Addendum to Review of MacDonald's

A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy

(The Addendum that Elsevier refused to publish.)
John Hartung, Ph.D.

Reaction to my review of Kevin MacDonald's A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy has prompted me to recognize several inadequacies in the expression of my opinions (Hartung 1995a, MacDonald 1994). I thank the editors of Ethology and Sociobiology for this opportunity to explain my point of view in a different way.

Regarding the Holocaust, clarification might be added by imagining that we can look at earth through a lens which causes people of different ethnic groups (or in-groups) to glow with an identifying color, such that if the Dutch were green, for example, Holland would be intensely green and there would be a fading green glow around its boarders -- a glow that would disperse into isolated specks of green as distance from Amsterdam increases.

Using this lens to view Europe and Western Russia in 1940, there would be two unique colors -- those of Jews and Gypsies. These groups would be different in the pattern of their dispersal, with the absence of a central location that is proportionate to their overall size, and the presence of many small glowing circles scattered far and wide. My contention is that if we knew a war would soon break out near the center of Europe a -- war that would kill about 60 million people -- an understanding of human nature and the nature of human ethnocentricity would enable us to predict which in-groups would suffer most simply on the basis of the intensity of their light and its pattern of dispersion. To put a point on that, armed with knowledge of the destructive power of ethnocentrism, it would be clear that the largest concentrations of killing would occur at the Japan/mainland Asia interface (25 million+) and at the German/Russian interface (20 million+). It would also be clear that Jews and Gypsies would suffer most relative to their size.

The question might then arise, "how did these two decentralized groups come to have such vulnerable dispersal patterns?" I think the dispersal pattern itself is not unique. Instead, I think that the maintenance of the diffuse pattern is unique. That is, many groups have been shattered and dispersed, but nearly all of them lost their smaller circles of light through processes of extinction at the hands of, and assimilation into, surrounding groups. So how did Jews manage to maintain a widely dispersed pattern for two millennia? This is the central subject of Kevin MacDonald's book. He documents the cycles of success followed by victimization and recurrent reactive racism which account for both Jewish survival and resistance to assimilation.

Reactive racism is the spiral by which contiguous groups increase their in-group ethos in reaction to other groups' in-group ethos (more centrally the subject of MacDonald's second book, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism; in press; see also Shahak 1994). Such spirals usually cause smaller groups to be extinguished/assimilated. MacDonald reviews how the Jews have managed to hang on. In short (too short, sorry), they have done it the old fashioned way -- through much hard work directed toward that end, with a particular emphasis on education and intellectual prowess. That is the HOW. The WHY goes back to one of the world's 4 or 5 most powerful memes -- the ideology of the Bible. MacDonald details some of this in his book, and I added some specifics in my review (see also Hartung, 1995b).

As to the charge of anti-Semitism that has been leveled against me, if anti-Semitism is defined as prejudice against people who are Jewish, I am not anti-Semitic by any stretch of the imagination. One can have respect for people of a religious persuasion while questioning the persuasions of their religion. However, if one's definition of anti-Semitism applies to those who make critical inquiry into fundamental tenets of Judaism, I could be labeled anti-Semitic. What matters to me, in this regard, is that the facts I put forth be true and that conclusions drawn follow from those facts. These concerns are irrelevant to persons for whom religion is sacrosanct. Of such persons I ask only that they not go away with the impression that I am anti-Semitic, by their definition, without being concomitantly anti-Christian (Hartung, 1995b).

To readers who think of religions as sets of ideas, and to whom all ideas are subject to challenge, I apologize for, and deeply regret, shortcomings in my presentation which have caused offense.

Hartung, J. Review of A people That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (see MacDonald, below). Ethology and Sociobiology 16:335-342, 1995a.

Hartung, J. Love thy neighbor: the evolution of in-group morality. Skeptic 3:4:86-99, 1995b.

MacDonald, K. A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994.

Shahak, I. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, London: Pluto Press, 1994.