A while back, a commenter wrote:
Our cultures are all at various levels of development, for a variety of reasons, (none of them being genetic- read “why the west rules”, by head professor at Staford), and everyone has unique genetic benefits to share, hopefully as far and wide as possible.
I replied that I’d read the book. It’s been a while since then, but better late than never.
Why the West Rules, by Ian Morris, belongs to a genre of books that race-denialists like to claim as evidence that race-realists are mistaken and ignorant. These books, though read by few, are important to the race-denialist ideology; they form the basis of its “Thick-book tactic,” which I wrote about in my very first post:
Back in the days when I was part of the religious Jewish community, I took note of a common tactic to defend accepted dogma. I call it “The Thick Book Tactic”. The way it works is that a famous person, regarded as a scholar, writes a long book supposedly disproving the targeted heresy. Back in those days, I had my own “heresy” and I actually went through the trouble of reading the “thick books”. I discovered that they were practically devoid of real content, instead referring to other works – which, in turn, were easy to debunk. Those “thick books”, when actually read, were card houses. But the truth is that they were never intended to be read, at least not by the general populous. Instead, the main intention was to give people something to point to and say, “Do you see this thick book? It debunks your heresy. People wiser than you have already resolved your issues”. Of course, when I wrote my own opinions, well founded as they were, few were interested in reading them because I was not famous. The masses would much rather point to nonsense written by a famous person, than actually consider an opposing view. They’re comfortable in their faith and those “thick books”, even if never read, help support their ideology.
Today, “liberals” have their own “thick books” that they use to defend their racial orthodoxy. Very few actually read them of course. Those thick books would intimidate the vast majority of those who would question racial orthodoxy because they are so thick. Not only that, but they use technical terminology and refer to other works that few laymen have even heard of.
Why the West Rules belongs in the same category as Guns, Germs and Steel, Empire, The Emperor’s New Clothes, What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee and The Skull Measurer’s Mistake. The authors don’t always claim that their motivation, in writing their books, was to combat “racism” – but the ignorant masses have been citing them, as weapons against “racism” nevertheless. Professor Morris quotes Guns, Germs and Steel and Empire several times in his book.
Almost from the start, Morris writes (pgs. 50,51):
Racists are often eager to pounce on such details to justify prejudice, violence, and even genocide. You might feel that taking the time to talk about a theory of this kind merely dignifies bigotry; perhaps we should just ignore it. But that, I think, would be a mistake. Pronouncing racist theories contemptible is not enough. If we really want to reject them, and to conclude that people (in large groups) really are all much the same, it must be because racist theories are wrong, not just because most of us today do not like them.
It is clear that, according to Morris, “racism” is any belief that acknowledges meaningful racial differences between humans – exactly the types of differences that would help explain the course of civilization, and progress, in our world. Morris refers to “racist theories” numerous times in his book – and yet he never specifies what they are, and why they are wrong. We can only surmise that, according to him, if you believe in racial differences, then you must be a Nazi or a Nazi supporter.
Morris almost entirely ignores sub-Saharan Africa in his book. Instead he (conveniently) focuses on civilization as it developed in the West (by which he means the Middle East, North Africa and Europe) and the East (by which he means China, Korea and Japan). I don’t know of any race-realists who believe that East Asians are less intelligent (overall) than Europeans. In fact, we tend to consider them a bit more intelligent.
I would classify Why the West Rules as a history book more than anything else. The history it deals with is specifically Chinese versus Western history. Morris’ frequent jabs at “racist theories” must be directed specifically at white supremacists, who consider all other races to be inferior. Since most of us, who write and read this blog, do not fit into this category, I could simply conclude that any anti-racist arguments in this book do not apply to us.
Except that Morris, citing similarities between Chinese history and Western history, repeats (more times than I could count) that “people (in large groups) really are all much the same.” I suppose this might make sense if we excluded Africans, Native Americans and Austronesians from being “people.” It appears as if he believes that the more often he repeats his belief, the more true it becomes.
And it is true. People are “much the same” all over the world. That is to say, our similarities far outweigh our differences. A smile means more or less the same thing in Madagascar as it does in Portland. Laughter, a scowl or a hug also have similar meanings all over the world. Each of us can travel to any country, learn its language, listen to its music and enjoy its cuisine. But we are not all exactly the same (even in large groups), and I believe Morris is mistaken when he assumes that our similarities prevail when it comes to large groups of people.
Poor people are “much the same” as wealthy people. Animists are “much the same” as Christians or Muslims. Less educated people are “much the same” as the well-educated. Yet we find vastly different rates of crime and dysfunction around the world. Tolerance toward sexual minorities (such as homosexuals and transsexuals) differs as well. The same can be said for environmental conscientiousness. Clearly, small average differences in populations can lead to vast differences in the types of societies they produce. It’s the cumulative effect of small differences; large societies magnify such differences. They do not cancel them out, as Morris seems to believe.
Though Morris is fond of quoting other liberal professors, such as Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, he completely ignores Phillipe Rushton, John Baker, Frank Salter, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending and Nevan Sesardic. But on page 569 we do find this:
When psychologists strap people into functional magnetic resonance imaging machines and ask them to solve problems, these scholars point out, the frontal and parietal areas in Western subjects’ brains light up more (indicating they are working harder to maintain attention) if the question requires placing information within a broad context than if it calls for isolating facts from their background and treating them independently. For Easterners the reverse is true.
What does this difference mean? Isolating facts and treating them independently from their context are hallmarks of modern science (as in the beloved caveat “other things being equal…”); perhaps, one theory runs, the contrast in brain function means that Westerners are simply more logical and scientific than Easterners.
But perhaps not. The experiments do not show that Easterners cannot separate facts from their background or that Westerners cannot put things in perspective; only that each group is less accustomed to thinking that way, and has to work harder to pull it off. Both groups can, and regularly do, perform both kinds of tasks.
Go back and reread that last paragraph; it doesn’t pass the laugh test. Obviously, individuals can overcome their natural tendencies, and think outside the box. But it’s ridiculous to claim that an entire civilization would do so consistently over the course of thousands of years – and do so as effectively as another civilization for whom this comes naturally. Among race-realists, it’s generally accepted that East Asians, though possessing high intelligence, have a harder time with inventiveness than their Western counterparts.
Why does the West rule? According to Morris, the answer is geography. The West (specifically Western Europe) had access to the Atlantic, which gave it easy access to the New World – in contrast to China, which had the much wider Pacific Ocean separating it from the New World. In earlier times, it was the Mediterranean Sea that gave the West an advantage (along with a variety of domesticable seeds and animals found in the “Hilly Flanks” (Levant).
Morris makes valid points. There’s no doubt that geography did play a huge role in the early development of Western civilization, but Morris would have done well to read The 10,000 Year Explosion. After all, on pg. 101, he writes:
By imposing such mental structures on their world, Hilly Flankers were, we might say, domesticating themselves. They even remade what love meant. The love between husband and wife or parent and child is natural, bred into us over millions of years, but farming injected new forces into these relationships.
Humans adapt very quickly to new environments. It strains credibility that any non-creationist would fail to consider that civilized humans would evolve to meet these new challenges. If Siberians and Inuit could evolve short extremities (in response to extreme cold), if Tibetans could evolve higher haemoglobin concentrations (in response to low oxygen levels of higher altitudes) and if Indo-Europeans could evolve to digest cow’s milk (as a source of protein), then surely civilized humans could evolve their brains to better cope with the complexities of urban life and government.
The closest thing to an actual objection to HBD (human biodiversity) that Morris provides is on page 67, where he writes:
Within a few thousand years early humans reached a tipping point that was as much demographic as biological. Instead of dying out so often, bands of modern humans grew big enough and numerous enough to stay in regular contact, pooling their genes and know-how. Change became cumulative and the behavior of Homo sapiens diverged rapidly from that of other ape-men. And once that happened, the days of biological distinctions between East and West were numbered.
It would have been nice if Morris spelled out what he really meant. But It sounds like the dispersion theory put forth by Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari in Race and Human Evolution. I’ll quote myself from that post:
The multiregional model, not to be confused with polygenism, holds that the various human populations intermingled sufficiently, over the eons, to both transmit all advantageous genes to all populations and to ensure that the human species did not divide further into separate species.
This is problematic because rarely are genes (or even traits, for that matter) clearly “advantageous” to all. We’re used to assuming that higher intelligence is always an advantage, but we would be wrong. As Miller himself points out (pg. 46), large brains are expensive:
Most of us think that being smart is self-evidently good. Why, then, if Homo habilis had the potential to mutate in this direction, did they putter along for half a million years before “suddenly” morphing into taller, bigger-brained creatures? The most likely explanation lies in the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch. A big brain is expensive to run. Our own brains typically make up 2 percent of our body weight but use up 20 percent of the energy we consume. Big brains create other other problems too: it takes a big skull to hold a big brain – so big, in fact, that modern women have trouble pushing babies with such big heads down their birth canals…
In our own era, we can plainly see that more intelligent women have fewer babies. From an evolutionary perspective, this would make increased intelligence a disadvantage. Therefore, we cannot simply assume that higher intelligence would have spread throughout the world, and impacted all human populations equally – no more so than we would have all benefited from the Tibetans’ “better” haemoglobin.
Morris takes another vague jab at HBD on pages 72,73:
The debate over multiregional origins drags on, and as recently as 2007 new finds from Zhoukoudian and from Xuchang were being trumpeted as showing that modern humans must have evolved from Homo erectus in China. Even as the publication announcing these finds was being printed, however, other scholars drove what looks to be the final nail into the multiregionalist coffin. Their sophisticated multiple-regression analysis of measurements from more than six thousand skulls showed that when we control for climate, the variations in skull types around the world are in fact consistent with the DNA evidence. our dispersals out of Africa in the last sixty thousand years wiped the slate clean of all the genetic differences that had emerged over the previous half million years.
Racist theories grounding Western rule in biology have no basis in fact. People, in large groups, are much the same wherever we find them, and we have all inherited the same restless, inventive minds from our African ancestors. Biology by itself cannot explain why the West rules.
Why the West Rules was written for laymen. I have no degrees in biology, history or archeology, yet I was able to understand everything Morris wrote. I didn’t have to have my dictionary handy, or consult professors, in order to translate the text into plain English; it’s already written in plain English. But the first paragraph above left me scratching my head. What does he mean by “sophisticated multiple-regression analysis… control for climate?” If certain climates favor specific skull types, it would have been nice if Morris let us in on the secret. What I don’t see here is any attempt to explain cause and effect. Multiple regression analysis shows us correlations; it does not show us causes and effects. If people in colder climates have larger skulls, perhaps it’s because cold weather necessitates higher intelligence, which in turn leads to larger skulls. I don’t see Morris addressing this at all. – which is odd, because on page 55 he writes:
The very fact that Heidelberg Man could survive at Heidelberg, well north of the 40-degree line, is itself evidence of a smarter ape-man.
The second paragraph is just as vexing. Is Morris implying that evolution ceased once our ancestors left Africa? He presents no evidence of this – aside from the fact that he says so.
Similarly, on pages 60 and 61 he writes:
The spread of modern humans wiped the slate clean. Evolution of course continues, and local variations in skin color, face shape, height, lactose tolerance, and countless other things have appeared in the two thousand generations since we began spreading across the globe. But when we get right down to it, these are trivial. Wherever you go, whatever you do, people (in large groups) are all much the same.
The evolution of our species and its conquest of the planet established the biological unity of mankind and thereby the baseline for any explanation of why the West rules. Humanity’s biological unity rules out race-based theories.
Evolution would not dare bring about any non-trivial variations. To do so might upset people like Professor Morris, and we can’t have that. We know that modern humans “wiped the slate clean,” and that the conquest of our planet “established the biological unity of mankind” because… Professor Morris says so.
In reality quite the opposite is true. Any such unity that might have existed before the African exodus would have been lost as humans settled more and more diverse environments. A diversity of environments means a diversity of humans. In order to survive, from the frigid tundra of the north to the steamy jungles of the south, we absolutely had to adapt – and lose any “biological unity” that might have originally existed. The human brain, being the most versatile organ in the body, would have been the first to adapt and change according to the environment.
Professor Morris is a member of the educational establishment elite, as his biographical information in Wikipedia makes clear, and as we see on page 598, where he writes:
Late in 2006, my wife and I were invited to a conference at Stanford University called “A World at Risk.” This star-studded event, featuring some of the world’s leading policy makers, took place on a bright winter’s day…
Members of this elite are, as a rule, adherents of the Church of Liberalism. Morris’ faith guides him throughout his book, yet he remains oblivious to his own indoctrination. On page 513 he writes:
In fact, for growing numbers, faith seemed less of an issue altogether, and new creeds such as socialism, evolutionism, and nationalism filled the place religion had so long held.
Noticeably absent is his own creed, “liberalism” – unless he meant to include it in “socialism.”
I’ll give credit where credit is due. Professor Morris does make an effort to be balanced. Though his natural aversion to whites sometimes comes out (on pages 509 and 519, he refers to white settlers as the “White Plague.” He borrows this term from Nial Ferguson’s Empire, but uses it in a more derogatory manner), he’s harsh in his criticism of non-white empires as well.
Throughout the book, Morris points out deficiencies in gender-equality throughout history. Thus he calls ancient Greek democracy “male democracy” (pg. 260) and spills much ink on Chinese foot-binding (pgs. 424, 425). He glorifies (not necessarily their morality, but their power and leadership) the few women who ruled (or co-ruled) empires, such as Empress Theodora of Byzantium (pgs. 344, 345) and Empress Wu of China, to whom he dedicated an entire section (pgs. 337-342).
True to his liberal creed, Morris casts Islam in a positive light. He writes (pg. 351):
Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism, or Christianity, Islam was born on the edge of collapsing empires and came of age amid constant warfare. Islam was not a religion of violence (the Koran is a good deal less bloody than the Hebrew Bible), but Muslims could not stand aloof from fighting. “Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you,” Muhammad had said, “but do not attack them first. God does not love the aggressors”… Compulsion had no place in spreading religion, but Muslims (“surrenderers” to God) were obliged to defend their faith whenever it was threatened – which, since they were pushing and plundering their way into collapsing empires at the same time as spreading the word, was likely to be quite often.
And on page 353:
They came not to bury the West but to perfect it; not to thwart Justinian’s and Khusrau’s ambitions, but to fulfill them.
I can’t help but wonder if Morris thinks that the ongoing rape of British girls, by Pakistani Muslims, is “perfecting the West.”
Some facts are easy for race-realists to explain; we’re willing to look at the whole picture, and we don’t find ourselves contorting our minds into unnatural convolutions. This is how Professor Morris deals with one such fact (pg. 522):
Native Americans never developed indigenous industries and South Asians were much slower to do so than East Asians. Some historians think culture explains this, arguing (more or less explicitly) that white Western culture strongly encourages hard work and rationality, Eastern culture does so only weakly, South Asian culture even less, and other cultures not at all. But this legacy of colonialist mind-sets cannot be right.
When we look at reactions to Western rule within a longer time frame, we in fact see two striking correlations. The first is that those regions that had relatively high social development before Western rule, like the Eastern core, tended to industrialize themselves faster than those that had relatively low development scores; the second, that those regions that avoided direct European colonization tended to industrialize faster than those that did become colonies. Japan had high social development before 1853 and was not colonized; its modernization took off in the 1870s. China had high development and was partly colonized; its modernization took off in the 1850s. India had moderate development and was fully colonized; its modernization did not take off until the 1990s. Sub-Saharan Africa had low development and full colonization, and is only now starting to catch up.
Regarding Africa, it would be helpful to refer to the human development index from Wikipedia. None of the “high development” countries are in sub-Saharan Africa (in other words, non of them are black African) – but they were all heavily colonized. Among the “low development” countries we find Ethiopia, which was never colonized. South Africa, which was subject to white rule until very recently, is near the top of the “medium development” countries. In other words, Morris’ theory doesn’t hold up very well in Africa. If anything, the opposite is true. European colonists were responsible for saddling Africa with one lasting handicap: They gave the curse of “diversity” to Africa. By drawing the borders the way they did, various tribes found themselves within the same borders. Hence, they were at each others’ throats for control over the country.
As for the rest of the world, average IQ explains most of it. Those with higher average IQs were more likely to hold their own against European rule. Their higher IQs were the reason they maintained independence – and the reason they succeeded in the industrial world. Those with lower IQs were easy prey for colonialists – and those same low IQs gave them a disadvantage in the industrial world.
I take issue with Professor Morris’ simplistic interpretation of genetic advantage. He writes* (pgs. 558 and 559):
Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else, but anyone who does want to take this line will need to show that all the mettle was somehow bred out of Westerners in the sixth century CE, then bred back in in the eighteenth; or that Easterners bred themselves into superiority in the sixth century, then lost it in the eighteenth. That, to put it mildly, is going to be a tough job. Everything suggests that wherever we look, people – in large groups – are all much the same.
He seems to believe that a genetic advantage would guarantee success 100% of the time. I’m not aware of anybody who believes that genetics accounts for all of the differences we see among humans – to the exclusion of any environmental factors. Life is never as simple as that. A less intelligent student can sometimes outperform a more intelligent one, in exams, if he studies harder. A slow runner can sometimes outrun a fast runner, if he trains hard enough. A group of genetically gifted people may sometimes fall on hard times due to external factors. A genetically flawed group of people may sometimes get lucky and live better than those who are more gifted. As Morris himself writes (pg. 562):
Thanks to the paradox of development, the lead in social development that geography had given the West at the end of the Ice Age was long-term but not locked in. Collapses are unpredictable things. Sometimes a few different decisions or a little good luck can postpone, reduce, or even head off disaster; our choices can make a difference.
Why the West Rules is a long book, and I could go on and on, but I’ll conclude by saying that, as a history book, it’s a good read. I learned a lot of history from this book, and I found it entertaining (not always in a bad way). But as a rebuttal to race-realism, it fails miserably. If anybody tells you that “racism has been debunked” by this book, show him this link.
*Early in the book, Morris establishes a “development index” where he quantifies, for any give civilization, energy capture (in calories per capita), social organization, war-making capacity and information technology. Based on this index, the West led the East from the dawn of humanity up until the sixth century AD, at which point the East overtook the West. Then the West recaptured the lead in the 18th century, and has kept it until the present.
Jewamongyou's Blog 
Reblogged this on saboteur365.
Thanks!
Good post, only read half so far but will finish it off later. Very good so far.
Based on your quotes and analysis, Morris comes off looking like the ideologically partially blinded fool he undoubtedly is. By the way, his argument concerning white European intellect vis-a-vis the Dark Ages is asinine. Those centuries weren’t nearly as dark as the enlightenment thinkers maligned them to be.
The west is in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
And it’s all done in the name of “equality,” “fairness,” and “good
intentions. We are “good intentioning ourselves into the grave.”
Go ahead 30 years in time, and see a bi-racial “society” vacant of all
intellect and see these creatures eating, drinking, screwing ,sleeping
and dying.
I don’t think that the race “realists” are any closer to the truth than the anti-White race deniers. 99.999% of netizens belong to one of two camps. Camp #1 believes that there are no differences between races or genders. They often like to blame straight White men for the world’s problems. Camp #2, whom you often see on heartiste and amren, say they believe in race and gender “realism” but in practice they only believe in the differences that favour White males.
For example, some of the race studies show that although Black and Hispanic Americans have academic ability compared to White Americans, Jewish and Asian Americans have higher academic ability compared to White Americans. The amreners and heartiste acolytes love to tell people about Black and Hispanic academic inferiority ad nauseum. However, when you bring up the fact that Jewish and Asian kids have an even higher average level of academic achievement than White kids, they suddenly shriek in disbelief.
I have only ever seen two individuals online who have actually stated the truth in regards to race and gender. One is Lion of the Blogosphere, and the other is a dissident commenter on amren.
As for “camp #2,” as you describe them, I wouldn’t consider them “race-realists.” However, we should take into account the vast amount of anti-white propaganda we’re subject to. It’s only natural that people react to this by taking the opposite extreme, and praising whites at every opportunity. Even the most rational of people are still people, and they let their emotions get the better of themselves sometimes.
I don’t give the anti-whites the same benefit of the doubt, because the entire power structure of the modern world supports their agenda. So their position is one of intellectual laziness and cowardice.
Why are you making excuses for the anti-Coloureds? People who are anti-White have no excuses for their racism and ignorance of the truth; the same standard should be applied to people who are anti-Coloured.
“However, when you bring up the fact that Jewish and Asian kids have an even higher average level of academic achievement than White kids, they suddenly shriek in disbelief.”
I’ve yet to encounter any self-described race-realist who shrieked or gave vent to any outraged disbelief at the higher average IQs of Asians and Jews. In fact, the Asian standard is something of a cherished stock reply among race-realists to claims that IQ tests are biased. Why, race-realists can ask, if whites only designed IQ tests to favor whites and make blacks and Mestizos look dumb, did they design a test that instead appears to favor Asians?
Go to amren or heartiste. Most of the people there (save a few dissidents) make up all sorts of excuses when I tell them that Jewish kids, on average, have higher levels of academic achievement than White kids. A standard excuse is “but the study only included upper class Jewish prep school kids. studies on White kids include Whites from all segments of society.” This is blatantly false.
Well, these people I would not count as race-realists, however they choose to identify themselves. They’re racialist zealots hoping to validate their preconceived religious convictions with the prestige of science.
I concur.
@anonymous – Again, you write gibberish. “Higher levels of academic achievement” is not the same as IQ. I’ve spent *years* perusing the AmRen site and I’ve never seen anyone challenge the fact that northeast Asians and jews have higher group average IQ scores than whites. Never. In fact, among the pro-white sites on the web, AmRen differs from most other heavily trafficked sites in its acknowledgement of these facts.
The only “anti-Semitic” content I’ve seen at AmRen came from commenters (frequently deleted by site moderators) accusing jews of masterminding and causing the third world invasion of every white nation on earth. And the very idea that such a small group could manipulate the most successful and powerful nations on earth to cause their decline and eventual collapse is in itself acknowledgment of their intellectual prowess.
If you’ve actually been on AmRen’s site, and if you’ve actually posted comments that weren’t moderated to oblivion, my guess would be either you couldn’t comprehend what was being discussed or, as I wrote in my reply above, you’re simply a lying anti-white marxist.
About Jews and immigration policy, this information might change your mind about only intellectual lightweights suggesting that “such a small group could manipulate the most successful nations on earth to cause their decline”. To suggest that a monolithic conspiracy set out specifically to destroy the western world is unrealistic, but Jews of varying ideological bent have played a crucial role in the demographic dilution of Europe and the United States.
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-immigration.html
Typical of anti-white racist Marxists, your gibberish makes no sense. Your lies about HBD show you up for what you are. AmRen and its founder explicitly and frequently note northeast Asians higher (than whites) IQ scores along with the fact that european Jews have the highest average group scores. That you falsely accuse them proves you either know nothing firsthand and repeat the lies of others or you lie yourself. In either case you are a contemptible wretched cur.
I suspect that a lot of the more intelligent academic race-deniers have some inkling as to genetic inequalities among races, however, they are being dishonest about it. How many of these people would object, on moral grounds, say to a study on race and athletic ability? I doubt that many would, in fact someone did write such a book.
The idea that one race may have innate genetic advantages over another is perfectly fine with them, so long we are talking about non-whites with an advantage over whites. Either these people exhibit a level of cognitive dissonance that is beyond belief, or they are pathological liars. Either way, I am not impressed.
I can answer anecdotally from my own experiences. I have close friends and family who are lifelong committed leftists and they all secretly admit that negroes are cognitively deficient and that the cause is genetic and immutable. Their position is, as Hillary Clinton might say, “what difference at this point does it make?” If anything, it means that affirmative action and welfare will always be necessary and that even more money must be spent on education in hopes of getting the most from the negroes’ limited intellectual potential. It means that law enforcement must be more lenient with negroes and that more money must be spent on rehabilitation and intervention due to negroes’ inherent violent tendencies and limited ability to control impulses. It means extra efforts and funding must be given to allow negroes to get mortgages and car loans. And it means we must be extra tolerant of negroes’ social pathologies and aberrant behaviors because, well, they just can’t help it.
In other words, a world where the Marxists acknowledge negroes’ genetic cause for their failures looks exactly like *this* world except for the admission that it’s caused by DNA. And they’ll *never* admit its genetic because Hitler.
Re Anonymous:
White people are being deliberately replaced in their own ancestral homes, their property is being stolen from them, their daughters raped, their freedoms taken away and any positive self-identity denied to them – and you wonder why I make excuses for them bearing animosity toward those for whose sake all the above is done to them? I don’t condone hatred toward any group solely for what they are, but I can certainly understand hard feelings toward such people.
“I don’t give the anti-whites the same benefit of the doubt, because the entire power structure of the modern world supports their agenda.”
You use the exact language of the feminists, anti-Whites, and fat apologists when you hold people to a double standard. Here at this link, a feminist fat apologist uses the exact same way of thinking as you do: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/10/skinny-shaming-not-reverse-discrimination/
She basically says that fat shaming is not okay, but thin shaming is okay because thin people are supported by the powers that be. How is that any different from what you are saying? And for that matter, how is it any different from what liberals and Black supremacists are saying? I have heard a Black “social leader” claim that anti-White statements are okay while anti-Black statements are not, because the powers that be support Whites.
So basically it boils down to a never ending argument over who “the powers that be” are supporting. You say that TPTB support Blacks and White women so it’s okay for White men to be nasty towards Black women. They say that TPTB support White men so it’s okay for White women and Blacks to be nasty towards White men. It’s a never ending story of fighting fire with fire. In the end, everybody loses.
JAY never said its “okay for White men to be nasty toward Black women.” That is not true. He said “I don’t condone hatred toward any group solely for what they are…” Everything he’s said, indicates he’s against what you are trying to attribute to him here.
The media uses this tactic all the time to attack race-realists. They know that merely making the accusation is often enough, most people will believe it, without checking out sources! That’s why they keep doing it.
Your equivalence of anti-white Marxists working diligently to commit genocide against whites with “fat shaming” exposes you as one of the evil monsters who would see whites erased from the earth. There is no equivalence except with Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler.
Whites, the people who have given humanity every significant modern convenience, literature, math and science, and life preserving medicine, deserve the opportunity to live at least as much as any other population. You and your kind would exterminate whites and hope to keep your cars, airplanes, ships, bountiful crops and livestock, cell phones, computers, clean water, and medicine. You would kill the Golden Goose, but you’re too stupid to realize that when whites are gone so too will be their compassion and generosity that has *GIVEN* all their blessings to the lowest denizens of the planet. And the only race smart enough to maintain the modern world, Northeast Asians, have no history of charity to weaker people. Once you’ve succeeded in erasing all whites, the northeast Asians will make very short work of enslaving or killing the negroes and American Indians formerly under whites’ protection.
But for you socialists it *always* ends in mass murder doesn’t it?
Four factors determine national wealth, power, or success, however you want to define success: the genetic endowment of the people; the physical resources of the nation; the national culture; and sheer blind luck (The Brits, for example, had the English Channel, a moat that spared them the need for a standing army, which meant that the monarchy could act only with the approval of parliament, which meant power to the landowning and merchant classes, which led to the enclosure of common land the quest for colonies, the accumulation of capital, the search for investment opportunities, rewards for innovation and soon you had a tiny island nation ruling a quarter of the world — see Carrol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope) .
It is almost certainly impossible to determine conclusively the relative importance of each of these strands in accounting for any particular national accomplishment or failure. Moreover, national fortunes rise and fall, which indicates that genetics cannot be of overriding importance. For example, during the middle ages Western Europe was a poverty stricken backwater with only a small population. Then they got the industrial revolution which made them rich, powerful and numerous. But they have already lost the lead in population and wealth and will surely soon lose their military preeminence too.
Biological diversity is fascinating, often beautiful and a resource of vital importance to humanity. Liberals often care passionately about spotted owls or marbled murrelets or other forms of non-human diversity, yet are committed to destroying human diversity. through the destruction of the sovereign nation state and the mogrelization of the world’s human population. Why is that?
Here’s a beautiful African woman, a member of the Koisan people of South Africa, one of the most ancient human races: straighten the hair and she’d be difficult to distinguish from an Asian.
I think your four factors are good points. Blind luck does even out over time however, even geographic luck such as the English Channel. i.e. There are plenty of island nations who have not had anywhere near the success of Britain.
If we look Long-Term, then personally I think that genetics are a very good guide as to national success and culture. The Chinese have often been poor at times and often had troubles. But, looking broadly at the last 5000 years, generally they are a very civilised culture. Same goes for Europe. So-called “Dark Ages” between 500 – 1400 doesn’t mean their genetics were any worse during that time, rather that their culture took a while to recover after the fall of Rome. (And did it recover with a vengeance!) So, looking long term, considering a freezing northern climate, which hindered economic growth but also increased IQ, Europe has also been civilised for eons.
Then look at African and Australia. I don’t recall them ever having the success of Europe or east Asia. And if there are isolated periods at some points in history where the Best pockets of (black) Africa are temporarily slightly better than the worst times of Europe, doesn’t mean too much. Saying Africa is as good as Europe is like saying Chimps are as smart as humans, just because the smartest chimps are smarter than the dumbest humans.
I doubt if we will ever sort these factors out and discover which were critical in historical development, although all must surely have had a role. But lack of clarity is no reason for saying, as liberals do, race probably doesn’t matter so the Hell with human biodiversity, let’s just mix everyone up.
On the contrary, I would say that since race may matter let’s not destroy the human biodiversity we have — at least for a few hundred years while we give the matter serious thought. The diversity that we have is the product of several hundred thousand years of evolutionary differentiation and, once destroyed, can never be recreated.
The argument for a role of culture, whether genetically or otherwise dependent, in the success of civilizations seems more probable to the point of certainty. The liberal drive to destroy cultural differentiation, to reduce all culture to a by-product of the commercial system and the machinery of top-down social control, thus seems clear evidence of a program to enslave the world to a globalist plutocracy.
But to answer my own question, why do liberals treasure non-human biodiversity yet seek to destroy human biodiversity? the answer is that they do not understand that their arbitrary system of ethical belief is a religion as much as any other. It is a set of moral assumptions and a consequent code of conduct to which believers attach high emotional significance. The assumption that all men are equal, despite the obvious inconsistency with reality, is one of those liberal axioms, which cannot be questioned.
The importance of religion, as Francis Fukuyama explains in “the Origins of Political Order,” and the reason it is universal to humanity is that it makes it possible for members of a community to anticipate the behavior of, and thus cooperate effectively with, those beyond their immediate circle of family and acquaintances.
But not all religions are equal in their effectiveness in promoting community well being. The liberalism that now dominates the west is clearly a suicide cult, as is evident from the sub-replacement fertility of all the Western nations and the self-genocidal policy of replacing the dying indigenous population with philoprogenitive immigrants of a different race and culture.
“thick book” is a nice description of Morris’s tiresome work. I read it on a kindle that gave no indication of where in the text I was, and it seemed to go on, and on, and, Oh God, on.
“why do liberals treasure non-human biodiversity yet seek to destroy human biodiversity?”
I have a somewhat different take on this. I am not convinced liberals treasure human biodiversity. In fact, liberals treasure the most criminal and backward of non-white cultures as the best. They suffer from an inverted value system. They also despise whites, believing we have innate guilt.
I think that subconsciously, liberals are attracted to the violence of blacks and Hispanics, and that manifests in their preference for them over other races. Liberals are emotional by nature and they have a greater resonance with the more emotional races.
More women tend to be liberals as well, compared to men. Liberalism is also based on envy and class warfare. Instead of admitting that people and races are different, and will achieve different levels of success, the liberal insists, it is racism holding back minorities. They don’t believe in taking responsiblity. It is a childish worldview.
I have actually heard liberals express disdain or contempt for East Asians who sacrifice, work hard, and obtain enough money to start their own business. They are viewed as somehow class traitors for their upward mobility.
I am not convinced liberals treasure human biodiversity.
Well no. As I implied, liberals seek through the promotion of mass migration and mongrelization to destroy the racial and cultural diversity of the Western nations. That liberals do this while claiming to champion diversity is just clever globalist PR. In their treatment of the racial and cultural identity of the Western nations, liberals are vandals and hooligans.
““why do liberals treasure non-human biodiversity yet seek to destroy human biodiversity?””
“I have a somewhat different take on this. I am not convinced liberals treasure human biodiversity.”
Huh? Was the original post edited after your reply? Or did he really write “liberals … seek to destroy human biodiversity?” And you replied, “I am not convinced liberals treasure human biodiversity.”
Is this an Abbott & Costello skit? “I say that dog is white!” “Whaddaya mean Abbott? That dog is white as snow. Any idiot can see that it is white!”
Maybe it’s me. It’s past my bedtime.
“I say that dog is white!” “Whaddaya mean Abbott? That dog is white as snow. Any idiot can see that it is white!”
LOL
And thanks for the confirmation that I really did say what I thought I’d said.
My apologies CanSpeccy. I believe I misread your comment when I made my post. I’m sorry about that. I should have read it more carefully.
DC: Not to worry: you were polite enough, even when thinking we disagreed.
The liberal claim to champion diversity while seeking destroy it through multi-culturalism, mass migration, mongrelization of populations, and the suppression of the fertility of indigenous peoples, tends to confuse most people. The confusion is maintained by (a) the mendacious liberal insistence that objection to the cultural and racial genocide of one’s own people is racism; and (b) the refusal of liberals to acknowledge that diversity is the product of evolutionary differentiation, both racial and cultural, and is necessarily destroyed when races and cultures are compelled to mix.
The confusion arises from the fact that there are two kinds of liberals: the Machiavellian manipulators of human belief and emotion, who seek to reduce the mass of mankind to the condition of a domesticated species, to be bred, culled, and indoctrinated at the will of the globalist elite; and the more or less innocent dupes who have assimilated the self-destructive liberal beliefs of the kind you describe.
I’m impressed with the masochism on display here. I tip my hat to you guys who can actually suffer through a tome such as this without suffering massive brain and eyeball hemorrhage. It’s really hard for me to read a Marxist’s comment if it’s more than a paragraph. Their writing grants a glimpse into the inner workings of their mind – inner workings that are jumbled, illogical, and diseased. Many times I will find myself literally nauseous from their efforts to state that “a is not a” and that since they “feel that a is b” so then must we accept this as truth.
When I’m up for a dose of fantasy, I’ll read Tolkien and find out what Gandalf and the Hobbits are doing. A Marxist’s fever dream that evolution skipped brain development ensuring that negroes are just as intelligent as Jews despite all objective evidence to the contrary requires suspension of disbelief far greater than that necessary to believe Middle Earth is real.
Anybody else remember the good old days when insanity earned you a frontal lobotomy? Apparently today it earns you a lucrative non-fiction book deal or a seat in Congress..
“Noticeably absent is his own creed, ‘liberalism’ – unless he meant to include it in ‘socialism.'”
He probably considers liberalism and evolutionism to be synonymous. Hence, Obama “evolved” on gay marriage by becoming more liberal.
I agree with JAY’s review one hundred percent. The book is readable as far as history goes. It’s readable as far as it stick to the facts, and its “energy capture” is a good way of measuring things, and Morris figuring out its worth has no basis on biology. Hence why it’s an interesting concept, since he’s just sticking to the facts. His excuses however always fall back to geography and plant and animal species available to respective continent. The idea that “humans are all much the same” is BASELESS. He states it again and again as though it has been proven time and time again, but it hasn’t been proven and it is not based in reality. That means that the whole basis of his book is flawed. It’s fine to talk about energy capture, and compare the continents. But in determining why the continents’ energy capture are different, is where the book really falls down.
And it doesn’t just ignore a few facts, it is deliberately misleading. As the review points out, Morris bringing up the multi-regional evolution theory, which no one seriously states is true (because it isn’t), while manipulating the narrative to make out that at the same time, other scientists’ “sophisticated multiple-regression analysis of measurements from more than six thousand skulls showed that when we control for climate, the variations in skull types around the world are in fact consistent with the DNA evidence” (an utterly meaningless statement in itself) is a way of Morris deliberately misleading his reader.
So, lies, obfuscation, more lies, more obfuscation, and still more lies all baked together into the book and intended to implant a marxist egalitarian worldview that is objectively and demonstrably false. Thank you and the others who have spared me the odious chore of wading through this nonsense myself.
I’m sure that the Politically Correct brigade will use this book as yet another “debunker” or race based human difference (or “HBD”) – yet, as ever, the book debunks nothing. And the fact that the author writes in such an arrogant tone, that we should take his word for “humans are much the same everywhere”, when he does nothing to justify this, kind of proves to me yet again that if there WAS any scientific evidence of racial intelligence being equal (and indeed all the evidence points to the opposite), then yet again another book has missed the opportunity to tell us WHY.
(also JAY FYI in the review, when you mean to write “aggressors” you typo it ‘agfgressors’)
Thanks. Fixed.
I cannot speak for human biology, but I do believe that I *can* speak for the field of Late Antiquity.
Islam’s claims of “perfecting” previous civilisations most likely derive from a justification of what its prophet had been preaching. And, by happy circumstance, we possess a more-or-less first-hand account of what that preaching was (delivered to us from a Mizrahi Jew, by way of a “converso” Christian document entitled Doctrina Jacobi). This prophet was telling his crew, “the keys to the Garden [Paradise] are swords”.
In Islam there never was any pretence of perfecting the West as a culture of its own. Its prophet was an Arab and was never part of the West – not even in the way other western Semites (like Carthaginians, Jews etc) were/are part of the West. This prophet hated the West. He called us mushrikun, people who associate others with G-d. He even called Jews that (there’s talk that the local pleb Jews were indulging in some angel-worship, I don’t know if this is true or if modern scholars are trying to salvage Islam’s reputation here).
Moreover, everybody knows all this already. They know that Islam’s prophet was violent, and was out to destroy and replace what our forefathers had built. “But it’s okay, those empires were crumbling anyway” isn’t much of an argument IMO.
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“Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else, but anyone who does want to take this line will need to show that all the mettle was somehow bred out of Westerners in the sixth century CE, then bred back in in the eighteenth; or that Easterners bred themselves into superiority in the sixth century, then lost it in the eighteenth. That, to put it mildly, is going to be a tough job. Everything suggests that wherever we look, people – in large groups – are all much the same.”
In the agriculture age, the most important driver of your economy was how much grain you could grow. Northern Europe and Japan/ Korea/ Mongolia had limitations in growing enormous quantity of grains due to climatic/ geographic conditions unlike places like Egypt, Iraq, the Indian subcontinent etc… Thus in the medieval era they were poorer. Even with Europe Germany/ Scandinavia though ample in water could not compete with say Italy in food production due to climatic restrictions. A similar case can be made for Japan vs China/ Indonesia etc… ,most of Japan is mountainous. There was no way England could compete with the Ganges of India in food production even though England had good soil quality. Similarly Scotland could not compete with England because of the topography of the land (more mountains). That explains why England has about 10 times the population as Scotland and was more wealthier. Take this difference and multiply it many times to get the difference between Northern Europe/ Japan Korea on one hand and the Middle zone (India, Middle East etc..) Besides Northern Europeans and North East Asian were located at the edge of Eurasia unlike people in the middle zone and thus could not gain wealth from trade passing through their territories. So even if these populations of the North had higher IQs and other favourable traits they were poorer and more backward than the middle IQ populations in the middle zone during the agricultural age.
The Industrial revolution changed all that. Now wealth creation was moving from Agriculture to industry and wealth creation was no longer tied to the amount of grain they could grow in their lands. And it was now the high IQ cold climate populations of Europe and North East Asia finally got their advantage over the Middle Zoners. Also thanks to innovations made in transportation technology in Britain (steam ships), moving resources from the tropics to the temperate zone for manufacturing was easy and cheap. This is what explains why India or the Middle East were so advanced in the agricultural age but now are failures compared to Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc… and the Northern Europe settled places like North America, Australia, New Zealand in this technological age.
“Racist theories grounding Western rule in biology have no basis in fact. People, in large groups, are much the same wherever we find them, and we have all inherited the same restless, inventive minds from our African ancestors. Biology by itself cannot explain why the West rules.”
Huh? Pretty much the same? That’s odd! Then how come the vast majority of succesful long distance runners come from the eastern parts of Africa, while succesful short distance runners have a biological heritage out of Western Africa?
I’m pretty sure I’ve read several articles that point out the genetically reasons behind the Africans success in running. So perhaps people ARENT ‘much the same wherever we find them’?
And perhaps, I’f there is a genetic component to athletic/physical ability, there is also a genetically component to intelligence?
Nah, that’s heresy!
Playing the devil’s advocate here. The author chose his words carefully. Groups can differ in running ability, average intelligence and other traits, but still be “much the same.”
We know that groups separated by restrictions on gene flow, whether these be geographical, political, religious or social, will diverge genetically over the course of time, and this has quite evidently happened to human groups. The Chinese, for example, look different from the English and the Australian aboriginals, in general, have a larger visual cortex than the average Austalian settler.
Whether these differences “matter” depends not only on what these differences are, something about which we at present know very little, but also on your point of view. If you’re for the New World Order, you’re more likely to want to destroy whatever group diversity exists in the human population, since such group differences reinforce nationalistic feelings and thus help the resistance to globalization. However, if you understand that mongrelization of the human population is a one-way process that cannot be reversed, you may think we have to give it at least a hundred years of study before we decide whether trashing human group diversity “matters” or not.
Pretty certainly those who think that group biodiversity matters are correct, although if African women become the major winners of Nobel Prizes in physics in the next 100 years, one will more likely be convinced otherwise. But in any case there’s a powerful aesthetic argument for retaining human group diversity.
But it should not be an obligation upon advocates of diversity (i.e., those opposed to mongrelization of humanity) to prove their point: comprehensive evidence upon which to resolve the issue does not exist. Thus the position of those for the destruction of diversity (generally liars who identify themselves as “lovers of diversity”), who claim that such destruction entails no loss, is untenable.