MinnesotaSmith
Membership Revoked
Mods, this should no doubt eventually go to ALT/UNEX. Given the imminent election, and the stakes involved in voting major party or Libertarian/Constitution Party, I thought this bore some discussion on the main page. The implied position of this piece is that those stakes involve more than who gets to make the decision to buy what trinket in our economy, but extend even to unavoidable failure of national survival, possibly within the lifetimes of many forum members.
The bolding is mine.
http://www.amren.com/913issue/913issue.html#article3
The Folly of the Welfare State, Part II
Raymond B. Cattell, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, Pergamon Press, New York, 1972, 482 pp.
Reviewed by Thomas Jackson
The first part of this review described Professor Cattell’s wish to base morality on science rather than on the revealed dogma of religion. In his view, men will develop a truly scientific morality only after further evolution has heightened their powers and broadened their vision. In the meantime, moral behavior is that which promotes evolutionary improvement while immoral behavior impedes it.
Ethics based on evolution have profound implications, both for the ways in which societies govern themselves and the ways in which they conduct external affairs. In fact, whether deliberately or unconsciously, Western societies now violate the principles of evolutionary ethics at every turn, and intractable problems flow from these violations. Ultimately, a society that flouts the laws of evolution will destroy itself.
Professor Cattell proposes a substantial body of thought on which a society might base its larger moral choices. He has given it the awkward name of Beyondism, and though he insists that it should be a subject of constant study and improvement, he has sketched its general contours.
If it was wrong to say that the earth was created in six days, it may also be wrong to tell a man to love his neighbor as himself.
Beyondist morality is sharply different from the Christian ideal, which he describes thus:
“We are asked to give all our consideration to ‘the publicans and sinners,’ the lost sheep, the prodigal sons and reprobates which Christianity so debatably cherishes. What would a rational sociology and psychology say of these? Today's newspaper tells us with piously approved optimism that ‘poor and rich, patriotic and alienated, criminals and good citizens; we all need one another.’ To which a society with any sense of direction whatever must reasonably add the amendment ‘Some [are needed] more than others!’“
The political expression of a preoccupation with lost sheep and prodigal sons is the welfare state. It does not merely accept the notion that reprobates are just as valuable as virtuous, hard-working citizens; it treats them as more valuable, since it taxes the virtuous in order to support them.
Such a society must set aside healthy notions of blame and responsibility. It must assume that every person, no matter how degenerate, has natural rights that a society must meet. Rights to food, housing, “dignity,” and all the other “rights” on which a welfare state is based can only be met by assuming that the unproductive are somehow entitled to live off benefits that are forcibly exacted from the productive.
According to Professor Cattell, the attempt to give precedence to “moral” or “transcendental” rights over contractual rights can be traced back to the religious preoccupation with lost sheep. Nevertheless, as he reminds us, even so progressive and influential a thinker as Jeremy Bentham once wrote, “Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights . . . nonsense upon stilts.”
The modern form of nonsense upon stilts is the refusal to view failure as anything more than the consequence of “oppression” or “victimization.” Since the welfare state has abolished laziness and stupidity along with blame, individual failure is to be understood only as societal failure.
From a Beyondist point of view, it is not merely illogical and unfair to make the good pay for the failures of the bad; it is an evolutionary catastrophe, for along with blame, the welfare state has abolished genetics. Of all the bogus rights promoted by the welfare state, the most dangerous is the “right” of those who are unable to look after themselves to bring into the world yet more mouths that the productive members of society must feed. It is no accident that the children of the incompetent and irresponsible tend, themselves, to be incompetent and irresponsible. In the nearly 20 years since Professor Cattell published his book, research has only confirmed the extent to which intelligence and even personality traits are inherited.
Nevertheless, the welfare state willfully turns its back on the laws of heredity. The preoccupation with lost sheep means, for example, that society devotes ever-greater efforts to the impossible task of trying to prepare welfare-bred low achievers for life in a complex, industrial society. A much more productive and sensible approach would be to improve succeeding generations through attention to the laws of heredity.
Welfare payments permit the irresponsible and incompetent to rear, at public expense, as many children as they want. These are the very children who fill classes in remedial learning, and who are likely to quit school and become criminals. The competent and responsible, who are taxed to pay for welfare, remedial education, and prisons cannot afford to have many children of their own. Richard Herrnstein of Harvard concludes that as a result of these differential birth rates, every new generation brings a decline in the average American IQ.
One of the primary goals of a society is the transmission of its culture to succeeding generations. Professor Cattell describes this transmission as the forcible molding of an essentially animal nature into patterns of higher behavior. He recognizes that this is painful: “That the educational acquisition process in complex, modern culture stretches the genetic endowment in frustration tolerance of present day man close to its limits is shown by the temper tantrums and tears of childhood; the disorders and mental anguish of adolescence . . .”
The welfare state refuses to acknowledge that different individuals and different groups are unequally prepared, genetically, to acquire culture. Throughout the history of our species, progress has taken the form of ever-greater cultural demands made on a slowly improving genetic substrate. Degeneration is the reverse process, the reduction of cultural demands to meet the limited capacities of a declining genetic substrate. The genetic substrate of a nation can decline not just through differential birth rates but through migrations.
It is clear that in the United States, the direction of cultural movement has gone sharply into reverse. Proof of this is everywhere, but a few homely examples will serve to show what Professor Cattell may have had in mind. When the New York City subway was built, stations had public rest rooms, which patrons used for their intended purposes. As the city's population changed, subway rest rooms became havens for muggers and rapists. They became a menace rather than a convenience, and the transit authority now keeps them locked. To the general inconvenience has been added the stink of urine in the hallways.
Another example of the reversal of culture in the face of genetic decline is the sinking standards of American education. School integration has not improved public education for non-whites. On the contrary, it has lowered standards for everyone. It is now not uncommon for high school “graduates” to be unable to read their own diplomas.
In Detroit, the major American city most clearly and completely governed by blacks, violent lawlessness is so common that shop keepers work behind bullet-proof glass, wear armored vests, and keep weapons behind the counter. The culture of Detroit is declining to meet the genetic substrate.
Burgeoning crime rates, growing illiteracy, failing international competition—these are all well-documented aspects of the current American decline, yet the welfare state resolutely refuses to recognize their biological component. And indeed, there is also a failure of the will even among the genetically gifted, some of whose children likewise sink into the mire of cultural decay. But even if the moral and cultural rigor of a nation does not go slack, a decline in the human raw material can only drag a society downward.
Because it denies both responsibility and heredity, the welfare state is both a societal and an evolutionary dead end. As Professor Cattell points out, if the cost of producing and educating the average citizen—as the average sinks lower and lower—ever becomes greater than his life-time contribution to society, the national order will collapse. [Think Somalia -- M.S.] At the same time, in an evolutionary environment in which welfare payments have removed any connection between genetic fitness and survival, each generation will be less fit than the last.
What can be done to reverse these trends? Professor Cattell is mainly concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of an evolutionary ethic and has little to say about how it would be practiced. He believes, for example, that in a healthy society, in which the parasitic and dysgenic character of irresponsible reproduction were widely understood, unfit citizens would voluntarily refrain from having children. This might eventually be true in a society that had completely thrown off the illusions that foster the welfare state, but any attempt to halt evolutionary decline in America will have to start with something more than exhortation. As Professor Cattell concedes, “any realistic ethical system must regard a man who begets [or IMO a woman who births -- MS] eight children on public welfare as someone as socially dangerous as any criminal.”
For now, there is not even a hint of exhortation. Anyone who suggested publicly that welfare recipients merely be urged not to have children would be quickly silenced. In the United States, as in other white countries, the essentially religious view—that the superior must be sacrificed for the benefit of the inferior—prevails. Rather than establishing a genuinely scientific morality, Western societies prefer to ignore the science of genetics. Ignorance, especially willful ignorance, always has a price.
One of the attractions of redemptive religion is that it offers rewards after death. Beyondism strikes no such deals. In the proliferation of the incompetent at the expense of the competent it sees only injustice and folly. Professor Cattell warns of what may come: “Probably never in history has there been a period in which dysgenic trends could take effect so rapidly as in the welfare state . . . Two or three generations of disregard for genetic quality might lead to such a breakdown of the economic and cultural level of society as would be well nigh irremediable.”
The welfare state has no means of reversing the declines it sponsors.
It rewards failure with handouts and punishes success with taxes.
Is this not the direction in which America is headed? What are the chances that the rest rooms in the New York City subway will ever again be opened to the public? When will thoughtful parents regain confidence in public schools? When will it become possible again to run a shop in Detroit without weapons and bullet-proof glass? It is far more likely that localized horrors will spread rather than that civility will return to the wastelands.
The welfare state has no means of reversing the declines it sponsors. It rewards failure with handouts and punishes success with taxes. “Compassion” requires that more and more effort go into succoring those at the bottom of society, while at the overburdened top, the march of culture grinds to a halt. Professor Cattell warns of “the cost of making the whole of society a hospital, or a producer of dependent adults . . . converting substantial fractions of society into stall-fed, domesticated animals.”
He reminds us that “‘love,’ as pity, can err like any other emotion, and even create what it needs to feed upon.” The welfare industry, by making problems worse through misdirected largesse, only creates more clients for its “services” and more compelling reasons for its own existence. Beyondism would call for a genuine compassion that would solve the problems, not a perverted compassion that ensures their continuation.
Heretofore, evolution has worked by differential death rates. Nature cut down the unfit. Now that heredity is better understood, the species could be rapidly improved through differential birth rates. The great tragedy is that in an era in which this process has become understood, the social order promotes differential birth rates that are dysgenic rather than eugenic.
Professor Cattell is under no illusion that current social thinking will soon change. Nevertheless, he has followed the implications of an evolutionary ethics into the realm of intergroup relations—which will be the subject of the third, and concluding, part of this review."
====================================
They Saw it Coming
The man who first proposed to support the poor increased the number of the miserable.
—Menander, c. 300 B.C.
If you stop supporting the crowd, it will support itself.
—Seneca, 8 B.C. - 65 A.D.
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more the poverty will increase.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1892
The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
—Herbert Spencer, 1820 - 1903
Three generations of morons are enough.
—Justice Oliver Holmes, 1841 - 1935
The bolding is mine.
http://www.amren.com/913issue/913issue.html#article3
The Folly of the Welfare State, Part II
Raymond B. Cattell, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, Pergamon Press, New York, 1972, 482 pp.
Reviewed by Thomas Jackson
The first part of this review described Professor Cattell’s wish to base morality on science rather than on the revealed dogma of religion. In his view, men will develop a truly scientific morality only after further evolution has heightened their powers and broadened their vision. In the meantime, moral behavior is that which promotes evolutionary improvement while immoral behavior impedes it.
Ethics based on evolution have profound implications, both for the ways in which societies govern themselves and the ways in which they conduct external affairs. In fact, whether deliberately or unconsciously, Western societies now violate the principles of evolutionary ethics at every turn, and intractable problems flow from these violations. Ultimately, a society that flouts the laws of evolution will destroy itself.
Professor Cattell proposes a substantial body of thought on which a society might base its larger moral choices. He has given it the awkward name of Beyondism, and though he insists that it should be a subject of constant study and improvement, he has sketched its general contours.
If it was wrong to say that the earth was created in six days, it may also be wrong to tell a man to love his neighbor as himself.
Beyondist morality is sharply different from the Christian ideal, which he describes thus:
“We are asked to give all our consideration to ‘the publicans and sinners,’ the lost sheep, the prodigal sons and reprobates which Christianity so debatably cherishes. What would a rational sociology and psychology say of these? Today's newspaper tells us with piously approved optimism that ‘poor and rich, patriotic and alienated, criminals and good citizens; we all need one another.’ To which a society with any sense of direction whatever must reasonably add the amendment ‘Some [are needed] more than others!’“
The political expression of a preoccupation with lost sheep and prodigal sons is the welfare state. It does not merely accept the notion that reprobates are just as valuable as virtuous, hard-working citizens; it treats them as more valuable, since it taxes the virtuous in order to support them.
Such a society must set aside healthy notions of blame and responsibility. It must assume that every person, no matter how degenerate, has natural rights that a society must meet. Rights to food, housing, “dignity,” and all the other “rights” on which a welfare state is based can only be met by assuming that the unproductive are somehow entitled to live off benefits that are forcibly exacted from the productive.
According to Professor Cattell, the attempt to give precedence to “moral” or “transcendental” rights over contractual rights can be traced back to the religious preoccupation with lost sheep. Nevertheless, as he reminds us, even so progressive and influential a thinker as Jeremy Bentham once wrote, “Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights . . . nonsense upon stilts.”
The modern form of nonsense upon stilts is the refusal to view failure as anything more than the consequence of “oppression” or “victimization.” Since the welfare state has abolished laziness and stupidity along with blame, individual failure is to be understood only as societal failure.
From a Beyondist point of view, it is not merely illogical and unfair to make the good pay for the failures of the bad; it is an evolutionary catastrophe, for along with blame, the welfare state has abolished genetics. Of all the bogus rights promoted by the welfare state, the most dangerous is the “right” of those who are unable to look after themselves to bring into the world yet more mouths that the productive members of society must feed. It is no accident that the children of the incompetent and irresponsible tend, themselves, to be incompetent and irresponsible. In the nearly 20 years since Professor Cattell published his book, research has only confirmed the extent to which intelligence and even personality traits are inherited.
Nevertheless, the welfare state willfully turns its back on the laws of heredity. The preoccupation with lost sheep means, for example, that society devotes ever-greater efforts to the impossible task of trying to prepare welfare-bred low achievers for life in a complex, industrial society. A much more productive and sensible approach would be to improve succeeding generations through attention to the laws of heredity.
Welfare payments permit the irresponsible and incompetent to rear, at public expense, as many children as they want. These are the very children who fill classes in remedial learning, and who are likely to quit school and become criminals. The competent and responsible, who are taxed to pay for welfare, remedial education, and prisons cannot afford to have many children of their own. Richard Herrnstein of Harvard concludes that as a result of these differential birth rates, every new generation brings a decline in the average American IQ.
One of the primary goals of a society is the transmission of its culture to succeeding generations. Professor Cattell describes this transmission as the forcible molding of an essentially animal nature into patterns of higher behavior. He recognizes that this is painful: “That the educational acquisition process in complex, modern culture stretches the genetic endowment in frustration tolerance of present day man close to its limits is shown by the temper tantrums and tears of childhood; the disorders and mental anguish of adolescence . . .”
The welfare state refuses to acknowledge that different individuals and different groups are unequally prepared, genetically, to acquire culture. Throughout the history of our species, progress has taken the form of ever-greater cultural demands made on a slowly improving genetic substrate. Degeneration is the reverse process, the reduction of cultural demands to meet the limited capacities of a declining genetic substrate. The genetic substrate of a nation can decline not just through differential birth rates but through migrations.
It is clear that in the United States, the direction of cultural movement has gone sharply into reverse. Proof of this is everywhere, but a few homely examples will serve to show what Professor Cattell may have had in mind. When the New York City subway was built, stations had public rest rooms, which patrons used for their intended purposes. As the city's population changed, subway rest rooms became havens for muggers and rapists. They became a menace rather than a convenience, and the transit authority now keeps them locked. To the general inconvenience has been added the stink of urine in the hallways.
Another example of the reversal of culture in the face of genetic decline is the sinking standards of American education. School integration has not improved public education for non-whites. On the contrary, it has lowered standards for everyone. It is now not uncommon for high school “graduates” to be unable to read their own diplomas.
In Detroit, the major American city most clearly and completely governed by blacks, violent lawlessness is so common that shop keepers work behind bullet-proof glass, wear armored vests, and keep weapons behind the counter. The culture of Detroit is declining to meet the genetic substrate.
Burgeoning crime rates, growing illiteracy, failing international competition—these are all well-documented aspects of the current American decline, yet the welfare state resolutely refuses to recognize their biological component. And indeed, there is also a failure of the will even among the genetically gifted, some of whose children likewise sink into the mire of cultural decay. But even if the moral and cultural rigor of a nation does not go slack, a decline in the human raw material can only drag a society downward.
Because it denies both responsibility and heredity, the welfare state is both a societal and an evolutionary dead end. As Professor Cattell points out, if the cost of producing and educating the average citizen—as the average sinks lower and lower—ever becomes greater than his life-time contribution to society, the national order will collapse. [Think Somalia -- M.S.] At the same time, in an evolutionary environment in which welfare payments have removed any connection between genetic fitness and survival, each generation will be less fit than the last.
What can be done to reverse these trends? Professor Cattell is mainly concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of an evolutionary ethic and has little to say about how it would be practiced. He believes, for example, that in a healthy society, in which the parasitic and dysgenic character of irresponsible reproduction were widely understood, unfit citizens would voluntarily refrain from having children. This might eventually be true in a society that had completely thrown off the illusions that foster the welfare state, but any attempt to halt evolutionary decline in America will have to start with something more than exhortation. As Professor Cattell concedes, “any realistic ethical system must regard a man who begets [or IMO a woman who births -- MS] eight children on public welfare as someone as socially dangerous as any criminal.”
For now, there is not even a hint of exhortation. Anyone who suggested publicly that welfare recipients merely be urged not to have children would be quickly silenced. In the United States, as in other white countries, the essentially religious view—that the superior must be sacrificed for the benefit of the inferior—prevails. Rather than establishing a genuinely scientific morality, Western societies prefer to ignore the science of genetics. Ignorance, especially willful ignorance, always has a price.
One of the attractions of redemptive religion is that it offers rewards after death. Beyondism strikes no such deals. In the proliferation of the incompetent at the expense of the competent it sees only injustice and folly. Professor Cattell warns of what may come: “Probably never in history has there been a period in which dysgenic trends could take effect so rapidly as in the welfare state . . . Two or three generations of disregard for genetic quality might lead to such a breakdown of the economic and cultural level of society as would be well nigh irremediable.”
The welfare state has no means of reversing the declines it sponsors.
It rewards failure with handouts and punishes success with taxes.
Is this not the direction in which America is headed? What are the chances that the rest rooms in the New York City subway will ever again be opened to the public? When will thoughtful parents regain confidence in public schools? When will it become possible again to run a shop in Detroit without weapons and bullet-proof glass? It is far more likely that localized horrors will spread rather than that civility will return to the wastelands.
The welfare state has no means of reversing the declines it sponsors. It rewards failure with handouts and punishes success with taxes. “Compassion” requires that more and more effort go into succoring those at the bottom of society, while at the overburdened top, the march of culture grinds to a halt. Professor Cattell warns of “the cost of making the whole of society a hospital, or a producer of dependent adults . . . converting substantial fractions of society into stall-fed, domesticated animals.”
He reminds us that “‘love,’ as pity, can err like any other emotion, and even create what it needs to feed upon.” The welfare industry, by making problems worse through misdirected largesse, only creates more clients for its “services” and more compelling reasons for its own existence. Beyondism would call for a genuine compassion that would solve the problems, not a perverted compassion that ensures their continuation.
Heretofore, evolution has worked by differential death rates. Nature cut down the unfit. Now that heredity is better understood, the species could be rapidly improved through differential birth rates. The great tragedy is that in an era in which this process has become understood, the social order promotes differential birth rates that are dysgenic rather than eugenic.
Professor Cattell is under no illusion that current social thinking will soon change. Nevertheless, he has followed the implications of an evolutionary ethics into the realm of intergroup relations—which will be the subject of the third, and concluding, part of this review."
====================================
They Saw it Coming
The man who first proposed to support the poor increased the number of the miserable.
—Menander, c. 300 B.C.
If you stop supporting the crowd, it will support itself.
—Seneca, 8 B.C. - 65 A.D.
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860
The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more the poverty will increase.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1892
The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
—Herbert Spencer, 1820 - 1903
Three generations of morons are enough.
—Justice Oliver Holmes, 1841 - 1935
Last edited:
I STRONGLY suggested that she never return! She never did.
