Why MacDonald is wrong about the Jews

Kevin MacDonald, whose work provides the main intellectual inspiration for contemporary anti-Semites (virtually every anti-Semite who has ever written to me uses MacDonald as his authority), explains all of Jewish history and culture in terms of an ethnicity-based “evolutionary” strategy by which the Jews have repeatedly gotten the best of gentiles and undermined their morale and their civilization. A correspondent, who is not Jewish, offers a cogent critique of Kevin MacDonald’s critique of the Jews.

The flaw in MacDonald is very simple:

Jewism is a weak, not a strong, strategy.

MacDonald is blinded by the post-WWII success of the Jews into imagining that their group strategy has produced favorable results over the historical long haul. It has not. For most of Jewish history, Jews have either been persecuted, exiled, or have lived in an unstable and indefensible volksland. Jewism has been a preternaturally strong strategy for conserving inherited cultural identity under adverse conditions, but it has not served the worldly self-interest of actual Jewish human beings.

Personally, I think the zenith of modern Jewry was about 1999, and Jews are already in decline again, as shown by the increasing decadence of Jewish youth in America and Israel, the decline of Jewish intellectual rigor visible in institutions they dominate, and the stupid decision of Jewish neocons to think they would help Israel by lobbying for the invasion of Iraq.

I believe history will record a brief Jewish Golden Age that occurred during these historical singularities:

1. The period between the emergence of an economy with complex intellectual demands, and the emergence of computers that can do it all, which will render Ashkenazic IQ economically irrelevant.

2. The period between the West’s abandonment of the ethnic authoritarianism that enabled it to build itself up, and the exhaustion of the social capital built up during this period.

Either way, MacDonald is very wrong.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2005 10:15 AM | Send