentance. Eagles eat not men till they are dead, but women devour them alive. For a woman will pick thy pocket and empty thy purse, laugh in thy face and cut thy throat. They are ungrateful, perjured, full of fraud, flouting and deceit, unconstant, waspish, toyish, light, sullen, proud, discourteous, and cruel.

A stinging rebuke, sure to be discounted by many as sour grapes. Swetnam admits as much:

Yet perhaps some may say unto me that I have sought for the honey, caught the Bee by the tail, or that I have been bit or stung with some of these wasps, otherwise I could never have been expert in betraying their qualities.

He admits to being a rambling man:

Indeed, I must confess I have been a Traveler this thirty and odd years, and many travelers live in disdain of women. The reason is for that their affections are so poisoned with the heinous evils of unconstant women which they happen to be acquainted with in their travels; for it doth so cloy their stomachs that they censure hardly of women ever afterwards.

He is sure that he'll be rebuked for his candor:

When I first began to write this book, my wits were gone awool-gathering,...and so in the rough of my fury I vowed forever to be an open enemy to women.

[...] I esteem little of the malice of women. For men will be persuaded with reason, but women must be answered with silence. For I know women will bark more at me than Cerberus, the two-headed Dog, did at Hercules when he came into Hell to fetch out the fair Prosperina, [...] For I have known many men stung with some of these Scorpions, and therefore I warn all men to beware the Scorpion.

I know women will bite the lip at me and censure hardly of me, but I fear not the cursed Cow, for she commonly hath short horns. Let them censure of me what they will, for I mean not to make them my Judges, and if they shoot their spite at me, they may hit themselves. And so I will smile at them as at the foolish fly which burneth herself in the candle. And so, friend Reader, if thou hast any discretion at all, thou mayest take a happy example by these most lascivious and crafty, whorish, thievish, and knavish women, which were the cause of this my idle time spending.

But Swetnam is far from alone in warning against the weaknesses of women. Marriage advice poured from the pens of 16th- and 17th-century writers. Considered among the worst one can find in a wife is the dreaded scold or shrew. John Taylor, from A Juniper Lecture (3), in 1639:

It is better for a man to have a fair Wife that himself and every man else will love, or a deformed wife that would hire others to make much of her, or a drunken Wife that would make much of herself, or an old wife that were bedridden of her tongue, or a thievish wife that should steal from himself and others, or a sluttish wife that would poison him and end all his misery [...] than to be matched and overmatched with a scold.

For a scold will be melancholy malicious, [...] she will knit the brows, frown, be wayward, froward [contrary], cross, and untoward on purpose to torment her husband. Her delight is chiefly to make debate abroad and to be unquiet at home. In her house she will be waspish, peevish, testy, tetchy, and snappish. It is meat and drink to her to exercise her spleen and envy, and with her twittle twattle [idle chatter] to sow strife, debate, contention, division, and discordant heartburning amongst her neighbors.

I have heard a husband ask a wife such a mild question, and she hath snapped him up so disdainfully with an answer, that no Mistress would have used her apprentice boy so scornfully [...] Therefore I advise all men--young and old, rich and poor--to marry any woman of any bad condition other than a scold.

Here is the advice of William Whatley to women in 1619:

If ever thou purpose to be a good wife, and to live comfortably, set down this with thyself: mine husband is my superior, my better; he hath authority and rule over me; nature hath given it to him... God hath given it to him.

In the anonymous but oft-recited Homily on Marriage (1562), we are warned that

The woman is a weak creature not endued with like strength and constancy of mind; therefore, they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be; and lighter they be, and more vain in their fantasies and opinions.

A woman's gossiping tendencies were seen as of potential harm. Samuel Rowland, in The Bride (1617), warns the wife to

...be no gadding gossip up and down
To hear and carry tales amongst the rest
That are the news reporters of the town.

Once sexually experienced, a woman whose husband had died (common in this age) was seen as a potential seductress, and thus should remarry. According to McManus and Henderson, "Thomas Becon (1547) advises remarriage as the only course that enables a young widow to avoid unchastity,

'for how light, vain, trifling, unhonest, unhousewifelike, young widows have been in all ages and are also at this present day experience doth sufficiently declare."'

[Today's context requiring us to perhaps replace 'young widows' with 'young divorcees'? 'young non-virgins'?]

Indeed, the sexual voracity of some women was immortalized in verse, as we have here Ben Jonson, from 'A Celebration of Charis' (1630s), giving the words of a woman defining her 'ideal' lover:

For his Mind, I doe not care,
That's a Toy, that I could spare:
Let his Title be but great,
His Clothes rich, and band [ruff] sit neat,
Himselfe young, and face be good,
All I wish is understood.
What you please, you parts may call,
'Tis one good part I'ld lie withall.

As for the education of a woman, Spanish Catholic humanist Juan Luis Vives (who had studied under Erasmus), author of Instruction of a Christian Woman, (1523), Plan of Studies for a Girl (1524), and Duty of Husbands (1529), recommends, say McManus and Henderson,

'the moral philosophers for their efficacy in subduing women's tumultuous passions; for this purpose, a woman should read Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and Aristotle.'

Elizabeth Brooke Jocelyn, an educated bourgeoise Englishwoman, wrote the following to her husband while pregnant with her first child. Fearful of dying in childbirth, she expressed her wishes on the future tot's education, if it be a girl (emphasis ours):

I desire her bringing up to be learning the Bible, as my sisters do, good housewifery, writing, and good works; other learning a woman needs not, though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion. Yet I desired not so much in my own, having seen that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdom, which is of no better use to them than a mainsail to a flyboat, which runs under water. But where learning and wisdom meet in a virtuous disposed woman, she is the fittest closet of all goodness. [...] But, my dear, though she have all this in her, she will hardly make a poor man's wife. Yet I leave it to thy will. If thou desirest a learned daughter, I pray God give her a wise and religious heart, that she may use it to his glory, thy comfort, and her own salvation.

Much to consider in these words, much to perhaps repulse us, but what repulses us can often be useful to reflect upon. Our own weaknesses, after all, are always the hardest to see.

       (1) Usher Henderson, Katherine and McManus, Barbara, Half Humankind, Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England, 1540-1640, U. of    Illinois Press, 1985.
   (2) Full title: The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women or the vanity of them, choose you whether, With a Commendation of wise, virtuous, and honest Women, Pleasant fro married Men, profitable for young Men, and hurtful to none. (1615)
   (3) Full title: A Juniper Lecture, With description of all sorts of women, good and bad: From the modest to the maddest, from the most Civil to the scold Rampant, their praise and dispraise compendiously related. The Second Impression, with many new Additions. Also, the Author's advice how to tame shrew or vex her. (1639)

More Able and Less Able

2011-11-05T02:54:00.006+01:00

The More Able will dominate the Less Able, always and everywhere.

Right-thinking people in the West are indignant about Europe's past colonial plunders. They are furious at the thought of Western companies swooping in to buy up state assets from highly-indebted African countries. More sanguine are they, however, about this:

"Roll up, roll up, roll up. Elgin Marbles, Acropolis, Mykonos. Anyone? You don't have to be an ancient Greek historian to understand the significance of it. But maybe it helps. [...] Under pressure to raise €50bn as the quid pro quo for its massive €110bn (£98bn) bail-out, Greece is being forced to hawk its industrial and commercial backbone to the highest bidder."

Who's buying?

"The advisers and sell-offs being set up include:

• Deutsche Bank and National Bank of Greece on the sale of OPAP, the state gambling monopoly

• Credit Suisse on state lotteries

• Rothschild and Barclays appointed for road concessions

• PriceWaterhouse selected for railway firm OSE

• France's BNP Paribas and Greece's National Bank on the extension of an operating lease on Athens International Airport.

• Lazard [Global Equity] on exploiting the commercial activities of the Greek trusts and loans funds."

Just as water finds its level, the More Able will dominate the Less Able. EU Observer tells us the tale in headlines:

Greek strike turns violent ahead of new austerity vote

Followed shortly by:

Merkel wants 'permanent' supervision of Greece

Culminating with:

Germany makes Greece pay with sovereignty for new bail-out

Not quite, perhaps, what the cheery Greeks were expecting in 2001:

Lyberaki, Antigone and Paraskevopoulos, C. J. 2002. “Social capital measurement in Greece”. In OECD–ONS International Conference on Social Capital Measurement, 25-27 September, London.

'More able' and 'less able' are relative terms. John Ward eloquently reminds us of what the Greeks are more able:

"Greece is about music and fishing nets, summer affairs and old ladies or grey-bearded men in black, whitewashed walls against sharp blue skies, windey cobbled streets, barbecued half-warm food, aubergines, and – on every level – warmth.

In the Greece of my heyday, ferries arrived when they arrived, and meals were served when the restaurant owner judged that the ambience was right. [...] The streets of Greece were littered with feral cats, the evenings with chance encounters and gentle musicians. Everything was chaotic in a way that chimed perfectly with the times. The last thing Greece should ever have done was start wearing red braces and go join Wall Street."

Wearing red braces and joining Wall Street...If such is required to exist in the Eurozone, how could one know which nations are More Able to wear those red braces and which are Less?

. . .

Some, for example, have hinted that a widespread reticence to pay one's taxes has crippled Greece's ability to thrive in the Eurozone. Could a generalized lack of respect for the commonweal be fatal to Eurozone membership? Is such a lack of respect measureable?

Antigone Lyberaki and C.J. Paraskevopoulos, in their 2002 paper "Social Capital Measurement in Greece," give us some potential clues.

Corruption index: How does Greece stack up against the rest of Europe?
(higher score = less perceived corruption)

How much do the Greeks trust the 25% of their fellow citizens who work in the Civil Service?

So in which institutions do the Greeks place their trust?

Some researchers have suggested that one can guess the probable corruption level of a country by the intensity of associative participation. In Greece?

Could respect for the commonweal be linked to interest in the happenings of the larger society?

After nearly 30 years of receiving EU structural funds, which all were assured would create a 'levelling' effect between Greece and the countries who sent it such funds:

Links in a chain, one might be tempted to believe, to help explain a country where:

"Along street after street of opulent mansions and villas, surrounded by high walls and with their own pools, most of the millionaires living here are, officially, virtually paupers. How so? Simple: they are allowed to state their own earnings for tax purposes, figures which are rarely challenged.

Manipulating a corrupt tax system, many of the residents simply say that they earn below the basic tax threshold of around £10,000 a year, even though they own boats, second homes on Greek islands and properties overseas.

And, should the taxman rumble this common ruse, it can be dealt with using a ‘fakelaki’ — an envelope stuffed with cash. There is even a semi-official rate for bribes: passing a false tax return requires a payment of up to 10,000 euros (the average Greek family is reckoned to pay out £2,000 a year in fakelaki.)" [emphasis ours]

And so the Less Able-- the Less Able to run a society which respects the commonweal and pays its bills-- fall prey to the More Able:

"The EU-IMF-ECB troika 'comes and goes' every few months, but it's clear Greece will need a 'permanent, long-term supervision', German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in the Bundestag on Wednesday. She also said Greek citizens deserve the respect of Germany."

Respect, unfortunately, is earned. By showing oneself Able. Only the better souls among us do not end up feeling contempt for those who insist we hold their hand. If it is a question of living on one's knees or dying on one's feet, what can one imagine the Greeks will end up choosing?

Previously: Letting Things Slide, Colonialism Today

Lied to?

2011-10-29T23:54:00.006+02:00

Photo source

Those who remarked upon racial differences in the past, we've been promised, did so for one reason: They were European Supremacists. Anyone who attempted to quantify such differences was driven by the need to prove his own group's superiority. 'Don't read those books,' we're told as youngsters, 'they're a lot of racist nonsense.'

So we don't. And they molder on library shelves, relics to forget about.

Until we do.

And see we've been deceived.

An author of European descent looking to paint in the worst light possible all groups other than his own would be advised to refrain from making observations of the following type.

'[...] from the [Hawaiian] community's standpoint the importation of Chinese has been a conspicuously successful experiment. There is no question in anybody's mind regarding their thrift and industriousness and their dependability. Lacking any marked tendency to collective ambition, or "race solidarity" as it is sometimes expressed, they are the less liable to form troublesome political "blocs" and are unlikely to scheme too deeply for the advancement of their group. [...] The Chinese is an almost ideal immigrant. He possesses all the virtues of a useful citizen without the embarrassing ambition to become one. [...] He is therefore an ideal resident of another man's country.'

Thus spake S.D. Porteus in 1926 in his study on the ethnicities of Hawaii, Temperament and Race.

E.B. Reuter, writing on 'Mixed-Blood Races' in 1919, has this to say of Chinese in the Philippines:

'The vigorous, thrifty, entreprising Chinese share with the Chinese half-breeds the monopoly of the trade in the [Philippine] Islands. [...] The quiet, industrious Chinese half-breed is perhaps the best man on the Islands.'

He goes on to cite Friedrich Ratzel who asserts in his 1898 History of Mankind that

'the Chinese half-breed in the Philippines is superior to the European half-breed.'

A.E. Jenks passes along this anecdote in his 1914 article 'Assimilation in the Philippines':

'During the latter days of my residence in the Islands in 1905 Governor-General Wright one day told me that he had recently personally received from one of the most distinguished Filipinos of the time, and a member of the Insular Civil Commission, the statement "that there was not a single prominent and dominant family among the christianized Filipinos which did not possess Chinese blood." The voice and the will of the Filipinos today is the voice and the will of these brainy, industrious, rapidly developing men whose judgment in time the world is bound to respect..."'

T.R. Garth in 1931 undertook an exhaustive survey of all racial group studies conducted up to that point (1880-1930) in which, after averaging dozens of test samples taken over the decades, he reported:

'The racial I.Q.s as found are, by way of résumé: whites, 100; Chinese, 99; Japanese, 99; Mexicans, 78; southern Negroes, 75; northern Negroes, 85; American Indians, full blood, 70. If one says that what is fair for one is fair for another, then regardless of environmental difficulties, the Chinese and Japanese score so nearly like the white that the difference is negligible.'

[Those familiar with the Flynn Effect will not be mystified to see that today, tests show Chinese and Japanese slightly above Europeans on such a scale.]

Garth also admits that, on a range of mental process tests,

'these groups were found to be inferior to the whites, except the Chinese, who were slightly better than the whites in rote memory only.'

Porteus in 1926 led a detailed sociological study in Hawaii observing different ethnic groups' character traits (relying on the judgement of plantation owners, schoolteachers, doctors, and social workers). Studying Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Porto Ricans, Filipinos and native Hawaiians, he found that the Chinese cleanly outscored every other group in Prudence, Self-Determination, and Dependability, and were second only to the Japanese in Planning Capacity, Resolution, Stability, and Self-Control.

W.A. Bonger, in his detailed 1943 comparative study Race and Crime, claims to be unable to find elevated criminal activity in Chinese populations in North America. On the contrary, N.S. Hayner in 1937 reports that:

'None of these Oriental groups presents a problem when compared with whites, but they do show interesting variations in the extent of criminality when compared with one another. A study of 1,944 Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino male arrests in Seattle for the five-year period 1928-32 shows that when these arrests are compared with the estimated number of Oriental males fifteen years of age and over, the average annual rate is 5.7 percent. The rate for white males of the same age is 11.1 percent. When considered separately the Japanese men have a rate of 2.6 percent, the Chinese of 9.6, and the Filipino of 11.8.

[...] Judge Helen Gregory MacGill of the Vancouver Juvenile Court found that during the ten-year period from 1926 to 1935 the rate for white juvenile delinquency in the city of Vancouver was thirteen times as great as that for Orientals.'

Could it be, despite the assurances of our schoolteachers, that most who examined ethnic differences in days of yore did it out of pure scientific curiosity, and not out of nefarious race-boosterism?

When one sees that one has been lied to about some things--however well-intentioned those lies may have been--it begins to make one wonder how long and deep the lies go.

We'll just have to keep peering behind those musty old book covers.

As long as they remain on the shelves.

Chalk and cheese

2011-10-22T01:37:00.024+02:00

Photo source

"Our Italian colleagues from University of Rome Tor Vergata and University of Parma proposed
an idea that [as far as] public feelings of security and trust in the judicial system, southern and northern Italy should be treated as two separate countries.

In their view, they are as different as chalk and cheese: in the northern part,
the sense of necessity in terms of obeying the rules and moral condemnation of corruptive conduct in authoritative organs is much higher than in the South."

(E.U. Ethics Standardization Team member)

How many 'nations' can a nation contain? Depends on whom one asks. Inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, the former Sudan, the former Rhodesia could perhaps enlighten us. Or those living in the current Kashmir, or Caucusus, or Flanders.

Richard Griggs and Peter Hocknell have pegged the number of actual nations existing on planet earth at between 6000 and 9000. Europe alone, they say, is home to over one hundred. Lines drawn on maps by generals and statesmen tell us lies and half-truths. One nation, different beliefs, different values, different characters: What can a map really tell us?

Here, for example, is the nation known as the Italian Republic:

Photo source

What is a nation? By what can national or cultural values be measured? By the relatively successful functioning of one's institutions?

By one's measured public corruption levels?
[higher score = lower corruption]

Golden, Miriam and Picci, Lucci, 'Proposal for a New Measure of Corruption, Illustrated with

Italian Data,' Economics & Politics, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 37-75, March 2005.

By the nepotism levels reigning in academia?

Data source: Stefano Allesina, "Measuring Nepotism Through Shared Last Names: The Case of Italian Academia," PLoS ONE 6(8): e21160. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021160

By one's monetary wealth-producing capacity?

Data source: Eurostat

By one's arrival at widespread literacy?

Emmanuel Todd, 'L'Invention de l'Europe' (The Invention of Europe), Paris: Seuil, 2e edition, 1996.

One's performance on standardized tests?

Map by A Reluctant Apostate, data from OECD

What can one's electoral history tell us about values, past and present?

Three above maps from Emmanuel Todd, 'L'Invention de l'Europe' (The Invention of Europe), Paris: Seuil, 2e edition, 1996.

Is there a causal relationship, in either direction, between our government systems and us?

Putnam, Robert D., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1994.

What does how we say we would like to be ruled say about us?

Original image

What about that of our history of civic functioning?

Can our marriage practices tell us anything about who we are and what we value?

Data source (average 1930-34 and 1960-64), drawn from Cafalli-Sforza et al.

Further analysis at HBD chick

Difficult as ever to say what makes a 'nation,' what lines one can draw around it, what it believes, what it values, from whence its values come.

Nation and 'nation' will shift again, as they long have.

It would behoove us not to conflate the two.

Ethnic Co-existence, Yesterday

2011-10-15T23:06:00.006+02:00

People of our age have adopted the curious habit of considering ourselves more advanced, better informed, more wise, than the people of any generation who came before us.

This is new.

Peoples past always looked backwards toward a "golden age" of prosperity and wisdom whose great men were giants of philosophy, of whom we today are but a pale reflection. Why this change of heart among moderns?

Our technical innovation? Cuisinarts and contact lenses and polystyrene beer cozies are the proof that we have transcended our forebears in sagacity?

It would appear so, as even the opinions of our most prominent ancestors from two or three centuries past are today often held up to ridicule. This is particularly so when it comes to that most delicate of modern questions, ethnic co-habitation. The zeitgeist of our age, here in the West at the start of the 21st century, holds that each neighborhood should be an even blend of many ethnic groups: salt and pepper and cinammon and cumin put into the same shaker, thoroughly mixed, and sprinkled liberally.

Our forebears, even the most illustrious, would find such a thought curious indeed.

(So, incidentally, would our East Asian counterparts today, but then again they turn in a different sphere, chuckling peacably at our folly from afar.)

In the United States, world-famous "melting pot" and ground zero for modern racial politics, it may be of interest to consider the troubled ethnic co-existence of today in light of some of our predecessors' remarks on the subject. Above all in regards to Sub-Saharan Africans, that group who has lived longest alongside northern Europeans on North American soil.

A snapshot of the current situation can be viewed by perusing the works of racial anthropologist Paul Kersey at SBPDL, whose exhaustive coverage and analysis of the topic is without equal, or of the witty Unamusement Park, tireless aggregator of statistics on unpleasant truths whose database should not be missed. Journalist Steve Sailer frequently writes about the issue, as do the social commentators at Alternative Right, La Griffe du Lion, and Audacious Epigone.

As they and many others have demonstrated, relations between Afro- and Euro-Americans are at a rocky place. In this age of equal housing rights, as soon as a neighborhood becomes largely Afro, Euros begin to flee the numerous pathologies confronting them (the famous "white flight"), preferring an expensive moving process to facing daily grafitti, insult, vandalism, noise disturbance, property theft, and street violence. Curiously, as the neighborhood becomes "blacker and blacker", many Afros themselves feel compelled to leave the company of their ethnic brethren and to follow the Euros to their new neighborhoods (the frequent but rarely commented upon "black flight"). Where the cycle begins again. And again. And again.

So as we pack our bags and get ready to move house again, annoyed by the growing insecurity of our newly Afro neighborhood but secure in our liberal convictions that it's surely our fault, somehow, that this demographic acts out in this way, let us dare to cast an incautious eye on the opinions of an earlier age. Opinions which we once laughed off as hopelessly out of touch, misguided, archaic, but which we find harder and harder to ignore as ruthless reality begins to topple even our surest convictions.

Caution: Our forebears used words that may sound impolitic, mean-spirited, even abusive to our ears. What realities did they face in their daily lives capable of bringing them to such extreme conclusions? One can only survey the state of Afro-America in 2011 and ponder:

Abraham Lincoln:

"All I ask for the negro is that, if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy." "I yield to all which follows from necessity. What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races."

[Addressing an Afro-American audience:] “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.”

Thomas Jefferson:

"To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications."

Benjamin Franklin:

"Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?"

Scottish philosopher David Hume:

"I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. [...] Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptom of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession."

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family."

Henry Clay:

“What is the true nature of the evil of the existence of a portion of the African race in our population? It is not that there are some but that there are so many … who can never amalgamate with the great body of our population.” "[Repatriation to Africa would] rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.”

New York governor John Dix:

“The mass of crime committed by Africans is greater in proportion to numbers, in the non slaveholding than in the slaveholding States; and as a rule the degree of comfort enjoyed by them is inferior. This is not an argument in favor of slavery; but it is an unanswerable argument in favor of rendering emancipation and colonization [to Africa] coextensive with each other.”

Francis Scott Key:

“I cannot remember more than two instances out of this large number [of his freed slaves], in which it did not appear that the freedom I earnestly sought for them was their ruin. It has been so with a very large proportion of all others I have known emancipated.”

W.E.B. Dubois, in 1899:

"The number of deserted wives [in Philadelphia], however, allowing for false reports, is astoundingly large and presents many intricate problems. A very large part of charity given to Negroes is asked for this reason. The causes of desertion are partly laxity in morals and partly the difficulty of supporting a family. The result of this large number of homes without husbands is to increase the burden of charity and benevolence, and also on account of their poor home life to increase crime. Here is a wide field for social regeneration.

[...] There can be no doubt but what sexual looseness is to-day the prevailing sin of the mass of the Negro population, and that its prevalence can be traced to bad home life in most cases. Children are allowed on the street night and day unattended; loose talk is often indulged in; the sin is seldom if ever denounced in the churches. "

Finally, writer Thomas Nelson Page, in 1904:

"The Negroes, indeed, may be divided into three classes.

The first is a small class, comparatively speaking, who are more or less educated, some being well educated and well conducted; others, with a semblance of education and none too well behaved. The former constitute what may be termed the upper fraction; the latter possess only a counterfeit culture and lack the essential elements of character and even moral perception.

The second class is composed of a respectable, well-behaved, self-respecting element; sensible, though with little or no education, and, except when under the domination of passion, good citizens. This class embraces most of the more intelligent of the older generation who were trained in slavery, and a considerable element of the intelligent middle-aged, conservative workers of the race who were trained by that generation. The two together may be called the backbone of the race.

The third class is composed of those who are wholly ignorant, or in whom, though they have what they call education, this so-called education is unaccompanied by any of the fruits of character which education is supposed to produce. Among these are many who esteem themselves in the first class, and, because of a veneer of education, are not infrequently confounded with them.

The first two classes may easily be reckoned with. They contain the elements which make good citizens and which should enable them to secure all proper recognition and respect. They need no weapon but that which they possess: good citizenship.

Unfortunately, the great body of the race, and a vast percentage of the growing generation, belong to the third class. It is this class which has to be reckoned with. It is like a vast sluggish mass of uncooled lava over a large section of the country, burying some portions and affecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its surface smoulder fires which may at any time burst forth unexpectedly and spread desolation all around. It is this mass, increasing from beneath, not from above, which constitutes the Negro question."

According to our individual experience, these diverse and strongly-worded opinions from prominent men of our past may leave us open-mouthed in horror, shaking our heads in disbelief, or grimacing in recognition. Only life, after all, that daily accretion of small observations stacked one upon another over long years, can lead us to decide if our forebears spoke wisdom or folly-- or something in between.