HBD Books

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

By John Derbyshire

272 pp. Crown Forum 2009

This is an iron wall between the behavioral science and political thought that makes the vast majority of writing on current affairs worthless.  Why do men earn more than women?  Why do blacks not test as well as whites?  Why is Europe wealthy and Africa poor?  There are simple and correct answers to all these questions, but they puzzle the modern educated mind.  John Derbysire deserves credit for going outside of the political mainstream and seeing reality as it as.  He gives us his thoughts on where the conservative movement went wrong and the virtues of pessimism in We Are Doomed.  

I’m particularly partial to the author.  There is no more mainstream race realist out there and it was through his writings that I moved away from PC conservatism.  The irony is if you find yourself often agreeing with John Derbyshire you’re probably not going to be able to stand half of everything else that’s written in his magazine National Review (At least during a Republican administration, when they’ll support anything that the president does.  They’re better today now that their utopian kookiness only applies to foreign policy.)  Educated people who seek out an alternative to the liberal culture will at first look to respectable conservative outlets.  In espousing race realism at National Review Online, Derbyshire has done as much to bring reasonable analysis of public affairs to a mass audience as anybody.  

Culturalism

According to Derbyshire, there are three ways of looking at the world.  Religious, cultural and biological.  The first is the view of the vast majority of humanity.  The second that of the transnational elite.  The last isn’t very popular but is the one that we know, thanks to cross adoption studies and neuroscience, is true.  Unfortunately, 

To get anywhere in American political life, you need to be a Religionist with some Culturist gloss, or vice versa.  If the first, you are most likely a Republican; if vice versa, a Democrat.

The denial of human nature has poisoned everything from economics to art.   The composer Anton Webern predicted in the 1930s that one day mailmen would hum his atonal melodies on their routes.  If human tastes can become whatever we want them to be, then that wouldn’t be such a strange idea.  Unfortunately for the modernists and luckily for the healthy and sane, we are not blank slates that can be forced to find ugliness beautiful. 

Charles Murray is cited on education and Steve Sailer on The Diversity Recession.  Children failing at school?  It must mean we haven’t invested enough!  Barack Obama said so himself.  We are supposed to forget stories like what happened in Kansas City when those in the “edbiz” got everything they wanted and failed.  In 1997 the city’s schools were over 75% minority and in typical urban shape.  Since this was the result of white flight, the school board and federal government sued the state for turning a blind eye to voluntary segregation.  After eight years of litigation, judge Russell Clark told the plaintiffs to “dream”-organize the school system with an unlimited budget.  The district would spend two billion dollars over the next twelve years.  Fifteen new schools were built and 54 old ones renovated. The Cato Institute reports that the district’s schools received

… an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.  [Students] could take courses in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin …  In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. They absorbed their physics from Russian-born teachers, and elementary grade students learned French from native speakers recruited from Quebec, Belgium, and Cameroon. … [T]here were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to Senegal and Mexico.

After twelve years of such nonsense, test scores actually decreased.  A healthy pessimism understands that poor and minority students are for the most part hopeless.  Not only that, but Ice People (Asians and whites) don’t want their children going to school with Sun People (blacks and Hispanics) “because Sun People kids are, in the broad generality, un-academic and unruly.”  Derbyshire has personal experience.  His children’s school district is about a quarter NAM (he does use the term) and the school board president once said that anybody who didn’t like the diversity was free to move to Cold Spring Harbor (2 percent Sun People).  The problem is that average home is over a million dollars there.  “Celebrate Diversity!…if you can’t afford to escape it.”  

Derbyshire is funny and talks about minorities with a refreshing honesty that is rare to nonexistent on the American right.  Q: What do you do if your car breaks down on Martin Luther King Blvd.?  A: Run!  In future tellings of the joke “Barak Obama” might replace MLK.  

The Diversity Cult is destroying the nation and the conservative movement, when not actively celebrating it, puts up absolutely no resistance.  The average white household is worth more than $88,000 while the average black or Hispanic one is worth less than one tenth as much.  This isn’t a recipe for social peace.  Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, China, and every other country where different groups of people are trying to live together prove that diversity is a societal cancer.  In America, when we’re talking about income distribution, government spending, immigration or crime we’re really talking about race.  We’ve needlessly cursed future generations with a fragmented nation.

There is a class who benefits from all this.  It’s a bureaucratic elite, disproportionately women and minority, that lives parasitically off the wealth creators.  The prototype is Michelle Obama, who made $316,000 per year as the University of Chicago Medical School’s “Vice President for Community Relations,” or Diversity pusher.  The New York Times reports that over 80% of people who have lost their jobs since the recession began have been males.   Women tend to work in the government subsidized health and education fields which leech off the wealth created by men.

The author is brave enough to suggest that giving women the right to vote was a mistake.  The fairer sex’s silliness has been recognized since at least 391 B.C.  In the play “The Assemblywomen” by Aristophanes the women of Athens disguise themselves as men and take power.  They set up a socialist regime where “No one will be motivated by need: everybody will have everything…the children will regard all older men as fathers.”  At conservative gatherings, Derbyshire estimates that the male to female ratio is ten to one.  While men dominate political discourse in general, any diversity seminar will certainly have a more even balance.  

Pessimism Is Realism

While governments have been corrupt always and everywhere, America’s founders had the good sense to realize the best you can do is limit the power of the state.  They had a mature view about religion: false but neccessary.  That’s why you can dig up quotes from the founders that sound both pro and anti-Christian and both believers and atheists try to claim the men.  Unlike most revolutionaries, they had a very pessimistic view of human nature.  Derbyshire has the quotes to prove it.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

 — JOHN ADAMS, 1772

 

Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

— THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1779

 

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. 

— GEORGE WASHINGTON, ABOUT 1780

The constitution is rare in being a founding document about what government may not do, rather than promising that future leaders would play the role of Santa Clause (the document is meaningless today.  The words of sexually puritan slaveholders are used to justify forced integration and homosexual “rights”).  For a while it worked.  In 1935, H.L. Mencken wrote “the New Deal has admitted [the White House] to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer.”  He was talking about a government that had no more than a billion dollars to work with, or a measly 16 billion in today’s money.  Lately, the word “trillion” has become a part of our vocabulary when talking about federal spending.  Earlier presidents understood the inherent depravity of the state.  Calvin Coolidge once told his father that “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”  He understood that vast majority of what a government can and does do if allowed is unjust, stupid and evil.  

Coolidge’s roots were in New England Calvinism, which manages to even be pessimistic about the afterlife.  Calvinists hold that the vast majority of humanity is damned.  While Derbyshire no longer believes in God, he seems to admire the masculinity of the faith.  

A pessimistic country wouldn’t have bet billions of dollars and thousands of lives  on Iraq becoming a constitutional democracy, thought that millions of poor NAMs would assimilate and improve the country, or wrecked the economy by setting out on a crusade to make sure every Tyrone or Miguel would own his own home.  Derbyshire checked his 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and found that out of 152 countries listed only six have survived until 2009 under the same government.  The US, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada (for example Britain doesn’t count because the loss of Ireland, Germany due to the Nazism and Communism, etc.).  Stability has been the exception throughout human history.  

And to a conservative it is obvious that, if you have the great good fortune to live in such a society, you should leave well enough alone, and not go attempting revolutionary overhauls of (for example) your population by (for example) uncontrolled mass immigration from absolutely everywhere.  In saying that I am of course expressing an older style of conservatism, the one we had before the happy clappers took over.

In the last chapter the author tells us that he wants to end his book on an optimistic note and offer suggestions about what we can do.  Unfortunately, his heart isn’t in it.  

I fully expect to pass the rest of my life as an American without ever seeing any major conservative legislation passed by Congress, or any major executive action drawn from conservative principles, or any Supreme Court ruling that will do more than slow the advance of state power by a percentage point or two.

The NAM population is growing, the culture is filth, and although there’s been some populist resistance to the big government agenda, the elites are just as insane as ever.  If there’s a silver lining somewhere we really need to squint to see it. Derbyshire recommends we console ourselves with literature-he’s partial to Samuel Johnson, Rudyard Kipling and Samuel Beckett.  For his kids, they should try to get government jobs.  

Are We Doomed?

In all probability, yes.   But Derbyshire notes that pessimism is like bad weather-embracing it is liberating.  Think the worst of your fellow man and you’ll occasionally be pleasantly surprised but never disappointed.  We can also remind ourselves how unpredictable history is.  Sixty years ago Eastern Europe fell to communism, but thanks to the economic stagnation the system caused it’s now the only region of the white world without a troublesome minority underclass.  Poland and Russia will have the luxury of developing while watching NAMs destroy America and Western Europe.  In the US, perhaps the wrecking of the economy will delay or help prevent an eventual white minority.  Sure, this isn’t the optimism of Christians or social engineers, but it’s all we’ve got.