The ever-useful Paul Craig Roberts on a couple of recent books, one by Rothbardian Hans-Hermann Hoppe on monarchy and one by a Finnish Darwinian on ethnic conflict as genetic nepotism writ large. Libertarians and Darwinians can be single-factor ideologues, but they’re not always at their worst and there’s a lot to be learned from people who emphasize factors it’s PC to ignore. I’ve learned a lot from Richard Epstein and Charles Murray, for example.
While the biological
While the biological dimension of race is certainly real and important, and while the tyrannical suppression of speech about race and related issues is something that threatens us all, at the same time I find it hard to empathize with people who want to reduce human nature, human civilization, and all moral issues to the desire of genes to replicate themselves. As an example of this kind of thinking, here is a typical passage from a personal web article by Englishman Geoffrey Sampson (linked to a Sam Francis article linked to the Paul C. Roberts article) for which he was forced to resign from a local council in Britain:
“But this really misses the point. We don’t prefer people who share more of our genes over people who share fewer because the latter have particular outward features that we dislike. We prefer the former because they share more of our genes, and we all want our own genes to become numerous. Biology forces us to want that, which is why it forces us to want to get our bodies entangled with the opposite sex. If some politically-correct person announces `I have no racial feelings at all, myself’, the appropriate response is `Oh, so does that mean you are asexual, too?’ That might wipe the sanctimonious smirk off his or her face.”