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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I'm not sure there's a paradox here so much as there are Jews on both sides of the issue... Conservative and religious Jewish advocacy for an increase in fertility is no different than Mormon advocacy; incidently, the latter rate is higher than the former, and even secular Jews in Israel are below replacement level. This isn't evidence of some "hypocrisy" or scheming among Jews.

The key point is that religion and culture manipulates breeding behavior towards eugenic or dysgenic ends. Is the Brahmin being a hypocrite when he comes to America and joins the chorus of anti-racism and denounces eugenic-minded thinking for white people? It's his religion! There is, in fact, nothing hypocritical or paradoxical about preaching eugenics for your people and preaching dysgenics for your outgroup. If you are in competition with other tribes, this is going to be a powerful strategy, particularly if you can convince your outgroup that dysgenic behavior is the realization of a universal moral good, and eugenic behavior is the ultimate evil. It's ultimately tribalistic, not conspiratorial or hypocritical or paradoxical.

Religion, culture, and eugenics are one. This fact is understood foremost by the Jews, who have carried this knowledge through the millennia within their myths. Take the Book of Genesis: Jacob, the Patriarch of the Jewish people, swindles a herd of sheep from his father-in-law by peeling the bark off the tree. Seeing the striped tree, the white and black sheep interbreed and Jacob the Deceiver wins the flock of speckled sheep. This myth portrays ancient knowledge of the use of media for eugenic purposes, and it's important to recognize here that sheep are symbolic for people in biblical myth.

Of course Judaism is not the only religion that transmits an ancient knowledge of eugenics through the medium of religion, the Hindu caste system could be regarded as one of the most successful eugenic programs in human history, with most Brahmin to this day possessing the Aryan haplogroup R1a1 that has been inherited unbroken from the paternal line. It would be inaccurate to call this a conspiracy or eugenics with the veneer of religion, the religion is eugenics and eugenics is the religion.

There are of course some instances of outright hypocrisy, like LessWrong advocates for polygenic embryo screening falling over themselves trying to explain why it's not eugenics:

In my view, the term “eugenics” should not be used to describe embryo screening. In most people’s minds “eugenics” conjures images of government-sponsored sterilization efforts, genocide, and racist pseudoscience. I understand the technical definition is just “good for genes”, but this is not what comes to mind for most people when they hear this word.

Even worse, most of the horrible things done in the name of “eugenics” in the past were in fact not eugenic at all! The entire Nazi theory of genes was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how genes worked. They believed that non-aryan peoples were “contaminating” the “pure aryan bloodline”, and that only by purging those who were unpure could they make a perfect master race. Which is of course not just a morally repugnant theory, but also wrong.

If you want to have a productive conversation, I would suggest using the term “epilogenics” to describe non-coercive means of improving genes that are in line with what we expect those affected would want. There are of course still some concerns with epilogenics (increasing inequality for example), but they are decidedly NOT the same concerns that people have about eugenics.

Here is a case where we see a sheer hypocrisy, but I don't even know if the author of this LW article is Jewish- although I suspect many Jews will make a similar argument as they use polygenic embryo screening. The more profound behavior we see in this article is the familiar use of the Holocaust to denounce eugenic thinking for white people, which is actually the crux of the issue.

With the understanding that religion, culture, and eugenics are inseparable, then we must relate the genetic trajectory of the nation and Europe to its sacred myths, and there is no myth more sacred today than the Holocaust. Understanding the Holocaust as the body of myth that formulates the prevailing civic religion, the issue becomes much deeper than merely a question of hypocrisy. It's a religion that denounces European race consciousness as the ultimate evil and all behaviors against European race consciousness as the ultimate good. It's the anti-caste system, where the civic religion is used to deconstruct and destroy rather than moralize a race consciousness that would be required for eugenic-minded behavior and culture.

The article you link traces the use of this civic religion to derail eugenic-minded thinking within the Academy and culture writ large. There is a full knowledge and recognition of where this breeding program is headed, best illustrated by Lise Funderburg's National Geographic feature, The Changing Face of America: We've become a country where race is no longer so black or white.

Certainly, race still matters in this country, despite claims that the election of Barack Obama heralded a post-racial world. We may be a pluralist nation by 2060, when the Census Bureau predicts that non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority. But head counts don’t guarantee opportunity or wipe out the legacy of Japanese-American internment camps or Jim Crow laws. Whites, on average, have twice the income and six times the wealth of blacks and Hispanics, and young black men are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Racial bias still figures into incarceration rates, health outcomes, and national news: A recent Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family prompted a barrage of negative responses, including claims of white genocide and calls for “DIEversity.”

...

When people ask Celeste Seda, 26, what she is, she likes to let them guess before she explains her Dominican-Korean background. She points out that even then she has revealed only a fraction of her identity, which includes a Long Island childhood, a Puerto Rican adoptive family, an African American sister, and a nascent acting career. The attention she gets for her unusual looks can be both flattering and exhausting. “It’s a gift and a curse,” Seda says.

It’s also, for the rest of us, an opportunity. If we can’t slot people into familiar categories, perhaps we’ll be forced to reconsider existing definitions of race and identity, presumptions about who is us and who is them. Perhaps we’ll all end up less parsimonious about who we feel connected to as we increasingly come across people like Seda, whose faces seem to speak that resounding line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

There's a recognition, celebration, that this is what Americans will look like in 2050, and this is absolutely downstream of the prevailing cultural and religio-political myth that defines the boundaries of our ways of thinking about race and eugenics. This is far more important than any individual-level hypocrisy, and after all pointing out a hypocrisy can be cathartic but it never motivates a rethinking of things and doesn't reach the crux of the issue in any case.

Yeah, that was the article I saw and I realized the interviewee was a different person working on a similar project:

I saw an Israeli television campaign that showed faces on trees and bus stops, like missing children ads. A voice-over said, “Have you seen these people? Fifty percent of young Jewish people outside of Israel marry non-Jews. We are losing them.”

It's interesting to contrast the description of that television campaign with the campaigns we see in the United States, which would be a good example of what the article you linked is identifying.

Also, as @2rafa has pointed out before, a lot of Jews and Jewish NGOs, including George Soros, advocate for increased non-Jewish immigration to Israel.

The "both-sidesing" is so tiresome, we are allowed to take stock of the net impact while recognizing there is a distribution of advocacy and influence among Jews. The net impact is that we see Jewish influence hostile to European race consciousness and heavily affine to Jewish race consciousness. Even assuming an exogamy rate of 50% in the United States, given the small proportion of Jews among the population in America that implies an enormous endogamous influence from Jewish identity.

Not necessarily, I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be resolved if they all just loved and married each-other and became one peoples. The Jewish religion is passed matrilineally, so there could be TV campaigns in Israel promoting Jewish women to take Palestinian men and I wouldn't have a principled opposition to that.

Upvoted this in appreciation of the cleverness of the reply - I'm a big fan of dirty rhetorical tricks like that.

This is absurd, I am not evading the question. One of the best aspects of the American project is the formation of a pan-European ethnic identity, which has entailed the mixing of distinguishable European groups into a "white" identity. That is a political project, and ethnogenesis, that I support.

I don't support the political project of Sweden becoming Middle Eastern. I doubt Jews would support the project of racially integrating with the Palestinians.

I answered your question: I am not against it in principle, but I am concerned with the political motives and outcomes of that social organization, which everyone always has been throughout all of human history, and this concern took the form of religion.

My tongue-in-cheek answer was meant to demonstrate the hostility of encouraging endogamy for your ingroup and exogamy for your outgroup. Seems pretty hostile, doesn't it? It's only tongue-in-cheek, I have an unreciprocated respect for Jewish ethnic identity and I wouldn't seriously demand that they race-mix with the Palestinians to smooth racial tension.

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