This is an online discussion between E. Michael Jones and Lasha Darkmoon on the moral code, arising out of a brief exchange of ideas on the same subject between E. Michael Jones and Kevin MacDonald in Culture Wars magazine. Following the original discussion as it appeared in Culture Wars (reprinted with permission), MacDonald appends a comment.

E. MICHAEL JONES: It was kind of Professor MacDonald to respond to my critique of his writing in Jewish Nazis, but I don’t feel that he has made me want to change what I said. His claim that “My moral sense certainly does not come from Catholicism but is intimately tied up with evolutionary thinking” is preposterous.

It is impossible to derive the moral order from biology much less evolution, which is an ideology which attempts to use biology to justify capitalism. From an evolutionary point of view, KMac should be a philosemite. Haven’t the Jews won out in the struggle for existence in the United States, and therefore, the world? His evolution undermines his morality and vice versa. He reminds me of Adam Smith, whose insights into economics were vitiated by his ideological commitment to moral Newtonianism, the English ideology of his day.

According to Georg Ratzinger, the Jews succeeded in getting the economy of states like Austria and Hungary under their control, not because they were more intelligent (or had “higher IQs than Caucasians,” as Professor MacDonald claims) but because their internalization of Talmudic culture had allowed them to become “skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare”.

KEVIN MACDONALD: I have made it very clear in many places that it’s a combination of high IQ and ethnic networking. For example, I have argued that Jews are far overrepresented in elite educational institutions than would be predicted on the basis of their IQ, and the same goes for much else, from Hollywood producers to Nobel Prizes. On occasion I have also noted that Jews do not attach any moral importance to non-Jews. They see them solely in instrumental terms, so anything goes. If Bernie Madoff had only ripped of non-Jews, he’d probably be a hero in the Jewish community—and would have gotten a much lighter sentence. White collar crime is practically a way of life among Orthodox Jews.

LASHA DARKMOON: I can see MacDonald’s viewpoint here. He has made it absolutely clear in his writings, and repeatedly so, that Jews are NOT at the top of the heap just because they are cleverer than the goyim. They owe an enormous amount of their success to networking. In cruder terms, they are highly successful as a group because they are consummate cheats. They break the rules, we keep them. This gives them an advantage over us. The dog that steals food from another dog’s dinner plate is likely to be fatter than the moral dog that refuses to cheat!

E. Michael Jones disagrees with Kevin MacDonald’s belief that his moral sense springs from his evolutionary philosophy and that it has nothing to do with his childhood Catholicism. EMJ calls this view “preposterous.” KMD has perhaps expressed himself a bit clumsily here, but I think I understand what he is getting at. If I may translate: KMD is saying that his moral sense does not derive from early childhood indoctrination as a Catholic but is part of his genetic makeup. Having a moral sense, he is saying, has survival value. A race that keeps the Ten Commandments, to put it simply, has more chance of surviving than a race of amoral scallywags.

Consider: where does our innate horror over incest spring from and our natural guilt and shame over masturbation? It does not spring from religious indoctrination in childhood. It springs from our genes. We know instinctively that these acts are inimical to our long-term survival, both individually and as a race. Our moral sense tells us to avoid acts like these in the interests of our own survival. Sodomy, for example, is not going to help a race to survive if it becomes endemic. Where do you think the moral code comes from? Direct from God who inspires his prophets to take down his dictation? Or from the wisdom of generations inscribed in the Codifier’s genes? My natural instinct tells me that incest is wrong. I don’t need Moses or Manu to tell me this. If they were to reverse their teachings and tell me that incest was okay, I would not suddenly become pro-incest.

In a word: the moral code is inscribed in our genes. If Jones is repelled by this idea, let him reflect that it is God himself who may be the inscriber.

In 1934 Cambridge anthropologist Dr JD Unwin published Sex and Culture. In it he examined 86 civilizations spanning 5,000 years. His findings? Sexually promiscuous cultures invariably collapsed in moral anarchy and sooner or later entered the dustbin of history. The societies that thrived and prospered were the ones in which the strictest sexual restraint was practiced both before and after marriage. “I know of no exception to these rules,” Dr Unwin concluded.

E. MICHAEL JONES: I am a fervent admirer of the writings of Lasha Darkmoon and am grateful that she has taken the time to weigh in on the discussion that Professor MacDonald and I have been having over the relationship between biology and morality. Her recent article on Iran was the best summary of the current situation that I have read anywhere.

The careful reader of the above letter to the editor, however, will notice that she contradicts herself in trying to square the circle of that perennial paradox, biological (or evolutionary) morality. On the one hand, she writes that the Jews “are highly successful as a group because they are consummate cheats. They break the rules, we keep them. This gives them an advantage over us. The dog that steals food from another dog’s dinner plate is likely to be fatter than the moral dog that refuses to cheat.”

And yet just one paragraph later, she tells us that “Having a moral sense, he is saying, has survival value [her emphasis]. A race that keeps the Ten Commandments, to put it crudely, has more chance of surviving than a race of amoral scallywags.”

Well, which is it, Lasha? The contradiction stems from a confusion between the material and the spiritual which lies at the heart of sociobiology, which is forever trying to deduce morality from biology, the intellectual equivalent of looking for love in all the wrong places.

Man is a composite being made up of body and soul (if that word, sounds tendentious to the sociobiologists, they can substitute “mind” in its place). He has both a brain and a mind. These two entities are related but distinct. Human beings, unlike angels, can’t have minds unless they have brains, which function according to the laws of chemistry, biology, electricity, etc. and are a direct product of our DNA. Our thoughts, however, are a function of our minds, and, although we can affect our minds by manipulating the chemistry of our brains through alcohol and drugs, the logic of our thoughts is independent of the functioning of our brains.

The mind can apprehend Logos; the brain cannot. The moral code is part of the Logos; it is not “inscribed in our genes.” If it were, Moses would not have needed the 10 Commandments (especially since his followers had super DNA) because what happens genetically happens automatically. I did not have to will the color of my eyes or the shape of my nose, but all of us have to will moral behavior because we are rational creatures who were created by God with the ability to apprehend Logos and act on it once we have apprehended it.

God has inscribed much information into the genetic code, but the moral law is not to be found there. It is part of the Logos than can only be apprehended by the intellect and implemented by the will. The natural law is most certainly written on our hearts, which is to say, it becomes obvious to our intellects once we reach the age of reason, but it is not inscribed in our DNA. To say that morality is inscribed in our genes is like saying that the weather report can be found in our TV. Sociobiologists are in the unenviable position of believing that they can affect the weather by changing the computer chips that run their TVs.

LASHA DARKMOON: I am tempted to let EMJ have the last world. After all, I cannot hope to best him in argument! Nor am I trying.

Let me just make two short comments. Disconnected comments. Make of them what you will.

First, what scientist would admit the existence of the Logos? Can Logos be empirically proved? Would Richard Dawkins allow you to talk about the Logos in one of his classes where evolution is being discussed? I doubt it.

[I have defined Logos here as “the Christ Principle, the rule of law in a divinely ordered universe.”]

You have implicit faith in the Logos. So do I. But Dawkins doesn’t. To him, and maybe to Kevin MacDonald, science cannot allow unverifiable metaphysical entities to form part of their discussion. Dragging the Logos or Plato’s Universals into the discussion, they would claim, is a violation of Occam’s razor. An unnecessary entity is being dragged into the discussion.

I happen to believe in the Logos, which to me is pretty much the same as the God of the great mystics, the Absolute that existed before the Big Bang: Brahman the Supreme.

Of course the moral code would be found in Brahman, but so would everything — including good and evil, light and darkness, love and hate, peace and war, life and death.

Second, when I say that the moral code is inscribed in our genes and has survival value, you are astute enough to point out that I am guilty of a flagrant contradiction. For the Jews who do not accept Logos obviously do not live by the same moral code as we do who accept Logos. As I said earlier, they get ahead by cheating. Here, then, is the apparent contradiction: if the moral code is inscribed in our genes and helps us to survive, how is it that the Logos-rejecting Jews survive so well without the moral code?

The answer I offer for this may not satisfy you, but it satisfies me. It is this. Unfortunately, it would be regarded as “anti-Semitic”.

One argument you can advance to show that good Christians survive because they are good, and bad Jews survive even better because they are bad, is this: Jews are fundamentally different from the rest of us, as their own Talmudic rabbis tell us repeatedly, i.e., they belong to a different parasitic or predatory species: as such, the moral code they subscribe to is the reverse of our moral code. It is a parallel “moral code” derived from the Anti-Logos. This is the code that allows them to cheat: to regard every non-Jew in the world as fair game, as exploitation material, as put there by Yahveh solely for the Jew’s advancement.

Is such a view anti-Semitic? Jews would naturally say so. But it’s a view their own rabbis advance, especially in the Talmud: that the goyim are placed here on earth purely for Jewish exploitation. You can’t say the Jews are acting “wrongly”. They are acting wrongly only according to our moral code, not according to their own. Remember that their moral code is not derived from the Logos, which they reject, but from the Anti-Logos.

This puts an entirely different complexion on matters. The assumptions we make when we subscribe to the Logos (e.g., that good is better than evil) are not axiomatic. The Devil, who subscribes to the Anti-Logos, doesn’t accept the premise that good is better than evil. “Evil, be thou my good!” Satan proclaims in Paradise Lost.

Jews who reject Logos, in other words, don’t need the moral code as we know it to be inscribed in their genes in order to survive. They need the reverse of our moral code. To put it crudely, in order to survive, they need to be immoral. But remember this: what is “immoral” to us is moral to them. The Talmud makes this abundantly clear. Christian morality is turned upside down in the Talmud. As you yourself have already pointed out, these Talmudic Jews completely reject the Just War theory that insists on fair play and proportionality. This Just War theory may be fine for Christians, they assert. But why should it apply to them? I can well understand why many people equate Talmudism with Satanism. I can see very little difference between these two anti-religions.

To summarize: Christian civilization, in order to survive, needs the Christian moral code to be inscribed in the genes of Christians; and this moral code is basically the wisdom of our Christian ancestors — a moral code, if you will, derived from the Logos. Jews, on the other hand, do not survive by subscribing to this Christian moral code. Their moral code is an entirely different code, also inscribed in their genes; and this Jewish moral code is basically the wisdom of their Jewish ancestors, specifically of their venerable rabbis — and this Jewish moral code is derived from the Anti-Logos.

Julius Evola expressed a similar viewpoint in his Preface to the Italian translation of the Protocols of Zion:

To debase, to make all fixed points variable, to make all certainties problematic, to sensualise, to tendentiously exalt what is inferior in man, to spread a sort of terror…this is the true meaning of cultural Judaism. We do not think that there is a genuine plan here…. The fact remains that the whole, disorganised, unconscious influence is in perfect accord with the occult, integral, unitary influence of the hidden forces of world-wide subversion. In order to recognise the existence of international Judaism, it is not therefore necessary to assert that all Jews are led by a genuine organisation, and that their whole action consciously follows a plan. The link is established to a large extent automatically, by nature. (See here)

E. MICHAEL JONES: First of all, I would like to begin by saying that I am in complete agreement with Miss Darkmoon. Her claim that Jews “belong to a different parasitic or predatory species” is anti-Semitic. In fact, it is the classic expression of anti-Semitism and the opposite of what I believe.

The fact that the Jews rejected Christ and thereby Logos did not change their DNA; it made them enemies of the human race but it did not transform them into a different species. No, they are human like us, but human beings raised via the Talmud to hate Christ and Logos in all its manifestations, which means they are raised as Heinrich Graetz pointed out, to take delight in cheating the goyim and all the predatory behavior which Julius Evola criticizes. If they were condemned to do this by their DNA, then we could not hold them responsible for what they do, in which case we would have no reason to be morally indignant. Logos is not some option for the elect; it is the operating system for all humanity. Everyone must be held accountable for his actions even if he is in rebellion against the moral order, as Jews are.

Similarly, if Richard Dawkins disagrees with me about Logos, he does nothing but substantiate my point, for he could not express his disagreement with me unless both of us participated in the very Logos which he denies. “Even those who set themselves up against you,” Saint Augustine once said, “do but copy you in a perverse way.” Anyone who argues against Logos testifies to its existence.

The same is true of practical reason. As Miss Darkmoon points out, Satan himself, because he has been endowed by the God who created him with intellect and will, must substantiate the first principle of the practical reason, namely, “Good is to be pursued and evil avoided,” when he claims, “Evil, be thou my good.” He has no choice in the matter. If he acts, he must choose what at least seems like a good thing. The moral law exists to educate us to choose real over apparent goods.

DNA is also part of God’s Logos, but biological mechanisms, while they determine how fish spawn, do not tell us how to act. Intellect and will do that for us, as I tried to explain in my last letter. Confusing the biology which runs the brain with the mind which needs the brain as its necessary condition is part of the unfortunate legacy of Darwinism, and something which keeps Miss Darkmoon and Professor MacDonald from reaching their full potential as thinkers.

Dr Lasha Darkmoon (email her) is an academic with higher degrees in Classics. She is also a poet and translator. Her articles can be sampled here, her poems here.

KEVIN MACDONALD: I welcome this opportunity to expand on my views on morality. I admire the work of both Dr. E. Michael Jones Dr. Lasha Darkmoon and have learned a lot from them. I must confess that it pains me a bit to critique EMJ’s work because he is an ally on many of the important issues. In general, I think that we need different people with different approaches in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. My work is geared to people who are scientifically inclined and who are comfortable with a worldview based on evolutionary biology.

At the outset, I take issue with EMJ’s notion that the world of the mind is beyond the reach of modern science. Humans possess two quite different types of psychological mechanisms: The evolved modules of our ancient evolutionary past which operate automatically and often below conscious awareness (implicit processing); and more recently evolved mechanisms of explicit processing centered in the higher brain centers which are able to respond to cultural input (symbols, language, and religious ideas such as EMJ’s concept of logos) (see here). These latter mechanisms are what we usually understand by ‘mind’, but they are well studied and certainly not out of the reach of scientific understanding. My view is that the main evolutionary game in the contemporary world revolves around conflicts of interest over the construction of culture, including the promotion of ideologies such as Marxism, Catholicism, etc. (see here) that could not exist without explicit processing. In my work I have emphasized the special Jewish role in the construction of the culture of Western suicide—the creation and promotion of the ideologies of the left that have been disastrous to Europeans and their traditional cultures.

In my original comments to Dr. Jones, I rejected the interpretation that my views on morality were shaped by a “residual moral consciousness which he retains as a lapsed Catholic.” My reply was that the success of Jews was a “bad thing only in the sense that it compromises my interests as a non-Jew. I am taking a consistently evolutionary view—that ultimately the only standard is persistence in the game of life.”

This requires a bit of unpacking. It assumes that it can be documented that the various Jewish-dominated intellectual movements and the actions of the organized Jewish community discussed in The Culture of Critique were aimed at advancing Jewish interests in opposition to the interests of non-Jews, and particularly the European-derived majority of the United States and other Western countries. Conflicts of interest are ubiquitous in life and in nature, so there is no need to invoke a unique sense of moral outrage stemming from my Catholic background.

In agreement with many evolutionary psychologists, I see many examples of moral outrage as components of human evolved psychology. As Dr. Lasha Darkmoon mentioned, we are naturally morally repulsed by certain behaviors—incest is a classic textbook example, resulting in incest taboos as a cross-cultural universal as well as psychological adaptations that underlie that fact that typical human living conditions prevent, say, brothers and sisters or parents and children from being sexually attracted to each other.

We are also morally outraged when we feel exploited or cheated—the classic “cheater detection” paradigm of evolutionary psychology. We not only become cognitively aware that we have been exploited, but there is moral outrage at the cheater that motivates and energizes acts of retribution. But this reaction of moral outrage stems ultimately from the simple fact that exploiter and exploited have different interests in the game of life, with the result that the mental machinery of moral outrage evolved. Another example is that of rapist and the victim who feels moral outrage against her rapist. Prototypical modular examples of moral outrage are natural (evolved) responses to having one’s interests violated. Such adaptations are expected to evolve when the precipitating conditions recurred over evolutionary time. Because conflicts of interest have been endemic to all human societies on an evolutionary time scale, we naturally feel moral outrage when we feel victimized by others.

Besides moral outrage, the other critical moral emotion is empathy. This emotion is part of the human affectional system—the personality system of love and nurturance designed to cement close family relationships (see here, p. 217ff). There are individual differences in this system, with people very low on the system prone to psychopathy and exploiting others (no empathy or guilt; mostly men), while people who are very high on the system are prone to pathological altruism—helping others (even non-relatives), even at extraordinary cost to self to the point that it is personally maladaptive (mostly women). Although there are often other motives (such as being loved by the media), many of the people who are maladadaptively altruistic are Whites people who have deep empathy for Third World sufferers to the point that they do things like adopt Haitian babies.

Ultimately, it is a sense of moral outrage against what has happened to White America in the last 50 years that motivates many of us. (I date the beginning of the disaster from the passage of the 1965 immigration act in the U.S., and similar policies developing around that same time throughout the Western world, although of course, much happened prior to this date that enabled those events.)

Far from being forever out of the reach of scientific research, there is a great deal of research on how we make moral judgments. Research on morality has shown the priority of emotion in making typical moral judgments. (See Jared Taylor’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Haidt’s “tribal moral communities” have been discussed on TOO as an important tool for understanding the dominance of the left in universities and elsewhere.) We typically have an immediate emotional response to events and we then rationalize our moral judgment cognitively rather than the reverse.

But there are other routes to moral emotions besides reflexive responses of moral outrage represented by the above examples of incest and rape. In my case at least, my sense of moral outrage about the transformations to Western societies developed as a result of using the higher brain processes (explicit processing) described above—what a psychologist would label a top-down process. (In the same way, there are bottom-up processes[loud noises reflexively leading to fear] and top-down processes [becoming aware that Heidi Beirich is hatching a plot to get you fired] also resulting in fear but mediated by explicit processing.) As a result of reading about various Jewish intellectual and political movements, I came to see Jews as advocating policies that are opposed to the interests of European peoples. It was this cognitive awareness based on a great deal of reading and thinking that led me to my current beliefs. But once I became confident I was right about this and I saw how these cultural shifts have led to the impending eclipse of White America, the result has been a sense of moral outrage every bit as real and motivating as the reflexive moral outrage experienced by a victim of rape.

I believe the vast majority of Whites would also feel moral outrage at what has happened if they understood how and why these changes came about. Hence the importance of preventing honest discussions of Jewish power and influence in the mainstream media and in the academic world.

Jewish moral outrage against the West is fueled by the same brain higher brain processes that resulted in my moral outrage, abetted also by the traditional Jewish sense of superiority and hostility toward outgroups. However in the case of Jews the cultural input revolves around Jewish interpretations of historical anti-Semitism as irrational hatred of Jews culminating in the Holocaust.

The most difficult question is why for so many White people, the decline of White America and the rise of multiculturalism throughout the West are themselves moral imperatives. How did the West uniquely develop a sense of moral outrage directed against their own people and their own interests? This is indeed the most difficult question and far too complex to discuss here adequately because it ultimately involves a theory of the uniqueness of Western culture as resulting from a prolonged and relatively recent evolutionary past as Northern hunter-gatherers. This has resulted in a tendency toward moral universalism and altruistic punishment (see here (p. 19-25), here, Discussion section, here). But the main point here is that since the 19th century Jews have understood the importance of culture in creating moral communities via influence on culture. The culture of Western suicide is the result of Jewish dominance of the media (see here, p. 48ff) and veto power over all the centers of power in Western societies. All of the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involve moral critiques of the West. The ultimate result has been the creation of the culture of the Holocaust (Ibid., p. 44ff)—including guilt over slavery, colonialism, etc.

The lesson here is that we must create our own moral communities that recognize the legitimacy of White interests. In order to motivate Whites, we must have a sense that our cause is moral and we should have a sense of moral outrage at what has happened to put us in our current situation. Our people will not be motivated by a cause that they see as immoral. And in order to do that, we must have intellectual confidence that we are right about the legitimacy of our cause because without it we are prone to feeling that our cause has no moral legitimacy either. And that in turn depends on plugging into science to support the legitimacy of ethnic genetic interests—that we have as much right as anyone to defend our territorial interests, reclaim our culture, and oppose policies that discriminate against out people.