David Morris on the Pathology of Moral Universalism

David Morris has a very nice article, “The Contemporary use of Philosophy and Ideas,” on the BNP website. Much of it reflects recent blogs on this site (here and here), with a British twist. A major theme is that the British have a strong attraction to universalist abstractions, often pursued with a moral fervor.

The orthodox views held by progressives encompass Liberalism to Marxism and they believe in universals, but we believe in “particulars.” Universals are abstract terms like humanity whereas a specific people is a particular. Universalist thinking leads to intervention in the internal policies of other sovereign states as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. We particularists are concerned with our own nation and if we were to do any invading it would be to sort out the conflict within our own nation.

The progressives erect a set of idealisations – what we are becoming, what we should think and how we should behave.

Whereas it’s natural to be concerned about family, kin, ethnic group, and race, the universalist embraces abstract ideas, with no concern with how they will affect his natural interest in preserving those closest to him.

The government planned drastic financial cuts for us, but increases in overseas aid! This perverse attitude grew from the Victorian middle class influenced by evangelical Christianity, which believed it had a duty to ‘save’ unchristian natives. It became a preference over the British working class which endures today. Characteristic of this is Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, whose eyes ‘had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa’. Like the elites she neglected those around her, including notoriously her own children. Her thoughts were directed instead towards the fictitious African possession of Borrioboola Gha and her idealistic plans for its development.

This is the British equivalent of the moral fervor of their American offshoots, the Puritans,  who were intent on freeing Africans by waging a Holy War on their Southern cousins (see Kevin Phillips, Cousin’s Wars).  Morris sees these trends at work in contemporary British society: “the belief that we are progressing to a utopian future – The Brotherhood of Man, a classless society, etc.” It relates to ideas of “the ‘perfectibility of man’ and a supposed God-like ability to transcend nature including their own nature. It is this manifestation … that is destroying our way of life” [his emphasis].

The perfectibility of man was also fundamental to the Puritan tradition that has been so influential in American culture and politics.

The result is a failure to face reality:

Even though once luxuriant African states fall into crime and poverty, while once prosperous, economically successful Detroit descends in to crime and poverty, even hunger is there now, progressives pretend we are progressing. Even New Orleans didn’t penetrate their bubbles. They go on holiday to Jamaica where safe areas are sectioned off for tourists, but do not connect that reality with Brixton or other inner cities which are no-go areas for Whites. Even when Muslims blow up trains and there are almost weekly terror trials going on, they dream that we are all coming together. … Our cities are being colonized by people with Medieval mindsets and there are no spontaneous colonies of nice liberal progressives springing up in Nairobi and Beijing.

Exactly. While the West pursues its utopian fantasies with great moral fervor, the rest of the world continues as it has always been—except that they are now colonizing us. “Our cities are being colonized by people with Medieval mindsets and there are no spontaneous colonies of nice liberal progressives springing up in Nairobi and Beijing.”

When you invite people in, they will take territory, assert their interests, and ultimately displace you. But the utopian universalist is unable to consider the obvious practical consequences: “To think practically about this would be to reflect on what is really happening from examples and, not, like progressives and the Soviet Union, propagandise people into believing that what they wish would happen is happening. It is to consider the consequences of actions and not socially engineer people for a future utopia; it is not to pretend human nature is a social construct, but by accurate judgement of how people really behave in given situations to make wise judgements of others.”

Morris is a race realist: “Our Englishness is our essence as it is in our genes which created our culture which in turn moulds our descendants.” Unfortunately, one of the ethnic traits of a great many Englishmen and other Europeans is to be prone to moral universalism and utopian thinking. Morris is quite aware of the ability of culture to exert control over more natural emotions — a theme that fits well with contemporary psychology. Nevertheless, there are limits. Indeed, “The contemporary totalitarian elites are actively suppressing natural feelings and risking a mass break out of negative emotion” — exactly the sort of anger that is resulting in public furor over illegal immigration in America.

In other words, these attempts at erecting utopias will ultimately result in huge psychological tension as people are expected to swear allegiance to universalist abstractions even as they see their neighborhoods invaded by non-Whites, even as their jobs are outsourced to foreign countries or taken away by immigrants, and even as they see the political and cultural power of their own group declining — in a word, displacement. In these circumstances, the more selfish and particularlist emotions centered around family and ethnic group inevitably bubble to the surface to compete with the universalist abstractions. In the contemporary world these abstractions are being imposed on us by elites—including the Jewish component of the elite which manages to aggressively promote moral universalism in the Diaspora in the West while also aggressively supporting its neo-fascist ethnostate in the Middle East. Indeed, as noted previously, promoting multiculturalism as a moral imperative in Western societies (but not Israel) is reasonably seen as a Jewish ethnic strategy. No moral universalism there–just the facade.

By all accounts, particularlist anger is welling up in White Americans — especially among the middle and working class — outraged at the changes they see; they are also the ones are are more negatively affected by these upheavals. (It’s always easier for elites to pledge fealty to moral abstractions when there a no costs to them personally; they seem blissfully unaware of their ethnic costs.)

There are certainly legitimate doubts that this anger will be productively directed given the record of elites in the Republican Party. Part of what we need is an intellectual revolution that challenges the unique Western proclivity toward moral universalism and fratricidal aggression against morally defined outgroups. We’ve got to stop thinking like the Puritans and base our attitudes on a foundation that is in tune with biological reality. All the data show that multiethnic societies are prone to conflict and to less of a sense of civic responsibility, among other things.

The good news is that culture can trump biology (see also here). The conflict between the universalist strands and the particularlist strands of our ethnic nature as Westerners may be resolved if we realize the folly of a universalism that results in the dystopian nightmares we are seeing form before our eyes. Culture and our rational thought processes can indeed suppress biological urges — including our urge to wage holy war on behalf of abstract principles. And right now we have to realize that it is entirely rational to suppress our biological urge toward moral universalism. Our survival is at stake.