So, my question is, how do you interpret the quote? — Daniel Sjöstedt

As if I'd rather read a ton of other things. ;-)

But yeah, it's obviously poetic, so it's quite silly to insist that it has to be interpreted "literally."

That it's so poetic is why I particularly hate it as philosophy. In my opinion that sort of thing is just horrible writing.

Not that I'm much of a poetry fan in general.

Ah, well I happen to be a fan of his poetry, so I guess that's why I'm interested in discussing the quote ^^

Irony is a mastery of truth, Nietszche was raised by women, and surrounded by women with few to no male role models growing up. He talks a lot of masculine talk, but the woman he wanted ran away with his friend because she thought he was too feminine... so madness and vicarious world domination was more like plan B.

Frantic Freddie never had much luck with women. His sister in particular. Perhaps he was referring to self-flagellation.

Frantic Freddie never had much luck with women. His sister in particular. Perhaps he was referring to self-flagellation. — Ciceronianus the White

It is an interesting thing, but I doubt most people were great womanizers back in the day.

Furthermore, is the best doctor the one who benefits you, or the one who benefits himself? It seems to me that the best man is also one who most benefits women, not himself. We have a very pathetic standard in our society, and we seem to think that the best man is the one who most benefits himself (by shagging a lot of women) rather than the one who most benefits women and their needs. It's really very pathetic, I don't understand how we have come to admire and respect such a standard.

I don't think we can dodge the fact that Nietszche was a misogynist. But of course any single quotation wrenched out of context can give a false impression, and this particular sentence, clearly not meant literally, doth not a patriarch make.

So, my question is, how do you interpret the quote? — Daniel Sjöstedt

I think it's necessary to put what a man (or woman) utters in the context of his/her times - the socio-cultural milieu that influences him/her. Did Nietzsche only serve as a mouthpiece for the then prevalent credo? If so, he can be forgiven for this oversight(?)

Anyway who says we're any better? Women are still underpaid, sexual and domestic abuse etc. is still rampant.

And while Nietzsche has the courage (temerity?) to speak his mind, we (at least some of us) hold our tongues for fear of the inevitable backlash.

Also, while I won't go so far as to say women are inferior, I do think there are real differences between men and women. Physical and mental differences are clearly mentioned in science. The question that naturally arises is that of suitability. Do you employ a 4 feet tall frail woman as a fireman or policeman?

On the metaphor, then: maybe someone can elaborate on how Nietzsche uses the metaphor of women? :)

And now accept a little truth by way of thanks! I am old enough for it!
Swaddle it up and hold its mouth: otherwise it will scream too loudly, the little truth."
"Give me, woman, thy little truth!" said I. And thus spake the old woman:
"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"—
Thus spake Zarathustra.

I think he may be genderizing his apollonian and dionysian distinction. But maybe he is also poking some fun.

Schopenhauer apparently did not appreciate noise, interruption ('never interrupt as the 11th commandment') and especially the "infernal"cracking of whips, he called it the assassin of thought, which was prevalent at the time, used by carters, porters, and messengers, and all this cracking apparently drove Schopenhauer to distraction. Whips were a prominent feature in his essay:

On Noise (A Schopenhauer)
https://youtu.be/h0Ctf-cFJzA

Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the crying of children are horrible to hear; but your only genuine assassin of thought is the crack of a whip; it exists for the purpose of destroying every pleasant moment of quiet thought that any one may now and then enjoy.

It is an interesting thing, but I doubt most people were great womanizers back in the day.
Agustino — Agustino

Who's speaking of womanizers? Nietzsche would make Ward Cleaver seem like Don Juan.

I don't know but would a man of the same size be hired? Think on that.

There are lots of other passages in Nietzsche's work critical of women. He seems to have had a low opinion of them in general for whatever reason/s. So did Schopenhauer and Kant. Kant thought that most women were innately deficient, in term of their capacity for rational thought and therefore essentially morally deficient in consequence. BTW, If you read Schopenhauer's essay, "On Women" , you will find that he is even more caustically misogynistic than Nietzsche,

Regards

Dachshund.

Have you read Beyond Good and Evil? Lots of commentary on women there. I dont see it as metaphorical. He simply says it is one man's opinion. My conclusion is that his views on women were a product of their time. He is no different than any other philosopher in that respect. Misogynistic or racist views are seen in many philosophers of the past(Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, etc).
“When a woman has scholarly inclinations, there is usually something wrong with her
sexuality(144)”.
Where neither love nor hate are in play, woman is a mediocre player(115) In revenge and in love, Woman is more barbaric than man(139) Comparing man and woman overall, you could say: woman would not have a genius for finery if she did not have an instinct for the secondary role(145)
Women want to become independent, so they are beginning to enlighten men about the “woman an sich” – this is one of the worst developments in Europe’s general trend towards increasing ugliness. Just imagine what these clumsy attempts at female scientificity and self-disclosure will bring to light! Women have so much cause for shame; they contain so much that
is pedantic, superficial, and schoolmarmish as well as narrow mindedly arrogant, presumptuous, and lacking in restraint (just think about their interactions with children!), all of which has been most successfully restrained and kept under control by their fear of men.

Look out when the “eternal tedium of woman” (which they all have in abundance!) first dares to emerge! When, on principle, they start completely forgetting their discretion and their art – of grace, play, chasing-all-cares-away, of making things easier and taking them lightly, as well as their subtle skill at pleasant
desires! Even now, female voices are becoming heard which – holy Aristophanes! – are terrifying, and threaten with medicinal clarity what, in the first and last instance, women want from men. Isn’t it in the very worst taste when women prepare to be scientific like this? Fortunately, enlightenment had been a man’s business, a man’s talent until now – as such,we could remain “among ourselves.” And with respect to everything that women write about “woman,” we can ultimately reserve a healthy doubt as to whether women really want – and are able to want – to provide
enlightenment about themselves . . . If this is not really all about some woman trying to find a new piece of finery for herself (and isn’t dressing up a part of the Eternal Feminine?), well then, she wants to inspire fear of herself: – perhaps in order to dominate. But she does not want truth: what does truth matter for a woman! Nothing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable,
hostile for women from the very start than truth, – their great art is in lying, their highest concern is appearance and beauty. Let us admit that we men love and honor precisely this art and this instinct in women: we have
a rough time of it, and gladly seek relief by attaching ourselves to a being in whose hands, eyes, and gentle stupidities our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity look almost stupid to us. Finally, I will pose the question:
has a woman herself ever acknowledged a female mind as profound or a female heart as just? And isn’t it true that, judging overall, “woman” has
historically been most despised by women themselves – and not by us at all? – We men wish that women would stop compromising themselves through enlightenment: just as male care and protection of women were at work when the church decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia!"(232)

It shows corruption of the instincts – even apart from the fact that it shows bad taste – when a woman refers specifically to Madame Roland or Madame de Sta¨el or Monsieur Georges Sand, as if that proved something
in favor of the “woman an sich.” Men consider these the three comical women an sich – nothing else! – and precisely the best involuntary counterarguments
against emancipation and female self-determination.

Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the spine-chilling thoughtlessness in the feeding of the family and the head of the house! Women do not understand what food means: and yet want to cook! If woman were a
thoughtful creature, then the fact that she has been the cook for thousands of years would surely have led her to discover the greatest physiological facts, and at the same time make the art of medicine her own! Bad cooking and the complete absence of reason in the kitchen have caused the longest delays and the worst damage to the development of humanity: even today,
things are hardly any better. A speech for young ladies.

Seven little maxims about women
Suddenly we’re bored no more when a man crawls through the door!
∗ ∗
Age, alas! and science too gives weaker virtues strength anew.
∗ ∗
Black gowns and a silent guise make any woman look quite – wise.
∗ ∗
Who to thank for my success? God – and my own tailoress.

So far, men have been treating women like birds that have lost their way and flown down to them from some height or another: like something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful, – but also like something that has to be locked up to keep it from flying away.

To be wrong about the fundamental problem of “man and woman”; on the one hand, to deny the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension; and, on the other hand, to dream, perhaps, of equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements and obligations: that is a typical sign of a shallow mind, and a thinker who has proven to
be shallow in this dangerous area – shallow in instinct! –, can be generally regarded as suspicious, or, even more, as shown up for what he is, as exposed. He will probably be too “short” for all the fundamental
questions of life, including future life, and unable to get down to them in any depth. On the other hand, someone who has the same depth in his spirit as he does in his desires, and also that depth of goodwill
which is capable of harshness and strictness and is easily mistaken for them – that sort of man will only ever be able to think about woman in an oriental manner. He needs to understand the woman as a possession, as property that can be locked up, as something predestined for servitude
and fulfilled by it. In this he has to adopt the position of Asia’s enormous rationality, Asia’s superiority of instinct, just as the Greeks once did (being Asia’s best heirs and students); we know that, from Homer
up to the times of Pericles, while their culture was growing and their strength expanding, the Greeks were gradually becoming stricter with women too – in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical – in fact, how humanly desirable all this has been: just think about it for a while!

The men of our epoch treat the weaker sex with more respect than any epoch has ever done – this is part of the democratic tendency and fundamental
taste, as is a lack of respect for age –: is it any wonder that this respect is immediately misused? People want more, people learn to make demands, people ultimately find this respect tax almost hurtful, people would prefer to compete for rights or, in all seriousness, wage war: enough, woman loses her shame. Let us immediately add that she also loses her taste. She forgets her fear of man: but the woman who “forgets
fear” abandons her most feminine instincts. It is fair enough and also understandable enough for women to dare to emerge when fear of men is no longer inculcated, or, to be more exact, when the man in men is no longer wanted and cultivated; what is more difficult to understand is that in the process – women degenerate. This is happening today, make no mistake about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has won out over the military and aristocratic spirit, women are now striving for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: “the woman as clerk” is written on the
gateway to the developing, modern society. While women are seizing new rights in this manner, trying to become “master” and writing “progress” for women on their flags and pennants, the opposite is taking place with terrifying clarity: woman are regressing. Ever since the French Revolution, the influence of women in Europe has decreased proportionately as they
have gained rights and entitlements. Accordingly, the “emancipation of women,” to the extent that it has been demanded and called for by women themselves (and not just by shallow-minded masculine dolts), turns out to be a strange symptom of the increased weakening and softening of the most feminine instincts of all. The stupidity in this movement, an almost
masculine stupidity, is enough to make any woman who has turned out well (which always means a clever woman) thoroughly ashamed. To lose your sense for which ground best insures your victory; to neglect practice of your own military arts; to lose control of yourself in front of men, perhaps even “to the point of writing books,” where you used to act with
discipline and subtle, cunning humility; to work with virtuous courage against men’s belief in any veiled, fundamentally different ideal in women, in any sort of Eternal or Necessary Feminine; to dissuade men, emphatically and at length, from thinking that women must by kept, cared for, protected, and looked after like gentle, strangely wild and often pleasant house pets; to collect together, in an inept and indignant manner, everything slavish and serflike that was and still is intrinsic to the position of women in the present social order (as if slavery were a counter-argument
and not rather a condition of any higher culture, any elevation of culture): – what does all this mean except a crumbling away of feminine instincts, a defeminization? Of course, there are plenty of idiotic friends and corrupters of women among the scholarly asses of the male sex who recommend that women defeminize themselves like this and copy all the stupidities that the “man” in Europe, that European “manliness” suffers
from, – who would like to bring women down to the level of “general education,” and maybe even of reading the newspapers and taking part in politics. Every now and then, people even want to make free spirits and literati out of women: as if a woman without piety were anything other than absolutely repugnant or ludicrous to a profound and godless man –. Almost everywhere, women’s nerves are being ruined by the most pathological and dangerous of all types ofmusic (our most recent German music) and women are being made more hysterical by the day, and less capable of performing their first and last profession, the bearing of strong children. People wantwomen to be more “cultivated” in general and want, as they say, to make the “weaker sex” strong through culture: as if history
did not teach as vividly as possible that “cultivating” human beings and weakening – in particular, weakening, dissipating, afflicting the strength
of the will – have always kept pace with each other, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (recently even Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and their dominance over men precisely to the
strength of their will – and not to schoolteachers! What inspires respect and, often enough, fear of women is their nature (which is “more natural” than that of men), their truly predatory and cunning agility, their
tiger’s claws inside their glove, the naivet´e of their egoism, their inner wildness and inability to be trained, the incomprehensibility, expanse, and rambling character of their desires and virtues . . . What inspires pity, in spite of all the fear, for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she seems to suffer more, be more vulnerable, need more love, and be condemned to more disappointments than any animal. Fear and pity: these are the feelings with which men have stood before women so far,(239)

It's both allegorical and represents his views on women.

The opinion "don't forget thy whip" comes from a female voice in the text. The implication is that women prefer the man who won't take any shit from them.

The root of it would be the human female propensity to both hypergamy and cuckoldry. The flower of it is the female tendency to lie, act and dissemble, which is the level that Nietzsche is dealing with.

It's all basically about the way humans reproduce and evolve. The best option for a female is to get a kid by the highest status "alpha" male around and persuade him to invest time and energy in helping her raise the kid. If that's not possible, the second best is to get a kid by the alpha and then get some poor schmuck "beta" male who's none the wiser to invest time and energy raising a kid that's not theirs (hence "cuckoldry", it's the same strategy as the cuckoo bird uses). If that's not possible, third best, the consolation prize, is to settle for a kid by the beta and get the beta to help look after it.

Human males have their contrary strategies, philandering/avoiding commitment, and requiring bona fide faithfulness in women. (Incidentally the root dishonesty of Feminism is that it highlights that latter strategy in males, while pretending that it's some bizarre male thing that comes out of nowhere as a dominance strategy, thereby downplaying or not admitting to the female tendency to cuckoldry to which that male strategy - of requiring faithfulness and obedience in the female - is a defensive response.)

Hence the "war of the sexes" - this is what it actually is, and it all unfolds pretty logically and inevitably from sexual dimorphism and the differences between the mechanics of sperm and egg production - eggs are rarer and more precious, therefore require more careful use and investment strategies; human children also require high investment. Therefore the female has to a) get the best quality sperm, and b) get some male or males to co-operate in raising the kid. But it needn't be the same male.

Notably, this process is often unconscious for the woman, and if you challenged her she'd be surprised or deny it. This is because whether any of the three strategies is successful depends on both the physical beauty and character of the female, and women hate to be reminded of how much their reproductive success depends on their physical beauty, especially since it's time-limited (and of course this is a really cruel aspect of nature, and one can hardly blame the woman for wanting to avoid its implications). Also, having an upstanding character and taking responsibility for anything is a pain in the ass, whether you're male or female, and if you can get away without it, so much the better. But it's easier for women to get away with it. Hence Nietzsche's connection to acting, lying, dissembling, etc., as quintessentially female traits - those are the female equivalent of males being assholes.

The final result is that females are and always have been pretty much the gatekeepers of the human reproductive process, they are generally the selectors of males, while making males think they're selecting females. This is just the way the human genome has unfolded - and it's the reason for our dominance of the earth, as men have been "shit tested" and their stock improved by high standard female selection generation after generation. The man who's smart enough to see through female hypergamy and not be cuckolded is the kind of man that women want, i.e. women ultimately look for men who can "master" them. i.e. the type of man who doesn't take any shit from women is the type of man women want and are turned on by; the weak man who allows himself to be pushed around and bamboozled by female "glamour" and female rhetorical persuasion is despised by women.

All this (minus the evolutionary biology explanation of course, just on the level of honest, time-tested observation of behaviour) was the general opinion of most intelligent people back in the day, both male and female, when the sexes felt themselves opposed to each other as equally canny "frenemies," each with plusses and minuses on their ledgers.

Whether we in the current year have truly progressed by suppressing those ideas, or regressed, is still a moot point. The rising rate of depression among women and the rising suicide rate among men might be a clue.

You undoubtedly know that feminism, and in particular that variety which sees gender as socially constructed, would reject all the assertions above, those coming from Nietzsche, the sociology-biological account, and your self-described. common-sense.
But I'm guessing even those allowing for biologically based behavioral differences between men and women would consider Nietzsche to be a throwback to Victorian attitudes.

Great post.

Apart from evolutionary arguments, there's also the idea that we get intellectually/spiritually bored with anyone we can predict/control. We may be sufficiently sexually or financially interested to hang around, but the ideal is beauty, worldly resources, and a personality that challenges/inspires one's own. Because I don't know what they might say, I don't know what I might say in response. Such lovers help one another enlarge themselves. They increase their individual values as a team.

Those who settle for non-challenging relationships appear to choose beauty and wealth over the mystique of personality (which is roughly art and science). This might help explain why even high class prostitutes aren't generality respected. It also explains the taboo on older men dating females in their 20s. The idea is that sublimated or developed personalities (desirable in themselves as not predictable or creative) will have and will to continue to prioritize personality themselves.

I can imagine, however, an older man or women compartmentalizing the satisfaction of the itch for personality. For instance, an intellectual/artistic man may scratch the itch for unpredictable interaction among his friends and be content with a beautiful and sweet but otherwise predicable lover. But why should she tolerate this situation? If he isn't famous or rich, she probably won't. (She is by assumption not impressed with his unintelligible chatter about Plato or Heidegger among his friends. Unless he's a professor with a Volvo who takes her to nice cocktail parties? Or a musician who can take her backstage. The idea is that whatever the hell he's into that she is not intrinsically interested in at least opens worldly/public possibilities that smell like 'alpha' or are at least fun.)

A last point comes to mind. The man who needs and seeks women is already a little laughable. I'm still addicted myself, but my itch for freedom and control pushes against this addiction --unsuccessfully. The the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. A relationship protects one from the obsession with the ideal partner and the anxiety of dating, allowing one to get some work done. [For me true romance would be lovers working together at their shared, highest ambition. They might co-write a movie or a scientific paper or play in a band together. But this kind of compatibility is like winning the lottery.]

Well yeah, it's pretty obvious that Feminism is anti-science at this stage (it became anti-science some time during the early 1970s when Marxist Feminists co-opted the broader movement - amusingly, losing working class female support in the process).

There was always some degree of bad faith, some pseudo-history and pseudo-science, in Feminism, but so long as Feminism was pursuing equal rights in a classical liberal framework that didn't matter so much. Now that Feminism is just one intersectional facet of the broader PC cult, it's necessarily anti-science and it necessarily has to falsify history to maintain its dogmas in the teeth of the evidence.

Social constructionism is just the most awful rubbish. 20 years from now people are going to look back on this past few decades' abject conformity and bowdlerization and marvel at it, just as we used to laugh at the Victorians putting doilies on piano legs when we were kids in the early 1960s, or as we look back in horror at the period of eugenics, or the time when psychiatrists used to lobotomize people or give them electro shock therapy.

[For me true romance would be lovers working together at their shared, highest ambition. They might co-write a movie or a scientific paper or play in a band together. But this kind of compatibility is like winning the lottery.] — foo

Yeah, I remember some writer somewhere saying that the ideal relationship is when you have the couple moving in parallel to a shared goal, as opposed to focussing on each other. Having kids is obviously the most common shared goal for humanity, and a powerful one, with lots of depth and room for development - and in fact that process of a shared project of raising kids is what seems to lead to the deeper kind of love that's born of mutual respect that you sometimes see with old couples. (Note, this is perhaps why arranged marriages can be successful too - if the parents are wise, they can pick compatible partners, and then the business arrangement deepens mutual esteem over time.) But you could in theory have other shared goals too.

On that matter of arranged marriages, I've often wondered what the distinction is between marriage based on romantic love (or elective affinity) that's so common in the West vs. arranged marriage, which is so common in the rest of the world. I think with the latter, the arrangement is based on sensible, practical economic considerations and the like, with some eye to the proposed couple being simpatico at a psychological level. The selection method of romantic love, on the other hand, seems to rely on trusting some kind of innate ability for nature to decide wisely - I have in mind something like maybe the hormonal "smell" of a partner triggering some kind of deep-seated calculation in the brain, that the child resulting from intercourse will be well-formed? Something like that anyway. IOW, maybe our brains are wiser than we know in that area.

But other than that, I think generally that the "sexual revolution" was pretty disastrous. Sex is not a toy, it's a nuclear weapon, and that's why societies have always hedged it about in various ways with various taboos and restrictions. It was wise to look at the matter rationally, and perhaps tinker with reforms here and there, to protect individuals' negative rights better; but it wasn't wise to just ditch all the evolved patterns completely.

Anti-science could mean ignoring the research entirely. Or it could mean disagreeing with a particular scientific interpretation. Because it seems to me the science is far from settled when it comes to gender behavior. Ideology is thoroughly entangled here, within the scientific community as well as between scientists and
feminists. The debates among Dennett,E.O. Wilson and Dawkins, and Gould, Lewontin and Rose have been fierce, and have failed to settle the question of to what extent, and via what mechanisms, inherited structures shape behavior in general as well as gender specifically.
My own sense is that there is an evolutionarily adaptive biological component to gender behavior, but any attempt to translate this component into specific claims about male vs female behavior will likely stumble,given that they are hopelessly intermixed with cultural norms.
So on this point feminists are mostly right about the socially constructed basis of gender roles, especially given the radical change in westernized women's perception of their capabilities and goals over the past 100 years.

No, I think it's quite settled that Gould, Lewontin and Rose are Marxist shills, it's just that a) the evolutionary biology people are too polite to say so outright, and b) a lot of people in the humanities are themselves Marxist shills, or at least have the traditional sense of "no enemies to the Left." so they just keep the "debate" going artificially.

For example Gould has been caught with his pants down re. his critique of Samuel George Morton on intelligence and skull measurements, the centerpiece of that execrable pile of piffle, The Mismeasure of Man. That should be enough to instantly disqualify him from any serious discussion. (Lewontin and Rose are hacks in a similar vein, though I don't have to hand right now the relevant critiques for them.) And tracing the nature/nurture debate back to its origins with Franz Boas, the whole idea that there ever was any substance to the nurture über alles claim has always been nothing more than a bunch of smoke and mirrors from particular noisy and influential Leftists down the years.

There is no debate among serious scientists or philosophers on any of these issues: race is real, gender is real, 70-80% of variability in intelligence is down to genes, etc., etc. Social constructionism is bunk, at least if you take the hardline version (obviously lots of culture is socially constructed in an uncontroversial, superficial sense).

But the laughable thing is that none of these facts have the dire implications that their detractors seem to think they have (or at least seem to be insinuating they have, to people who might care about such implications): none of these facts alter the fundamental classical liberal principle that you can only judge an individual on the basis of their revealed actions, not on the basis of the average traits of their group.

Essentially, students in the humanities have been sold a pup for the past 30-50 years, during which time academia was gradually taken over by a crabbed, quasi-religious political cult. In another few decades, people will look back on this past period in wonderment, at how things could have gone so badly awry in academia, at how entire institutions could have been taken over by such a queer, particularist, convoluted view. (Of course we know the method: nepotism mixed with intimidation, at first moral, and eventually outright violent, as we are seeing today.)

"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"— (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 18. Old and Young Women) — Daniel Sjöstedt

Even the ubermensch is a complete slave to his bollocks.

Men have a daily urge to spread their seed and much of the time women get pretty bored with being the receptacle for men's spunk. As a result men like Nietsche have for centuries resented women; resented their control of their libido; resented their ability to reproduce; and the men think they ought to have the right to fuck whosoever they want, when they want.
Nietsche was just an ordinary wanker, like everyone else.

One already has a whip - for horses, dogs, and other men and boys. Clearly it is an impassioned plea for gender equality.

There are a lot of people (certainly in the U.S.) who protest strongly against what they see as censurious, anti-democratic tendencies among groups aligning themselves with ideologies on the left. the highly publicized incidents of rejection of free speech on numerous university campuses, the witch hunts against those violating tenets of political correctness, etc., are just some examples. But the anitpathy toward these Social justice warriors comes form a diverse group that includes everything from alt-right fascists organizations, evangelical social conservatives, libertarians and even postmodern social constructionsits like Ken Gergen, who wrote a paper in 1991 decrying the moralistic, censurious nature of identity politics, which he referred to as a 'politics of blame'.

So maybe you could help me understand where your own political, scientific and philosophical views fit in here. You referred to "noisy and influential Leftists", said that "a lot of people in the humanities are themselves Marxist shills" , talked about "the fundamental classical liberal principle" and claimed that "academia was gradually taken over by a crabbed, quasi-religious political cult".
This leads me to wonder, are all leftists Marxists? If not, are there leftist political or philosophical positions that you agree with, (that are not part of a 'crabbed, quasi-religious political cult') and distinguish from Marxism? Marxism emerged from the left Hegelians. Would you trace leftist thought(or the sort of leftist thought you reject) back to Hegel, or are there post-Hegelians you identify with(Kierkegaard, William James, John Dewey)? Is Thomas Kuhn a leftist? What about Jean Piaget, who disagreed with Chomsky and Fodor over their claim for a genetic basis of language content? Or Richard Rorty, who who closely aligned with Dennett on many issues?
Val Dusek wrote: "While Pinker and Robert Wright consider themselves liberals, of the New Republic, drifting-toward-neo-conservatism sort, Matt Ridley comes out as a nineteenth century libertarian similar the earlier Social Darwinists, in claiming that biology shows us that a libertarian society with minimal state is best". Where do you fit on this spectrum? Do you consider yourself a Dennett-style New Atheist liberal?

While I agree that anyone who denies any role of biological inheritance in gender behavior is taking an extreme position, it seems to me the interesting debate concerns, as I said in my previous comment, how one defines the precise influence of inherited proclivities on, and inter-relationship with, culture.
It's all well and good to say that gender and intelligence exist, but the challenge is how to define them.

Within the expansive discipline of cognitive science, there is a wide spectrum of views on this subject, ranging from the sociobiologism of Dawkins to the embodied, enactivist, extended cognitive ideas of Andy Clark, Shaun Gallagher and, Evan Thompson. My interest is in the thoroughgoing accounts given by theorists such as Pinker, Dennett, Clark, Gallagher and others of cognitive-affective functioning, including language , consciousness, memory, perception, social process such as empathy and explanation of pathologies like autism. It is at this comprehensive level of modelling psychological and intersocial process that effective understanding of the practical meaning of such terms as gender behavior and intelligence can be obtained.
All political ideology aside(as if its possible to do this), I've been finding more powerful and useful ideas about these issues coming from the embodied enactivist crowd that from Pinker and Dennett, who are beginning to appear a bit long in the tooth and outdated.

The enactivists are not out to appease your 'crabbed, quasi-religious, cultish Marxist shills', but their nuanced and complex research work escapes some of the greedy reductionist tendencies of the Dawkins-Dennett crowd while sidestepping the one-sidedness of social constructionism.

Yeah, I remember some writer somewhere saying that the ideal relationship is when you have the couple moving in parallel to a shared goal, as opposed to focussing on each other. Having kids is obviously the most common shared goal for humanity, and a powerful one, with lots of depth and room for development - and in fact that process of a shared project of raising kids is what seems to lead to the deeper kind of love that's born of mutual respect that you sometimes see with old couples. — gurugeorge

Good point. But let's say that our lovers are not parents and have decided not to be parents. What holds aging childless couples together? In my experience, these are creative types. Their desire to reproduce is sublimated into a desire to make great science or art. Or perhaps they understand their own lifestyle as a sculpture, so that they want to travel, eat exotic foods, know exciting people. Roughly speaking, they are sculpting their own personalities. This is a generalization of the childless life project.

It initially makes sense that having many different sexual relationships would be good for the sophistication or enlargement of the personalities involved. But sex is a nuclear weapon, as you say, and the anxiety of desire interferes with objective pursuits. Someone wrote somewhere that we marry the people we love so that we can stop thinking about them. So an aging childless couple may play it safe and love the one they are with so that they can keep working on the primary object, which is their own sublimated personality. Is this narcissism? Yes and no. The sublimation of a personality is a way of death and revision. The successful sublimation involves a burning away of non-resonant idiosyncrasies.

The selection method of romantic love, on the other hand, seems to rely on trusting some kind of innate ability for nature to decide wisely - I have in mind something like maybe the hormonal "smell" of a partner triggering some kind of deep-seated calculation in the brain, that the child resulting from intercourse will be well-formed? Something like that anyway. IOW, maybe our brains are wiser than we know in that area. — gurugeorge

I also have the theory of the smell. I would add to what you said above. There's also the idea of the individual choosing for sublimating/cultural reasons as opposed to strictly economic reasons. Let's say that the daughter of rich parents chooses some creative man from a family without money or connections. Perhaps she's creative herself and can see a value in him that cannot be cashed out now but promises something in the future. A great writer has higher status than an actuary, I think. But predicting this kind of greatness is difficult. It requires the same kind of greatness itself. In short, the daughter chooses a risky stock according to her own non-algorithmic intuition.

But other than that, I think generally that the "sexual revolution" was pretty disastrous. Sex is not a toy, it's a nuclear weapon, and that's why societies have always hedged it about in various ways with various taboos and restrictions. It was wise to look at the matter rationally, and perhaps tinker with reforms here and there, to protect individuals' negative rights better; but it wasn't wise to just ditch all the evolved patterns completely. — gurugeorge

You may be right. As I see it, however, this is the world we're in. So I try to understand in order to navigate more effectively. And because it's fascinating. It feels good to think that one has an accurate picture.

Wow, a lot of questions there! Some peacemeal responses:-

I'm on the classical liberal/libertarian wing of the Alt Right. I view the Left/Right divide so far as economics goes with some degree of equanimity. I lean towards economic libertarianism, but I'm not totally hostile to some elements of socialism or social democracy in a nation, a lot depends on what's naturally congenial to a given folk, and to some extent there's a trade-off between economic efficiency and other considerations, as well as a general trade-off between the costs and benefits of any proposed economic or political measure, and a balance to be struck (wrt any given question) between progressivism (trying to improve things) and conservatism (keeping things that work).

In terms of religion and philosophy, well, I'm 58 so I've been around the houses. I started life straight out of the gate at 6 years old rejecting my native Catholicism and secretly being an Atheist, and till my early 20s I hated Christianity with a passion, but I've softened a lot towards religion generally and Christianity specifically over the years. I'm also aware that most barefoot rationalists make strawmen out of the arguments for God, and that the actual classical arguments (Aristotelian, Thomist, etc.) aren't quite so easy to dispatch, so I'm more of a Huxleyian or perhaps Spencerian Agnostic these days. I'm just easy on the topic, particularly since I've also done meditation and had mystical experiences myself. There's a lot we don't know, and I don't begrudge people making a bet about that vast Unknown, and living by it, so long as they don't get any on the furniture. However, myself, I'm still of the Feynman mindset - it's ok not to know, and one doesn't have to stuff something, anything, into that Void.

Yeah, I'm long familiar with the people you mention, and fan of some of them too - Pinker, Dennett, Haidt, etc. Wright or Ridley? Probably Ridley, I find his unbounded optimism congenial. There's a lot in that type of thinking that can help people of all political persuasions find common ground, or at least, if not exactly common ground, at least ground on which civil discussion can be had.

In terms of deep philosophy, I'm broadly Aristotelian, but also somewhat Nietzschean (so a bit like Ayn Rand in that respect), plus I'm now (after years and years of thinking he was a poseur) persuaded that Wittgenstein was a very great - though of course highly idiosyncratic - philosopher, who was basically in the process of reinventing the Aristotelian wheel before he died (with On Certainty). His approach to the philosophy of language, as well as Austin's type of ordinary language analysis - these are a great foundation for philosophical thinking. But I do think philosophical theory is possible too (Dennett's "engineering" understanding, based on Sellars' "how things in the broadest sense hang together in the broadest sense").

My overall metaphysical view, especially as it relates to philosophy of Mind, has been for a few years now more or less Riccardo Manzotti's Process Externalism, and I'm pretty much an Externalist all round (semantic, epistemological, etc.). Embodied Enactivism would also fit here, and I agree that's generally the way forward for many reasons. (I read Varela/Thompson - as well as Johnson - many years ago, and triangulating that with Dennett's review of them - it's really a toss up between whether you want to keep the traditional lingo like Dennett does, or want to venture into using newer coinages and process-oriented concepts, which I tend to favour. In that light, it's not so much Dennett's ideas that are long in the tooth, it's the traditional lingo, the jargon, in terms of which we think of epistemology and philosophy of mind that's passed its sell-by date.)

I also think that there are some reasonable points made even by gender theorists, even by Marxists sometimes, and a lot of the names you mention, like Hegel, Kierkegaard, etc., even Postmodernists or Pragmatists like Rorty also sometimes say profound and interesting things; it's just the ideological element (the desire to give society a makeover according to abstract principles, usually the abstract, unquestioned principle of egalitarianism, which is the fag end of Protestantism) that I dislike. Humanity is not a topiary garden to be trimmed just so to suit any abstract ideal, one must deal with the material as one finds it, one must work with the grain (in the Daoist sense), and if one wishes to change it one must nudge it along with compassion and care, always appealing to the rationality of the individual whose mind one wishes to change.

In that vein, I'm not really sure that defining things is all that helpful. What's more helpful is trying to notice patterns in the world. And to me now, it seems like race, biology, etc. are a much more important factors in all sorts of ways than received opinion thought for much of the 20th century. It seems to me now that a lot of the ideas that were current then (which I grew up with in part) have been blind alleys, and that the progress of science has shown that some of the older common sense ideas, developed over the course of centuries by observation, that were rejected during the 20th century, were actually sound. But science also offers the possibility of advance too, and not everything from the 19th/20th centuries was shit - the basic classical liberal framework, which treats individuals impartially and fairly, is sound, and was a definite gain. But much of what came after classical liberalism, especially in the 20th century, was hubristic overshoot in various directions, particularly in the direction of egalitarianism, which if it means anything beyond just a restatement of the classical liberal principle of equal treatment regardless of station, talents, or capacities, is a lie, a great, stinking, whopping lie. Equality of outcome is a foredoomed goal (unless you're talking about a colony of clones, of course! :) ).

"It seems like race, biology, etc. are a much more important factors in all sorts of ways than received opinion thought for much of the 20th century".

Do you agree with this statement concerning race:

"It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. "

No, I disagree with that statement. Within-race variation is irrelevant to questions of relative likeness/unlikeness between groups - it's a bit of a red herring that's often brought up in these discussions.

In a family, Uncle Bob can have quite a different look and temperament from Cousin Alice, but that doesn't affect the fact that they're part of a family of people who are more like each other than they are like another family. Similarly for the more diffuse concept of race: lots of variation within, yes, but it doesn't affect the fact that race x is identifiably different from race y, along all sorts of measurable dimensions. It's all relative.

Edge cases and outliers also don't affect the issue: in absolute terms there are probably quite a few Black people of the extraordinary absolute level of intelligence of a Thomas Sowell, but that doesn't affect the average, in fact, the fact that there's an average implies there will be outliers at both ends, one must expect them (and this counters the racist tendency to see individuals of another race as all clustered within a narrow "spike" at the average, that's the racist error, to thoughtlessly apply a stereotype to all individuals, instead of just using it as a loose guide to expectations).

However, it is the fact that the bulk of a population is distributed around a given average for any given trait, that matters (for public policy, and for what you can reasonably expect of a random member of that group, etc.). Although again, none of that touches the classical liberal principle that you must judge any given individual on the basis of their actions, not on the basis of your (reasonable or unreasonable) expectations.

It's really quite simple an unproblematic, and there really never was any need to make a fuss about it either way (we just have to make a fuss about it now because it's been absurdly denied for so long): race is a kind of extended, diffuse sort of family, and a family is a tiny nano-race. Most people (not all, but most) have a feeling for their ethnic group/race that's a more vague, diffuse version of the feeling they have for their family. And relative ethnic/racial homogeneity in a given region makes for a smoother-functioning society with a high level of automatic trust/predictability in social interaction; whereas a multiracial, multiethnic society is low-trust, with unpredictable social interactions and constant tensions and friction. There can be mixing at the fringes of course, here and there, but there has to be a solid majority of one ethnic or racial type in a given region (and for various other reasons, including the advantages and limits of the principle of strength in numbers, that has to be ultimately the size of a nation, a good few millions and upwards, at least).

Re. race and culture: while culture is to some extent detachable from race (both from the point of view of the principle that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, and from the point of view of cultural appropriation and mixing being part of the fun of life, and an important means whereby cultures mutually enrich each other), culture is fundamentally a biological outgrowth, part of the extended phenotype. e.g. some political organizations or forms of social structure are more congenial to some races or ethnic groups than others, and races/ethnic groups will typically naturally tend to generate and sustain different types of culture to others. For example meritocracy, individualism and egalitarianism are favoured by Northwestern European Whites in about equal measure, while Chinese also like meritocracy, but are more enamoured of clannish forms of social organization, are not so interested in individualism, and only occasionally flirt with egalitarianism, while being very big on "filial piety." It's a matter for close empirical investigation figuring out what's what in these sorts of areas. And again, these are just averages, with all sorts of edge cases, outliers, exceptions, etc.

If you disagree with the statement I quoted, then your disagreement is only based on science if you can show me evidence that your claim is the scientific consensus, that the consensus disagrees with my statement. A few links will suffice. Not links to individual researchers, but to a source that makes specific claims concerning what the consensus is. Without a consensus there is no scientific fact of the matter, just conjecture.
As far as the rest of your comment, everything that you attribute to genetic differences can be explained on the basis of social transmission as well. That's not surprising, since genetic and cultural mutability are just slower and faster versions of the same process of adaptive development.
So the practical consequence of a genetically driven vs strictly culturally driven origin of social differences would be in how they dictate expectations concerning the capacity of particular ethnic groups to approach the type and level of political and intellectual functioning of other groups.
For instance, use of government incentives to encourage one group to catch up to another would appear pointless if the cause of the inequality was believed to be genetic.
Another way in which our expectations of others are shaped by, or perhaps shape, our determination of the source of their inequality with respect to us, involves our views on diversity and multicultural mixing.
You wrote:"relative ethnic/racial homogeneity in a given region makes for a smoother-functioning society with a high level of automatic trust/predictability in social interaction; whereas a multiracial, multiethnic society is low-trust, with unpredictable social interactions and constant tensions and friction."
Interesting that my experience has been the opposite.And the statistics concerning psychological dysfunction(suicide, opiate abuse) and crime seem to corroborate this.

I live in a neighborhood of Chicago that is about 50% white(that breaks down to equal percentages Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Irish, Scandinavian,Jewish and other) , and equal percentages black, hispanic and Asian. It also has a large gay and lesbian population. The local high school includes speakers of 100 languages. The crime rate is relatively low and its a supportive, energetic, creative and friendly place with 20 theater companies, many art galleries and active political involvement.
I had lived for a few years in a small town that was about 98% white(70% German heritage).
It was stiflingly narrow-minded, and I perceived more social friction there than in my Chicago neighborhood The lack of exposure to different kinds of people made the sheltered, provincial residents less adaptable to novelty. Ethnically/racially homogeneous communities aren't fairing very well these days. Their crime rates far surpass multiethnic places like New York and San Francisco. Of course economic hardship has a lot to do with this, but then economic vitality and cultural diversity are closely linked these days.

So what determines the difference in our views on the relative stability and vitality of more vs less homogeneous communities? My hunch is that your own experience of the alienness of other races preceded and justified your embrace of the genetic explanation. What to you in your dealings with other races seemed a gaping divide in behavior could only be explained by genes. If you lived in my community, I imagine you would have a more difficult time than I in seeing past the surface differences between the residents of my high rise building or my neighborhood in order to arrive at what unifies our community.
Everyone needs the right kind of balance between cultural homogeneity and diversity Too little variety is stifling and anti-creative. Too much is chaotic and destabilizing.
People have an instinctive sense of what that right balance is for them, which is shaped by the type of community they grew up in. Maybe you were raised in a small town and find the transition to a multicultrual urban center too jarring, but the clear choice people are making these days, not just in the urban core but in suburbs and even small towns, is towards greater diversity. Among millennials , that trend includes a dramatic rise in mixed race individuals.
If that trend continues at its current pace in the U.S., you wont have to worry about racial disparities much longer, because there wont be any discernable races to distinguish among.

In sum, I get the sense that what really concerns you about less intelligent Blacks and clannish, non-egalitarian Asians is that you believe their value systems are to an extent irreconcilable with Northwestern European Whites like yourself. You cant imagine thriving in a check to jowl existence with groups whose ethical practices conflict with, dilute and devalue yours. That would indeed be a problem. But do genes code for ethics?

My hunch is that your own experience of the alienness of other races preceded and justified your embrace of the genetic explanation. — Joshs

lol, no, I'm an ex-socialist, and extremely high on the "openness" trait. If you met me without knowing me, I guarantee you I'd pass the "ant smell" test for a liberal. Personally I'm quite happy living with people of any race who are more or less intellectual and moral peers. But I recognize I'm a bit of an outlier in relation to my people - or any people.

This is the problem with the lines of argument that come from opposition to ethnonationalism and the Alt Right, they're often characterized by a reflexive tic that seems to want to instantly pathologize any manifestation of ethnic solidarity - which is handy for avoiding discourse, but not very helpful for improving the situation. But if you do that, if you pathologize ethnic solidarity tout court, then you'd have to also pathologize, for example, Jewish ethnic solidarity, which is exceptionally strong, or Black ethnic solidarity, or Chinese, Japanese, etc. On the other hand, it would be passing strange if only White ethnic solidarity were eeeebil to the point of inducing horripilation, and all the other forms just fine and dandy, no? That would require some sort of extraordinary evidence and explanation. ;)

That said, yes, some people on the Alt Right are inherently prejudiced at an instinctive, emotional level - obviously that gut-level reaction is an inheritance from times when people who looked very different were likely to carry novel diseases. But that's the same for all races and ethnic groups, they all have some percentage of innate bigots.

But we should thank our lucky stars that there are some people like that - effectively, they are like canaries in a coalmine. And to mix metaphors horribly, because of their innate prejudice, they're in a position to wake up the boiling frog, sleepily dreaming the abstract multicultural dream, before it's too late.

If you disagree with the statement I quoted, — Joshs

I wasn't quibbling with the fact of occasional greater variability within than between, I was disagreeing with the final implications usually drawn from that - i.e. that "We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations."

So the practical consequence of a genetically driven vs strictly culturally driven origin of social differences would be in how they dictate expectations concerning the capacity of particular ethnic groups to approach the type and level of political and intellectual functioning of other groups.
For instance, use of government incentives to encourage one group to catch up to another would appear pointless if the cause of the inequality was believed to be genetic. — Joshs

Yes, exactly. Race doesn't have any important implications for interpersonal interactions, as I've said (the classical liberal rule holds). But it does for policy, and the lower average IQ of Blacks tells us that beyond a certain point, it's a waste of time and money to try to level the playing field (although of course we ought to do as much as possible up to the point where compensatory and leveling policies are actually effective, which requires that we constantly monitor proposed policies against ensuing results). Ultimately, race realism and denial of the equality myth is the death knell for the utopian strand of the Left - which is why it's so vigorously resisted, of course, and why people like Gould feel it's their moral duty to fudge evidence and rationalize reality away.

But "genetically-driven" is a bit of a strawman. Nobody's suggesting ethnic purity tests. It's the same kind of red herring as "define White." There might be some situations where the law would have to draw an artificial line where boundaries are fuzzy in reality, but that's what the law has to do all the time, and where to draw such lines is always up for reasoned debate between the people duly responsible for making such decisions.

It was stiflingly narrow-minded, and I perceived more social friction there than in my Chicago neighborhood — Joshs

I can't speak to your personal experiences, but that's not my personal experience. I think you're probably also looking at the statistics re. Chicago through rose-tinted glasses; racially-motivated Black anti-White and anti-Asian violence is perhaps a bigger problem than you think. Again, the statistics are often fudged on this because the precious narrative has to be maintained, even if it's at the cost of human suffering, of crimes being miscategorized, not properly investigated, etc.

Also, I think that a lot of the animus against "narrow minded" White groups is the result of a long chain of Chinese Whispers (if you'll forgive the term :) ) arising ultimately from that pestiferous and long-debunked Frankfurt School piece of trash pseudo-science, The Authoritarian Personality, as reflected in decades of narrative conformity in academia, in movies, tv shows, etc., etc. It is, literally, a prejudice many of us have as a result of indoctrination, a prejudice that sensitive nerdy types in school are especially likely to glom onto. (I know that because it's the jock-hating stance I started off with.) The reality is that Whites are the most open minded and meritocratic race of all, and always have been, ever since the Indo-European habit was to allow individuals of a conquered people to rise in their ranks socially, based on merit - so open minded, in fact, that their brains have fallen out :) This relative innate open-mindedness and willingness to be fair, is what's been unfairly taken advantage of by various ethnic interest groups and pressure groups over the past few hundred years. No more. Or as Thor would say - "ENOUGH!" :D

I already admitted that it's fine for there to be some areas where there's mixing, and I often point that out to my fellow Alt Righters (and they usually agree - most of them really, really, REALLY don't care about outliers, exceptions and fringes, again, very few are asking for purity tests or mass deportations or mass revoking of citizenship). I agree that it's healthy to have some areas and districts like that. I think it's actually quite important for a society to have an "underbelly", a counterculture, where degeneracy and nonconformity can thrive. But it must be limited, the counterculture can't become the main culture, and the Left's attempt to flip things like that has resulted in a great deal of human suffering and social dislocation (higher crime among certain groups as a result of the breakdown of the family, increasing female unhappiness, increasing male suicide). Heck it's even genetically healthy that there be some degree of miscegenation at the fringes of an ethnic group - it keeps the larger gene pool on its toes. But again, it's all a question of degree and relativity. There can be a bit of mixing, but there also has to be an ethnic supermajority. Cool, bohemian districts in cities are not upscaleable as a model for society at large.

Again, in a form of quick and dirty summation, I'd say that liberalism had reason and general agreement on its side so long as it emphasized negative liberty and the rights of the individual qua individual (the right, for example, of gays to live their lives free of bullying and physical violence), but the Left long overshot the mark when it tried to dismantle the pillars of social stability that arise from softer forms of social sanction (e.g. people expressing their dislike of homosexuality, or their support of teenage abstinence). That's for people to work out among themselves (and words are wind if you're secure in your degeneracy - there's the test).

Re. statistics, etc., and what they might or might not show, here's an entry point for criticism of multiculturalism.

"I wasn't quibbling with the fact of occasional greater variability within than between, I was disagreeing with the final implications usually drawn from that - i.e. that "We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations."

My quote was from Richard Dawkins. Here's another from biologist AR Templeton:

"Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race."

From the journal Science:

"In the wake of the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s, genome pioneers and social scientists alike called for an end to the use of race as a variable in genetic research (1, 2). Unfortunately, by some measures, the use of race as a biological category has increased in the postgenomic age (3). Although inconsistent definition and use has been a chief problem with the race concept, it has historically been used as a taxonomic categorization based on common hereditary traits (such as skin color) to elucidate the relationship between our ancestry and our genes. We believe the use of biological concepts of race in human genetic research—so disputed and so mired in confusion—is problematic at best and harmful at worst. It is time for biologists to find a better way."

You havent given me any links to biologists who dispute the claim that "We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations(not just as individual opinion, but as showing a consensus)." Where is this scientific consensus you're assuming???

And you never answered the question: do genes code for ethics?
If homosexuals are degenerate, is this a genetic deficiency or a lifestyle choice? I never knew anyone who considered homosexuals degenerate who wasnt operating from a religious morality. Of course, the medical and psychiatric profession once upon a time labeled it as a pathology, but here was a hidden theological element working there,

" I'm still of the Feynman mindset. I'm a fan of Pinker, Dennett, Haidt, My overall metaphysical view has been for a few years now more or less Riccardo Manzotti's Process Externalism,"

You realize none of these people would agree with your interpretation of the biological findings on race, or support your arguments on ethnonationalism. Perhaps you don't understand their theories as well as you think you do. You're better off with Herbert Spencer.

Im not interested in pointing fingers, ,moralizing, accusing people of prejudice. I have a selfish aim in this issue.You could call it technological. I want to create a social 'machine', the ideal environment, that nurtures, stimulates and elevates my intellectual and creative capacities to the greatest extent possible. So what mix of people do I want to surround myself with to further this goal? What are the leading intellectual centers in the world and why? One would think that since the trajectory of cultural and technological leadership led from the mid east to the Mediterranean and onto Northwest Europe and the former Anglo colonies of Australia, Canada and America, it would be a simple matter of surrounding oneself by Anglo Saxons(and Jews, unless you think they are morally suspect due to genetic traits). But if you look at the English language , you'll notice that its the ultimate mutt language, a mixture of all kinds of sublanguages(latin, greek, indo-european). This reflects the fact that Anglo-Saxons are themselves a a European mutt people, kind of a northern version of the Jews.
So already, a complex intermixing of influences that can be unified in some way seems to be connected with creativity.
And within those Anglo countries, its the large cities with their increasing ethnic and racial mix that are hands down the most creative places(Sydney, London, NYC, Toronto). Arguably the most purely Anglo-Saxon region of the U.S., Appalachia , is also the most educationally and economically backward.

You were born into a culture whose open mindedness and creative attanments were a result not of purity, but its opposite, of its supreme muttness, its constant integrating into itself of outside factors. The same is true of biological evolution. Muttness is the key to adaptivity in biology, a constant self-overcoming via exaptation. Thats the meaning of Nietzsche's ubermensch. Purity is a deathnell for organisms. You had a free ride. You enjoyed the fruits of your culture's talents, but want to preserve it by doing the opposite of what made it thrive in the first place. That is likely to turn it into another Appalachia.


There is only one really workable formula for economic vitality these days, and its a globalist multiethnic one.
If youre a high tech corporation and you dont encourage a free flow of diversity, youre going to get outcompeted. And if you're a person who moves to a homogeneously white village, your community is going to be made economically irrelevant.
Interestingly, this demographic recipe is a mirror of what cognitive and tech researchers are discovering about how to make machines smarter. Its about self-organizing distributed nodal networks. Your ethnonational model I think is an inferior recipe for a hyper-competitive elite creative human or machine society. Look at those working at the leading edge of research into robotics and intelligent systems, and see what kind of social communities they choose to surround themselves with, and see what their views are on ethno-nationalism.

How are ethnonationalists supposed to compete if they dont include in their ranks anyone who contributes to the cutting edge of information technology?

"I'm an ex-socialist, and extremely high on the "openness" trait. If you met me without knowing me, I guarantee you I'd pass the "ant smell" test for a liberal. Personally I'm quite happy living with people of any race who are more or less intellectual and moral peers".

Dont take this personally, but you strike me as more timid than open. The ideas you like to emphasize are about avoiding and excluding, cloistering yourself rather than shattering inhibitions and venturing beyond the safety of the family. Sounds kind of boring to me. It s the kind of thing I've fled my whole life.

I dont't impugn your motives. I believe you just want what you think is best for all cultures, not just your own. But I think you and I live in different temporal worlds. Time moves more slowly in your world. Outside races-ethnicities appear more different in your world in ways that you cant fully determine, and don't seem to have any momentum toward assimilating into your culture's values even after a long period of time. So a genetic explanation is a metaphor for the slow rate of cultural intermixing among different groups in your world., and within your region it makes perfect sense to hold the political views that you do.
In my faster world, outside races-ethnicities don't seem that different from me in the first place. Partly that may be because, when growing up, in my neck of the woods all the kids were of mixed European ancestry(although there were few Asians and no Blacks). Billy was Irish-Bohemian. George was Italian-Scottish-German, Jane was Polish-Greek-Russian, Wews was Jewish-catholic, and so on. I dont remember any kid who was simply Anglo-Saxon, and these disparate backgrounds didnt seem to dictate any significant differences in values or behaviour among my peer group. I didnt know there was any difference between the English and the Irish until I was in my teens, because in my suburban melting pot experience English and Irish-Americans were indistinguishable by behavior. Their immigrant grandparents had a very different experience, restricted to partly ghettoized city neighborhoods where they were often treated as intellectually or morally inferior. It wasnt seen how they could ever assimilate into a protestant majority culture..
In my fast-paced urban neighborhood, the newer immigrants from places like Mexico, Asia and India pour in, and are embraced because the community of former immigrants doesnt see them as profoundly alien, and has learned from decades of past experience how quickly their children assimilate into an American urban culture that makes it easy for them to do so, unlike in your slower changing world where they remain outsiders.
In my fast world, the Chinese immigrants remain clannish, but their kids lose almost all traces of this behavior. In your slower world, the children remain like the parents. In my fast world, Black residents with education are attracted to the diversity and opportunity of my neighborhood, and
I cannot tell any significant difference in intelligence between them and myself.
. In your slow world Blacks on average remain at a noticeable disadvantage intellectually compared to Anglo Saxons, to such an extent that beyond an occasional Thomas Sowell, you can hardly think of more than a handful of blacks of your own acquaintance that you can stand face to face with and say that they are your intellectual equal.
Theres no question that slower worlds like yours need the kind of biological account and political approach that you are advocating for in order to retain their stability.
. My concern is that slower worlds have a habit of being made obsolete by faster worlds.
You may succeed in maintaining an acceptable level of insularity for your generation, but you may have a hard time stopping your kids from fleeing to multicultural urban centers where the economic opportunity is.