Are whites too individualistic to survive?

Steve Sailer follows up his critique of white nationalism, which I criticized earlier, with a further argument that goes to the heart of the white Western crisis. On one hand, Sailer writes, white racialists such as Jared Taylor want whites to behave as a distinct ethnocultural group, following their distinct, white-Western, inclinations. But on the other hand, those inclinations, over history, have been much more individualist than those of other racial/ethnic/religious groupings. For example, whites since the 13th century have demanded and exercised the freedom to marry whom they will, something that is prohibited in serious ethnic cultures. If whites can marry whom they will, including people outside the ethnic or racial group, how can the white race survive?

I don’t dismiss Sailer’s argument. It is entirely possible that the white race, as a bright fellow said to me years ago, is like a computer loaded with software that is programmed to destroy its own hardware, that is, that whites have tendencies toward individualism and libertarianism that doom the white race as a race.

But Sailer’s argument is not the last word. For one thing, Sailer seems to be assuming that the ultra-liberated, ultra-individualist culture of the modern West is the West, period. In fact, this liberated Western society is the product of rampant modernity and liberalism, which has weakened and canceled traditional morality, religion, national consciousness, and racial consciousness, in short, all the things that made our civilization possible. Without those things, we become nothing but atomistic, yuppified consumers incapable of maintaining our historic culture. But the whole point of traditionalism is not to accept modernity as the final word but to resist it, to restore our lost values and traditions, to return to the truths we have rejected.

Second, freedom of marriage only becomes a threat to the survival of an ethnic people when other ethnic peoples are living in the same country in conditions of complete individual freedom. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, there were very few non-whites in America other than blacks. Given the strong social taboos and (in some states up to the 1960s) laws forbidding black-white intermarriage, the freedom to marry (limited by the social and legal prohibition on black-white intermarriage) did not threaten white solidarity and survival. But once the society became highly multiracial, then, given our individualism, intermarriage naturally began to occur.

Just as traditionalism seeks to restore traditional morality, which would lessen extreme individualism, it also seeks to restore national and racial consciousness, which would (1) result in a total reversal of our current immigration policies, halting the browning of America, and (2) lessen the tendency toward racial intermarriage.

So my short answer to Steve Sailer is: if we assume that the existing, hyper-liberal American culture is the only culture we can have, then you’re right, the white race will not be willing or able to preserve itself. But if we look beyond our present, demented culture to a restored traditionalism, then the survival of our culture, nation, race, and civilization becomes possible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 12, 2005 02:21 PM | Send