Note: In biology, “adaptive” means (very precisely) promoting the survival and reproduction of an organism’s genes. “Natural selection” is the logical and empirical process whereby forces of nature affect the survival and reproduction of some genes over others. The terms, “natural selection” and “selection pressures” (particular causes of selection) help one think clearly.

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the twentieth Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral — confusing “what is” with “what should be.” It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology, meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon, the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the “fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, Might Is Right . . . , (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of ninteenth-century Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about genes or modern molecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is . . . part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life” (p. 49).

“Ragnar Redbeard” was a pen name, but whoever he was, he was an extremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid literary style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to find both style and content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me more than once that I was reading a satire, one suitably embellished by esoteric Biblical references and Victorian phraseology: a worthy companion to Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyone in the twenty-first century look twice at such a book? One reason would be the emergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics (OK, communism is out, but aren’t there big problems with unregulated market economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party and “true conservatives”?), human nature (we don’t all have the same IQ?), or race relations (diversity is not a utopia?). Much of this rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.

Some have even concluded late in their lives that they’ve been the butt of a big ideological con game. They eventually realize that humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all “equal” except in the restricted sense of each person theoretically having one vote (“one idiot, one vote”). And is “democracy” really all that sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on utopias and now simply want to obtain or defend a half-decent way of life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened if not already lost — given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedowns, the dumbing down of schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is “right” or “good” turned up-side-down, maybe we should re-examine “Social Darwinism” too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives as an unending history of horrible treatment meted out by humans on their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on “might” in the normal course of human affairs. He probably commits one empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in Chapter IV: While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood for Passover rituals is a myth, he accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human cannibalism — perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural selection are not always so horribly bloody. Quite right. However, that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis Khan whose Y chromosome has been found by geneticists to be so widespread across Asia due to the fact that the leaders of the Mongol armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.

Actually, RR may be advocating “power” more than bloody battles, thus helpfully broadening the concept of might. No one has to tell us that power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay attention. This issue is at the heart of a recent debate between Eric P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous decline of the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United States.

RR is quite successful in demonstrating the ubiquity of power relations, and then is surprisingly convincing in his argument that striving for power is not only an essential and inevitable feature of life but is highly desirable as a course of action for any man wanting to make a success of his life (RR seems to be addressing primarily males.)

About equality: one of RR’s main messages is that there is no such thing, in any practical sense, and never will be; the idea of “equal rights” is nonsensical. Instead, people vary in their abilities and other characteristics all over the lot. People have always been and always will be in a state of competition; so that the only thing to do, really, is to strive to compete as well as one can and forget about ever being treated equally. The only way to be treated as one would like is to have the power to enforce such treatment.

An obvious implication for Whites in the West is that anyone happily waiting for other races and ethnies to treat us “equally” or even well, once they take over (very soon) as majorities in the US and Europe, is an illusion. With the votes they will simply run our countries as they see fit and to hell with us.

STOP!! Devout Christians will find the next paragraphs offensive! Read at your own risk!

RR provides an extraordinarily articulate, and to me hilarious, critique of Jesus Christ and Christianity. Might-makes-right being his number one rule, he has nothing but contempt for Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and celebration of the weak, the poor, the miserable. RR values the courageous, the powerful, the ruthless. Why in the world would any sane person value, desire, or want to emulate what Christ recommended?

[W]e must either abandon our reason or abandon Christ…All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces. . . . He praises “the humble” and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures and damns the successful. All that is noble he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind and urges us to live artificial lives . . . he advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult, contumely [outrage], indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. . . . this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive suffering. (p. 7)

Anyone who wonders if Christianity is fundamentally a malevolent Jewish stratagem for emasculating goyim will find this treatise exhilarating. Everything within the Christian church seems designed simply to fleece the flock:

The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful? How divinely glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepard, who leadeth his lambs ‘to green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by.’ . . . For two thousand years or so, his fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with commendable diligence — for the shearing-shed and the butchers-block.” (p. 14)

With RR, not even the “golden rule” goes unscathed — on the grounds that it makes no sense to follow it given that no one else does. Shades of the alternative “Golden Rule”: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

The theme extends to practical politics where “deceitful Ideals are cunningly woven by dexterous political spiders, to capture and exploit swarms of human flies” (p. 18). He follows with a searing analysis of America’s “Declaration of Independence” which he says begins with “an unctuous falsehood, a black, degrading, self-evident lie — a lie which no one could possibly believe but a born fool. With insolent effrontery it brazenly proclaims as ‘a self-evident truth’ that ‘all men are created equal’ and that they are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with certain inalienable rights’” (p. 19). The subsequent . . . “democracy” as practiced by Americans is viewed as an elaborate con game, a view that should strike a chord after the recent bank bailouts and the Iraq war.

We must then ask ourselves: Is the extreme altruism advocated by Christianity at all responsible for the West “giving away the farm”? Think about Teddy Kennedy and his Jewish associates who opened up America to immigration from the whole world.

RR’s attack on Christianity and “equality” of course begs the question of alternatives. As a friend recently remarked:

While many people (in our movement and without) sneer at what they see as an emotional crutch for weaklings, the fact remains that the birthrate is closely correlated with a hopeful, optimistic view of life. No society has ever been able to function without a religion. And it is most unlikely that anyone will be able to create a religionless society in the future.

If that is true, and this writer agrees, a major contribution to the survival of our people, the indigenous people of the British Isles and Europe including those who migrated to the Western Hemisphere, would be to develop a religious alternative to Christianity. Such a religion would regard the survival of our people as its primary sacred goal and hopefully would be more consistent with scientific knowledge. It would establish communities of the like-minded of common ethny (as Jews have done). It would develop either new rituals or utilize those imagined as originating in pagan or Druidic times. Perhaps, as a friend suggests, some existing Christian communities, especially those whose main goal is “community,” could be gradually “retro-fitted” along these lines. Keep the harmless features of Christianity, especially the European cultural details, but throw out or simply ignore everything that RR is making fun of.

What then do we now make of the main issue raised by MIR, the relationship between “what is and what ought”? RR seems to be saying that “what is” (e.g., human ruthlessness) determines directly “what ought.”

First, we should note that evolutionary biologists/psychologists have in recent years argued strongly that our values and morals do originate in aspects of human nature (what is) that evolved biologically. Actually, David Hume pretty much figured this out back in the eighteenth century. This would be the first “link” — between brain mechanisms (emotions, motives) that are adaptive and what a person feels is the right thing to do even if the feeling of right is logically distinguishable from what “really” is right.

That distinction is the basis for the “naturalistic fallacy” critique of Social Darwinism. Oliver Curry has well reviewed why this fallacy is, itself, a fallacy: The logical distinction between “is” and “ought” does not detract from the empirical relationship between what is adaptive and what a person normally values.

We must ask, then, if there is anything more important to us than our own survival and that of our close relatives. If there isn’t, then how could we do anything more ethical or morally correct than doing whatever is adaptive for us and ours? For us, whatever is adaptive should be morally correct, no?

But wait! Morally correct for whom? Isn’t there a flaw here in the anti-Social Darwinists’ reasoning? They have in mind a morality that not only applies to everyone on the planet but a morality of which the consequences are beneficial to all of humanity, not just ourselves and relatively close kin. Sounds like a corollary of Christianity! (Unless Jesus intended that his principles apply only to relations among fellow Jews.)

Such a moral principle necessarily stands outside of human evolution in the sense that, according to all the widely accepted theory in evolutionary biology, such a moral principle could not have evolved as an adaptive trait of individuals. A moral principle is certainly not a measurable physical force like gravity, permeating everything. It exists only within a person’s brain.

This does not mean that people could not act according to such principles. But it would mean that doing so would not automatically “feel good” in the same way that helping oneself or helping one’s family feels good. With enough propaganda, of course, nearly anything is possible. But that’s what it is: Propaganda.

This is probably what’s behind the controversy over government-run health care in the US: For most Whites, it doesn’t feel good to support a program where they would pay disproportionately for medical care for the hordes of non-Whites who now populate the country — even if they could be convinced it was good for the country as a whole.

A universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity also runs into problems because of individual differences:

1) Sociopaths/psychopaths apparently lack normal moral feelings/values. They feel no guilt, so nothing like a universal moral imperative to help humanity there.

2) The fact that, say, the desire for revenge is found throughout the world as a human universal, would be consistent with it being adaptive. But individuals will still vary in the strength of that desire which is subject to the natural selection common to all biological variables.

Finally, a universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity fails to deal adequately with conflicts of interest. Individuals are often in competition because of different interests: Hunters feel morally justified in shooting a deer to eat. The deer, were he capable of such thought, would feel differently about being shot. No common morality there. Same logic within our species. What seems morally justified to the Hatfields will not be to the McCoys.

So there would not seem to be a universal moral code by which everyone would agree on the same ethical course of action in a particular circumstance. Bye, bye Christianity.

So RR may have been onto something in taking his strongly Social Darwinist position. His book’s heuristic value lies in the hard-nosed, un-blinking acknowledgement that life is tough; one had better get used to it, get prepared for it early in life, appreciate the warriors among us and never go “soft” (except, as RR says, around close family members and close friends!) If you cease being prepared, you’ll get run over by those who are tougher and more ruthless.

MIR is not advocating indiscriminate homicide, since the real focus of the game, evident by the end of the book, is simply “power”, which can be obtained in myriad ways. A further caution would be that what has been adaptive in the past may not be so in the future since relevant selection pressures may change. What is adaptive in one situation may not be so in another.

Long term, the unanticipated consequences may be the most important. Biologically, it might seem adaptive to simply slaughter your enemy. But as Daly and Wilson once suggested, whether one adheres to a policy of “an eye for an eye” or a “massacre” should depend on whether an attempted massacre of one’s enemy seems likely to be total. If they don’t all get killed, the survivors may have a long memory and your own survival and reproduction may suffer.

Here one might reflect on the Nazis’ “final solution” that ended well before completion: The surviving Jews have displayed great energy in obtaining reparations and hunting down escaped Nazis. The “Empire Strikes Back” is the situation facing the British, as descendents of once conquered peoples have non-violently emigrated to the U.K. Similarly, Mexicans are subjecting the American Southwest to a “reconquista” by presenting themselves as a useful labor force and congenial nannies.

There is a lesson in MIR, then, for anyone attempting to protect his family or his nation or a collection of allied nations, depending on which level one’s adversary is targeting. For example, Whites in America and Europe today are generally under threat. The lesson would be to gain power, economic as well as territorial, establish enclaves wherever convenient but eventually, as the late Sam Francis declared, re-conquer the whole of one’s country. A few Christians may balk at this, but encourage them to be hypocrites.

A slogan recently seen on a T-shirt, “Fighting Solves Everything”, may be an oversimplification. But the attitude is a good one. Inculcate it in your children.

MIR is available for only $10.00 from the Occidental Press. Get it for your friends and relatives.

Kevin MacDonald

Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator that we have. His writings on the death of the West, immigration, the neocon influence in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with his recent op-ed “Making a monkey out of Darwin.” The article and the book it relies on, by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of Creationist ideas claiming that Darwinism has no scientific basis and that it has led to great evil. I have discussed some of these issues in a previous article on Ben Stein’s movie Expelled which links Darwinism to the Holocaust and represents the scientific community of evolutionists as an oppressive Inquisition-like establishment bent on squelching heresy (obviously far more true of the $PLC and the ADL).

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck’s idea that people can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact opposite of Darwin’s view that the basic mechanism of evolution is natural selection — the selective retention of genetic variants because they result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet Union — the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature and produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko applied this to agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their children would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a golden age where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like greed, envy, and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently reasonable to simply exterminate those who didn’t get with the program and who clung to their pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the Lamarckians in the Soviet Union rationalized the murder of many millions of their fellow citizens in the name of creating the new Soviet man. Read the rest of the article.

Richard Lynn

When it comes to population, quality matters more than quantity.  While educated Westerners never tire of sprinkling their conversations with the word “overpopulation,” voicing concern about population worth is taboo.  Put it this way: you have to spend the rest of your life in a city filled with Nigerians or Japanese.  You can either pick the ethnic makeup or the amount of people in the city.  Which would you choose?  As it’s settled that genes influence character and intelligence, could these traits be declining in some or all populations?  Has it to some extent?  Anecdotes exist about single educated women and fertile welfare queens, but hard data is needed.

While support for eugenics has been around since the time of Plato, the first person to worry about genetic deterioration was French physician Benedict August Morel.  He’s an obscure figure today and much better known is the more important Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883.  He thought that more genes for lower intelligence and poor character were concentrated in the lower classes, whose higher fertility would lead to a decline in genetic quality.  Galton spent his life working to reverse the trend.  He eventually convinced Darwin himself of the danger.  Biologist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote:

In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive.

It wasn’t until 1974 that Nobel prize winning physicist William Shockley called the process dysgenics.  Darwin went on to despair over the excessive breeding of “the scum.”  Data has always been needed on whether his fears had been justified.  Richard Lynn brings together studies and data from the last 200 years dealing with the connection between fertility and intelligence/socioeconomic status from all over the world.  How afraid should we be?

Selection throughout Time

The conditions that hunter-gatherers lived in insured an upkeep of genetic quality.  Usually there was a chief who had to have a certain amount of intelligence to acquire and maintain his position.  He had the most access to females, there would be relatively high ranking men who had one wife and many of the unfit never bred.  Mutations that popped up which adversely affected health would be weeded out.  Early nation-states continued with polygamy.

With Western man’s transition to civilization selection was weakened but not eliminated.  The higher social classes enjoyed better nutrition so had better health and children more likely to survive into adulthood.  Christianity struck a blow against the Western gene pool by enforcing celibacy among the priesthood but probably more than made up for it by prohibitions against adultery.  Most who have children out of wed-lock then and now have/had lower intelligence and less self-control.  Overall, the years 1500-1800 were good for Europe’s gene pool.  In England from 1620-1624 the middle classes reported 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class.  Part of the reason why is life expectancy.  In Berlin from 1710-1799 the average life expectancy for the upper class was 29.8 years compared to 20.3 for the lower class.  The numbers for Geneva, Rouen and Neuruppin in the 18th century are similarly tilted towards the former.  This didn’t mean that everybody died when they were 20-30 years old but that more of the lower classes were dying in childhood before they could mate.

Lynn understands that for these numbers to mean anything it would have to be shown that there was social mobility.  If everybody was stuck in their own class with no opportunity to rise or fall then we would expect different social classes to be similar and not worry about differences in fertility.  Pitrim Sorokin looked at a wide range of societies and found that there has never been one with no social mobility at all.  The closest thing has been the caste system in India, but even these classes weren’t absolutely closed.  Economist historian S.J. Payling concluded that there was significant social mobility in Europe from at least the 14th century on.

Natural Selection Breaks Down: Health and Intelligence

Mutations occasionally pop up in any population.  Since the vast majority are adverse, stable fertility for an entire population still means deterioration.  The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit.  The results of the slacking of selection in our modern world is apparent in disease.  Today, almost 1% of children born have a mutation for a common genetic disorder.  Due to carriers of bad genes surviving and new mutations, it’s estimated that the rates of hemophilia, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria are increasing every generation by 26%, 120%, and 300% respectively.  Humanity requires that we save children that can be saved but breeding for those with diseased genes needs to be restricted.  Lynn hints that better genetic screening and selective abortion can offset some of the consequences of modern medicine.

American psychologist Theodore Lentz was the first to devise a method for finding the relationship between intelligence and fertility.  He tested the IQs of children and found out how many siblings they had.  Assuming that children have the same IQ as their parents, if those with lower IQs had more brothers and sisters than children with high IQs then it could be determined that dysgenics is happening.  In 1927 Lentz calculated an IQ drop of 4 points per generation.  Calculations in Britain found a drop of about 2 points per generation. These surveys didn’t include the childless but since they are disproportionately those with higher IQs the studies actually underestimate the extent of dysgenic fertility.  Reviewing various studies and using findings from twin and adoption cases showing that IQ is 82% heritable, Lynn calculates a genotypic IQ decline of 5 points in Britain from 1890-1980.  In the US he calculates a drop of 2.5 IQ points for whites and 6.2 for blacks over three generations.  Interestingly, women are shown to universally have more dysgenic fertility than men.  This is partly because low IQ men probably have a harder time finding mates than low IQ women.

The Fall of Greece

Greece is a particularly interesting example.  Papavassiliou (1954) looked at IQ, socioeconomic status and fertitlity for men and came up with the following results.

Intelligence and Fertility in Greece, 1950s

Socioeconomic status      N         Mean IQ               N of Children

Professional 41              117.2                1.78

Skilled Workers 80              100.9                2.66

Semiskilled 27                91.0                4.00

Unskilled 67                 82.2                5.56

My calculations give an IQ of 96.9 for the parent generation and an IQ drop of 4.9.  Using a heritability of .82 for IQ puts the IQ of the children’s generation at 92.9 (IQ of parent generation – .82 x 4.9) .  Lynn has found elsewhere that the IQ of Greece is 95. This low (for Europe) figure is surprising considering the country’s historical accomplishments.  Papavassiliou’s data may solve the puzzle.

Does the Flynn Effect Disprove Eugenics?

While science has shown that traits for IQ and socioeconomic status are heritable and those with poor genes are outbreeding those with good genes, actual performance on IQ tests in the industrialized world has risen over the last century.  How can this be?  This seeming paradox is called the Flynn effect, after the scientist who estimated IQ gains of about 3-4 points per decade over the 20th century.

We can rule out the effect of increased familiarity with written tests or better education because these gains are present in children as young as two years old.  It is doubtful that it is due to increased stimulation because adoption studies show that the effect of shared environment is negligible; two biologically unrelated people raised in the same house are no more alike than any two random strangers.  Lynn’s explanation is that the Flynn effect is due to better nutrition.  This seems like the best explanation, as over the same time period height and brain size have increased by one standard deviation: the same as the increase in IQ.

So while genotypic intelligence, which can be seen as underlying genetic quality, has decreased, actual performance, phenotypic intelligence, has seen an increase.  This increase can’t last forever and the evidence shows that in the developed world, with even the poorest suffering from obesity, the Flynn effect has hit its ceiling.  We can now expect a decrease in observed intelligence in the developed even discounting low IQ third world immigration.

The Case of Character

Francis Galton and the early eugenicists weren’t only concerned with the decline in intelligence and health but what they called character: a moral sense, ability to delay gratification and work towards long term goals and sense of duty.  Modern psychologists call this conscientiousness and Lynn gives a working estimate for it being 66% heritable.  The news here is even worse than the data on intelligence.

Looking at criminals and psychopaths and their number of siblings yields a decline in consciousness that is twice the rate of the decline in intelligence.  This has had real life consequences

The straightforward prediction is that the high fertility of criminals has led to an increase in the number of genes in the population responsible for crime and this will show up in increasing crime rates.  These increasing crime rates have certainly occurred in most of the economically developed nations during the second half of the twentieth century.  In the United States, crime rates approximately tripled between 1960 and 1990; in Britain they quadrupled, and similar increases have occurred in many other countries.

Rates of out-of-wedlock births tell a similar story.  Western populations are morally worse than ever and we can expect the modern welfare state to continue to accelerate the decline.  Unfortunately, most social scientists and policy makers are too steeped in the environmentalist dogma to deal with these problems.

Does the Universality of the Problem Mean It’s Hopeless?

While there are no direct studies for IQ and fertility in the third world we can check to see how socioeconomic status and education, both correlated with IQ, relate to number of children.  Lynn calls the birth rate of the lowest class over the birth rate of the highest class the dysgenic ratio.  For example, if those in the lowest class have 3 children per woman and the higher class have 2, the dysgenic ratio is 3/2 = 1.5.  Anything over 1 indicates dysgenic fertility and anything under 1 indicates eugenic fertility.  While a number over 2 is high for modern Western nations, ratios have been calculated at 3.1 for Columbia, 2.6 for Guatemala, 2.7 for Mexico and 3.1 for Brazil.  Muslim and African countries have lower ratios, but only because even the highest classes have  large numbers of children.  In a worldwide survey the only exceptions are Bangladesh, Fiji and Indonesia who have ratios of 1.01, 0.93, and 0.86 respectively.  The developing world can be expected to remain “developing” indefinitely.

So dysgenic fertility is found everywhere: among rich and poor and every race.  Does that mean it’s hopeless?  We won’t know until we at least acknowledge and try to deal with the problem.  Communism once controlled half the planet and today its equivalent is globalization and the supposed triumph of liberal democracy.  While communists can say that true communism “has never been tried” and continue to be liberals, the legacy of Nazism poisons the eugenics movement.  Of course, blaming the ideas behind eugenics for the crimes of the Nazis is as silly as blaming the ideology of the welfare state for Soviet labor camps.  So there is no rational reason why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.  While the facts of differential fertility may discomfort our feminized elites we must never stop repeating that the cost of doing nothing is the end of civilization.  There’s no virtue in ignoring that.

Richard Hoste runs the website HBD Books.