Monthly Archives: May 2017

In the West  with easy contraception and abortion humans need security to breed

Robert Henderson

Security is what the vast majority of humans want.  It is part of our evolved nature. If you offer a man or woman a guaranteed income of £25,000 pa or a ten percent chance of gaining an income of £100,000 pa most will choose the certainty of £25,000.

When it comes to having and raising a family in a country which has readily available contraception and safe abortion practices a sense of security becomes vitally important.   Without those two hindrances to producing children birthrates will normally look after themselves by at least maintaining a population and in all probability increasing  it if the availability of the essentials of life – food, clothing, heat and shelter – is sufficient to maintain increasing numbers of people.

Where contraception and abortion are readily available individuals can and frequently do refrain from having many children. That is the case in rich industrialised countries where the number of children a couple have is to a very large extent a matter of choice.  Because of this  birthrates in the West are currently  either  below replacement levels  (which require 2.1 children per woman) or  are only just meeting the replacement level . Moreover,   the Western  countries which do meet the replacement level often  do  so only because of  the higher fertility rates of black and Asian  immigrants  and their descendants , who at least for several generations after the initial act of migration  maintain a higher rate of breeding than the  native white populations of the West.

Why are the native populations of the West failing to reproduce in sufficient quantities?  The fact that abortion and contraception are readily available is part of the explanation, but the reduction in children is also the consequence of changes in general social circumstances and the mentality of people rather than an immediate cause.   Infant mortality is low so having a large family to guarantee that enough children survive to adulthood is no longer necessary.  In addition, the creation of full blown welfare states means that people are no longer necessarily dependent upon their children for help in their old age so they do not see their children as an essential  insurance policy for their future.

There are attempts to explain the decline in births in the West by claiming that fertility is falling.  This does not meet the facts. Take abortions.  185,824 were undertaken in England and Wales in 2015. The birthrate for England and Wales in 2015 was 1.83 with 697,852 live births. Had no abortions been performed in 2015 the England and Wales birthrate would have been comfortably over the 2.1 replacement rate.  In short, the UK (and the West generally) does not have a fertility problem but an abortion problem.

But none of this explains why reproduction has become so depressed that it has dipped below replacement level. Contraception and abortion together with the changes in social organisation mentioned above might explain if most people were stopping at, say, three children.  A proportion of the population will simply decide for whatever reason that they do not want children,  most people still want to have children and most people actually have children. The problem is they frequently do not have enough children to replace themselves. So what is going on? The missing element is insecurity.

Cultural insecurity

The huge numbers of unassimilable immigrants which have been allowed to settle in the West have not only depressed the material conditions of the Western native populations (especially the poorer parts of those populations) through competition for jobs, housing, welfare, health and education. They have also  by their failure to assimilate created a constant and growing anxiety amongst the native population, especially those parts of the population which have found themselves living in areas heavily settled by racial and ethnic minorities.

Allied to the changes wrought by unassimilated immigrants is the grip political correctness has on Western societies.  This is an ideology which covers an ever wider range of subjects in which “discrimination” is zealously   detected by its adherents , but at its core lies the idea of multiculturalism.  This asserts  that all cultures are equal and results in the  pretence that the native culture and native population have no greater status than that of the immigrant derived  communities and  that consequently  all immigrant cultures should retain their ancestral ways. The result of this is  the creation of ghettos in which the larger immigrant groups live lives that are separate from the rest of the population and to all  intents and purposes  the ghetto represents a  colonisation of the areas affected    All of this is dangerous  for both the native population and the immigrant because  it promotes anger amongst the native populations and unreasonable expectations amongst the minorities created by immigration.

The politically correct internationalist elites have gone to great lengths to suppress  resistance by the native population to mass immigration and its consequences.   The culture and ethnic interests of the minority populations are relentlessly promoted while  the culture and ethnic interests of the native populations are suppressed.  Any criticism of immigration or its consequences is met with accusations of racism which both the mainstream media and politicians promote routinely. Punishments are exacted such as hate-filled media witch hunts, the loss of a job and, increasingly, criminal charges for saying politically incorrect things about immigration and/or its consequences. The fact that similar though generally lesser punishments  are meted out to anyone who it is claimed has  breached other aspects of political correctness – most commonly  accusations of homophobia and sexism – intensifies the sense of claustrophobia which  the imposition of strict limits to what may and may not be said naturally creates.

To the suppression of complaint about mass immigration Western elites have added the denigration of the native cultures from which they have sprung.  The history of countries such as the UK and USA are constantly portrayed as something to be ashamed. Collective guilt is laid upon the shoulders of the current native white populations for the existence of colonialism and the slave trade. Anything which is praiseworthy in white history is suppressed or diluted by ahistorical claims that it was not really the work of the whites or that if it was whites who were responsible they were only able to produce the praiseworthy thing because of white oppression of non-white peoples. Any expression of national feeling by the native white populations is immediately decried as nationalism at best and racism at worst.

The constant brainwashing has its effects,  for example,  in 2112 a substantial minority of English people said   when questioned that the St George’s flag is racist, ,  but it  is by no means wholly  successful in obliterating the non-pc feelings of much of the population. The politically correct find in particular the resistance of the native poor to eagerly  assume the politically correct agenda tiresome at best and   unforgiveable at worst.  As a consequence the white working class have gone from being the salt of the earth in the 1950s and 1960s to being seen as irredeemable now.

There is also another cultural aspect. It has become fashionable in the West to say that large families are antisocial, that breeding freely is a form of selfishness for it both takes up resources and  endangers the planet  because Western countries use per capita  much more of the Earth’s resources (especially energy from fossil fuels)  than the developing world.   This has given those who could afford to have as many children as they wanted,  or at least many more than they do have, a pseudo-moral  “green” reason for not breeding freely, something they can readily  ensure with reliable and easy to get contraception and abortion.  This pseudo-moral reason is bolstered by  people in the media peddling the same idea and by the social circle of each individual doing the same. It is all part of the Western guilt trip so assiduously  developed and tended  by  the politically correct.

Material insecurity

The feeling that a person is not culturally secure in the place where they live is the most fundamental and corrosive cause of insecurity, but even without that there are plenty of material circumstances which can rob people of their security,  for example, a lack of affordable and secure housing, the absence of a secure job which pays enough to raise a family and inadequate schools and medical services.

The wealthier people are the more security they both have and feel they have.  For the rich having as many children as they want is purely a social and personal choice because affordability does not come into it. But the truly rich are by definition very limited in any society and the creation of ever increasing differences in wealth stemming from the combination of globalisation and laissez faire economics has led to the shrinking of the proportion of Western populations which can really feel economically secure. Today what were once the comfortable middle classes are feeling the pinch, especially those who have not got on the property ladder.  In most parts of the UK  the only way a mortgage can be afforded by those getting on the property ladder  today is for both the man and woman in a relationship to work full time, something which inevitably reduces the enthusiasm for and opportunity to have children. But  even the dual income property purchase   is increasingly a pipe dream as property prices have reach absurd levels  with the average UK price in  2017 being £317,000. In fact purchasing a property is becoming impossible even for those with what would be regarded as very  comfortable incomes.  To the horrendous price of property  can be added the insecurity generated by the fact that jobs are no longer secure even for the highly educated and skilled.  Consequently, the middle classes are feeling more and more insecure and less and less likely to have more than two children.

But if the middleclass are struggling to keep up appearances the poor in the West are really in the mire. They suffer from the same problems as the middle classes, the cost of housing and the insecurity of jobs, but in an  amplified form, not least because they rely much more on state provision than the middle classes and state provision is being squeezed  by the legacy the 2008 crash, the continued extravagance of an Aid regime which currently costs around £13 billion pa,  the cost of being in the EU,  the  offshoring of jobs to the developing world,  and most obviously and painfully  to the ordinary Briton  by the  huge numbers of immigrants arriving in the West who compete for healthcare, school places, social housing and jobs, especially those which have traditionally been done by the native Western poor.

Historically a sense of security for the poor has largely come from them  providing aid to one another, either individually or through organisations which helped and protected the poor such as churches, trade unions, friendly societies and the co-operative movement.  Such mutual help is almost gone now amongst the native poor  in the UK (and most of the West). This is partly because state-provided  welfare has substituted for  the help from churches, trade unions, charities and suchlike and partly  it is down to the fact  that the  native poor  have had their social circles fractured  either  by being  shifted from the areas  they used to dominate  to places where they are not  in the majority or they still live in their original  areas but these have been subject to  mass immigration of those who cannot or will not assimilate. Either way this has produced the same end of the native poor living in areas which they do not dominate.

The particular problem of housing

At first when the native British poor were moved from the slums after WW2 there was a plentiful supply of what is now called social housing and was called council housing then. These were let on lifelong tenancies, tenancies which could also be passed down the generations.  This  provided a secure base to raise a family.  Private rents were also controlled. This situation remained until the 1980s.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher did two things to greatly reduce the social housing stock. She created a Right-to-Buy for those in council housing which steadily reduced the existing stock of publicly owned properties to let at rents which those on low wages could afford and came close to killing off the building of new council housing. Controls on private rents were also removed.

The shrinking of housing at reasonable rents was temporarily ameliorated by the relaxing of the rules controlling mortgages so that those on even modest wages could afford to buy a property. This together with  Right-To-Buy initially swelled the number of owner occupier but d that id not last  for  UK owner occupation rose to a high of 71% in 2003 but has since sunk to 64%.

Had pre-1980 levels of house building been maintained with immigration at per-1997 levels there would have been something of a housing shortage but nothing like the crisis we now have.  The problem is that immigration did not stay at re 1997 levels but skyrocketed under Blair and has remained huge ever since . In 1997 the estimated UK population was 58 million, today it is 66 million. Most of this huge increase is down to immigration.

In recent years the  UK has been building less than 200,000 new build  homes pa.  Immigration in the year to September 2016 was 273,000. The idea that the UK can somehow build itself out of the current chronic shortages is clearly nonsense as things stand.

Work

The absence of a secure affordable home is surely the biggest material  barrier to starting a family, but insecurity of work runs it a not too far distant second  and of course bleeds into the question of whether a secure home can be afforded.   Margaret Thatcher came to power with a mission to reduce state ownership through the privatisation of all  the large nationalised industries and a desire to see market forces produce what was blithely called “creative destruction”  of our manufacturing  industry (much of which was off shored)  while the  British coal industry was wilfully destroyed. This resulted in a huge loss of  jobs  of the sort which had been the  staple of the native working class.

The  increase  in immigration has led to competition not just for skilled jobs but also the unskilled and semi-skilled  work.   Wages have been suppressed by this competition   and cemented into place by the payment of in-work benefits  which have become an excuse for employers to keep wages low and to generally degrade conditions of employment. For example, there is the growth of self-employment  from necessity rather than inclination and the rise of the zero-hours contract which does  not guarantee any work  but supplies work  only when it suits the employer. A person might work 40 hours one week and 15 hours the next and zero hours the week after.  This may suit  a student or  a couple where the person who is on a zero hours contract is working  not provide the basis for a couple to start a family.

Finally, there is the threat posed by robotics and AI systems to employment. This has not reached the point where most jobs can be done by robots and/or AI systems.  Nonetheless  the technology has already  devoured many jobs, especially  manual ones,   and the thought of what may happen as robots and AI systems get ever more powerful and intelligent will play on the fears of people  especially if they have been made redundant through the introduction of such technology.

This is one case where the overwhelming majority  are ultimately “all in it together”

All of these  sources of insecurity come together to suppress Western reproduction.  This is unsurprising. If couples cannot get a secure home and are  constantly  uncertain about whether they will be employed the next week; if they can only get low paid work; if they are constantly fighting   with immigrants over  public goods such as healthcare and education; if  they have no social support as once the poor had; if they  are constantly  told they should be ashamed of their country  and that it is selfish  to have many children is it any wonder that with ready contraception and abortion  that Western  countries have birthrates below replacement level?

If insecurity is the answer to low birthrates  then the answer must be to increase the sense of security  within  Western populations by raising morale by ending mass immigration,  improving security of employment  and engaging in massive house building programmes to dramatically increase the available property which is either within the scope of people to buy or  allows them to rent at a reasonable price with the type of security of tenure found in the best publicly owned rental property.   There also needs to be a clear understanding that the native populations  of Western countries have priority over  foreigners and  an  end to  multiculturalism .

The perilous demographic  position of Britain  (and  Western nations generally)  can be seen in the fact that whereas it was the native British poor who were at risk of experiencing crippling insecurity fifteen or twenty years ago, today it is virtually anyone who is either not unreservedly rich or is old enough to have bought a property before prices rocketed  is living in a  seriously insecure world .  No longer can the better off  think that they are safe. Moreover, even the  rich must wonder now and then  if  they are secure  as the number of stable and  prosperous countries   in the world diminishes through a combination of mass immigration and  terrorism.

Why the universal wage is a non-starter

Robert Henderson

The universal or citizen’s  wage is finding favour in various political quarters. This is remarkable because it is very obviously hopelessly  impractical.

The idea of the universal wage is  that every adult in a society should receive  a payment from the state. It is predicated on these two rules:

  1. The payment should be enough on which to live.
  2. It will replace all forms of direct welfare which provide money to the individual. Indirect welfare such as healthcare and education would continue as now.

If the payment is  not enough to live on then it will  be impossible to do away with  welfare  payments because not every  person can be assured of a job  which pays enough to allow them  to live by combining the universal wage with  their earned money.  Moreover, there will always be substantial numbers who cannot find work for substantial periods of time.  Then there are the  old who are over retirement age,  children and  the disabled or ill who cannot work. Again, unless the universal wage is enough to live on,  benefits in the shape of additional payments would have to be made which  would  again break the second rule described above.

The amount needed to live

At what level should the universal wage be set? In the UK it would be difficult for any  person to provide for all their basic needs on  less than £10,000 pa and in most parts of the country £10,000 would be grossly inadequate if the person does not own  their own home or live in council housing or its like.

It would be possible to pay different amounts according to the cost of living in different parts of the country, but that would mean reintroducing large scale public administration to work out who gets what. That would breach  the second rule.

To allow a person to live in any part of the country when they have to pay  a private market rent or bear the burden of a huge mortgage  would probably mean a universal wage of £20,000 although even that would be pushing things in London and other parts of the South East of England.

£20,000 might fund a single person, but even two people living as a family would find it difficult to raise children on a combined £40,000  if they did not own their home or  live in affordable housing in much of the UK.    If we are to believe the  estimates  the media   frequently make of  what it costs to raise a child in the UK we would think £10-15,000 a year would be required for each child .   The Fostering Network   charity estimates that the weekly maintenance cost of a baby is £164 and for a 16-year-old  or older £245. Most people will think that is much higher than most parents actually spend,   but £5,000 a year on average for a  child is probably realistic.

The population of the UK was  officially  estimated at 65 million in 2015. It has probably risen to about 66 million by now,  but for the sake of arithmetical co0nvenience I will take the population to be 65 million.  In  2015 the age distribution was as follows:

UK Population   0 to 15 years (%)               16 to 64 years (%)            65 years and over (%)

65,110,000             18.8                                           63.3                                              17.8

Rounded to the nearest whole number that is 81% over the age of 16 and 19% under the age of 16. That gives approximately 52 million  people over the age of 16 or older and 13 million people under the age of 16.

If the £20,000 adult payment is used  (52 million x £20k)  that would  cost    £1,08 trillion.

If the £5,000 under 16 payment is used  (13 million x £5k) that would cost       £130 billion

Total  Cost                                                   £1.38 trillion

That is greater than the estimated UK Government expenditure for the present financial year,  viz:

Estimated Government revenue and expenditure for the year 2017/18 

Revenue        £744 billion

Expenditure  £802 billion

Clearly the £20, 000 adult and  £5,000 child  universal wage would be impossible  as the cost  is not far short of twice the total estimated expenditure by the UK government for the financial year  2017/18.  Even if the universal wages for adults and children was half that it would cost  nearly £700 billion leaving just over £100 billion to fund  for everything else a government is expected to provide such as healthcare, education, defence and roads. Clearly £100 billion  would be a hopelessly inadequate for that task.

But dismal as those figures are the position is far worse because the government’s tax revenue will be set to plummet because if the universal wage is enough to live on  two  things will happen:

  1. Many people will opt to work fewer hours, take less demanding jobs or cease paid employment altogether.
  2. Consumption will shrink substantially reducing tax paid on purchases.

Hence,  trying to fund the universal wage by orthodox means  through would meet with  a double problem, far less money coming in and far more going out. A wonderful recipe for governmental  financial catastrophe.

As this would be a permanent state of affairs government borrowing would not be a solution.  There  would be nothing to stop a government attempting to pay  for the universal wage  by doing what has been done with Quantitative Easing (QE) , namely, magic it out of thin air, but that would lead to at best hyperinflation and at worst the complete  collapse of the currency.  That experiment would not last long.

What is certain is that simple arithmetic tells you the universal wage is completely impractical It   fails because it  either has to be set at a level which would allow the individual to live without working, which means it is  far too expensive,  or its proponents are driven back to making additional payments for those who cannot live on the universal wage because of different regional costs of living (particularly the cost of  housing)  or circumstances such as old age or disablement or sickness.

 

Racial preference in babies 

Robert Henderson

Two studies by researchers in Canada , US, UK, France and China examining the response of babies of six to nine months old to people of different races  have shown  the babies to have a preference for people of their own racial type

The first study  (published in Developmental Science) tested the response of babies to associating music with own-race faces   and other-race faces with the result that from six months happy music began to be associated with own-race faces and sad music with other-race faces.

The second study  (published in Child Development) found that   “Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty”  and  six to eight months old babies  were “were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race than from an adult of a different race.”

The studies involved “babies who had little to no prior experience with other-race individuals. “

Dr. Kang Lee, professor at OISE’s Jackman Institute of Child Study  and the  lead author of the studies states  “The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child’s first year.  This challenges the popular view that race-based bias first emerges only during the preschool years.” ……

‘“When we consider why someone has a racial bias, we often think of negative experience he or she may have had with other-race individuals.  But, these findings suggest that a race-based bias emerges without experience with other-race individuals,” said Dr. Naiqi (Gabriel) Xiao, first author of the two papers and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.’.

Racial bias is natural

That racial bias is either directly inbuilt or at the least developed very early  in humans as a response to  the racial type which surrounds them should surprise no one because it is a  natural result of homo sapiens being social animals. Behaviours and physical differences which signal that an individual belongs to a particular  social group are a  sine qua non of being a social animal for without such signals trust cannot develop and without trust there can be no social animal.  That humans should be biologically  programmed to respond more favourably to those of the same racial type is an example of the necessary signals required  to determine the boundaries  of their  human group.

Those who will not have natural selection determining human responses to racial difference at any price will doubtless claim that if there is racial bias at such an early age it is environmentally determined, that it is nurture not nature. For example, it might be thought that a  baby’s  preference is for  those who have provided care for the child during the early months after birth. Plausible enough at first glance . However,   the research demonstrated  that   babies showed a general preference for those of racial type like their own  not simply a preference for individuals with whom they are familiar. Of course this could be the consequence of being accustomed to same race faces – remember that the babies  were specifically chosen to have had little or  no experience of different race faces and  the babies  could have  been imprinted with a positive response  to same-race faces and to see other-race faces as either unrecognisable as faces or simply  as not being faces containing the trigger qualities to inspire trust.

But even if nurture did determine the infants’  preference for those of the same race by making  babies  identify with the race of those who  cared from them  for the first six months   or so of their lives the nurturists would still be faced with the problem  that there must be an innate behaviour in babies which  makes them favour those  of the  racial type who brought them up in the first six months or so  of their out of womb  existence.   Even if every baby was removed from their parents and given to those of a different racial type to raise – an obvious and deeply sinister absurdity –  the  babies would, if it is nurture at play,  still end up favouring the racial type who raised them in the early months.  Racial bias would not be eradicated merely shifted from the baby’s race to another race with,  presumably, the  baby then favouring  those of a different race to themselves.

Beyond infancy

The significance of the research reaches far beyond the behaviour of  babies. If the babies naturally develop a preference for those of  the same race as themselves, whether though an innate preference or because of the race of those who raises them,  who  will be in the vast majority of cases the same race as the baby,  then it is reasonable to expect that preference is carried through to adulthood and through adulthood.

Nothing  better demonstrates the  natural tendency  of human beings to  remain racially distinct than the remarkably low rate of inter-racial breeding even  in circumstances  where there is every opportunity for  it,  most particularly in the great cities of Western Europe and  North  America, where the populations are increasingly varied and the prevailing  elite ideology positively encouraging of such liaisons.

Even   societies which have had very racially mixed populations for a long time  display a  remarkable  ability to maintain retain racial distinctions over  very long  periods  of time – Brazil is an excellent  example of  this,  with social class being very much graded by skin colour. To argue that racial difference is  not important to the choice of a mate is as absurd as arguing  that the attractiveness of a person is irrelevant to the choice of a  mate.

In  Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner  cite a study made of a  US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84).  The site is one  of the  largest  in  the US and the data examined  covered  30,000  people equally  divided  between San Diego and Boston.   Most were  white  but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The  questionnaire the  would-be  daters had to  fill  in  included  a question  choice on race as “same as mine”  and “doesn’t matter”.   The study  compared  the responses  by white would-be  daters  (those  from non-white were not analysed) to these  questions with the race of  the emails  actually  sent soliciting a date.   The result  in  Levitt  and Dubner’s words was:

“Roughly  half of the white women on the site  and  80  percent  of  the white men declared that  race  didn’t  matter to them. But the response data tell a different story  The white men who said that race didn’t  matter sent  90  percent of  their e-mail  queries  to  white women. The  white women who said race  didn’t  matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

“Is  it  possible that race really didn’t  matter  for  these  white women and men and that they simply  never  happened  to browse a non-white date  that  interested them?”

Or,  more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter  because they wanted to come across  especially  to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?”

In short, around 99% of all the women and 94%  of all men in the sample were  not  willing  to  seek a  date of a  different  race.   How  much stronger  will  be  the tendency to refuse to breed with a  mate  of  a different race?

Another  way  of testing the desire to remain racially separate  is  to look at social class and inter-racial  breeding. The higher up the social scale a  person is the less likely they are to have a partner of a  different race – if you doubt this try to find examples of the rich and  powerful who  have  a  partner of a different race. Those who  have the most choice overwhelmingly choose members of their own racial type, despite the fact that they have the protection of their wealth and position  to shield their spouses and children  from the effects of racial discrimination.

If sexual desire will not commonly override the natural disinclination to remain racially separate nothing will.

The fact of identifiable races

The  fact  that  humans  have external  racial  differences  which  are sufficiently distinct to allow  people throughout the world to  broadly categorise an individual into categories such as  white and  black is in  itself  indicative of the innate human tendency to  breed with those who are racially similar, even though for several thousands of years large human populations of different racial types have existed in close proximity. If  human beings did not have an innate preference for those who racially resemble themselves, humanity  would have bred itself  into something approaching a uniform racial type, at least in those parts of the  world  which  were not very isolated – different  races  have  had regular  and  numerous  contact  with each other  for  at  least  three thousand years. The alternative explanation to an innate tendency is the truly fantastic one that Man everywhere spontaneously developed cultural barriers to breeding which had nothing to do with any innate tendency. If anything is a social construct it is not race but the liberal idea that Man is a single species.

Race is  much stronger as a mediator of who to mate with than ethnic (cultural) difference – think of the very  high proportion of those in Britain who have Irish/Welsh/Scottish/English mixed ancestry. Nonetheless, ethnic differences are culturally potent amongst racially similar populations. For example, on either side of the England/Scotland border,  the inhabitants  born and raised close to the border retain Scots and English accents even though they may have lived their entire lives only a few miles apart.

Because the tendency to mate with those of a similar race is so strong  and universal,  both in place and time, it is reasonable to conclude  that the  behaviour  is innate and that cultures  necessarily include  the requirement for a member of the society to be of a certain racial type. The  consequence of this is that someone of a different racial type  is effectively precluded from full integration because one of the criteria for  belonging has not been met.  That is not to say,  of course,  that many  of the habits of mind of an alien culture may not be  adopted  by someone  of  a  different race.  What is withheld  is  the  instinctive acceptance  of the alien and his or her descendants  as members of  the society. Just as no human being can decide for themselves that they are a member of this or that group, no individual can decide that they belong to this or that nation because it is a two-way process: the other members of the group they wish to join have to accept them as a true member of the group. (Stephen Frears the English  film director once wryly remarked that he had known the actor Daniel Day-Lewis “before he was Irish”).

Assortative mating

There is a widespread  biological behaviour  known as assortative mating.   Members  of  sexually reproducing  animals  select  mates  by certain criteria.  In that much loved laboratory animal,  the fruit  fly drosophila,  this may be the number  of sternopleural bristles;  in Man it  includes  many criteria including racial type.  Other  human  prime assortative criteria are size, intelligence, education and class.  Some of  these criteria such as education and class are more clearly  linked to  nurture  than  Nature,  but even they can be  direct  or  indirect expressions  of   qualities which are at least largely innate  such  as intelligence. I  say  direct  or  indirect  because  the  beneficial qualities  may not be in the individual, for those with  superior education and high social class may lack the  innate qualities of their parents  or earlier ancestors and their privileged position may  simply be a residue of the superior innate abilities of their parents or other ancestors.

For the purposes of inter-racial mating, size,  intelligence, education and  class all come into play. There are clear average  differences  of size  between the three major races:  blacks largest,  whites  in  the middle and Asians smallest.  This would mean that on average members of one  racial  group  would be less likely to choose  another  member  of another racial group. The differences in IQ would have the same effect, with  blacks  being  less likely to mate with the  other  two  races because their IQ is further removed from them than  they are from  each other. Differences in IQ will also be reflected, directly or indirectly in  educational achievement and social class and hence in  mating, for example,  if a minority population of blacks amidst a  majority  white population  have proportionately  more people of low education and  low social  class than the white majority,  something which  should  happen other  things  being equal because of their inferior  IQ  distribution, they are less likely to mate with members of the white majority simply on the grounds of education and class.

The hopeless and dangerous quest for behavioural change

The lead author of the two studies Dr. Kang Lee has no doubts about the  scope and power of racial preference,  but  like so many  academics who  work  in the field of racial difference  he wants to try to fit his findings into a politically correct shape, viz:

“Implicit racial biases tend to be subconscious, pernicious, and insidious. It permeates almost all of our social interactions, from health care to commerce, employment, politics, and dating. Because of that, it’s very important to study where these kinds of biases come from and use that information to try and prevent racial biases from developing,” he said…..

“These findings thus point to the possibility that aspects of racial bias later in life may arise from our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy,” …

“If we can pinpoint the starting point of racial bias, which we may have done here, we can start to find ways to prevent racial biases from happening,” he said.

“An important finding is that infants will learn from people they are most exposed to,” added lead writer  Dr. Xiao, indicating that parents can help prevent racial bias by, for example, introducing their children to people from a variety of races.

The idea that babies could  be programmed to not differentiate between different racial types is practically impossible .  The impracticalities range from most people not having ready   access to people of other races or the social contact which might allow babies to experience people of other races to the fact that there are in practice many different racial types  beyond the basic racial classifications of white, black and so on, for example, an Ethiopian  looks radically different from a Nigerian and a Mongolian very different from a Han Chinese.   In short, the idea that showing babies people of different  races would not condition them to react to all racial  types in the same manner.  Moreover, is it realistic to imagine that people would generally  be willing to seek out those of a different race to accustom their children to  different races? I think that most people would think that extremely improbable.  What then, state coercion to force such  associations?

The experiments also leave some important questions untested.   What happens with  mixed race babies  where the parents are not mixed race?  For example, how  would a child born of a white father and black mother respond to such an experiment?  Or how about a child born of a black father and a Chinese mother?

The belief that behaviour which is innate can be eradicated  is downright dangerous because an innate behaviour evolves for a good reason. The reason for the preference in this case is to  maintain  the integrity of the group to which the individual belongs.   If it was possible to change the bias towards those of the same race the logical result would be to weaken the group to which  an individual  belonged.

It is also extraordinarily  difficult to see how such a change might be effected  because if the behaviour is innate by definition it would be what the individual  naturally wants to do.  If pressed on the subject the politically correct would say it was a matter of education,  by which they mean indoctrination or brainwashing. This of course is what many Western elites have been practising for the past fifty years or more as they have  gradually placed  political correctness at the centre of  Western  politics. But despite the immense attempt at politically correct indoctrination (which begins in schools at a very young age) mixed with threats of penalties such as the loss of jobs, the exclusion from most public offices and  criminal charges  for saying politically incorrect things , preference for those of the same race has remained stubbornly unmoveable amongst most of those upon whom the indoctrination  has been  practised.

But the politically correct  indoctrination and threats  are not  even handedly  applied.  In the West it is the white native populations which bear the brunt of these practices.  Indeed, racial  and ethnic minorities are effectively left unmolested by the politically correct.  The result is to  allow these minorities to  have free rein to still exercise the innate preference for those of the  same race and by extension the  same ethnicity, while the white native populations are constantly denigrated and increasingly punished by the state and the mass media if they  attempt to do the same, namely, to  favour their own racial type and their own cultural practices.  The result is to strengthen the racial and ethnic minorities in the West and to weaken the native populations.

Of course most people amongst the native white populations of the West will supply the politically correct words when they are in  public but it is remarkable that so many native white people , including those with a public profile, do breach the politically correct  diktats, something which is doubly remarkable because of all the politically incorrect sins it is those which deal with race and ethnicity which attract the heaviest penalties. The fact that people so often behave in such a politically incorrect fashion when it comes to race and ethnicity tells its own story, namely, they still have the innate preference for their own race and ethnicity and the attempt to make them deny this, or at least pretend to deny it,   produces a kind of emotional claustrophobia which results in a politically incorrect transgression.

Perhaps in the future it may be possible to genetically change the way human being relate to those of a different race but there is no sign of any  possibility of that at present. But suppose it was possible, how could such a profound alteration in the human psyche be embraced by any society which called itself free or democratic?

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