Note: Today at 1:00 PM EDT I will be on with Paul Ramsey. It is only on Rumble as I am a very bad man, so YouTube prohibits me. Yesterday I did a chat with Mike Farris which will be posted here sometime today.
Nathan Cofnas is a college faculty member at Cambridge University who became a minor celebrity as a college student for engaging in a round of debates with Kevin MacDonald about MacDonald’s books on Jews. His primary purpose was to gain attention for himself, but his secondary purpose was to dismiss MacDonald’s theory of group evolution strategy to explain Jewish behavior. Cofnas has now returned to the subject with another paper disputing MacDonald’s theory.
His latest effort is neatly summarized in the abstract of the paper. “I conclude that, contra the anti-Jewish narrative, Jews are not particularly ethnocentric, Jewish intellectuals do not typically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles but not for Jews, Jews did not orchestrate the rise of liberalism or blank-slatism in the West, and anti-Semitism is not primarily a response to actual Jewish wrongdoing.” It would take a heart of stone not to chuckle a bit at that.
What you see from Cofnas in his latest effort is what we saw from the very beginning, which is sophistry decorated with the trappings of the academy. In fairness, most of what comes from the humanities and the pseudo-sciences is sophistry decorated with the trappings of the academy, but Cofnas avoids the insider language and abracadabra phrases common in the modern academy. That makes the sophistry the star of the show, rather than a supporting actor.
The biggest sin is his insistence that his premise is the default hypothesis simply because it suits his argument. He claims that the most logical explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in various fields is intelligence and geography. Jews are smart and they tend to live in urban areas. Therefore, they tend to be overrepresented in cognitive fields because these fields tend to operate in urban areas where Jews are overrepresented relative to the general population.
That is intellectual base stealing. He assert a premise without proof and then he declares it the default hypothesis. That said, he is not wrong in claiming that Jewish IQ is a key factor. Contra most of the fans of MacDonald’s work, but not MacDonald himself, Jews are an IQ outlier. While they are suffering from the same decline effecting all of humanity, Jews remain at the top of the IQ pyramid, and this helps explain their overrepresentation in cognitive fields.
The trouble is, and Cofnas understands this, it does not explain everything. In purely cognitive fields in which no other factors play a role, Jews should be twenty percent of the people in the field, despite being two percent of the population. Twenty years ago the anonymous academic posting under the name La Griffe du Lion modeled this using chess championships in the former Soviet Union. His model corresponds with the arguments from psychometry regarding Ashkenazi intelligence.
The problem, however, is that Jews are wildly overrepresented in fields that are not cognitively challenging, but culturally important. Unless someone wants to argue that the mass media or pornography are cognitively challenging fields, there is something else driving Jewish overrepresentation in these fields. Geography helped a little in the case of mass media fifty years ago, but not in this age. That and the over representation is quite outlandish in some fields.
Within living memory, the answer was ethnocentrism. Into the 1980’s it was common for Jews and non-Jews to quip that Jews stick together. Jewish comedians had a field of humor around the question, “is it good for the Jews?” It used to be understood that minority populations stick together. In fact, this was part of the melting pot theory of Americanism for half a century. Jewish ethnocentrism goes a long way toward completing the picture on Jewish overrepresentation.
Cofnas rejects this out of hand, and it is not hard to see why. If he concedes this point, then it opens the door a bit for MacDonald. When you boil it down, MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy is the claim that Jews evolved a model of reality that has allowed them to thrive as a distinct minority, often in the midst of a host population that is hostile to Jews. In order for this to occur, Jews would have had to develop a high degree of ethnocentrism to resist assimilation.
The second order effects of this model of reality are things like overrepresentation in activities disruptive to the majority. If who you are is dependent upon your membership in a group and that group’s identity depends upon an adversarial relationship with the surrounding populations, members will gravitate to those things that benefit the group and undermines the power of those other populations. Anyone who has followed a sports team will recognize this impulse.
That is why Cofnas must reject ethnocentrism, even though it is blazingly obvious to anyone paying attention. There is nothing unusual about ethnic groups sticking together in America nor is there anything immoral about it. Modern Wokism is just group identity applied to artificially constructed identity groups. Cofnas, however, must anathematize ethnocentrism, as it provides a building block for MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy.
The weakness of the Cofnas argument does not automatically validate MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy. The best argument Cofnas makes in this long back and forth is that the theory lacks empirical support. At best, MacDonald provides a useful model for Jewish group behavior, but he offers nothing with regards to the biological mechanism at work here. If Jews evolved to be this way, then how exactly does that work from a genetic perspective?
That is the real problem with MacDonald’s theory. Evolutionary biology is gene-centered, so something like group selection gets little support. In other words, MacDonald’s theory is at odds with current science. More importantly, it is at odds with the current dogma within the human sciences. In this regard, MacDonald has company, as those suggesting multi-level selection may help fill in the gaps are facing the same headwinds as MacDonald.
Max Planck famously said, “Science advances one funeral at a time” and that is what will most likely happen with regards to group behavior. Observation tells us that groups have innate behaviors. Biology tells us that if such a thing exists, it must be gene specific and subject to selection pressure. The people controlling the flow of grant money to the human sciences tell us that talking about group behavior is dangerous and best avoided, so we wait for the next round of funerals.
That may be the biggest error in MacDonald’s work. He had to know he was treading on dangerous ground with this topic. His use of the word “strategy” to describe his theory may be technically accurate, but it conjures the wrong ideas in the wrong heads, which is the real issue here. The anti-Semites hear “strategy” and imagine men in secret, plotting their demise, while the anti-anti-Semites hear the word “strategy” and imagine the first set of men in secret, plotting their demise.
Scientist such as David Sloan Wilson, Elliott Sober and E. O. Wilson have been able to research and discuss this material by avoiding trigger words. If you are going to talk about group behavior and you suspect certain groups with power would like to avoid talking about group behavior, it is prudent to avoid the sort of language they associate with threats to their group power. We like to believe that the truth will set you free, but it is just as likely to get you hurled into the void.
In the end, the participants in this debate are in the realm of model-dependent reality, even though they do not realize it. The Cofnas model of reality is useful to him personally, but also useful to his supporters in the academy. It solves the sorts of problems they encounter. The MacDonald model of reality is different, but not contradictory to the Cofnas reality. In fact, there is overlap between the two and that is where model independent reality lies.
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