A review of Separation and its Discontents by Kevin McDonald, from February, 2012

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I am posting this review of the second of Kevin MacDonald's trilogy in response to request from Mark from Melbourne. The review disappeared when Amazon stopped carrying all three books

Other Gentile authors such as Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn have also been disappeared. His 200 Years Together is readily available in Russian and French, but Columbus Falco's English translation entitled The Crucifixion of Russia remained available from Amazon for only a couple of years.

On the other hand, Jewish authors such as Norman Finkelstein, Yuri Slezkine and Robert Wistrich, to name three off the top of my head, remained available despite offering more pointed criticisms than McDonald's. Go figure

Remarkable in that it got published; important in its subject matter; oversights in its content

Gentiles always seem to get caught flat-footed. Jews claim historical victimhood, emphasizing the Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust and other sufferings. There is always the tone of wounded innocence, as if it is nothing that they ever did but purely a product of evil Christianity. The Gentiles, with no conscious recollection of ever having done anything to offend the Jews, are usually at a loss to defend their ancestors, and certainly at more of a loss attempting to justify their behavior.

MacDonald provides the immense service of constructing an evolutionary social identity theory of group interests. There is no disputing the Darwinian observation that animal populations are in constant competition with one another. The same is certainly true of human breeding groups. The Jews’ rituals and beliefs set them apart, and their practices of endogamy, even consanguinous marriages, and a general refusal to accept converts keeps them apart from their host societies.

Today's charges of anti-Semitism, and racism in general, are made against the backdrop of today's moral and ethical values. It is important to recall that in every century prior to our own it was natural and expected for identifiably different groups of people to be in conflict with one another. The French and the Germans went at it for years. Going back to the Jews, the Bible is a 2000 year litany of conflict between the Jews and their neighbors, in which God himself endorsed genocide against Israel's enemies. The Bible states that the Jews took over the promised land of Canaan from the peoples who dwelt there before the time of Moses and Joshua, and who, because they had had no contact with Israel, cannot have been guilty of any aggression against them. Unprovoked, Israel invaded Canaan and killed everybody, man woman and child, and livestock as well.

MacDonald's task is not to apologize for events such as the Third Reich's Endlösung. His mission is to explain it, and to that and he dedicates a chapter. He has another chapter dedicated to the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, and a third dedicated to anti-Semitism at the time of the Roman Empire. Similarly, MacDonald does not condemn Israel for its ethnic cleansing of the pre-1948 Arab inhabitants, or its discrimination against the few who remain within the state of Israel, but he explains the phenomenon in the light of evolutionary psychology and social identity theory.

MacDonald tells you four times that the Jews have an average intelligence of one standard deviation above that of Caucasians. One time I might believe; two times is excessive. But four in one book? Moreover, the footnote cites his own previous book. He should have chosen one of the many other authors who have documented the same thing.  Henry Harpending, Arthur Jensen, and Tatu Vanhanen, among the world's most respected psychometricians, all make the point.

MacDonald's thesis is in conflict with Harpending’s in one particular. The latter posits that the Jews achieved their exceptional intelligence by surviving adversity, especially in Eastern Europe. Putting it bluntly, the dumb ones died off. Harpending and most researchers find that there are gradients among the Jews.  The Ashkenazim achieve the stated one standard deviation above the norm.  The Sephardim are a little ways down, and the Oriental Jews are simply not that exceptional. MacDonald's should at least have some footnotes to attempt to reconcile his theory that classical era anti-Semitism was sparked by resource competition of Gentiles against exceptionally talented Jews with other hypotheses that would suggest they were not that exceptional.

Arthur Jensen suggests that widespread consanguinous marriage is a major reason for lower intelligence among populations in the Middle East. He even gives a figure in his masterwork, "The g Factor," of about a seven or eight point intelligence deficit due to "inbred depression." MacDonald talks about widespread cousin marriage among the Jews, with the Rothschild family being exceptional even among the Jews for the incidence cousin marriages and uncle-niece marriages. Nobody has noted an intelligence deficit among the Rothschilds. Somebody needs to come up with a reconciliation.

MacDonald advances a thesis that liberal societies such as sprung up in England and France, and historically characterized the United States, are impossible to sustain in societies with large numbers of unassimilated minorities. He also advances the thesis that good times tend to mask the problem, and bad economic times to exacerbate it. This is an important observation and seems consistent with what one sees recently in both the United States and Europe. The politics in both places are becoming increasingly polarized, with the middle and lower class indogenes resentful of the successful minorities – read Jews and Occupy Wall Street – and the immigrants who threaten their livelihoods. He would predict that we will become increasingly polarized, fragmented into ethnic groups. So far the political process in the United States has managed to hold agglomerations of different interests together in the two major political parties. This is not the case throughout Europe, and it may not remain the case in the United States. In other words, diversity is anathema to the liberalism which invited diversity in the first place.

MacDonald pursues his theory into the first half of the 20th century, claiming widespread endogamy and also exceptional reproductive success for Jewish populations. I would like to see some evidence. My observations, having lived in California, Washington DC, Germany and now Ukraine, are that Jewish families have faced the same reproductive struggles as Gentile families. Specifically, Jewish kids grow up to be homosexual at least as often as others. Even in the 60s Jewish kids often married outside the faith in the cosmopolitan US areas where I lived, which are architypical Jewish habitats.  Jewish girls certainly experimented with Gentile guys.  My observation is that Jewish families are often childless, and more frequently adopt than WASP families. I believe that MacDonald's observations may be more true among the relatively small Jewish populations remaining in Germany and here in Ukraine, and among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) in the United States, and I will grant their historical validity, but I am sure that they are not broadly true in contemporary America.

His last chapter is titled as a question: "Is Diaspora Judaism Ceasing To Be An Evolutionary Strategy?" He cites the increasing number of marriages between Jews and Gentiles in the United States, the fact that their children are most frequently not raised as Jews, and the general small size of Jewish families. A countervailing tendency is the increase in Haredi Jewish communities, with their intense belief and large numbers of children. Moreover, he points to Israel and says that exogamy is not an issue there, obviously enough, and that it too is becoming more fundamentalist. His conclusion is that it is too early to count the Jews out. They will probably survive.

I think he is leaving a couple of factors out of his equation. The most important is feminism, or rather female emancipation. Jewish men no longer have control over their women’s reproductive practices. Jewish women, endowed with those great intellects, find that they are very welcome in the workplace all over the world. Just look at any postgraduate program in any American university and you will find lots of them. Moreover, these women are generally quite secular in their outlook, and often do not want to sacrifice their career opportunities for family. In conversation, they usually do not speak terribly highly of Jewish men as marriage prospects. Without the social pressure applied by a strong, cohesive community my bet is that they will not be raising anywhere near a replacement level of young Jewish children.

Ecology is a second question. A breeding community needs a critical mass in order to survive. Grizzly bears, for example, need large unbroken stretches of forest. Jews are so thoroughly accepted in the United States, so unconstrained in their choice of where to live, that Jewish communities even in expensive suburbs tend to be fairly dilute. The Jews see each other in synagogue and perhaps in Jewish day schools, but a large proportion of their social interactions are with Gentiles of similar social class. The exceptions to this are few enough to name: Crown Heights in New York, other neighborhoods on Long Island, and perhaps certain neighborhoods of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Outside of these precincts, Jews will find the constant interaction with Gentiles will be an anodyne to religious fervor.

A third factor is the strength of religion. Upper-class WASPs, churchgoing or not, often merely observe the forms of religion while finding the dogmas difficult to swallow. The same applies to Jews. Why should they follow the 613 laws of the Torah?  How can they be certain that theirs is the only God, or even that their God exists? Secular Jews have been among the most vociferous atheists of our age.  MacDonald brings this issue up, the relevance of Judaism after the enlightenment, but posits that it is headed back to a pre-enlightenment fundamentalism.  I wouldn’t be so sure.

To conclude, it is a very important book.  It’s importance is underscored by the stunning, absolute silence with which the Jewish community itself has received the book.  While it should be the topic of lively discussion, even to mention it is infra dig at best, or taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism.  Jews, the most successful human group ever to walk the planet, should have thicker skins than that.  If Jewish anthropologists can roam the world studying native tribes in search of support for theories such as those of Freud and Marx, isn’t turnabout fair play?

What if the Inuit were to critique the culture that fostered Franz Boas?

One might say, turnabout is fair play.  Freud analyzed the gentile and found him a sexually repressed, guilt-ridden mess.  Adorno, Marcuse et. al. constantly investigated the roots of supposed anti-Semitism among Caucasians in general.  Now, in an exhaustive triology, Kevin MacDonald puts the Jewish people under the microscope.  Jews just HATE that kind of attention.

No, he is not an anti-Semite.  He is a social scientist seeking theories which might best explain observed phenomena.  And interesting phenomena they are.  The Jews are the world’s most persistent, and successful, victims.  Most victim groups, like say the Armenians or American Indians, have their moment of martyrdom and then recede into history.  The Jews have three millennia of victimhood and are still the most intelligent and most prosperous people on the planet.  Is this worthy of investigation?  Jews themselves think, absolutely not.  It isn’t true, you can’t prove it and besides it’s not their fault. 

MacDonald doesn’t get it close to 100% right, but given the stumbling blocks constantly thrown in his path, he doesn’t do a bad job.  Most interstingly, almost all of his sources are themselves Jewish.  A critic cannot find much that is original with MacDonald to vilify… he has footnoted himself so heavily as to be tedious. 

I just love reading stuff they tell you you shouldn’t, like Alfred Kinsey in the ‘40s or “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in the ‘50s.  If you love the lure of the forbidden, check out my review of MacDonald’s “Separation and its Discontents”

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