Episode 35: Kevin Macdonald, 'The Culture of Critique' | I Don't Speak German podcast

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Episode description

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Episode description

This episode, Daniel (finally) tells Jack all about antisemitic academic Kevin Macdonald and his antisemitic book of antisemitism masquerading as science, 'The Culture of Critique', the influence of which ranges throughout today's far-right.

Content Warning.

Show Notes:

(NB: Our mention of Elizabeth King's Twitter-ban is out of date. She's back, apparently. Hooray!)

"MacDonald’s central thesis is that Judaism is best understood not as a religion but as a blueprint for an experiment in eugenics–a “group evolutionary strategy,” he calls it–designed to maximize a single trait: intelligence. For thousands of years, he says, Jews have separated themselves from their neighbors, choosing to confine themselves to a closed society with strict rules against marrying outside the group. They have lived by policies of extreme group loyalty and obedience to rabbinical authority, which served to maintain their racial purity; and they practiced low-birth-rate, high-investment parenting, which is the royal road to a high group I.Q. They conferred social status (which brings along with it the most desirable women) on men according to their brilliance–indeed, says MacDonald, study of the Talmud was nothing more than a casuistic exercise meant to weed out the dim. Eventually, their highly developed genes for mental and verbal acuity, as well as their social aggression (also carefully bred-in), gave the Jews powerful tools that enable them to dominate neighboring ethnic groups in the endless war of all against all for food and resources."

[...]

"Are MacDonald’s peers aware of what he’s writing in the name of a field long accused of fostering–unfairly, many of them would say; by Jews, MacDonald would say–sexist and racist stereotypes? Do other evolutionary psychologists have an opinion on MacDonald? Culturebox called several well-known members of HBES, specifying in her voice messages that she was writing an article about MacDonald. Few returned her phone calls, but those who did said they’d never read his Jewish trilogy. Two leading scholars said they had read papers of his on other subjects and found them “muddled”; one academic said she had been forced to reject a paper by MacDonald on child development for an anthology she was editing. When Culturebox described the contents of MacDonald’s books to them, they expressed extreme shock and said he contradicted the basic principles of contemporary evolutionary psychology. “The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn’t make it on the basis of modern population genetics,” said John Tooby, the president of HBES and a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Also, he said, “group-selection theory”–the idea that natural selection can occur at the level of a group (such as a bunch of Jews) as opposed to individuals–was debunked in the 1960s, and though some scholars are working to bring group-selection theory back, it remains a minority view."

George Michael, "Professor Kevin MacDonald's Critique of Judaism: Legitimate Scholarship or the Intelleetualization of Anti-Semitism?"

"Kevin MacDonald was bom in 1944 and raised in a traditional
Catholic family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Growing up, he attended
Catholic schools and obtained a BA in philosophy from the University
of Wisconsin in 1966. While in college, he became involved in the
campus anti-war movement. Interestingly, several of his roommates
were Jewish, which, as MacDonald later recounted, opened his eyes to
Jewish involvement in radical causes. One incident in particular that
left an impression on him was when Jewish student radicals recruited
him to give a speech in order to present a supposedly non-Jewish
veneer to their politics. During this phase in nis life, MacDonald
entertained dreams of becoming a jazz pianist, i Several years later,
however, he abandoned both his musical career and radical politics to
enter graduate school at the age of 30."

From the introduction to CoC:

"CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these
Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors— the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

"Here I attempt to answer some typical criticisms that have been leveled against CofC. (See also my website: www.csulb.edu/~kmacd). I also discuss issues raised by several books that have appeared since the publication of CofC. There have been complaints that I am viewing Judaism in a monolithic manner. This is definitely not the case."

"The main point of my testimony is that the attacks made on David Irving by Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should be viewed in the long-term context of Jewish-gentile interactions. As indicated by the summaries of my books, my training as an evolutionist as well as the evidence compiled by historians leads me to conceptualize Judaism as self-interested groups whose interests often conflict with segments of the gentile community. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been a pervasive feature of the Jewish experience since the beginnings of the Diaspora well over 2000 years ago. While anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been colored by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition exactly as expected by an evolutionist. Particularly important have been the themes of separatism—the fact that Jewish groups have typically existed as recognizably distinct groups and have been unwilling to assimilate either culturally or via marriage to the wider society, the theme of economic, political, and cultural domination, and the theme of disloyalty."