Form, Function, & Phenotypes

^[1]1,103 words

French translation here ^[2]

Ted Sallis’s recent article “Anders Breivik & Genetic vs. Phenotypic Interests ^[3]” is internally consistent, but his focus on the genetic patterns that are the blueprint of Whiteness causes him to miss the forest for the trees. While his line of genetic research is good science,  it’s incomplete science which is not yet prepared to inform our politics. It lacks altogether a deeper appreciation of the nature of what those alleles actually represent.

By moving prematurely from theory to practice, Sallis arrives at prescriptions that are at best incomplete and at worst counter-productive. In many ways, the past decade has been a lost one for our cause due to its inappropriate emphasis on arguments and strategies drawn from biological research. It’s self-evidently obvious that nobody’s going to be compelled to die in battle for his “ethnic genetic interests,” at least not explicitly so. This is perhaps fortunate, given that such a campaign wouldn’t accomplish the presumed objective.

Preservation in the conventional sense is futile, even if we Whites were to colonize Mars. In the final analysis, form is a reflection of function, and the White race has been in a steady decline since the selective factors which generated Whiteness subsided. Is our goal to preserve the blond phenotype? Why? Why was it selected in the first place? What good are strong jaws, blue eyes, dolicocephalic craniums, or delicate ivory skin that bubbles up and peels off when exposed to sunlight? Is Whiteness defined as a collection of visible and invisible traits that can be quantified through genetic analysis, or is Whiteness a holistic effect of adaptation to a specific challenge?

The line drawn at the Strait of Bosphorus is a purely political line and shouldn’t be confused for an anthropological one. It’s smart to draw the line there for historical, geographical, political, religious, and cultural reasons. But there are plenty of specimens on the Asiatic side of the strait whose genotype and phenotype are essentially White, and there are plenty of specimens on the European side of the strait whose genotype and phenotype are generally incommensurate with any attempt to arrive at a common definition of what it means to be White. The squishy reality is that the genetic difference between White Europeans and Asiatic Caucasians is more clinal than cladistic. The conventional boundaries of “Europe” are an excellent place to draw that line, though we shouldn’t pretend that the men and women with freckles and cleft chins who land on the wrong side of it are genetically alien in any meaningful way.

Setting aside the genetic threat of blue-eyed crypto-Turks, differential breeding patterns within the race are rapidly transforming it. While there’s little selection for appearance and health, selection for behavioral patterns and cognitive abilities carries on apace. As we speak, the higher classes of Whites are gradually drifting on to become managerial elites in not only function but in form. They’re becoming less creative, less impulsive, less courageous, and less socially alpha. In summary, they’re being selected to excel in a mature civilization rather than in a nomadic warrior tribe . . . a process which has already occurred among Jews, Mandarins, and Brahmins. Would a purely “White” population which has radically transformed itself through resorting within its gene pool continue to be “White” as we know it, despite being completely different?

Defining ourselves as a kinship group isn’t the goal. It’s merely a precondition. Stopping the flood of non-Whites isn’t promoting Whiteness. It’s merely shooing away the vultures picking at our exposed viscera. We’ll eventually die off one way or another whether the vultures and hyenas have their shot at our carcass or not. To survive, we must discover a way to re-create or simulate the selective conditions which created Whiteness in the first place. It’s not about identifying some alleles and preserving them. Even if this quixotic project were completely successful, it would only succeed at arresting our potential for further progress.

To quote Julius Evola’s essay “Race and War” from The Metaphysics of War ^[4]:

One of the most serious obstacles to a purely biological formulation of the doctrine of race is the fact that cross-breeding and contamination of the blood are not the only cause of the decline and decay of races. Races may equally degenerate and come to their end because of a process – so to speak – of inner extinction, without the participation of external factors. . . .

When a race has been reduced to a mere ensemble of atavistic automatisms, which have become the sole surviving vestiges of what once it was, then a collision, a lesion, a simple action from outside, is enough to make it fall, to disfigure it and to denature it. In such a case, it does not behave like an elastic body, ready to react and to resume its original shape after the collision (provided, that is, that the latter does not exceed certain limits and does not produce permanent actual damage), but, rather, it behaves like a rigid, inelastic body, which passively endures the imprint of external action.

This means, essentially, ‘to exalt’ its inner race; to see to it that its intimate tension is never lacking; that, as counterpart of its physical integrity, within it there is something like an uncontrollable and irreducible fire, always yearning for new material to feed its blaze, in the form of new obstacles, which defy it and force it to reassert itself.

What Evola  is conveying here is that Whiteness is as Whiteness does. Biological reductionism focuses on the weapon while losing sight of its role in the war. We have only three alternatives to extinction: succeeding in the current habitat (becoming Jews); reviving or simulating the habitat which causes Whiteness; or pursuing an entirely new form and function, as suggested in Greg Johnson’s notorious essay “Is Racial Purism Decadent? ^[5]” While a recommendation that we seal off the borders and defend our kin is good advice, it’s ultimately precluded by the fact that Whites in their currently dysfunctional and decadent form would be incapable of acting on the advice even if they found it persuasive.

Until we Whites can overcome the inner extinction Evola speaks of, this outer extinction will continue to carry on unabated. Until we can rekindle that blaze which originally propelled us and can find the material to feed that blaze, then we’ll continue to die off. If we expect to actually reverse the decline in the frequency of the alleles which are unique to our population, then we’ll have to look beyond alleles and towards the traditions and transcendent ideals which were once the function animating our biological form.