In my previous post I hinted toward the topic of anti-semitism without saying so explicitly. It was only vaguely relevant and hinting in such a manner is just fun to do. Here I’ll be focusing more explicitly on the topic.
Among the small group of people who’ve heard of Albert Jay Nock, many will know that he’s been accused of anti-semitism. Searching for the source of that belief I generally come across sites by fans of his defending him by pointing out his later statement that he really just dislikes “folks” and disliked Jews in so far as they were “folks”. What a charming fellow he was. I was expecting a sort of proto-Kevin MacDonald. After a period of googling I found that the Atlantic carried a reply from James Marshall entitled The Anti-Semitic Problem in America. From there I found Nock’s original article, and from my reading that would have actually been a more appropriate title than The Jewish Problem in America (part 2 here).
Part 1 is devoted to the issue of anti-semitism, especially its tendency to erupt among the lower classes during a crisis and carry along the reluctant elite and masters of the State (he probably would have enjoyed Thomas Sowell’s Are Jews Generic? as well as Amy Hua’s World on Fire). The second part is about how the Oriental and Occidental in a mirror image must view those who are not von unsere Leute to be “the Other” in modern academic jargon. Nock holds out little hope for assimilation to proceed as it did for Irish immigrants before him.
Here he strikes me as wrong for multiple reasons. His image of Irish immigrants seems to be based on a myth promulgated by the Irish themselves. Jews in America today are so thoroughly Occidentalized that if anyone referred to them as “Oriental” in the presence of representative Americans (not people fond of the word “sayanim”) he would receive bewildered looks. Nock is right about some of the same issues applying to other Orientals such as Armenians and Lebanese (as is thoroughly discussed in Sowell’s essay) but the former hardly seem too alien nowadays and the latter only to a significant degree if they are Muslim (which most in America are not). Nock worries about Nurenberg laws and ropes on lampposts arriving in America within his lifetime, but as folks like Steve Sailer point out the peasants have had much more than pitchforks for a long time here and there has never been a real pogrom against the Jews (although there was a little bit of that directed against the Italians). The peak of anti-Eastern European sentiment is generally attributed to or at least linked to the Second Ku Klux Klan, which the IRS forced to dissolve due to embezzlement in 1944 but had been declining since the 1925 conviction of Grand Dragon David Stephenson for rape and murder. Their anti-Jewish violence didn’t seem to extend much past the lynching of Leo Frank (who at least received a trial, however kangaroo-like, unlike most pogrom victims).
Given that Nock’s pessimism proved to be unwarranted, should that make me rethink my own? I think the two cases are different for a number of reasons. One is that the “generic” Oriental acts as a middle-man minority or “market-dominant” minority. That is not at all the case with our Mexican or more broadly Hispanic immigrants. They are distinctive for acting as agricultural neo-peasants, servants and (most worryingly) an urban lumpenproletariat underclass. There are certainly middle-class Hispanics, but overlap does not imply equality and I am focusing on what is distinctive enough to merit attention. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence in. Within a few generations the Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants assimilated to middle class norms. A recent study by Hispanic academics is entitled “Generations of Exclusion” precisely because a socioeconomic gap has remained pronounced over four or five generations. We even have case studies of where Jewish and Mexican immigrants arrived at the same place at the same time, with widely divergent results. Nock’s concern was with anti-semitic attitudes among the American mass-man, which have turned out to be largely irrelevant (though apparently Al Sharpton caused some problems in Crown Point a while back). If his concern was that Jews weren’t becoming Midwestern farmers like other German immigrants, he would be up a creek without a paddle.
On my part I should concede that immigrants to America do not seem to have the same proclivity for terrorism and rioting (which seems to have peaked in the U.S in the 70s) as Muslims in Europe do. However, while there may be reduced levels of social pathology the sheer size of the demographics could make it more serious. Jews make up only about 2% of the population today and I don’t think they were ever far more. That’s well below any sort of critical mass. In some decades the country could be majority-minority in which only a plurality of citizens identify with Huntington’s “settlers” and huge portions feel alienated. That’s heading into World on Fire territory.
Even without communal violence, a permanent underclass is an unpleasant thing to have. Our indigenous population on reservations is depressing enough despite its low numbers and removed location. We witness cycles of failed policies that spur other bad policies. After the Great Migration northward around WW2 there were public housing projects and urban renewal. Then there was white flight and bussing, with further flight from suburbs to exurbs and the Sun Belt. Now the residential patterns are reversing with gentrification and Section 8 housing. In response to increased crime rates voters look to authoritarian “law and order” politicians like Giuliani. Poor housing and lack of credit led to campaigns against redlining, and then Fannie Mae and ACORN teaming up to create the subprime bubble. Disparities in employment led to the ban on IQ tests in hiring, necessitating a college degree as a substitute. Everyone then needed one, so both colleges and high schools inflated their grades and the value of a degree dropped. The government spent more and more money to make college affordable, with the obvious result of colleges increasing their prices as long they could. Affirmative action was deemed an acceptable temporary remedy, but John Rosenberg can tell you how tenaceously enduring it is, which shouldn’t be surprising as the underlying problem it is supposed to solve doesn’t get solved. Educational interventions such as Head Start were shown to have no lasting effect on the scholastic gap, but politicians insist No Child must be Left Behind. That in turn necessitates that schools cheat on standardized tests. Parents want their children to go to “good schools” which it turns out just means “good students”, and vouchers threaten to ruin things for the lucky ones, so they will reliably oppose measures that would reduce the power of teacher’s unions and slow down the growth of the administrative bureaucracy. People also seek to live in “good neighborhoods” largely defined by “good schools”, and will use a host of zoning or environmental restrictions to keep others out and ensure those neighborhoods stay “good” and housing prices high. Neglecting to invest in anything but your house seems rational when there’s rampant inflation, and inflation is popular when the government and huge portions of the population are debtors. Discuss these issues candidly and receive the fate of Summers or Watson. Those hardheaded scientists are so irritating they seem needing gleichgeschalten.
It seems I’ve gotten carried away from the original topic. So I suppose the answer to Daniel Koffler’s question is no, the goyim don’t really care that much about the Chosen People.
UPDATE: I’m kicking myself for not linking to this from Steve Sailer tying up how Jewish fear of anti-semitism impedes our discourse on other issues. I’ve mentioned before that even some of the most mistaken ideologies have a grain of truth to them that permits them to thrive, and this is no exception. Human beings are prone to having an ingroup-outgroup bias that can manifest itself in some pretty violent ways. Ethnic/racial conflict is one of the most ugly kinds, as documented by people like Chua. That is in fact why I am so wary of the World on Fire scenario. I think the country is currently in a state where it could openly deal with such issues in an open and peaceful manner, but I also think our good fortune is a rare thing that could slip from our grasp unexpectedly.
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 1, 2008 at 2:55 am
What a post!
Can’t say I agree with everything here (it’s a little too uncritically accepting of mainstream history and mainstream dissent) but it’s great to see you trying to synthesize multiple areas of thought into this one post.
My opinion on Da Joos? Not all powerful, but certainly a top 10 achiever among mostly endogamous ethnic groups.
I’m interested in anglo-ashkenazis, a hybrid group that seems to have emerged sometime between the 19th century and post world war II (probably mostly post world war II). Also I’m interested in nontransparent tensions between jews and scots (scots were the “smart” pets of wasps prior to the twentieth century jewish mega-ascension, it seems to me).
August 1, 2008 at 5:54 am
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August 1, 2008 at 5:56 am
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August 1, 2008 at 6:50 am
And is there anything more infuriating than indifference? People would rather be loved than hated, but they’d rather be hated than invisible.
August 1, 2008 at 7:15 am
[…] in a post originally discussing the status of anti-semitism in America, diverges to discuss the nature and […]
August 1, 2008 at 7:33 am
My impression is that the relevant type of Scot finished assimilating and *became* wasps. This happens with Jews too, but more slowly.
August 1, 2008 at 11:13 am
Scots are predominately Protestant already, especially Presbyterian. In Northern Ireland they were English as far as the locals were concerned. In America the early Scots immigrants tended to live in Appalachia, with lots of other “border” English. Nowadays they tend just to call themselves “American”.
Things were different in England, though, I imagine. In the 19th century Sephardic Jews seem to have been more prevalent though. I think Ricardo, Disraeli and Judah Benjamin were all Sephardic.
August 1, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I would also be interested to here more specifically where HA dissents.
August 2, 2008 at 12:01 am
I think people try too hard for explaining people’s behavior as rational.
Yes, there’s a nominal ban on IQ tests, but people weren’t using them before. Do they use them in other countries? Bill Gates whines that he can’t use them; and probably he’s too much of a weirdo to get away with it, but the mere fact that he wants to use IQ tests makes him a weirdo.
College degrees didn’t replace IQ tests, since people weren’t using IQ tests before!
I think the GI bill is a much bigger deal here, but I don’t know how it kicked off a change in the status of college, especially not how it created a trend.
August 2, 2008 at 4:45 am
Douglas, I suspect those are good points. I also thought the IQ test nominal ban >>> college degree requirement increase was a little bit too neat and overreductionist.
Also, I think your point on scot=protestant is just taking advantage of poor standard nomenclature. WASA/E (Anglican/Episcopalian) is just a more cumbersome acronym, so it’s unused.
And by scots I’m talking about the homeland and diasporic scots, I’m not being American-centric here. There is plenty of scot endogamy and identity distinct from Anglosaxons and other white ethnicities. There’s a whole geographic region of the world called Scotland, for example, with its own parliament.
There’s some evidence I’ve read that after ashkenazis, scots have the 2nd highest IQ for a mostly endogamous ethnic group (although it’s a huge drop from Ashkenazi to Scot).
August 2, 2008 at 1:28 pm
HA,
was my complaint against the kind of thing you mean by “mainstream dissent”?
August 2, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Douglas,
I’m not aware if that’s part of a mainstream dissent narrative (that IQ band >>> college degree requirement), but that does have the ring of the mainstream dissent to it. I thought your complaint was more just a good sense skepticism of narratives that are a little too pat and overreductionist.
August 2, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I’d like to add what I think is an obvious but unstated point: that I suspect there’s an internally mostly endogamous subgroup of WASPs that has a higher IQ than Ashkenazis. Otherwise the international language of science, engineering, and finance would be Hebrew and the intellectual and finanacial elites of the world would be concentrated in New Israel. Just like the American IQ is much lower than the jewish American IQ, I suspect the WASP IQ is much lower than this WASP subgroup’s IQ, which is probably the highest of any mostly endogamous ethnicity by a considerable margin.
August 2, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Do they use them in other countries?
I don’t know.
Bill Gates whines that he can’t use them;
Publicly he doesn’t talk about IQ and instead pushes No Child Left Behindism. Supposedly in private he’s obsessed with IQ and the interviews his company gives out are proxies for such tests. Imperfect substitutes though.
since people weren’t using IQ tests before!
I don’t know if Griggs actually involved a standard issue IQ test, but it had disparate impact, and that was the important thing. Requiring a college degree is an acceptable way of screening. Other screens with disparate impact are not.
I think the GI bill is a much bigger deal here
Good point.
I’m not being American-centric
I usually am, to too great a degree. I think we see similar issues in other countries which Hitler dejudaized and generated their own underclass not ethnically distinct from the elites. Sailer claims here that our educational system is a sort of reverse of what they have in Europe, but I should probably have more information on Europe to say anything with confidence.
There’s a whole geographic region of the world called Scotland, for example, with its own parliament
That brings to mind the return of relative backwardness among the Scots compared to the English. The Republic of Ireland is also now outperforming Northern Ireland and the UK economically. We can’t attribute this to changes in IQ. Institutional differences explain some of Ireland’s shift, but Scotland is still under British law.
that I suspect there’s an internally mostly endogamous subgroup of WASPs that has a higher IQ than Ashkenazis
I haven’t heard any evidence for that, but they are a much bigger group.
Otherwise the international language of science, engineering, and finance would be Hebrew
Most Jews don’t speak Hebrew and I think most Israelis speak other European languages. I think Ashkenazis are also a minority or at least a plurality within Israel.
the intellectual and finanacial elites of the world would be concentrated in New Israel
I think there are more Jews in America than Israel, and those Jews are also more Ashkenazic. New York and London also benefit from path dependence and scale. A patch in the Middle East surrounded by Muslims also strikes me as a precarious position!
I would like to hear some elaboration on this WASP subgroup.
August 2, 2008 at 7:28 pm
In 1969, shortly after being discharged from the US Army, I took a Wonderlic test (one of two tests cited in Griggs) before being hired by the US Steel Corporation. Way back in those days US Steel was just behind the Big Three(that’s US auto companies for the younguns) in terms of size.
August 2, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I think we see similar issues in other countries which Hitler dejudaized and generated their own underclass not ethnically distinct from the elites.
Your link is about the UK white working class. The English and Scottish working and under classes seem to revel in belligerent drunkenness; in the US the broader society has created moral and legal sanctions that have greatly reduced such behavior among the comparable socio-ethnic population in the US.
August 3, 2008 at 10:32 pm
English as the world language is a recent development. It’s largely just because the US is so big. Jews were not involved in science much until the early 20th century in Germany. They fled to the US and made it big in science. Also, the world wars damaged science in France and Germany which had provided competing languages until then.
It is a little odd that the Royal Society, which I think as the center of science, didn’t make English the dominate language of science much earlier.
It seems difficult to isolate an endogamous population in England. It’s striking the way they’d let new businessmen into the upper ranks.
HA, you’re too obsessed with IQ as a unitary measure. from the consilliance thread: Nixon is the only president I know who got there by being smart. (Bill) Clinton & Obama are a lot smarter than Reagan, but all three are about charisma.
If Scots and Jews were “smart pets” of Wasps, it wasn’t because the Wasps were smarter, but the opposite, like how W needed Rove to plan things for him. If you can harness others’ intelligence, that may be better than having your own, but it’s not a measure of intelligence!
August 3, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Griggs was partly about high school degrees. As far as I can tell, it banned employers from requiring them for hiring (without demonstrating that it matters), yet no one cares about this part of Griggs.
Lots of employers ask about SATs, but I don’t think they actually make much use of them; some ask about GPA. Maybe these people are exposing themselves to lawsuits, but you can’t complain that Griggs is stopping them.
I can’t tell if Duke Power company required either a diploma or a high score or if it required both; the text of the decision is inconsistent.
August 3, 2008 at 11:51 pm
H.A.: “I suspect there’s an internally mostly endogamous subgroup of WASPs that has a higher IQ than Ashkenazis. Otherwise the international language of science, engineering, and finance would be Hebrew and the intellectual and finanacial elites of the world would be concentrated in New Israel.”
The revival of Hebrew as anything other than a liturgical language is barely a century old.
Britain has aristocratic bloodlines and no doubt some of them are high-IQ.
August 4, 2008 at 12:30 am
I remember once reading that Lord Dunsany was the only aristocrat that was also a great literary figure. There are certainly a lot of top-notch Jewish writers though.
August 4, 2008 at 3:30 am
Douglas,
I’m not really obsessed with IQ as a measure of intelligence. I recognize its apparent weakneses, and a 2008 understanding of the brain recognizes that successful outcomes are the product of a kludge of relatively optimized brain structures that affect things as diverse as motivation, attention, and sociability. Abstract reasoning aptitudy (unfortunately to many of the inhabitants of TGGP’s comment threads) doesn’t get one too far by itself in our reality. You’re reminder is useful in that it should be regularly made in these discussions.
The truth is I use IQ because it’s short and it’s a commonly understood referrant. But I hope this makes my larger view on intelligence clear (in that it’s more narrow than an IQ overreductionist).
August 4, 2008 at 11:41 am
There is a lot of what might be called “Brigadoonery” about the Scots. This is mostly no older than the early nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott could well be credited with originating it, and it has been maintained by an interesting variety of characters since, from romanticising aristocrats like the late Lord Lyon, Thomas Innes of Learney and Sir Iain Moncreiff of that Ilk; the left-leaning Scottish National Party; and in the U.S. mainly by Southerners, from Thomas Dixon (“The Clansman”) to Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.).
While it is not disputable that legally and jurisdictionally Scotland is a distinct country. it is much harder to maintain that the Scots are genealogically or genetically distinct from the English. The stereotypical Scot is the kilted, Gaelic-speaking highlander, yet the majority of Scots are from the lowlands, and culturally, linguistically, and ethnically differ little from their counterparts in the north of England. Lowland Scots is a dialect of English. St. Margaret of Scotland, the queen of Malcolm Canmure (the Malcolm of “Macbeth”) was an Anglo-Saxon, the niece of Edward the Confessor. Marriages between Scottish and English gentry and nobility were frequent. Norse and Danish elements are found in Scottish genealogies as they are in English ones. Although there was no Norman Conquest of Scotland, much of the Scottish gentry and nobility has Norman ancestry (e.g., Sinclair). There is an element from the low countries (e.g., Fleming). The current chief of Clan Mackay holds a Dutch title, that of baron van Ophemert. To summarize, from an ethnic standpoint, the Scots are much the same mix of Celt, Saxon, Scandinavian, French and Burgundian as are the English.
The other, and older stereotype of the Scots – that of the impecunious and ambitious adventurer – has been with us since James VI succeeded to the English throne as James I, and brought with him from Scotland a retinue of acquisitive and opportunistic courtiers. Scotland historically educated its people well; James V had decreed that the sons of all tenants-in-chief of the crown should go to university, and until very recently the overall standards of the Scottish educational system were better than those of the English (New Labour have let both go to hell). It was the poverty of their home, and their preparedness to do better than they could there, that drove these Scots to make their fortunes furth of Scotland – not, I think, anything racially distinct about them.
August 4, 2008 at 6:44 pm
HA, I phrased that very badly. I should have said “intelligence as a unitary measure.” That probably wouldn’t have been clear, but at least it would have been what I meant.
I think we should use intelligence and IQ synonymously. You seem to use “intelligence” to mean any mental trait that contributes to success. While we should definitely not focus just on IQ, I don’t want to use the word intelligence too broadly. Maybe I’m just confabulating reasons, but here’s one: “intelligence” gives the idea more of a sense of unity and coherence than it has. I do think that this convention will be clearer for people who haven’t seen it being set.
But I could just be confused; maybe you’re always talking about non-transparent IQ. But we need this exchange for me to tell what you’re claiming about, say, MBAs.
August 4, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Yes, I think being good-looking or not having a stutter is a great aid to success but should not be conflated with intelligence (even if it may be correlated with it).
August 5, 2008 at 4:06 am
TGGP, I’m not sure about that. I think being good-looking and not having a stutter could be outcomes (to a degree) that are cues of intelligence, like having a high test score on one’s record or accumulating wealth.
August 7, 2008 at 11:08 am
Apropos of comment 20: whomever wrote that Lord Dunsany was the only aristocrat that was also a great literary figure is either construing “aristocrat” or “literary figure” too narrowly or is just plain ignorant. How about Byron, Tennyson, or Macaulay? All were peers. Are poets and historians not “literary figures”?
August 12, 2008 at 4:48 pm
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