Race: A Reader Enquires

Why racial purity won't save the West

A reader recently emailed me with some questions about race that I think express the concerns and misconceptions of many, so with his permission I have reproduced some of his comments here with my responses.

In relation to males and masculinity and all the rites of passage we go through and all of the traits we should exhibit and nurture, the one thing you seem to dodge is that of race. 

My video on racial traits addressed the topic directly enough to get banned on YouTube, and you don’t get the flak unless you’re over the target.

Surely men as leaders and protectors of their women, children and elderly have always been concerned with the continuation of their own particular race/tribe? 

If by this you mean only impregnating women of the same race or even ethnicity, then no - definitely not. Not only the Native American tribesmen often took white women, for example, but the Mongols, Vikings and many others also took women from other races and tribes.

There was also interbreeding between early hominid forms. Cro Magnon men didn’t turn down Denisovan babes.

Surely, in light of the masculine archetypes that you continue to put forward, not being concerned with the preservation of one's one racial/ethnic/tribal group goes against the very fabric of what it is to be a man?

Being a poor protector goes against the ‘very fabric of what it is to be a man,’ followed closely by being a poor procreator and a poor provider. By contrast, the Moors in Spain who impregnated Christian and Jewish women, for example, were completing their masculine conquest of what, at the time, was a weaker culture.

The same holds throughout the history of warfare from its earliest tribal state to, for example, the Red Army’s rape of Berlin. Because women are the limiting factor in reproduction and therefore a scarce resource, many wars have in fact been fought over women: impregnating women of another racial/ethnic/tribal group was the aim.

There are even evolutionary psychologists who argue that the reason rape is the most common female fantasy is precisely because it’s adaptive: the superior male genes of the conquerors are welcomed.

You've also spoken about the hyper-masculinity of Islam.  Muslims and blacks seem to me to be the groups most heavily invested in marrying within their own religion and race.  They also appear to have the most masculine and aggressive public images right now for the most part (male traits).

Muslims are a religious group; blacks are a racial group. Many Muslims, however, are black, and black men on average have higher levels of muscularity, testosterone and aggression than do either Caucasians or Orientals. This at least partly explains what you term the hyper-masculinity of Islam.

I'm very acutely aware of my Scottish identity.  It runs through my veins and it is tied up in the landscape, industry, religion, linguistics, folklore, legends, legal system, dance, food, customs, and more.

A black or Oriental immigrant could become Scottish in all the ways you list there.

Given your stance on masculinity, don't you think it would also be a good idea to tell men to honour their forefathers and to continue with their legacy in all of their endeavours, pass on what they left to us, and to extend this even at a racial level?  And that preserving one's race/tribe isn't equated to hating other races/tribes? Surely that must also be there in among the fairy tales and legends.

Nothing about the legacy you list there depends on race. And it’s unclear what people even mean by continuing a racial legacy anyway. For example, I am a mixture of British, Scottish and Irish - with some Viking blood as well - but I also have black ancestry. Exactly which forefathers am I supposed to honour? And all their genes will be passed on whatever I do anyway.

Until you do address this issue of racial/tribal preservation, I will continue to find your logic flawed, or at best selective in its truths in relation to masculinity.  You don't have to answer to me directly, but it is a very curious omission to your body of work.  If you have written about it before, I've not encountered it, so apologies if I'm remiss in my homework. 

Race is a materialistic concept. Innumerable cultures have collapsed while remaining racially homogenous. That includes ancient Rome.

The reason I don't think you answered that man's question about Europeans standing their ground in relation to a white group identity is because I don't feel you gave him what he was looking for; namely the words to be able to use in order to stand his ground in the face of a barrage of verbal assaults.  

White group identity isn't the main thing at stake. That's a left-wing trap, making you fall into the mirror image of Black Lives Matter, a radical Marxist organisation. It’s encouraging you to look at human beings through the lens of materialism.

What's at stake is the tradition of Western civilisation, and by far the strongest attacks against it are coming from whites, especially the highest IQ whites. As Slim says in Of Mice and Men, ‘take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.’

I feel that man is looking to you, as am I and others, for the perfect response that will neutralise these false accusations of 'racist', 'white supremacist', 'far-right', 'privileged', etc. I've not yet seen any.  

You can’t stop the smearing. But you can stop caring. That is the real neutralising.

As our alpha male leader, the task now falls upon your shoulders.  Something to think about. 

Race is a superficial, materialistic concept that doesn't even come close to touching the spiritual unity of the West. Racial or ethnic purity is also neither sufficient nor necessary for sustaining a culture, as evidenced by the countless 'pure' cultures that have collapsed.

Pope Benedict wrote that ‘the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side’, and the Catholic Catechism states that ‘because of its common origin the human race forms a unity, for "from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth”. (360)

It is all about surviving the psychological attacks from the left and coming out of this war with a healthy self-esteem and -regard.

When you properly understand how the Left works, the smearing loses its power. It’s just an attempt to exile you from a group you shouldn’t want to be in anyway.

Here's hoping you get as strong a grip on the public consciousness as Jordan Peterson has.  You deserve it.

That is highly unlikely. Peterson thinks the answer to the problems with liberalism is more liberalism. He thinks that good ideas will beat bad ideas:

There’s an optimism about rationality there that, in my view, history simply does not support at all. People aren’t wholly rational; in fact, often the truth is despised. Historically, bad ideas have actually been beaten in war, not debate. You can’t reason with unreasonable people. Peterson, like most intellectuals, overstates the importance of  the intellect.

August Sander did a great study on people's physiognomy, and you can absolutely spot a Romanian gypsy from a German, etc. because of their skull shape and other features. All of these things that make us unique and special as tribes.

The plasticity of the skull is far greater than many on the Right would like to admit. Boas, for example, showed that the skulls of Sicilian and Jewish US immigrants evinced significant changes of shape within the first generation. Place shapes race. If a 'pure' Scotsman moves to a different environment, epigenetics alone mean his offspring will differ from him. And if a black or Oriental moves to Scotland, it will exert its influence on him, too.

I live in Glasgow and I refer to it as Glafrica because of the abundance of gangs of black men who now proliferate the streets.  These men will breed the next generation of Scots, and then you no longer have Scotland the idea. You will have Scotland the land mass which is Africa rebuilt, and which is no longer Western.

When the men of a culture become weak, its women will welcome an influx of stronger men. Scottish men have themselves to blame for that. But ultimately Scotland itself, the land, will shape the people who live there. Gumilev and Spengler, for example, both saw geography as moulding ethnos. You can’t rebuild Africa in Scotland. That’s ridiculous. Scotland will subtly shape any Africans who live there, and in time they will form a distinct ethnos.

The West would appear to you to be an idea rather than a place built by white men and women to reflect their values in everything from science, religion, philosophy, art and beyond.

Catholic Christianity built the West. Racial purity does absolutely nothing to save a spiritually hollow culture - what Spengler called Fellaheen, spiritually exhausted. Whiteness will not save the West.

People point out that racial differences in IQ are partly genetic. That is true. But Orientals have higher IQs: Jared Taylor, for example, noted that “Asians are objectively superior to whites by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what are the ingredients for a successful society.” And yet mere IQ is not enough: Oriental culture is inferior to Western culture. Joseph Needham, noting the stillbirth of science in China, says that “the conception of a divine celestial lawgiver imposing ordinances on non-human Nature never developed”:

“It was not that there was no order in nature for the Chinese but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed aforetime. The Taoists, indeed, would have scorned such an idea as being too naïve for the subtlety and complexity of the universe as they intuited it.” See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), p.581

In Science and Creation, Stanley Jaki actually extends this thesis to six other great cultures apart from China: Arabic, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. Orthodox Islamic scholars, for example, rejected any conception of the universe that involved consistent physical laws.  In Wisdom 11:21, by contrast, God is said to have “ordered all things by measure, number, weight.”

Cultures come with race attached, and for the West to survive it must remain predominantly white, or the change in race must happen at a much slower pace so that people can be raised in a Western climate.

No, countless racially pure cultures have collapsed. And blacks aren’t destroying the West. In fact, Christian Africans actually now uphold Western values better than liberal whites do. Despite the efforts of Western agencies, for example, African bishops uphold the traditional teaching on contraception.

The Jews, too, provide a model of valuing religious unity over liberalism. The journal Philosophia generated some controversy last month for daring to publish a debate between Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald on the latter’s thesis that ‘Jewish-designed intellectual movements have weakened gentile identity and culture while preserving Jewish identity and separatism.’ Relative to the liberalism that characterises the West, Jewish culture is robustly focused on family, patriarchal social arrangements, religion governing all aspects of behaviour and religious law trumping secular regulations. If an ethnic Jew converts to Christianity, Israel no longer recognises him as a Jew: Jewish unity is religious. There are important lessons for the West to learn from this.

Multiculturalism is going to be nothing more than a land grab between tribes. 

Yes. Abandoning the Christian unity of the West means a reversion to tribalism. T. S. Eliot’s warning in ‘Thoughts After Lambeth’ (1931) is even more relevant now:

‘The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.’

I enjoy these kinds of questions and will be starting a paid option on Substack so we can get into this material in more detail.