Utopia and its Scapegoats
By • 3/12/07 |
The last two columns on White America have criticized the Utopianism of our age. We saw in “The Realist Vision” how deeply engrained in our culture the Blank Slate/Noble Savage theory of human nature is. The next column, “The Truth about Human Nature,” revealed that this Utopian vision not only contradicted facts established by the human sciences, but also the very nature of life itself. Human beings do not come into the world as Blank Slates or Noble Savages; rather, our selfish genes have ensured that we are equipped with instincts that enable us to compete effectively in the struggle of life.
People are inclined to be indulgent with Utopian idealists. While they may be naïve, we think, at least their heart is in the right place. Even if their idealism is incompatible with human nature, how can we possibly object to their ambition of establishing a less competitive, more harmonious society? At worst, it seems, such people are harmless dreamers.
Such indulgence is misplaced, however, for Utopianism can be, and has been, profoundly destructive. Utopians’ belief in the perfectibility of human nature prevents us from recognizing our innate limitations. Moreover, the logic of Utopianism requires scapegoats. If human beings are meant to live in harmony with each other, someone must be to blame for our current unharmonious state. Utopians must therefore invent an agent of radical evil responsible for introducing unhappiness into the world and preventing us from being the Noble Savages we naturally are.
In The Dark Side of the Left, the historian Richard J. Ellis has insightfully analyzed the American Left’s need for scapegoats. Ellis examines a strain of “radical egalitarianism” in American culture stretching from the Abolitionists to modern-day feminists and environmentalists that aims to stamp out social hierarchy and self-seeking behavior. As Ellis says:
In its pure form, egalitarianism entails rejecting hierarchical authority as a violation of individual autonomy and equality, and repudiating self-seeking, competitive market relations for disregarding or degrading human fellowship and cooperation… . Radical egalitarians typically desire not only to ameliorate current wrongs but also to transform human beings as we know them… . The imagined future in which conflict has been banished and coercion eliminated rests upon the assumption of the transformation of human nature, or, at least, a recovering of humanity’s natural goodness.1
Believing in the Utopian potential of humanity, the Left must invent a principle of evil to explain why Utopia fails to be realized. Consequently, “the world becomes divided into the oppressor and the oppressed, the reactionary and the progressive, the corrupt and the pure.”2 In short, the good and the evil.
The Leftist need for a scapegoat is one of the reasons for the emergence for what I have called the “whites as cancer” myth. While this myth had been emerging throughout the 20th century, it came to its full flower in the New Left of the 1960s. The movement that motivated the pro-Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War student activism of the time, the New Left gave a radically anti-American and anti-white cast to American Leftism. At the heart of the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the groups of radical egalitarians that Ellis discusses.
For the SDS, America was the land of egoism. Tom Hayden, the guiding spirit behind the SDS, said in the group’s manifesto, the 1962 Port Huron Statement, that America was controlled by a “system with selfish production motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than war-based.” This selfish spirit of America was at the root of the institutions and ideologies that governed it.
Selfishness was behind the greedy and destructive nature of American capitalism. Capitalism had concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small business elite and excluded “the mass of… the people from basic decisions affecting the nature of work, rewards, and opportunities.” As such, America was a land of “politics without publics.”
Selfishness was behind the “warfare state” as well. America was dominated by an “oligopolistic” “military-industrial complex” that pursued an imperialist foreign policy in order to further business interests. For the New Left, the claim that the Cold War was necessary for the defense of the free world was a sham. Rather, it was an excuse for the US government to hand out subsidies to “Big Industry” in the form of military construction bills and other defense appropriations.
The selfishness of American society had had a deadening effect on the emotions, desires, and tastes of Americans. The exclusion of Americans from decisions affecting public policy had inculcated apathy and cynicism. Due to automation and industry’s unresponsiveness to its employees, work had become “unfulfilling and victimizing.” Advertisements created “pseudo-needs” in consumers: “we learn to buy ‘smart’ things, regardless of their utility.” Americans had lost their sense of beauty because “aesthetic values are subordinated to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial market.”
The SDS tied all of the negative effects of American egoism to whiteness. “Our America is still white,” the Port Huron Statement declared ominously—in the coming years, the Left would work to change that! White Americans, said the New Left, were responsible for the poverty and illiteracy of blacks. “While hungry nonwhites [in the European colonies] around the world assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs.” The desire of most American whites to remain separate from non-whites was a sign of the cowardice and small-mindedness induced by capitalism.
White, like might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the “nonwhite,” however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around “different people,” he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity.
Similarly, America was holding back non-whites around the world. The “military-industrial complex” installed regimes friendly to American business and suppressed communist movements that were in the interests of the people.
It was only white America and the other imperialist powers of the West that were afflicted with such soul-destroying egoism. For the New Left, non-whites were Noble Savages whose authenticity represented an alternative to “the system.” The manifesto called nonwhites America’s “greatest nonconformists” and stated, “The counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African, and Latin American peoples.”
Ellis provides copious proof of the New Left’s absurdly romantic view of non-whites. These student activists believed that non-whites’ freedom from competitive egoism also freed them from the conflicts, repressions, and hypocrisy that scarred the West. Hayden wrote elsewhere, for example, that Southern blacks were capable of an authentic “humanism” that was “immune to the ravages of a competitive society.” The hallmarks of this non-competitive society were an “honesty” and “insight” that those whose minds had been formed by mainstream, white America’s “framework of lies” could not achieve. Rural blacks were, according to another New Left writer, “simple people living lives of relative inner peace, love, honor, courage, and humor.” The authenticity of blacks made them the natural moral leaders of America. According to activist Casey Hayden, Tom’s wife:
[Blacks] were first in our value system. They were first because they were redeemed already, purified by their suffering, and they could therefore take the lead in the redemption of us all.
The authenticity of blacks was rooted in their closeness to nature. Writing of blacks in the rural South, another activist wrote they “maintained a closeness with the earth [and] a closeness with each other” that was absent from the majority American culture.3
The New Left portrayed the North Vietnamese in the same way. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin says in his history of the period that the Vietnamese seemed to his set “a species apart, a virtual new breed of human, not only representative of the will of their populations … but a model for the world’s revolutionary future: even our own.”4 For Tom Hayden, the Vietnamese were “the most extraordinary people now living in the world, setting a new standard of morality and sacrifice for the whole world.” The Vietnamese were “whole” human beings, rather than “split” like commercialized Westerners. Their “human socialism,” said Hayden, “was evident in unembarrassed hand clasps among men; the poetry and song at the center of man-woman relationships; the freedom to weep which we observed in everyone from guerillas to generals, from peasants to factory workers.”5 New Leftists found it easy to sweep aside the North Vietnamese history of mass murder and prison camps in their eagerness to believe in Utopia.
It was this atmosphere that made possible the statement by Susan Sontag, herself a New Left intellectual, with which this site began. Here is the complete quote:
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself6.
Such unbalanced pronouncements are the inevitable consequence of the Utopian’s need for a scapegoat.
The naivete of 1960s Leftism is commonly recognized today. Certainly, neither the North Vietnamese, nor American blacks turned out to be Noble Savages—far from it! However, the spirit of the New Left lives on in the “whites as cancer” myth. A Realist Vision that recognizes egoism as intrinsic to humanity is the cure for the crude good vs. evil worldview of the Left. Certainly, whites are not plaster saints: we have pursued our interests in the past, just as every other race has. However, a fair analysis shows we have also pursued our interests more humanely and more productively than other races, and that is why we deserve to be recognized as the race of compassion and accomplishment.
- Richard J. Ellis. The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 5-7. ↑
- Ellis, pp. 13-14. ↑
- Quotes from Ellis, pp. 150-53. ↑
- Todd Gitlin. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam), pp. 272-73. ↑
- Quotes from Ellis, p. 163. ↑
- Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America (1966),” Partisan Review 44 (Winter 1967): 57. ↑
If you want this article to be exposed to a wide audience, take the time to recommend it at digg. Millions of readers traffic the site, and the more recommendations an article gets, the better its chance of being read. If you don't have digg account yet, registration is easy. Just click submit to get started. |
Click here to join the White America mailing list. You'll get an e-mail notice whenever White America publishes new entries.
To the Realist and All, regarding:
“A Realist Vision that recognizes egoism as intrinsic to humanity is the cure for the crude good vs. evil worldview of the Left. Certainly, whites are not plaster saints: we have pursued our interests in the past, just as every other race has. However, a fair analysis shows we have also pursued our interests more humanely and more productively than other races, and that is why we deserve to be recognized as the race of compassion and accomplishment.”
In many respects, the “compassion and accomplishment” of whites are also our greatest weaknesses!
Compassion directed toward ones’ genetic adversaries is utter foolishness in my book. Blacks and other nonwhites clearly fit that bill and offering them compassion without thought of our own survival, has allowed for the current crisis we face as a race and civilization. A crisis of misdirected “compassion” that sees us facing a decline from 38% of the Earth’s population in the year 1900, to that of a mere 15% to 10% of it in 2007.
Productivity and the rewards it brings, allows the West and the USA in particular, to wallow in a “guilty” sense of comfort and arrogance that we can “transform” that which is not our kind into replicas of ourselves. Thus, our wealth and security are squandered to “uplift” the nonwhite enemy and allow them to unnaturally sustain numbers far greater than either the carrying capacities of their own countries, or their technological/scientific capabilities would allow. Moreover, this is not only achieved through our “compassionate” monetary and technological “aid” but through allowing immigration and refugee status, to millions of their worthless surplus populations as well.
We as a people have to give up on the idea of “universal inherent” equality and brotherhood, and move to accepting that egoism and group survival are paramount goods, while also acknowledging evil to be inherent in most of the Third World’s ridiculous demands and expectations of the West. Fair, but also uncompromisingly firm when need be with nonwhites, should be our generally accepted principle of interaction with them.
And that would be particularly true of the hoards of them now living amongst us, in our own countries!
I truly think the problem with the “Utopia” crowd is their hypocrisy. These Upper Middle Class White Socialists always preach “anti-racism”, but live in lily white neighborhoods. They oppose capitalism, but are able to go to prestigious colleges because their parents made a ton of money through capitalism. Once cannot counter the “anti-racism” and “utopia” crow without exposing their hyrpocrisy. Everyone in life is hypocritical one way or another, but these people take it to a new level.
For the SDS, America was the land of egoism. Tom Hayden, the guiding spirit behind the SDS
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “guiding spirit”:
http://www.hws.edu/news/update/showwebclip.asp?webclipid=612
Changing of the times January 24, 2003 THE WASHINGTON TIMES By Julia Duin
Jews were major anti-war organizers during the Vietnam era. Three of the defendants — Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Lee Wiener — in the Chicago Seven trial were Jewish. The case involved the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.
“Jews constituted one-tenth of all students in the 1960s, but they were half or more of the radicals leading protests on campus,” said Joshua Plaut, executive director for the Center for Jewish History in New York. “In 1966, half of all the delegates at the national Students for a Democratic Society convention were Jewish.”
Svigor’s remark deserves a discussion in this forum. It is necessary to understand and confront the Jews’ disproportionate contribution to the left: old left, new left, and multicultural left. This trend continues even in neo-conservatism, where most Jews on the right hang their hats. Much utopian-liberal opiate has been integrated into the neocon creed.
Why? And what is the right thing to do about it? Kevin MacDonald has an intelligent theory, but it’s wrong. “Dr.” Duke has another theory, but it’s as stupid as he is. Most thinkers on the right prefer not to touch such a “sensitive” subject.
Inverted-World, not AmRen, may be the only forum where a truthful discussion may be held on this subject, and perhaps some useful conclusions reached.
Going back to Svigor: David Horowitz by himself makes up for the three Jewish a**holes among the Chicago Seven.
It is certainly no secret that Jews were disproportionately represented in the New Left, as they had been in the Old Left as well. However, I don’t think there is any dispute that Tom Hayden, of Midwestern Irish Catholic descent, was the guiding spirit behind SDS. He was one of the founders of the group, wrote its manifesto, and played a dominant role in the group during its whole existence.
I’ve never denied that Jews played an important role in creating the whites as cancer myth, and I agree with Jules that this will have be dealt with. The advancement of Jewish interests was certainly one of the reasons for the emergence of this myth. However, there were other, and I believe, more important reasons as well, as I will make clear in the coming weeks. Blaming the whites as cancer myth solely on Jewish ethnic interests, which the majority of the American racial right does, is just another form of scapegoating.
Realist, You’ll have to give me some proofs concerning the advancement of Jewish interests as a motivation for the Jews’ support of the multiculti agenda. I know that this is what MacDonald says, and it’s an elegant theory, but I have one problem with it:
I am a (3/4) Jew, and I have been interacting with Jews all over the world for 50 years. I’ve known, and counted among family, friends and acquaintances communists Jews, orthodox religious Jews, and Zen-monk Jews, and nihilist Jews, and regular liberal Jews, and conservative GOP Jews, and warring professor Jews, and professional warrior Jews. In the US, in half the countries of Europe, in Australia, Canada, and Israel. All walks of life, the full arch of professional and economic status.
Not once, not in a single word, have I ever come across a shred of real-life evidence supporting the Mac Donald theory. In contrast, other controversial theories, such as the racial difference ideas discussed on this forum, fit like a glove thousands of real-life events and observations in my life.
My money is on the utopian and social justice element in 3500 years of Jewish religion as the explainer of the mean psychological profile of Jews as a group. It’s the explainer of the motivation of the historical Jesus — a Jewish firebrand activist, if there ever was one. The apostles, too.
The contemporary problem may be that with religious observance having athropied generations ago, what Jews may have in their bones they projecct onto the State - man realm rather than keeping it in the God - man realm.
What say you?
Jules,
I don’t have any settled thoughts on the question of Jewish influence in creating the racial revolution of the 60s. I regard the revolution as the confluence of many different forces, of which Jewish interests were one, but I haven’t decided on the relative importance of them. There were so many conflicts at work in the racial revolution: the conflict between generations, the conflict between the liberal, pacifist North and the conservative, hawkish South, the conflict between the educated class and the working class. Jews’ desire to create a society of racial “tolerance” where they would be safe, which led them to support civil rights and the immigration of non-whites, was just one ingredient in the cauldron, and perhaps not even a very important one. I’ll have to work it all out in the future.
Civil rights is something else. Whatever we know about the statistical profile of blacks, unlike the Third World immigrants the blacks are here because we brought them, in chains. Jim Crow was a disgrace, and as far as I am concerned if Jews were disproportionately represented among those who fought it and brought about its end, I say, good for them and for us.
I think that Jews’ motivation in the civil rights era was altruistic. They were fighting for justice for a truly oppressed minority. It was a noble fight.
But times have changed. And a MacDonaldesque interpretation of Jewish support for current multiculturalism, open borders etc. makes even less sense than in the context of the 60s. For the unique benefits that have accrued to Jews in America are a direct result of the Founding Fathers’ and subsequent elites’ WASP consciousness and grounding in the Old Testament. The more Third World people stream into the US, the lesser the general populations’ benevolence toward the tiny and dangerously enviable Jewish minority. And that’s even before reckoning that a high percentage of the newcomers are Muslim, including hundreds of thousands of real barbarians — Jew and Israel haters all.
When you take under account the birth rates of the 3 million American Muslims, and add to it the stream of Muslim immigrants, and factor in the demographic contraction of the under- 6 million American Jewish comunity, what you have here is the very opposite of a rational strategy of self preservation. You are looking at a picture of collective Jewish suicide, including a certain demise of Israel due to cessation of support by the future Third World America.
The Suicide of the West is multilayered ….
When I think of all that we Whites have lost, I’m filled with a bitter anger. However, I do realize that the liberal baby boomers are going to be in a fix in the coming years. These Whites had no children and will be left to fend for themselves when social security/medicare goes bankrupt in just a few years or less. When I think of them scrounging for garbage and the utter anarchy of the black and latino cities, I would be lying if I said I didn’t smile at such a notion. Burn baby burn!