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Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future [1] by Kevin B. MacDonald,  September 2019

The Frankfurt School, or Institute for Social Research, received a sympathetic review on Quillette:

As the full horror of Nazi crimes became ever more apparent, they adapted their philosophical synthesis of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in an effort to understand why millions of Germans and European collaborators submitted with very little resistance to what Hannah Arendt would call “the banality of evil.” Their conclusions are sobering. – The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission, Matt McManus [2].

In his most well-known work, The Culture of Critique [3], professor Kevin MacDonald is less sympathetic.

Having read The Culture of Critique several times, I acquired a copy of the magnum opus of the School’s “philosophical synthesis of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory”, The Authoritarian Personality [4], published in 1950, and I had to admit that MacDonald’s critique of it has merit. The Frankfurt School didn’t just oppose fascism, it pathologized ordinary American families. And his criticisms of other intellectual movements, such as the Franz Boas school of anthropology, appeared to have some truth in them. One of the reasons Boas’s student Margaret Mead produced a fantasy about sexual relations among teenagers in Coming of Age in Samoa [5], published in 1928, was the school’s political bias in favor of non-Western societies. Whether his claim, that the fact that the founders of these movements are self-identified Jews, is relevant, I find more controversial.

It was twenty years before The Culture of Critique received its first serious review, from Nathan Cofnas – Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy – A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory, March 2018 [6]. Then Amazon deleted MacDonald’s book from its catalogue. But it hasn’t removed MacDonald’s new book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, yet. It is superficially as impressive as the Culture of Critique – reasonably argued, well-referenced, and its assertions tested by showing that they predict the known facts better than the alternatives. For example, the Indo-Europeans did not convert collectivist cultures they conquered to their own individualism, but individualism, uniquely on earth, flourished in the Western Europe they also conquered.

Individualism’s central argument is that the superiority of Western civilization is the result of natural selection. The specific environment of Western Europe selected for individualism, objectivity, fairness, guilt, marriage based on personal attraction, and moral communities, as opposed to most of the world, which suffers from collectivism and the assumption that truth is what is good for the collective.

As described below, the Western world remains the only culture area characterized by all of the markers of individualism. Taken together, these tendencies are unique to the Western European culture area and the argument here is that they have an ethnic basis. I do not suppose that Western Europeans have any unique biological adaptations, only that we differ in degree in adaptations characteristic of all humans and that the differences are sufficient to enable the evolution of a unique human culture. – chapter two, page 91

And no society outside the West developed a “deductive method of rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms.” – chapter five, page 212

So the professor thinks Western civilization is worth defending. And because he thinks many of its virtues are genetically-based, he thinks it’s worth defending against what he calls “replacement-level migration”.

In chapter five, “The Church in European History”, in the middle of a passage explaining the effect of Christianity on Western civilization, via leaders who mostly practiced what they preached, referring to the moral standards derived by Paul from Jesus, and championed by Augustine and Kant, MacDonald says

In any case, moral perfection becomes the ultimate measure of a person’s worth – something that should be kept in mind in the present age when subscribing to a multicultural ideology and replacement-level migration has been successfully propagated as a moral imperative throughout the West. – chapter five, page 199

Chapter five defends the claim that the Catholic Church – which I’ve always regarded as a bastion of reaction – helped develop the basis of the modern Western liberal world, because its interests countered various forms of collectivism, and helped the genetically-based nuclear-family-plus-individualism characteristics of the West to survive and thrive.

Relative monogamy and sometime celibacy, even for the powerful, were essential for the success of the West, in contrast to its competitors. Obviously, societies which allow rich men to accumulate wives contain serious conflicts. For every extra wife a man has, another man has none. And the ladies didn’t like it either. One sultan of Morocco sired over eight hundred children, according to the Guinness Book of World Records [7]. Polygyny would be highly adaptive, except that most people have a genetic interest in abolishing it.

The basis of ability to control sexual desire originates in the female of the species. To put it simply, a man can have many children in one year, but a woman cannot. It’s not adaptive for a woman to “just have sex”. The female strategy “playing hard to get” evolved as a solution to the widely divergent reproductive abilities and interests of the two sexes. This is one of the adaptations which distinguishes homo sapiens from the other ape species, and contributes to its overwhelming success in contrast to all the others. But it required the development of culture to condition men, too, to respect, and even to practice, restraint.

Christianity is a late example of one of these cultures. But according to MacDonald, the record also shows that Germanic tribes, who took over the Roman Empire after its conversion to Christianity, already had achieved some of the elements of advanced sexual restraint.

MacDonald sometimes gratuitously inserts his political viewpoint. But he usually backs it up. An example is this, in chapter seven, “Moral Idealism in the British Antislavery Movement and the ‘Second British Empire’”:

Further, if Charles Dickens is to be believed, Exeter Hall was quite similar to the contemporary left, which typically ignores the wage-lowering and community-destroying effects of mass non-White migration on the native working class, particularly the White working class. It also illustrates how contemporary academic historians, some likely motivated by ethnic animosity toward traditional White majorities and acting similarly to the Jewish intellectuals discussed in ‘Culture of Critique’, are committed to inducing guilt over the Western part among White people. To the extent that such campaigns are successful, they depend on pre-existing tendencies toward guilt and empathy that characterize an important subset of Western Europeans – tendencies deriving from the unique evolutionary history and culture of the West, as discussed elsewhere in this volume. – chapter 7, page 351

“Exeter Hall” was an informal group of wealthy individuals identified in the public mind “with what Charles Dickens described as ‘platform sympathy for the Black and … platform indifference to our own countrymen’”.

Some of this may be true, but not all of it. I believe it is possible to remove the racial politics from the above conclusion and end up with a more rigorous analysis. For example, it’s not “particularly the White working class” which is negatively affected by mass immigration from poorer countries. It is in the economic interests of Mexican Americans to oppose illegal immigration from Mexico. Afro-Caribbean Britons have an economic interest in reducing immigration from Poland. One needn’t oppose the racial identity politics of the left with more racial identity politics. But MacDonald’s work does help us understand the genetic and cultural bases of white guilt and related pathological tendencies in Western peoples.

The author tries to test his theories by asking “is there a simpler explanation?”, sometimes successfully, but one case he omits is the notion that the elites work against their own ethnic group because class trumps race. In chapter eight, “The Psychology of Moral Communities”, he describes a meeting of part of the British establishment, apparently exhibiting “a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham”, and repeats Dickens’ description of educated elites’ sympathy for foreigners and indifference to their own countrymen, parodied in the person of Mrs Jellyby, who neglected her own daughter in favor of distant Africans (pages 383-384).

But the high-ups don’t neglect their daughters – they don’t live in Rotherham. Mass immigration is in their material interests, because it produces cheap labour. MacDonald doesn’t consider whether this class analysis is the solution for the “evolutionist”, who he says “can only marvel at the completely unhinged – pathological – altruism on display here, given that the people making these policies are presumably native White British themselves”. If you “can only marvel” at the fact that your theory fails to predict the data, it’s worth reexamining the theory. And the masses have class interests too:

One might suppose that this resulted in East Anglians having a tendency toward ‘insurrections against arbitrary power’—the risings and rebellions of 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and John Ball, Clarence’s rebellion in 1477, and Robert Kett’s rebellion of 1548, all of which predated the rise of Puritanism. – chapter 6, page 228

Tyler’s rebellion actually began in Kent, and Ball was from St. Albans, but in any case, surely the worldwide phenomenon of struggles like the Peasant’s Revolt, cannot most parsimoniously be explained by genetics.

Neither can criminality in non-white communities. MacDonald cites a study showing how, in one generation, the payment of reparations to Native Americans, by allowing their communities to profit from casinos, reduced drug abuse, violence and so on. In this example, poverty is the main driver of crime, not race. A black comedian asked humorously “can we have casinos too?” Well, why not?

Finally, MacDonald’s conclusion.

On the basis of the evidence of anti-Western media [8], mass immigration, and his genetically-based theory of Western history, he states that creating a whites-only homeland in North America would be “possible” (page 507), though he mentions it would involve the forceful transfer of millions, like the ethnic cleansing of Germans by the Red Army at the end of World War II, and the partition of India and Pakistan. Both of these involved the mass murder of men, women and children. I don’t believe that is what it will take to preserve Western civilization, and if that is what it would take, it wouldn’t be worth preserving.

There were until recently political parties in the UK which called for non-whites to be “sent back”, including those born in the UK. They regarded people of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds from the Indian subcontinent, and their descendants, as the same. But it’s only the third of these groups which has contributed the majority of mass murderers and mass child-rapists in the country. In this case, culture is the driver, not race.

One is not obliged to choose between the racial identity politics of the left, and of the right. The former has been taken care of in other articles. I hope this helps deal with the latter.

1. Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, Kevin B. MacDonald, September 2019

2. The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission, Matt McManus, Quillette, September 2019

3. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements Kevin B. MacDonald, 1998

4. The Authoritarian Personality, T Adorno, E Frenkel-Brunswik, DJ Levinson, RN Stanford, 1950

5. Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead, 1928

6. Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy – A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory, Nathan Cofnas, March 2018

7. Greatest number of descendants, The Guinness Book of World Records – https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/67455-greatest-number-of-descendants

8. The 1619 Project, the New York Times

Isn’t it strange, how in a Western society, you have to argue, on empirical grounds, that the suppression of academic freedom on scientific subjects ‘can do harm’?

How Stifling Debate Around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm – Noah Carl, Springer Evolutionary Science

Tower Hamlets officials did not divulge real reason for turning down Big Ride for Palestine – the Guardian

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has become so submissive to Jewish power that one of its councils canceled a charity bike ride to raise money for sports equipment for children in Gaza.

Because Labour has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of ‘anti-semitism’, it couldn’t allow speakers who might describe Israel as comparable to apartheid South Africa, or being based on ethnic cleansing.

It’s a dreadful thing when an over-scrupulous interpretation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is used behind closed doors to prevent awareness raising of the situation in Palestine and the need for humanitarian support

said a spokesperson for the charity which organises the annual ride. The whole point of the IHRA’s definition of anti-semitism is to criminalise opposition to Jewish child-killers, so this statement is rather naive.

Incidentally, Tower Hamlets is a place American right-wingers, including the president, say is overrun with Islamists. That fear appears to be misplaced.

I recommend the online journals mindingthecampus.org, thecollegefix.com, and campusreform.org. Each of them contribute to exposing various totalitarian leftist ideologies, hatched in higher education humanities and social pseudoscience departments, which are spreading into politics, the law, the media, social media, and corporations like Google.

These sites expose daily the lies of student and faculty social justice warriors (SJWs), who invent white supremacy, and who hypocritically claim that opinions they disagree with are “violence”, while aggressively, and sometimes violently, suppressing academic freedom, the principal principle of higher education, with the assistance of grievance studies academics and lickspittle administrators. Sometimes they are called “snowflakes”, as if the problem is hypersensitivity, rather than dishonesty.

For an example of why exaggerating prejudice is problematic, here’s a section from a documentary about the problem. Professor Brett Weinstein, driven out of Evergreen College by a violent mob of students, led by a mad black woman, and their white ally, college president George Bridges, says

it’s spreading, and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle, but of course this is going to find its way into the courts, it’s already found its way into the tech sector, it’s going to find its way to the highest level of governance if we’re not careful, and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue

But there is one kind of exaggeration which articles on the above-mentioned websites always support, using similar language to the SJWs. That is, they claim that opposition to Israeli policies is racist toward Jews. Here’s an example to start with:

Anti-Semitism Growing on America’s Campuses – Anne Hendershott, Minding the Campus, 4/09/19.

The article’s examples of “anti-Semitism” are simply criticism of a country, and its supporters, none of them on the basis of ethnicity. But the author claims this criticism could lead to a repeat of the Nazi holocaust.

Pink Floyd star Roger Waters participated in a conference at the University of Massachusetts called “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights”.

UMass recruits pro-Palestine panel to address ‘attacks’ on Rep. Ilhan Omar – Ben McDonald, Campus Reform, 4/25/19

As if to illustrate the need for this conference, this Campus Reform writer reports

80 civil rights, education, religious, faculty, and student organizations have called on UMass to rescind its sponsorship of the event

Most of these groups are not civil rights, educational and religious, but obscure, pro-Israel, and right-wing. But they have appropriated leftist language, claiming that the ideas expressed at this forum harm students’ “safety and well-being”.

80 Organizations Concerned about UMass Sponsorship of Political Event and Faculty Misconduct (PDF)

These groups just tried to stop the administration from sponsoring it, but the College Fix reported that some students sued the university to try to get the event called off, on the grounds that it will make them “suffer immediate and irreparable harm”.

UMass Amherst students sue to prevent pro-Palestinian event on campus – College Fix Staff, 4/27/19

I’m not sure when this “snowflakes for Israel” phenomenon began, but it was no later than February 2013. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who opposes p.c. language when it suits him, claimed that an event at Brooklyn College to defend the movement for Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment against Israel would promote hatred against Jews. Arguing for boycotting a country because you disagree with its policies does not constitute an attempt to stir up racial hatred. These claims are ridiculous, but, just like the claims of racism against black people at Duke, Yale, Evergreen, Middlebury, Oberlin and other institutions of higher education, they are taken seriously by cowardly college administrators.

This is Dershowitz’s article

Brooklyn College’s anti-Israel hatefest – Alan Dershowitz, New York Daily News, 1/30/13

and here is a response

Alan Dershowitz, Defender of Academic Freedom – Heal Thyself! – Jonathan Weiler, Huffington Post, 4/8/13.

Attacking the BDS movement is one of the principal aims of Israel’s supporters in the USA currently. Half of American states have laws penalizing people for supporting BDS, despite these laws’ clear unconstitutionality. That is one of the reasons for the UMass forum mentioned above.

Campus Reform and the other two sites generally defend freedom of expression. But there is one exception. Here are two articles praising the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”:

– Senators aim to crack down on campus anti-Semitism, of which there is plenty

–  Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign campus anti-Semitism bill, possibly on trip to Israel

Adam Sabes, Campus Reform, 4/1/19 and 5/15/19.

The new bill would make it illegal to accuse Israel of being more racist than “any other country”. It’s nothing to worry about, though because

this particular legislation does not violate “any First Amendment rights”

which means that saying Israel is racist is not protected speech.

“Anti-Semitic incidents” nearly always means “criticism of Israel and its lobby”. It’s not anti-Semitism which is increasing, it’s how broadly it’s defined – just as the phrase “white supremacy” is used by the left to delegitimize more and more opinions. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism is becoming influential, and it includes

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor

Working Definition of Antisemitism – IHRA, 5/26/16

Accusing something of being racist, isn’t racist, even if it’s inaccurate. For example, I don’t think Trump’s government is racist, but those who say he is, aren’t being racist. I do happen to think Israel is a racist state (spoiler alert), but whether I’m right or wrong, this opinion isn’t racist.

How do they get away with it? In the same way as the other kind of SJWs. They take advantage of a weakness in Western societies – but that is a subject for another essay.

Yes, Hitler was as evil as Churchill, he was as evil as Roosevelt, he was as evil as Truman

– David Irving

Eve Mykytyn’s article “Hate speech without hate: Britain and the United States” responds to the recent attempt by Islington Council in London to ban Gilad Atzmon from playing sax with the Blockheads at the Assembly Hall because one Zionist falsely claimed he is a “holocaust denier”. Fortunately, Santa Claus was available to take his place.

At the top of Eve’s article is a picture of the famous Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the sixties, against right-wing McCarthyism. Ironically, Berkeley is now one of the most notoriously anti-free-speech places in the country, in which the police cooperated with anti-fascists to violently deplatform Zionist speakers Milo Yiannopoulos and Pam Geller.

Mykytyn doesn’t mention this, but her piece does broaden the critique of censorship which Atzmon started. Whereas he has concentrated on Zionist, and crypto-Zionist, efforts to censor himself and others, she examines some cases of other kinds of censorship.

It starts by saying “Gilad Atzmon is fighting a battle for free speech in England”, which has some truth in it. He is fighting on one front out of several.

Rather than just selecting examples which seem to confirm Atzmon’s critique of Zionist censorship, Mykytyn finds a few examples of other forces trying to shut down freedom of expression in Western societies.

The one glaring exception is the censorious effect of Islam and its supporters and apologists.

The article defends the freedom of white extremist Richard Spencer, but doesn’t mention the considerable efforts being made to protect us from “Islamophobes”. Robert Spencer, along with a number of others, has just had his Patreon account removed, after pressure from MasterCard. PayPal is also on the offensive against mostly right-wing, often Zionist, internet personalities. If censorship is used at least as much against Islamophobes as Islamophiles, it tends to undermine Atzmon’s view of Western society as dominated by the former.

In different ways, the following prominent individuals on both sides of the Atlantic have had their freedom greatly curtailed by Muslims: Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pam Geller, and the staff of Charlie Hebdo.

Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim, was subject to attempts to stop her speaking to the secular society at Goldsmith’s College in London in November 2015, and Muslim extremists disrupted her talk, with the support of the feminist and LGBT societies at the college.

But not all gay activists are morons. For example, Milo Yiannopoulos opposes Islam. This is one of the reasons leftist mobs violently stop him from speaking – they call him an “Islamophobe”. Gilad Atzmon uses the same debate-crushing neologism. As if LGBT people had set up a Gay State In the Levant (GSIL), and thrown Muslims off roofs.

Then there’s Tommy Robinson. He and his family have to live under police protection – when they can get it – because of his outspoken condemnation of the UK’s numerous Muslim child-rape gangs.

Robinson’s hostility to Islam has led him, via a simplistic binary world-view, to sympathy for Israel. He argues against freedom for the Palestine solidarity movement, which he calls “terrorist”. But Robinson’s persecution has been much worse than what Atzmon has experienced.

On two occasions, the government jailed him on trumped-up charges. In one case, they allowed terrorists to beat him unconscious. On the latest occasion, last year, they imprisoned him for two months, but this time, they put him in isolation. However, he could only get prison meals which Muslim inmates openly bragged of poisoning, so he had to live on tins of tuna for two months.

A UK parliamentary committee has recommended making it illegal to express “Islamophobia”: “Islamophobia Defined” (PDF).

Rejecting the observation that Islam is not a race, these SJWs from all the major parties try to convince us that “Islamophobia” is a form of “racism”.

Atzmon often hints that he thinks Western states are Islamophobic, for example, that the attacks on Middle Eastern countries are something to do with them being Islamic (Being in Time). But Iraq was a secular republic. 9/11 was not retaliation for US involvement in the 1990/91 Gulf War – bin Laden wanted to participate in it too: “Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam” – Jason Burke.

Seeing Zionism and Islam as simple opposites is the same error Tommy Robinson makes. The Western countries support Israel to the hilt, but they are also afraid to criticise Islam. Political correctness is so entrenched in Britain that two conservative prime ministers in succession have said that ISIS is nothing to do with Islam. The opposition goes out of its way to praise Muslims, and all the Muslim child-grooming cases have occurred while Labour councils looked the other way, or sent whistleblowers on diversity courses. America’s a bit less submissive, but what did president George W Bush say six days after September 11th, 2001? He said “Islam is peace”. Barack Obama was just as deluded. Donald Trump is the first president to condemn “radical Islam”.

The European Court of Human Rights recently upheld the conviction of an Austrian woman who stated the simple historical fact that Mohammed was a paedophile. Surely this is worse than being driven out of the Labour Party for reporting the fact that Nazis cooperated with Zionists.

The scope and scale of the growing censorship in Western societies are greater than Atzmon has indicated. His one-sided condemnation of Zionist censorship depends on selecting from the evidence that which appears to conform to his hypothesis. This article by Eve Mykytyn is a step in the right direction. If you defend freedom, you can’t cherry-pick which censorship you oppose.