The image is misleading. Dawkins doesn't literally believe that genes are selfish entities with a will to replicate themselves. If they were, they would be like animating souls. In the Darwinian world where Dawkins lives, genes are not souls, but merely molecules ruled by the determinist laws of chemistry. And they are the result of a series of chemical accidents over millions of years, starting from the first self-replicating protein.
Notwithstanding scientists' arrogant claims, the function of genes remains highly mysterious — and overrated. If genes did what the Dawkinses tell us, we would be 99 percent identical to chimps. We are not. On the chemical level perhaps, but we are not chemical beings. We are spiritual beings. Obviously, the hardware of genetics does not explain the totality of our inborn ancestral inheritance.
"Blood" is the name people used to give to the spiritual qualities that pass from generation to generation, before they knew anything about DNA. The idea is that we are genealogical beings, spiritually as well as physically. How does it work? Do we have an ancestral or a racial collective soul? How do "blood" or "genes" account for the sense of kinship that forms the basis of organic societies — what Ludwig Gumplowicz called the "syngenic feeling"?
By reading about White advocacy and "race realism" for the last couple of years, including on this site, I have learned much about what is deceptive in liberal ideologies, but I have not found a satisfying philosophical alternative, a theory of man that would explain the spiritual and social importance of kinship, lineage, ancestry, ethnicity and race.
Cultural wars are fought with cultural weapons, and it seems to me that most "race realists" are using inappropriate weapons, such as Darwinism or Christianism. Those weapons are actually used by our opponents with more efficiency: the mainstream Darwinian dogma is that race is a myth, and the only thing that should matter for Christians is that under Christ all men are brothers. I have already written about the flaws of Christian anthropology (here and here). Now I wish to focus on Darwinism, our aggressively dominant anthropological paradigm. I will start with a critic of Darwinism, both as a nihilist theory of life and as a moribund scientific paradigm. Then I will present alternative views of life and evolution, from Intelligent Design to Rupert Sheldrake's "morphic resonance". They are, fundamentally, improved versions of Platonism, which may also be called Idealism. Finally, I will explain how this Platonic science of biological organisms is relevant for understanding the nature of social organisms, as Alexander Dugin also argues in Political Platonism.
The Darwinian Catastrophe
First, a clarification: a distinction must be made between Darwin's theory of how vegetal and animal species appeared from previous ones, and what is commonly called "social Darwinism," but should really be called Spencerism. Although Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", expressed great enthusiasm for Darwin's book, his sociological views predate Darwin's biological theory, and do not depend on it. Sociological concepts cannot validate Darwin's theory of the "origin of species", which is the only thing that deserves the name "Darwinism". It must also be pointed out, as Dawkins does, that the concept of "group selection", which is useful for understanding race relations, is incompatible with the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection, since altruistic individuals who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the group have less chance of survival. Incidentally, since altruism and group selection do exist even in the animal kingdom, Darwin was right when he said: "I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved rubbish."[1]
But before I expose the scientific fallacy of Darwinism, let's talk about its impact on our civilization. As Nietzsche correctly characterized it in the second of his posthumous Untimely Meditations, Darwinism means essentially, to the layman, "the lack of all radical difference between man and beast". And Nietzsche saw that as a philosophical atomic bomb:
if we have these [ideas] thrust on the people in the usual mad way for another generation, no one need be surprised if that people drown on its little miserable shoals of egoism, and petrify in its self-seeking. At first it will fall asunder and cease to be a people. In its place perhaps individualist systems, secret societies for the extermination of non-members, and similar utilitarian creations, will appear on the theater of the future.Although he characterized Darwinism as "a true but fatal idea", Nietzsche criticized the mechanical nature of the Darwinian model, and its neglect of the "will to power" inherent to life, of which he had learned from Arthur Schopenhauer. In his preface to the second edition of On the Will in Nature (1836), five years before Darwin's Origin of Species, Schopenhauer had warned against
the unparalleled zeal and activity displayed in every branch of Natural Science which, as this pursuit is mostly in the hands of people who have learned nothing else, threatens to lead to a gross, stupid Materialism, the more immediately offensive side of which is less the moral bestiality of its ultimate results, than the incredible absurdity of its first principles; for by it even vital force is denied, and organic Nature is degraded to a mere chance play of chemical forces.Seventy years later, the English writer Bernard Shaw, in his preface to Back o Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch), worried about the secular ethics of ruthless competition implicit in Darwinism, and blamed it for the Great War:
Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it.[2]As Shaw was writing this, Darwinism was imposing itself as the metaphysical framework of all "human sciences," and the foundation of a new idea of man, who is no longer distinguished from the animal kingdom by a qualitative leap. Sigmund Freud, among others, owed his success to having re-founded psychology on Darwinian principles, that is to say, on the predicate that the creative spirit of man was only a by-product of his (repressed) animal instincts: "It is merely the principle of pleasure [...] which from the outset governs the operations of the psychic apparatus" (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929). Since, according to Darwinian logic, procreation determines selection, it was naturally in the sex drive that Freud found the key to the human psyche.
Because we are now all living inside the Darwinian matrix, we don't easily measure its impact or see where it is driving us. Let's take, as a good indicator, the success of the latest Darwinian star Yuval Noah Harari, who sold close to 30 million copies in 60 languages. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015, first published in Hebrew in 2011), he hammers the point: we are no different from animals, and "life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer — and no meaning." Then in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017) came the good news, the promise of redemption, the new alliance of man with himself, the prophecy of his self-deification by the miracle of high technology:
Having reduced mortality from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having saved people from abject misery, we will now aim to make them positively happy. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
[...] bioengineers will take the old Sapiens body, and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. They will thereby create new godlings, who might be as different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo erectus. Cyborg engineering will go a step further, merging the organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, or millions of nano-robots that will navigate our bloodstream, diagnose problems and repair damage. ...
A bolder approach dispenses with organic parts altogether, and hopes to engineer completely non-organic beings. Neural networks will be replaced by intelligent software, which could surf both the virtual and non-virtual worlds, free from the limitations of organic chemistry. After 4 billion years of wandering inside the kingdom of organic compounds, life will break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, and will take shapes that we cannot envision even in our wildest dreams. After all, our wildest dreams are still the product of organic chemistry.
The Mechanical View of Life
This collective mental disorder that causes a man to think of himself as a machine (is there a name for it in the DSM-5?)[3] can be traced back to Frenchman René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes was fascinated from childhood by the new machinery of his age, and intuited that animals are no different from sophisticated automatons. Like everyone else, he was impressed by Kepler's claim that "the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork," and decided that living organisms were also not organisms but machines.
According to the Aristotelian tradition followed by Thomas Aquinas, living beings differed essentially from inanimate matter by their inherent vital principle, or anima, which was conceived as surrounding the body rather than inside it. But since the cosmic organism was now deprived of its anima mundi and converted into a mechanism, Descartes wanted to get rid of the anima in animals too. He was cautious enough to make an exception for man, who had a rational soul located in the pineal gland.
Descartes' machine theory of life was continuously challenged by a school of thought that came to be called "vitalism" in the nineteenth century. Vitalists claimed that the phenomena of life cannot be fully explained by mechanical or chemical laws derived from the study of inanimate systems, and that the processes of morphogenesis and reproduction require an additional causal factor. For vitalists the evolution of species could be accounted for if the "élan vital" (Henri Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice, 1907) includes some sort of Schopenhauerian "will to evolve". Bergson wrote:
the more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.[4]Although the term "holism" was only coined in 1926 by Jan Smuts, it clarifies how vitalists distinguish organic from inorganic systems. In the words of Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine, 1967), every part of a holarchy, called a holon, "has a dual tendency to preserve and assert its individuality as a quasi-autonomous whole; and to function as an integrated part of an (existing or evolving) larger whole."[5] In their development, holistic systems require some kind of teleological principle, a preexisting plan, in other words a Platonic or Aristotelian "Form".
A symbolic representation of holistic systems
With the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity, Darwinism evolved into what Julian Huxley would call the "modern synthesis" (commonly called neo-Darwinism). In the 1930s, thanks to the electron microscope, the quest for the explanation of life moved from the cellular level to the molecular level. Biology became conceived as a branch of chemistry. Francis Crick, who shared in a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, wrote in Of Molecules and Men (1966): "the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry."[6]
Ironically, the focus on the molecular level unveiled the mind-blowing complexity of living cells, which puts increasing pressure on the simplistic Darwinian model of evolution by accidental mutations.
Intelligent Design
Michael Behe explains in his best-selling book Darwin's Black Box:
Biochemistry has demonstrated that any biological apparatus involving more than one cell (such as an organ or a tissue) is necessarily an intricate web of many different, identifiable systems of horrendous complexity. The "simplest" self-sufficient, replicating cell has the capacity to produce thousands of different proteins, and other molecules, at different times and under variable conditions. Synthesis, degradation, energy generation, replication, maintenance of cell architecture, mobility, regulation, repair, communication — all of these functions take place in virtually every cell, and each function itself requires the interaction of numerous parts.[7]Can such tremendous complexity have happened by a Darwinian series of mistakes in the replication of genes, by chance alone? It is important to understand that, according to Darwin, the only creative process in evolution is "accidentally produced variations." Natural selection creates nothing; it acts only negatively by eliminating disadvantageous variations. As Stephen Meyer puts it in Darwin's Doubt, natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest." This is a crucial point, hidden for the general public, who is naively led to believe that natural selection is a creative force. Richard Dawkins, for instance, deceives his readers when he writes in The Selfish Gene that, "evolution works by natural selections." That statement is blatantly false within Darwinian science, but it is essential for Darwinian indoctrination.
And remember: Darwin knew nothing about genes. The smallest part of the organism that he could see was the cell, and the cell was for him a "black box". He had no idea of the nature and causes of the "accidentally produced variations" that could miraculously give birth to selective advantages. It was not until the 1940s that accidental variations were determined to be errors in the replication in the DNA code. However, experiments show that spontaneous or induced genetic mutations only give birth to weaklings or monsters, which are often sterile. In other words, natural selection tends to preserve the genetic heritage by eliminating individuals who deviate too much from the standard.
Darwin insisted, and today's neo-Darwinists keep insisting, that each variation must be very small, and that only the gradual accumulation of a great number of micromutations can produce a significant change. Behe underlines the biggest obstacle to this theory, with what he calls "irreducible complexity". A system is "irreducibly complex" if it "is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." The classic example is the eye. Gradual development of the human eye appears to be impossible, since its many sophisticated features are interdependent.
The eye either functions as a whole or not at all. So how did it come to evolve by slow, steady, infinitesimally small Darwinian improvements? Is it really plausible that thousands upon thousands of lucky chance mutations happened coincidentally so that the lense and the retina, which cannot work without each other, evolved in synchrony? What survival value can there be in an eye that doesn't see?[8]Note that the alternative to Darwin's gradualism know as "saltationism" doesn't solve that problem, and neither does Stephen Jay Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibria": the appearance of any "irreducibly complex" organ is still probabilistically impossible by mere blind mutation.
Michael Behe is a prominent biochemist who defends the hypothesis of "Intelligent Design". Since this movement argues that the complexity of life, that appears greater and greater with each new discovery, is the most compelling proof of the existence of God — or Mind, or Purpose — , deicide scientists have entered into crusade mode. Hence the aggressive campaign to ban university professors favorable to Intelligent Design, as documented in the film Expelled: No Intelligent Allowed. There is now a Darwinian selection in academia to eliminate non-Darwinian scientists. I happen to have experienced it on a small scale, when, after I received my doctorate degree, I was refused a university teaching position for the sole reason — it was clearly signified to me — that I had translated, edited and prefaced Phillip Johnson's book, Darwinism on Trial.
Intelligent Design advocate and populizer Stephen Meyer develops another key argument in his book Darwin's Doubt:
"the entities that confer functional advantages on organisms — new genes and their corresponding protein products — constitute long linear arrays of precisely sequenced subunits, nucleotide bases in the case of genes and amino acids in the case of proteins. Yet, according to neo-Darwinian theory, these complex and highly specified entities must first arise and provide some advantage before natural selection can act to preserve them. Given the number of bases present in genes, and amino acids present in functional proteins, a large number of changes in the arrangement of these molecular subunits would typically have to occur before a new functional and selectable protein could arise. For even the smallest unit of functional innovation — a novel protein — to arise, many improbable rearrangements of nucleotide bases would need to occur before natural selection had anything new and advantageous to select."[9]Meyer emphasizes that the revolution in biochemistry has led to the realization that life is not fundamentally about matter; it is about information. DNA "codes" information, which can be "transcribed" into RNA molecules, and then "translated" into a sequence of amino acids as protein molecules are synthesized. "Since the molecular biological revolution first highlighted the primacy of information to the maintenance and function of living systems, questions about the origin of information have moved decidedly to the forefront of discussions about evolutionary theory."[10] Random or accidental changes in any sequence carrying information degrades the information and can in no way add new information. That is why the major challenge to Darwinism has come from mathematicians: in 1966, a distinguished group of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists convened a conference at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia called "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution."[11]
Morphogenetic Fields and Morphic Resonance
For Stephen Meyer, "the discovery of digital information in even the simplest living cells indicates the prior activity of a designing intelligence at work in the origin of the first life."[12] But this "designing intelligence" need not necessarily be conceived as a transcendent God, external to his creation. In other words, the Intelligent Design paradigm should not be narrowed down to a modern version of the watchmaker (the computer-maker), who creates new models once in a while. It is also possible to follow a more pantheist or animist line of thinking and assume that intelligence (or mind, which includes will and emotion) is inherent to life itself. Documentaries on the intelligence of plants can help (here, here or here).
Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake argues along this line: "Living organisms may have an internal creativity, as we do ourselves."[13] But Sheldrake gets more interesting when he introduces the notion of "morphogenetic fields". He did not invent it, and gives credit to Hans Spemann, Alexander Gurwitsch and Paul Weiss, who in the early 1920s proposed that morphogenesis is organized by "developmental", "embryonic", or "morphogenetic" fields. These fields organize the development of the embryo, and guide the processes of regulation and regeneration after damage.
The specific nature of the fields, according to Weiss, means that each species of organism has its own morphogenetic field, although fields of related species may be similar. Moreover, within the organism there are subsidiary fields within the overall field of the organism, in fact a nested hierarchy of fields within fields.[14]Thinking in terms of fields is necessary, Sheldrake argues, because genetic information cannot be located only within the genes:
"The concept of genetic programs is based on an analogy with computer programs. The metaphor implies that the fertilized egg contains a preformed program that somehow coordinates the organism's development. But the genetic program must involve something more than the chemical structure of DNA, because identical copies of DNA are passed on to all cells; if all cells were programmed identically, they could not develop differently."[15]Part of the information that "gives form" to the organism, therefore, is not materially encoded; it belongs to the morphogenetic fields, not the DNA. Sheldrake uses a simple metaphor to make that idea easy to understand:
Consider the following analogy. The music that comes out of the loudspeaker of a radio set depends both on the material structures of the set and the energy that powers it and on the transmission to which the set is tuned. The music can of course be affected by changes in the wiring, transistors, condensers, etc., and it ceases when the battery is removed. Someone who knew nothing about the transmission of invisible, intangible, and inaudible vibrations through the electromagnetic field might conclude that it could be explained entirely in terms of the components of the radio, the way in which they were arranged, and the energy on which their functioning depended. If he ever considered the possibility that anything entered from outside, he would dismiss it when he discovered that the set weighed the same switched on and switched off. He would therefore have to suppose that the rhythmic and harmonic patterns of the music arose within the set as a result of immensely complicated interactions among its parts. After a careful study and analysis of the set, he might even be able to make a replica of it that produced exactly the same sounds as the original, and would probably regard this result as a striking proof of his theory. But in spite of his achievement, he would remain completely unaware that in reality the music originated in a broadcasting studio hundreds of miles away.[16]On the notion of morphogenetic fields, Sheldrake builds up the notion of "morphic resonance". Since morphogenetic fields contain an inherent memory, that memory might not be immutable, but might be influenced by feedback. In other words, all organisms (or organs, or cells) moved by a certain field enter in resonance with each other, and that resonance constitutes the field itself.
Morphic resonance takes place on the basis of similarity. The more similar an organism is to previous organisms, the greater their influence on it by morphic resonance. And the more such organisms there have been, the more powerful their cumulative influence.[17]This is what Sheldrake also calls "formative causation": "according to the hypothesis of formative causation, the form of a system depends on the cumulative morphic influence of previous similar systems"; "morphic fields are not precisely defined but are probability structures that depend on the statistical distribution of previous similar forms."[18] That still doesn't explain the appearance of new species, a question that Sheldrake leaves open.
I cannot get into more detail about Sheldrake's theories, but here is his own summary, from The Presence of the Past:
let us recall the hypothetical properties of these fields at all levels of complexity: They are self-organizing wholes. They have both a spatial and a temporal aspect, and organize spatio-temporal patterns of vibratory or rhythmic activity. They attract the systems under their influence towards characteristic forms and patterns of activity, whose coming-into-being they organize and whose integrity they maintain. The ends or goals towards which morphic fields attract the systems under their influence are called attractors. The pathways by which systems usually reach these attractors are called chreodes. They interrelate and co-ordinate the morphic units or holons that lie within them, which in turn are wholes organized by morphic fields. Morphic fields contain other morphic fields within them in a nested hierarchy or holarchy. They are structures of probability, and their organizing activity is probabilistic. They contain a built-in memory given by self-resonance with a morphic unit's own past and by morphic resonance with all previous similar systems. This memory is cumulative. The more often particular patterns of activity are repeated, the more habitual they tend to become.Platonism and the Organic Society
Perhaps the highest accomplishment of European pre-Christian thinking had been the philosophical concept of the divine Creative Intelligence, often personified as Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. In those days, scholars were "philosophers," lovers of Sophia, who believed that the Intelligence that designed and animated the cosmos could be approached by the human intelligence in which it was reflected.
Plato, the prince of philosophers, considered that all manifestations in this world of sense-experience were imperfect reflections of archetypal Forms or Ideas. With Intelligent Design and Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance, we are witnessing the return of Plato. This is a general trend in science, where concepts of energy fields are replacing matter. Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, wrote:
On this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures, or — in Plato's sense — ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.[19]Since Plato's central thesis is the reality of Ideas, Platonism may be called "Idealism". In the broad sense, Idealism affirms the existence of another world, more real than the material world but inaccessible to our physical senses. Idealism is the theory that postulates the primacy of Mind over Matter.
With this we can begin to form an organic political theory. A community or a nation can only be organic or holistic if it has a life of its own, an anima, a collective soul that unites men in morphic resonance not just physically and socially, but spiritually. Interestingly, it was Herbert Spencer who drew the first systematic comparison between the structure of individual organisms and that of societies, in an article titled "the social organism". Like biological organisms, he remarked, social organisms grow and increase in complexity and differentiation as they grow. Both are made of interdependent micro-organisms. A civilization is the most developed form of social organisms.[20]
The implicit political theory of Western liberal society is based on individualism and materialism, the exact opposites of holism and Idealism. The individual is declared to be the ultimate, in fact the only, human reality. The individualistic conception of man first led to "contractualist" political theories, starting with Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651).[21] In his wake came Bernard Mandeville, who argued in The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) that vice is the indispensable motive that produces a society of luxury, while virtue is useless or perhaps detrimental to public prosperity. Then came Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776). Postulating, like Hobbes, that human beings are motivated exclusively by their own personal profit, Smith speculated that in a society of free competition, the sum of everybody's selfishness would create a just society: "Every individual [...] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." We know the result: money is not the blood of a social organism made of cells and organs, but the fuel of a social machine where individuals are reduced to dispensable and interchangeable parts.
In a recent essay, Alexander Dugin puts the blame on "nominalism", the philosophy that challenged Platonic Idealism (also called "essentialism" or "realism") by denying the existence of universals in the fourteenth century. "Nominalism laid the foundation for future liberalism, both ideologically and economically. Here humans were seen only as individuals and nothing else, and all forms of collective identity (religion, class, etc.) were to be abolished." According to Dugin, nominalism caused the greatest harm by destroying "the collective identity of the Church," understood as "the mystical body of Christ."
That's true, but the Church is a supernatural, not a natural organism. And with its exclusivism, it has contributed to undermine other holistic systems. In the early fifth century, the Christian poet Prudentius protested against the respect due to the protective "genius" of Rome, denying that such "ghost" had the slightest reality. As Edward Gibbon sees it, it was Christians, with their eyes focused on the City of God, who caused the fall of the Roman Empire by showing an "indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare."[22] Christianity has replaced the pagan hero who sacrifices his life for his community, by the saint who renounces family ties and dies for his creed, or starves himself in the desert! Who needs saint Anthony or saint Ignatius? It is commonly agreed that, with its egalitarian, atomistic concept of the human soul and its focus on individual salvation, Christianity begot individualism, and later modern democracy: from "one salvation per person" to "one vote per person".[23]
So I'm all for Christian race realists to fight with "The Sword of Christ", but the notion that White people need to turn back to the Christian faith in order to save themselves collectively is a dangerous delusion. We might as well do the Ghost Dance.
Anthropologist Weston La Barre used the Ghost Dance as the symbol for the theory that relationship with the dead ancestors is the foundation of traditional societies (The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion, 1970). That's food for thought.
But let me point out another lesson in the concept: with the Ghost Dance, Native Americans were trying to bring a magical end to their own genocide. The movement ended with the Wounded Knee massacre. Ten days before, Lyman Frank Baum, editor of South Dakota's Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (and future author of The Wizard of Oz), wrote:
The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them... The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live like the miserable wretches that they are."[24]Replace "Redskins" by "Whites" and "Whites" by "Jews", and you have a view of White Americans' future as some would like it. There is surely a karmic connection between the two scenarios: collective destiny means collective responsibility. Exterminating the Indians who couldn't be enslaved and importing inhumanly millions of Africans instead brought a curse on White civilization. Yahweh made you do it perhaps (Schopenhauer blamed Western barbarity on the Judaic spirit), and Yahweh is now making you (us) pay for it.
The Transgenerational Factor
But we are not ready for the Ghost Dance yet. Whites will fight for their lives, their identity, their dignity, their freedom of speech, their legitimate place of leadership. Very difficult times are ahead.
We know our enemy's strength: Jews, wrote Martin Buber, make blood "the deepest, most potent stratum of [their] being." The Jew perceives "what confluence of blood has produced him. [...] He senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood"[25] (more of the same in my article "Israel as One Man"). Our weakness is individualism. Our sense of blood is weak. To most Whites, the word itself evokes nothing but what prolongs their miserable individual life. Where else than America can you buy blood?
Our core identity, whether we like it or not, is that we are all members of family trees. Our liberal mindset might tell us otherwise, but blood doesn't lie. Our ancestors live within us. Sometimes they fight within us; think of the racial war going on inside the head of a man of mixed origin but always identified as Black, never as White.
It is probably a privilege of old age to realize how much our psychology and our destiny were shaped by our genealogy. In his eighties, Carl Jung said:
I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case.[27]Transgenerational psychology has yielded a lot of surprising confirmation of Jung's intuition. One pioneer was Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, who documented those "invisible loyalties" that unconsciously connect us with our ancestors and shape our destiny, on the basis of a system of values, debts and merits.[28] French sociologist Vincent de Gaulejac speaks of "genealogical impasses," neurotic knots of the type: "I do not want to be what I am." An individual who tries to break away from his family "remains overdetermined by a filiation which imposes itself on him even if he thinks he is escaping from it."[29] The French bestseller on the subject was written by "psychogenealogist" Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, and is translated as The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree (Routledge, 1998). I had the privilege to meet the author during a seminar on psychogenealogy. The subject has long interested me for personal reasons. I grew up in a family haunted by one of those "family secrets" that seem to mysteriously produce transgenerational neuroses. When I finally discovered what it was after decades of speculation, I began to understand why "extra-pair paternity" (the anthropological technical term) is seen as a seriously destructive factor in most civilized societies (but not to the Himba).
Anthropology teaches that the complex network of blood and marital relationships that surrounds each person from birth to death (what Lewis H. Morgan in 1871 called "systems of consanguinity and affinity") forms the distinctive structure of every society. Our ancient kinship system, inherited from the Roman world, has been torn to pieces. Whether we want to save our civilization or prepare for a new one, we should perhaps work on restoring the clan from the grassroots level. Building a new clan culture is quite a challenge, because the clan can only sustain itself on the basis of natural hierarchies, which clash with our democratic and mercantile "values".
But if we prioritize building big strong healthy sustainable families, good men and women will come from them — heroes, perhaps. Some will fail, some will be killed, but their memory will live on, and new ones will come. It reminds me of something Laurence Leamer wrote about the Kennedys:
Joseph P. Kennedy created one great thing in his life, and that was his family. [...] Joe taught that blood ruled and that they must trust each other and venture out into a dangerous world full of betrayals and uncertainty, always returning to the sanctuary of family.[30]
Notes
[1] Darwin to Falconer in 1862, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Harvard UP, 2002, p. 2. Darwin added (but he was wrong): "but I expect and hope that the framework will stand." It is true that the concept of "group selection" was introduced by Darwin himself in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), but that doesn't change the fact that it is incompatible with Darwinism, at least with neo-Darwinism.
[2] Bernard Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah (1921), on www.gutenberg.org.
[3] Interestingly, Darwin complained about it in his autobiography: "My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts" (p. 144).
[4] Henri Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice, quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, Icon Books, 2011
[5] Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Coronet, 2012.
[6] Quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion.
[7] Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, S&S International, 2006, p. 46.
[8] Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, p. 37.
[9] Stephen Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, HarperOne, 2013, p. 177.
[10] Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt, p. 168.
[11] Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt, p. 170.
[12] Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt, p. 159.
[13] Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion.
[14] Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, Icon Books, 2011.
[15] Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation, Park Street Press, 2009, p. 9.
[16] Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, pp. 111-112.
[17] Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past.
[18] Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance, pp. 94, 109.
[19] Quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past.
[20] Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1888, p. 497, quoted here.
[21] T. D. Weldon called them "mechanical political theories", as opposed to organic ones, in States and Morals, 1947.
[22] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, quoted in Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, p. 31.
[23] Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropo logical Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 23-59.
[24] Quoted in David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford UP, 1992, p. 126.
[25] Quoted by Brendon Sanderson in his review of Geoffrey Cantor and Mark Swetlitz's Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, in The Occidental Observer.
[26] I wonder, by the way, how Dawkins justifies having only one child in three marriages. Is he smarter than his genes?
[27] Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé (1963), Vintage Books.
[28] Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy, Harper & Row, 1973.
[29] Vincent de Gaulejac, L'Histoire en héritage. Roman familial et trajectoire sociale, Payot, 2012, pp. 141-142, 146-147.
[30] Laurence Leamer, Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty, HarperCollins, 2005.
Comment: See also: