Is Kevin MacDonald a Racialist?

Professor Kevin MacDonald (http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/) cites Philip Weiss (Mondoweiss)  positively in a recent blog entry (http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/blog-Weissberg-Weiss.htm).

In response Philip Weiss writes the following on his own blog (Kevin MacDonald and the Politics of WASP Resentment).

I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold. He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud. When he speaks, feelingly, of the displacement of WASPs, he is giving voice to a declension and hurt that I've seen even in gentile friends of mine, and that is rarely expressed. He understands how important Jewish history is to this moment in world and U.S. history. He is concerned about Palestinian human rights and the Israel lobby's astonishing ability to remove Palestinian suffering from the American discourse. Still, in the end I reject the embrace.

What's troubling about MacDonald is that he's a racialist. Everything he says always goes back to immutable racial categories. Thus the existence of the Jewish state doesn't provoke him  to look for a more idealistic social model, no it rationalizes for him a WASP ethnocentrism. Everyone in their own ethnic corner. Stay there. All that talk of European-descended peoples in the above passage. The very ethnocentrism I found stifling in my own Jewish cultural milieu and stifling too when I encountered the WASP version at my college. He's a racialist too in that he seems always to reduce Jewish personality to certain traits. I even agree somewhat about some of these traits. For instance, I read in one of his essays that Jews are "psychologically intense." Well I'm psychologically intense, my brother is psychologically intense. But my sister isn't. Maybe it's a real tendency but it feels vague and a little vicious. Then there's his rap on Jewish ethnocentrism. I agree that Jews tend to be ethnocentric. As an assimilationist Jew, I am intensely aware of this trait. The Jewish law against intermarriage smacks of racism in today's America (even Jews agree, in opinion surveys; and mad Joe Lieberman lied about these laws when he ran for president 8 years ago). As Norman Mailer observed to the American Conservative, post-Holocaust Jews are fixated on the question, "Is it good for the Jews?" Pure ethnocentrism, and grotesque-- when you consider the cultural and political power Jews have achieved in the U.S.

The problem with MacDonald's formulations, though, is that he seems to hoot (I say "seems" because I've just skimmed a few of his statements) at the idea of Jewish suffering, seems to overlook the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life.* Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, once said that it took seven generations to overcome great historical grievances.  I'm sure I'm misremembering his lines. But the trauma of having nearly half your people wiped out--is there any empathy for the effects of that in MacDonald?

I became interested in Kevin MacDonald when Judy Shulevitz accused him of anti-Semitism. I knew Judy at Yale. She was somewhat involved in Jewish activities but in the 1980-81 time frame was certainly not capable of disputing the contents of the Talmud with anyone. While she could have increased her knowledge of Jewish religious texts during the twenty years before her attack on Professor MacDonald, Judy is quite hypocritical on issues of racism and anti-Semitism (see http://www.euvolution.com/euvolution/critique.html), and I am baffled at all her ridiculous attempts to justify Jewish ethnochauvinism. Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim act like other Eastern Europeans. Ornate explanations are not necessary.

 

Professor MacDonald theorizes "that the high levels of IQ found among Ashkenazi Jews and some historical Sephardic populations indicate a higher genetic potential of intelligence among these Jewish groups" and argues, "While it is true that some Jewish populations have undistinguished lQs, it seems very likely that, whatever cultural pushes there have been for IQ within Jewish groups, there is also a strong genetic component."

 

While Professor MacDonald thinks that race or ethnicity matters, he hedges on the genetic component, and he points out in a recent blog entry (Jon Entine's Screed) that his analysis of evolved group behavior does not depend on evolutionary genetics.

Finally, the new population genetic data would not change anything in Separation and Its Discontents or The Culture of Critique. The main theoretical basis of both of these books is social identity theory. Psychological research on social identity processes finds negative attitudes toward outgroups even when the groups are randomly composed. For example, social identity processes underlie the hostility that can develop in crowds of football fans sporting different team colors: "My team is better (and more moral and more intelligent) than your team." Genetic differences are certainly not required.

As a result, even if historical populations of Jews and non-Jews were genetically identical, social identity theory would predict positive ingroup biases and negative attitudes toward outgroups. In fact, it's interesting that population genetic data consistently place Jewish populations closest to their Middle Eastern neighbors, the Palestinians. Being genetically close doesn't mean that in-group/out-group hostility can't develop.

Professor MacDonald is trying to understand the developmental and non-developmental aspects of the psychology of group behavior. He is not engaging in mathematically incorrect statistical analysis of sociological data of the sort that Charles Murray peddled like snake oil in his book entitled The Bell Curve. Nor is Professor MacDonald engaging in the sort of racial pseudoscience that Entine popularizes in Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People and that many Zionists use to justify the theft of Palestine from the native population.**

 

Finding reasons for Jewish (more correctly ethnic Ashkenazi) success in finance and similar endearvors is easy without resorting to biological deterministic arguments. Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich) began writing his book entitled Menahem-Mendl in 1892. It was published in 1909. It is considered a work for young adults. The first story deals with the pitfalls of options trading in Odessa. If Jewish children grew up with such materials four generations ago, is it so surprising that their descendants today are developing complex financial instruments on Wall Street and in the City of London?

 

In other words, today's Wall Street Jews benefit from at least four generations of lore, networking and experience. Understanding the evolution of such skills is probably more tractable with neural network modeling than with statistical genetic analysis, which has a large hand-waving component because of the difficulty (or impossibility) of mapping traits considered components of intelligence with specific genes or gene-complexes.

 

The concept of intelligence as discussed by authors like Murray and Entine is fraught with judgment and prejudice. Because Murray treated intelligence as a virtue, in his framework Jews were virtuous while African Americans were not.

 

In contrast, late nineteenth century discourse of intelligence did not make the same type of assumptions about the virtue of intelligence. Scientists, statisticians, intellectuals, and scholars of that time period often considered sneakiness or craftiness as a major component of intelligence, and there was a common belief that Jews had sneakiness in the blood. From this standpoint Jews might be more intelligent than non-Jews, but only because they had an inherited sneakiness advantage that more than compensated for the Jewish lack of creativity as many writers described Jewish abilities.

 

Not only has the conceptualization of intelligence generally reflected the biases of given writer, but tests or other means for measuring intelligence invariably embody the designer's thinking about intelligence and then influence the user's understanding of intelligence. 

 

Nadia Abu el Haj tried to make this point in her book Facts on the Ground by citing Hacking and Galison (Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj), but she appears hardly to have made a dent in the preconceived notions of Jewish racists like Northwestern Professor Jacob Lassner or Columbia Professor Alan F. Segal.

The behavior of these two academics in trying to prevent Abu el Haj from obtaining tenure is probably understandable in terms of a model of Jewish group evolutionary strategy of the sort that Professor MacDonald has developed.

 

While Professor MacDonald's work has studiously avoided value-laden language and terminology, whether positive or negative, in his published works about Jews and other ethnic groups, there are some fundamental difficulties in studying Jews. Scholars, whose research leads them in Jewishly unacceptable directions, are often subjected to organized campaigns of persecution as Professors Abu el-Haj, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, Juan Cole, and Norman Finkelstein have experienced, but MacDonald's scholarship faces a unique problem. 

 

Because there is so much documentation of communities associated with Judaism over such a long time period and over such a wide geographic space, Jews would seem the perfect subjects for studies in the evolution of group behavior. Unfortunately, the data are not scientifically or historically reliable.  Modern materials often correspond more to Jewish (or especially ethnic Ashkenazi) narcissistic or national beliefs about themselves while pre-Zionist Jewish literature for the most part embodies the self-conceptualization of a collection of groups united by trade networks and a religious legal (halakhic) tradition for approximately one millennium. Jewish literature more than a millennium old should more properly be considered "pre-Jewish" and is hardly more factual than Virgil's Aeniad.

 

Without sufficient skepticism, the study of modern Jewish literature about Jews can lead a scholar into essentialist views of Jews while an injudicious focus on the older texts may produce results more akin to research in folklore than in group behavioral psychology. Both criticisms probably apply to parts of A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998), but Professor MacDonald's more recent endeavors and articles on Jews and Neoconservatives show increasing facility with Jewish literature and awareness of ethnological differences between Jewish groups (see The SY's and the Ostjuden Comparing: Two Very Different Jewish Groups***). His approach can be quite helpful when the massive amounts of information about Jews obscure simple truths or when Jewish groups like Neoconservatives try to mislead their friends and critics about true origins, concerns, or goals. 

 

Professor Kevin MacDonald is not a racialist, but genuine racists like Charles Murray and Jon Entine are busy with scribbling nonsense over at the American Enterprise Institute. Is not the real question, "Should not the American Enterprise Institute have long ago been totally discredited?" Why does anyone pay any attention to it and its denizens?

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Notes

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* Modern Jewish trauma about the Holocaust looks mostly like a matter of political convenience. The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick connects Jewish Holocaust fixation to political expedience of the US government and of the organized Jewish community in the post-1967 period. As I remember, Novick missed the role that the Holocaust has played in obscuring Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi involvement in the planning and execution of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide during the Russian Revolution and early decades of the Soviet Union. I have a copy of the 1966 Commentary Reader. It is 763 pages long. The section entitled "The Holocaust and After" is 126 pages, but barely half of the text of this portion of the book actually deals with Nazi mass murder of European Jews. For example, Irving Kristol's essay does not focus on the Holocaust but is entitled "The Nature of Nazism." Kristol writes, "It is this gap between personality and duty which may help explain the picked Einsatzgruppen -- for the most part educated men: doctors, lawyers, civil servants -- who in cold blood exterminated several million people in Eastern Europe." If the book had been published 10 years later, Kristol's essay would almost certainly have been far more Jewishly focused while the amount and nature of Holocaust material contained in the section would have been much larger and much more particularist.

 

** According to Vladimir Jabotinski in  "Сионизм и Палестина" ("Sionizm i Palestina" – Zionism and Palestine) in Еврейская Жизнь (Evreiskaia zhizn' – Hebrew Life), no. 2 (February 1904), p. 205, European Jews have a scientifically demonstrated connection to Palestine:

[The] tie between Zionism and Zion is for us not only an ineradicably strong instinct, but also an empirically proven consequence of strictly positivist study (пробньи, законньи вывод строго-позитивного размышление -- probnyi, zakonnyi vyvod strogo-pozitivnogo razmyshlenie).[37]

 

For more information on the real origin of ethnic Ashkenazim, see Zionazi Racial Science, The Origins of Modern Jewry, and Les origines des juifs actuels.

 

*** As with many groups there is a disconnect between Syrian Jewish (SY) prescription and practice. When I was researching the origins of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, I discovered an interesting case of a marriage between a Syrian Jewish rabbi, who had studied at the Lakewood Yeshiva, and a young Egyptian woman of crypto-Jewish background. Just as money whitens in Brazil, wealth appears to correct a questionable lineage among Syrian Jews.

 

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