kanethenotorious
Phoron
I see Ted Sallis was still going at it in 2022. Way back in the day, when Odessa Syndicate was around (the short lived alternative to Occidental Dissent), I made a blog about the "Mediterranean race" implying that there was a Mediterranean phenotype that includes both Southern Europe and the Near East. I did this under the handle Iceman. Sallis took extreme offense and blogged about me for a while. I see it still sets him off when people distinguish between Northern and Southern Europeans. Someone in the comment section said I was a "phora socialist" (which at the time wasn't true, now I am) and not a nordicist - how could Sallis get confused. The truth is that I was posting class anthropology. I wasn't saying anything good or bad about Northern or Southern Europeans, I was just separating them.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/ was his blog, but you can only see it through archive.org.
www.theoccidentalobserver.net
--------------------------See Post Below--------------------
I recently became aware that Ted Sallis has been criticizing my book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (2019; hereafter Individualism) on his blog. Sallis is basically on-page with most of my work, including my work on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, and he has made great contributions in defending and promoting Frank Salter’s theory of ethnic genetic interests. Some of this work was posted on TOO, and in all, he has written 17 articles for us, starting with “Why Was the Understanding of Ethnic Genetic Interests Delayed for 30 Years?” in July of 2009.
In preparing this, I looked at his blog entries under ‘MacDonald‘; here I discuss what I regard as his most important objections, but also ones that are likely to give rise to questions from others who have read the book.
Am I a Nordicist?
Sallis claims I am a Nordicist. I presume this refers to the fact that a major theme of Individualism is that I claim to have found a north-south cline in family structure, and I link geographical variation in family structure with the settlement patterns of the three groups that populated pre-historic Western Europe—the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, the Indo-Europeans (mainly north-central Europe and northern Italy), and the Early Farmers from Anatolia (mainly in the southern part of Western Europe). I suppose one can argue with that, but I don’t see an argument in Sallis’s writing. Doing so would require an explanation of how my review of the population genetic data in Chapter 1 fails to show a north-south genetic cline linked to these three groups, and/or that my review of the family history data in Chapter 4 is faulty. The family history data show a more collectivist pattern in southern Europe (e.g., brothers living together with wives and parents) than in northern Europe, the extreme being Scandinavia with nuclear families characterized by very weak ties among their members.
But the claim that I am a Nordicist has an evaluative ring to it—that I think that the Nordics are superior in some way. In fact, Individualism reveals the weakness of northern Europeans, especially in the current cultural environment in which traditional social controls embedded in religion have disappeared, resulting in a dysfunctional, guilt-prone culture unable to oppose the invasion of other peoples that is now besetting them. Moreover, Scandinavia was a relative backwater in European culture compared to the dynamic northcentral regions of Western Europe. Charles Murray’s map of human accomplishment (discussed in Ch. 9 of Individualism) excludes the great majority of Scandinavia, apart from Denmark which has a strong infusion of German genes (Ch. 1). If anything, I suppose one could call me a Germanicist.
Individualism and Conformity
I portray Scandinavians as highly individualistic but also as highly conformist—what I regard as a paradox in need of explanation, but Sallis regards their conformity as a fatal flaw in my argument. I regard this paradox as a fundamental problem for any analysis and certainly not solved by Sallis’s theory that individualism resulted from geographical distance from racially dissimilar others (see below). There is no question that Scandinavians are conformists. My first efforts to understand this are from a 2012 review of David Hackett Fischer’s Fairness and Freedom (pp. 80–81) where I discuss the Jante Laws of Scandinavia and the Tall Poppy Syndrome in New Zealand as basically socially enforced egalitarianism common in hunter-gatherer cultures around the world (see Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest [4]), and a major point of Chapter 3 of Individualism is that, because of their peculiar ecological position (briefly described below), the northern Europeans retained their hunter-gatherer ways for a very long time, holding off the Early Farmers of more southerly regions prior to the Indo-European invasion for 2000-3000 years. My solution was thus to emphasize the point that extended kinship is less important as a social glue among Nordics (and to a lesser extent, among the Indo-Europeans compared to southern Europeans). All cultures require mechanisms of social cohesion, but rather than relying on kinship distance, as in the rest of the world, social cohesion is maintained mainly by reputation in the community: Can you be trusted? Do you uphold the moral values of the community? Are you a courageous, competent warrior? From Chapter 8:
And I should add that one thing that stands out from my reading is how persistent family structures are despite vast changes in other areas. Chapter 4 on family structure is critical. For example, recent research on families in southern France shows continuing remnants of moderate collectivism—living near their parents (often residing in the same house), marrying people from the same area, helping each other more (including financial aid), and having stronger distinctions between male and female roles. Patrick Heady labels this pattern “parentally anchored and locally involved,” the extreme opposite being “origin free and locally detached” [13] typical of Scandinavia. On the other hand,
Sallis:
Incidentally, Henrich’s (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World expands on this, emphasizing the uniqueness of Western European individualism in a cross-cultural context (I agree), but placing a much greater role on the medieval Church and Protestantism for the ultimate triumph of individualism than I do. In Chapter 5 of Individualism and in my review of WEIRDEST, I argue that the role of the Church in producing Western uniqueness was more a facilitative effect building on pre-existing proclivities toward individualism and motivated by its pursuit of power over feudal lords; for example, Henrich explains relative lack of individualism in southern Italy as resulting from relatively late influence of the Church in the area. The point here is that any adequate theory must attempt to explain Western uniqueness but at the same time explain variation within Western Europe.
Regarding Sallis’s link to the paper on individualism-collectivism, it goes to a chart from an unidentified study linking variation in a single gene, the 5-HTTLPR gene, with individualism-collectivism. Unless one believes that individualism-collectivism is influenced genetically by only one locus, this is hardly conclusive and ignores all the data on geographical variation in family structure.
Regarding the point that Russians and Poles “have a lot of northern hunter-gatherer ancestry,” the review of population genetic evidence from Chapter 1 does not support a general northern hunter-gatherer profile but shows the distinctiveness of Scandinavia resulting from seasonal changes in the ability to form large groups (Ch. 3). The only discussion in Individualism related to the generality of northern hunter-gather influences is on Finland, where Swedish genes are more common in the west, likely as a result of colonization; but the further east one goes, there is more evidence for collectivist family structure and other ethnic influences. From Chapter 4: “Although they could leave the family farm with an equal inheritance as their brothers, sons tended to remain in the household, the oldest son becoming patriarch, while daughters married outside the family. In eastern Finland in the second half of the eighteenth century, fully 70 percent of families were extended or multiple, rising to 84–90 percent among the peasants. This pattern is remarkably similar to that found in southern France and southeastern Europe, and contrasts with the patterns of northwest Europe, as discussed in Chapter 4.” Importantly, Finland is a genetic outlier to Scandinavia and Western Europe generally and geography within Finland is strongly linked to ethnic genetic differences between eastern and western Finland (here for a list of relevant studies).
Culture and Evolution
My work has always featured a strong role for culture, paradigmatically in the aptly named The Culture of Critique where the rise of a new Jewish elite with a powerful influence on culture resulted in evolutionary costs to the previously dominant European majority, including especially the establishment of replacement-level non-White immigration as the norm. Sallis seems to endorse the following comment from another blogger:
But the comment seems to imply that being relatively individualist is incompatible with cohesive groups like the Crusaders. However, a major aspect of my theory is the importance of social controls and ideology in creating cohesive groups—a perspective I developed in my writing on the Spartans (Social and Personality Development, 1988), the Jews (A People That Shall Dwell Alone, 1994), and on National Socialism as a mirror image of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy with a powerful ideology of racial uniqueness and social controls embedded throughout the culture (e.g., the educational system where previously dominant Jewish-Marxist professors, like those of the Frankfurt School, were exiled and lower-level education was imbued with National Socialist ideology) (Separation and Its Discontents and The Culture of Critique; both 1998). Individualists can be molded into cohesive groups—think of a Western military unity with a strong ideology of patriotism (even of the civic nationalist variety), courage in the face of lethal danger, and the importance of following orders, but combined with severe penalties for desertion or treason. In Individualism I discuss group cohesion among the early Puritans as enabled by the powerful social controls and ideology of Calvinism, but with the disappearance of these controls there were movements of Puritan-descended intellectuals promoting radical libertarianism.
Moreover, my claim that Western Europeans tend to be individualists does not imply that there is no shred of ethnocentrism or racial ingroup-outgroup feeling among them. We are naturally drawn to people who are like us (e.g., Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory, reviewed in Chapter 8). As reviewed in Chapter 6, in the nineteenth century it was common to take pride in America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage (often combined with the view that other groups could and would become “just like us” after immigrating so that America would retain its Anglo-Saxon character forever—a view that soured toward the end of the nineteenth century). And in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading up to the immigration restriction law of 1924 (reaffirmed by overriding President Truman’s veto in 1952 and only overturned in 1965 as a result of Jewish activism), racial consciousness was entirely mainstream and promoted by respected academics and book publishers; such views often appeared in popular magazines (Ch. 6).
But whereas ethnocentric tendencies are difficult to inhibit among people with strong genetic tendencies toward ethnocentrism (e.g., the Jews), they are much easier to overcome among relative individualists. Hence the importance of the cultural revolution inaugurated by the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of America and now dominating the West (The Culture of Critique, discussed and cited in Chapter 8 of Individualism). The cultural messages promoted by our substantially Jewish elite have resulted in White racial guilt stemming from one-sided presentations of the racial-ethnic and gender-related grievances of other groups. These mechanisms are powerful because they essentially establish a moral community that reflects the primeval social glue of Western culture. But it is a moral community that is fundamentally antithetical to the ethnic genetic interests of Western peoples.
Sallis’s Theory
In any case, I find Sallis’s theory of European individualism unpersuasive for a number of reasons. For example, eastern Europe in general is more collectivist in terms of family structure than western Europe despite living among racially and ethnically similar peoples for the vast majority of their history, and it was noted above that family structure is highly resistant to change despite huge cultural transformations, such as changing elites. Most Western groups lived with Jews as a very distinct alien, often hated outgroup for centuries without effects on family structure or obliterating individualism. How does the theory explain the uniqueness of Western individualism cross-culturally—were Western European peoples the only people in the world with no experience confronting racially dissimilar others? How does the theory explain the relatively collectivist family structure of traditional Ireland compared to Germanic family structure (reviewed in Chapter 4)? How does it explain the difference in family structure between Scandinavians and the Germanic peoples of Europe (the latter roughly populating the area encompassed by Murray’s map of human accomplishment)? In Individualism I make a major point about the contrast in family structure within France between northeastern France and France south of the Loire. I rather doubt that the latter area was threatened by more racially dissimilar others—the only invasion from the south that I am aware of were the Muslims defeated in 732 by Charles Martel of the Germanic Franks who are more individualist in terms of family structure than France south of the Loire; the Huns came from the east, but their invasion was short-lived and would have affected Germanic groups at least as much. Indeed, how would it explain Murray’s map of human accomplishment in general? Moreover, it is at best an incomplete theory because it does not provide a mechanism for understanding the paradox of individualism mentioned above: If, say, Swedes are so individualist because they evolved at a greater distance from racially dissimilar others, why are they also the most conformist?
Conclusion
It’s always difficult and a bit distasteful to have to respond to someone who is basically in agreement on many issues, and someone who has posted on TOO. But it has to be done, and frankly I thought the tone of many of Sallis’s comments was uncollegial to say the least. I hope this can clarify some of these issues and move the ball forward a bit.
https://eginotes.blogspot.com/ was his blog, but you can only see it through archive.org.
A Response to Some Issues in Ted Sallis’s Blog – The Occidental Observer
www.theoccidentalobserver.net
A Response to Some Issues in Ted Sallis’s Blog
July 26, 2022/94 Comments/in Featured Articles/by Kevin MacDonaldI recently became aware that Ted Sallis has been criticizing my book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (2019; hereafter Individualism) on his blog. Sallis is basically on-page with most of my work, including my work on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, and he has made great contributions in defending and promoting Frank Salter’s theory of ethnic genetic interests. Some of this work was posted on TOO, and in all, he has written 17 articles for us, starting with “Why Was the Understanding of Ethnic Genetic Interests Delayed for 30 Years?” in July of 2009.
In preparing this, I looked at his blog entries under ‘MacDonald‘; here I discuss what I regard as his most important objections, but also ones that are likely to give rise to questions from others who have read the book.
Am I a Nordicist?
Sallis claims I am a Nordicist. I presume this refers to the fact that a major theme of Individualism is that I claim to have found a north-south cline in family structure, and I link geographical variation in family structure with the settlement patterns of the three groups that populated pre-historic Western Europe—the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, the Indo-Europeans (mainly north-central Europe and northern Italy), and the Early Farmers from Anatolia (mainly in the southern part of Western Europe). I suppose one can argue with that, but I don’t see an argument in Sallis’s writing. Doing so would require an explanation of how my review of the population genetic data in Chapter 1 fails to show a north-south genetic cline linked to these three groups, and/or that my review of the family history data in Chapter 4 is faulty. The family history data show a more collectivist pattern in southern Europe (e.g., brothers living together with wives and parents) than in northern Europe, the extreme being Scandinavia with nuclear families characterized by very weak ties among their members.
But the claim that I am a Nordicist has an evaluative ring to it—that I think that the Nordics are superior in some way. In fact, Individualism reveals the weakness of northern Europeans, especially in the current cultural environment in which traditional social controls embedded in religion have disappeared, resulting in a dysfunctional, guilt-prone culture unable to oppose the invasion of other peoples that is now besetting them. Moreover, Scandinavia was a relative backwater in European culture compared to the dynamic northcentral regions of Western Europe. Charles Murray’s map of human accomplishment (discussed in Ch. 9 of Individualism) excludes the great majority of Scandinavia, apart from Denmark which has a strong infusion of German genes (Ch. 1). If anything, I suppose one could call me a Germanicist.
Individualism and Conformity
I portray Scandinavians as highly individualistic but also as highly conformist—what I regard as a paradox in need of explanation, but Sallis regards their conformity as a fatal flaw in my argument. I regard this paradox as a fundamental problem for any analysis and certainly not solved by Sallis’s theory that individualism resulted from geographical distance from racially dissimilar others (see below). There is no question that Scandinavians are conformists. My first efforts to understand this are from a 2012 review of David Hackett Fischer’s Fairness and Freedom (pp. 80–81) where I discuss the Jante Laws of Scandinavia and the Tall Poppy Syndrome in New Zealand as basically socially enforced egalitarianism common in hunter-gatherer cultures around the world (see Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest [4]), and a major point of Chapter 3 of Individualism is that, because of their peculiar ecological position (briefly described below), the northern Europeans retained their hunter-gatherer ways for a very long time, holding off the Early Farmers of more southerly regions prior to the Indo-European invasion for 2000-3000 years. My solution was thus to emphasize the point that extended kinship is less important as a social glue among Nordics (and to a lesser extent, among the Indo-Europeans compared to southern Europeans). All cultures require mechanisms of social cohesion, but rather than relying on kinship distance, as in the rest of the world, social cohesion is maintained mainly by reputation in the community: Can you be trusted? Do you uphold the moral values of the community? Are you a courageous, competent warrior? From Chapter 8:
So my view is that Scandinavians are conformists in a social setting where reputation is paramount because of their evolutionary background as hunter-gatherers living in socially enforced, highly egalitarian moral communities where extended kinship relationships were relatively less important. In interacting with another person, the important issues are whether another person is trustworthy and whether one can benefit from the relationship, not how closely related the person is. But on the other hand, Scandinavian family relationships are egalitarian and relatively loose. The radical individualism of Sweden is illustrated in the following, from Chapter 4:
The concept of moral communities as the social glue of Western societies is recurrent throughout Individualism, particularly in Chapter 7 on the movement to abolish slavery. It is not cherry-picking but backed up with numerous examples and is strongly rooted in theory. Sallis writes, “unfortunately, MacDonald started to extend that idea into bizarre HBD-Nordicism, and stretching facts to fit into some overarching theory of heritable group differences to explain even relatively shallow differences in national behavior.” I need specific examples of how I have stretched facts in order to reply. Obviously, this is a very difficult area. Theory must attempt to deal adequately with all the historical data on political and family structure, population genetics, and much more—and with seeming paradoxes such as the extreme individualism of Scandinavia combined with social conformism. My solution to the paradox of individualism may not be correct, but refuting it requires more specificity.
And I should add that one thing that stands out from my reading is how persistent family structures are despite vast changes in other areas. Chapter 4 on family structure is critical. For example, recent research on families in southern France shows continuing remnants of moderate collectivism—living near their parents (often residing in the same house), marrying people from the same area, helping each other more (including financial aid), and having stronger distinctions between male and female roles. Patrick Heady labels this pattern “parentally anchored and locally involved,” the extreme opposite being “origin free and locally detached” [13] typical of Scandinavia. On the other hand,
I would apply the same sort of analysis to African-American families in the U.S.—that the lack of male involvement in rearing children is at least partially explained by their West African cultural-genetic heritage where men had multiple wives and each wife headed her own household and provided for the children. If indeed there are such proclivities among African-Americans, it is not surprising that changes in welfare laws making it easy for women to rear their children without male provisioning would give a major impetus to out-of-wedlock births among African-Americans (and other groups, but less so) compared to levels prior to 1960.
Sallis:
I never claim that any group of Western Europeans is altruistic simpliciter apart from altruistic punishment against cheaters in games like the ultimatum game, citing a paper by Joseph Henrich et al. (2010) in Chapter 3 on egalitarian individualism.[15] Such willingness to punish others at cost to self for violations of the standards of a moral community is important for understanding the behavior of individualists—apparent now in the willingness of many Whites to punish defectors from racial egalitarianism (although at this point, such punishment can easily be in one’s self-interest because of the reward structure that goes along with contemporary racial orthodoxy).
Incidentally, Henrich’s (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World expands on this, emphasizing the uniqueness of Western European individualism in a cross-cultural context (I agree), but placing a much greater role on the medieval Church and Protestantism for the ultimate triumph of individualism than I do. In Chapter 5 of Individualism and in my review of WEIRDEST, I argue that the role of the Church in producing Western uniqueness was more a facilitative effect building on pre-existing proclivities toward individualism and motivated by its pursuit of power over feudal lords; for example, Henrich explains relative lack of individualism in southern Italy as resulting from relatively late influence of the Church in the area. The point here is that any adequate theory must attempt to explain Western uniqueness but at the same time explain variation within Western Europe.
Regarding Sallis’s link to the paper on individualism-collectivism, it goes to a chart from an unidentified study linking variation in a single gene, the 5-HTTLPR gene, with individualism-collectivism. Unless one believes that individualism-collectivism is influenced genetically by only one locus, this is hardly conclusive and ignores all the data on geographical variation in family structure.
Regarding the point that Russians and Poles “have a lot of northern hunter-gatherer ancestry,” the review of population genetic evidence from Chapter 1 does not support a general northern hunter-gatherer profile but shows the distinctiveness of Scandinavia resulting from seasonal changes in the ability to form large groups (Ch. 3). The only discussion in Individualism related to the generality of northern hunter-gather influences is on Finland, where Swedish genes are more common in the west, likely as a result of colonization; but the further east one goes, there is more evidence for collectivist family structure and other ethnic influences. From Chapter 4: “Although they could leave the family farm with an equal inheritance as their brothers, sons tended to remain in the household, the oldest son becoming patriarch, while daughters married outside the family. In eastern Finland in the second half of the eighteenth century, fully 70 percent of families were extended or multiple, rising to 84–90 percent among the peasants. This pattern is remarkably similar to that found in southern France and southeastern Europe, and contrasts with the patterns of northwest Europe, as discussed in Chapter 4.” Importantly, Finland is a genetic outlier to Scandinavia and Western Europe generally and geography within Finland is strongly linked to ethnic genetic differences between eastern and western Finland (here for a list of relevant studies).
Culture and Evolution
My work has always featured a strong role for culture, paradigmatically in the aptly named The Culture of Critique where the rise of a new Jewish elite with a powerful influence on culture resulted in evolutionary costs to the previously dominant European majority, including especially the establishment of replacement-level non-White immigration as the norm. Sallis seems to endorse the following comment from another blogger:
Much of this I agree with. In Chapter 8 of Individualism I discuss the rise of a Jewish elite dominating the media and academic world as undermining any sense of collective White interests and as promoting media messages aimed at inhibiting White ethnocentrism via top-down prefrontal control over the modular lower brain regions, essentially by creating moral communities in which departures from racial egalitarianism are seen as evil. This has been critical in understanding the current deracination of Whites.
But the comment seems to imply that being relatively individualist is incompatible with cohesive groups like the Crusaders. However, a major aspect of my theory is the importance of social controls and ideology in creating cohesive groups—a perspective I developed in my writing on the Spartans (Social and Personality Development, 1988), the Jews (A People That Shall Dwell Alone, 1994), and on National Socialism as a mirror image of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy with a powerful ideology of racial uniqueness and social controls embedded throughout the culture (e.g., the educational system where previously dominant Jewish-Marxist professors, like those of the Frankfurt School, were exiled and lower-level education was imbued with National Socialist ideology) (Separation and Its Discontents and The Culture of Critique; both 1998). Individualists can be molded into cohesive groups—think of a Western military unity with a strong ideology of patriotism (even of the civic nationalist variety), courage in the face of lethal danger, and the importance of following orders, but combined with severe penalties for desertion or treason. In Individualism I discuss group cohesion among the early Puritans as enabled by the powerful social controls and ideology of Calvinism, but with the disappearance of these controls there were movements of Puritan-descended intellectuals promoting radical libertarianism.
Moreover, my claim that Western Europeans tend to be individualists does not imply that there is no shred of ethnocentrism or racial ingroup-outgroup feeling among them. We are naturally drawn to people who are like us (e.g., Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory, reviewed in Chapter 8). As reviewed in Chapter 6, in the nineteenth century it was common to take pride in America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage (often combined with the view that other groups could and would become “just like us” after immigrating so that America would retain its Anglo-Saxon character forever—a view that soured toward the end of the nineteenth century). And in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading up to the immigration restriction law of 1924 (reaffirmed by overriding President Truman’s veto in 1952 and only overturned in 1965 as a result of Jewish activism), racial consciousness was entirely mainstream and promoted by respected academics and book publishers; such views often appeared in popular magazines (Ch. 6).
But whereas ethnocentric tendencies are difficult to inhibit among people with strong genetic tendencies toward ethnocentrism (e.g., the Jews), they are much easier to overcome among relative individualists. Hence the importance of the cultural revolution inaugurated by the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of America and now dominating the West (The Culture of Critique, discussed and cited in Chapter 8 of Individualism). The cultural messages promoted by our substantially Jewish elite have resulted in White racial guilt stemming from one-sided presentations of the racial-ethnic and gender-related grievances of other groups. These mechanisms are powerful because they essentially establish a moral community that reflects the primeval social glue of Western culture. But it is a moral community that is fundamentally antithetical to the ethnic genetic interests of Western peoples.
Sallis’s Theory
At times, Sallis appears to deny that Nordics are highly individualist, while here he is proposing to explain the high levels of individualism among some Europeans (presumably including Nordics) as the result of geographical distance from racially distinct others. For example, he seems to deny that Nordics are particularly individualist when he complains about my statement that “Scandinavian [societies] are the most individualist cultures on Earth…” (Sallis’s emphasis): “That MacDonald continues to assert that lie, refuted at my blog, and then cites himself as evidence (!!!), really trashes his reputation as an objective scholar.” I think I have made clear here why I think Scandinavian cultures are the most individualist cultures, and a more elaborate version is in Individualism. And it’s based on much more than citing myself. And calling it a “lie” is outrageous—at most it’s a garden variety scholarly mistake.
In any case, I find Sallis’s theory of European individualism unpersuasive for a number of reasons. For example, eastern Europe in general is more collectivist in terms of family structure than western Europe despite living among racially and ethnically similar peoples for the vast majority of their history, and it was noted above that family structure is highly resistant to change despite huge cultural transformations, such as changing elites. Most Western groups lived with Jews as a very distinct alien, often hated outgroup for centuries without effects on family structure or obliterating individualism. How does the theory explain the uniqueness of Western individualism cross-culturally—were Western European peoples the only people in the world with no experience confronting racially dissimilar others? How does the theory explain the relatively collectivist family structure of traditional Ireland compared to Germanic family structure (reviewed in Chapter 4)? How does it explain the difference in family structure between Scandinavians and the Germanic peoples of Europe (the latter roughly populating the area encompassed by Murray’s map of human accomplishment)? In Individualism I make a major point about the contrast in family structure within France between northeastern France and France south of the Loire. I rather doubt that the latter area was threatened by more racially dissimilar others—the only invasion from the south that I am aware of were the Muslims defeated in 732 by Charles Martel of the Germanic Franks who are more individualist in terms of family structure than France south of the Loire; the Huns came from the east, but their invasion was short-lived and would have affected Germanic groups at least as much. Indeed, how would it explain Murray’s map of human accomplishment in general? Moreover, it is at best an incomplete theory because it does not provide a mechanism for understanding the paradox of individualism mentioned above: If, say, Swedes are so individualist because they evolved at a greater distance from racially dissimilar others, why are they also the most conformist?
Conclusion
It’s always difficult and a bit distasteful to have to respond to someone who is basically in agreement on many issues, and someone who has posted on TOO. But it has to be done, and frankly I thought the tone of many of Sallis’s comments was uncollegial to say the least. I hope this can clarify some of these issues and move the ball forward a bit.
