Source: July-August, 1995, issues of American Renaissance, Dept A, P.O. Box 1674, Louisville, Ky. 40201

The Morality of Survival by Michael W. Masters

"The West] has not yet understood that whites, in a world become too small for its inhabitants, are now a minority and that the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles."[emphasis added] --Jean Raspail, The Camp Of The Saints

The loss of racial identity in the Western world is symptomatic of a deeper crisis within the European peoples, whose culture and technology have provided the world with much of what we know today as modern civilization. At its core, the crisis is the inevitable consequence of a profound, and perhaps fatal, misunderstanding of the nature of morality. We have lost sight of ancient and eternal laws of Nature on which our civilization must be based if we are to survive. We no longer have the luxury of indulging in universalist altruistic principles that, no matter how noble they may appear, have driven us to the brink of ruin.

Demographic projections based on American and European immigration policies, as well as the evidence of one's own senses as one walks the streets of any large Western city, point to a bleak future. Within a century or two, perhaps less, the peoples of the West, those whose ancestry derives from the Nordic and Alpine subraces of Europe, will have ceased to exist as a cohesive entity. How quickly the end will come depends on immigration rates, differential birthrates among ethnic groups, and mixed-race childbearing rates. But the final outcome is fixed so long as we adhere to our present course.

And yet, frank discussion of the outcome, the submergence of the race that produced the world's first, and perhaps only technological civilization, is usually silenced with words like "racist," "bigot," and "xenophobe." Neither the flawed moral system that enforces this silence nor the people who support it will outlive the demise of the West. But when the West is gone, it will be of little consolation that those responsible will have expired as well. If we are to reverse course, it is vital that we take steps now, before it is too late.

If, today, the West's moral system is flawed, how can it be corrected? The first question we must ask is whether it is moral for ethnic groups as well as individuals to seek survival. And if so, what are the moral actions we may undertake to secure survival? What must be the moral basis of our civilization if it is not to be lost? In his book, Destiny of Angels, Richard McCulloch calls these questions a matter of "ultimate ethics."

The Moral Dilemma of the West

The dilemma of our people is the product of a deep misconception about nature and morality. It arises from the mistaken, sentimental belief that altruism can be extended beyond its evolutionary origin--kinship and within-group altruism--to the whole of humanity. It results from failure to accept the role of genetic factors in defining human temperament and potential.

The standards that govern public debate are reminiscent of the Dark Ages in that they have no basis in science or in human experience. Instead, they consist of moralistic assertions derived from a world view rooted in radical egalitarianism. The long term consequence of adherence to these principles is rarely examined, let alone subjected to scientific scrutiny.

Most Western people would agree that an innate sense of right and wrong plays a key role in the Western moral system, a system that values individual worth and reciprocal fairness. The tragedy of this moral view is that it has been extended to the world at large--seemingly the most noble behavior humanity has ever exhibited--and has become the threat to the survival of the West.

As biologist Garrett Hardin demonstrated in his 1982 essay, "Discriminating Altruisms," universalism--a chimerical One World without borders or distinctions--is impossible. Groups that practice unlimited altruism, unfettered by thoughts of self-preservation, will be disadvantaged in life's competition and thus eliminated over time in favor of those that limit their altruistic behavior to a smaller subset of humanity, usually their own genetic kin, from whom they receive reciprocal benefits.

Professor Hardin writes:

"Universalism is altruism practiced without discrimination of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space . . . . To people who accept the idea of biological evolution from amoeba to man, the vision of social evolution from egoism to universalism may seem plausible. In fact, however, the last step is impossible . . . . Let us see why.

"In imagination, picture a world in which social evolution has gone no further than egoism or individualism. When familialism appears on the scene, what accounts for its persistence? It must be that the costs of the sacrifices individuals make for their relatives are more than paid for by the gains realized through family solidarity . . . .

"The argument that accounts for the step to familialism serves equally well for each succeeding step--except for the last. Why the difference? Because the One World created by universalism has--by definition--no competitive base to support it . . . [Universalism] cannot survive in competition with discrimination." [emphasis in original]

Professor Hardin adds:

"[W]e must not forget that for three billion years, biological evolution has been powered by discrimination. Even mere survival in the absence of evolutionary change depends on discrimination. If universalists now have their way, discrimination will be abandoned. Even the most modest impulse toward conservatism should cause us to question the wisdom of abandoning a principle that has worked so well for billions of years. It is a tragic irony that discrimination has produced a species (homo sapiens) that now proposes to abandon the principle responsible for its rise to greatness." It is to the advantage of non-Europeans, virtually all of whom retain their cohesion as distinctive, discriminating groups, to exploit the economic wealth and social order of the West, benefits many demonstrably cannot create for themselves. When this cohesive drive is placed in competition with self-sacrificing Western altruism, there can be only one outcome. In the near term, Europeans will be displaced by groups acting in their own self-interest. In the long run, biological destruction awaits us. Since those who displace us do not, by definition, maintain our morals standards--for if they did, they would not be replacing us--our flawed moral system will vanish with us.

The fact that universal, self-sacrificing altruism destroys its practitioners is its most obvious flaw. Any survivable moral order must recognize this.

The Cosmic Race

The dream of a Utopia in which racial harmony prevails, has never come true. Today, racial encroachment is a threat to the very existence of Western peoples. Lawrence Auster, author of The Path to National Suicide, An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, has elsewhere summarized the situation thus:

"Modern liberalism told us that racial differences don't matter, and on the basis of that belief, liberals then set about turning America into a multiracial, integrated, race-blind society. But now that very effort has created so much race consciousness, race conflict and race inequality, that the same liberals have concluded that the only way to overcome those problems is to merge all the races into one. The same people who have always denounced as an extremist lunatic anyone who warned about `the racial dilution of white America,' are now proposing, not just the dilution of white America, but its complete elimination. Race-blind ideology has led directly to the most race-conscious---and indeed genocidal---proposal in the history of the world."

This change of strategy was signaled by the cover story of a Fall 1993 special edition of Time. The story featured a computer synthesized image of a woman representing the intermixture of all of the ethnic population elements of the United States in their present proportions. The subliminal message conveyed by this computerized android, obviously still of predominantly European ancestry, was: "Don't worry, this is harmless." Or, in the current idiom of multiculturalism, "let us celebrate our diversity." Of course, this image represents the utter destruction of diversity, not its conservation.

This computer-generated android is a lie. The American population base is in a state of rapid change. Whites are now having fewer children, and there are thus fewer whites of child bearing age than Time assumes. This is happening worldwide. The question is, what would be the result of this plan being carried forward on a larger scale, carried to its logical conclusion in a world sans borders? Time's android is but a way station on the road to what some lovingly call the Cosmic Race.

People of European ancestry constitute something over ten percent of the world's population, but since 1980, white births amount to only a little more than five percent of the world's new children. The birth rate in the West has fallen to dangerously low levels, now about 1.8 children per woman. A level of 2.1 is required to balance deaths. Birth rates in the third world remain very high, thanks in large measure to the infusion of Western food, medicine, and "peacekeeping."

Because people are not computer morphs but have discrete ancestors, let us assume that the fraction of people with European ancestry is now one-sixteenth of the child-bearing population. When the Time experiment is complete on a world-wide scale, the resulting human will have only one white great-great-grandparent. He will be visibly Asian since about 60 percent of the world's population is Asian. In round numbers, this amounts to ten of the sixteen great-great-grandparents, including four from China alone. Three would come from India and three more from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Africa would supply three and non-white Latin America and the Caribbean basin the remaining two.

In this scenario, which is already unfolding on the North American continent and in Europe and Australia, the single European ancestor would leave no discernible residue in homo cosmicus. Europeans would be extinct, fulfilling the nightmare vision that Jean Raspail described in The Camp Of The Saints. This is not a condemnation of any real human being with such an ancestry. Nevertheless, this process would eradicate the biological diversity that multiculturalists claim to cherish. In its place would be only uniformity, the irreversible submergence of all races.

The passing of any race is an event of great significance. The destruction of an entire population is, in fact, genocide by the definitions of the UN Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as ". . . the destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial or national group. The acts so defined include. . . the destruction of the conditions of life necessary for the physical existence of the group . . . ."

The debate about race must be framed in these terms in order to convey its true importance. The battle cannot be won by allowing the other side to limit the terms of debate by declaring certain subjects beyond discussion. The consequences are too important.

The Dual Code of Morality

Why, though, does race matter? The answer lies in the biology of genes and in the impact of genetic kinship on altruism. For many decades, altruism was a paradox for theories of evolution. Darwin himself realized that altruism was difficult to expalain in terms of individual "survival of the fittest." In his book, Race, Evolution and Behavior, Philippe Rushton writes, "If the most altruistic members of a group sacrifice themselves for others, they run the risk of leaving fewer offspring to pass on the very genes that govern the altruistic behavior. Hence, altruism would be selected against, and selfishness would be selected for."

Prof. Rushton suggests that this paradox is resolved by genetic similarity theory, a field pioneered by biologist W.D. Hamilton and others. Prof Rushton writes:

"By a process known as kin selection, individuals can maximize their inclusive fitness rather than only their individual fitness by increasing the production of successful offspring by both themselves and their genetic relatives . . . . Genes are what survive and are passed on, and some of the same genes will be found not only in direct offspring but in siblings, cousins, nephews/nieces, and grandchildren . . . . thus, from an evolutionary perspective, altruism is a means of helping genes to propagate."

Over time, kin selection has resulted in a dual code of morality, an altruistic code for one's genetic kin and a non-altruistic code for everyone else. Anthropologists have suggested that humans evolved through a process of migration and tribal warfare between groups composed of genetically related individuals. In A New Theory of Human Evolution, Sir Arthur Keith wrote, "The process which secures the evolution of an isolated group of humanity is a combination of two principles . . . nmaely, cooperation with competition . . . . I hold that from the very beginning of human evolution the conduct of every local group was regulated by two codes of morality, distinguished by Herbert Spencer as the `code of amity' and the `code of enmity'."

Garrett Hardin writes, "The essential characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double standard of morality--one kind of behavior for in-group relations, another for out-group." In-group relations are characterized by cooperation while out-group relations are characterized by conflict. Liberals have tried to discredit the role of tribal conflict, claiming that such distinctions have been lost as groups reached nation size. But in so doing, they miss the vital message of genetic similarity theory. National ethnic groups represent the growth and consolidation of genetically related tribes over time.

Professor Hardin argues that, because of the nature of altruism and competition, the dual code of morality is inescapable and cannot be eliminated from human society:

"In the absence of competition between tribes the survival value of altruism in a crowded world approaches zero because what ego gives up necessarily . . . goes into the commons. What is in the commons cannot favor the survival of the sharing impulses that put it there--unless there are limits placed on sharing. To place limits on sharing is to create a tribe--which means a rejection of One World. . . . A state of One World, if achieved, would soon redissolve into an assemblage of tribes."

The in-group out-group distinction still operates today; it is only the battleground that has shifted. Tribal warfare has been replaced by territorial irredentism and competing birthrates.

The liberal campaign to eliminate feelings of national, cultural, or racial solidarity among Western peoples was undertaken largely in the hope that the abolition of "tribalism" would inaugurate an era of world peace. As Professor Hardin has shown, tribalism cannot be eliminated. Worse still, any idealistic group that unilaterally dismantles its own tribal sense will be swept away by groups that have retained theirs. Unless the current direction is changed, the West will be destroyed in this new form of biological warfare.

The dual code of morality is therefore the cornerstone on which any enduring moral order must be based. It is also an answer to the question of ultimate ethics posed earlier: "Is it moral for ethnic groups to seek to survive?" Since it is impossible to eliminate "tribes" from the human race, the answer to this question must be yes. That which is built inextricably into the laws of the universe cannot be immoral.

Universalists might try to caricature the dual code of morality as an invidious double standard, but it is something we practice every day without even thinking about it. Without it, no group, be it a family, club, corporation, political party, nation, or race would exist. It is how groups distinguish between members and non-members. Employees of the same company treat each other differently from the way they treat competitors. Members of the same political party cooperate with each other and run against opponents. Families draw sharp distinctions between members and strangers. It is easy to overlook the dual code of morality precisely because it is so fundamental a part of human nature.

The "code of amity, code of enmity" explains racial loyalties. It is an extension of the biologically necessary fact that parents love their children more than the children of strangers. Such feelings are normal and natural. Yet "racism" has become the curse-word that stops discussion. Those who use the word as a weapon say that racial loyalty is racism when exhibited by whites but is justifiable pride when exhibited by non-whites. The word is simply a means of gaining power over people who have exaggerated moral scruples.

The Biology of Diversity

Feelings of racial loyalty are grounded in biological differences. These are discussed authoritatively in J. Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, but they do not imply that one race has a right to rule over another. Frank discussion of real differences must not be considered morally repugnant. Scientific truth cannot be racism, at least not in the pejorative sense that the word is now used.

Most forms of behavior (by whites) that are characterized as racism do not involve unprovoked assault on people of other races, but are simply the natural loyalty of humans for their own group. They are necessary for survival. Unprovoked violence is a moral evil, but by all statistical measures, whites are overwhelmingly the victims of crimes of racial violence, not the perpetrators.

Blacks are twelve percent of the population but commit almost two-thirds of the violent crime in America, are over twelve times more likely to murder whites than the reverse, are more than a thousand times more likely to rape white women than the reverse, and choose whites as crime victims fifty percent of the time compared to whites choosing blacks as victims only two percent of the time.

Interracial crime is just one manifestation of a fundamental biological principle called Gause's Law of Exclusion. In his book, The Mammals of North America, University of Kansas biology professor Raymond Hall states the law as follows: "Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area." [emphasis in original] One will inevitably eliminate or displace the other. Prof. Hall specifically includes humans in this rule: "To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other."

Oblivion need not come in the form of physical destruction. It may simply involve the loss of habitat. Harlem, Watts, East St. Louis, and many other black neighborhoods were once occupied by whites. The arrival of blacks (or other non-whites) in sufficient numbers makes it impossible for whites to survive, whereas the process does not work in reverse. Even without the carnage of inter-racial crime, whites could be eliminated through sheer loss of territory. Viewed in biological terms, ethnic diversity is prelude to destruction.

The great majority of people, of any age and origin, do not concern themselves with the rise and fall of civilizations. Like fish in water, they are conscious of their environment only when it changes rapidly and threateningly, a rarity in most people's lifetimes. Yet civilizations do fall, and the warning signs for ours have been present for more than a century. Rudyard Kipling's line, "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," presaged the message of early twentieth century Americans, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose books, The Passing of the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color, helped bring about the immigration restrictions of 1924.

The 1924 national origins quota system was dismantled in 1965 during the wave of self-recrimination that accompanied the Civil Rights era. Should Chinese historians of the twenty-second century be writing the final history of Western civilization, no doubt they will cite the 1965 Immigration Act as the blow that broke the back of Western man.

Elmer Pendell, in his book, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct, surveyed historians' theories as to why civilizations fall. They include Oswald Spengler's analogy to individual aging and death, theories of moral decay, and theories based on ecological deterioration. Concerning the latter, Garrett Hardin notes in The Limits of Altruism: "No civilization has ever recovered after ruining its environment." [emphasis in original] All of these theories have their appeal, yet none is a complete explanation for what is happening to the West.

Pendell's own hypothesis seems closer to the mark. A civilization arises when natural selection produces a people of above-average intelligence. As the founders conquer natural culling forces, those who would have been removed from the population due to their lesser abilities survive and produce more children than the more intelligent founders. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin and author of Hereditary Genius, first noted that `men of eminence' have fewer children than the average. Eventually the intelligence level of the population falls below that needed to sustain civilization.

Pendell suggests another factor in the collapse of civilizations, the gradual adulteration of ethnically homogeneous founding populations through losses in wars and, in ancient times, the taking of slaves. The modern analogue of slavery is immigration. Tenny Frank, in his book History of Rome, wrote, "The original peoples were wasted in wars and scattered in migrations and colonization and their places were filled chiefly with Eastern Slaves." We cannot speak of the spirit of Rome or the culture of Rome, Frank said, "without defining whether the reference is to the Rome of 200 BC or 200 AD."

Theodor Mommsen wrote in The History of Rome, "The patrician body. . . had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries and in the time of Caesar there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes (clans) still in existence." In 9 A. D. laws were passed requiring each patrician family to have three children. Lead poisoning has been implicated in the failure to reverse the decline of Roman blood, but the reasons do not change the outcome. Even in ancient Rome, slaves did not stay slaves forever, and their gradual suffusion through the population by intermixture would have contributed to Rome's demise. The same situation, massive infusion of non-Western peoples and a birthrate below replacement level, threatens the West, and for reasons quite unrelated to lead poisoning.

After The Fall

Eric Fischer, writing in The Passing of the European Age, said that a new civilization never arises where an earlier civilization has died. If Pendell's theory is correct and if the hypothesis of Tenny Frank and others explains the loss of a hereditary capacity for civilization, then Fischer's observation has a genetic explanation. Civilization cannot arise on the site of an earlier civilization once the hereditary character of the people is permanently altered. This process is happening in the Western world today through immigration, welfare, and liberal policies that promote the submergence of ethnic groups into a global "melting pot."

Should the West suffer the fate of Rome, there will be no recovery. Whether or not other civilizations arise among other peoples remains to be seen. Present economic success indicates that East Asia may be a future center of civilization. However, modern innovations flow predominantly from the creative wellsprings of the West. Whether innovation could be sustained in the absence of Western peoples remains to be seen. There is evidence that this might not happen; intelligence testing of Asians shows a relatively small standard deviation, suggesting a smaller right tail of the IQ distribution and a smaller percentage of innovative individuals.

Although dire predictions about the future are often ridiculed, it is wise to remember Rome--catastrophes can and do occur, and in a globally linked world, the consequences could be shattering. In The Limits of Altruism, Garrett Hardin cites Harrison Brown, author of The Challenge of Man's Future, as the first person to recognize the vulnerability of the West's advanced civilization. Brown focused on the role of metals in modern civilization and on the technology required to obtain metals. Prof. Hardin summarizes the situation:

"Looking only at the copper component of the problem, we should note that preliterate man managed to create the Bronze Age only because of the ready availability of copper ores assaying greater than 20 percent. . . . Only the most primitive of means are required to process high grade ores. But now we are reduced to extracting our copper from ores that assay less than 1 percent, and soon we will have nothing better than 0.1 percent. It takes a very sophisticated technology to deal with low-grade ores, a technology that only a large population of technologically advanced people can muster."

Prof. Hardin continues, "Our many technologies form an incredible network of mutual support, mutual dependence. If this network were disrupted . . . it is doubtful if our kind of technology could ever be rebuilt. . . . On all counts, it looks as though our civilization, once fallen, will never be replaced by another of comparable quality."

Prof. Hardin suggests two possible causes for the destruction of modern civilization: nuclear warfare and a population crash brought on by exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity. However, genetic submergence of the peoples with the innate ability to sustain civilization will do just as well.

The Roots of Western Order

The Map of Freedom, published annually by Freedom House, graphically demonstrates that free forms of government generally track population concentrations of people of European descent, a strong suggestion that freedom has a genetic origin. Although there are exceptions, notably Japan, which lost a nuclear war to the West and had a Western constitution imposed on it, the world of the free is largely the world of the Western European. The partially free include newly emerged Eastern Europeans and a scattering of other nations around the world. Much of Africa and Asia remains in the not free category.

Thomas Jefferson foresaw this. Fearing "importation of foreigners," he wrote in Notes on Virginia, "They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as usual, from one extreme to the other. . . . In proportion to their number, they will infuse into it [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass."

Because economic inequality between groups inevitably produces envy, stable societies are almost always homogeneous. Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies live on the edge of dissolution. In such cases, the role of government turns to conflict management, as Brent Nelson points out in America Balkanized. "Government as conflict management is an emerging theme of public life in the U.S., a theme which recurrently manifests itself in the concepts of dialogue, mediation, sensitivity, tolerance, and balance. The latter terms are increasingly the shibboleths of American public life. The fiction is maintained that these concepts . . . will produce a final resolution of intergroup conflicts. . . . [T]he reality is something quite other." Laws against "hate crime" and "hate speech" reflect that other reality.

If today's ethnic minorities become a majority it will be beyond the power of Western peoples to control, peacefully by means of the ballot, the destiny of the nations that were once their own. There is no guarantee that protections prevalent in Western societies will be preserved in societies that become non-Western. There is no historical reason to believe that governments based on principles of individual liberty will survive the disappearance of Western peoples.

Post-colonial Africa is enlightening. For the most part, the Dark Continent is reverting to its ancestral ways, suitably updated by the infusion of Western weapons, as evidenced by carnage in Somalia and Rwanda. That this disturbs our heightened Western sense of compassion is understandable. But sentimentality should not blind us to the long term implications for our own survival. Nature's books are being balanced in Africa, and they will be balanced in the West, either by us or by Nature itself. Just as giving food to people who cannot feed themselves simply hastens an inevitable population crash, bringing third world people into the West simply hastens the transformation of the West into an extension of the third world.

The European tradition of ordered, self-governing liberty is probably part of our genetic heritage. Throughout the third world, governments range from anarchy to dictatorship. That too, is surely genetic. Those few non-European countries that appear to be free have generally maintained democracy through intimate contact with the West. If Europeans are marginalized and ultimately absorbed by the third world, the idealism of Western liberalism that permitted the third world invasion will have proved to be a lethal genetic flaw.

Few concepts are more ingrained in Western thought than respect for the "rule of law." The West has a history of order that predates the eight-hundred-year-old Magna Carta. Roman Law was supreme in the Mediterranean world for nearly a thousand years. Unique among the peoples of the earth, the people of the West recognize, at least in theory, the subordination of government to individual rights.