I want an apology

I was lunching with Count Wallenstein this past week in some excessively expensive restaurant in Toronto. We were talking about human genomics and what DNA studies have turned up of late, and how much of all previous thinking they have obviated. . I shall refer it as the Genomic Revolution. It is as important as the Enlightenment, and it will resound through the ages.

Count Wallenstein was insisting on an apology.

“From whom?” I asked.

“All those Marxists. All those feminists. Do you know that when I went to college, I was immersed in Marxism, and feminism? York University: four years of leftist indoctrination”

“Me too. If my political convictions depended on what I had to read in university, I would be some brand of Marxist”

“All totally wrong, totally and absolutely wrong. Not just wrong in theory, wrong in fact. And I was told I was a fascist reactionary because I thought Marxism was rubbish and feminism just another flavour of it.”

“Feminist thought is a branch of leftism without the Marxist economics, Count, but Leftism is eternal.. It predates Marxism. The urge to declare the constitution of reality invalid because some baby is crying goes back to Rousseau, but the impulse is eternal. If only we got rid of the priests, kings and lords, we would all be rich and happy.”

We reminisced about our late teenage indoctrination in university. Marx, Freud, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfort School. Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin.

All rubbish. All gone. All repudiated by the Genomic Revolution. There is a human nature and we are part of it. We are competitive, cooperative, hierarchical, and egalitarian. We have a broad range of behaviours but we are not infinitely plastic. We cannot be remade in the form required by intellectual fanatics.

I would argue that the Genomic Revolution has destroyed Leftism as a serious political movement. The moment one accepts that man has a range of behaviours arising from evolution, the less it is possible that he can be remade by political doctrines. No amount of political correctness or religious doctrines can wipe out differences in intelligence, adaptations to climates, competitiveness, sexual attractions and urges, or our ability for friendship and cooperation. The Genomic Revolution does not argue one way only. It argues against any attempts to declare its findings void, be they leftist or rightist, religious or atheistical. By establishing that our propensities are thousands or millions of years old, it confines the discussion to the real.

For example, in a university course which I took a few years ago, I heard a young man argue for something as if Darwin had not written and evolution had not occurred. It was a standard piece of political correctness- not Christian fundamentalism. I said to the class: “You speak as if Darwin had not written. Come on! Evolution is real.” He told me I was “suppressing the discourse”. Yeah, I was suppressing the constant stream of leftist drivel.

You can take your pick of books expressing the findings of the Genomic Revolution.

You have available a wide array of political views being expressed in the following books. The work of Brian Sykes , one of Count Wallenstein’s favourites, is directly relevant, but many others are available, each expressing (mostly implicitly) different contemporary political views, yet each is grounded in a discussion of facts, and the ensemble is overwhelming in its repudiation of a view of man that sees him as the expression of arbitrary political, social and sexual arrangements. Inform yourselves in any of: Nicholas Wade, Spencer Wells, Vincent Sarich, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, Ian Tattersall, the late Phillippe Rushton, Terrence Deacon, Geoffrey Miller, my taste for whom Count Wallenstein is not responsible.

 

The Count and I are still waiting for our apologies from the Maoists, Marxists, feminists, and fellow travellers who tried to educate us.

 

You hear me, Sam Noumoff?