MacDonald's Spartan Dream

Kevin MacDonald asks: Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive? Rather than dismiss him off-hand as an anti-Semite, I will take his question and assumptions at face value.

My main objection to MacDonald is that he privileges the dichotomy of Jews and Gentile whites. Some Jews do as well, for understandable psychohistorical reasons. But that dichotomy is wrong and outdated. Jews are a small ethno-religious group. Whites encompass a range of ethnic and religious groups. If we exchange MacDonald's implicit label, Gentile whites, for his explicit one, Westerners, it is obvious that Jews are one of the ethnic and religious groups that together make up "Westerners."

No matter how much the Hutus and Tutsis hated each other, to the outsider they were all Africans. Similarly, despite whatever other Westerners may say, to anyone outside of the West Jews are obviously Westerners. Are Jews different in origin, culture and religion from most other Westerners? Certainly, just as Afro-Semitic Ethiopians are different from the majority of sub-Saharan Africans who are Bantu. But no one would doubt that they are both African peoples. If MacDonald wants to get Darwinian, he should adopt a wider vantage point and realize that despite the mutual distrust between African tribes, they're all niggers to the white man with the whip.

What MacDonald wants is for Westerners to become like the Chinese. There should a billion of us speaking the same language united in the same geo-political space. Yet perhaps there's a reason the West succeeded in global domination instead of China. Perhaps that reason is the flourishing side by side of culturally related but distinct groups like Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians and yes, Jews. As a Jew, I hope other Western nationalities continue to exist in the future. If imitating "the Jewish model" helps them to survive, I'm all for it. Fair's fair. After all, "the European model" helped the Jews to establish the state of Israel.

I am leery, however, of the concept of white nationalism. Jews base our nationhood in no small part on shared descent, but ultimately anyone may become a Jew and a Jew may renounce his Judaism. Shared descent has its limits, and our spiritual and biological brothers are not always the same. A Jew may live in England and become an English nationalist. An Englishman may convert to Judaism and become a Jewish nationalist. But white nationalism makes every race a slave to pure biology. The spiritual and ethical demands (not always met, I am the first to admit) that balance Jewish ethnocentrism - apparent in the many Jewish critics of the worst aspects of Jewish ethnocentrism - are devoid from MacDonald's racialized view of what it means to be Western.

Traditional tribalism allows outsiders to join the tribe. Consider the tales of white explorers who "went native" in the bush, of Ruth the convert or Disraeli the Brit. MacDonald, however, does not have faith in his tribe's ability to assimilate newcomers. He must put up genetic walls to block entry, like the Germans who cast out their Mendelsohhns and Wittgensteins. The end-result? A diminished and shattered Germany. Similarly, I fear MacDonald's dream can only result in a diminished and shattered West, sacrificed on the altar of purity - just as many Western principles are currently sacrificed on the altar of diversity. For the sake of Western survival, we must not let the city-states of remembered Greece fall to the barbarians at the gate. But adopting MacDonald's Spartan empire of blood is giving in to the barbarians within.