Gideon,

I don't think I shall get anywhere arguing scriptural interpretation with you. Are Jews at large driven by the calculating ethnocentrism described by Kevin MacDonald? Or by the universalist humanism you profess? Something of both, would be my best guess, the mix being different under different circumstances and at different degrees of religious intensity. My strong impression of the Haredim, for instance, is that they don't give a fig about Gentiles and would not subscribe to your moral universalism. On the other hand, a lot of secular Jews I know are idealists like yourself, whose idealism embraces Gentiles too.

In any case, I gather you don't agree with my suggestion that for Jews, the issue we are discussing—where should Jews stand on immigration?—really comes down to: Good For The Jews? or: Good For America? You seem to think our organizing principle should be: Good For Everybody In The Whole World!

That is so preposterous I can't even summon up any admiration for the high idealism that must underlie such a position. I actually prefer the ethnocentrism Kevin MacDonald imputes to your people. At least it is recognizably human. Perhaps you are familiar with Pascal's wise observation that while man is neither angel nor beast, he who would act the angel acts the beast.

While I am with you in wishing to see "a considered, rational approach to the immigration problem," it was not "a small group of pontificators" who derailed the recent Senate bill by "lathering up their base." Do you really regard ordinary Americans with such contempt? Do you really think that they can be "lathered up" to oppose something that a small group wants them to oppose?

The recent Senate bill was derailed by great masses of ordinary citizens overwhelming their representatives with mail, email, phone calls and faxes because they were outraged at the shoddy dishonesty of the bill's contents, and were inclined to believe that the 1986 experience, when the government promised us strict enforcement in return for amnesty, then delivered the amnesty but not the enforcement, would be repeated. This was not an army of brainless automata "lathered up" into action by some small, sinister clique of manipulators. It was popular democracy at work, and a proud moment for freedom and the rule of law in these United States.

Nor is it true that "a majority of Americans actually want comprehensive immigration reform that includes a realistic path to citizenship for those already here." It took me less than two minutes on Google to locate a poll, by a respectable market-reasearch firm, showing 68 percent of respondents favoring deportation as an answer to illegal immigration.

I don't myself believe that "America needs more people to keep our economy running smoothly." That the Chairman of the Federal Reserve says this is so, does not make it so. Even a Fed Chairman can be mistaken. There was very nearly no immigration at all into the U.S.A. from 1945 to 1965, yet the economy boomed as never before. How did that happen? A national economy is a very flexible and ingenious thing, certainly able to cope with shortages, of labor or anything else, by means other than immigration. It might raise wages, or automate, or outsource. Indeed, many economists tell us that automation, and technological advance in general, is retarded by a large supply of cheap manual labor. I am not an economist, but this seems plausible to me.

"The role of immigrants in our economy is … a well-established plus." Is it? Does that include both legal and illegal immigrants? Both high- and low-skilled immigrants? Is your "well-established plus" net of the costs of educating immigrants' children, supplying health care to immigrants who cannot afford it, incarcerating immigrants who commit crimes, and defending ourselves against immigrants like the nineteen who committed the 9/11 atrocities? In any case, even if this were true in some general sense, it would not get us very far with the questions I thought we had agreed were central: How many immigrants? With what skills and education levels? From where?

The various names and studies you cite as claiming to have proved that immigration increases our prosperity can easily be countered by others who claim the opposite thing. I named George Borjas and Robert Rector in my previous post. But again, even if I were to concede this point, which I do not, some issues would be left dangling. For all I, or you, know, the American people at large might be willing to sacrifice that claimed 0.1 percentage point in GDP growth if they could be relieved of the social, cultural, political, and fiscal problems arising from mass immigration. I personally would certainly be so willing. Man does not live by bread alone… Speaking of which, what happened to your ringing declaration, five paragraphs earlier, that: "The Torah is a unique attempt to create a nation governed not by pursuit of power or the accumulation of wealth but by recognition of the worth of each person as the image of God"? If the accumulation of wealth is not, according to the Torah (which "We Jews take … very seriously") a governing principle, why are you bringing it forward to justify your views on immigration?

I think you are quite right to say we "can't predict who's going to make the greatest contributions." I certainly wouldn't depend for accurate predictions on those functionaries in the immigration bureaucracy who, in practice, end up as the decision-makers.

But what follows from this truth? In a situation where you can't accurately predict, you have no choice but to "go with the percentages." In this case that means preferring some groups over others. Groups who have thrown up great numbers of entrepreneurs, generated plenty of jobs and helped increase our national prosperity, or who have enriched our cultural and intellectual lives—groups like, oh, say, the Ashkenazi Jews—should be given preference over groups whose members are more inclined to vegetate in low-skill employment or welfare dependency.

Don't you agree? Or, if you don't agree, what would be your prescription for increasing the probability that our selection of immigrants (remember, we have already agreed that selection is unavoidable) will be optimal for our nation? What, actually would be your criteria for selection, Gideon?

You say, correctly, that I want more diversity in our immigration. You then say: "this point makes no sense." You then go on to argue that your program "would promote diversity and fairness." Why do you want to promote something that makes no sense? I am afraid I did not follow the logic of this paragraph. I also object to your assertion that "people migrate to neighboring places." No, they don't. I didn't; neither (I am pretty sure) did your ancestors. People migrate to places that (a) offer them a better life than the one they currently have, and (b) permit them to come in and settle. Migration flows are not governed by irresistible laws of nature. They can be—and, among sensible nations, always have been—controlled by borders, visa procedures, and laws.

I am sorry to have "astounded" you with my caution towards persons claiming to be fleeing persecution. However, a generous attitude to such persons will result in massive fraud. As an illustration, I point you to Britain, where the phrase "asylum seeker" is now a synonym for "illegal immigrant." I can guarantee that an open-hearted program such as you favor will provide, for every genuine refugee from real persecution, at least ten, and more likely a hundred, persons who are taking advantage of your generosity. Many of them will be, almost by definition, people of criminal or amoral character.

I do not want these people. I don't think I am a callous person—I am pretty sure than no-one who knows me would describe me so—but I am not generous towards strangers with things I own that are precious to me, that I have struggled and sweated to acquire. If the stranger has a hard-luck story I may do him the courtesy of listening to it; but the world, you know, is full of hard-luck stories.

Of course we can deport 12 million people if we want to. (And according to at least some polls—see above—we do want to.) Our nation has, by acts of collective will, done far more difficult things than that. If sensible policies were implemented, great numbers of illegal immigrants would anyway self-deport.

I am not clear why Auschwitz came to your mind. We are speaking of deporting people back to their home countries. Are you supposing that those home countries would gas the returning deportees and incinerate their corpses? Why on earth would you suppose that? My own opinion of the government of (for example) Mexico is pretty low, but not that low. As to families of mixed status being "ripped apart," again I'm afraid I don't quite follow. Are you suggesting that, in a case where one family member is legally resident and another is not, we should deport the illegal resident while forcibly preventing the legally-resident member from accompanying them? That is certainly not something I would favor, and I don't see how it could lawfully be done. Our government has no power to prevent persons from leaving our territory, unless they are guilty of some crime.

I am flattered and pleased by your kind remarks about my accomplishments since coming to the U.S.A. They seem to me, honestly, to be very slight. Again, though, this is individualist stuff. Any given person might make great contributions after settling in the U.S.A. Unfortunately, as I said before, this is not a thing that we—certainly not our overworked and ill-paid immigration officials—can predict on an individual basis. We can only "go with the percentages."

I have ended up as a writer of (I hope) modestly useful books and (I hope) mildly entertaining commentary. I might, for all anyone knew when I first entered the U.S.A., have ended up as an axe murderer doing 25-to-life in some state correctional facility. Who can tell? As I said in a previous post, the individualistic approach, though highly congenial to the national temperament, and appealing to the universal human interest in the life particulars of other human beings, does not get us very far with policy-making, which must primarily be based on statistics, modified slightly, and very cautiously, around the edges to take account of some few particular and exceptional cases.

You conclude with further expressions of regret that this year's Senate immigration bill was "shot down" by a "vocal minority." This account of the bill's fate is not true, though. See here and any number of other places. The U.S. public at large was hotly opposed to that bill, the more so the more they learned about it. The principal reason for such widespread opposition was that the bill promised amnesty in return for enforcement; and the American public has been given that promise before, and remembers that it was flagrantly broken. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us.

I, at any rate, am not ashamed of what happened to that wretched, deplorable, and dishonest bill. To the contrary: I should be proud and glad to think that I contributed in some small way to the slaying of that dreadful monstrosity, that gross and impertinent fraud on the citizens and lawful residents—Jew and Gentile alike—of the United States.

Next: Jewish immigration activists looked out for Jewish interests. So what?

The post Good for America? Good for Jews? Good for the Whole World? appeared first on Jewcy.

Gideon,

Every statement of immigration restrictionism should begin with the observation that British restrictionist Enoch Powell took pains to include in all his speeches on the topic: Numbers are of the essence. This seems to be especially difficult for us Americans, with our individualist ethos, to grasp. The settlement of one (or ten, or a hundred) people from Algeria, Bangladesh, or Chile is of no consequence to America's future. The settlement of ten million is of mighty consequence. An individualist approach to immigration issues, while occasionally illuminating, does not scale up well.

After many exchanges of this kind, to-ing and fro-ing with advocates of lax immigration policies, I have come to the conclusion that the real gulf in immigration talk is not between conservative and liberal, cruel and kind, nativist and xenophile, or practical and sentimental. It is between those who are keen to discuss numbers and those who, for whatever reason, are unwilling to do so.

Your response (which, if you don't mind my saying so, is not really a response, more a mission statement) to my first post illustrates this truth in several places. Your second paragraph, for example, has this:

Today, we are witnessing a striking parallel to our own Jewish American history, as Latin Americans, Asians and others clamber to get into America like we did…

I'm afraid I don't see the parallel at all.

If, as I insist, numbers are of the essence, then we should scrutinize the numbers in the two cases. In 1900 there were about 11.2 million Jews in the world. About 9.0 million were in Europe; about 5.2 million in the Russian Empire (which at that point included Poland). The population of the U.S.A. in 1900 was 76.2 million. The worldwide pool of Jews from which the "great wave" came therefore represented about fifteen percent of the receiving population. The actual pool so far as the main sending countries were concerned was a tad more than half that— let us be generous and say ten percent. (And let us note that both figures are slightly inflated by the fact of substantial Jewish immigration 1881-1900.)

Now to your "parallel." Leaving aside "others" (I am determined to be generous to your argument!) your Latin American and Asian total—depending on precise definitions, and again I am trying to be generous to you, taking only the 1999 figures—is about 5,780 million. Dividing by the current population of the U.S.A. (estimated at 301.1 million) I get a sending-pool to receiving-population ratio of 1,920 percent.

Fifteen percent… ten percent… 1,920 percent… Forgive me, Gideon, but I don't quite see your "parallel"—though I'll admit that the numbers are indeed "striking."

Just so with all your other assertions, when I try to reduce them to numbers. You say, for example, that: "American immigrants founded or co-founded some of the world's most prominent tech companies, among them Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo! and Google."

Well, let's see. Wikipedia lists a total of eleven people as founders of those five companies. Of the eleven, five are foreign-born: one each from Germany, India, France, Taiwan, and Russia. If you want to slice the cake a bit thinner, you can note that the French-born entrepreneur (Pierre Omidyar) is of Iranian parentage, while the Russian one (sergey Brin) is Jewish.

A cautious conclusion one might draw is that our immigration policy ought preferentially to admit more Germans, Indians, French-Iranians, Taiwanese, and Russian Jews. Further thought suggests that if (as is apparently the case), you, Gideon, want U.S. immigration policy to have, as one of its aims, the growth of imaginative entrepreneurship in our country, we ought to carry out a close numerical analysis of entrepreneurship by country of origin, education level, religious affiliation, and so on. Depending on what that tells us, we could then adjust our immigration policy to favor the most entrepreneurial groups.

Such studies have in fact been done. Here is one (though a bit out of date, I'm afraid—a more current one might throw the argument in your favor…) from the Center for Immigration Studies. Sample quotes:

…The difference between Middle Eastern immigrants who have a self-employment rate of 28.2 percent, the highest of any region, and the self-employment rate of 4.8 for Central Americans, the lowest of any region, is extremely large. By region of origin, immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Canada … have self-employment rates that are four or more percentage points higher than those of natives. In contrast, immigrants from Mexico … and Central America have self-employment rates that are more than four percentage points lower.

Koreans, Cubans, Canadians, and immigrants from the United Kingdom have the highest self-employment rates, while immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines have the lowest rates of self-employment. There is also significant variation within regions. For example, Cuban immigrants are much more entrepreneurial than Haitian or Dominican immigrants, even though they are all from the Caribbean.

Age and education … do not account for all of the differences between immigrant groups. For example, 27.5 percent of college-educated Middle Eastern immigrants between the ages of 35-44 are self-employed. In contrast, college-educated Mexican immigrants in the same age group have a self-employment rate of only 10.5 percent. Thus, much of the difference between the two groups remains even after controlling for these two factors.

It is clear that current immigration policy does not produce a flow of immigrants that fundamentally alters the overall level of entrepreneurship in the United States.

Under a perfectly open immigration policy, several hundred millions, perhaps two or three billions, of people would come to settle in the U.S.A. This prospect is absolutely unacceptable to the American people. (Trust me on this one, Gideon.) It follows inescapably that U.S. immigration policy must perforce be selective. We must—we must—say to this one: "Yes, you may come and settle in our country." We must say to that one: "No, you may not come to settle in our country." We—we, the people, the citizens of America, not the Wall Street Journal editorial board, nor Gideon Aronoff, nor John Derbyshire—we Americans must decide, by consensus, how many immigrants we want, from where, with what skills and education.

If we shirk this decision, as in fact we have, we shall just get great numbers of people from nearby poor countries, with a weighting towards those willing to break American laws. Hence our huge population of Mexicans and Central Americans, unknown numbers of them present here in defiance of our laws. The 2000 census showed—see Table 2 here—Mexico running away with the percentage of our foreign-born population, at 29.5 percent. Number two, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) was far behind at 4.9 percent. France and Russia do not even appear in the top ten. El Salvador sends us more people than Germany. Perhaps, Gideon, you can point me to a high-tech company founded by a Salvadoran immigrant?

Since, as I have noted above, U.S. immigration policy cannot help but be selective, we really ought to give some thought to the selection criteria. Why such colossal favoritism towards Mexicans, for example? Mexico is not even a particularly poor country. Of the 179 nations listed here by per capita annual GDP, Mexico ranks No. 54 with $8,066. El Salvador is No. 98 with $2,619. Good grief: 47 countries—count 'em, 47!—have per capita GDP less than one-tenth of Mexico's. What about the struggling people of Cambodia ($503), Madagascar ($299) and Burundi ($119)? Around five billion people worldwide are poorer than the average Mexican. Are you not outraged, Gideon, that these unfortunates have such vanishingly small representation among our foreign-born population? Where's that famous Jewish compassion?

Having exceeded my word count, I can offer only sketchy responses to your other points—though if you would like me to expand on anything, please say so, and I shall.

To your invocations of the Torah and Talmud, I am afraid I must respond with goyish skepticism. The one thing that is plain to even the most casual inquirer into Judaism is that it is an exclusivist religion. What, otherwise, does the phrase "chosen people" mean? Many commentators fluent in the relevant languages and studies (this commentator, for example) tell us that "stranger" in these texts means "Jewish stranger." Some of these commentators tell us that the extension to Gentiles is a result of the Enlightenment liberalization of classical Judaism; some, that it is a well-intentioned but ignorant misapplication of the texts; some, that it is part of the conscious deception Jews engage in when presenting themselves to Gentiles. I am not competent to judge which, if any, of these commentators is correct. I must tell you, though, that if you want to confront the Kevin MacDonalds of the world, you had better be ready with responses to points of this kind. "The Torah says…" will pass with a general audience. With a skeptical—not even necessarily antisemitic—audience, you will have to do better.

The rest of your questions:

"How generous should we be to people who are fleeing persecution?" Not very, would be my answer. (1) It is in the nature of persecuting regimes that actual evidence of persecution is hard to come by, so there will be many bogus refugees. (2) The U.S. government should place the interests of U.S. citizens before all other considerations. Some people are persecuted for excellent reasons. The fanatical (and fanatically antisemitic) Muslim Brotherhood is savagely persecuted in Egypt and other Arab countries. Will you be generous to them? (3) Where persecution is the norm in a country, that country needs major reform. The only people who can carry out such reform are the people of that country. As Dr. Johnson observed, sometimes martyrdom is the only test of truth.

"If we practically can’t deport 12 million people…" Your premise is false. Not only can it be done, it has been costed. The National Policy Institute will email you Ed Rubinstein's report, whose conclusion is that: "No matter how high the costs of deporting illegal aliens may seem, the costs of not deporting them are larger still." (Ed actually computed the cost at "between $41 billion and $46 billion annually over five years." That's about the cost of 92 Space Shuttle launches a year.) The Eisenhower administration deported, or caused to self-deport, several hundred thousand illegal aliens in a few months, and it didn't even make newspaper headlines.

"What policies best serve to promote the integration of newcomers?" Well, some diversity would help. One of the most troubling aspects of our immigrant numbers in recent years has been the decline in diversity.

"Since we can't accept everyone in the world, what are the criteria for a controlled, liberal immigration system?" Aha! Why don't we ask the American people? But I am very glad to know that we are in at least general agreement on this central point: Numbers are of the Essence.

NEXT: The Torah, the Talmud, and the Undocumented Worker

The post Why Such Colossal Favoritism Toward Mexicans? appeared first on Jewcy.

From: John Derbyshire To: Gideon Aronoff Subject: An astonishing pattern

Gideon,

I hate to act the Philadelphia lawyer here, but my attention got snagged right away on that word "should."* Where should Jews stand on immigration?

"Should" implies either some desired goal (If you want to ace that interview you should get your hair cut) or moral obligation (You should be patient with very old people). Which "should" are we looking at here? I shall try to tackle both.

Goal-wise, the starting point for discussion is our old pal Kevin MacDonald—to be exact, Chapter 7 of his book The Culture of Critique. The chapter heading is "Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy." Kevin gives a very full account (the chapter, with its notes, is 59 pages long in my 1998 hardback edition) of Jewish efforts, from the late 19th century on, to shape U.S. immigration policy in what American Jews perceived to be their group interests. In a nutshell:

• Fear of antisemitism was the main force driving Jewish activism on immigration issues.
• Jewish activists perceived a strong group interest for Jews in making U.S. society as ethnically heterogeneous as possible. To be the lone identifiable ethnic minority in an otherwise homogeneous society would, they believed, be to invite antisemitism.
• Destroying the WASP hegemony—or, later, the white-European-Christian hegemony—was a key goal. MacDonald: "[T]he historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century." [p. 260]
• There was a contradiction (MacDonald says an insincerity) at the heart of this program, in that while the propaganda for more immigration stressed the harmonious blending of many ethnicities into a "proposition nation," many of the propagandists—MacDonald cites Israel Zangwill as an example—were themselves ardently ethnocentric, opposed to (for instance) Jew-Gentile intermarriage.
• "[T]he rejection of national interest as an element of U.S. immigration policy" was "a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration," says MacDonald [p. 288] Again: "Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was viewed as irrelevant…" [p. 292]

Thus MacDonald. Is he right? Certainly the extraordinarily tenacious attachment of American Jews to liberal immigration policies calls for some explanation, and social commentators aren't exactly vying with each other to provide one. Faute de mieux, I think MacDonald's explanation is a pretty good one. I would qualify it with two points:

• Practically all of that chapter deals with the period 1881-1965. The subsequent 42 years have seen much dilution—assimilation, in fact!—of Jewish identity in the U.S. As Yuri Slezkine notes in his book The Jewish Century: "In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent."
• In MacDonald's view, there is never anything of idealism or selfless charity in anything Jews do. All is Machiavellian group self-interest. He convinces me that group self-interest is indeed in play, but there is more to human beings than that. The Jews one actually knows seem to be moved at least in part by genuine idealism.

It remains the case that the generality of American Jews, certainly among the commentariat, are very hostile to immigration restriction. They believe that wellnigh unrestricted immigration from absolutely everywhere is … is what? Good For The Jews? That would be MacDonald's interpretation. My own impression, talking to these people, is that they actually believe it is good for the U.S.A. Indeed, given that most of present-day immigration is of either (a) Muslims, who are antisemitic almost to a man, or (b) Latin Americans, which is to say, people from countries where antisemitism is more common, and more frank, than it ever was in the U.S.A. (where do they think all the old Nazis retired to?)—given that, the persistence of extravagant pro-immigration sentiment among American Jews today is rather astonishing. Perhaps the only explanation can be that Jews have so thoroughly internalized the Good For America justification that it overrides the understanding—which they must surely possess—that it is Bad For The Jews.

And it should be said, of course, that there are now numerous exceptions to all the above—many American Jews, including some prominent and activist ones, who are off the old reservation on immigration issues—Stephen Steinlight, for example.

So: If the "shoul
d" in our title implies a goal, and the question mark invites us to offer suggestions for attaining that goal, we need to know what the goal is. MacDonald would say that the goal is Jewish group self-interest, best attained by making Jews just one minority in a nation of minorities, a multiculturalist bouillabaisse, arrived at via unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere. I myself would be more charitable. For many Jews, I believe, the goal is a better U.S.A. Some, apparently really believing the catch-phrases about "diversity," "vibrancy," "nation of immigrants," and so on, truly think that the country will be improved by floods of immigrants from everywhere. Others, like Dr. Steinlight (I wonder what motives MacDonald would ascribe to him?) disagree.

So much for a goal-directed "should." What about a moral-obligation "should"? All matters of interest, Jewish-group or other, aside, what is the right stand to take, the good and moral stand?

As a conservative, I would say that the right stand, for Jews or any other Americans, is the one that conserves. That is to say, it is the one that best keeps intact our national values, our national coherence, and our national interests.

It is simply not true that our national values have always included openness to immigration from everywhere. Until the 1965 Act—which is to say, for 82 percent of our nation's history—they never did so. (And even that Act included quotas on immigration from Latin America.)

How it improves our national coherence to import an entire new racial minority, doubling our opportunities for racial discord, is mysterious to me. (And if you don't think Hispanics are a race, you had better go argue with them about it. Their main lobbying organization is called National Council of The Race).

Our national interests, like those of any other nation, center on peace, prosperity, and domestic tranquillity. On the last of those three, I have made my opinion plain. I think that "diversity" is a bust, and that we should solve the race problem we have—have always had—before introducing another one. On peace there is little to say. A nation as powerful and remote as the U.S.A. has not much to fear in the way of existential threats. Since the entire Muslim world is currently hostile to us, and inclined to express its hostility in acts of civil terror, I do think it is foolish of us to permit Muslims to settle in our country, and I think I would think this more intensely if I were Jewish. The prosperity issue is one where we can have real debate. Does unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere make us richer? I myself am persuaded by the arguments of, for example, George Borjas and Robert Rector that it does not, but I acknowledge that there are some cogent arguments on the other side.

In summary: If "should" implies means to an end, it depends on the end: Good For The Jews, or Good For America? If "should" calls on a moral obligation, then as a conservative, I would say that the obligation is to conserve those qualities that made us a good, strong, just, and prosperous nation, and not to endanger those qualities by embarking on dramatic demographic adventures.

* This post has been modified since publication.

NEXT: Let's Roast Some Old Chestnuts

The post Where Should Jews Stand On Immigration? appeared first on Jewcy.

You have “so many gay male friends”? Really? As Lady Bracknell said: “We obviously move in completely different circles.” I only have one gay male acquaintance, and he’s been living in France for several years. He is the world’s second greatest fan of Montserrat Caballé, me being the first. I have no gay friends at all. I had a lesbian personal trainer once. (Hi, Jennifer.) She was terrific—mean and pitiless, which is what you want in a trainer. Ex-military of course. (And yes, she rode a motorbike and played golf.) Right now I can’t even claim any gay acquaintances. But it’s true I don’t get out much.

As to gay marriage, I think Steve Sailer had the last word on it, as least as far as males are concerned: “Homosexuals don’t want marriages, they want weddings.” And of course, gay marriage is mostly a lesbian thing anyway. Where it’s allowed, the female-male ratio is at least two to one. These gals really need each other. I mean, who ever heard of “male gay bed death”?

I totally agree with your remark that “not that many people have truly interesting minds.” I’d go further: even people that do have interesting minds aren’t interesting very much of the time. I’ve met my share, and come away with more disappointment than dazzlement. I suspect that blogging is like modern poetry—far, far more producers than consumers. But yet, to quote Sam Johnson right back at you: “A man must do something.” Or, to quote him again (ain’t nobody gonna out-Johnson Derb!):

A transition from an author’s book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke. —Rambler #14 (May 5, 1750)

I had a vague impression that the 1997 Lolita movie had been abandoned, the topic by then being thought too outrageous. Not so: IMDB has it listed. I bet there was a fuss, though I can’t remember anything. Dominique Swain, the title character, was 17 when the movie was released—escaped?—so presumably 16 when cast. Sue Lyon was 16 when the 1962 movie was released. I predict that in the next version of Lolita to be filmed, the actress playing the nymphet will be at least 25, and there will be a bigger fuss than ever.

Hitler “eternally of interest”? Yes, and this is odd, because he was a pretty dull person. Reading Speer’s account of his table talk, you wonder how on earth everyone stayed awake through those long Berchtesgarten evenings. But of course they did! It’s a good thing there was no blogging back then. Imagine a Hitler blog! (Someone probably has.)

I bet he was a heroic farter—vegetarians always are. It’s not just the beans, it’s any vegetable matter in large quantities. The upside is, the farts don’t smell as bad as meat farts. Totally the worst farts are dog farts. Have you ever had a farty dog? Oy oy oy. My dog weighs all of 22 pounds, but he could stink up the Superdome. Old Chinese proverb (no kidding): Bie ren pi chou, zi ji pi xiang—“Other people’s farts stink, but your own are fragrant.” This is relevant to blogging somehow.

Wasn’t the thing about one testicle confirmed by the Russian autopsy, whose details were in the newspapers 30 or so years ago? One still wants to know about Goebbels, though.

James Wolcott. Wolcott doesn’t seem to have posted anything since yesterday. Perhaps he is hiding from us. In lieu of a comment, I offer you Dorothy Parker’s poem on Gissing (from memory):

Those who’ve read Gissing

Say I don’t know what I’m missing.

Till their arguments are subtler

I’ll stick with Samuel Butler.

Reason. I’m still at the stage, when confronted with political comment, of making a bee-line for the Rudy stuff. Here’s Reason on George Will on Rudy: “Of all the ’08 frontrunners, Rudy can marshal the most proof of his economic conservatism. At some point, though, he has to talk about the role of the executive and the national security state. Not just reenact 9/11—talk about the powers of the president and the federal government.”

Yes, that’s what I want to hear, too. I’m sure we shall.

Why don’t the Reason people like McCain, though? He wants to ship the entire populations of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, etc. up here, same as they do. You’d think they’d be kinder’n’gentler with a fellow open-borders enthusiast.

But at least Reason noticed us. Not to very much effect; the comment veered off into something about the Sex Pistols.

One commenting reader grumbles that: “We don’t have that multicultural guilt. We are actually classical liberals. I guess the word ‘liberal’ really has jumped the shark.” Er, yes, honey, round about 1965. Another one allows that: “JD’s stuff isn't that bad, provided he avoids the word ‘buggering’.”

Buggering! Buggering! Buggering! Buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering buggering!

Kesher Talk. The Kesher people noticed us too. We’re getting COVERAGE! It was back-handed, though: “John Derbyshire and Daphne Merkin … seem resentful and enervated by the whole thing.” Listen. mate: If you had two kids with combined ages 25, two cars with combined ages 24, no job, teeth falling out, a damp basement, a garage that needs painting, and taxes still to do in mid-March, you’d be resentful and enervated too. Whyn’t you try it? Huh? Huh?

On some actual substance: There’s a little gush about Zionism at the front of the blog. I’ll confess I didn’t quite follow the writer’s argument, not being interested in the topic at that level of detail. I only want to say, since a lot of American Zionists are blind on the point, how very peculiar it seems to us non-Zionists that so many people should be so passionately keen on a country yet not live there. I’m sure any smart Jew can give me a 10,000-word explanation—a smart Jew can give you a 10,000-word explanation of anything—but to the rest of us, I repeat, this seems really, r—e—a—l—l—y odd. I honestly don’t mean this in any negative way (“Go live in your stupid Arab-oppressing Israel if you like it so much, why dontcha?”) It just seems… odd.

Design Observer. Still no connection. These guys are really hiding from us.

Yglesias.Yglesias still hasn’t noticed us, which I’m glad about. He strikes me as one very smart Jew, who would probably chew me up and spit me out. I hate when that happens. He’s on Rudy’s case too:

Back in 1993, Rudy Giuliani plays the family card, deploying Donna Hanover's love and affection for him and his legendary skills as a father for political gain. [Then a video clip of Rudy doing family things 15 or so years ago.] Nowadays, of course, young Andrew Giuliani is a bit older and not on speaking terms with his father. The source of the fight seems to be that Rudy not only divorced Andrew's mother, but insisted on publicly humiliating her in that uniquely classy Giuliani way. Mitt Romney, famously, is the only practicing monogamist among the Three Stooges.

This got me wondering. If I look at my own reasons for favoring Rudy, part of it is my perception that Rudy is one mean, nasty son of a bitch. I like that in a President. After all, it’s highly unlikely that the meanness and nastiness will be directed at me personally. It will, one hopes, be directed at America’s enemies; and at our corrupt, dysfunctional, and costly federal bureaucracies; and (this was sure the case during his mayoralty) at the race-guilt shakedown lobbies; and at our moronic, venal, and cowardly congresscritters; and… Why on earth would anyone want a nice guy for president?

Really, seen in this light, the only question about Rudy is, does he have enough ornery meanness and nastiness to go round? Is he a big enough son of a bitch? Perhaps there’s some kind of hormone treatment we can give Rudy, to make him even more of a pitiless, sneering, devious, wife-dumping jerk. I sure hope so.

Do I still have Jennifer’s number? I could use a really harsh workout.

John 

The post Movable Snipe: Male Gay Death Bed, More Johnson, More Gissing, and Zionism appeared first on Jewcy.

Daphne,

I’ll admit, I’m confused.  I want to do a proper (say 5,000 words) response to yours of yesterday, but we’re actually supposed to be discussing these blogs, and at 500-600 words for the lot.  Whoever it was (I’ve seen it attributed to just about everyone from Cicero onwards) who said “Sorry this is such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one,” knew everything you need to know about the art of writing.

Well, let me take up a couple of your points, then try to find something brief & snappy to say about Wolcott & Co.

Lolita.  I said everything I have to say in that piece the Jewcy folk very kindly linked to.  (Though I said some of it over again, in abbreviated form, for the National Review print magazine.  Heck, why waste material?)  If there are some points you would like to make, go ahead, and I’ll respond to them.

The gravamen of both my Lolita pieces—and of a great deal else of what I write—is that you can’t say or do anything intelligent about society, politics, or culture, unless you get human nature right; and we were closer to having it right 50 years ago than we are today—way closer, I would say; and that Nabokov’s book illustrates the point.  

For heaven’s sake, didn’t we learn anything from communism?  Why was communism such an appalling failure?  Because it was founded on an utterly false view of human nature.  (Mao Tse-tung actually denied that any such thing as human nature exists.)  If you get that wrong, then everything you do is wrong—and eventually evil.

Terrible Yid.    That keys nicely into your skirt-clutching squeals of horror at Evelyn Waugh referring to someone (a third party! in a private letter!) as “a terrible yid.”  Now, Waugh was not a very nice person, and was furthermore a crashing snob.  (I tremble to think how he would have described me, in private, to a third party.  “A terrible oik,” very likely.)  I’m sorry but—get ready to clutch your skirts again—I don’t see anything wrong with him writing that.  

I’m a philosemite myself, and have a paper (and pixel) trail to prove it; but I don’t see anything wrong with disliking Jews in the generality.  There are things you can legitimately dislike—for example, the relentless hunting for a writer’s one mildly anti-Semitic remark, and the shrieks of triumph when you find it, and the fierce anathemas and readings-out that follow.  Though a disagreeable person (read his son’s memoir for the grisly details), Waugh was a superb writer with a perfectly normal range of prejudices.  

Of all the European countries, Britain has been the one in which Jews have lived most securely, have prospered best, have felt least excluded, for three hundred years and more; and all that has been in an atmosphere of mild and genteel anti-Semitism, of the sort illustrated by Waugh’s remark.  As a comfortable accommodation with the realities of human nature, this is hard to beat.  We are certainly not going to beat it by screaming and finger-pointing at every expression of negativity by one group against another.  Yet we are well on the way to outlawing such expressions.  This will not end well.  This will not end well.

Pbuh.  One more remark, though this one on my previous post, not yours.  I attached a playful “pbuh” to Ronald Reagan’s name.  A Jewish friend (it’s actually Noah Millman, who seems to have given up blogging, which, if the case, is a great pity) tells me that for Jewcy, a much more apt expression would be “Z’l” for “Zichrono livracha,” which (says Noah) means “May his memory be a blessing.” 

I like that.  We Gentiles could use something similar.  As the punchline of a well-known Soviet-era Russian joke goes:  Darn Jews get the best of everything.

OK, a quick scan of the assigned blogs.

James Wolcott.    The answer to your question, Daphne (i.e. why a guy with all the print outlets he needs should bother blogging), I think the answer is:  He wants to be rude and obscene.  Rude?  Look at what he says about Judge Napolitano—“defrosted caveman.”  It’s true, the judge’s hair starts extraordinarily low down on his forehead—my kids always comment on that if in the room when I’m watching O’Reilly—but heck, the judge can’t help it, any more than Evelyn Waugh could his squint.  I find Judge Napolitano’s commentaries usually very sapient.  And by the way:  Is it just me, or does he look…  a bit…. Jewish?

Then I stopped reading Wolcott after making the mistake of clicking on the Gissing link and getting the Wikipedia entry for New Grub Street—a novel that, as Orwell said in his fine essay on Gissing, has the same kind of effect on a writer as a novel about sexual impotence would on any male.  My fault, not Wolcott’s. 

Reason.    Now I remember why I am not a libertarian:  They are morons on the topic of immigration.  (And those of us who disagree with them are of course “nativists.”)

Based on that data, the [March/April issue of Foreign Policy] concludes: “You can no longer argue that illegal immigrants are an excessive burden on U.S. healthcare.”

I don’t believe a word of it.  Come with me to the emergency room of Huntington hospital—if you can get in there for all the Salvadorean illegals using it as their primary health-care provider.  And even if it were true, so what?  They are here illegally.  Enforce the damn law, damn it. 

However, a very high proportion of American Jews are likewise morons about immigration, so I may be in trouble with the Jewcy readership here.  Memo to same:   The richest sources for current and near-future immigration are (a) Latin America, and (b) the Middle East.  Latin Americans don’t like Jews much—where do you think all the old Nazis retired to?  And some proportion of Middle Easterners—and, on recent evidence, some larger proportion of their born-in-the-West offspring—regard the killing of Jews as a holy sacrament.  ARE YOU PEOPLE NUTS?

Kesher Talk.    Couldn’t find much of interest today.  (Note:  Any text that includes the words “Plame” and “Libby” is ipso facto outside the compass of the expression “of interest.”)  I did catch this post:  “Of all the people in the world who ought to be careful about making insensitive remarks comparing Jews to Nazis, you think high among them would be German Catholic religious leaders.”  Well, I would say that Austrian vegetarian nonsmoking atheists with toothbrush mustaches and greased-down forelocks would actually be top of the list, but hey.

Design Observer.    “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.”  Did the tsunami of Jewcy readers crash their server?  Is “webpage” really a single word now?  Where do flies go in the winter?  Etc., etc.

Yglesias.    My eyelids were getting heavy again 15-20 seconds into browsing Yglesias, then I perked up.  More slagging off of my NR colleagues!—this time of my boss, no less.  Actually I thought Rich’s point about Rudy’s “executive prowess” was a good one.  Rudy came in to a city government with out of control spending and a swollen, corrupt bureaucracy.  He attacked both, fearlessly and relentlessly.  GWB, by contrast, having come into a federal government with ditto and ditto, vastly expanded the spending, and added fat new layers of bureaucracy.  That makes Rudy the anti-Bush.  That (I think) is Rich’s point, and it’s an excellent one.

But the to-ing and fro-ing among conservatives on Rudy and his record is the really interesting political conversation going on right now.  On a scale of political interesting-ness—for not-very-wonkish people like me, I mean—with the Plame guy at 0.001 on the scale and Election Night at 100, the Rudy debates are at least a 50.  I confess I haven’t yet read Prince of the City, but I know I must, and it’s top of my list.  In spite of having been a New York City taxpayer for most of Rudy’s mayoral term, I don’t know the guy as well as I need to—as well as we all need to.  It’s getting serious now.

John 

The post Movable Snipe: Human Nature, Zichrono livracha, Illegals, and Rudy appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Daphne,

Coultergate! For heavens’ sake, it was just Ann being Ann. What a fighter the gal is, though! I saw her on Hannity & Colmes last night, totally not apologizing, blasting away at all the conservative weenies who, says Ann, are just letting liberals dictate the agenda. I’m with Ann on this point, while also somehow being at one with the liberals in finding Ann a bit… scary. Then some slagging off of my own blog-home, NRO, of K-Lo and Jonah. This gets my back up. I can give noogies to my NR colleagues, call K-Lo’s pet project a cult, or tell Jonah he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body and ought to come right out and say so; but I don’t care to see other people doing it. It’s family business. But then James Wolcott gets right back in my good books with an affectionate sketch of Clive James, of whom I’ve been a big fan since those Observer reviews Wolcott mentions. Loved Clive’s autobiography, too. His advice to schoolboys on what to do if you cack your pants in class was, I thought, invaluable.

I feel about Reason the way I feel about strenuous physical exercise—a jolly good thing, in the grand cosmic schema, but somehow not for me. The first headline I saw on Hit and Run amply, abundantly, confirmed that feeling: Pediatricians Continue to Resist the Government’s Urine Grab. Uh-huh. Then: “Can private-public toll partnerships revolutionize the way we drive?” Pass. Kerry Howley’s piece on the sexualization of little girls (thongs now come in kid sizes etc.) was nicely counterintuitive, and played right into my growing irritation with
Bill O’Reilly’s furious jihad against “child abusers,” a category that, on the Big Mick’s expansive definition, would sweep up several harmless and really very nice old men of my own childhood acquaintance into the O’Gulag along with, to be sure, the very occasional genuine monster. And then—oh boy!—a YouTube clip of the old Soviet National Anthem! Priceless! The pop version (second link in that posting), by contrast, stank.

“News and views from a hawkish liberal Jewish perspective,” says the banner at Kesher Talk. I had Babelfish translate that into Hebrew and then the Hebrew back out into English. Funny—it came through as: “We’re guilty as all get out about blacks, Hispanics, and all the other people we are smarter and richer than, but don’t even think about messing with Israel!” Well, it’s nice to know where you are right up front. Some Judaic stuff—Rosh Chodesh Ellul, Simchat Torah—that all bounced right off my poor, and poor, gentile brain. Fair enough, it’s a Jewish site—just so long as they feel guilty about me, too. What else? Some talk about that Wilson gal & the Plame guy, pure insomnia cure as far as I’m concerned—I’d rather read about Rosh Chodesh Ellul. Then—Rudy! They got my attention there. A good, long, interesting post about Rudy’s dark side. Yeah, yeah, but the guy understands key things—e.g. that govt. spending is mostly squandered, that govt. bureaucracies are mostly incompetent, that govt. programs of every kind, including wars and “diplomatic initiatives,” almost always do more harm than good—and this is a new thing in our national life, at least since Ronald Reagan, pbuh.

At Design Observer, I found myself looking right into (so far as physical laws permit) the cross-eyed squint of
Evelyn Waugh, “as good a writer as it is possible to be while holding untenable opinions” (G. Orwell). (Imagine a stare-off between the late EW and the current President of Iran! It would rip the fabric of spacetime.) There followed a nice bit of Waughiana. Scrolling down, the next mugshot is of Idi Amin, who had a personality even nastier than Waugh’s, and who could not even write fiction. (At least Saddam Hussein tried.) And, nut job though Idi undoubtedly was, his random thuggery did less harm to Uganda, and killed fewer Ugandans, than the more systematic nation-wrecking of his predecessor and successor, the quasi-Leninist hack Milton Obote. Then a lot of postings about design—it’s a design website, duh. Where’s that Rosh Chodesh Ellul link?

Matt Yglesias is one of those names I’ve been hearing bandied about for ever, yet never really had much clue who he was—like the Plame guy, or Ludwig von Mises, or Jessica Simpson. Well, here I am, looking at his blog at last. Wall to wall political wonkery, lightly seasoned with some TV arcana. Must try, must try, … zzzzzzzzz.

John

[Check back at the Daily Shvitz for Daphne's reply.]

The post Movable Snipe: Coulter, Lolitas, and Waugh appeared first on Jewcy.

You bet. Though since I broke the bank previously, and am thereby presumably the cause of our moderator bringing down the guillotine, I’ll keep it short.

On empathy for immigrants: yours is not a sufficient explanation. Why haven’t the Irish, or the Italians, been as prominent in fighting immigration restriction as the Jews? MacDonald argues (with bags of documentation) that opposition to the early-20th-century restrictionist movement, which eventually led to the 1924 Immigration Act and quota, was almost entirely Jewish. You might argue that Jews are better at organizing and agitating in causes like this, but then you are just walking into MacDonald’s trap.

You also owe me an explanation of why current immigration-restrictionists are not Daughters of the American Revolution, or hillbilly descendants of 18^th-century Scotch-Irish settlers, but people like Mark Krikorian (third-generation Armenian American), Peter Brimelow (immigrant from Britain), Michelle Malkin (daughter of immigrants from Philippines), and so on.

On MacDonald’s picking on the Jews: Well, his excuse is that the Jews provide an exceptionally data-rich set for the kind of study he wanted to undertake. That ought to be convincing. If I decided to embark on an inquiry into human groups’ ability to execute “group evolutionary strategies” across centuries, the Jews would be ideal. Of course, we are not convinced, for the reasons I have mentioned: MacDonald’s disinclination to say anything at all nice about the Jews, as well as his rather (it seems to me) unscholarly language in speaking about “manipulation” of Gentile culture by Jewish intellectuals, and so on.

I find myself wishing very much that someone Jewish had done the kind of study MacDonald did. I agree with you that it was worth doing; I agree that the results are often interesting and often true; I just wish it hadn’t been this guy who wrote Culture of Critique.

On the deracination of young Jews: Slezkine, in his book The Jewish Century (which I wish we had more space to discuss) gives his opinion that following the last influx of Jews (i.e. from the USSR in the years around 1980), the Jews of the U.S.A. are settling down as just another American ethnicity, with an increasingly feeble group identification and high rates of exogamy. (He gives the rate of out-marriage as 3 percent in 1940, 50 percent in 1990.)

Slezkine also makes much of the fact that we goyim are all becoming Jews: “learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds… pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake…replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations).” He quotes Levenson: “A Jewish style of life may be more endangered when everyone eats bagels than when Jews eat hot cross buns.”

All this sounds right to me; so while MacDonald has, I believe, uncovered some interesting truths about twentieth century American culture, I am not sure he has anything to tell us about the future.

Did MacDonald demonstrate that the group evolutionary strategy of the Jews had negative consequences for American intellectual culture? In Culture of Critique I believe he did. One of the most corrosive influences on 20^th-century American life has been the collapse of group confidence among white Gentiles.

“These [Jewish-inspired and -led] movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society,” says MacDonald in Critique. I think that’s putting it a bit too strongly; but yes, the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasian anthropologists, did manage to convince white-Gentile America that there was something deeply wrong with it. That is not to mention the number of lives that must have been wrecked by Freudian superstition, and the unpleasant future consequences that will flow (I believe) from decades of well-nigh unrestrained Third World immigration.

I do think we’d have been better off without all that. You have to put something in the other side of the balance, though: the wonderful vitality of American popular culture, which had a huge Jewish component, the war-winning, disease-curing, and life-improving developments in the theoretical sciences that had so many Jews among their originators. History is all swings and roundabouts. Net-net, would the U.S.A. have been worse off, or better off, without the Great Wave Jewish immigrants? It seems indisputable to me that we would have been worse off. MacDonald would disagree.

Finally, I endorse your call to Jews, and anyone else with an inquiring mind, to give MacDonald a try. I don’t think he is going to go down in history as one of the giants of social science, but he does have some interesting things to say, and he doesn’t give a fig about PC—always refreshing, in this rather stifled day and age. Still, I wish these books had been written by someone else.

JD

The post War-Winning, Disease-Curing, And Life-Improving appeared first on Jewcy.

Thanks, Joey.

Now look: We can’t agree too much, or the whole debate will peter out.

Was that really 4,000 words? Good grief!

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

Qualifications: You may, if you have ironclad journalistic credentials going back decades, like Novak or Buchanan, get away with something critical of Israel or the Israel lobbies. For a minor figure like myself, however, even that—let alone a favorable review of MacDonald—would be professional death.

Leftwing figures like Chomsky or Fisk are neither here nor there. The modern left is riddled with antisemitism, and nobody notices it any more. I spoke of the milieu I know. In this milieu, I say again, you don’t f*ck with the Jews. William Cash’s treatment—he was writing for The Spectator, a rightwing British magazine—was no anomaly. It was just what I should expect.

On the matter of intergroup courtesies, I think you are right that things have gone way too far, as some of the examples I raised in my last post illustrate. I certainly don’t think ethnic humor is out of bounds, though. The fact that it flourishes in private settings shows that it satisfies some deep human need.

I used to watch a lot of mainland Chinese TV, including the variety programs. Most Chinese TV humor consists of making fun of the various accents, manners, and stereotypes of China’s many regions. The Shandong people are pugnacious and none too bright; Cantonese will eat anything that moves; Shanxi people are cheap; Shanghainese are crafty; Beijing people ingratiating (“oily” is the actual Chinese word—jing you = “capital oil”); northeasterners inclined to crime; and on and on ad infinitum.

Even in PC America ethnic humor flourishes, on the understanding that jokes about group X may only be made by members of group X (though anyone is allowed to laugh at them). Chris Rock is outrageously funny on the criminality and sloth of blacks (“My friend called and said his car had broken down. He asked me what he should do. Where was he? I asked. He said he was on Martin Luther King Boulevard. I told him he should RUN…”). Similar with Jackie Mason and all his shoulder-shrugging Jew jokes.

On Kevin MacDonald: I thought his first two books made too much of the fact that the premodern European Jews were a distinctive group very diligent in maintaining group cohesion and advancing group interests. What’s surprising?

I thought Culture of Critique much more striking because of its detailed coverage of a topic I had been thinking about in an unfocused way for a long time, viz., how the great influx of European Jews into the U.S. in the decades around 1900 had had strong effects on American intellectual culture. This includes some very negative effects, like the elevation of spite-the-goy movements such as the Frankfurt School, and self-contained Talmudic-style pseudosciences such as Freudianism, headed by charismatic, authoritarian rabbi figures.

The very intense opposition of American Jews to almost any kind of immigration restriction has been much chewed over, not only by Kevin MacDonald. However, attitudes are changing fast.

John Podhoretz, editorial page editor of the New York Post, went to address a group of Midwestern Jews several months ago on the topic of illegal immigration. I hear that when he started with the traditionally Jewish-American lines about unrestricted immigration being a gift from G-d, etc., the audience hissed him down!

And several of the immigration-restrictionist groups (the CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA…there are so many now I’m losing track) have Jewish activists in key positions—Dan Stein of FAIR comes to mind. It’s dawning on a lot of U.S. Jews that the main sources for present and future mass immigration into the U.S. are (a) Latin America, and (b) the Muslim world.

The former has high levels of antisemitism (look at where all the old Nazis retired to!) while the latter is antisemitic root and branch, and contains thousands of people who think that killing Jews is a holy sacrament. Mass immigration may no longer be “good for the Jews.” Older and more insulated Jews like Podhoretz haven’t got it yet, but I think younger Jews have.

I have a number of problems with MacDonald. There is, for instance, the one I specified in my review of Critique: his flat refusal to say anything positive about Jewish contributions in the U.S. For example, Jews totally revitalized American popular culture, especially musical culture. It’s hard to understand why someone working with such flammable material wouldn’t make some effort at fire prevention.

And then there is the issue of intention, which he is slippery about. To what degree is this “group evolutionary strategy” conscious? He clearly doesn’t think there is a “Jew Central” organizing it all, so I guess it is self-organizing, but what’s the mechanism of transmission? Why would it consciously be kept up by self-de-Judaized Jews, which is what most of the Jewish intellectuals in Critique are? If any of it is conscious, does MacDonald think there is a component of malice against Gentiles? (I think he does think so, but don’t recall him saying it explicitly.) If none of it is conscious, what does he think drives it? Genetics? Or what?

But I am over limit again.

JD

Next: A break from hooray-for-us historiography

The post A Black and a Chinaman Walk Into a Bar… appeared first on Jewcy.

All right, Joey, I will indulge your curiosity.

If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, “Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work and I think everyone should read him,” the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised.

You forget how lonely conservatives are. The flame of thoughtful, responsible American conservatism burns low, and needs constant careful attention. In the folk mythology of present-day America, conservatism is associated with Jim Crow and the persecution of racial minorities. I have not the slightest doubt that many millions, probably tens of millions, of Americans believe that, say, Pat Buchanan is a secret member of the Ku Klux Klan.

I live in an ordinary middle-middle-class New York suburban neighborhood. My neighbors all know I am a conservative commentator. A couple of them will not speak to me on that account. The others just think I am mildly nuts—a thing associated in their minds, somehow, with my being British-born. They regard me with a sort of amused sympathy. The nearest conservative I know lives about eight miles away.

Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly, by indirect means of course (I mean, it would be no use to just stamp “THIS IS NOT AN ANTISEMITIC MAGAZINE! WE DO NOT FAVOR THE RETURN OF JIM CROW LAWS!” in Day-Glo letters on the cover) that they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment.

And that matters. In America, persons who have, or are suspected to have, incorrect opinions on race, are low-status. Human beings are primarily social animals, and we are intensely conscious of status rankings within the groups we belong to.

The best guide here is novelist Tom Wolfe. Recall that passage in The Bonfire of the Vanities—I don’t have the book on hand so I’m working from memory here—where the young New York district attorney and his wife have hired a British nanny to look after their baby. This makes for an uncomfortable situation at first, because British people get status points in urban U.S. society just on account of being British. (Yes, of course it’s absurd, but I assure you it is the case.)

So this struggling, ill-paid young DA and his wife, both from modest backgrounds, have an employee with more status points than a domestic servant ought to have. The status structure of their household is out of joint. Then one day the nanny makes some mildly un-PC remark about Black people, and the DA and his wife fairly weep with relief. The nanny is low-status after all! Nothing to worry about!

So if National Review were to print unqualified praise (or even praise not severely qualified) of a guy who argues that Jews have a “group evolutionary strategy” that involves the transformation—I think in The Culture of Critique MacDonald actually says “destruction”—of Gentile society, they would have done what that nanny did: dumped several status points down the toilet.

A conservative magazine simply can’t afford to do that. Its hold on the attention of the U.S. public is too precarious. A conservative magazine can’t afford to let a writer say anything nice about MacDonald without putting it under some such title as “The Marx of the Antisemites.”

There isn’t any kind of chicanery or dishonesty there. That’s just how the world is, how America is, under what Bill Buckley calls “the prevailing structure of taboos,” and the prevailing system of status perception, both of individual human beings and of easily anthropomorphizable entities like opinion magazines.

National Review wants to get certain ideas out to the U.S. public—ideas about economics, politics, law, religion, science, history, the arts, and more. To do that, the magazine needs standing in our broad cultural milieu. It needs status. That’s hard at the best of times for a conservative publication. To lose status points—to lose standing—just in order to draw readers’ attention to some rather abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college faculty member, would be dumb. Ergo, as I said, NR would reject a piece of the kind you suggested, and they would be correct to do so. I would do so if I were editor of NR.

To your next point (I am working from the bottom up again) that my professed fear of ticking off Jews is some kind of affectation or pose, I can only assure you that this is not so. Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first heard it: “Don’t f*ck with the Jews.” (Though I had better add here that I was mixing mainly with British expats at that point, and the comment came from one of them. More on this in a moment.)

Joe Sobran expressed it with his usual hyperbole: “You must only ever write of us as a passive, powerless, historically oppressed minority, struggling to maintain our ancient identity in a world where all the odds are against us, poor helpless us, poor persecuted and beleaguered us! Otherwise we will smash you to pieces.”

Though if you look up the William Cash affair I mentioned in my last post, Sobran’s quip is really not all that hyperbolic. When the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the CEO of United International Pictures, Barbra Streisand, assorted other media bigshots, and of course the ever-vigilant Mr. Leon Wieseltier, all denounce you in public, you are in pretty serious trouble.

(Since that is the second time I have mentioned the “Kings of the Deal” brouhaha, and since a great many readers will not know what I am talking about, I have put the whole thing on my website here.)

This may be characteristic only of conservative journalism—I don’t know, never having done the other kind. A person doing liberal-oriented opinion journalism surely needs no such cautions, having completely internalized all the “blank slate,” egalitarian, and victimological tenets of the majority culture, and the status-ordering precepts I sketched above. (And this is even leaving aside the high probability that a liberal commentator is anyway Jewish himself!)

The place of Jews in modern American conservatism is a deep and fascinating story, with of course the conversion of the neocons at its center. You have to bear in mind the overwhelming dominance of Jews in every kind of leftist movement in the U.S. until about 30 years ago. Yuri Slezkine has the astonishing numbers. (Did you know that of the four student protesters shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970, three were Jewish? So says Slezkine, anyway. If you take four people at random from the U.S. population, the chance that three or more of them will be Jewish, given the most generous estimate of the proportion of Jews in the population, is worse than one in four thousand.)

In any case, it was a great achievement, and a great boost, for American conservatism to have peeled off a platoon of articulate, energetic intellectual heavyweights from the great socialistic mass of American Jewry.

Generally speaking—and I certainly include myself here—American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have them on board. Not that there aren’t some frictions, particularly on mass immigration, the mere contemplation of which just seems to make Jews swoon with ecstasy (American Jews, at any rate. Israeli Jews have a different opinion…). MacDonald gives over a whole chapter of The Culture of Critique to the Jewish-American passion for mass immigration.

There is also some odd kind of bonding going on between Jewish conservatives and evangelical Christians. I say “odd” because of how, I imagine, this bonding would have looked to the grandparents of today’s Jews. The explanation I have most commonly heard is that Jewish conservatives want to be accommodating towards evangelicals because the latter are friendly to Israel. Hence you get prominent Jewish intellectuals saying nice things about nutty evangelical preoccupations like intelligent design.

The Israel explanation doesn’t seem particularly convincing to me. Don’t evangelicals want all the Jews to return to Israel so that the End Times can commence, in the course of which the Jews will be annihilated? Nevertheless, once or twice a week I read something that leaves me thinking that in the mind of this or that Jewish conservative intellectual, evangelical Christianity is “good for the Jews.”

At any rate, these minor frictions and divisions are inevitable in a movement as broadly defined as conservatism. Jews are welcome in the American conservative movement. The great energy and intelligence of Jews, and their strong sense of group identity, do, though, sometimes lead to the same kinds of pathologies in the conservative movement as Kevin MacDonald logged in the Jews’ self-created movements (such as Freudianism, Boasian anthropology, and the New York intellectuals).

In particular, they are under the same temptation to defer to charismatic intellectual “rabbis,” and to
enforce rigid standards of orthodoxy, with vituperation and expulsion for dissidents. I’d emphasize that these are occasional tendencies, and I believe they are much less marked among Jewish conservatives than among, say, Freudians (or for that matter among Jewish liberals). They are there, though; and if you get on the wrong side of them, you are in deep doo-doo.

And in the larger culture, a Gentile conservative who riles up Jewish liberals is really asking for trouble. You could ask William Cash.

Let me deal with your point about the British, and the larger point about group identification.

On the Brits: You are certainly right that the correct approach here is anthropological; though I don’t think your insufferable tone of sneering moral superiority would be tolerated in professional anthropological circles today.

So far as I understand modern theories of the mind, a great deal of our brainpower is given over to processing social information. The theory that seems to me most plausible involves three different modules in the brain: a relationship module, a social module, and a status module.

The relationship module manages our one-on-one relationships with other human beings. It includes a sort of lexicon of all the persons we know, tagged by their attributes as we see them. (Not just common attributes like “fat” or “red-haired,” but me-centric attributes like “enemy” or “borrowed my copy of The Culture of Critique and never returned it.”)

A second, the social module, manages our behavior in our group, and our attitudes to our group and to outside groups. Group stereotypes, for example, which perform very valuable social-psychological functions, dwell in this module.

A third, the status module, computes our status within our group, either by objective criteria, or by attempting to “read” the entries about us in other people’s relationship-module lexicons, via those people’s external behavior. This status module has algorithms for computing status. The code of the algorithms, and the data we input to them, differs from one society to another, and from one group to another in a given society. (We all belong to several groups, of course.)

Among the Masais, a male’s status in his village is measured by the number of cattle he owns. An American academic who belongs to the groups “mathematicians,” “dedicated amateur hang-gliders,” and “opera lovers” will measure his status in the first group by how many papers he has published, his status in the second by how long he has managed to stay aloft, and his status in the third by how many donations he has given to his local opera company.

Now, in the broad and general group “respectable middle-class Americans,” one’s attitudes toward other races are very, very important criteria in determining one’s status. A person like the nanny in that Tom Wolfe novel, who reveals incorrect attitudes on race, suffers massive loss of status thereby.

As criteria for status-in-group evaluation, these attitudes are less important in Britain. In many subsets of modern middle-class British society, mildly negative remarks about black people, like those uttered by the nanny, would not lose you any status points at all.

This does not mean that Americans are morally superior to Britons; still less does it mean that Britons are more sophisticated, more worldly-wise, than Americans. All it means is that for historical reasons—mainly because the U.S. once had legal race slavery, while the British Isles (as opposed to the British territories overseas) never did—British people compute status-in-group slightly differently from the way Americans compute it. The nanny’s error was to assume that her employers’ status modules were running the same code as British people’s. Coming from Britain to the U.S., I made many such errors myself, and still occasionally do.

So far as it is possible to make generalizations about such things, British behavior in this regard is closer to the norm for modern humans than is American behavior. The critical importance of racial attitudes in middle-class American status rankings is extraordinary. This has been the case for decades. Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers was deemed unpublishable under that title by U.S. publishers even then; they changed the title for U.S. audiences. Yet the play version was being performed in provincial British theaters, under Christie’s original title, well into the late 1960s.

As I said, this is not a question of moral superiority on the part of Americans, nor of superior worldliness on the part of Brits; it’s just that our thinking is slightly different, probably as a result of different national-historical experiences. (Though as always nowadays, group genetic peculiarities cannot be ruled out. Recent studies indicate that the population of the British Isles has been very little disturbed for tens of thousands of years. The successive invasions of Celts, Romans, Teutons, and Normans only slightly altered a common Paleolithic genome, likely derived from a small, and therefore distinctive, founder group.)

The exquisite sensitivity of Americans in these matters causes no end of misunderstanding and bad feelings, as the William Cash episode shows. I am sorry to say that it often makes Americans look like hypocrites to foreigners, making rather a mockery of all our pretensions to moral superiority. House hunting in the New York suburbs in 1992, my (Chinese-born) wife and I were once sitting in the office of a realtor, an American lady, trying to spell out just what we were looking for. We had no kids at the time, but were moving to the burbs precisely to raise a family. Well, chatting with the realtor, I said that of course we wanted to be in a good school system, one with not too many black kids. The realtor’s reaction was similar to the one described by P.G. Wodehouse when he wrote: “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”

You don’t say things like that. You just do them: practically no white Americans, looking for a place where they can settle down and raise a family, will seek a school district that is majority black. In fact, that realtor, when she had thawed some, carried out what I am sure is her normal procedure of steering us well away from heavily black school districts. Patterns of housing segregation in the U.S. speak for themselves, very eloquently. This is, however, the only way in which honest speech about race in America is allowed. (I believe, in fact, that if the realtor had said: “Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time and mine by showing you properties in heavily black neighborhoods,” she would have been breaking the law. Her behavior, however, was indistinguishable from what it would have been if she had said that, and meant it.)

And if you are not raised in the U.S., you are sometimes totally nonplussed by the stuff native-born Americans come out with in this area. For example, I stared hard at the following paragraph of yours, struggling to get some sense out of it:

Like Irishman and other antiquated coinages, it suggests that ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity[….] American Jews, like other Americans, dislike that implication, and we once dealt with it by insisting on wacky constructions such as “Americans of the Hebrew faith.”

“Irishman” is an “antiquated coinage”? This is news to me. What, then, am I supposed to say this week? “Person of Irishness”? And does calling someone an Irishman really “suggest that ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity”? All it suggests to me is that the guy comes from Ireland.

And if American Jews “dislike” the notion that “ethnicity is a fundamental feature of a person’s identity,” then why are we having these exchanges? And why is “Americans of the Hebrew faith” any more risible than “persons of the Hibernian ethnicity,” or whatever damn fool thing it is you want me to say instead of “Irishman”?

I once wrote a novel about Chinese people. My first-person narrator, a Chinese immigrant in America, refers to himself once or twice as “an Oriental.” The book reviewer for USA Today took me to task for that. “Oriental,” she told me sternly, was a word that could only be used for carpets and furniture. For people, the correct term was “Asian American.”

So I guess Confucius, Li Po, and Mao Tse-tung were all “Asian Americans.” And then, of course, there was that wonderful moment in the 2002 Winter Olympics when a Black American woman won a gold medal, thereby becoming the first Black woman from any country to win a winter gold. The announcer for the NBC network could not bring himself to say it as I just said it, though. God forbid anyone should think he had noticed the lady’s blackness! The only way he could bring himself to say it was: “She’s the first African-American woman from any country to win a winter gold medal.” I’m sorry, but this stuff just makes me fall around laughing.

Now to the very interesting question of whether or not ethnicity is “a fundamental feature of a person’s identity.” I think the only honest answer is that for some people, including some Jews, it surely is, at least some of the time, and for others, not.

Look: My ethnicity (white English) is part of what I am. It is one of the groups I identify with. This is not deplorable, or wicked, or exclusivist of me; it is just human, dammit. We are social animals who organize ourselves into groups. An individual in a complex modern society identifies with several groups. These identifications have different weights in his mind; in fact, they have different weights (the term of art is “salience”) in different circumstances.

I had occasion to remark recently, in a discussion elsewhere about whether or not I am a racist, that I would feel much more at ease in a room full of black African mathematicians than I would in a room full of white English soccer hooligans. In the first group my salient identification would be “mathematician,” and I would be a mathematician at ease among mathematicians.

My identification with the group “white English” would not be very salient in that group—definitely not as salient as it would be if I wandered into a bar on 125th street in Manhattan. In the second group I would be very uncomfortably aware of my membership in the group “bookish types who dislike physical violence and have little interest in sport.” That would be my salient group identification in that milieu; and as the only person in the room nursing that group identification, I would be exceedingly ill at ease.

Membership in the group “Jewish people” must be something every Jew is aware of at least some of the time, even if it is only rarely his salient group identification. Jewishness is, after all, as group identifications go—compared with “white English” for example—exceptionally well defined and historically rooted.

To draw from Slezkine’s fine book again, those Russian Jews who consciously de-Judaized themselves in the late-19th and early-20th century, and moved from the Pale into metropolitan Russia, and became such an important part of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state, suddenly found their Jewishness—which they thought they had shucked off, left behind in the shtetl!—very, very salient when Hitler’s Panzers rolled across the border. It’s situational, see.

The idea you seem to be retailing—that these group identifications, with all their inner complexities of status, and all their situational vagaries of salience is all some airy figment of our imaginations, or some relic of a barbarous era we (or at any rate, the most morally advanced of us) have left behind—strikes me as bizarre and preposterous to the furthest degree. Do you really believe that? Good grief!

The beginning of wisdom is to look at humanity as it is, with its arms and legs, its eyes and tongues, its livers and kidneys, and its brains organized into modules, in some way like I sketched above, those modules busily processing information—information about light and temperature, visual and aural information, and above all (for we are social animals) social information.

I may choose, freely choose, to treat my fellow human beings well or badly; but my interactions with them are governed by my brain, which has evolved with the ability to do some things but not others. Utter indifference to group identity is a thing the brain cannot do. The denial of human nature gets us nowhere.

Whatever we think of Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jews and their “group evolutionary strategy,” he is at least talking about a real human personality, one that I recognize when I look at myself and other people. It’s a personality that is aware of belonging to groups, that vies for status in those groups and that nurses negative feelings of various degrees to at least some other groups. Even when it wishes no harm to any other group, if given the choice between advancing the interests of a group it belongs to, versus advancing the interests of a group it does not belong to, will choose the former action nine times out of ten.

That is humanity as I know it, and as the great novelists and dramatists have portrayed it, and as the human sciences are beginning to uncover it in fine detail through such disciplines as evolutionary history. The bloodless, deracinated, group-indifferent, “blank slate,” omnisympathetic creature promoted by the merchants of Political Correctness is one I do not recognize as human. Those merchants are human, though, for all they seek to deny it. Their lofty pretensions to have risen high above us grubby group-identifying lesser beings strike me as just another form, a particularly obnoxious form, of in-group status-striving.

Best,

JD

Next: The Jewish media Goliath

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Thanks, Joey.

The title of my review, “The Marx of the Anti-Semites,” was thought up by one of the editors of The American Conservative, most probably Scott McConnell. My own suggested title for the piece was “The Jew Thing.” I don’t actually think that “The Marx of the Anti-Semites” is a very good title. Kevin MacDonald is a more conscientious social scientist than Marx was; and while dedicated antisemites use MacDonald for supporting evidence, they probably think him a bit of a milksop for not condemning the “Zionist Menace” more frankly and forcefully.

Working back through your questions: Yes, indeed I was, and am, “afraid of offending Jews.” Of course I am! For a person like myself, a Gentile who is a very minor name in American opinion journalism, desirous of ascending to some slightly less minor status, ticking off Jews is a very, very bad career strategy. I approached the MacDonald review with great trepidation. I gave my honest opinion, of course—the entire point of my line of work is to speak your mind and get paid for it—but I’ll admit I was nervous. Reading the review again, I think it shows.

I have somewhere formulated Derbyshire’s Law, which asserts that: “ANYTHING WHATSOEVER said by a Gentile about Jews will be perceived as antisemitic by someone, somewhere.” I have experienced the truth of this many times. Further, I have the awful example of William Cash before me. Cash wrote an article titled “Kings of the Deal” for The Spectator back in 1994, pointing out, in a perfectly inoffensive way (and, of course, quite truly) that lots of Hollywood movers and shakers are Jewish. You can google the consequences.

Why is Derbyshire’s Law true? I am not sure. It seems to me that Jews have a very strong preference that their Jewishness not be noticed. They want to “pass” as much as possible.

I remember thinking how strange it was, in that special issue of The New Republic devoted to The Bell Curve, that Leon Wieseltier should declare himself “repulsed” at the suggestion, by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, that Jews have higher intelligence than Gentiles.

“What an odd thing to say!” I thought to myself. “Why, if someone were to say that my common-ancestry group was smarter than others, I’d be proud!” But that was a very Jewish reaction on Wieseltier’s part. It’s not hard to see why this should be so, historically. Remember all those Jewish jokes with the punch line: “How many times do I have to tell you, Sammy—don’t make trouble!” I am sure Kevin MacDonald has an explanation for it somewhere, though I can’t recall a specific passage.

Were Scott McConnell and Pat Buchanan similarly fearful of being thought to have gotten the Jew Thing? I don’t know. You had better ask them yourself. I don’t know Pat very well, so I can’t speak to his case. I do know Scott quite well, and I am quite sure he is not an antisemite in any sense in which I understand the word. He does believe that Israel, via her lobbies in the USA, has a distorting effect on U.S. Middle Eastern policy; but that is (at least in Scott’s case) a geostrategic judgment, and not antisemitic.

What are we to think of MacDonald and his books? My own opinion of MacDonald is that he is a plain reactionary, at least so far as the Jews in America are concerned. Someone described George Orwell as being in love with 1910. I think MacDonald is in love with 1950—with the old Gentile supremacy, when Jews were kept out of golf clubs and hotels advertised themselves on their stationery as “near churches” (translation: No Jews, please). He doesn’t wish any harm to Jews, but I do think he resents the disproportionate representation of Jews in the media, the academy, and other elites.

I’ll confess I can’t work up any indignation about this. It’s not an unreasonable point of view, though I don’t share it—I still haven’t got the Jew Thing.

I like my elites to be as smart as possible, and, yes (sorry, Mr. Wieseltier), Jews in general are much smarter than the rest of us. Who doesn’t know it? But there is nothing more normal in human beings than group partiality—a fondness for one’s own group, and some measure of negativity toward other groups. That’s just human nature, and I do think it’s silly and counterproductive to pretend human nature is other than what it is.

We are social animals, and we organize ourselves into groups, and develop group loyalties and hostilities, as naturally as we eat and love. Nasty things happen if our groupiness gets out of control, of course; but you could say the same of eating and loving, or any other aspect of human nature. Here comes the need for ethical and legal systems, also very human.

I therefore approached MacDonald’s work dispassionately, interested to see what he has to say. I found his first two books tough-going, jargony, and not very well written. The Culture of Critique, though, is an interesting book, and I think he says things that are true, uncomfortably true—for example about the tendency, on the part of 20th-century Jewish-led intellectual movements like the Frankfurt School, to pathologize Gentile culture.

I was glad to see that someone had written about these things in a non-vituperative way. They are things that occur to any thoughtful American sooner or later, and it is satisfying to see someone who’s done a lot of reading on these topics, trying to fit them into some kind of coherent social-historical framework.

Is MacDonald’s analysis a correct one? Partly correct? Totally incorrect? Well, I guess we’ll get to that in our exchanges. I registered some of my doubts about The Culture of Critique in my review of it. I have since acquired some more. After reading Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, for instance, I have a much clearer idea about the role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution, a view at odds with much of what MacDonald says.

Before passing the ball back to you, though, Joey, I have a question. My eye was stopped dead by your use of the word Jewess. Is this word still current? I myself used it, in all innocence, about 10 years ago, and was sternly reprimanded by several people (this was on an email discussion group). Perhaps this is a word that Jews may use, but Gentiles may not? Give me a ruling, please.

Best,

John Derbyshire

Next: Don’t sell yourself as a martyr to world Jewry

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