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A review by lpm100
Woke Eugenics by Edward Dutton
slow-paced
1.0
Book Review
Woke Eugenics
"Yet another evolutionary book with the perfume of Nostradamus about it."
2/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters over 242 pages of prose. Just about 20 per chapter.
-Extremely heavily sourced. (682 sources; 2.81 PER page). Overwhelming majority seem to be to journal articles.
-BUT: the impact factor of his cited journals is typically less than 2.0
-No index
*******
In a sense, this book's ultimate line of reasoning is very old: If you want Utopia to arrive, first you have to tear down everything that exists. (The Islamists want to tear down the entire world to hasten the caliphate; white supremacists supported the 9/11 attacks, because it was hastening the destruction of an irredeemably corrupt society; Theodore Kaczynski was hastening The Luddite Revolution.)
Dutton is of a piece with these types: He thinks that "woke" movements will tear down the existing system and discourage genetically unfit people from breeding (p.199)
I myself am a race realist who has no problem with Eugenics / eugenic-arguments, and I would like to believe that raising a conservative normative family of sons puts me among the "genetically fit."
Nonetheless, I still don't think that this author has "come correctly."
(And how "correctly" might he come, given that he has a PhD in Religious Studies, and no lab in which to conduct research for want of a professorship? Also, he is giving serious consideration to people like the Unabomber - - who never reproduced. Was he really genetically fit?)
And as anybody who has read books about evolution / Psychology/Evolutionary Psychology/Pop Psychology knows, it is 100% possible to staple together a bunch of papers with statistically significant (but not practically significant) effects to make a book--- about nothing.
I do agree with his line of reasoning that "wokeness" could have genetic effects. ("Wokeness" is the commonly used term for "identity synthesized" politics. Thanks to Yascha Mounk for the concept)
Over what time scale, though? Wokeness has been mainstream for about 10 years. If the author is extrapolating this over long periods of time, don't we have a "restriction of range" problem here?
I come away with a sense of perplexity.
1. Some of the people that he cited are very discredited, including one that he cited heavily-- JP Rushton. (One of Rushton's books said that there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and penis size, and he put the average length of black men somewhere between 6.25" and 8".) And also Kevin MacDonald, who talked about "group survival strategy" as a way to cloak over his anti-Semitism.
2. When discussing evolutionary concepts, it is very easy to make a connection between any two random things that may not have a basis in reality. (And that's how you will convince yourself that the average black guy has an 8 inch todger.)
But on the other hand, it is not so easy to discredit the author *just* because of that connection, because it happens all the time that fringe authors are considered fringe only because they will point out the elephant in the room.
For example: It seems like everyone in the government and the media ties themselves in knots refusing to accept the apparently lower cognitive ability / general performance of sub-Saharan African descended people--but this guy has no problem being honest about it.
4. The author's output is so prodigious, how much is the repetition and overlap of the total set of his writings? Is it even worth the time to read other of his books? (And you best believe that I'm not purchasing 25 books by one author at the price of $20 per book.)
5. Could it be that so many predictions are made in this book, the statistically some of them will come true? (It is certainly what you would expect from the law of large numbers.)
6. I happen to live around Orthodox / Ashkenazi Jews, and I have noticed that they have a very disproportionate number of *extremely* nice looking people with the fabled Ashkenazi verbal IQ / general intelligence.
And you would predict this with a Duttonesque line of reasoning.
But then, there are also a large number of exotic genetic diseases / mental problems (lots of anxiety / ADHD, etc), and this doesn't quite fit with his theory.
What's the dealio with that?
*******
Second order thoughts / questions:
1. Over what time scale is the author talking about? Decades or centuries? If it's the latter, I don't think anybody who's reading this book will be alive to see the experiment played out.
2. There is at least one book (Alon Ziv, "Breeding Between The Lines") that encourages/touts the benefits of miscegenation. So, based on Dutton's speculation: if low status European males types marry non-whites and higher status non-whites marry lower status whites.... does "hybrid vigor" (a concept that Dutton himself has used elsewhere) make it such that those offspring are better?
3. Is there a such thing as a "mental immune system" ? (Apparently there is a such thing as cognitive immunology.)
4. (p.168) Dutton talks about social class in England being understandable as "separate breeding castes." But what if you have a really nice looking girl from one of the lower castes marry/ have babies with a lower one, are the castes really that stable? And "status exchange theory" is not new. (90% of black Americans have European ancestry, to an average of 17%; Black Men with White Baby Elephants is a sociological cliche at this point).
5. Upwards of a thousand unanswered questions.
-If Wokeism is dysgenic, can a population of people recognize this and stop it? Or, could it be that the easy conditions of Western civilization create the space for dysgenic patterns/situations to occur?
-If Western civilization is created because of eugenic selection, and only Western societies are interested in "wokeness," does that mean that eugenics contains the seeds of its own destruction?
-Could it be that since life is so harsh in the backward African continent that those difficult circumstances are selecting for eugenic conditions? Or that since life is so easy in Western Europe and North America, that genetic selection is at a standstill? Or even actively dysgenic?
-What is the deal with these genetically fit white people that the author talks about financing and supporting the institutions that call for their own destruction? Is oikophobia eugenic because it is a (mental) product of white people or is it inherently dysgenic (But therefore could not be a Western / white people product?) because it can be the idea that leads to the destruction of the people that hold it?
6a. Maybe "group survival" is a strategy. If so, what are we to make of the fact that wokeness is anti-natalist? Dutton tries to square the circle with the "spiteful mutant hypothesis," but when I do further research ONLY his name is linked with it.
6b. Can group survival be different within a group? I live in a community of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. Ultra Orthodox Yiddish speaking Jews have 6.6 children per woman, but non-orthodox have 1.4 children per woman. It has been this way for a long time, and yet the population manages to stay stable. Or, could the solution for Japan be to just have 10% of Japanese women have 6.6 children?
7. Make up your mind. Hybrid vigor? Hybrid depression? Inbreeding vigor? Inbreeding depression?
8. Side note: I looked up some pictures of Andrea Dworkin, and I have to agree that she is repulsive.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too many papers in low impact journals, too many papers to sort through to determine the strength of their effects. Or even if they said what the author is asserting. (And that may have been the point, in fact.)
*******
Supplemental books that address some of the topics at length:
1. "Trans." Helen Joyce. Bits about the way reality is being stood on his head with a focus on Britain.
2. "The Coddling of the American Mind." Jonathan Haidt. Societies that are too comfortable auto-generate mental illness by defining down what is stressful.
3. "Bad Therapy." Helen Shrier. Self-generated mental health crises.
Quotes:
"Conservatives are having more children but mutational load is increasing, leading to more leftists." (71)
"One interpretation of black lives matter is that educated black females are angry that they cannot obtain high status males. Thus, whites must be portrayed as wicked in order to steer educated black males away from white women."
"But Wokeness goes further than merely creating Anarcho-tyranny. It brazenly politicizes the justice system in order to persecute its opponents. (140)
Anarcho-tyranny is defined "as a dictatorial state strongly regulating the life to the citizens, such as by enforcing woke dogmas, while failing to enforce more general law and order." (139, Sam Francis)
Woke Eugenics
"Yet another evolutionary book with the perfume of Nostradamus about it."
2/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters over 242 pages of prose. Just about 20 per chapter.
-Extremely heavily sourced. (682 sources; 2.81 PER page). Overwhelming majority seem to be to journal articles.
-BUT: the impact factor of his cited journals is typically less than 2.0
-No index
*******
In a sense, this book's ultimate line of reasoning is very old: If you want Utopia to arrive, first you have to tear down everything that exists. (The Islamists want to tear down the entire world to hasten the caliphate; white supremacists supported the 9/11 attacks, because it was hastening the destruction of an irredeemably corrupt society; Theodore Kaczynski was hastening The Luddite Revolution.)
Dutton is of a piece with these types: He thinks that "woke" movements will tear down the existing system and discourage genetically unfit people from breeding (p.199)
I myself am a race realist who has no problem with Eugenics / eugenic-arguments, and I would like to believe that raising a conservative normative family of sons puts me among the "genetically fit."
Nonetheless, I still don't think that this author has "come correctly."
(And how "correctly" might he come, given that he has a PhD in Religious Studies, and no lab in which to conduct research for want of a professorship? Also, he is giving serious consideration to people like the Unabomber - - who never reproduced. Was he really genetically fit?)
And as anybody who has read books about evolution / Psychology/Evolutionary Psychology/Pop Psychology knows, it is 100% possible to staple together a bunch of papers with statistically significant (but not practically significant) effects to make a book--- about nothing.
I do agree with his line of reasoning that "wokeness" could have genetic effects. ("Wokeness" is the commonly used term for "identity synthesized" politics. Thanks to Yascha Mounk for the concept)
Over what time scale, though? Wokeness has been mainstream for about 10 years. If the author is extrapolating this over long periods of time, don't we have a "restriction of range" problem here?
I come away with a sense of perplexity.
1. Some of the people that he cited are very discredited, including one that he cited heavily-- JP Rushton. (One of Rushton's books said that there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and penis size, and he put the average length of black men somewhere between 6.25" and 8".) And also Kevin MacDonald, who talked about "group survival strategy" as a way to cloak over his anti-Semitism.
2. When discussing evolutionary concepts, it is very easy to make a connection between any two random things that may not have a basis in reality. (And that's how you will convince yourself that the average black guy has an 8 inch todger.)
But on the other hand, it is not so easy to discredit the author *just* because of that connection, because it happens all the time that fringe authors are considered fringe only because they will point out the elephant in the room.
For example: It seems like everyone in the government and the media ties themselves in knots refusing to accept the apparently lower cognitive ability / general performance of sub-Saharan African descended people--but this guy has no problem being honest about it.
4. The author's output is so prodigious, how much is the repetition and overlap of the total set of his writings? Is it even worth the time to read other of his books? (And you best believe that I'm not purchasing 25 books by one author at the price of $20 per book.)
5. Could it be that so many predictions are made in this book, the statistically some of them will come true? (It is certainly what you would expect from the law of large numbers.)
6. I happen to live around Orthodox / Ashkenazi Jews, and I have noticed that they have a very disproportionate number of *extremely* nice looking people with the fabled Ashkenazi verbal IQ / general intelligence.
And you would predict this with a Duttonesque line of reasoning.
But then, there are also a large number of exotic genetic diseases / mental problems (lots of anxiety / ADHD, etc), and this doesn't quite fit with his theory.
What's the dealio with that?
*******
Second order thoughts / questions:
1. Over what time scale is the author talking about? Decades or centuries? If it's the latter, I don't think anybody who's reading this book will be alive to see the experiment played out.
2. There is at least one book (Alon Ziv, "Breeding Between The Lines") that encourages/touts the benefits of miscegenation. So, based on Dutton's speculation: if low status European males types marry non-whites and higher status non-whites marry lower status whites.... does "hybrid vigor" (a concept that Dutton himself has used elsewhere) make it such that those offspring are better?
3. Is there a such thing as a "mental immune system" ? (Apparently there is a such thing as cognitive immunology.)
4. (p.168) Dutton talks about social class in England being understandable as "separate breeding castes." But what if you have a really nice looking girl from one of the lower castes marry/ have babies with a lower one, are the castes really that stable? And "status exchange theory" is not new. (90% of black Americans have European ancestry, to an average of 17%; Black Men with White Baby Elephants is a sociological cliche at this point).
5. Upwards of a thousand unanswered questions.
-If Wokeism is dysgenic, can a population of people recognize this and stop it? Or, could it be that the easy conditions of Western civilization create the space for dysgenic patterns/situations to occur?
-If Western civilization is created because of eugenic selection, and only Western societies are interested in "wokeness," does that mean that eugenics contains the seeds of its own destruction?
-Could it be that since life is so harsh in the backward African continent that those difficult circumstances are selecting for eugenic conditions? Or that since life is so easy in Western Europe and North America, that genetic selection is at a standstill? Or even actively dysgenic?
-What is the deal with these genetically fit white people that the author talks about financing and supporting the institutions that call for their own destruction? Is oikophobia eugenic because it is a (mental) product of white people or is it inherently dysgenic (But therefore could not be a Western / white people product?) because it can be the idea that leads to the destruction of the people that hold it?
6a. Maybe "group survival" is a strategy. If so, what are we to make of the fact that wokeness is anti-natalist? Dutton tries to square the circle with the "spiteful mutant hypothesis," but when I do further research ONLY his name is linked with it.
6b. Can group survival be different within a group? I live in a community of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. Ultra Orthodox Yiddish speaking Jews have 6.6 children per woman, but non-orthodox have 1.4 children per woman. It has been this way for a long time, and yet the population manages to stay stable. Or, could the solution for Japan be to just have 10% of Japanese women have 6.6 children?
7. Make up your mind. Hybrid vigor? Hybrid depression? Inbreeding vigor? Inbreeding depression?
8. Side note: I looked up some pictures of Andrea Dworkin, and I have to agree that she is repulsive.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too many papers in low impact journals, too many papers to sort through to determine the strength of their effects. Or even if they said what the author is asserting. (And that may have been the point, in fact.)
*******
Supplemental books that address some of the topics at length:
1. "Trans." Helen Joyce. Bits about the way reality is being stood on his head with a focus on Britain.
2. "The Coddling of the American Mind." Jonathan Haidt. Societies that are too comfortable auto-generate mental illness by defining down what is stressful.
3. "Bad Therapy." Helen Shrier. Self-generated mental health crises.
Quotes:
"Conservatives are having more children but mutational load is increasing, leading to more leftists." (71)
"One interpretation of black lives matter is that educated black females are angry that they cannot obtain high status males. Thus, whites must be portrayed as wicked in order to steer educated black males away from white women."
"But Wokeness goes further than merely creating Anarcho-tyranny. It brazenly politicizes the justice system in order to persecute its opponents. (140)
Anarcho-tyranny is defined "as a dictatorial state strongly regulating the life to the citizens, such as by enforcing woke dogmas, while failing to enforce more general law and order." (139, Sam Francis)