Speaking of wise young men ...

Noah at Gideon's Blog discusses my "citizenist" position. (Unfortunately, his comments don't seem to be working.) I have to take exception, though, to his statement:

"To put it bluntly: it cannot be that white people "inherently" reject tribal or racial consciousness; no one familiar with the history of European nationalism, to say nothing of the color line and race slavery, can seriously maintain such a thing."

But, what Noah overlooks is the mechanism for maintaining tribal distinctiveness: loveless marriage. The Middle East is full of ancient groups like the Samaritans, the Yezidis, the Druzes, etc. because it is taken for granted that elders will arrange the marriages of the young, and will do it more to insure the ethnic identity and separateness of the tribe than the romantic fulfillment of the couple.

But that mechanism has been under cultural assault for at least 700 years in Western Europe, since the origin of "courtly romances" about true love. And long before that the Roman Catholic Church banned cousin marriages, which reduced the payoff to arranged marriages, perhaps setting the stage for the growing social approval of love matches. Those who elope with their soulmates are ostracized. And in a region organized on clannishness rather than law, ostracism means you don't have a mafia to watch your back, so you are in severe trouble.

So, what we've seen in the West is a fairly steadily expanding definition of the boundaries of the tribe, typically defined in territorial rather genealogical terms. Indeed, the "history of European nationalism" is one of vastly expanded definitions of who "we" are to encompass huge territories defined by language groups. This emerging European ability to organize and enthusiastically cooperate at the scale of the tens of millions made Europeans world-conquering. As Burke might have said, "Citizenism did not make Revolutionary France free; it made it formidable."

This vast trend means that an ideology of racial separatism, such as Jared Taylor's white nationalism, is ultimately doomed among white Americans by the enormous value we place upon true love and our discomfort at ostracizing those who find love across ethnic boundaries.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer