Have you read David Pearce?

[…] the midst of an article on other topics, an insightful […]

[…] From an in-depth look at runaway universalism: […]

What is the country you describe and are white children there now the minority of births country wide?

[…] I detailed in my post The Rise of Universalism, the universalist behavior of Northwestern Europeans is a natural consequence of their special […]

[…] and my favorite post from this year by another blogger was jayman’s The Rise of Universalism! (^_^) you should read it. i also meant to mention my favorite post by another blogger in last […]

[…] Europe underwent a series of unusual selection pressures (see her outstanding piece here, also JayMan and Peter Frost). Among them were Church-imposed outbreeding and manorialism, which seem to have […]

So, can you explain the apparent counterexample that Nazi Germany poses to the theory that NW Europeans are genetically universalist?

Is racism (defined as a specific loyalty to one’s race) clannish? It would seem so because: 1) conservatives manifest stronger racial loyalties and are more clannish – so linking them causally is parsimonious; 2) race, being biological, is a kind of greatly attenuated kinship; and 3) racism is anti-universalist.

But then, why did a northern European country embrace the most virulent racism of the 20th century?

When I brought this (obvious) objection to Peter Frost’s attention, his response was that Nazism is a form of universalism. If that’s accurate, “universalism” is a misleading label for the NW European mindset.

[…] Frost, “A Genetic Marker for Empathy?,” The Unz Review, August 22, […]

For over a hundred thousand years, all humans–even relatively outbred ones–got the vast majority of their information about the world from vertical sources like their parents or local religious leaders.

There’s a lot of evidence against this assertion. http://works.bepress.com/david_lancy/133/

I was talking about Eastern Europe as a whole. My definition of Eastern Europe is all the European post-communist states (except East Germany) plus Russia, for a total of 21 nations with a population of roughly 330 million.

In linguistic terms there are:

13 Slavic nations (pop. 285 million)
2 Latin nations (pop. 25 million)
2 Finno-Ugric nations (pop. 10 million)
2 Albanian nations (pop. 5 million)
2 Baltic nations (pop. 5 million)

In religious terms there are:

9 Orthodox nations (pop. 240 million)
7 Catholic nations (pop. 75 million)
3 Muslim nations (pop. 10 million)
2 Protestant nations (pop. 5 million)

By alcoholic preference there are:

10 Vodka nations (pop. 240 million)
5 Beer nations (pop. 65 million)
4 Wine nations (pop. 20 million)
2 nations with no data (pop. 5 million)

So I think it’s fair to say that most (but not all) Eastern Europeans are Slavs; are Orthodox; and prefer vodka.

One more thing:

List of Slavic countries

West Slavic:
Poland, Czech, Slovakia (not a single orthodox, 2 not vodka)
Southern Slavic:

SLovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, BUlgaria (1 Muslim, 3 orthodox, 2 catholic, only 1 Vodka)

Eastern Slavic:
Belarus, Ukraine, RUssia (orthodox, vodka)

So you have 12 Slavic countries (not counting small MOntenegro), of which 6 is orthodox and 5 are VODKA. THis is not “MOST”.

If you are going by the population, then it’s different for one reason: Russia, which alone counts for almost half of Slavic population. Once exlude Russiam, by population again you won’t have “MOST” Slavs.

In summary, you took “Russia” for granted as standing for “Most slavic countries”. This is very annoying for most of us non-Russians.

Sure, it’s German speaking, but genetically it has a lot of Slavic admixture. Meaning you can’t assume it’s all innate.

Culture co-evolution works that way…

Cultural model generally fit with SOME personality types. For example, US(ass) government may introduce a gothic culture among young people as the (advantageous) behavioural standard. Even if most americans are not gothic-like (depression cult) in personality type, some will be. Those who are gothic-like will can increase the number of children in a long term, because cultural (environmental) stress tend to reduce fertility. And conformist people will adapt themselves in these culture, like ”racism’ and ”homophobia’ today. Racism, specially against blacks, was a mainstream in 50′s. Homossexuality, in western, specially, was treated as mental disease (partially correct, specially for excessive promiscuous one) at least in the 70′s.

Cultural change fluctuations mean micro-adaptation. Humans live in societies, we are a social animals. And ordinary humans reflect less about their actions.

Cognitive ordinary people tend to have less responsibility about factual reality or truth.

Biological changes, like, biological-like gothic folks become majority (increase in suicides and depressions) in the United States is more rare, but superficial or cutural changes are trivial.

“Korean respect for the aged is because of its culture – not its genetics – Koreans are Confucians – Confucian philosophy venerates the old and one’s ancestors.”

What’s your concrete proof that it’s not in genetics?

It’s all too easy to claim that is “only culture”. A culture doesn’t grow and maintain itself in empty air, but is mostly, and firmly, supported via the genetics underneath – so called “gene-culture co-evolution”, else why such a Confucius culture only exists within the East Asians, but not randomly in Romania or Morrocco or somewhere, eh?

“When a Korean immigrates to America his successive generations lose his Confucian philosophy. They adapted to Western philosophy”

Again, that’s a very bold claim. They may dress, speak and act like, or even more than, their Western counterparts in the West on the surface, perhaps due to the social pressure of “blending-in”. Panda doubts that they have lost their Confucian philosophy while at their homes.

Absolutely!

I am not an expert on this either, but see Panda’s intuitive response on this “effective empathy” here last year:

http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/affective-empathy-evolutionary-mistake.html

“Could an anonymous commenter do better?”
No, but I’ll share some thoughts about song lyrics if nobody minds.

Empathy with personal identification i.e. shared preference/experience

If you like pina colada or getting caught in the rain (etc.)

Change in society since the seventies. People’s goals have shifted steadily toward wealth, social status and good looks.

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646001-even-religion-america-offers-more-choice-pick-and-mix

The point is made more bluntly by Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an umbrella body for more than 40,000 Pentecostal and evangelical Latino churches in America and Puerto Rico. The Catholic church in Latin America is “an extension of the bureaucratic state”, he charges, and offers only indirect access to God through the Virgin Mary and the priesthood. Worse, Catholics are told that salvation awaits in another life—and in the meantime, blessed are the poor. In contrast, evangelical churches offer a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, leading to a blessed life here and now. [...] Father Ed Benioff is director of an Office of New Evangelisation for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, founded in 2013 to woo wavering worshippers, especially younger ones. He finds young Latinos steeped in impatient American dreams of individual success. Father Ed is pinning his hopes on the example of Pope Francis, offering the millennials—the age group now in their teens to early 30s—a meaningful life by serving others.

No question – empathetic actions are natural – they are generated by a biological genetic marker (most likely more than one). There are genetic markers for muscles as well. As we mature, activating our muscles is more and more a matter of will – a matter of intellectual intent. Activating empathy is a matter of will also. In most human situations empathy is only one of many emotions that can be activated. Like a muscle, you use it or lose it. If you use it, and how you use it, is mostly a learned cultural phenomena.

Empathy is a type of action. An animal of one species can show empathy for an animal of different species – that is a fact. We don’t use “empathy” when one animal eats another animal. We use the word empathy when kindness is apparent – when we observe caring.

A car has four main elements to it. It is a wagon with wheels and a motor, and it can be steered. If you take away any one of those elements, it is not a car.

Empathy has three elements to it – first there is an observation, then am element of personal identification tempered with kindness. Remove any element and it is not empathy.

Well the traditional groups like nation states, which are the crucial entity, actually exist. The Universalist group is just like the arbitrary group in the experiment in which the subject was shown photos of individuals and told those were fellow members of the same arbitrary group as the subject. The subject’s theory of mind (ie cognitive empathy) brain circuits lit up when looking at the photos of the fellow arbitrary group members. The people pushing the Universalist idea are Liberals, who are not arbitrary, represent a coherent tradition, and are immensely powerful.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3209554/Is-baby-racist-Scientists-discover-way-reverse-racial-bias-young-children.html

Data on charitable contributions as a percentage of income show that people in conservative states (presumably conservatives) are more generous than people in liberal states (presumably liberals)

I’m not surprised by that at all. Conservatives, I bet, care about charity/volunteering in the context of religion. A lot of them compelled to do so because of what their church requires. Even Muslims, the prototype of clannish, non-commonweal oriented people, give tons of money through religious organizations because of the inclusion of “alms” as one the Five Pillars of Islam. But I’m guessing that liberals feel more actual internal reward in giving to the poor, independent of any outside entity telling them to do so. Also, liberals are more likely to live in places where they expect the government to provide for the poor.

“Pro-social behavior is learned and is not at all the same thing as affective empathy.”

So your “affective empathy” is not social behavior. To have empathy one has to observe another being. Don’t human observations of another being influence future actions? Doesn’t the use of the word “affective” imply future and action? Aren’t all actions involving humans – social behavior? Do your words logically add up to valued truth?

It seems to me that you want to take “caring” out of the definition of empathy. “Caring” meaning the motivation behind looking out for our fellow humans. You want to make empathy into an exclusive none thoughtful none intellectual hard coded biological reaction. You want to strip social caring away from the idea of empathy. The problem for you is that we are social beings with emotions that steer behavior and with logical brains that steer behavior – we are hard coded to integrate the two. They work together – our lives are a product of both emotion and intellect. It is impossible to take social behavior out of the human empathy equation.

I fear we are about to lose another long understood idealistic word to intellectual nonsense. Is “empathy” going to be corrupted like the words Liberal, and Marriage, and Investment are? Is human cultural goodness going to take another hit by intellectuals?

I do not quite understand what you meant, Sean. Could you explain again * If you do not bother you!

There is a large proportion of homosexuals who are leftists. But if the ” socialist ” (pseudo) were not superficially favorable to their cause, most of them would not be leftists.

Liberalism brings together a large number of disparate groups that are opposed to social Darwinism.

The example of basketball (sports in general) is instructive. There are no sports, as well as ideologies, out of the human world. But nothing that man do to entertain or to believe, is based on something totally unnatural.

the torturer uses empathy (the ability to imagine and recognize the feelings of the other)

This does not seem to have a lot emotional content.

I think of sympathy has having a great deal of emotion involved.

I can’t see real connection between the two.

It is comparing an empirical observation with a gut emotion.

There is always a relative outgroup. For Vermont it might be Alabama. This is the problem with theories like HBD chick’s idea that some people see themselves as in a single delimited group with all humanity.

The out-group is composed of the people who refuse to accept the universalism. If you would otherwise be in the universalist group but you reject the rainbow vision by clinging to your white race, regional group, gender identity, religious group, etc., you are the out-group.

Problémy in my ”smart”phone..

to play and not ”Toplay”, a nice bangladeshian guy,

http://mic.com/articles/105702/neuroscientists-may-have-discovered-how-our-brains-can-overcome-racial-prejudice

But even known-to-be arbitrary groups (the coin came up heads so you are in the greens not the blues) invoke social identity processes. Brain scans revealed that people shown photos and told ‘these are the others assigned to your group’ switched on their theory of mind brain areas. This and other test showed that being assigned to a group understood to be completely arbitrary makes us see other members of the group as more human.

There is always a relative outgroup. For Vermont it might be Alabama. This is the problem with theories like HBD chick’s idea that some people see themselves as in a single delimited group with all humanity.

Mad magazine had a joke years ago satirizing the liberal version of empathy:
“The liberal holiday: be kind to your inferiors day.”

Peter,
I know that this label tend to be ephemerous but people tend to aglomerate themselves in groups where happen sharing of similar ideas and attitudes. Leftism is a philosophical meme like traditional religions but some people fit perfectly with one of this memetic way of life, in other words, there are a prototypical leftist and conservative. Is like sports. Basketball is a cultural recreative meme but some people have the perfect biological profile toplay

Data on charitable contributions as a percentage of income show that people in conservative states (presumably conservatives) are more generous than people in liberal states (presumably liberals). For 2014, the states with the highest percentage donation/income were Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia; the states with the lowest percentage donation/income were Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. Much of the conservative state giving is to churches, but much of churches’ funds are spent on charity to the needy.

The evolution of white conservative is exactly to be like the average east asian, less religious, more intelligent, more literal but also more apathetic with real empathy, because real empathy is not just or specially long term positive attitudes but very short term, help people (and non-human animals) all the time, when they are in need. Conservatives tend to think a lot a long term, because psychological gratification of capitalistic system, while liberals (in my opinion, a very diverse group) tend to think in short term.

It explain why almost of brazilian leftists believe that ”bolsa família” (money distribution for low classes) is a good way to reduce extreme poverty, despising the grotesque show of corruption of major”socialist” brazilian party.

Brazilian leftist mentality is ”all brazilian parties are corrupted, but ”worker party” at least has achieved reduce extreme poverty” while typical brazilian (conservative) mentality about this specific political context is that ” poor people aren’t hard worker”.

Leftists are naive to perceive that ”Worker party” is not doing it just because by their bleeding hearts but to create a long term dependent and stupid class, the archetypical ”proles”. Dependence is slavery.

“The challenge now is to measure the genetic component of affective empathy not only in different individuals but also in different populations.”

Why – what for —- culture trumps genetics – why not just build a caring empathic culture?

As far as the universe is concerned “genetics” is old tech – new tech is brains and culture.

Are you trying to take us backwards?

There is no shortage of psychometric tests for affective empathy. The challenge now is to measure the genetic component of affective empathy not only in different individuals but also in different populations.

But you haven’t thought of the newsbite affective empathy test. I know – it isn’t your style and I have more respect for you for that – but this is how you get the message across:

“But I Didn’t Inhale: How our Genes Could Explain the Elusive Contact High”

Pop science is all about how you spin it. Sure, it’s easy to look down on it, but you can’t discount how immensely influential it is, even in the hands of mediocrities like Bill Nye.

It should be pointed out, though, that conservative whites do a lot of charity/volunteering through churches and religious organizations.

If we control for ethnic background, I’m not sure whether “conservatives” would show more affective empathy than “liberals.” When I go to Vermont, I’m struck by the degree to which Vermonters help the needy. I’m not talking about the government. I’m talking about a spontaneous desire to help, as seen in a multitude of volunteer groups of all sorts. I’m told the same is true for Minnesota. Yet both states are very “liberal.”

What I’ve noticed when comparing both conservatives whites and East Asians to liberal whites is that the former group (conservative whites and East Asians) tend to be more concerned with politeness, courtesy, and orderliness, while liberal whites tend to be more concerned with more abstract concerns like social justice and community volunteering. I’m sure others have noticed this if they’ve been around these three groups. Hasn’t the psychologist Jonathan Haidt delved into this in his research?

“I think that Koreans are more polite and respectful to the old. I also think foreigners should learn from Koreans about how they treat the aged with courtesy.”

The idea that genetics rules all of human behavior is bogus. God gave us brains that takes in information —- we can use that information in a logical fashion and create knowledge. That knowledge can override our biological instincts. The process leads to philosophical cultures.

Korean respect for the aged is because of its culture – not its genetics – Koreans are Confucians – Confucian philosophy venerates the old and one’s ancestors.

When a Korean immigrates to America his successive generations lose his Confucian philosophy. They adapted to Western philosophy. Hmm – how can this be – two thousand years of genetics are changed in two generations. Of course, it was never genetics in the first place.

Animals have empathy – 98% of everybody has some capacity to be empathic. It is ones culture that determines how it is expressed and to what degree.

“Nonetheless, too much affective empathy may lead to an overload where one ends up helping others to the detriment of oneself and one’s family and kin.”

One could almost put it the other way about: when it doesn’t really matter, people let go of their affective empathy and start extending it to everyone and everything. The average girl nowadays is all upset about animals farmed for meat but nothing like that could have arisen when people were poor farmers. Vermonters nowadays don’t have to deal with Indians on the warpath, but when that was a concern the Vermonters would have been offering big money for scalps of Indians, any Indians (which they in fact did). That said, it is difficult to imagine an Audie Murphy or a Chris Kyle from Vermont; they enjoyed hunting as boys and killing humans as adults. Re Finns, you would never get a Danish Simo Häyhä.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201502/hyper-mentalism-hyper-empathizing-and-supernatural-belief

The results imply that individuals with high self-reported empathy and interest in people, coupled with poor self-reported understanding of physical causality and low interest in technical, motor, abstract, and organizable systems, had more supernatural beliefs than others.

” These concepts seem to correspond to your use of the terms “empathy” and “sympathy.””

Could we say that empathy is a peception, an ability to perceive, whereas sympathy is an expression, a willingness to express?

I don’t quite understand why hbd*chick prefers an approximate line to the detailed line http://demoblography.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/hajnal-line.html because the differences seem significant :-

- round Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania rather than through the middle of them
- through Slovakia and Hungary rather than through Czech and Austria
- across the top of Croatia (Slovenia inside) rather than across the top of Italy (Slovenia outside)

(that’s if I’ve compared correctly).

My idea about non-kin empathy would that people with less genetic similarity than their parents and relatives, in personality and cognition, specially, will be more predisposed to be more universalistic-goal.

More mutational load, less exclusive kin-”empathy”.

Liberals seems have more mutations than conservatives, tend to look differently than their parents or than ethno-national phenotype. American conservatives tend to be more anglo while liberals tend to be less Wasp (urban liberal versus countryland conservative).

Less endogamy but without excess of mixing race, tend to produce the biological individual, self-sense of individuality.

Liberals tend to born by moderate conservative families and tend to be like ”the black sheep” of family.

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/first-born-children-likely-grow-conservatives-81925

It also explain more creativity ability among liberals than conservatives (although I believe that the most creative tend to be independent thinkers)

I included Austria with the other German-speaking countries because … wait for it … it’s a German-speaking country. That’s the “scientific reason” behind my “petty theory.”

I never said all Eastern European countries are Orthodox or prefer vodka, but most are and do. The drink of choice in the countries you named are:

Poland: beer
Czech: beer
Slovakia: spirits
Slovenia: wine
Croatia: wine

http://chartsbin.com/view/1017

[…] http://www.unz.com/pfrost/a-genetic-marker-for-empathy/ […]

Austria is founded on previous Slavic lands and its “Slavic” character was often commented upon by others; today, also genetically Austria shares a lot with Slavic people. I’d say you are trying to include Austria not because of any scientific reason, but simply because you WANT reality to conform to your petty theory.

Not to mention Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia are not orthodox countries; historically there were times when they were either beer or wine cultures; and nowadays those countries are again more and more beer-oriented.

Time for personal anecdote: Frankly from my interaction wih English, French, German and Slavic, I always had the best time spent together with other Slavs AND Germans (to my surprise, because in my youth my stereotype of Germans were arrogant, cruel, boring and uncreative). I often couldn’t find common tongue with English and French, but in every conference I went to I had fun time with Germans.

“In both cases, my hunch is that “conservatives” are disproportionately drawn from populations that have, on average, a higher capacity for affective empathy” [...] “The third one had two groups of participants: Israeli Holocaust survivors and a control group of European-born Israelis who had emigrated with their parents to the British Mandate of Palestine. The incidence was 48% in the Holocaust survivors and 63% in the controls (Fridman et al., 2012).”

Interesting, that might explain the difference between wingnut Jewish Israel politicians and moonbat Western Jewish radicals.

Remember that dopamine receptor study “a culture/gene interaction in the carriers, whereas the noncarriers show no difference, regardless of ethnic originn:” The minority with high dopamine variants seems to be responsible for all the peculiarities of a population. The high dopamine increases the effect of reward seeing as it is associated with alcoholism, gambling, sexual infidelity and migration (mixed ancestry). The same adaptation increases the extent to which people internalise their culture. That has to be susceptibility to reward orientation (approbation). The adaptation we know about that is associated with being attuned to others and responsible for major cultural differences works by sensitizing us to others approbation, for good or ill.

Two Paths:

They argued that although a short allele of 5-HTTLPR is linked to anxiety and depression, especially under traumatic life conditions (Caspi et al., 2003), this genetic risk might be mitigated by cultural collectivism, which involves more caring social relations and support networks. Cultural collectivism might therefore “buffer genetically susceptible populations from increased prevalence of affective disorders” (p. 529), which in turn might lead to a relatively high prevalence of the short allele of 5-HTTLPR. (Kitayama et al., 2014)

This post:

For instance, it has been found that people with at least one copy of the short allele of 5-HTTLPR tend to be too sensitive to negative emotional information. This effect seems to be attenuated by the deletion variant of ADRA2b, which either keeps one from dwelling too much on a bad emotional experience or helps one anticipate and prevent repeat experiences (Naudts et al., 2012).

As I read this, the ADRA2 deletion stops people from being depressed by making them susceptible to social support (ie cultural collectivism).

I was thinking along the same two lines as I was reading this, and your experience with the black guy evokes much. Eight years year-round basketball and over three years incarcerated, we’ve had plenty close contact. I was going to say a contact high depends on them more than you entirely, them high you sober, and what I think about blacks is that they have more spirit, defined as something that can be exuded and received, so I’m no wise surprised you got high. (I’m a literary guy, not science, but whats vague is not nothing, and what can’t be measured can still be felt, so forgive my “spirit” and trust my individual empiricism.) IQ Tests are perfectly fair to blacks; I don’t believe for a second these emotional tests can be, though I know not how they are administered at all. But I know a lot of gangster rap, and I know what fisticuffs from Africa feel like, and I’ve known three salt u da earth women well enough, and a bunch of other stuff, and their emotions are just better called spirit. To say that they have precious little affective empathy means nothing. Functionally speaking, their societies reflect the fact that spirit has a spectrum that spans a kind of empathy to raw aggression, I would say. Peter Frost is brilliant, but this paper is perfectly innocent racism qua ignorance. I take the r word back but you know what I mean.

Gotta run but the second thing was I believe its got to be a sex trait too.

It would be very interesting to see if there was any significant correlation between those three groups and the prevalence of any possibly important alleles.

This isn’t my field so I’m only competent to observe but it seems that the marker under study is not strongly sex-linked.

I have spent a lot of time in East Asia and my conclusion is that the women have considerable “cognitive empathy” whereas the males do not. Certainly one would anticipate that cognitive empathy on the part of women (but not of men) in a sexist society would be a survival imperative whereas, perhaps,”affective empathy” would be a waste of time! East Asian women frequently complain that their men lack “sensitivity to their feelings” and are often drawn to Westerners: particularly northwest Europeans – your Hajnal Liners – who, they claim, have more “understanding”. Nevertheless, affective empathy doesn’t appear to be strongly marked in East Asian women.

There is a general tendency among East Asians to bottle up emotions – it’s unseemly to display them: this has given rise, I suppose, to the Western stereotype of oriental inscrutability.

I too have long been irritated by “empathy” taking over from “sympathy” though not entirely confident in my right to pedantry. But sympathy is I think what you have “with” someone as the Greek etymology would suggest. It is about “fellow feeling”.

Empathy I seem to recall being originally encouraged to use only for projecting yourself into someone else’s state of mind.

Maybe it would be better in the current context to start with a question about what reaction(s) to others’ manifestations of emotions would be likely to change people’s relations with others in productive or adverse ways and to contrast this with both the presumed hunter gatherer relations over tens of thousands of years and the patriarchal authoritarian mode that was surely not uncommon amongst Middle Eastern farmers. A related question would be to try and trace a change in behaviour from the time and culture of Abraham to the settled farming days of a few hundred years later.

In both cases, my hunch is that “conservatives” are disproportionately drawn from populations that have, on average, a higher capacity for affective empathy.

Love the fetus, hate the baby..

In both cases, my hunch is that “conservatives” are disproportionately drawn from populations that have, on average, a higher capacity for affective empathy.

My hunch is the opposite – for whatever that’s worth…

Conservatives have higher affective empathy? I would’ve expected the exact opposite: liberals experience more (at least for non-family members).

If the Chinese, Japanese, Siberians and Israelis have a higher average incidence of the “empathy gene” than the Swiss, Dutch, Canadians and Americans, then the Hajnal Line and the Western European Marriage Pattern don’t really tell us much about the evolution of affective empathy.

On the other hand, in the real world Northwest Europeans seem to be far more empathetic on average than East Asians or Jews. The former suffer from a pathological altruism–particularly with regards to outgroup immigration–that seems to be mostly absent from the latter, so maybe the deletion variant of the ADRA2b gene isn’t the most reliable marker of an empathetic mindset.

The Hajnal Line divides Europe into a Roman-German west and a mostly-Slavic east, based on lower and later marriage rates and lower fertility in the west. This pattern probably started in the Frankish heartland between the Rhine and the Seine along with manorialism, then spread to areas conquered by the Carolingians (France, the Low Countries, most of Germany, Northern Italy), and then finally to neighbouring areas under Frankish influence (Northern Iberia, Britain, Scandinavia, the eastern German lands).

The parts of Eastern Europe west of the Hajnal Line (Czech Republic, western and northern Poland, coastal areas of the Baltic States) were heavily Germanized from the Middle Ages right up until 1945. The parts of Western Europe with higher and earlier marriage rates and higher fertility, were generally the ethnic outliers: non-Indo-European Finland, Celtic Ireland, and the areas of Southern Iberia and Southern Italy that were long under Moorish and/or Byzantine rule.

So the Western European Marriage Pattern was essentially an ethnic marker: from a Frankish core it expanded to include all the Latin and Germanic lands, but no further. Did this pattern lead to the traits (individualism, guilt proneness, empathy, trustworthiness) that we find in Northwest Europeans today? Maybe, partially. But I think there are three main problems in using the Hajnal Line to define the boundaries of Northwest Europe:

1) The exclusion of Austria

For some reason the Hajnal Line is shown as beginning well to the south of Trieste, then jogging to the northwest before turning northeast towards St Petersburg. By doing this it excludes the bulk of Austria, including Vienna. Are we to believe that Vienna–for many centuries the largest city as well as the political, economic and cultural hub of Germany–had a completely different pattern of marriage and fertility than all the other German-speaking lands?

That seems very unlikely, to say the least. But even if were true at some point in the Middle Ages, Austria today clearly clusters with the rest of Northwest Europe in every measurement you could possibly name. Austria is just as ‘German’ as Bavaria or Saxony, so if it is excluded from Northwest Europe because it (allegedly) falls to the east of the Hajnal Line, then you might as well exclude Germany, and Switzerland too. And that makes no sense at all.

2) The exclusion of Finland and Ireland

I don’t dispute that these two countries did in fact have historically different patterns of marriage and fertility from the rest of Northwest Europe. But I would argue that both countries have so thoroughly assimilated to Scandinavian and Anglo-American cultural norms respectively, that their falling outside the Hajnal Line is basically irrelevant today, and that both should definitely be considered integral parts of Northwest Europe.

Finland was under Swedish rule for nearly 700 years, and even when it was transferred to Russian control Swedish remained the sole official language of Finland for the next 50 years. Swedish is still a co-official language in Finland, and Swedish-Finns have played a hugely outsized role in all aspects of Finnish life: politics, the military, industry, trade, art, architecture, literature, science, music, and on and on, arguably even more so than Finnish-Finns have. And Finland since independence, especially since 1945, has aligned itself ever more closely with the rest of Scandinavia, so much so that it has at least partially subsumed its sovereignty to the Nordic Council, along with Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.

Ireland has been partially or wholly under British control from 1169 AD right up to the present day. There has been so much mixing between British and Irish that the British Isles as a whole are generally considered to be a single genetic cluster. When Southern Ireland achieved independence after WWI, they tried to assert their Celticness and Catholicism to differentiate themselves from the Brits. But linguistically this has been a total failure: 100% of the Irish speak English, and Gaelic has been reduced to a folkloric language, almost completely unused in daily life. Religiously, this worked for a while, but this year’s gay marriage referendum (62% said yes) put the final nail in the coffin of Ireland’s once-rigid Catholicism. And since the rise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ beginning in the 1980s, Ireland has been basically indistinguishable economically, politically and culturally with the rest of the English-speaking world.

3) The inclusion of the Latin nations

France and most of Italy, Spain and Portugal fall within the Hajnal Line. But these four nations don’t really cluster with Northwest Europe in terms of language, religion, culture, politics, economics, or even basic geography. Instead, I believe they form their own distinct Mediterranean-Latin-Catholic sub-civilization in Southwest Europe, as opposed to the Nordic-Germanic-Protestant leitkultur in the Northwest and the Alpine-Slavic-Orthodox one in the East.

The division of Europe into three parts is apparent in something as basic (and culturally important) as each region’s tipple of choice: in the Northwest it’s beer, in the Southwest wine, and in the East vodka. We can see the same pattern in any international measurement of living standards, with the Northwest European nations all clustering near the top, followed by the Southwest and then the East. Some of the East’s lagging is no doubt due to the lingering after effects of communism, but I think the same Northwest-Southwest-East order ranking can be found in the psychological traits listed above (individualism, guilt proneness, empathy and trustworthiness).

So basically what I’m arguing is that the Hajnal Line shouldn’t be used to define Northwest Europe. Instead, a linguistic definition makes a lot more sense. The 18 Germanic nations of Europe and their overseas offshoots, including Austria, Finland and Ireland, but not France, Italy, Spain or Portugal, make up the Northwest European sub-civilization.

English: UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
German: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein
Scandinavian: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland
Dutch: Netherlands, Belgium

Almost all the most virtuous psychological traits, are idealized by psychology and applied in a politically skewed cultural context. Empathy is an extremely idealized feature. The vast majority of people, and most hbd’ers, as it should not be otherwise, are only partially empathic. That is, most tend to project on the other, putting in its place. But they tend to do it mirrored way, and if it was me **

Most do not try to understand what the other is feeling, why this feeling, the causes and circumstances. Clinical psychology is based on this error, psychologists stand in the place of his patients, but mirrored way, and if it were me ** He never tries to see the side of the patient, because it is always self-projecting and imagining in context social. I’m like that, and that’s fine, if I try, he may also be, like me.

Family problems are also based on self-projection. The father wants his son to be like him. Often this will be a reality when there is similarity in personality and (+) cognition (intelligence). But when there is no similarity, it will be a torment for the child because the father will make the partially empathic approach.

East Asians do not seem more empathetic than Europeans, but differently. Empathy (or partial empathy) Asian, it tends to give based on their greater collective civility, although to be very emotionally apathetic, they can also be modulated for the cold behavior, as has happened in China.

A fascinating early step perhaps. Without retracting agreement from Ron’s points I would be keen to learn of a lot of follow up studies, including other genes and their prevalence, distribution and sometimes multiple effects, but especially wrt just-so stories as hypotheses to be tested. Leaping out to be assessed is some reason why Africans wouldn’t have evolved the same variants as Asian hunter gatherers or the NW European people if the latter are found by testing ancient DNA to have had the variant for more than the last 8000 years or so. Come to think of it the time frame for selection for the variant is going to be critical for following up PF’s line of speculation.

I was trying to add this as a separate comment. I may be missing something through lack of the attention I would give to something I know a lot about but do I correctly infer that the old kinship emphasis to the SE – but weren’t they farmers anyway? – is consistent with families not really caring much what other members feel as long as they do as they are told or otherwise conform?

Ron Unz, here’s how Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen have psychometricized empathy:

https://psychology-tools.com/empathy-quotient/

http://personality-testing.info/tests/EQSQ.php

http://isik.zrc-sazu.si/doc2009/kpms/Baron-Cohen_empathy_quotient_2004.pdf

You’re right that it’s fuzzy, ultimately it’s a self-report thing.

Peter, I recently thought of a good way to test for for affective empathy. I wrote something on Steve’s blog about an incident when a black ex-con tried to have his way with me, and described how weird I felt after he took a hit of crack in front of me. I felt physically very unsettled, despite the fact that I couldn’t have inhaled more than an inconsequential fraction of the cocaine he did.

So I described it as a “contact high,” which is a well-known, if ambiguous, phenomenon. One reader mistook this as suggesting that I was smoking crack, too, but I surmised that he simply didn’t understand the concept of a contact high. In fact, I’ve had contact highs on several occasions, not all of which involved fight or flight type scenarios with dangerous people.

It occurred to me that the elusive contact high is actually affective empathy in action. People who feel psychologically different around those who are under the influence of drugs probably have affective empathy. It makes perfect sense.

So if you want to test for affective empathy, it seems to me that testing those around psychotropically altered individuals for a similar response would clue you in to who has it and who doesn’t.

Perhaps this could put to rest the notion that affective empathy is a “fuzzy” trait. Personally, I think it might be a sexual trait. If, for example, you can “feel” when a woman’s in the mood, it gives you a much better idea of when you’ve got a shot. Maybe it evolved as a mutual arousal mechanism, which puts Nordic women’s “open” behavior in perspective (i.e. they expect you to know when they’re in the mood and when they aren’t without relying on traditional cues like clothing).

I know I’m fighting against the tide here, but the word “empathy” is being misused in this article, as it very often is in general.

The article defines empathy thus: “the involuntary desire not only to understand another person’s emotional state but also to make it one’s own—in short, to feel the pain and joy of other people.”

The correct English word for this is “sympathy”.

Empathy, if it is to be a useful and not entirely redundant word, is the cognizance of the feelings of others, as distinct from the sharing of those feelings.

The word was introduced to the English language in the early 20th century by Titchener (who invented it), but its current popularity owes to the work of the post-Freudian psychotherapist, Heinz Kohut.

Heinz Kohut explained the distinction with reference to torture and punishment: the torturer uses empathy (the ability to imagine and recognize the feelings of the other) to know how to maximize the victim’s pain, but the torturer feels little or no sympathy for the victim. Sympathy would stand in the way of the torturer’s goals.

Empathy and sympathy don’t always go together. Besides the example of the torturer, there’s also the case of the person who feels misplaced sympathy, because they incorrectly conceive how another person feels.

So empathy can exist without sympathy, and sympathy without real empathy.

East Asians tend to regard themselves as being more empathic than Westerners, including Northwest Europeans, the Westerners they most often encounter, in much the same way that Westerners tend to regard themselves as being more empathic than East Asians.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2015/06/162_180778.html

My church friend, Rachel, who has lived in Korea for almost six years told me that Koreans don’t express their thoughts clearly sometimes. Consequently, she doesn’t know evidently what they want. For instance, her husband, Jonathan, asked me to go out for dinner with church members several days ago.

Although I had my own schedule that day, I had to accept his proposal because I didn’t want to disappoint and hurt him. Hence, I can say that Koreans are emotional and considerate. We tend to sacrifice our time to help our friends. However, my observations tell me that westerners are individualistic. They prefer keeping their own space and never do what they don’t want to do.

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2015/07/162_183210.html

In Korea, seniors generally pay the money for juniors when they go out together for dinner and go to the bar to hang out. I definitely say that Koreans have an immaculate virtue, which foreigners cannot think of. A senior feels the responsibility for taking care of juniors by treating them to some food using his money. The juniors meanwhile feel happier to know that their seniors are willing to care them. Later, they will show more sincerity to their seniors. I think the unilateral trade from the seniors is the steppingstone to progressing favorable friendship with the juniors.

In a nutshell, Koreans are so generous and benevolent. I wonder if this character originates from a “collective society,” in which people prefer “we” to “I.”

I think that Koreans are more polite and respectful to the old. I also think foreigners should learn from Koreans about how they treat the aged with courtesy. A British friend of mine alleged that he could punch an elderly person if he is lazy and an alcoholic, while I said that we should embrace them whatever they do.

Westerners are even reluctant to give special favor for an old lady. For instance, when I was in Brisbane, Australia, I saw a vacant seat on the bus stop. As I was a conventional Korean man, I was supposed to yield it to the old lady who stood right next to me. At the moment I found a young lady staring at me so unkindly and sharply. She seemed to be extremely upset with me. She wanted to take the seat for herself. She never cared about the person who was at least 70.

I think that Westerners hardly regard the elderly as important and trustworthy. Worse, they make light of them, because they are physically weak. What I am saying is that ”All men are equal” does not make sense in this regard. We should be more attentive to the old who have devoted their life to the community. They are worthy of being loved and revered whatever they are.

On the other hand, I saw a Canadian friend in a bus who has lived in Gwangju for over 10 years. He was willing to give his seat to the old lady after finding that she was standing right behind his seat. I thought that Korean society has taught him how to respect the old and that a desirable tradition in Korea has affected him in a more positive way.

I think Universalism has accelerated recently because of technological changes encouraging more horizontal/lateral meme-transmission–widespread TV, internet, radio, cellphones, etc., did not exist a hundred years ago.

The Japanese seem quite resistant to immigration enthusiasm.

The history of anti-Semitic universalism (?) in Minneapolis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Minneapolis#Politics.2C_corruption.2C_anti-Semitism_and_social_change

Minneapolis was known for anti-Semitism beginning in the 1880s and through the 1950s.[28] The city was described as “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States” in 1946 by Carey McWilliams[29] and in 1959 by Gunther Plaut.[30] At that time the city’s Jews were excluded from membership in many organizations, faced employment discrimination, and were considered unwelcome residents in some neighborhoods.[31] Jews in Minneapolis were also not allowed to buy homes in certain neighborhoods of Minneapolis.[32]

Racialist universalism in Sweden before it became part of the American Empire in 1945:

http://conswede.blogspot.com/2008/07/social-paradigms-shift-eg-our-view-on.html

To illustrate what I talk about. Louis Armstrong visited Sweden in 1933. In all the news papers he was describe as something monkey-like let loose from the jungle. All across the line! And in the reviews by the most serious music critics.

Who would have imagined in 1933, that twelve years later Western Europe would undergo an America-led cultural revolution which would lead to the common belief that there are no differences between races?

Translation of two of the quotes:

Knut Bäck in Göteborgs-Posten, November 1933:
“This world is strange… No protests are raised against how the jungle is let loose into the society. Armstrong and his band are allowed to freely wreak destruction.”

Sten Broman in Sydsvenskan, November 1933:
“Dare I say that he at times had something monkey-like about him and sometimes reminded of, according to our perceptions, a mentally disturbed person, when he pouted with his mouth or gaped it to its widest open and roared like a hoarse animal from a primeval forest.”

The third quote compares the concert with a natural disaster, and Armstrong’s trumpet with a hell machine. The only good thing coming out of it, he says, is that it solves to old dispute of whether monkeys have a language.

This is what Europe looked like, up until 1945. And since some people will live under the misconception that this was a phenomenon of the ’30s, I here provide a quote from the Swedish Encyclopedia, Nordisk Familjebok, the 1876-1899 edition (here and here).

“Psychologically the negro can be said be on the level of a child, with vivid fantasy, lack of endurance, … can be said to lack morality rather than being immoral … etc.”

Even though the point here has been to illustrate how social paradigms can shift completely in short time (and this is just one out of numerous examples), let me add how up until 1945 all the focus was put on the differences between races, and after that all the focus has been put on what is equal (while ignoring differences).

@ Anbuis Kagan was dean at H Law for 6 years starting in 2003, and hired Lessig, who doesn’t appear to be Jewish and, IIRC, is one of their better profs. Jews have been prominent doctors, lawyers, and scientists for over a century (probably ever since the Code Napoleon rolled in.) Kagan is in the wrong place for the wrong time to cause the effects you want.

You’re basically arguing “Jewish privilege” to explain gentile underperformance, just like people arguing that “white privilege” explains why some people got home loans and other people didn’t (and somehow, these home loans explain the persistent racial IQ gap.)

For goodness sakes’, this is an HBD blog.

Also, I know too many unemployed Harvard grads to think that going to Harvard or being mentored by Harvard professors is some sort of magical career sauce that makes people have more influence over the world. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the employment rates of Iowa state grads and Harvard grads were quite similar. Having Harvard on your resume doesn’t get you a job in this economy.

I had heard that the outbreak of meningitis after hurricane Sandy was traced back to a single gay bath house, but news coverage didn’t say so. This is the closest to what I have heard. http://www.villagevoice.com/news/meningitis-outbreak-accelerates-in-nyc-gay-and-bi-communities-6438087

“their higher average IQs landing them in academia at a higher rate than non-Jews, where they ”

Supreme court Kagen only appointed jews and a few token non Asian minorities to Harvard after she got hiring power. A better explanation of the long march through the intuitions is thus.

A few entryists like Kagen get in saying they will hire the best but only hire fellow jews/sjws. Then they start something like every year professors have to be a mentor for someone that just so happens to be jew+sjw that once non jews are purged they will fill the lower schools. I saved this explanation from before.

“This can work for a professor at Elite University, because the 25 replacements will get jobs at Big State University around the country. It does not, however, work for a professor at Big State University because his PhD students will have to compete against graduates of Elite University doctoral programs.”

I was going to follow up on this idea. This concept is why a small number of schools can remake the entire educational and judicial institution of 300 million people. Probably 150 law professors (those at the best 5 or so) educate the majority of law professors and federal judges throughout the country. Control those 5 schools, and you control the judiciary for everyone in the United States (and, as mentioned, this is how academia was remade as well). 25 mentors from a Harvard professor/law professor go on to teach at 25 schools. 25 mentors from Iowa State go on to be marginally- or un-employed

There are some that believe that Christianity was created by jews as a slave religion to destabilize Rome. Martin Luthor who started the protestant reformation listed every financial scam known to man at the time in a book called “Jews & their lies” most of the scams are still done today. Everything said about white privilege is only true about them.

“On the topic of male homosexuality: do you believe the pathogen can be contracted by youths through sexual contact with adult gay men?”

I think if you found out a gay Hispanic PEDS nurse would be changing your boys diaper, you should request a woman do it or that he not be alone. I know someone who made that request.

I’ve read some of MacDonald, and while he is a lot more antagonistic now, he seemed to be of the opinion that Jews thought what they were doing was good with idea like the Frankfurt School.

NRx’s Moldbug’s position is that Jews are converts to the progressive religion.

I think both are true, they care converts but they’ve definitely inserted their own interests.

Well, none of that makes me optimistic for the future sadly.

What irks me most is that there is a snowballs chance in hell that universalism and outgroup altruism will be seen as the cause of any coming white displacement, the narrative which exists is that white people are evil.

It’s the prisoner’s dilemma. Swedes have decided to be ultimate cooperators, on the assumption that everyone else will play by the same rules. But not all groups play by the same rules. Universalist societies must insist that their members act universalist, or separate themselves Amish-style, else universalist societies are lost.

“Despite certain key problem presented by it, there is no question that NW European universalism has been an enormous positive force for humanity. It has ended institutional exploitation, oppression, and marginalization. It has improved the quality of life for millions, or even has made those lives possible. I personally have benefited from it and continue to do so. Some may argue that progressive causes have run their course. Having achieved as much as they could hope to achieve, they now reach a point of diminishing returns – and there’s certainly some truth to that…”

I do agree Jaymans, HOWEVER, the current social justice cause seems to be to varying degrees the disempowerment on Northwestern Europeans by more clannish people.

Of course, I am mostly referring to issues of immigration and tribal voting.

Is it not wrong that universalism seems to now be bent on liquidating those who made it? I doubt you’ll disagree that such a thing is wrong, more likely you will state that I am being overwrought so by all means any optimism would be welcome.

My kids are demanding attention, so I haven’t read all of the comments, but if I understand the argument fully, it is that outbreeding’s ethnic empathy lead to extra-ethnic empathy due to an external catalyst (the first world war seems a likely suspect), and has since iterated outward. This seems to undervalue the power of conformity, amongst other social technologies (25 years ago, SSM was not even a thing, much less a foundational tenet of our national religion, heresy from which is punished with ostracization.

To my mind, the trait this data tracks is not empathy, but narcissism. Western Europeans are more atomized than other groups, and universalism can also be viewed as a constant drive to atomize European social structure. This is why extra-hajnal whites are always enemy #1 of universalists, often targeted for behavior that would not raise eyebrows when partaken by a non-white ethnic group. It also explains why other whites are rarely (never?) extended this supposed empathy. I still think the general thesis here is strong: rapid changes are a result of rapid environmental changes, but the insane speed and uniformity implies a trait other than universalism. Narcissism fits, because it is heritable, but also responds strongly to environmental factors (smaller families enhance narcissism in kids), and encourages fragile psyches prone to conformity.

Lastly, very few “universalist” ideals are terribly empathetic. They tend to favor individuals over communities, displaying a distressing *lack* of empathy towards those who might suffer as a result of change that primarily benefits the few.

[…] Blog Posts – Everything You Need to Know (To Start) and The Rise of Universalism and National Prosperity – jayman’s been on a roll lately! (^_^) each of these warrants […]

Many commenters on this matter like to blame Jewish influence for these shifts in social attitudes, and it is true that Ashkenazi Jews commonly hold and have promoted progressive agendas. But what these commenters ignore is this: why do people listen? Or more to the point, why have some people (and peoples) embraced these views and not others? A promoted agenda is only as good as the traction it gains. Clearly, the trend towards universalism has been the purview of Northwestern European societies almost exclusively. If Jewish influence has had any role, it is only in the form of a rush in a much larger prevailing current.

Are the French Northwestern Europeans? How about the Italians, whose government is currently encouraging the Camp of Saints situation in the Mediterranean? What about the ethnically Italian Argentinian pope and his fellow Catholic leaders?

In this country you can look at areas in “Yankeedom” and you’ll find that, among Whites, it’s Protestants(the “Yankees”) who are the least likely to vote Democrat. Most likely are Jews and following them are Catholics.

Eh. Spend a little more time thinking, and the party’s over before you arrive.

“‘Universalism’ is, broadly, the belief that all humans deserve the rights and recognition that historically people would only reserve for their own clan, own tribe, or at best, own countrymen”

Sorry, but that’s just hopelessly vague. What are these “rights?” What is this “recognition?” of which you speak? What is it to “deserve” something?

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

“Universalism” comes in many different flavors and in many different strengths, ranging from the thoroughly reasonable (Judges in court ought to be impartial, regardless of the wealth, power, & status of the parties involved) to the totally insane (You’ve done wrong if you rescued your own child from a burning building instead of two strangers).

Making these distinctions is *so* important.

I haven’t yet read Salter’s book, but Anonymous’ gloss (assuming it is accurate) is interesting, and I think there’s something to it.

As I understand Salter’s view (via the commenters above), it seems concordant with the view that the ‘ultimate’ rationale for biological life is for replicators to replicate and attain representation into the future. The paradigmatic replicators, of course, are sequences of DNA (as per the evolutionary gene concept, to a first approximation). (One could also extend this view to encompass other replicators, such as memes.)

Insofar as the ‘ultimate’ rationale for biological life is as sketched above (for replicators to replicate themselves and attain representation into the future), then it is adaptive to act in ways that conduce to ethnic genetic interests.

Crucially, this would hold even if humans have not evolved to have ethnic genetic interests, and regardless of whether some, many, or most actually currently act in their ethnic genetic interests. Assuming humans have not actually evolved (or at least not yet) to act in their ethnic genetic interests, then there are at least two ways to do so: (1) act in their ethnic genetic interests without awareness that they are doing so, or (2) come to apprehend that since the ‘ultimate’ rationale for biological life is for replicators to replicate and attain representation into the future, they should intentionally act in ways that conduce to their ethnic genetic interests.

(2) effectively is like seeing things from an Archimedean point – rationally seeing what the adaptive thing would be to do in the present, insofar as downstream replication consequences are concerned (the ‘ultimate’ rationale), and then doing that thing. Again, this would be in spite of humans putatively not having evolved to act in their ethnic genetic interests. Indeed, because the pace of environmental and technological evolution has so outstripped the pace of genetic evolution, it would seem that, in many cases, at least, the only way to currently act adaptively so far as ethnic genetic interests is concerned is to see things from such an Archimedian point – that is, via rationality and scientific investigation. Ditto given the fact that our sociocultural environments have become so epistemically opaque with respect to which memes are actually fitness conducing.

But there is one other important point to make about all of this. And that is that even if the ‘ultimate’ rationale of life pertains to the replication of replicators like macromolecules, nothing normative follows. The fact/value distinction, as always, holds. The fact that life exists because of, and in the service of, replicators is just another statement of fact. Physics and the second law of thermodynamics explains why replicators have evolved in the first place and continue to do what they do. As the philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it, “The physical facts fix all of the facts”. That’s it. There’s no ‘point’ to any of it – to anything in the universe, for that matter.

So even if one chooses to act in one’s ethnic genetic interests – or even their own narrowly circumscribed inclusive fitness, for that matter – it is still just a normative sentiment, an expression of taste, like preferring strawberry ice cream to vanilla ice cream. To put it more poetically, regardless of what we do, if we could ask the universe whether what we are doing is ‘ultimately’ good or bad, right or wrong, the universe, if it could speak, would say in no uncertain terms: ‘Who gives a fuck? I give no fucks, because this is an intrinsically nihilistic universe’. So let’s not take all of this inclusive fitness and ethnic genetic interests stuff quite so seriously and just enjoy our short life in this odd (by human standards) reality.

Jayman, I think the inference (if I read you correctly) that the rest of the world won’t more or less close the ‘universalism gap’ with the west is a bit too quick. As Pinker showed in his book, even if there still is a gap, there in general has been quite a bit of moral progress on a global scale over time. I think the jury is still out: reason, science, and rational discourse needs more time to permeate through the globe before we make any solid conclusions. For instance, it may be that one critical factor, if not, for all we know, the critical factor, is the suite of traits that compose a given society’s elites. If a given society’s elites possess, for example, high IQ and other traits, they may be more likely to eventually subscribe to and espouse universalist values, and the rest of their society, in due course, regardless of their IQ and other traits, could very well inevitably imbibe those values. Recent work in evolutionary anthropology on cultural learning processes suggest that we have cognitive adaptations that are functionally specialized to learn cultural information in ways that are biased, such as via conformity-based learning and learning that attends preferentially to what highly prestigious people do and say (see recent work by Joe Henrich, Rob Boyd, Pete Richerson, and colleagues, for instance).

If we were able to magically juxtapose on the same planet America in 1800 with America in 2015, observers might very well erroneously conclude that differences in values and other sociocultural traits between the two societies were due primarily to genetic differences. So, I think the kind of argument Pinker and others make is still a very plausible one with respect to the rest of the globe. Even the sweeping changes in attitudes towards gays in American over the last two decades should give us a bit of pause.

If we look at high IQ, highly conscientious immigrants in western countries and their descendants, many of them hold political views that (at least by my lights) are effectively indistinguishable from the archetypal SWPL (but maybe someone has some data that speaks more directly to this). If the elites in other countries resemble these types, I’m actually optimistic that the so-called moral arc will reach these other places in due course.

Also, I think you’d be interested in this recent book by two evolutionary psychologists. To my mind, this book is rather profound and obvious at the same time. I think it is even more accurate than the book by Anonymous Conservative:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10309.html

Salter is making a philosophical argument, specifically a metaphysical one: Biological organisms are beings with the telos of self-perpetuation. Therefore people and any kind of organism, by virtue of being biological beings, are beings with the telos of self-perpetuation, regardless of what they believe or whether they act adaptively. Metaphysically, biological beings are beings with the telos of self-perpetuation.

Individual biological organisms die, therefore the “self” of the telos of self-perpetuation must not be the individual organism istelf, but something else. That something else is genes. The “self” of the telos of self-perpetuation must be genes, since genes, unlike the mortal biological organism, can perpetuate. Furthermore, since individual biological organisms have this telos of genetic self-perpetuation, the genes of the “self” must be the “distinctive genes”. Finally, since genes in general and these “distinctive genes” in particular exist elsewhere in other organisms, the “self” exists elsewhere in other organisms as well. Individual biological organisms are beings with the telos of self-perpetuation, and this self exists outside the individual biological organism.

Salter’s argument is premised on a metaphysical theory of what biological organisms “really” are or are “really” doing by virtue of being biological organisms. No matter what biological organisms actually do, as biological organisms, what they are really doing is being beings with the telos of self-perpetuation.

His argument does seem to be premised on a theory of how or why individual biological organisms act (because they are beings with the telos of self-perpetuation). To the extent that organisms don’t behave according to Salter’s theory, or that genes don’t know or regard copies elsewhere in other organisms as themselves, it’s not clear what it has to do with anything. It seems to be just a metaphysical theory or a normative system of ethics.

“Salter’s argument seems to be premised on a claim about how or why individuals behave in a certain fashion. To the extent that individuals also behave as if they don’t have ethnic genetic interests, his argument seems to be inconsistent.”

For a third time, Salter is well aware that people do not necessarily act adaptively in the modern world. He just points out that (by definition) organisms that consistently behave in a maladaptive manner will tend to eliminate themselves.

Individuals might choose any purpose in life, including ones that prevent their genes from being passed on to the next generation. However, maladaptive choices tend to eliminate genes that contribute to those choices within prevailing environments. Genes will not survive the organism in which they reside unless they launch the organism on an adaptive life course — avoiding predators, metabolising food, learning the local language, resisting parasites, finding mates and, in social species, nurturing offspring and defending the kin group. The individual phenotype is a survival vehicle constructed by a parliament of genes, each cooperating to perpetuate itself.

And one can disagree with Salter that ultimate interests are genetic interests. But Salter’s book is about how one should behave if one agrees / does wish to behave adaptively.

In this book I have argued that an overlooked interest possessed by all individuals is genetic reproduction. This has implications not only for self preservation and personal reproduction, but for the distribution of altruism between family, ethny and humanity. My primary aim has not been to explain human behaviour, but rather to offer social and political theory about what individuals should do if they want to behave adaptively. I have suggested strategies for defending genetic interests in a sustainable manner under various circumstances, and offered some thoughts on policy and ethical dimensions. Much of the argument is built on empirical and analytic assumptions that can be tested by: (a) the continued clarification of ultimate interests, including the relative importance of genes and culture; (b) the identification of kin, including ethnic kin, through genetic assays; and (c) the efficacy of strategies for defending genetic interests.

“His argument does seem to be premised on biological behavior, and it seems that you could just as easily take the behavior of individual organisms not acting as if they had ethnic genetic interests as a premise to conclude that ethnic genetic itnerests don’t exist.”

No. Again, Salter does not claim organisms always act adaptively. His book is about how someone should behave if they want to act adaptively.

“Ethnic genetic interests” exist regardless of whether or not any particular preference evolved or could have evolved. “Ethnic genetic interests” is simply Salter’s term for “The number of copies of a random individual’s distinctive genes in his or her ethny”.

Salter argues that individuals act in order to perpetuate their distinctive genes. Because they act this way, and because there are copies of individuals’ distinctive genes in other individuals such as the individuals of their ethnic groups, they have ethnic genetic interests.

Salter’s argument seems to be premised on a claim about how or why individuals behave in a certain fashion. To the extent that individuals also behave as if they don’t have ethnic genetic interests, his argument seems to be inconsistent.

Salter’s overarching premise is that reproduction / genetic continuity is the ultimate interest, for all living things.

Right, as I suggested, he seems to derive his notion of “ultimate interest” from biological behavior. He argues that all organisms, from the biological perspective, act in or for the ultimate interest or goal of perpetuating their “distinctive genes”. From this premise he derives the idea of “ethnic genetic interests”. He argues that since copies of these distinctive genes exist in other organisms as well, individual organisms have “ethnic genetic interests” as well. Regardless of what individual organisms think or how they behave, they have ethnic genetic interests.

His argument does seem to be premised on biological behavior, and it seems that you could just as easily take the behavior of individual organisms not acting as if they had ethnic genetic interests as a premise to conclude that ethnic genetic itnerests don’t exist.

JayMan,

“The problem is the coefficient of relationship between co-ethnics who aren’t close relatives is too low to make such an effort pay off through inclusive fitness, as these guys are trying to argue. Hence, such a preference could never have been selected for.”

Again:

(1) “Ethnic genetic interests” are not a preference. “Ethnic genetic interests” exist regardless of whether or not any particular preference evolved or could have evolved. “Ethnic genetic interests” is simply Salter’s term for “The number of copies of a random individual’s distinctive genes in his or her ethny”.

(2) You still don’t understand coefficients of relationship, despite having had months in which to correct your basic lack of understanding. The chart you hilariously believe “proves” ethnic genetic interests do not exist is generated with the assumption of no inbreeding. Humanity is obviously not panmictic. The probability of identity by descent between a Swede and another Swede relative to a sub-Saharan African is about the same as the probability of identity by descent between a Swedish grandparent and grandchild relative to an non-closely related Swede.

(3) You are not in any position to make pronouncements on how human genetic diversity was partitioned with respect to groups in the past. It’s likely that for much of human prehistory humans tended to live in relatively small, highly inbred tribes/band.

(4) Ethnocentrism exists. As do a variety of other apparent groupish adaptations.

Doesn’t Salter derive his notion of “ethnic genetic interests” from human behavior? [. . .] Thus doesn’t his claim depend on how people or organisms do behave?

No. Read the book:

https://archive.org/stream/OnGeneticInterestsFamilyEthnicityAndHumanityInAnAgeOfMassMigration2006ByFrankKempSalter/On%20Genetic%20Interests%20-%20Family,%20Ethnicity,%20and%20Humanity%20in%20an%20Age%20of%20Mass%20Migration%20%282006%29%20by%20Frank%20Kemp%20Salter_djvu.txt

Salter’s overarching premise is that reproduction / genetic continuity is the ultimate interest, for all living things.

“In this essay I argue for the importance of genetic continuity as an end in it-
self, for humans as well as for other species. Conserving any species or one of its
races entails preserving its genes, in addition to a conducive environment; not
only because genes code for the properties that we value, but because we affiliate
with life for its own sake. And we know that life is not only dependent on ecol-
ogy but on phylogeny, the evolutionary experience of a species impressed on its
genes. If eagles could speak they would probably demand the right — or at least
the chance — to survive and flourish, as do we. That is life’s overriding goal, its
ultimate interest. [. . .]

Genes are not the ultimate rationale for any-
thing, of course, since only a proposition can perform that function. But the pro-
cess of genetic evolution is certainly the ultimate cause of our existence. Individ-
ual humans are links in a chain of life stretching back millions of generations of
human and prehuman species that managed to perpetuate their genes.”

While he does go on to note that in general maladaptive behaviors will be selected against and discuss examples of adaptive, kin-directed altruism, nothing in his argument depends on humans having evolved to act adaptively in the modern world with respect to their genetic interests. Had he believed this to be the case, he would not have had any reason to write the book:

“On Genetic Interests is an attempt to answer the empirical question: How would an
individual behave in order to be adaptive in the modem world? I adopt the neo-Darwinian
meaning of adaptive, which is to maximize the survival chances of one’s genes. I begin
by describing humans as an evolved species and thus as creatures for whom genetic
continuity consists of personal reproduction or reproduction of kin.”

And:

“Humans can no longer rely on their instincts

There is nothing immutable or necessarily perfect about adaptations or the under-
standing, appetites and preferences they organize. Natural selection is con-
strained by evolutionary history and environment. It shapes bodies and behav-
iours in small increments by modifying existing species. Much in nature is badly
designed, if one examines it from an engineer’s viewpoint. [. . .]

Like adaptations that advance them, proximate interests can be imperfect in
promoting genetic interests. The main problem is the slowness of natural selec-
tion compared to the rapidity of technological and social change since the
Neolithic. The inertia of adaptations can cause them to continue to promote
proximate interests that no longer serve fitness. For most of humans’ evolu-
tionary history, adaptations tracked slow-moving environmental change, in-
cluding technological advances. In the species’ distant hominid and pre-hominid
past, proximate interests that reduced an actor’s fitness were valued less and less
as the genes that coded for such valuation failed to reproduce. For this reason, at
most moments in time proximate interests have correlated with ultimate interests
because the environment has changed so slowly that physiology and behaviour
could keep track with it. Proximate and ultimate interests have been in
equilibrium except where rapid changes in environment occurred. The
equilibrium applying to humans has been upset in recent generations, so that we
can no longer rely on subjectively designated proximate interests to serve our ul-
timate interest. We must rely more on science to perceive the causal links be-
tween the things we value and formulate synthetic goals based on that rational
appraisal.

Proximate interests, often reflected in consciously held values, have become
increasingly fallible guides to ultimate interests because modern humans live in a
rapidly changing world. Humans evolved in small bands consisting of a few
families, sometimes grouped into tribes numbering in the hundreds. For most of
their evolutionary history humans made a living by hunting and gathering in
largely natural environments. They lacked formal organization and hierarchy.
Adults coordinated activities by negotiating simple demographic role specializa-
tions — by age and sex — on an egalitarian basis with familiar band members.
Most information was common. Humans now live in societies numbering in the
millions where the great majority of interactants are strangers or acquaintances.
They make their living through a great diversity of occupations resulting in radi-
cal asymmetries in information. They live and work in largely man-made urban
environments. They are formally organized into states administered by extended
hierarchies of rank and resources actuated by authoritative commands, imper-
sonal contracts enforced by the state authority, and powerful forms of indoctri-
nation performed by universal education, centralized media and entertainment.”

Right, but I’m trying to address n/a’s claim that ethnic genetic interests exist regardless of what was selected for or how people behave. Salter himself seems to found his notion of “ethnic genetic interests” on how people behave.

I’m also still waiting for you to acknowledge you continue to give incorrect definitions of “ethnic genetic interests” and promote unambiguously wrong arguments against the evolvability ethnocentric altruism.

http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/06/jayman-continues-to-talk-about-things.html

Ethnic genetic interests exist regardless of whether or not one believes group selection has played any role in human evolution and regardless of whether or not people naturally favor others from their own group.

Doesn’t Salter derive his notion of “ethnic genetic interests” from human behavior? He argues that individuals, from the biological perspective, do anything and everything for the ultimate goal or interest, the “genetic interest”, of perpetuating their “distinctive genes”. From this premise he argues that since copies of these distinctive genes exist in other individuals as well, and therefore things such as “ethnic genetic interests” exist.

Thus doesn’t his claim depend on how people or organisms do behave?

This recent era of mass migration has coincided with the predominance of blank statist, extreme nurturist viewpoints and of the idea that there are no genetic differences between populations. If you have an extreme nurturist viewpoint and believe that all populations are essentially the same genetically, then it becomes much less of a leap to support or acquiesce to mass migration. Indeed it can even seem irrational to oppose mass migration if you hold these views.

It seems that before these views predominated, racialist, nationalist, Social Darwinian, anti-immigration views and politics were much more common in NW Euro countries. Also NW Euros today who reject blank slatism and accept population differences seem to be more skeptical of or reject altogether mass migration and embrace or are more amenable to racialist, nationalist, and Social Darwinist politics.

http://youtu.be/W8N3FF_3KvU Link

Here is a what seems to me to be rather tortured argument for epigenetic effects that mimic “blank slate” ideas. Don’t spank your kids and they will switch from r to K reproductive selection. Political lefties are favouring r selection and righties favour K selection. There appear to be some leaps in the logic, but they may be from studies that are referred to. Plus as far as I know Swedes aren’t a r selection population and are very left for the most part. Wanting to be a humanitarian superpower even if it bankrupts them. Maybe they are making some sort of long term investment? Change the world, fix others, like a Pygmalion project?

He trying to build an empirical argument against genetic determinism, or accept some genetic determinism but support the idea that this can be changed in a generation or so.

It seems like a good fit for your blog and how these ideas get popularized.

@anonymous – “This culture of the expanding moral circle of universalism seeks to expand the circle to things like animals, and obviously people recognize animals to be and behave differently from people. Furthermore, reciprocal altruism doesn’t involve trusting everyone, but having mechanisms to detect conformity, cheating, defection, etc. This culture is about viewing and treating other people, animals, as equivalent to or indistinguishable from close kin.”

i have to confess that i have probably been using the term ‘reciprocal altruism’ in an unorthodox manner (and certainly not in the strict scientific sense), and that i have been using it inconsistently as well. to be honest, i’ve been struggling with defining clearly the idea of the sort of altruistic behaviors that i think we see in nw “core” europeans.

as you say, nw european culture seems to be about viewing and treating all others as equivalent to or indistinguishable from close kin. this didn’t appear fully formed in nw european societies, but has been ‘coming on’ since sometime in the medieval period (it starts to become apparent in ca. 1000-1200, i think). and this universalism has been expanding until, nowadays, some are arguing for human rights for chimpanzees.

i’ve been calling it reciprocal altruism in opposition to the more nepotistic or familial altruism that you see in long-term inbreeding societies — reciprocal because the man on the street in the west treats everyone the same with the expectation that they will all do the same toward him. (not sure what else to call it — if you have any ideas, please lemme know! srsly. this is something i’ve been wrestling with!)

this “reciprocal altruism” (for lack of a better term right now) is clearly tied to the universalistic attitudes of nw europeans, while the nepotistic altruism of clannish groups is tied to their more particularistic moral sense. also included in the mix are individualism vs. communalism and the presence or absence of family honor.

I think a lot of Europe is pro MASS immigration for the wrong reasons. They will learn the downside, hopefully before there societies become too ‘enriched’ by diversity. You are grateful for universalism because it has allowed you to live in a better society Jayman. But if society changes because of universalism the qualities you like about it might change as well.

Interesting we talking about Europe and immigration, a very current article from the atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/closing-european-harbors/395321/

Especially the part of learning that todays migrants are tommorows criminals.

I think if HBD varience in population sub structure became common knowledge, there would be less calls for mass immigration. Part of the reason people in NW Europe want it, is they think it has only an upside and those populations can seamlessly integrate. Very regretfully this isn’t true.