-Caveat Lector-
The books being reviewed are by Kevin MacDonald, entitled:
1]A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.
[1994]
2] Separation and its Discontents:Toward an evolutionary theory of
anti-semitism. [1998]
3] The Culture of Critique: An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement
in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements. [1998]
Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 15:00:20 -0500
Kevin MacDonald's study of the Jewish people in sociobiological
perspective will not likely help anyone's career. The reason is certainly
not the author's lack of scholarly method or a failure to document his
argument. MacDonald drowns his reader in copious and convincing
documentation. Nor does he treat his subjects disrespectfully, attributing
to Ashkenazic Jews a mean I.Q .one standard deviation higher that of white
gentiles. MacDonald, however, commits the indiscretion of bringing up
Jewish behavioral characteristics that have also occurred to anti-Semites,
for example, aggressively combating the core cultures of host peoples while
practicing ritually and socially prescribed separation from others. He
links this Jewish behavior to a form of collective consciousness that may
be inborn as well as culturally acquired. MacDonald presents this
consciousness as belonging to a group that has worked strenuously to
preserve its genotypal identity.
Two explanatory statements should help provide the presuppositions for this
chain of argument. One, MacDonald regards the Jews not as a succession of
self-identified peoples revealing genetic and cultural overlap, but as a
single nation from antiquity to the present. Since Jews view themselves in
this fashion and since they have taken enormous pains until recently not to
intermarry, partly by upholding a vast code of Rabbinic traditions, this
assumption may be defensible. Two, MacDonald maintains that contemporary
Jews, particularly in the US, oppose and protest even the remnants of the
Christian host culture not because of any threat they face but because of
the desire to displace what is viewed as alien. Their distinctive culture,
group dynamics, and jealously guarded genetic inheritance are all cited to
explain why organized Jewry resists any public manifestation of a
non-Jewish American identity. Related to this stance of relentless
opposition, which finds academic expression in the "culture of critique,"
is a Jewish characteristic that MacDonald views as invariably present, a
drive to compete for social and material resources with those perceived as
outsiders.
Since Jews supposedly have acquired a cognitive advantage over most other
groups because of careful eugenic practices, they also compete with
remarkable success. What hindered their group performance in the past was
living among host peoples with a comparable degree of ethnic consciousness.
When this happened, as in medieval Europe or in twentieth-century Russia,
Jews have been limited in their collective and individual ambitions. As
explained in the last two volumes, such obstacles forced MacDonald's
subjects into adopting daring strategies, most fatefully the embrace of
revolutionary ideologies and programs. As an embattled outgroup, Jews
supported and led revolutionary movements in vast disproportion to their
numbers. And while tensions have existed in the last two hundred years
between Rabbinic and revolutionary Jews, MacDonald is correct to suggest
that that conflict has not been as sharp as commonly believed. Many
observant Jews have been on the political left, and today Orthodox Jews
feel no compunctions about voting for left-liberal Jewish politicians such
as Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer. What is understood to be "good for
the Jews" may not be so for traditional Christians.
Like most speculative studies, MacDonald's work is open to question, and
it may be appropriate to raise certain critical points. His stress on the
continuities between ancient and modern Jews assumes more sameness than may
be justified. He may exaggerate the degree to which Jewish theism was
invented to serve the need for ethnic solidarity. A huge historiographic
literature is available that presents the opposite view, namely, that
Jewish national consciousness began as a byproduct of Jewish monotheism. An
exhaustively researched dissertation by Steven Grosby, presented at the
University of Chicago in 1989, marshals considerable primary and secondary
sources in defense of this position. Also in pre-Rabbinic Judaism,
intermarriage went on frequently between Jewish and non-Jewish elites:
whence the non-Jewish wives of Moses, Solomon, the rulers of the two
post-Solomonic Jewish kingdoms, and of the Hasmoneans at the end of the
Second Commonwealth.
One should also not generalize about prohibitions against intermarriage
from the restrictions imposed on the Kohanim (the Jewish priestly class).
As explained in Leviticus and in the opening pages of Contra Apionum, a
Jewish apologetic written by the priestly historian Josephus, the
priesthood represented a "pure race {ti genos katharon} " by virtue of
having kept themselves from certain forms of intermarriage. Among the
forbidden unions in question however, were those between priests and widows
or divorcees, and concern was shown (and continues to be shown,
particularly in Sephardic communities) that priestly families marry within
their caste exclusively. Though this did involve eugenics, it was not of
the kind that applied to other Jews. Exogamy for nonpriestly Jews is
overstepping ethnic more than social boundaries.
Moreover, the most explicit counsels of separation from non-Jews at the
time of Jesus were found among the Essenes. According to accounts given in
the History of the Jews, (II, 119-120), no other Jewish sect, including the
eventually triumphant Pharisees, went so far to avoid contact with alien
peoples. But Essenes were also self-isolated monks, whose members shunned
contact with women as much as with gentiles. They definitely did not
exemplify general Jewish attitudes toward exogamy, any more than did those
Jewish political elites that intermarried.
In a memorable speech in 66 A.D., shortly before an insurrection was
launched against the occupying Roman legions, the nominal Jewish king,
Agrippa, maintained that Roman slavery might have been harder for the
Greeks to bear than for his own race: "How much worse must servitude be for
the Greeks, who surpass everyone else under the sun by virtue of their
noble race [poso mallon Hellesin ton helio panton prouxontes eugeneia]." In
the previous passage Agrippa had warned his listeners against comparing
themselves to the Greeks in terms of intelligence (ti oun, humeis Hellenon
sunetoteroi). Even more revealing, this rhetorical text in Josephus's
History (II, 342-401) refers to a tribe of Jewish converts located east of
the Tigris as homophuloi. The usage, which pertains to members of the same
tribe or race, must be seen as a generous flattery, particularly in view of
the fact that a Jewish prince was describing a subgroup of Parthians.
Agrippa's declamation does not refute all generalities about the intensity
of Jewish ethnic consciousness; nonetheless, it does suggest the need to
qualify some of MacDonald's more sweeping assertions. A Jewish nobleman
would not have referred to Parthian converts as homophuloi or have
characterized the Greeks as superior to his own group unless such beliefs
were widely accepted by his agitated audience. Certainly Agrippa was not
intending to insult Jewish ethnic pride.
On the other hand, MacDonald makes a strong case about the effects of
Rabbinic Judaism in strengthening Jewish ethnic cohesion and isolation. The
first volume provides a veritable thesaurus of Talmudic and post-Talmudic
Rabbinic teachings emphasizing the need for Jewish separation from other
nations. Such teachings typically fail to distinguish among different types
of outsiders (rov akum): all of them are treated with undisguised contempt
and made less worthy of moral consideration than Jews. But here the context
must be kept in mind. The Judaism in question is that of an exiled nation,
whether in Babylonia or in later sites of dispersion. While "this {Jewish}
people that shall dwell alone" achieves self-awareness in both the
Pentateuch and various prohibitions against mingling with strangers
(introduced in the sixth century B.C. by Ezra and Nehemiah), such
precedents, it may be argued, only became important in retrospect.
MacDonald focuses on them in tracing the evolution of particular attitudes,
but without the fate of exile, it is unlikely that these attitudes would
have become dominant for so long. The sense of the ethnic other, as an
undifferentiated presence, grew stronger for Jews in prolonged exile. And
since, as we learn in the second volume, the Church by the fourth century
demanded the marginalization of Jews as Christ-deniers, the Jewish
attitudes of exclusion received reenforcement from without.
Another point that should be stressed is that MacDonald infers too much
from current Jewish social behavior. Granting (inasmuch as MacDonald does
cite me correctly on this matter) that present-day Jews and Jewish
organizations deny to host nations the ethnic solidarity they claim for
themselves, what historical generalizations can be drawn? MacDonald leaves
the impression that Jews in exile have operated in this fashion
perpetually, but the gaps in historical evidence are too large to justify
this inference. As he himself acknowledges, Jews a thousand years ago
viewed life among gentiles as a penalty for their sins. They would go on
suffering this penalty until a national savior took them back to their
ancestral land. Until the last two centuries Jews were in no position to
dispossess gentiles: They coexisted with them in a situation of disparity.
Even if Jews had wanted to take over a Christian society, such a goal would
have seemed totally beyond reach. And given their exclusion from
professional and many commercial activities, pre-modern Jews could not
successfully compete for resources. MacDonald makes these observations at
length, which occasions certain unavoidable questions. Are Jews exhibiting
verbal truculence in an attempt to reconstruct gentile societies a
recurrent aspect of Jewish-non-Jewish relations? Or is MacDonald dealing
with a unique cultural context, in which Jews and gentiles play quite
specific roles?
MacDonald's courageous and painfully researched study provides the basis
for an affirmative response to the second question. In the last hundred
years, give or take a few decades, Jews have moved out of a traditional,
Talmudic society into commanding positions in an increasingly secularized
and by now morally confused Christian world. This has happened most
dramatically in Anglophone societies. The Protestantism of these societies
represents the least anti-Semitic Christianity, and the prevalent political
traditions are the most individualistic. In this favorable situation, two
developments occur. Jews make disproportionate contributions to science,
the professions, and commerce but also contribute to the breakdown of a
traditional gentile culture.
MacDonald devotes an entire volume to this latter tendency and links it
to the Jewish double standard. Together with their celebration of
internationalism, socially critical individualism, and antiseptically
secular public squares, Jews are forever making exceptions for themselves.
Those who fail to recognize and exalt this exception earn the censure of
Jewish spokesmen, whether as alleged anti-Semites or as Jewish self-haters.
MacDonald finds so many instances of this persistent double standard that
his demonstration becomes increasingly a belaboring of the obvious. He
reaches back into the late nineteenth century to cite Jewish civic leaders
who take stands simultaneously for a Jewish right to ethnic cohesion and
for a fluid composition for the American nation. According to MacDonald,
this double standard typified the relatively assimilated German Jews in the
US, even before the arrival of their Eastern European coreligionists. An
examination of the continuity of these attitudes is found not only in the
present study but in a heavily documented essay that appeared last year in
Population and Society. While the previous editor of that learned journal,
Virginia Abernethy, solicited MacDonald's work, soon after its appearance
the author went on to assume the journal's editorship.
Though the statements that MacDonald quotes about immigration and
multiculturalism may not have won the unanimous approval of American Jews a
hundred years ago, they are striking nonetheless. Current Jewish views
about the US having to be a culturally changing "global democracy" go back
far into American Jewish history. These preachments were not shaped by the
Holocaust and antedate the Eastern European Jewish immigration of ninety
years ago. And the wedding of these views to a justification for Jewish
ethnic particularity, MacDonald convincingly demonstrates, contributed to
the pluralist agendas drawn up in the early part of the century. German
Jewish humanist and socialist Horace Kallen combined a call for political
internationalism with a hope that the US would be filled with ethnic
enclaves. MacDonald plausibly explains the Jewish reasons for Kallen's
attempted fusion of ethnic mysticism with the dream of a world state. His
Jewish identity and sense of marginality in a gentile society shaped
Kallen's otherwise mystifying politics.
MacDonald also underscores the overlap between contemporary Jewish
polemics against immigration restrictionists and those produced by Jewish
organizations in the 1920s. Well before midcentury Jews were savaging the
opponents of liberal immigration policies as "unAmerican" and "Nordic
supremacists." These invectives, which emanated from the opponents of the
McCarran-Walter (immigration restriction) Act of 1952, had been part of the
propaganda arsenal turned against the naturalization acts of the 1920s. In
both cases the public advocates for restriction emphasized cultural and
economic, not biological, reasons for their stands.
The discussion of American Jewish organizations working to increase
immigration to the US, since the late nineteenth century and recently, from
nonwhite and nonChristian parts of the world, may be the section of
MacDonald's study most interesting to readers of Social Contract. In the
third volume it is made clear that Jewish immigration activism is not
motivated, for the most part, by universal fraternity. MacDonald pulls
together eye-opening assertions by Jewish civic leaders that a US
transformed by Third-World populations will be beneficial for Jews. Such a
transformed society will no longer be able to launch a Holocaust against
Jews, an eruption of cruelty to which white Christian peoples are thought
to be especially prone. The author is correct that those who express such
sentiments have no intention of abandoning their ethnic specificity, even
though they demand that white gentiles embrace a globalist culture. Since
MacDonald proves that powerful interests are fueled by such feelings, the
question arises whether his findings conflict with those of Samuel Francis
and myself. Unlike MacDonald, Francis and I have focused on general social
and political change, most particularly the dynamics and ideology of the
managerial state, in explaining the politics of open borders. But there is
no contradiction between MacDonald's examination of Jewish organizational
behavior and strategies and the order of explanation to which Francis and I
devote our research. MacDonald offers a contributing cause for a particular
behavior, namely, the readiness of Western peoples to adopt globalist
ideologies that are based on a rejection of inherited identities. Clearly
those who are predisposed to think and act in this way will do so less
hesitantly, if Jewish journalists and intellectuals encourage this
predisposition. Within a larger frame of political and social dynamics, it
is possible to find conditioning factors, and MacDonald has focused on one
of them in considerable depth. One can only speculate on how the
immigration debate would be shaping up if the prevalent Jewish opinions
were those of Larry Auster, Dan Stein, and Gerda Bikales, not those of Abe
Foxman, A.M. Rosenthal, and Martin Peretz.
Two observations may be in order about the trends in American Jewish
life highlighted in Volume Three. The attempts by American Jewish leaders
to weaken the American Judeo-Christian core culture does not, as far as I
can tell, advance any rational Jewish interest. It is both malicious and
socially self-destructive. It is hard to grasp how Jews benefit from
awarding preferential treatment to blacks and Hispanics, insisting that the
Ten Commandments be removed from public schools, or denigrating the
heritage of America's white majority. While it is certainly possible to
compose rationalizations for such politics, Jews would seem to have greater
interest in supporting a Western Christian society in the US than in making
heroic efforts to subvert the remnants of one. Why should they yearn to
replace a world that amply rewards their talents by one that will likely be
less friendly? Or in the words of my friend Rabbi Meyer Schiller," Do
American Jews really think that the new majority that they are raising up
will run to build Holocaust monuments?"
Another observation waiting to be made concerns Western Protestant
societies. What is called the "culture of critique" has not been equally
successful everywhere. Its inroads are most dramatic among those whom the
Presbyterian thinker James Kurth calls "progressively deformed" Protestant
peoples. Starting with the theologically based individuality and
anti-hierarchical bias of classical Protestantism, this deformation of the
Reformation has expressed itself in various late modernist obsessions. All
of them show some link to their Protestant sources but have been freed from
the sobering notions of original sin and divine redemption. These
Protestant variants feature subjectivity and self-esteem, but also social
guilt in the place of the older concept of sin. This substitution is
essential for understanding why political correctness afflicts Protestant
countries almost exclusively. Having researched the politics of guilt, it
seems to me that deformed Protestantism is foundational for this
phenomenon. There is more than a grain of truth in the comment made by
former President Mitterand a NOW delegation requesting sexual harrassment
laws in France: "In a Latin Catholic society they'd think you're cracked in
the head!"
Fits of self-rejection are also characteristic of deformed Protestants,
and in the US, Canada, Germany, and England Protestant clergy have been out
in front of those demanding atonement for racism, anti-Semitism, sexism,
and homophobia. Ray Honeyford and Claus Nordbruch have documented the
growing roles of the English and German governments in pushing
victimological agendas, and Protestant churches have been at work
instigating these governments. In the US even the Religious Right strikes
postures of atonement. In April 1995 Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition
expressed contrition for the persecution of Jews that had taken place
during the Spanish Inquisition. Reed was responding to a statement by Abe
Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League scolding American Christians for not
accepting "responsibility" for the Christian record of bigotry. Though
Reed, a Baptist of English descent, had nothing to do, even ancestrally,
with the cruelty of a Spanish Catholic regime toward Spanish Catholics of
Jewish extraction, he nonetheless behaved as a deformed Protestant. Like
others of his type, Evangelical Christian Reed resides in a predominantly
Protestant society where members of the once dominant culture wallow in
guilt toward "victimized" minorities. Jews have taken advantage of this
situation, but did not create it. MacDonald observes that neoconservative
philosopher Sidney Hook raised "ethnic diversity" to be the essence of
democracy. Hook's definition is said to be a Jewish attempt to destabilize
outgroups, but it may be something else. It is the way gentile
conservatives, almost all of them professing Christians, understand their
national and religious heritage. Hook, after all, bestrode the American
conservative movement for decades, as a spokesman for American values.
No assessment of this multi-volume work would be complete without
commenting on MacDonald's assertions about Jewish cognitive superiority.
His assumptions here overlap those of respected scholars. In July 1995, for
example, shortly before his death, Hans Eysenck commented favorably on the
presuppositions found in the first volume concerning Jewish intelligence.
Noting Jewish professional and financial ascendancy, Ashkenazic Jewish
overrepresentation among chess champions and Nobel Prize recipients, and
the continuing standard deviation between Ashkenazic Jewish and white
gentile I.Q. scores, MacDonald and Eysenck attribute Jewish accomplishments
to successful reproductive strategy.
While these presuppositions may be correct, other explanations are
available for the data being looked at. According to the research on
testing for a thirty-year period done by J.R. Flynn, mean I.Q. has risen by
approximately .2 percent each year. Sociobiologists Richard Lynn and
Michael Levin link this steady rise to environmental factors, particularly
the frequency of test-taking and exposure to test materials among the
young. The Flynn effect may also point to environmental reasons for the
displays of Jewish intelligence during the last several generations. Jewish
urbanization, Jewish professional aggressiveness (aka pushiness), and the
repeated exposure of Jewish children to test-taking may all contribute
decisively to those prize-gathering coups noted by Eysenck and MacDonald.
Those who push themselves forward, whether on research teams, in business
organizations, or as applicants for professional schools, will do better,
de paribus ceteris, than those who (like my Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors)
have been taught not to stand out. Note that descendants of German Jews, as
reported by Stanley Rothman, score a few points lower on I.Q. tests than
those of Jews from Eastern Europe. Having observed both in college, I am
not surprised. The first never haggled over grades and followed rules
meticulously; the second cut corners, when necessary, to get ahead. In
short, the German Jews were professionally hampered because they thought
and behaved like Christian bourgeois. They were better mannered and more
honorable but less successful than other Ashkenazic Jews, to whom they were
related genotypically.
Other bones can be picked with the arguments made about inherited Jewish
intelligence. Contrary to a suggestion that American Jews owe their
braininess to being descended from prolific Rabbinic dynasties, most
American Jews are not descended from such families. The Jews who came to
the US from Eastern Europe were overwhelmingly of different stock. Rabbinic
dynasts did not often leave Europe to seek their fortunes, and those who
came here, typically not in the great immigration at the turn of the
century, were celebrated exceptions. It also might be asked whether Jews in
Eastern Europe created a higher civilization than the one found among
literate European gentiles. With the exception of multiple glosses treating
ritual and dietary laws, one can point to few intellectual inventions, and
certainly no notable artistic ones, among pre-modern Eastern European Jews.
Classical and Christian Europe, by contrast, laid the foundations for a
rich civilization, artistically and intellectually, despite the supposed
cognitive limitations of European Christians. While the point is not to run
down a communal life to some extent inflicted, and while MacDonald is
correct about the solidarity produced by that way of life, one may be
justified in asking whether this was the best that might have come from a
race of intellectual giants. After all, Eysenck and MacDonald place Jewish
intelligence as far above that of white gentiles as they put black
intelligence below that middle standard.
Within our own civilization, different ethnic groups and subgroups have
done much and then declined. Lowland Scots, Northern Italians, Swabian
Germans, and American WASPs can all be cited as groups which made
remarkable contributions to learning and the arts and then lost their
cultural prominence. The theory put forth by Arnold Toynbee, that peoples
rise to greatness by responding to particular challenges, may shed light
here. But in any case there is no reason to explain those periods in the
sun enjoyed by particular groups as functions of inborn cognitive
superiority. The examples of Jewish cooperation and of Jewish competitive
strategies, to which MacDonald devotes his scholarship, provides an
explanation of current Jewish successes, independently of any putative
cognitive advantage. According to MacDonald, Jews have managed to
politicize art, literature, and many academic fields, and this has served
their interest as well as talent. Though perhaps not as artistically gifted
as other groups, they have reconstructed culture to play to their verbal
self-assertiveness. These counter-arguments do not disprove that Ashkenazic
Jews have high intelligence. What is maintained is that their successes do
not necessarily presuppose an inborn cognitive advantage. MacDonald himself
offers a far more convincing explanation in the course of his study.
The, for me, most engrossing part of MacDonald's work is the long,
learned section in the third volume, "The Frankfurt School and
Pathologization." This stretch will and has already upset those who
identify themselves with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and
as one influenced by some of its strains, I cannot say that I read
MacDonald's remarks with unmixed pleasure. Nonetheless, his critical
assessment deserves the attention of those who value intellectual honesty.
The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by the American Jewish
Committee, was a work that bore multiple marks of the Frankfurt School. Its
editors and contributors, particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
were fathers of Critical Theory. Moreover, it is hard to study the
production or reception of that turgid exploration of "fascist" and
"pseudo-democratic" personality-types without noticing the social world in
which it circulated. Adorno, Horkheimer, Ilse Frenkel, and Paul Lazarsfeld,
all were Frankfurt groupies before they contributed to this collective
enterprise. And so were those who wrote puff pieces in support, such as
Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, the last having recommended it to me while
I was his graduate student in the sixties. The pivotal themes in The
Authoritarian Personality were, as emphasized by MacDonald, anything but
new to those who contributed to the project. They were the complaints
directed against Western, and not only German, society by the youthful
radicals grouped around Adorno at the University of Frankfurt in the early
thirties. From Frankfurt these "anti-Nazis" would immigrate to the US and
then, reestablish their ideas in postwar Germany in the context of Allied
denazification. Little attention was paid to the fact that the antidotes to
Nazism proposed by the group were not entirely related to the disease.
Their real target was anything that gave cohesion to middle-class families
and societies.
MacDonald stresses that the "pathologization" of normal gentile society
found in The Authoritarian Personality foreshadows today's coerced
political correctness. The social criticism of the School implies the need
for a powerful regime of socialist administrators, to level inequalities
and resocialize allegedly dangerous personalities. MacDonald links this
call for massive social engineering to characteristically Jewish concerns
and anxieties among the overwhelmingly Jewish contributors. The gentile
other would remain a prowling presence, or so it was assumed, unless one
could reconstruct the surrounding society. (The German term Verharmlosung
comes inevitably to mind here.) The plea for resocialization in 1950
continued to resonate among Jewish "social scientists" who shared Adorno's
fears. Both the plea and rhetoric live on equally in the efforts of Jewish
organizations to identify traditional Christian values with
incipient"fascism." According to MacDonald, the inflated fears shown by
this behavior gained a vocabulary and intellectual respectability through
the exiled Frankfurt School.Its members expanded their critique of
capitalism, as the source of fascist culture, into a war against anything
identifiably Christian or bourgeois.
Despite its acerbic edge, MacDonald's commentary overlaps the works of
exponents of Critical Theory. For decades Frankfurt apologists have
depicted its members as hapless Nazi victims, who were rightly concerned
about American as well as German anti-Semitism. This idee fixe, as noted by
Christopher Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, was assumed and endorsed by
the American Jewish Committee and other groups which promoted The
Authoritarian Personality. The Jewishness of Critical Theory received new
support in Zoltan Tar's controversial monograph, The Frankfurt School: The
Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1977), which
highlights the peculiarly Jewish Marxism of its subjects. As seen by Tar,
the Frankfurt School was part of the attempt to establish a Western Marxist
alternative to Soviet Communism. Its representatives were alienated Jews in
search of a middle ground between Christian capitalist societies and
Stalinist partylines. Critical Theory was one among other products derived
from this search, together with various forms of anti-Leninist Marxist
humanism .The common element in these hybrid radical ideologies was the
combination of Jewish marginality with intentional Marxist deviation.
Though influenced by this already widespread interpretation, MacDonald
treats Tar's subjects in a less sympathetic manner. As a disenchanted New
Leftist, MacDonald is unmistakably upset (particularly in conversation)
about where certain ideas have led. He also complains in letters about
having been taken in by what others use to deal with their marginality. He
is overtly hostile to the Critical Theorists whom adolescent
revolutionaries praised back in the sixties, and he quotes Lasch and me on
the political and cultural implications of that sinister work that the
American Jewish Committee had funded.
Despite or because of his lack of kindness, MacDonald's treatment forces
us to acknowledge unpleasant truths. I say "we," since, unlike MacDonald, I
still find bits of Critical Theory worth preserving. These are the insights
about dehumanizing managerial societies, as opposed to the
pseudo-scientific pomposity criticized in the third volume. Undoubtedly
there is a stupid, dangerous side to the Frankfurt School traceable to the
Jewish anxieties of its members. Tar and MacDonald, morover, find evidence
of this disposition even before its members were forced into exile.
Nonetheless, its fullest expression came after the War in The Authoritarian
Personality and in tortured attempts by Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and
other Frankfurt School refugees to wed socialist politics to ostentatiously
displayed Jewish Angst. It is, to me, questionable whether one can
justifiably separate this pathologizing tendency from the Critical
Theorists'analytic contributions. Unlike the pro-Nazi blemishes in the
corpus of Carl Schmitt or the Stalinist concessions in the music of
Prokofiev, these Jewish obsessions take voluminous form and do have
longterm consequences.
Least convincing is the attempt to explain away these calls for social
engineering as the hackwork of impoverished exiles. My fellow-editors at
Telos magazine are so sure of this revisionist history that they threatened
to resign if I published my dissenting opinions in their "open forum." In
the late forties, however, Adorno and Horkheimer did not embark on their
longest and organizationally most demanding "study" just to make money. It
was the fruits of painful planning and brought them meager financial
reward. Its editors and contributors were not literary drudges but engaged
Jewish intellectuals, expressing specifically Jewish anxieties. Admittedly
one does not find the best of Adorno and Horkheimer in their labors for the
American Jewish Committee. But one does find things there that foreshadow
cultural and therapeutic trends, for example, the concern repeatedly
expressed by Adorno's renowned disciple, Jurgen Habermas, that Germans must
be forced into abandoning their bourgeois nationalist past. Habermas's
demand that his countrymen put away their cultural heritage and embrace a
contrived democratic faith (Verfassungspatriotismus) point back to Adorno's
starkly reconstructionist judgments. And those judgments, together with
loathing for the received civilization, pervade The Authoritarian
Personality. Thus Habermas indicates in 1992, in Was bedeutet "Aufarbeitung
der Vergangenheit" heute, that his notion of a collective German
responsibility for an authoritarian past is really Adorno's view.
Habermas's proposed reforms, a postconventional and postbourgeois
citizenship for his countrymen and virtually unrestricted immigration into
Europe, are by no means his purely personal hangups. They betray the
pathologizing tradition on which MacDonald focuses his critical energy.
Gentile radicals may have picked this stuff up along the way, but it stems
from a recognizably Jewish strategy for dealing with perceived Jewish
problems. Like Tar but far less gently, MacDonald forces us into this
genealogical journey.
>From culture of critique
Whither Judaism and the West?
One conclusion of this volume is that Jews have played a decisive role in
developing highly influential intellectual and political movements that
serve their interests in contemporary Western societies. These movements are
only part of the story however. There has been an enormous growth in Jewish
power and influence in Western societies generally, particularly the United
States. Ginsberg (1993) notes that Jewish economic status and cultural
influ-ence have increased dramatically in the United States since 1960.
Shapiro (1992, 116) shows that Jews are overrepresented by at least a factor
of nine on indexes of wealth, but that this is a conservative estimate,
because much Jewish wealth is in real estate, which is difficult to
determine and easy to hide. While constituting approximately 2.4 percent of
the population of the United States, Jews represented half of the top one
hundred Wall Street executives and about 40 percent of admissions to Ivy
League colleges. Lipset and Raab (1995) note that Jews contribute between
one-quarter and one-third of all political contributions in the United
States, including one-half of Democratic Party contributions and one-fourth
of Republican contributions.
The general message of Goldberg's (1996) book Jewish Power: Inside the
American Jewish Establishment, is that American Judaism is well organized
and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been
successful in achieving its interests. There is a great deal of consensus on
broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of
other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state
separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (p. 5). Indeed, the
consensus on these issues among Jewish activist organizations and the Jewish
intellectual movements reviewed here despite a great deal of disagreement on
other issues is striking. Massive changes in public policy on these issues
beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s coincide with
the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States.
Since the 1950s empirical studies of ethnic hierarchy in the United States
have tracked changes in ethnic group resources, including elite
representation (e.g., Alba & Moore 1982; Lerner, Nagai & Rothman 1996).
These studies have often emphasized the overrepresentation of Protestant
whites in corpo-rate hierarchies and the military, but have failed to take
into consideration group differences in commitment and organization. Salter
(1998b) provides a theoretically based assessment of Jewish influence
relative to African Ameri-cans and gentile European Americans based on
Blalock's (1967, 1989) model of group power as a function of resources
multiplied by mobilization. Jews are far more mobilized than these other
ethnic populations (one hesitates calling gentile European Americans a
"group"). For example, while specifically ethnic organizations devoted to
the ethnic interests of gentile European Americans are essentially political
fringe groups with meager funding and little influence on the mainstream
political process, Salter notes that the America-Israel Public Affairs
Committee ranked second out the 120 most powerful lobbies as rated by
members of Congress and professional lobbyists, with no other ethnic
organization rated in the top 25. Furthermore, AIPAC is one of the few
lobbies that relies heavily on campaign contributions to win allies. As
indicated above, Jews contribute between one-third and one-half of all
campaign money in federal elections, the donations motivated by "Israel and
the broader Jewish agenda" (Goldberg 1996, 275). Jews are thus
overrep-resented in campaign contributions by a factor of at least 13 based
on their percentage of the population and are overrepresented by a factor of
approxi-mately 6.5 if adjustment is made for their higher average income.
In overseas donations, the Jewish lead is even greater. For example, in the
1920s, before the post-World War II explosion of Jewish giving to Israel,
Jewish Americans may have given as much as 24 times more per capita to
assist overseas Jews than did Irish Americans to assist Ireland in its
struggle for independence from Great Britain. Yet this was the period of
peak Irish ethnic philanthropy (Carroll 1978). The disparity has become much
greater since World War II. Salter has adopted a preliminary conservative
estimate of Jewish ethnic mobilization as four times that of white gentiles,
based on comparison of per capita donations to non-religious ethnic causes.
In the Blalock equation influence is affected not only by mobilization but
also by the resources held by the group. Salter estimates that Jews control
approximately 26 percent of the "cybernetic resources" of the United States
(i.e., resources as measured by representation in key areas such as
govern-ment, media, finance, academia, corporations, and entertainment).
This aver-age level of resource control reflects both areas of high (> 40
percent) Jewish representation (e.g., mass media, high finance, the legal
profession, the intel-lectual elite, entertainment) and low (= 10 percent)
Jewish representation (e.g., corporate elite, military leaders, religious
leaders, legislators). The overall estimate is comparable to that made by
Lerner et al. (1996, 20) based on data gathered in the 1970s and 1980s.
Lerner et al. arrive at a 23 percent overall Jewish representation in
American elites. The results also parallel levels of Jewish
overrepresentation in other societies, as in early twentieth-century Germany
where Jews constituting approximately one percent of the population
controlled approximately 20 percent of the economy (Mosse 1987, 1989) and
also had a dominating influence on the media and the production of culture
(Deak 1968, 28; Laqueur 1974, 73).
Substitution of these resource and mobilization values into the Blalock
equation yields an estimate that Jewish influence on ethnic policy
(immigra-tion, race policy, foreign policy) is approximately three times the
influence of gentile European Americans. The results are highly robust for
different weightings of resources. Only an "extreme neo-Marxist" weighting
of re-sources (i.e., one that weights only the corporate elite, the
legislative branch of government, the military elite, foundations, and total
group income) brings Jewish influence down to approximate parity of
influence with gentile Euro-pean Americans.
As indicated above, there is a broad Jewish consensus on such issues as
Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee
policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. This
implies that Jewish influence and Jewish interests dominate these issues-a
result that is highly compatible with the discussion of Jewish influence on
immigration policy discussed Chapter 7 as well as the fact that all of these
areas have seen enormous swings in public policy in accordance with Jewish
interests that coincide with the rise of Jewish influence in the United
States. Salter's esti-mate that Jewish mobilization may be conceptualized as
several times greater than that of gentile European Americans is well
illustrated by the history of Jewish involvement in immigration policy: All
of the major Jewish organiza-tions were intensively involved in the battle
over restrictive immigration for a period lasting an entire century despite
what must have seemed devastating setbacks. This effort continues into the
contemporary era. As discussed in Chapter 7, opposition to large-scale
immigration of all racial and ethnic groups by large majorities of the
European-derived population as well as the relative apathy of other
groups-even groups such as Italian Americans and Polish Americans that might
be expected to support the immigration of their own peoples-were prominent
features of the history of immigration policy.
This "rise of the Jews"-to use Albert Lindemann's (1997) phrase-has
undoubtedly had important effects on contemporary Western societies. A major
theme of the previous chapter is that high levels of immigration into
Western societies conforms to a perceived Jewish interest in developing
nonhomogeneous, culturally and ethnically pluralistic societies. It is of
interest to consider the possible consequences of such a policy in the long
term.
In recent years there has been an increasing rejection among intellectuals
and minority ethnic activists of the idea of creating a melting pot society
based on assimilation among ethnic groups (see, e.g., Schlesinger 1992).
Cultural and ethnic differences are emphasized in these writings, and ethnic
assimila-tion and homogenization are viewed in negative terms. The tone of
these writings is reminiscent of the views of many late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals who rejected the
assimilationist effects of Reform Judaism in favor of Zionism or a return to
a more extreme form of cultural separatism such as Conservative or Orthodox
Judaism.
The movement toward ethnic separatism is of considerable interest from an
evolutionary point of view. Between-group competition and monitoring of
outgroups have been a characteristic of Jewish-gentile interactions not only
in the West but also in Muslim societies, and there are examples of
between-group competition and conflict too numerous to mention in other
parts of the world. Historically, ethnic separatism, as seen in the history
of Judaism, has been a divisive force within societies. It has on several
occasions unleashed enormous intra-societal hatred and distrust, ethnically
based warfare, expul-sions, pogroms, and attempts at genocide. Moreover,
there is little reason to suppose that the future will be much different. At
the present time there are ethnically based conflicts on every continent,
and clearly the establishment of Israel has not ended ethnically based
conflict for Jews returning from the diaspora.
Indeed, my review of the research on contact between more or less
imper-meable groups in historical societies strongly suggests a general rule
that between-group competition and monitoring of ingroup and outgroup
success are the norm. These results are highly consistent with psychological
research on social identity processes reviewed in SAID (Ch. 1). From an
evolutionary perspective, these results confirm the expectation that ethnic
self-interest is indeed important in human affairs, and obviously ethnicity
remains a common source of group identity in the contemporary world. People
appear to be aware of group membership and have a general tendency to
devalue and compete with outgroups. Individuals are also keenly aware of the
relative standing of their own group in terms of resource control and
relative reproductive success. They are also willing to take extraordinary
steps to achieve and retain eco-nomic and political power in defense of
these group imperatives.
Given the assumption of ethnic separatism, it is instructive to think of the
circumstances that would, from an evolutionary perspective, minimize group
conflict. Theorists of cultural pluralism such as Horace Kallen (1924)
envision a scenario in which different ethnic groups retain their
distinctive identity in the context of complete political equality and
economic opportunity. The difficulty with this scenario from an evolutionary
perspective (or even a common sense perspective) is that no provision is
made for the results of competition for resources and reproductive success
within the society. Indeed, the results of ethnic strife were apparent in
Kallen's day, but "Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled
around him to an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist" (Higham
1984, 209).
In the best of circumstances one might suppose that separated ethnic groups
would engage in absolute reciprocity with each other, so that there would be
no differences in terms of economic exploitation of one ethnic group by the
other. Moreover, there would be no differences on any measure of success in
society, including social class membership, economic role (e.g., producer
versus consumer; creditor versus debtor; manager versus worker), or
fertility between the separated ethnic groups. All groups would have
approximately equal numbers and equal political power; or if there were
different numbers, provisions would exist to ensure that minorities would
retain equitable repre-sentation in terms of the markers of social and
reproductive success. Such conditions would minimize hostility between the
groups because attributing one's status to the actions of the other groups
would be difficult.
The present tendencies lead one to predict that unless the ideology of
indi-vidualism is abandoned not only by the multicultural minorities (who
have been encouraged to pursue their group interests by a generation of
American intellectuals) but also by the European-derived peoples of Europe,
North America, New Zealand, and Australia, the end result will be a
substantial diminution of the genetic, political, and cultural influence of
these peoples. It would be an unprecedented unilateral abdication of such
power and certainly an evolutionist would expect no such abdication without
at least a phase of resistance by a significant segment of the population.
As indicated above, European-derived peoples are expected to ultimately
exhibit some of the great flexibility that Jews have shown throughout the
ages in advocating particular political forms that best suit their current
interests. The prediction is that segments of the European-derived peoples
of the world will eventually realize that they have been ill-served and are
being ill-served both by the ideology of multiculturalism and by the
ideology of de-ethnicized individualism.
If the analysis of anti-Semitism presented in SAID is correct, the expected
reaction will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving,
collec-tivist ideologies and social organizations. The theoretically
underdetermined nature of human group processes (PTSDA, Ch. 1; MacDonald
1995b) disal-lows detailed prediction of whether the reactive strategy will
be sufficient to stabilize or reverse the present decline of European
peoples in the New World and, indeed, in their ancestral homelands; whether
the process will degenerate into a self-destructive reactionary movement as
occurred with the Spanish Inquisition; or whether it will initiate a
moderate and permanent turning away from radical individualism toward a
sustainable group strategy. What is certain is that the ancient dialectic
between Judaism and the West will con-tinue into the foreseeable future. It
will be ironic that, whatever anti-Semitic rhetoric may be adopted by the
leaders of these defensive movements, they will be constrained to emulate
key elements of Judaism as a group evolution-ary strategy. Such strategic
mimicry will, once again, lead to a "Judaization" of Western societies not
only in the sense that their social organization will become more
group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware of
themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human
groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. In this sense, whether
the decline of the European peoples continues unabated or is arrested, it
will constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary
strat-egy on the development of Western societies.
This book is the final volume in the series on Judaism as a group
evolution-ary strategy. A future comparative book, tentatively titled
Diaspora Peoples, extends the focus to groups other than Jews and European
peoples-the Romany, Assyrians, overseas Chinese, Parsis, and Sikhs, among
others. It will test the extent to which the concepts and analyses employed
in this series expand our understanding of group interaction, cooperation,
and competition, and therefore human evolution in general.
--
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other
people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to
do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights
are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if
such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their
own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of
the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association,
or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will
constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in
which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom,
these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a
free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark
of liberty."
Lord Hailsham, c. 1965.
--
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