Lawrence Auster asks, "Is Sailer able to defend his status-competion theory of white suicide?" So I think to myself, hmmm...that sounds interesting. Sailer has a "status-competition theory of white suicide? Please do tell!"
The more fool I. Several hours and several thousand words later, having followed all of Auster's links (almost all of them to himself) and plowed through all of the ensuing verbiage, it turns out that the answer is: No. Steve Sailer does not have a 'status-competition theory of white suicide' - or, at any rate, Auster offers no reason whatsoever to believe that he does.
The most striking thing about this whole one-sided fracas is that, in the course of multiple posts with dozens of comments spread over the last couple of years, nobody - not Auster, not Gintas - not even such doubters as are allowed to speak - ever once quotes anything by Sailer. The whole discussion takes place in a weirdly fact-free vacuum.
Once, and once only, Auster links to (though he does not quote from) a VDARE column by Sailer, dating from 2nd January, 2007: "White Guilt, Obamania, And The Reality Of Race" - which is apparently the locus classicus of this grand, all-encompassing "status-competition theory of white suicide."
Here are the relevant passages from that column:
[Question:] "...why are so many whites, especially in the media, excited about promoting Obama for President in 2008?"...
[Answer:] "Supporting Obama for President...is seen by many whites as the ultimate in White Guilt Repellent.
"It's important to understand, however, that White Guilt is very different from, say, Catholic Guilt, which consists of straightforward feelings of personal moral failure.
"In comparison, I don't recall ever meeting any white person who personally felt guilty for the troubles of African-Americans. But I've known many whites who want to loudly blame other whites for black difficulties.
"Some whites at least heap guilt upon their own ancestors, but many who publicly proclaim the reality of White Guilt aren't averse to noting that their own forefathers arrived at Ellis Island long after slavery was over.
"In other words, White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle. Minorities are merely props for asserting moral superiority over other whites.
"Finding and punishing Guilty Whites has become a national obsession...
"...many whites want to be able to say 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites...Hey, I voted for a black guy for President!"
* * * * *
That's it. That's all, folks. So far as Auster seems to know, or care to know, that's all that Sailer has ever written on this subject. Yet he goes on, and on, and on about Sailer's point, parlaying it into some grand Sailerian theory of white suicide/suicidal liberalism, and complaining that it doesn't measure up to his own grand theory of same.
Now I would think that Sailer's point in this column is fairly straightforward and rather insightful: when many whites make a big show of their love for Obama and their hatred of racism, it's not because they actually care very much for African-Americans, in general, or think very highly of them. (In fact, in their daily lives, they go to great lengths to avoid contact with all but a very small and carefully selected subset of blacks.) However, they believe that their true thoughts and feelings here are shameful, and that they ought to think and feel just the opposite. They believe this because the media and the academy and all the other leaders and followers of public opinion have been telling them so for decades. Obamania just gives them a cheap way to advertise their ersatz enthusiasm for this high-status conventional wisdom.
Please note that Sailer makes no mention of "white suicide," or "suicidal liberalism," or any of the other things for which Auster seems to think he is offering a reductive theory. Nor does he speculate on why anti-"racism" has evolved, in the West, into the quintessential high-status belief, while "racism" has devolved into the ultimate badge of low-rent origins. Those interesting questions are simply beyond the scope of his column. He's just making an empirical claim about the nature of "white guilt." And it's far from an empty or trivial claim: presumably, the people he's talking about would loudly deny that he's right, and insist that their love is real and their enthusiasm genuine.
At one point, commenter M. Jose suggests to Auster that he's gone overboard: "I don't think that Steve Sailer is saying that status seeking is the root of 'anti-racism,' (i.e. white surrender). He is saying that status seeking rather than benevolence is what motivates most of the followers of 'anti-racism.'" Alas, this eminently sensible remark goads Auster into the following tirade:
"...if that's all Sailer is saying, then his statement has little more meaning than saying that people breathe oxygen. Since all human relations, and thus all human activities in society, inevitably involve questions of status...it's meaningless to say that white suicide is driven by status competition. It's like saying that people seek education and knowledge and the ability to speak well for motives of status. Well, obviously the degree of a person's education, knowledge and ability to speak well is highly correlated with status. But then how is the desire to be knowledgeable any different from the desire to parade suicidal liberal attitues on race? And how are those desires any different from the desire to have the most attractive possible mate, or from the desire to write a great book, or to discover a great scientific theory, or to design a great park? In Sailer's reductionist view of man, the motive for creating civilization is the same as the motive for destroying civilization. So his status competition theory tells us precisely NOTHING. Yet Sailer and his fellow reductionists somehow imagine that they've got the 'real goods' on suicidal liberalism!"
Now this is just remarkably silly.
In the first place, from the claim that "all human relations, and thus all human activities in society, inevitably involve questions of status," it does not follow that any particular activity of any particular individual or group is driven more by status-seeking than by some other motive. So to argue that Obamania is so driven is far from "meaningless."
In the second place, desires differ not only in their motives, but in their objects. So, for example, just because a particular instance of Obamania and a particular instance of the desire to be knowledgeable, or to have the most attractive possible mate, or to write a great book, or to discover a great scientific theory, or to design a great park might be similarly motivated, in part, by status seeking, these desires still differ in their objects.
In the third place, if Sailer really were to argue (which, so far as I can tell, he doesn't) that "the motive for creating civilization is the same as the motive for destroying civilization," that would be a really interesting claim, and would tell us a lot about "the whimsical condition of mankind," as Hume would say.
* * * * *
One might forgive Auster his many sins in these threads, were he to come through with a really useful Grand Theory Of White Suicide/Suicidal Liberalism of his own, but I'm afraid this is the closest he gets:
"...the unique liberal notion of morality...involves the following sequence of thoughts:
"(1) There is nothing higher than man.
"(2) Therefore, all human selves are equal.
"(3) Therefore the one wrong thing is to judge or discriminate.
"(4) Therefore people who do not believe in anything higher than man and who do not judge and discriminate, embody goodness itself, while
"(5) The people who do believe in something higher than man and who do judge and discriminate are subhumans. They are backward, the resentful, the bitter, the fundamentalist, the racist.
"(6) In short, all human selves are equal, but some human selves (namely those who know that all human selves are equal) are infinitely superior to other human selves (namely those who don't know and who resist this truth).
"Thus the belief in equality leads to the belief in the absolute superiority of some and the absolute inferiority of others..."
...from which we may safely conclude that Auster knows, if possible, even less about the ideas of the great theorists of liberalism then he knows about the ideas of Steve Sailer. Trust me on this one: I've read my Kant, and my Mill, and my Rawls, and so on and so forth, and I've known and worked with more liberals than you can shake a stick at - and not one of them, not ever, has gone through anything even remotely resembling any such "sequence of thoughts." This is not even a recognizable caricature. It's just weird, dopey stuff.
* * * * *
So here's my challenge to Lawrence Auster: next time you're in the mood to criticize Sailer, or Steyn, or Derbyshire, or Goldberg, or any of the other higher-status right-wing pundits who so obsess you - begin by actually reading their stuff. Continue by quoting their stuff at length. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PARAPHRASE THEM. You have no talent for sympathetic paraphrase, and you're probably too old of a dog to learn that new trick. Conclude by criticizing, as clearly and carefully as you can, what they have actually written, rather than something you think you have detected between the lines.
If you follow this advice, faithfully, for awhile, there's a chance - just a chance, mind you - that some of these worthies might stop ignoring you.
Comments (22)
Steve, have you read Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism or Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed? They make a somewhat similar case to that of Auster's, although perhaps not as overtly logical.
By the way, the same sort of observation can be applied to some ideologues of the Right, if their ideology is, like liberalism, materialistic. Whittaker Chambers, for instance, uses it in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged:
"Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them."
Like Randianism, liberalism cannot tolerate disagreement or resistance because resistance to it indicates not just a logical failure but a moral failure. Conservatives aren't just dumb people they're bad people.
In any case, I doubt if Auster is saying that liberals consciously go through the steps he delineates as if they were a process map. But it certainly seems that something like that thought process does operate in much of today's liberalism.
Posted by Rob G | May 26, 2011 5:54 PM
The "Grand Theory Of White Suicide/Suicidal Liberalism" actually comes from the ideas of James Kalb. He was a founder of VFR but was banned for mentioning the sacralization of the Holocaust.
Posted by Monty Lewis | May 26, 2011 7:02 PM
Kudos for that penultimate paragraph, which could be titled How Not To Be a Crank. It probably applies to most political writers on the Internet, though Auster's an extreme case. I made almost the exact same suggestion as you in comments here regarding a cranky diatribe by someone named Mary Grabar (I think that was her name) that was the topic of a post here.
Breaking those rules, I'll note that I do vaguely remember Sailer implying, more strongly than in the passage you quoted, that white status-seeking is an explanation of the phenomenon of white "anti-racism" itself. As Auster suggests above, or rather tries to suggest, that would be begging the question. It doesn't explain why high status is gained by expressions of "anti-racism" and not by, say, expressions of love for the white race. I remember thinking this while reading Sailer. If my memory is correct, then Sailer is guilty of taking a reasonable observation of SWPL psychology and casually suggesting that it also explains something it doesn't. A minor mistake by someone who gets an amazing amount of the big picture right.
Posted by Aaron | May 26, 2011 11:51 PM
"there's a chance - just a chance, mind you - that some of these worthies might stop ignoring you."
Ell oh ell.
Posted by Rollory | May 27, 2011 8:31 AM
I often don't know what to think of Auster, but his intellectual virtues and vices appear to stem from a single source. He has a unique ability to limn the "deep structure" of various social phenomena. When he does this, he is able to make almost preternatural insights. But, by the same token, he often posits deep structures that don't exist anywhere except his own imagination. This half-cocked reply to Sailer is, I think, a straightfoward manifestation of the Auster phenomenon. Auster went looking for a Big Idea, a deep structure that would make all of the unruly phenomena snap into alignment. In this case, the alleged deep structure is a comprehensive reductive materialism that fatally undermines all of Sailer's other criticisms against liberalism in one swoop. Somehow, that deep structure had to then be interpreted so that it entailed epiphenomenalism, genetic reductionism, semantic indeterminism, psychological egoism and all kinds of other notions that weren't even in the same area code as what Sailer was initially talking about. Classic Auster swing and a miss. But he still "hits" often enough to keep me coming back for more.
Posted by Untenured | May 27, 2011 9:03 AM
One of Auster's critics among the Game bloggers satirized the man and his commenters fairly effectively. I'm sure Auster is good for something, but he strikes me as the kind of guy who'd be that high-strung, nasal-toned political guy screaming at some pretty little airhead that she's a bad person for not understanding why some minor issue IZ TEH M0s7 1mp0r7@n7 EVAH!
Posted by Mike T | May 27, 2011 9:13 AM
As far as the grand theory of liberalism, that is by no means unique to Auster, and it sounds a lot like something our own Zippy has said often about supermen and untermensch.
Myself, I'm not much into grand theories, but I will say this: It would be tedious to document all the ways in which contemporary liberalism _does indeed_ move from screaming that everyone is equal to both totalitarianism and to justifying the destruction of whole classes of human beings as "non-persons." And in fact, those who do this usually justify the latter on the basis of the former: "Everyone is equal, so people must be punished for saying that homosexuality is immoral." "Everyone is equal, so women must be able to kill their unborn children at will." And so on and so forth. Conservative positions are treated as not even barely rational and are ruled out of the public square. The iron fist in the velvet glove has never before been so obvious. And all in the name of "equality."
Tracing out the exact steps by which one gets from one to the other is, perhaps, a futile task, since the liberal position is usually not even coherent and often amounts to sheer power-hunger plain and simple. (This becomes especially obvious when we have ridiculous counseling professors self-refuting spectacularly by attempting to be consistent absolute moral relativists.) But speaking for myself I can't blame either Zippy, Kalb, or Lawrence Auster for attempting to do so, whether or not their tracings can be matched directly to any passage of Rawls or Mill.
Posted by Lydia | May 27, 2011 9:31 AM
That's rich. A Gamer who blogs about scoring chicks and near conquests of secret virgins during his college days is the adult while Auster is the adolescent.
Posted by Andrew E. | May 27, 2011 10:23 AM
This claim is partly evidenced by the viscereal disgust and contempt that liberals express toward conservative ideas. They act as if they have been wounded or assaulted just by having been exposed to them. And how many times have we witnessed traditionalist conservative ideas being ritually denounced by some leftist as "revolting", "disgusting", "repugnant?", and with no argument whatsoever? These liberals may have quashed their capacity for disgust when it comes to sex, but it roars to the surface when it comes to ideology.
Posted by Untenured | May 27, 2011 12:58 PM
Steve,
This post is amazing. I can't tell you how many times I have thought basically the same thing as you but didn't have the patience to carefully go through all the links and source materials to document the way Larry so shabbily treats his conservative fellow bloggers. The blog title is perfect as well because despite it all, as Untenured says, Larry is still a blogger with certain intellectual virtues.
Ironically, I usually check Larry out by clicking on the link from Steve Sailer's blog!
Posted by Jeff Singer | May 27, 2011 1:38 PM
Steve,
Did you do a search for "white status" on Sailer's blog? I did a quick google search and a number of his iSteve blog entries show up in which he mentions and endorses this subject going back to at least 2005-6. If you follow some of the links you can get to some VDare articles and even an article he wrote for The American Conservative in 2006 where mentions white status competition as important to understand why our immigration policy is what it is. A cursory review does seem to show that this is a favorite theme of his.
http://www.google.com/search?q=white+status+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fisteve.blogspot.com%2F&hl=en&authuser=0&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=
Posted by Andrew E. | May 27, 2011 2:46 PM
Andrew E. - thanks for the suggestion. That search leads to a number of really smart posts by SS. But does it lead to anything that might justify, or even remotely explain, LA's attack on him?
No. It doesn't.
Posted by steve burton | May 27, 2011 6:53 PM
Jeff Singer - schtum!
People might start thinking we're the same person.
Posted by steve burton | May 27, 2011 7:04 PM
Lydia:
Myself, I'm not much into grand theories, but I will say this: It would be tedious to document all the ways in which contemporary liberalism _does indeed_ move from screaming that everyone is equal to both totalitarianism and to justifying the destruction of whole classes of human beings as "non-persons."
Yup, the unspoken corollary to the left-wing dogma that "All people are exactly equal" is "so if you're not equal, you're not a person".
Posted by The Deuce | May 27, 2011 10:59 PM
Monty Lewis, I think Kalb had left before I heard of VFR. I had never heard that story.
Lawrence himself told me our ways of thinking are too alien that it was pointless to attempt communicating, and on that one point at least he may know what he's talking about.
Posted by TGGP | May 29, 2011 4:06 PM
Monty Lewis, TGGP: obviously, the "sacralization of the Holocaust" (while the Holodomor passes more or less unnoticed) is a big part of the story, here.
Who can explain it?
Posted by steve burton | May 29, 2011 10:49 PM
Auster's liabilities are driven by a lack of generosity due to his extreme personalization of ideas, his own and others.
When a reactionary finally comes to the conclusion that the good guys have already lost, this often has the curious effect of releasing him from the shrillness of battle. As von Mises put it, "My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline. How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament." Auster doesn't think he has lost, and he doesn't have the temperament to handle battle any other way than he manages it now.
Posted by james wilson | May 31, 2011 12:11 AM
Aaron's correct that white status seeking as an explanation for whites' anti-racism has long been a theme in Sailer articles. I'm sorry I can't take the time to collect the examples, but it's true (for what it's worth, I like Sailer's articles).
I think Auster was right to point out that Sailer doesn't seem to understand that liberals subscribe to liberal beliefs because they think that they are good and true. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that a Darwinian worldview tends to lead to this type of thinking.
Posted by Bruce | May 31, 2011 12:24 PM
Bruce: sorry, but "I can't take the time to collect the examples" just doesn't cut it, here.
That said, it's not you I blame. Auster has been pursuing this white whale, off and on, for more than two years, now. There is *no* excuse for his ongoing failure to provide any evidence whatsoever for his characterization of Sailer's views. This is, after all, the age of the internet. If Sailer is guilty, the proof is only a link away.
Posted by steve burton | May 31, 2011 6:42 PM
Steve,
I think Andrew E. provided some links.
What I think is fair to question about Auster's critique of Sailer is whether or not there's evidence in Sailer's writings that he believes white status competition is the main thing or only thing driving whites' anti-racism.
Since I think Auster believes in a unified theory of left-liberalism, i.e. left-liberalism is a singular idea or thought process, maybe he assumes that other writers do as well. But maybe he's assuming too much and that's not the case with Sailer. I don't know.
Posted by Bruce | June 1, 2011 7:21 AM
Bruce: Andrew E. provided *a* link to a *search* - which turns up all kinds of interesting stuff, but nothing obviously helpful to Auster's attempted hatchet job.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Posted by steve burton | June 1, 2011 6:51 PM
James Wilson - that's a great quote from von Mises: "My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline. How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament."
Given time, even the greatest among us come to understand their helplessness in the face of the remorseless course of events.
I am reminded, as I so often am, of William Graham Sumner's unforgettable remark in his great work, *Folkways*:
"We are like spectators at a great natural convulsion. the results will be such as the facts and forces call for. We cannot foresee them...what once was, or what any one thinks ought to be, but slightly affects what, at any moment, is. The mores which once were are a memory. Those which any one thinks ought to be are a dream..."
Posted by steve burton | June 1, 2011 7:44 PM