Kevin MacDonald: American Transcendentalism - An Indigenous Culture of Critique

[Joe McCarthy]

http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-T...ndentalism.pdf

This is a fine primer on how much of the Northeastern WASP elite turned massively leftward in the nineteenth century and set the stage for the current crisis.

[The Ripper]

Didn't you say McDonald was a useless anti-semite [paraphrasing ] at one point?

[Joe McCarthy]

Didn't you say McDonald was a useless anti-semite [paraphrasing ] at one point?

No. I made a similar comment about Nick Griffin though.

[Imperivm]

No. I made a similar comment about Nick Griffin though.

But Nick Griffin has been pro-Israel for yonks. Besides, what's wrong with talking about Jewish influence apart from the fact the public is too stupid to understand the situation?

[The Ripper]

No. I made a similar comment about Nick Griffin though.

What is your opinion on this trilogy on the evolutionary psychology of Judaism and Jews?

[Joe McCarthy]

But Nick Griffin has been pro-Israel for yonks. Besides, what's wrong with talking about Jewish influence apart from the fact the public is too stupid to understand the situation?

Some anti-Semites are pro-Israel. I'm one of them.

And political campaigns is not the place to bitch about Jews. At least Griffin finally figured that out, though he's still going on about neo-cons, which is code for Jews.

[Joe McCarthy]

What is your opinion on this trilogy on the evolutionary psychology of Judaism and Jews?

Mixed feelings. My main objection is that it leaves the impression that Jews are the all encompassing cause of Western decline - and MacDonald has a noisy and obsessed following online that is so fixated on Jews that it renders itself irrelevant.

[The Ripper]

Mixed feelings. My main objection is that it leaves the impression that Jews are the all encompassing cause of Western decline - and MacDonald has a noisy and obsessed following online that is so fixated on Jews that it renders itself irrelevant.

Whenever you focus on one aspect, and view the world through that angle, it will always become 'over-represented'. I also think that sometimes MacDonald jumps too readily to somewhat far-fetched conclusions, but the research seems solid and his book provides a lot of data, sources and such.

[Joe McCarthy]

Anyhow, one key point that MacDonald may be unaware of is the theological split among Puritan descended Congregationalists that occurred in the 18th century and brought us the wonderful Unitarians, United Church of Christ (Obama's church, btw), etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregational_church

Without higher courts to ensure doctrinal uniformity among the congregations, Congregationalists have been more diverse than other Reformed churches. Despite the efforts of Calvinists to maintain the dominance of their system, some Congregational churches, especially in the older settlements of New England, gradually developed leanings toward Arminianism, Unitarianism, Deism, and transcendentalism.

By the 1750s, several Congregational preachers were teaching the possibility of universal salvation, an issue that caused considerable conflict among its adherents on the one side and hard-line Calvinists and sympathizers of the First Great Awakening on the other. In another strain of change, the first church in the United States with an openly Unitarian theology, the belief in the single personality of God, was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1785 (in a former Anglican parish.) By 1800, all but one Congregational church in Boston had Unitarian preachers teaching the strict unity of God, the subordinate nature of Christ, and salvation by character.

Essentially what this means is that a lack of unified doctrine and structure allowed for the development of spiritual universalism in contravention to the traditional double predestination of the Puritans. This laid the groundwork for universalism to be applied politically in secular form, and then racially - a textbook example of Schmitt's 'political theology' - that political ideals are nothing less than secularized religious doctrine. Of course the universalistic Unitarians were the New England intellectuals that mutated into the Transcendentalists of K-Mac's book review in the OP.

[Debaser11]

Well, I am very unfamiliar with the finer details of MacDonald's thesis about Jews. However, I think his general argument from what I've seen in interviews is very reasonable. In my mind, he gets labeled an "anti-semite" quite unfairly. (Even though I basically reject such vocabulary.)

This link posted by Joe would seem to further indicate that people who say MacDonald blames everything on the Jews are full of it.