Frank explains how the Bernie Madoff investment scandal exposes the illusion of choice in our society. As people believe they have a choice with investing, a choice in political leaders, and other frauds, it is quickly has become obvious that our society needs a severe overhaul, or correction.
Plus, a tribute to TRP listener Brian from Australia, whose picture appears on our wall of honor…. what happened to Rudy Mackell…. Democrat Scandals…. Bill Clinton calls in with his take on the week’s events…. your phone calls at 718.761.9996 and much more.
Israel begins ground invasion into Gaza
The region appears to be teetering on the edge of wider war on Saturday evening (ET), after thousands of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops crossed the border into Gaza, in the second week of this new Mideast war.
During the first week of the war, hundreds of bomb-laden rockets left Gaza launchers and headed targets in Israel. Many of the rockets used newer, more advanced technologies that permitted deeper penetration into Israel — approximaely one million Israelias are now potential targets.
In response, Israel’s air force has been pounding Hamas positions in Gaza. In the process, hundreds of civilians have been killed.
Now, on Saturday, the IDF began its ground invasion into Gaza. According to the IDF statement:
The objective of this stage is to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of the Hamas in the area of operation, while taking control of some of rocket launching area used by the Hamas, in order to greatly reduce the quantity of rockets fired at Israel and Israeli civilians.”
In particular, the Israelis are saying that they do NOT have the following as goals: They are NOT planning to reoccupy Gaza, and they are NOT trying to get rid of Hamas.
Let’s try to answer some of the principal questions:
In Eric Berne’s 1960s book, “Games People Play,” one of his games was “Let’s you and him fight (LYAHF),” which is usually played by a woman who provokes two men to have a fight over her.
Iran played LYAHF in 2006 between Hizbollah and Israel, and they both fell for it, but I don’t think they’re going to fall for it again, no matter what Hizbollah chief Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah would like.
Once again, though, I have to come back to the point that both sides are in generational Crisis eras, which means that neither side is inclined to compromise. Furthermore, the median age of densely populated Gaza is 17, and these hormone-laden kids, running around with guns and rockets, are not easily going to allow any peace agreement, although of course a temporary truce is still possible.
Hamas appears to be encouraging such an event. Some news bulletins on Saturday reported that Hamas leaders have been urging Gazans to head south to the border with Egypt, with the intention of breaking through the wall to Egypt, and joining with the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so there are two major scenarios for Egyptian involvement in the war:
Neither of these scenarios is pleasant.
Late Saturday evening (ET), someone posted YouTube video, compiling video from several sources, and providing spotty narration. It contains some interesting material:
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, a major Mideast war engulfing the entire region is coming with absolute certainty.
The worldwide financial crisis, throwing millions more people into poverty every week, is destabilizing populations around the world, and may also be doing so in the Mideast.
A lot of what’s going on now is against an artificial deadline: The January 20 inauguration of Barack Obama. A number of commentators have mentioned that Israel would like to be finished by then. But the complexity of the operation appears to make this unlikely.
At any rate, this war cannot continue in this form for long. Either a way will be found to get everyone to agree to a temporary truce, or else it will escalate into something much larger within the next few weeks.
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Mideast thread of the Generational Dynamics forum.) (3-Jan-2009)
Frank returns from a life-changing experience and realizes that one should never live in fear of being called a name for speaking their minds. Then, he launches into a passionate monologue, illustrating how society was better off when White people governed, as evidenced by what is going on in Communist-Occupied Rhodesia, aka Zimbabwe.
Plus, Texas Republican congressman Louie Gomert talks about this revolutionary idea to bailout the American Taxpayer by giving them a tax-free holiday …. Shady Island House Party… New York City raising taxes and tolls… yet another Charlie Rangel Scandal… your phone calls at 718.761.9996.
(Due to popular request, here is the interview with Craig Bodecker excerpted from the regular show).
Frank
and John speak to filmmaker Craig Bodecker, whose documentary “A
Conversation About Race” delves into the anti-white double standards of
race in America.
You can purchase “A Conversation About Race” at www.aconversationaboutrace.com
The Upside of Obama
Will he end white liberal guilt?
By Mark Goldblatt
If the election of Barack Obama — a 47-year-old black man with a political resume as ephemeral as a Mets pennant drive and a governing philosophy as dubious as Paris Hilton’s choice of boyfriends — accomplishes nothing else, it should illustrate the peculiar distorting effect on American society of white liberal guilt.
The final nail in the coffin of John McCain’s presidential candidacy, it now seems clear, was the fact that the American economy tanked in the months before the election. Fairly nor not, voters blame such downturns on the incumbent party. Whatever caused the current fiscal crisis, therefore, must be considered a prime factor in McCain’s defeat. The seeds of the crisis date back the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — which initiated a concerted, decades-long effort by the federal government to coerce banks into making loans to lower-income borrowers.
The sentiment was noble, albeit rooted in a desperate race consciousness: If more black families owned their homes, the theory went, they’d accumulate wealth as the properties increased in value. They would pass that wealth down to their children, and the financial inequalities stemming from America’s sordid racial past would gradually diminish.
The problem, of course, is that mathematical probabilities don’t bend to noble sentiments. The reason banks weren’t lending to black borrowers as frequently, or on as good of terms, as to white borrowers, had nothing to do with racism. It had to do with risk analysis. Writing loans to lower-income, lower-collateral borrowers means more defaults.
With the rise of subprime lending, lenders were able to make up for the increased risk by charging higher interest rates. To further mitigate the risk, lenders sought to reformulate and repackage the riskier loans, share their exposure, and tap into other sources of revenue. Congress paved the way with various forms of deregulation. The price of real estate soared because of new demand from those who’d otherwise have been unable to buy a house; speculators naturally moved in, because there seemed no way to lose; and then, well, here we are. In a mortgage meltdown, with grotesque foreclosure rates, on the precipice of a deep global recession and credit crunch, because sooner or later mathematical probabilities have their way.
Ironies abound. The most bitter is that a disproportionate number of foreclosures have affected black homeowners, because they were riskier buyers to begin with. But the most profound is that the fiscal crisis precipitated decades ago by the Community Reinvestment Act has contributed decisively to the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.
Many conservatives are licking their psychic wounds at the moment, but an Obama presidency may yet wind up as a healthy development — if it forces us to confront the ways in which white liberal guilt has warped our political landscape for the last four decades, especially since the primary victims have proven, time and again, to be blacks.
Take, for example, the calamitous decision in the 1960s to expand benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. AFDC began during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, intended to assist impoverished widows and their children. But its scope broadened during Lyndon Johnson’s administration to include payments to unmarried mothers with children. Why? Because the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks in 1963 stood at a record high of 23.6 percent, and thus many black parents were ineligible for help. The government, in effect, began sponsoring illegitimacy.
By 2005, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks had tripled to almost 70 percent. Is there any social pathology known to man not found disproportionately among children born out-of-wedlock? With only good intentions, the Johnson administration did more to undermine the structural integrity of the black family than did decades of Jim Crow laws, eventually spawning a degenerate urban culture in which the phrase “my baby’s daddy” eclipsed “my husband.”
LBJ’s Great Society fiasco inaugurated the era of white-liberal-guilt politics, whose distorting effects have reverberated ever since. The 1970s brought forced busing in an effort to integrate under-performing, predominantly black inner city schools. This ignited white flight to the suburbs, which actually further segregated schools, eroded local tax bases, and thus cut funds for the very school systems busing was intended to help.
Then there was affirmative action, a policy dating back to a Kennedy administration executive order barring federally funded projects from practicing racial discrimination in hiring or employment. Affirmative action soon evolved into the practice of discrimination in favor of blacks in order to redress past grievances. The consequence, when applied to college admission, was to channel black students into higher-tier schools than they were prepared for, thereby ensuring generation after generation of higher black dropout rates. A 2004 study published in the Stanford Law Review, for example, shows that affirmative action in law school admissions has resulted in significantly fewer black lawyers now practicing in the United States.
The fallacy behind the Community Reinvestment Act, AFDC expansion, forced busing, and affirmative action is that government intervention can accelerate the natural progress of blacks in American society. Experience has shown, time and again, that the government can only ensure equal opportunities. It cannot compel equal outcomes. That’s the work of generations — just as the subjugation and exploitation of blacks was the work of generations. The white-liberal-guilt-besotted desire for quick remedies to racial inequities has produced more far more misery than redress.
On election night, at the moment Barack Obama’s electoral vote count surpassed the necessary 270, I was walking down Ninth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, a bar-and-restaurant district. People streamed out onto the street, screaming and cheering; men and women, friends and strangers, black and white, young and old, began hugging. A number were weeping with joy. Amid the commotion, a 30-ish black man came running up the sidewalk and yelled, “There’s a new sheriff in town!” I didn’t realize he’d directed the remark to me until I saw him pass a young black couple with a knowing nod, then yell it again at a group of three white women.
Two days later, I received the following group e-mail from a white middle-aged woman, a colleague of mine: “Rosa sat, so Martin could walk. Martin walked, so Obama could run. Obama ran, so we could FLY. Hope rose on our wings. November 4, 2008. HOPE has risen to new heights!”
No one has ever assumed the presidency with the unrealistic expectations Obama faces. Judging from an altogether unscientific sample of conversations I’ve overheard over the last two months — a sample weighted towards college faculty and students, Manhattan pedestrians and diners, and, of course, CSPAN callers — Obama’s white supporters seem to think he’ll single-handedly heal our partisan rifts and make America beloved abroad, bring peace to the Middle East and capture Osama bin Laden, balance the budget and save Social Security. Yet even those absurdly lofty expectations pale (pun intended) beside the hopes that black voters, who cast ballots for Obama at a rate of over 95 percent, have invested in him. Blacks seem to view him as an amalgam of Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Miles Davis, and Julius Erving — except with a better outside shot.
Obama, therefore, is certain to disappoint as soon as he passes from promiser to decider. But he’s also uniquely situated to effect a genuine change in America’s race consciousness. The fact that his march to the White House resembled less a traditional campaign than a cult of personality — a cult that included much of the media — has a potential upside. Obama will set up shop on Pennsylvania Avenue owing less to his party’s leadership and lobbyists than any president in a century. Think about it. How many Democratic bigwigs endorsed Hillary Clinton before drifting to Obama? How many labor unions initially favored John Edwards? President Obama could, if he were so inclined, tell anyone, anytime, to take a hike.
What good could come of that?
The best-case scenario, though the least likely, is that President Obama, in a Nixon-to-China moment, turns to the NAACP, the Congressional Black Congress, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the entire ethno-grievance chorus and says, “Enough.” There are, he explains in a primetime speech, no governmental quick fixes to the collective inequalities in American society. Indeed, every time the government intervenes, it sets back the cause of justice for generations. Over time, without government interference, through parental sacrifice and individual initiative, inequalities will even out — unless, of course, you believe that black people and white people are innately different in their potentials.
Again, that’s the least likely scenario. But even without anything so dramatic, Obama can still cause a sea change in racial attitudes. He can do this, first and foremost, by example. He’s a husband and a father. He dresses in suits and ties. He speaks the King’s English. And he’s president of the United States. In other words, he’s no victim. If he’s authentically black — and what black person in America will dare say he isn’t? — black authenticity cannot equate with victimhood.
Obama isn’t being kept down by the Man. He is the Man. How will that fact sit with the subset of blacks, especially black men, who attribute their personal failures to invisible racist conspiracies working against them? The thought has to cross each of their minds: If nothing stopped a black man from becoming president, then maybe the reason my life is screwed up is because I’ve screwed it up.
But even if that’s too much to expect, how about Obama as a thoughtful, articulate, well-mannered, tattoo-free alternate image of black manhood to foul-mouthed rappers and dirtbag athletes? How many young black men will stay in school because Obama did? How many will bury their noses in homework because Obama did? How many won’t be ashamed to be seen with a book under their arms because Obama wasn’t?
In the final analysis, if an Obama presidency accomplishes any of the above — if it brings an end to the politics of white liberal guilt, or provides a role model for struggling blacks — it could serve a cause that outweighs and outlasts whatever wrongheaded policies the president-elect might pursue.
Sylvain Gouguenheim’s “Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne” reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau
Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance on the gaucheries of the European rubes. The rubes swing their elbows and knock over the pottery. It was the Eighteenth-Century philosophes and illuminati who coined the pejorative term Dark Ages to refer to the centuries immediately following the collapse of the Roman imperial administration in the West under pressure of the Gothic assertions of the Fifth Century. Liberal discourse often casually extends the same term to apply it to all of medieval European civilization up to the Renaissance. Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term Dark Ages insinuates ever existed, which means that the Enlightenment version of history is at least partly wrong. And yet the usual story retains its currency, as an item in a kind of liberal folklore.
Part of that story is the motif of the Islamic middleman role in the transmission of classical knowledge to Christendom. According to this motif, the West in the Eleventh Century possessed no first-hand knowledge of the Greek and precious little of the Roman classics. Fortunately (so the story goes) the Muslims had translated Plato and Aristotle into Arabic, knew all about them, and bestowed the gift of their lore on the benighted monks of Italy and France. The benefactors under this notion behave suavely and generously, while the beneficiaries are – to paraphrase a line from a David Lean film – ignorant, barbarous, and cruel.
In the spasm of western Islamophilia that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001, the myth of medieval Muslim learnedness and medieval European illiteracy gained strong new power for the Left whose acolytes have disseminated it with vigor from their ensconcement in the colleges and universities. Facts might have dispelled the myth had anyone cared to notice them. For one thing, Europeans never lost contact with the Byzantine Greeks, who blithely went on being scholarly classicists until Mehmet II bloodily vanquished Constantinople in 1453, slaughtering the literate elites and forcing the peasantry to submit to Allah. The Eighth-Century English church-chronicler Bede reports in his Ecclesiastical History that one of the first bishops of Canterbury, Theodore, was an educated Greek. The Twelfth-Century Icelandic myth-collector Snorri Sturlusson suggests in his Edda that the Norse gods were actually Trojan heroes escaping, like Aeneas, from Agamemnon’s destruction of their city – an interpretation that implies his knowledge of the theory called Euhemerism. Eighth-Century England and twelfth-Century Iceland were remote places, but, in Bede and Snorri, one can attest links to the classical tradition.
Facts like these could easily be multiplied – and a man who multiplies them with muscularity and clear-sightedness is the French historian Sylvain Gouguenheim, who documents them in his remarkable new book Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les raciness grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne (Seuil, 2008). [Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: the Greek Roots of Christian Europe.] The book is not as yet translated, but it deserves to be known to Anglophone audiences because it brings important truths to many a contemporary conversation.
For American readers, Gouguenheim’s title will have a familiar resonance. Henry Adams called his study of medieval European civilization Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. Adams took Gothic Christianity, as typified in the discourses of Aquinas and Abelard and in the architecture of the Lady Churches, to have begun its flowering in the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel on the French Atlantic coast that also figures in Gouguenheim’s account. Adams thought of the High Middle Ages as a dynamic, spiritually adventurous, and, in its way, modern period, directly the precursor of our own technically accomplished and intellectually audacious modernity. Gouguenheim has something of Adams’ view of the medieval world’s clear-sightedness and vigor and he begins by addressing the prevalent méconnaissance of those vital centuries, which in his judgment indeed established the kernel, or rather the “roots,” of our own. If, “for a long time, the cultural history of Europe in the High Middle Ages was presented in negative terms,” and if “the fall of the Roman Empire associated with the Germanic conquests had, in the course of the Fifth Century of our era, made a brutal rather than a progressive end to antiquity” – or if that is what people thought, Gouguenheim asserts: yet “in reality, recent work in ancient and medieval history has shown that the period of the Fifth to the Eighth Centuries was not so catastrophic, the effects of dislocation while quite real being mitigated by elements of continuity.” Greek Christendom constituted one such continuity, as already mentioned. It stood in somewhat aloof reserve, but it had the character of a resource capable of responding to western queries.
Gouguenheim cites the fact that educated Latin-speaking westerners, even after Boethius, could command Greek as explaining in large part the dearth of Greek texts in Latin translation between 500 and 1100 AD. But Latin compendia of Platonist and Aristotelian teachings did circulate, as did medical handbooks in the tradition of Galen. The Latin-speaking Church Fathers thus undertook their reflections “with the help of the logical categories of Greek thought,” such that classical philosophy “impregnated” their arguments as a type of “intellectual matrix.” One could bolster Gouguenheim’s observations in this regard by a reference to Bryan Ward-Perkins’ recent study of The Fall of Rome (2005), in which he remarks that even among the Gothic usurpers of Roman sovereignty in Spain, Gaul, and Italy, civilized individuals emerged who prized classical learning and did their best to preserve it. Theodahad (he reigned as Ostrogothic king of Italy from 534 to 536) offers the outstanding case, having been “learned in Latin literature and Platonic philosophy,” even though he “kept his Gothic moustache.”
In Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel, Gouguenheim points out that a Greek demographic presence linked the culminating period of Late Antiquity with the incipient phase of the Middle Ages in the West; and that presence persisted for centuries. “In the Europe of the High Middle Ages, many regions sheltered knots of ethnic Hellenes: Sicily, Southern Italy, and again Rome.” These communities supported literate elites, who contributed actively to the Latinate majorities among whom they lived, giving rise to such notable figures as Gregory of Agrigento (born 559), who became bishop in his native city later in life; George, Bishop of Syracuse, killed by the Arabs while on a mission to them in 724; Saint Gilsenus (mid-Seventh Century), a Greek-born monk living in a Roman monastery who evangelized in Hainault with Saint Armand; and Simeon of Reichenau, known as “The Achaean,” who belongs to the Tenth Century. In men like Simeon this Byzantine Diaspora reached well beyond Mediterranean Europe into the Rhine and Danube regions. Not only Greek but also Syriac Christians became additional mediators of the classical heritage at this time, driven from their homeland by the Jihad. “Paradoxically,” writes Gouguenheim, “Islam from its beginning transmitted Greek culture to the Occident by provoking the exile of those who refused its domination.” So, to be fair, did the Puritanical spasms of Byzantine court-theology in its regular iconoclastic moods. The persecuted iconodules, like the Syriac Christians, often sought refuge in Italy, Spain, or France.
Gouguenheim makes clear the conscious and deliberate indebtedness of the Carolingian Renaissance to these sustained currents from the East; he emphasizes the importance of the Carolingian Hellenophile project to the preservation and recirculation of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought before the school of Aquinas. “From the court of the Carolingians to that of the Germanic emperors of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, one does not cease to encounter men who interested themselves in Greek knowledge and culture.” Gouguenheim mentions how Pépin le Bref (reigned 751-768) petitioned the Pope for Greek texts and how Paul I responded by committing to royal custodianship various “liturgical books, manuals of grammar and orthography, of geometry [and] works of Aristotle and pseudo-Dionysius” along with “men capable of translating them.” Charlemagne himself employed an Italian of Greek background, Paul Diacre (720-799), “to teach Greek to the clerics” at a moment when a marriage seemed possible between his daughter Rothrude and a Byzantine prince. Charles the Bald (reigned 840-877) “was fascinated by Greek culture, to the point that he asked the Irish savant Duns Scotus Erigena to translate the work of [pseudo-Dionysius] towards 855.”
With respect to Aachen, Gouguenheim senses an “irresistible attraction for the Greek authors,” which carries over into the Ottonian period and even intensifies. “The reputedly obscure centuries of the Middle Ages were in reality animated by multiple intellectual rebirths.” Gothic Christianity, far from being averse to or irreconcilable with antique philosophy, “succeeded in the task of integrating antique culture within the Biblical framework of which [Christendom] was the issue.”
In addition to passing remarks, Gouguenheim devotes a separate chapter to the classicizing tendencies of the Syriac and Arab Christians, as distinct from their linguistic cousins and brethren in the Islamic faith. As part of Byzantium, of which their main region of Cappadocia was a province, Syriac Christians played a central role in constituting the Eastern theological discourse during the medieval centuries, continuing to do so even after they had fallen under the sway of the Caliphs, thereby assisting in the westward transmission of Attic and Alexandrian lore. Gouguenheim writes: “Insofar as one speaks of ‘Arabic-Muslim culture’ in the Seventh through the Tenth Centuries, one commits an anachronism… because the culture was at that time barely Muslim and was Arab only by displaced appellation.” Truly, “Syriac is closer to Hebrew than to Arabic,” and the elites of the Nestorian and Monophysite dispensations could generally boast bilingualism in their own tongue and the Koine of the Empire. The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.
Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”
More aggressively, “Muslim rejection – or indifference – to Greek knowledge manifested itself again through the destruction of the cultural centers that were the monasteries, the Muslims not acting in this way any differently from the Vikings.” One could remark here, however, that the Vikings at least had the decency after two centuries to cease their predatory behavior and settle down as members of Christendom.
Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.
Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel celebrates a central figure, Jacques de Venise (Twelfth Century), who, not only metaphorically, brought Aristotle to Mont Saint-Michel. Jacques was a cleric of Venetian origin, as his name tells, who studied in Constantinople before reestablishing himself in France. Jacques, as Gouguenheim phrases it, through his Herculean labor of scholarship and translation, supplies “the missing link in the history of the passage of Aristotelian philosophy from the Greek world to the Latinate world.” It is a matter of colossal importance that Jacques, as Gouguenheim reports, “translated a considerable number of Aristotle’s works directly from Greek to Latin, making him a pioneering figure.” (Emphasis added) According to the story prevalent today, Aristotle in his fullness returned to the ken of Christendom through a complicated chain of transactions, beginning with supposed Arabic translations out of Greek, and then, by way of Moorish generosity, from Arabic back into Latin and over the Pyrenees. But the story does not wash. It is plagued by linguistic problems, which Gouguenheim duly rehearses, but it is flatly demolished by what Gouguenheim has discovered concerning Jacques’ work. Jacques’ manuscripts, which are in almost every case the earliest attested for a given Aristotelian opus, swiftly gained a reputation, well founded, for being the most accurate and idiomatic. Jacques’ translations gained wide currency and formed the basis for an Aristotelian revival all across Western Europe.
As Gouguenheim writes, “The two great names of theological and philosophical reflection in the Thirteenth Century, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, utilized [Jacques’] Greco-Latin translations.” In a manner, Jacques brought his project to too fine a point of perfection, reestablishing the Aristotelian tradition so effectively that his own pioneering status lapsed into oblivion, exactly in proportion as knowledge of The Metaphysics and the Analytics came to be taken for granted. Many of his original manuscripts lay unrecognized in the archives at Mont Saint-Michel until recent decades.
Perhaps the most stimulating of Gouguenheim’s chapters is the antepenultimate one, under the title of “Problems of Civilization.” “Medieval Islam,” Gouguenheim notes, “had not developed any real curiosity for societies exterior to it.” While the magnum opus of Persian literature, The Thousand Nights and a Night, saw its first European translation early in the Eighteenth Century, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey ever interested any Muslim translator. “This absence of curiosity explains in part why the Middle Ages seem to comprise a paralyzing confrontation of several centuries, more often violent than peaceful, which the shared monotheistic belief better sustained than it ameliorated.”
But the notion of a common monotheism, while hopeful, might be misleading:
To proclaim that Christians and Muslims have the same God, and to hold to that, believing thereby that one has brought the debate to its term, denotes only a superficial approach. Their Gods do not partake in the same discourse, do not put forward the same values, do not propose for humanity the same destiny and do not concern themselves with the same manner of political and legal organization in human society. The comparative reading of the Gospel and the Koran by itself demonstrates that the two universes are unalike. From Christ, who refuses to punish the adulterous woman by stoning, one turns to see Mohammed ordaining, in the same circumstances, the putting to death of the unfaithful woman. One cannot follow Jesus and Mohammed.
Christianity was ready, moreover, to receive, not only the philosophy, but also certain basic political principles, of the ancient Greeks, particularly of the Athenians, such as “liberty, reason, and democracy.” Christian Europe in the medieval centuries was, indeed, in a position to admire from the ancient heritage – and to adopt critically – whatever might enhance its Gospel-based conviction of the free will of the individual. Thus the Attic achievement in particular lies at the elective root of a paradoxically self-identifying European culture. Islam knows only that it is Islam whereas Europe, when at its best, has always understood that it is itself and yet something else at the same time. A European sense of intellectual insufficiency and need gave unexpected strength to the progress and consolidation of the medieval mind. Europe would prove itself “permeable” in a way that Islam could not – convinced as it was of its own perfection ab origine. Thus, concludes Gouguenheim, “the Hellenization of medieval Europe was the fruit of Europeans,” who discovered, on their own, their filiations with the ancient societies.
Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most significant publications of the last few years. It is, I believe, destined to become a classic – not only in its original French, but also in the other European languages, once it has been translated. It dispels a myth, an invidious one that has long been central to the perverse palaver of western self-hatred. For those who, like me, command their French a bit unsurely, Gouguenheim’s prose is a miracle of balanced sentences and clear meaning. I would say that Gouguenheim’s study has a potentially large audience outside the academy and could become something of a popular success in the Anglophone nations.
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Hispanics in the barrio.
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As we saw in The Reality of Racial Differences, there are large, and almost certainly innate, differences between whites and blacks in intelligence and ability to defer gratification. Hispanics, America’s largest minority group, are much more similar to blacks than whites in these traits. Consequently, with the increasing size of the Hispanic population, America has every reason to expect higher rates of social dysfunction.
“Ability to defer gratification” is a bit of a mouthful. Social scientists use the more compact term “time preferences” to designate this attribute. People with little ability to defer gratification have high time preferences; those with more have lower time preferences. An even more compact, but less scientific term, is “provident,” which means “having or showing foresight; providing carefully for the future.” Since blacks and Hispanics are less likely to do these things than whites, we can refer to them as improvident races.
Hispanics are, of course, not a race, but a linguistic group; however, most of them do differ racially from whites. Sixty-six percent of Hispanics in the United States are from Mexico and another 17 percent from some other Central and South American nation. The large majority of the population of the nations in which most Hispanic immigrants originate is either Indian or mestizo, a mixture of white and Indian blood. Puerto Ricans, who make up nine percent of the Hispanic population are mostly mulatto, or a mixture of white and black. The characteristics of the Hispanic population thus reflect their Indian and black genetic heritage.
The average IQ in the mestizo and Indian-dominated countries of Latin America is about 86 versus the average white IQ of 99 and the average black IQ of 85. The average IQ of Puerto Ricans is 84, and that of American Hispanics as a whole, 89.1 Hispanics are thus marginally more intelligent than blacks, but substantially less intelligent than whites. Such large differences in intelligence are certainly in part due to genetic differences.
One consequence of low IQs is low educational attainment. Hispanic high school completion rates are lower than those of any other major racial/ethnic group in the country: 52 percent of Hispanics complete high school, against 78 percent of whites and 58 percent of blacks.2
Furthermore, even Hispanics whose families have been in the US for three generations or more are less likely than any native group to graduate from high school.3 The chart below shows how many times more likely than whites various groups are to drop out of high school, with the white bar set at one for the sake of comparison. Blacks are about 1.7 times more likely to be dropouts than whites and Hispanics about 3.7 times more likely. “First generation Hispanic” refers to American Hispanics who were born abroad, “second generation” to Hispanics whose parents were born in the US but whose grandparents were not, and “third generation+” to Hispanics whose grandparents were US-born. Even this last group is about twice as likely as whites not to complete high school; in fact, third-generation Hispanics are more likely than blacks to be high school dropouts.4
Such large differences in high school completion rates even among Hispanics whose families have been in the US for three generations or more suggest that it is unlikely that Hispanics will ever assimilate into American society.
Even those Hispanics who do stay in high school until the 12th grade do substantially worse on tests than whites. The chart below shows average scores for 12th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test. Scores on the NAEP verbal test show a similar pattern, with whites doing best by a wide margin and Hispanics doing slightly better than blacks.5
This deficit continues for college education. Hispanics are less likely to graduate from college than blacks and only about a third as likely as whites. Hispanics whose families have been in America three generations or more are only slightly more likely to graduate from college than the foreign-born.6
Their low educational attainment reflects not merely blacks’ and Hispanics’ low intelligence, but also their improvidence—earning a high school or college degree is hard work and requires the ability to defer gratification. Social scientists have found that high time preferences are a general characteristic of the poor, and particularly of the black and Hispanic poor. For example, University of California economist Emily C. Lawrence, examining preferences for unnecessary expenditures on food and for saving among different types of household, found that time preferences were higher for the poor than the wealthy and for the black and Hispanic poor than the white poor. Whites were more likely to save and invest their money rather than blowing it on the pleasures of the moment.7
Some of the best evidence of black and Hispanic improvidence comes from studies of their net worth. The average income of black households is 62 percent of the average white income, and that of Hispanics is 71 percent.8 Yet both black and Hispanic net worth is less than 10 percent of that of whites: Hispanic households have a median net worth of $7,932 and black households of $5,988 against whites’ $88,651. Hispanics’ net worth is thus just nine percent of whites’ and blacks’ just seven percent. It is clear then that blacks and Hispanics are less likely to save money than whites. Low Hispanic net worth is not due to their immigrant status. US-born Hispanics have a net worth of $10,425, which is still only 12 percent of the white net worth.9
Statistics on sexuality also reveal much about differences in time preferences among the races. It is in sexuality, after all, that the conflict between our desire for present gratification and our concern for our future well-being presents itself in the starkest form.
As expected, blacks and Hispanics show much lower providence when it comes to sex than whites do. Black births are more than twice as likely to take place out of wedlock than white births, and Hispanic births about 50 percent more likely.10
Sexual irresponsibility also leads Hispanics to be much more prone to sexual diseases than whites. Hispanics are 3.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than whites, and blacks 10 times more likely.11
The improvident are also more likely to be criminals than the provident. As I wrote in The Reality of Racial Differences, “Criminals are the best examples of people who favor present gratification at the expense of long-term rewards: a mugger is willing to sacrifice his whole future for the chance of stealing someone’s wallet.” It will come as no surprise then that Hispanic men are 3.5 times more likely to be in prison than whites and black men 7.8 times more likely.12
A sure sign of improvidence is the unwise use of credit. We are currently seeing the consequence of such improvidence in the increasing rate of mortgage defaults due to subprime home loans. The failure to repay debt has caused a wide-scale weakening of faith in the global financial markets that threatens to throw the American economy into recession. Many economists believe that our current difficulties are only the cusp of a tidal wave of defaults on bad debt.
Once again, the expected racial differences appear in incidence of subprime mortgages, with home loans to blacks being about 2.5 times more likely to be subprime and mortgages to Hispanics twice as likely.13 Nor can income disparities among the races account for the difference: the racial differences are even greater for affluent people, with affluent blacks and Hispanics more than three times more likely to have subprime mortgages than affluent whites.14 As the proportion of Hispanics in the American population rises, we can only expect to see further destabilization in our financial system.
Diversity, far from being a strength, means more home foreclosures, more prisons, more poor neighborhoods, and generally an increase in all that is nasty and depressing in our society. A healthy, prosperous nation requires a citizenry that meets minimum standards of intelligence and providence. If America ceases to do so, it will become more and more like Mexico as the years pass.
McDonald’s supersized retirement plans
Inside the McDonald’s off Interstate 270 in suburban St. Louis, manager Sadie Travis is hustling. Amid the beeping and buzzing of fry timers, Travis at any given moment is voiding orders at the register, handing out cups for drinks, wiping trays, or stuffing toys into Happy Meal boxes.
If only the fast-food titan could get more people like her to run its 6,700 company-owned restaurants. While an average McDonald’s grosses $2.2 million a year, seasoned managers who motivate employees and keep customers coming back can add more than $200,000 to that total. “Restaurant managers are in the most important position in our company,” says Richard Floersch, McDonald’s chief human resources officer. Yet despite generous salaries — up to $62,000 plus bonus and company car, say insiders — turnover is a constant concern in an industry that typically sees 43 percent of its staff leave each year.
To stanch the bleeding of valuable talent, McDonald’s in 2004 began offering a rich retirement savings perk. Employees who put 5 percent of their salary in the company 401(k) receive a company match of as much as 11 percent, turbocharging their savings right off the bat. To make sure employees take advantage of the program, McDonald’s has made enrollment automatic. And to ease the pain of automatically deferring 1 percent of pay, the company gave managers a one-time, 1 percent salary increase.
But persuading prized employees that the benefit is reason enough to stay with McDonald’s for the long term is an ongoing challenge. Skepticism about investing runs especially high among African Americans, who make up 15 percent of the company’s manager pool. Research shows that blacks, in the aggregate, are reluctant to save. According to a 2008 study by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab, blacks save an average of $169 a month for retirement, while comparable whites (in terms of household income) contribute about $249 a month. Race and ethnicity trump gender — and even salary — in the factors that predict whether a person will save for retirement.
Preparing for the future
Why don’t blacks save more? The reasons are complex, but the underlying theme is cultural. “African Americans are distrustful of the financial system because it has excluded them for generations,” says Andrés Tapia, chief diversity officer at Hewitt Associates, the benefits-consulting giant. Hewitt’s research shows that African Americans consistently put home ownership and college ahead of retirement goals. Owning a home and educating children become a huge priority, explains Tapia, “if you are the first person in your family to do it.”
Preparing for the future can also be controversial in the black community. “If your mama lives with you — and others in your extended community are struggling to get by — putting aside money that you can’t touch for the next 15 to 20 years feels selfish and inappropriate,” Tapia says.
Indeed, for many blacks, retirement is more a dream than a priority. The Ariel-Schwab survey found that African Americans under the age of 50 are nearly twice as likely as comparable whites to say they want to retire by 60, but they are half as likely to cite retirement as their most important savings goal.
Adding to the skepticism, the great market meltdown of 2008 showed that even the most carefully crafted retirement plans can be ruined by forces beyond a person’s control. “This is a big setback that will affect all people,” says Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel, the largest African American-run money manager. “In our community, which has had less exposure to the market, people are especially nervous” about investing. Such reticence has made McDonald’s efforts to sell its perk to employees all the more difficult.
Generous inducements to save
Few employers offer 401(k) plans as lavish as the one at McDonald’s. In fact, many companies have been cutting back on their matching contributions in recent months as the recession deepens. McDonald’s corporate match is especially extravagant at lower levels of saving: employees who put just 1 percent of their salary in the plan get $3 for every $1 they invest. (Most companies won’t even match a contribution until an employee puts in at least 3 percent.) McDonald’s then makes a dollar-for-dollar match on the next 4 percent. After that there’s a potential profit-sharing match of up to 4 percent. All told, workers who save 5 percent of their pay can see the total swell to 16 percent.
But corporate 401(k) plans aren’t an if-you-build-it-they-will-come kind of benefit. Companies can send out pamphlets, but the burden of persuading employees that the plans are worthwhile ultimately falls on people like Kenny Sanders, who heads human resources for the “Heartland” region of McDonald’s, overseeing 76 company-owned stores. Like Travis, Sanders, 44, started working at McDonald’s in St. Louis when he was a teenager. Over the past 28 years he has risen through the ranks beyond store manager to corporate management.
McDonald’s crew members don’t sit in front of computers all day, leaving little opportunity to check 401(k) balances or make tweaks to asset allocation plans at work. So Sanders spends much of his time out in the field talking to employees about their financial future. “My goal is to get people to understand that this is more than a job. You can put away a nice nest egg for you and your family, depending on how long you stay at this company,” Sanders says.
Looking beyond paycheck to paycheck
Sanders’ main goal is to keep people like Travis, who oversees one of the St. Louis area’s most profitable McDonald’s restaurants, interested in saving. Everything Travis knows about building a nest egg she learned at McDonald’s — most of it gleaned during the four years since the retirement program began. “Before that, I didn’t realize that putting money in the bank and saving for retirement is not the same thing,” she says. “It’s a real eye-opener to learn that McDonald’s will match what you put in,” Travis says. “It helps relieve a lot of stress.”
Sanders was the first person Travis turned to for investment advice when she looked at her September retirement account statement and saw that her balance was down almost $11,000 for the year. Sanders recalls assuring her. “You lose a little here, and then you gain a little there.”
Saving for the future has been a luxury that Travis, 47, could not afford until recently. For most of her life the divorced mother of two “was just making ends meet,” she says. Travis had her son, Lamar, at 20. Her daughter, Latisha, came along when she was 29. Buying a home, paying for braces, helping her elderly parents with living expenses — all those things derailed her plans to save for the future. “I know you have to have a security blanket, but I was living paycheck to paycheck when I had my first baby,” Travis says.
That’s why Travis connects so well with Ebony Henderson, a second assistant manager at the same McDonald’s, who gave birth to a boy named Jeremiyah in August and has a toddler son named Quian Jr. “We each had babies young,” Travis says. “But I’m not about collecting money from the state. I’m a person who wants to make money and keep stability. That’s how Ebony seems to me.”
When Henderson, 26, joined McDonald’s at age 15 to earn money for school supplies and clothes, she never thought it would be a serious career path. Today she eyes the golden rung of store manager and plans to start the interview process this month. “I’m doing good now, but I want to be where Sadie’s at in the future,” says Henderson, whose tinted hair matches her red cable-knit sweater. “I don’t want to be working all my life with nothing to show for it.”
Despite the market downturn, Travis says she remains on track for retirement. She’s confident she’ll be able to leave the work force in 10 to 15 years with a $200,000 nest egg. “I don’t want to shoot for a million,” she says. “I don’t want to be greedy.”
Others aren’t so sure about the future. Since the stock market began to unravel last fall, Sanders says, more than 100 employees have asked him for investment guidance, often brandishing their retirement account statements. “I’m not an adviser, so I can’t really tell them what to do,” Sanders says. He looks over statements to make sure employees are well diversified and usually recommends the financial advisory services McDonald’s offers to employees. “But I always say that staying the course is the right thing for me,” he says.
Amid the market turmoil, it’s more important than ever for Sanders to reach out to workers. After all, he says, “What’s good for employees is good for McDonald’s.”
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The monster in the depths.
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The culture of the age that we live in is founded on a lie: racial egalitarianism. It is an article of faith among the elites that govern the West that the races are the same in abilities and temperament, and that it is only racial bias in the present or in the past that prevents all races from performing at the same level.
This dogma has been conventional wisdom among the Western elites since 1950, when the United Nations published its “Statement on Race,” which declared: “[T]here is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their intelligence or temperament. The scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is the same…. [G]enetic differences are not of importance in determining the social and cultural differences between different groups of Homo sapiens.” Link, p. 102.
In the succeeding years, this dogma has filtered downwards from the elites and entrenched itself to such an extent that it is dangerous for any Westerner to contradict it.
The heart of race realism is recognizing this lie for what it is. Both the findings of the best scholars and simple common sense force us to recognize that the races are inherently different. But holding onto the truth is a hard duty, as it means refusing the dominant ideology of our culture, which constantly tries to persuade us that racial equality would be achieved if only people, and especially whites, were less racist.
The idea that the races are innately different flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that is promulgated by the mass media and many experts. It may seem odd that I am trying to persuade people to renounce the conventional wisdom. Last week, in criticizing the conspiracy theories of David Duke, I argued that conventional wisdom ought to be trusted in almost all cases. The reasonable person should reject it, I said, only where the evidence against it was overwhelming. Any challenge to conventional wisdom had to meet three stringent criteria:
Very few challenges to conventional wisdom meet these criteria, but the challenge of race realism to racial egalitarianism does. Studies of the black-white gap in intelligence prove beyond any doubt that the race realist perspective is correct.
The school of researchers that argues for the biological basis of racial intelligence differences, among whom are psychologists Arthur Jensen, J. P. Rushton, and Richard Lynn, have solid academic credentials and publish in peer-reviewed psychological journals, and their work is respected even by those who disagree with them. Furthermore, in 1988, a survey of experts in intelligence and its measurement found that a full 53 percent believed that the black-white difference in IQ was partially genetic in origin. The same study found the news media consistently overestimated the percentage of IQ experts holding egalitarian views. There can be little doubt there still exists today at least a significant school of experts that hold race realist views.
The reason why this school exists is simply that the evidence for race realism is so powerful. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on black-white differences in IQ, and wherever blacks are in the world, they score substantially below the white mean of 100 on IQ tests. In reviewing the literature on black intelligence in Race Differences in Intelligence, Richard Lynn found that 57 studies of the IQ of blacks in Africa conducted between 1955 and 1994 consistently showed that they had a mean IQ of around 671. Fourteen studies between 1986 and 2002 of blacks in the Caribbean and Latin America found a mean IQ of 712. Thirty-one studies of American blacks between 1918 and 1998 found a mean IQ of 853. Twenty-nine studies conducted in Britain and the Netherlands between 1966 and 2002 found a mean black IQ of 85 there as well4. In Israel, two studies of Ethiopian immigrants who are Jewish by religion but racially black showed they had a mean IQ of 655.
Second, despite all the efforts made in the US to achieve parity among the races, the IQ gap has not gone away. Indeed, it has remained approximately the same for nearly a century. In 1917, the first large scale IQ tests in America found about a 17-point difference between the scores of the races; the most recent studies show the difference is about the same6. The equalization of spending on black and white education, government educational programs for the poor, diversity training, and all the rest of it simply has had no discernible effect on the racial IQ gap.
This in itself is powerful evidence that the black-white IQ difference is rooted in biology. However, there is much more evidence of this. First, psychologists know intelligence is a highly heritable (i.e., genetically determined) trait. The heritability of IQ is as great as 80 percent, meaning it is primarily determined by genetic background7. The more related people are, the greater the similarity in IQ scores. The IQ’s of identical twins have a correlation of 0.86, whereas those of fraternal twins have a much weaker correlation of 0.6. However, after they have grown to be adults, there is no correlation whatsoever between the IQ’s of unrelated children who are reared in the same household8. Given the strong heritability of IQ, it is exceptionally unlikely that such a large difference as that between mean black and white IQ has no genetic component.
Some of the most powerful evidence of the biological origin of racial differences in intelligence comes from trans-racial adoption studies. For example, a 1992 study examining the IQ’s of adopted white and black 17-year-olds raised in upper-middle-class white families found that despite their similar environment, the adopted children with two biological white parents had a mean IQ of 106, whereas the adoptees with two black biological parents had a mean IQ of 899.
There is no doubt that IQ tests do measure intelligence. In fact, a person’s IQ is the strongest predictor of how well he will perform in school and whether he will get a well-paying, high-status job10.
In light of evidence like this, none of the cultural explanations of racial differences in intelligence and educational achievement are even remotely plausible. Some object that IQ tests are not a good measure of intelligence because they are culturally biased. But the racial IQ difference appears even on reaction-time IQ tests, in which subjects must respond as quickly as possible to a simple visual stimulus, such as a flashing light or a change in color in a dot on a screen11. It is difficult to see how such tests could be culturally biased.
Nor do arguments that blacks score lower on tests because of socio-economic deficits hold water. If class background explains differences in IQ scores, why do blacks raised in upper-middle-class white families score so much lower on IQ tests than whites from the same background? Moreover, black high-schoolers from affluent backgrounds regularly score lower than whites from poor households on SAT tests, which are a good measure of intelligence12.
Do the shapers of public opinion have a motive to deny racial differences in intelligence? Very much so. In fact, they have several different reasons for denying racial difference, which will be the subject of future writings on this website. As one example, Western elites hold racist doctrines responsible for the rise of Nazism and the genocide it brought about. The elites think the key to preventing such atrocities in the future is to discredit the idea of racial differences. The Nazi genocide was very much on the minds of the writers of the UNESCO statement on race quoted earlier, which contains this passage:
The myth “race” has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings and deprives civilization of the effective co-operation of productive minds. Link, p. 101.
There was thus a clear ethical and political agenda behind the UNESCO statement that gave its framers and subsequent generations of Western elites the motive to portray the evidence in a biased manner.
The work of race realist scholars proves that our culture ignores not only innate intelligence differences, but a principle of the utmost importance in explaining human behavior. If the popular media sweep such well-documented findings under the carpet, who knows what else they have swept there too? Once one has realized that innate racial differences exist, one begins to suspect a whole hidden reality beneath the surface of things that explains phenomena that are so mysterious to the talking heads on the news programs. To be a race realist is to constantly sense this monster in the depths.
The intention is not to start 2009 on a sour note. Therefore I will merely state some facts, provide a source or two and show a graph to put it all in perspective.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that the areas with the highest homicide rates in the world are Southern Africa, Central America and South America. The data was compiled from 198 countries and territories and represents acts of “unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person.”
Wikipedia lists the countries by homicide rate per 100,000 people and behold, the Rainbow Nation which is post-Apartheid South Africa features in the top 10. Not that any of the 8 countries knocking South Africa out of first place feature on my “places to visit” list. Maybe it’s just me not planning my next holiday in Iraq, El Salvador or Honduras, but I doubt there are many out there who do. A tad too much red for my liking then in this “rainbow”.
The Wikipedia data was then used to compile a chart for comparison. What do you think?
