Is There a Genetic Component to Culture?
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, clearly views himself as a highly intelligent and articulate member of the Enlightened Class. He mocks people with crude “reptilian brains” who are stupid enough to care for primitive and unenlightened concepts such as preserving your culture and, yes, your ethnic group.
He’s particularly appalled by the almost Nazi notion that there might be a genetic component to culture, which would imply that one population group cannot be totally replaced with another and produce the same result. This is an insult to the currently accepted view that there is no such thing as a nation or a culture, that everything is a mix in a state of constant fluidity.
Obviously, one could not make the same claim in the hard sciences, because one would then quickly be laughed out of the room. Yet in some of the social sciences this assertion is currently considered acceptable, even laudable. Nobody in physics or chemistry would suggest that all liquids are equal, or that particles are socially constructed. For instance, water, H2O, is essential to all known complex life forms on our planet. Yet change a single atom and the molecule becomes hydrogen sulfide, H2S, which stinks and is very poisonous.
Needless to say, human societies are vastly more complex than chemical compounds, but sometimes changing a few basic ingredients among humans — or even just one central one — can produce strikingly different results. Can you really replace the traditional English population with Pakistanis, the French with Africans, the Dutch with Moroccans or the Germans with Turks within a few short years and expect the same end result?
Merely asking this question makes you very nearly a pariah in polite Western society today, which indicates exactly how far in the direction of a colorblind, universal Idea Nation the self-appointed Enlightened Class has pushed the West. But is this situation sustainable?
If you believe Professor Eriksen and his counterparts all over the Western world, it doesn’t matter if Europeans are genetically replaced by others, or that Europe could in the future look like an extension of Africa or the Middle East. Color is just a word, we are all part of the same human race and “There are more important things to worry about than the future of the white race. Such as the European Enlightenment values of humanity, brotherhood, tolerance and optimism!”
Yes, but why were these values the unique products of European societies in the first place? And why have they frequently proven very hard to transplant to many other regions?
And why did North America go from being a backward region of a backward continent in global terms to an international powerhouse after it became a demographic and cultural extension of northwestern Europe?
Does Mr. Eriksen truly believe, as Jared Diamond says, that the result would have been the same had the region been settled by Bantus, or Afghans, or Hmong people?
Are we really willing to risk the continued existence of European civilization on the strength of these assumptions?
Because that’s what we’re doing today.
It’s difficult to relate to people who on the one hand claim that there is no such thing as race, and on the other hand that the white race is uniquely evil. The very term “white racism” indicates that there is such a thing as “whites”, and since this term is not normally used to describe Arabs or Pakistanis, we may conclude that they are not included in this category.
The key is to depict whites — and by that I mean people who are overwhelmingly of European genetic extraction — as always having a negative identity filled with self-loathing, but never positive group interests that they are allowed to defend. That’s what this illogical double-think achieves, where whites are evil but also do not exist.
Preserving and continuing your genetic line is the most basic instinct among all living entities, even down to bacteria. Mice want to continue their genetic line, too. Does that make them Nazi mice?
As I indicated in one of my essays in 2006, by all available standards we’re one of the most successful cultures in the world, yet our largest flaws, which could eventually bury us, are our naïveté, our excessive openness, and our lack of tribal instincts.
Why on Earth should we quietly watch while our country is subdued by the most unsuccessful cultures in the world?
The most basic instinct of all living things is self-preservation. An amoeba possesses a natural right to self-preservation, but not a Scandinavian. The solution may be to argue that Scandinavians are indeed a species of amoebas, and that we thus need special protection from the Worldwide Fund for Nature. We could showcase some of our finest specimen of Multicultural intellectuals to prove our point.
These days, that shouldn’t be too difficult to do.
For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.