Karl Pearson: The Original Alt Left?

Wikipedia:

Weismann claimed that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. Therefore, training benefits only the trained generation. Their children will not exhibit the learned improvements and, in turn, will need to be improved. “No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings. Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers.”[23]

“History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.”[24]

Pearson was known in his lifetime as a prominent “freethinker” and socialist. He gave lectures on such issues as “the woman’s question” (this was the era of the suffragist movement in the UK)[25]and upon Karl Marx. His commitment to socialism and its ideals led him to refuse the offer of being created an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1920 and also to refuse a knighthood in 1935.

In The Myth of the Jewish Race[26] Raphael and Jennifer Patai cite Karl Pearson’s 1925 opposition (in the first issue of the journal Annals of Eugenics which he founded) to Jewish immigration into Britain. Pearson alleged that these immigrants “will develop into a parasitic race. […] Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population”.[27]

 

Comments

  1. He is a good example of how today people endlessly debate who/what is the “real” right and left wing and ignore race. For me race always trumps other matters such as government type or economic system, that being the case I have to agree with what Pearson is saying.

    The same applies to Hitler and his party, the furious debates of whether he is left or right are pointless, the fact is that at times he catered to the working class and at times to the wealthy business elite, sometimes offering contradictory promises to opposing sides. His race politics is what appeals to some people, not his exact stance on tax rates or free speech.

    I also need to add that if you absolutely disagree with me, and think race is not important , please observe how countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Laos don’t have this left vs right debate. Even wealthy non white countries such as Japan don’t really have these endless political debate as whites are prone to.

  2. Jaakko Raipala says

    (edit: meant this as a reply to neutral’s post #1)

    The race theories and eugenics were actually catering to intellectuals and it’s one part where the German National Socialist regime deviated from typical nationalist, conservative regimes and parties of the time. Racial eugenics was an elite ideology for the high IQ crowd, it’s not the part of National Socialism that attracted masses. Pearson’s views on race were far more typical for a socialist than a conservative and not really “alt” for the left of the time.

    You can read all about in books like “Liberal Fascism” by esteemed American conservative Jonah Goldberg – eugenics was a progressive movement favored by pro-abortionists. Conservatives tended to reject evolution and the Aryan migration theory in favor of Genesis and the tower of Babel. Progressives were always the real racists!

    The German eugenics program was not at all unique and all Protestant countries enacted similar forced sterilization programs under labels like “racial hygiene”. Most opposition to it came from religious conservatives who were not influential under Hitler. Sweden as usual led the way and actually had a more extensive eugenics program than Germany.

    I would say that this one case where the progressives right but then… eugenics through mass sterilization sounds like a good idea until you realize that in practice it’s going to mean people like Swedish Social Democrat bureaucrats deciding whether someone gets to have children or not. On the other hand it does remind us that there’s a way to get intellectuals interested in race – you just have to promise them something elite sounding like eugenics and stay the hell away from white nationalism 1.0 and its low prole aesthetics.

  3. On that women’s suffrage issue … women in Germany gained the right to vote in 1918, along with the ‘very progressive’ Weimar Constitution in 1919

    As is often said, German-Austrian culture was the ‘most advanced’ in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, education, the arts etc

    So it is often cast as a ‘puzzle’ why the ‘most advanced culture in the world’ became Nazi … within 15 years after women gained the right to vote

    An answer we have from current alt-right sexual relations discussions … it was a ‘revolt of the beta males’ … after only a few years of life in ‘progressive Weimar’, most German men realised they were short-changed by the gynarchic, pro-women’s-rights, ‘progressive’ society

    It is being much pointed out today, that the ‘women’s rights’ cultures, where women are unchained to pursue their feelings, plus getting financial support from the state, either directly or via legal-system extraction of support from ex-male partners –

    This leads quickly to a situation in which the essentially ‘hypergamic’ female obsessively pursues alpha-type males, and scorns and despises the beta-type males … to the point that, women give up stable relationships just to pursue occasional trysts with an alpha when they can

    Rich and powerful males get girlfriends … also various kinds of rough-edged characters, gang-type guys, criminals, lawless migrants do so as well … but the dutiful ‘nice average guy’ … well he is not the ‘bad boy’ of women’s sexual fantasies … so most men are out of luck

    As is being pointed out, once the general run of males realise the system doesn’t work for them – they are sexually and maritally deprived, mere financial cows for the system – they will opt for a regime that will ‘get women back under control’

    In an older patriarchal order, the social ‘deal’ is that most every male can have a sexual partner, wife, family … but this system only ‘works’ if there is substantial social pressure to keep people married, and to prevent women from running off to play their alpha-seeking games

    So ‘fascism’ occurred in ‘advanced societies’, as the crude tool to reverse the gynarchy that was sexually depriving men

    And actually in fact women are fairly miserable under ‘feminism’ despite its ‘women power’ agenda

    So we see as well now, both Western women and men are ‘converting to Islam’ not because they really care about the old Arab ‘holy book’ etc … but because they both are attracted to the more traditional gender roles which are still associated with Islam but no longer with European Christianity … that AfD party ‘German nationalist’ Arthur Wagner who just converted to Islam and is now ‘Ahmed’, said as much … it was Islam’s ‘conservative family values’ that won him over

  4. All of the most famous Fabians (H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw) and even Communists like Haldane and (((Laski))) were eugenicists. There’s a book called The Intellectuals and the Masses that gets very indignant about it, but it should be completely unsurprising.

    You have to be really brainwashed to not think that the people of the future ought to have good genetics.

  5. The modern day progressives are still into eugenics, the only difference is that they preach that non whites are superior and wish to replace whites with them, this was the intent for some time now, but they are now openly advocating these positions in their opinion articles.

    The German Reich eugenics project is exaggerated, the SS might have had some strange racial purity plans by mixing with Scandanavians, but the bulk of the race laws were about racial separation more in line with Apartheid South Africa or Southern US states. These were standard racial norms for conservatives in the past, because no conservative in Britain or France pre 1960 would have seriously supported the idea of mass racial immigration and mixing.

    esteemed American conservative Jonah Goldberg

    I need to raise the fact that he is not American but jewish, and whether he is really conservative, even the non fascist types are not entirely sure about that one. He also no doubt supports the racial hygiene being enforced in Israel, so how can he be conservative?

  6. I need to raise the fact that he is not American but jewish

    Of course you do; we all have needs.

  7. You need to put ((( ))) around your name.

  8. reiner Tor says

    I don’t think he’s Jewish.

  9. Jaakko Raipala says

    The modern day progressives are still into eugenics,

    Democrats are the real Nazis!

    No, they are not eugenicists. There are for sure people hostile to white people in powerful positions in the US but none of them are acting out of any genuine belief that “non-whites are superior” comparable to even the simple old belief that whites evolved to be more intelligent than darker races thanks to the cold climate.

    Their fundamental motivation usually seems to be either an ethnic grievance against white gentiles or a political power play of trying to undermine the white voting majority. Their real motivations are nefarious enough and there is nothing to be gained from a false analogy of their beliefs with the eugenic movement that strived to genuinely improve the human condition.

    There’s nothing wrong with eugenics (even if some of the programs that were tried were excessively authoritarian) and it’s time to revive it now that biology is providing spectacular tools for it. This is going to be one way to attract intelligent people out of racial liberal ideology, unlike “racial preservationism”, “white nationalism” or other ideas that are already proven failures because the sacred high IQ whites don’t want to have anything to do with the people that populate these movements.

  10. Read the stuff from Brooks that was mentioned here just a few days ago, and there are others that are increasingly saying these things now.

    Whether they are genuine are not in their beliefs is not really the issue, they are openly saying that non whites are superior and are openly pushing to replace whites with non whites, so it looks like eugenics to me.

  11. Jaakko Raipala says

    (edit: reply to neutral comment #10)

    I have never encountered an eugenicist argument for non-white immigration. Give us even one link.

    Eugenics is a great idea. I would support anyone that’s actually pushing for it, though with reservations about excessive coercion like the forced sterilizations. But pro-eugenicists don’t exist these days outside of closets or dissident sites like unz.com.

    You are trying to come up with some contrived analogy between some progressive opinion piece and eugenics, remind us all that eugenics = nazi and triumphantly declare that whites now finally have the right to defend themselves since you’ve proven that whites, too, are the targets of “nazis” that get called “inferior” by “non-white supremacists”. We’ve seen people try this and get nowhere with it. You can’t beat the progressive Jews by letting a bunch of progressive Jews write the rules and the moral framework.

  12. When surfing the web, do 88s get pop-up adds for shiny black boots and brown shirts with epaulets?

  13. You can’t beat the progressive Jews by letting a bunch of progressive Jews write the rules and the moral framework.

    ?

  14. You are correct. Jared Taylor pointed out that Afghanistan and Somalia have “limited government” and other attributes that ought to appeal to white Americans but no white American would want to live there. OTOH Norway has high taxation and socialist style policies and is one of the most desirable places to live. Clearly political system is much less of an explanatory variable than is Race with respect to making a desirable living space.

  15. Clearly political system is much less of an explanatory variable than is Race with respect to making a desirable living space.

    So why do these oh-so-smart high IQ white people create these desirable living spaces and then once they’ve done that immediately decide to start destroying them? Why do they undermine their own societies with insanities like feminism, LGBT activism, transexual nonsense and climate change hysteria? Why do they want to import diversity to wreck their own societies? Why do they embrace mindless hedonism and consumerism and end up living miserable lives as alienated atomised lonely psychological wrecks?

    Is it possible that there is some fatal flaw in oh-so-smart high IQ white people that makes them want to destroy themselves? The white race had a good run but it no longer even wants to survive.

    Or could it be that it’s culture that matters, not race, and that white European culture contains a built-in self-destruct mechanism?

  16. Or could it be that it’s culture that matters, not race, and that white European culture contains a built-in self-destruct mechanism?

    Or could it be that they only started to have these problems when a certain other ethnically distnct group of people took control of their media and intellectual institutions and started promoting them.
    It really makes you think, doesn’t it.

  17. reiner Tor says

    The argument could be made that whites were vulnerable to begin with, both to a takeover by that specific ethnic group, and to the specific arguments for suicide promoted by that ethnic group once they took over.

    It wasn’t very stable even without their influence, as the examples of the French Revolution and abolitionism (ultimately leading to the bloody civil war in the US) show.

  18. Immigration is a nationalist issue. If you are a nationalist there is no reason to allow foreigners into your country. Jews are obviously superior, so what?

  19. The manosphere is not a reliable source of history lessons.

  20. The argument could be made that whites were vulnerable to begin with, both to a takeover by that specific ethnic group, and to the specific arguments for suicide promoted by that ethnic group once they took over.

    Precisely. If white European civilisation had been a healthy civilisation it would not have committed suicide just because it was told to do so by a hostile outside group.

    It wasn’t very stable even without their influence, as the examples of the French Revolution and abolitionism (ultimately leading to the bloody civil war in the US) show.

    And of course the First World War, the most spectacular mass civilisational suicide in history.

    Clearly there were very deep flaws in white European civilisation. It had been rotting from within for a very long time. I can’t see how we can blame another ethnic group for a sickness that had already taken hold by the late 18th century and had already become terminal by the beginning of the 20th century.

    I put it to you that that the verdict of the coroner’s jury must be that the death of white European civilisation was a case of suicide, not murder.