The following represents a preliminary attempt to wrap my mind around a very large subject.
Lately I've been reading a book on evolutionary psychology called Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, by Kevin MacDonald (see sidebar). Like anyone else who honestly considers the evidence of racial differences that are more than skin deep, the author is smeared as a hatethinker. Such heretics call themselves "race realists," while progressives call them Nazis. I suppose I would call myself as moderate race realist, which is still more than sufficient for banishment to the hate community.
Granted, it's a touchy subject for a number of reasons, but it needn't be. Compare it to something a little less controversial, sexual differences. Despite the insane propagandizing of the left, normal people not only understand that men and women are fundamentally different, but prefer it that way.
The sexes evolved through different evolutionary pathways, but are obviously complementary, one specializing in strength, competition, and abstract intelligence, the other in nurturing, intersubjectivity, and emotional intelligence, with obvious overlap in between. Why is this a problem?
It's a problem because it clashes with progressive theology, the first principle of which is Thy Slate Shall be Blank, or Else! If we are born a blank slate, then the state can push us around like so many bags of wet cement in order to bring about utopia.
At the same time, the evidence of evolutionary psychology implies that human nature isn't necessarily a simple and straightforward concept. For if the races are different, which is the real human?
Here again, I don’t see this as a big problem, for just as human nature is fully instantiated in both men and women, so too is it present in all human beings of any race. Essence cannot be actualized in the absence of a form that simultaneously expresses and constrains it.
Ah, but here’s an interesting catch, for where did this concept of a transcendent human nature come from? We don’t see it in Africa, or Asia, or India. Here at One Cosmos we regard it as a Christian idea, but for a strict evolutionist this begs the question and puts the cultural cart before the genetic horse.
Suffice it it to say, I’ve been pondering this question for several weeks, and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory resolution. Those who have read the book of the same name will recall that I tackled this subject in my own freewheeling and somewhat naive way in Chapter 3, Psychogenesis: the Presence of Mind.
I say "naive" for two reasons, first because I didn't understand back then that evolutionary psychology was such an offense against the one true faith of progressive Blank Slatism, and second, because I actually succumbed to a bit of B.S. of my own, since I... how to put it... overemphasized the discontinuous leap into universal human freedom, while underemphasizing the particularized genetic continuity.
Because of the latter, it is as if human nature is present in different musical keys, or perhaps like pure light passing through a prism and coming out different colors. Thus, human nature is simultaneously no race and all races. It reminds me of the pseudo-controversy of Jesus' race. The fact that he was of Middle Eastern descent is entirely accidental to his incarnation as and of human nature as such, which no mere race can ever exhaust, otherwise we could ourselves be perfect men.
The fact that no man can be perfect tells you a great deal, for it means that he has an essence he can never reach but is perpetually striving toward.
The other aspect of my resolution to this problem involves the difference between belief and discovery. For example, we don't dismiss the universal truth of the theory of relativity because it was discovered by a Jew. Just as there is no such thing as "Jewish physics," I would say there is no such thing as "Christian personhood," even though Christians are responsible for discovering personhood (with all its cosmic and meta-cosmic implications).
Conversely, evolutionary psychologists regard any and all religious belief as constrained and determined by genes -- as if there is a gene for "belief," with no possibility that the belief might actually conform to transcendent truth. Obviously, biologism doesn't allow for transcendent truth, even though -- like all ideologies -- it makes an exception for the affirmation of its own truth.
On the practical/political side of the equation, the only possible solution would be a passionate embrace of the objective principles animating western civilization (rooted in genuine discoveries about human personhood), and an insistence that anyone coming into this country understand and live by them. But the left embodies the opposite: a passionate rejection of those timeless truths, accompanied by a cynical strategy of killing them via the democide of open borders.
Let's end with an observation by Schuon, in order to deflect attention from myself:
Races exist and we cannot ignore them, less than ever now that the time of closed [genetic] universes has come to an end....
If racism is something to be rejected, so is an antiracism which errs in the opposite direction.... the fact that races are not separated in completely watertight compartments in no way means that pure races are not to be found as well as mixed ethnic groupings. Such an opinion has no meaning for the simple reason that all men have the same origin and that humanity as a whole -- often wrongly referred to as the human race -- constitutes one single species.
Or this:
the existence of Christ or of the Vedantic doctrine adds nothing to the value of a white man with a base nature any more than the barbarism of certain Africans tribes takes anything away from a black man of saintly soul...
foreign races have something complementary in relation to ourselves without there being in principle any 'lack' in us or in them either.
And about progressives who deny the provenance of progress?
Now, there are few things so absurd as the anti-Westernism of those who are themselves westernized.
