Pulled from the briskly invigorating comments to this insightful Mangan post on the paradox of nationalism. The discussion had moved into explanations for the apparently self-immolating pathologically altruistic universalism that characterizes people of NW European descent. A commenter digs up a Darwin quote that suggests the wise man understood the dynamics of outbreeding and reinforcing cultural feedbacks (feelbacks?) to create a universalistic morality among the populace.
in other words, there’s been something of a runaway universalism
Just as Darwin predicted in his ‘Descent of Man’.
“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures.
Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.”
More memetic than genetic.
More? Could be both equally. I do think proponents of out- and inbreeding genetic theories of universalism tend to give short shrift to the role that culture-gene feedback loops play in amplifying nascent changes in a people’s character and moral sense. Cf, the recent surge in obesity.
Darwin considered the evolution of wide-ranging and unprejudiced empathy toward others the “noblest” of human virtues. But, he also understood that there were races of man, past and present, who would not or could not return the favor. In reconciling this inherent contradiction bedeviling those who wished to believe in a one-world humanity of equal moral disposition, Darwin glimpsed the outline of a tyrannical self-monitoring masochism and the development of cultural institutions to codify that tyranny of the mind.
More of the perceptive man’s thoughts:
Darwin goes on to touch upon what today is called political correctness…
“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts, and “not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us.”* Whatever makes any bad action familiar to the mind, renders its performance by so much the easier. As Marcus Aurelius long ago said, “Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”*(2)
* Tennyson, Idylls of the King, p. 244.
*(2) Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. V, sect. 16.”
Darwin, as well as great minds from long before his time, foresaw our modern PC, anti-white male witch burning death culture. The point of anti-white propaganda and ritualistic shaming of those who dare to question the reigning equalist narrative is humiliation of wrongthinkers. Humiliate those who entertain even wispy tendrils of wrongthought and you spare the universalist religion and its glassy-eyed Hivemind followers from suffering stains of dispiriting truth upon its soul.
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