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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38166 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.

I'm confused why you think the caste system is eugenic. Indians, like Jews, suffer from a surfeit of genetic diseases from their excessive endogamy norms. And the extreme endogamy norms seem to be inherited from the Harappans the Aryans conquered not the Aryans themselves. You don't see anything like it from the Iranian branch of the Aryans.

You also seem to be confusing eugenics with kin/group selection in your argument. Unless you think the only genes that are 'good' are your own despite how objectively inferior they might be on other metrics.

Propensity for genetic disease is only one dimension of fitness for some objective like maintaining a ruling class or group survival as a diaspora with strong loyalties to an ancient, foreign religion. There are tradeoffs, but propensity for genetic disease isn't strictly inferior to other traits like IQ or religious zealousness in realizing these group-level objectives.

I'm not sure where the attribution of the caste system to the Harappans comes from, if you have anything to read about that I would be interested. The earliest description of the caste system comes from the Sanskrit (Aryan language) Rigveda. All indications are that the caste system was created to preserve the genes of a conquering ruling class in the framework of a religion with inherited priestly function.

You don't see anything like it from the Iranian branch of the Aryans.

Persia was conquered by the Arab Muslim jihad- and jihad, it should be noted, is another stark example of group-level genetic strategy as religion along with Hinduism and Judaism. The Jihad is the reason for the ethnic composition of Iran today, and a quick search shows < 9% frequency of R1a in Iran compared to a 57% frequency among Rajasthan Brahmin.

So we see persistence of a caste system where Aryan genes have been preserved, and no caste system where they were conquered. All Indo-European civilizations have had some form of a caste system, with the Phratry in Ancient Greece, which also contained elements of inherited priestly function, attributed to Indo-European origins. And of course the Patrician class in ancient Rome emerged with the Italian conquest by the Indo-European derived peoples who became the founders of Rome. This is not to deny by any means that the caste system and Hinduism in India is heavily influenced by contributions from all its indigenous populations, it's to say that this is a common a feature of Indo-European civilizations, and we don't see it where those genes no longer exist.

Edit: As an aside, here's a really interesting comparison of Sanskrit with Lithuanian that puts the cultural similarity in perspective:

Sanskrit: Kas tvam asi? Asmi svapnas tava tamase nakte. Agniṃ dadau te śradi tada viśpatir devas tvam asi.

Lithuanian: Kas tu esi? Esmi sapnas tavo tamsioje naktyje. Ugnį daviau tau širdy, tada viešpatis dievas tu esi.

English: Who are you? A dream in your dark night. I gave you the fire in your heart, so you are god our lord.

And

Sanskrit: Kas tava sūnus?

Lithuanian: Kas tavo sūnus?

English: Who is your son?

You are confusing Varna with Jati as caste. Other Indo-Europeans had a Varna like tripartite division between warriors, priests and commoners, but there wasn't the extreme level of endogamy that you find in India that has let upper caste Indians remain genetically extinct from lower caste ones. You don't see that in other Indo-European societies, but you do see it in the Dravidians.

I'm glad to mention Greece, because in Mycenean Greece there was absolutely no correlation between steppe ancestry and social status. The gryffin warrior a steppe style chariot riding warrior aristocrat with his ostentatious grave was found to have no steppe ancestry at all. Despite them clearly having close contact with the proto-Indo-Iranian peoples before they entered Greece. The Basque have a higher percent of the Indo-European r1b then there fellow Iberians. The non-Indo-European Etruscans were genetically identical to their Itallic neighbors.

Edit: I'm also a little confused about your obsession with Y-haplogroups. We have lots of studies on autosomal DNA. Eastern Iranians are more Aryan than Brahmins and a quarter of Iranian citizens are Turks.

I doubt anyone truely cares about the actual proportion of various ancestries. What they care about is ethnogenesis, how their people came to be.

For this purpose, Y and Mt DNA shed light in some aspects that autosomal DNA only cannot, such as the type of intermingling that gave birth to your ethnic group, power dynamics, etc.

For example almost all Latin Americans have y-haplogroups denoting European paternal descent but their Mt DNA shows near complete Native American ancestry for Maternal descent.

Hence we can infer that Latin Americans of today originate from European men and Native American women.

What about European maternal ancestry? The conquistadors were almost all men.

Native American paternal ancestry? You can guess.

This pattern of ancestry turns up in many other populations.

Most modern Europeans attribute their ethnogenesis to such asymmetric gender mixing.

There is actually pretty strong evidence that the original proto-Indo-European speakers were from Armenia/Northwest Iran and the new population that formed the late proto-Indo-European in Ukraine that became the modern Europeans was actually mostly from the y-haplogroup the EHG who lived there before, and the mitochondrial DNA is mostly from the original proto-Indo-Europeans from Armenia. Because, ancient DNA from Hittites in Anatolia had absolutely no EHG ancestry and certainly no y-haplogroups from any EHG. Of course, it's controversial to people like the starter of this thread who cares so much about y-haplogroups.

I'm an Anglo, but our culture was spread by proto-Germanic people with the haplogroup I1, a non-Indo-European haplogroup, and we are mostly not I1 now. We are mostly the Bell Beaker R1b, even in Germany and Denmark we are mostly R1b, with lots of R1a. If you look at a map of what the most common haplogroup Germanic speaking people have its a pastiche of all 3. I'm not ashamed of any of my ancestors and I think this whole thing is ridiculous.

No, why would I? My ancestors were from an amalgamation of very divergent groups in relatively recent history. My cousins are descended partly from similarly divergent groups. Unless we hope to drive the various non-white racial groups that exist in the USA to extinction, I see no reason to oppose interracial marriage. That we should support eugenics in general, then sure, but I'm not advocating for miscegenation laws, genocide, or sterilization.

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