Moralism & Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival

5,451 words [1]

The following is the text of the speech that was made by Prof. MacDonald at the Northwest Forum on February 25, 2017 (audio here [2]).

Obviously President Obama was a horrific President in pretty much every possible way. His domestic policies in particular have been anathema to the Alt Right—he would, after all, have loved to sign an immigration amnesty/surge bill into law. Nevertheless, a couple of things he said in his farewell address [3] made a lot of sense, although he probably wasn’t thinking about the Alt Right when he said them.

Obama said that too often people think of those who oppose them as not merely misguided, but malevolent. This is a huge problem for the Alt Right. The very label is typically associated in the media with words like “Nazi,” “white supremacist,” and “racist”—all of which have strong moral connotations after years of browbeating by the media. These words produce psychological reflexes intended to preclude honest debate or any rational discussion of our ideas. And they have been very effective in doing just that.

During an interview [4] with an NPR reporter, I mentioned that I hoped the phrase “White supremacist” would not be used in whatever eventually gets aired. The interviewer seemed surprised, thinking that “white supremacist” was a perfectly reasonable label to use, and defending his stance by claiming that some Alt Rightists have talked about Europeans as a superior and uniquely talented group. Depending on how an idea like that is phrased and conceptualized, I have no problem with it. We should have pride in the accomplishments of our European ancestors, as tabulated, for example, by Charles Murray [5].

But our desire to preserve a European identity and culture really has nothing to do with European talents, and I think pretty much everyone on the Alt Right is aware of this. We could be the most average or below average people on the planet but still have a legitimate interest in wanting to preserve our people and culture—and the territories needed for that. None of the people shouting about “white supremacists” would suppose that Africans should be supplanted from the African states they control, no matter what their talents or lack thereof, and the same goes for Korea and every other country with a historical ethnic and cultural core. And of course, many of the same people comfortable with condemning “white supremacists” are quite content with Israel being a “Jewish state.”

But being called a white supremacist in today’s political climate has obvious moral implications (happily, the phrase did not appear in the NPR interview—a small victory). Such a person is not only misguided, he or she is malevolent. Such a person is consumed by hatred, anger, and fear towards non-whites, gays, women, and the entire victim class pantheon, or so goes the stereotype. And that’s the problem. Being cast as evil means you are outside the moral community. There’s no need to talk with you, no need to be fair, or even worry about your safety. You are like an outlaw [6] in Old Norse society—“a person [who] lost all of his or her civil rights and could be killed on sight without any legal repercussions.”

So the antifa at the November NPI conference felt entitled to beat up a cameraman, throw foul-smelling liquids at attendees, and break into a dinner venue. There have been other assaults, notably on Richard Spencer in January in Washington, DC, but also in February at the UC-Berkeley riots. So we often hear “no free speech for fascists,” not only at antifa protests but in university classrooms, designed to shut down errant professors and students. College students showing sympathy for Donald Trump can be hounded [7] into dropping out of school. We find students protesting [8] having white philosophers on the curriculum. No need to discuss their ideas because they are dead White males and ipso facto a component of racial oppression.

Moralistic Rhetoric as a Weapon against the West

It’s not really important to the discussion here, but I have argued [9] that in Western, individualist societies, people are less prone to ingroups based on kinship, but are far more prone to forming ingroups based on reputation or moral standing. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, exclusion from the group because of a reputation for being immoral or untrustworthy was the ultimate kiss of death. So we want to be “good people” by fitting into the current moral zeitgeist, and of course that zeitgeist is now completely dominated by the Left.

In any case, our political rhetoric, whether it’s going to war in Iraq (or the First World War, or the Second World War, or the Civil War) or demanding civil rights for Blacks, is saturated with moral rationales. I was amazed to find that moral rationales were used by the Romans during the Republic (e.g., the need to defend a weak state against an aggressor), despite the fairly incessant, aggressive wars of conquest throughout most of the period. And, overwhelmingly, it works.

But perhaps the election of Donald Trump shows some slippage, since he was morally condemned from Day 1 of his campaign. This hasn’t let up since his victory. The moral condemnations continue to rain down on him from the mainstream media and in the continually well-funded anti-Trump protests and marches—especially over immigration, which is the moral imperative of our age (“No Human Is Illegal”). This shows that moralistic rhetoric isn’t even close to losing its power, even though we should be happy that polls show that a solid majority of Americans support the travel ban, and some polls show Trump with around fifty percent support overall.

The problem is that far too many white people think they are in a competition to be the most virtuous person around—to the degree that pointing out “virtue signaling” has become a standard tactic on the Alt Right. When I was still teaching at a university, the competition for sainthood among white academics was a sight to behold.

So obviously, it would be great for the Alt Right to frame their issues in moral terms if they want to appeal to a broad audience of white people. There has to be a moral core there. It’s not a matter of “we’re superior and therefore deserve to rule.” It’s more like, “We are who we are and want to create our own culture”—just like pretty much everyone else around the planet. Hatred toward the other need not be part of this equation, although it must be said that there is nothing wrong with hating your enemies—the people who are really actively out to get you.

The Alt Right media is essentially an attempt to get others, both whites and non-whites, to see the world as we see it. But the point is that by vilifying us as moral cretins, people automatically close off the possibility of even trying to see the world as we see it. After all, if a person is morally culpable, there is the implication that that person is blameworthy. Excuses like having different, sincerely-held beliefs, no matter how well-founded, don’t have to be considered. Immorality implies malicious intentions.

Liberals and Women More Likely to Exclude Others Over Trump Support

Studies have shown that liberals tend to be far more intolerant [10] of people with conservative opinions than vice-versa. This is especially true of women who identify as Democrats:

Nearly one-quarter (24%) of Democrats say they blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media after the election because of their political posts on social media. Fewer than one in ten Republicans (9%) and independents (9%) report eliminating people from their social media circle. Political liberals are also far more likely than conservatives to say they removed someone from their social media circle due to what they shared online (28% vs. 8%, respectively). . . . Only five percent of Americans say they are planning on spending less time with certain family members because of their political views. Democrats, however, are five times more likely than Republicans to say they are trying to avoid certain family members due to their political views (10% vs. 2%, respectively). . . . Democratic men are nearly twice as likely as Republican men to block or ‘unfriend’ people in their social media circles because of their political views, and Democratic women are three times more likely to take this step than their Republican counterparts.

I think that a reason for this is that liberals see the liberal/conservative/Alt Right political divide in moral terms. They see conservatives and especially anything approaching the Alt Right as evil. On the other hand, people on the Right do not typically condemn liberals as immoral. Naïve and misguided, perhaps. Uninformed, maybe. Believers in an impossible, utopian, idealistic future, quite often. For some of us, this critique of the Left takes the form of pointing out that their policies will likely lead to untold horrors, as was the case with the Communist revolutions, and is quite likely to be the case with the imagined multicultural kumbaya utopia that will be magically free of ethnic and religious conflict. But even then, we don’t suppose that your basic white, suburban, college-educated, New York Times-reading liberal is advocating multiculturalism with evil intent. It’s all about, “I’m a good person. A really good person. I want the best for everyone.”

Jewish Motivation for Supporting Multiculturalism and Immigration

On the other hand, there is good reason to think that quite a few non-white ethnic activists do have malevolent intentions. I suspect Jewish activists who work on behalf of immigration and multiculturalism of having rather obviously self-interested motives (diluting the white majority), as we see in their hypocritical posturing in terms of moral universalism (given their support of Israel) and often hateful attitudes toward European peoples and their cultures. As I noted in Chapter 1 [11] (p. 13) of The Culture of Critique [12]:

Sammons (1979, 263) describes the basis of the mutual attraction between Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx by noting that “they were not reformers, but haters, and this was very likely their most fundamental bond with one another.” The suggestion, consistent with social identity theory, is that a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the gentile-dominated power structure perceived as anti-Semitic. This deep antipathy toward the non-Jewish world can also be seen in sociologist and New York Intellectual Michael Walzer’s (1994, 6-7) comment on the “pathologies of Jewish life,” particularly “the sense that ‘all the world is against us,’ the resulting fear, resentment, and hatred of the goy, the secret dreams of reversal and triumph.” Such “secret dreams of reversal and triumph” are a theme of the treatment of Jewish radicals in Chapter 3 as well as in Chapter 4 on Freud and the psychoanalytic.

This hatred and the revenge fantasies are fueled by the lachrymose view of history in which Jewish history is one, long tale of persecution by Europeans, beginning with the Romans and ending with the Holocaust. And more and more we see expressions of hatred toward whites by Black Lives Matter and Latino activists holding signs saying things like, “Go back to Europe,” and of course there are plenty of white people who have internalized this mindset. Mainstream Jewish sensibilities of hatred toward whites are leaking into the mainstream of other groups.

The white people who have internalized the message of white guilt are the altruists in this game, and these liberal altruists are quite happy with this self-image. They bask in it. They own it. They wear it emblazoned on their tee-shirts and broadcast it on social media.

Sex Differences in Social Exclusion

But why are women more inclined to this behavior than men? This is not a subtle sex difference, and I immediately suspect an explanation rooted in our evolutionary history. In the absence of a study explicitly linking such exclusionary attitudes with personality traits, I suggest that an personality psychologist informed about evolution would emphasize the similarly robust sex differences in terms of love, nurturance, and empathy. In general, women are higher on these traits, and the evolutionary logic is that these traits have been more important over evolutionary time for women because they feed into nurturing children and cementing close relationships within the family. Relationships of love and affection are particularly important for northern peoples for cementing family relationships because individual choice of marriage partner is the norm rather than arranged marriages to first cousins, as in the Middle East. Arranged marriages are enforced by the extended family and don’t require mutual affection.

It’s no accident that women are more attracted to the helping professions like nursing and social work, or that they are more susceptible to the propaganda emanating from the media (e.g., the countless stories of suffering refugees, like the viral photo of the Syrian child on the beach in Turkey, and now sob stories about people who are negatively impacted by Donald Trump’s travel ban from certain Muslim-majority countries, not to mention striving DREAMers, and other assorted victim groups). Encouraged by the media, empathy and compassion for designated victim groups becomes a badge of honor and a very important aspect of self-identity. They hold up signs at rallies advertising their virtue and allegiance to group values. They fear being shunned by the group.

Another phenomenon that feeds into this fear of being shunned is an often replicated finding in developmental psychology: whereas boys often react to disliked peers with anger and aggression, girls are more apt to react by social exclusion and forming cliques, termed “relational aggression [13]” as opposed to physical aggression. Disliked others are simply shunned. “This behavior is marked as a female phenomenon and is labeled as catty, vengeful, deceitful, manipulative, back-stabbing, or just plain mean.”

So, as we all know, women are not simply saints. When they don’t like someone for whatever reason, and especially if the subject is not a very nice person to begin with (after all, even though women are higher in general than men on empathy, some certainly are not), they are very much into social exclusion as a remedy. This feeds into women’s greater social conformity. They fear social exclusion, which is such a prominent part of their peer groups.

Moral Indictments of the West as Characteristic of Jewish Intellectual Movements

Here I want to stress one aspect of my book The Culture of Critique. It’s no accident that all of the intellectual and political movements discussed in it were moral indictments of the West. These Jewish intellectuals understood how to appeal to Westerners. They knew what buttons to push. Together, these movements comprise the intellectual and political Left in this century, and they are the direct intellectual ancestors of current Leftist intellectual and political movements, particularly postmodernism and multiculturalism. From Chapter 6 [14] of The Culture of Critique (pp. 213–14):

Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. A critical feature of these movements is that they have been, at least in the United States, top-down movements in the sense that they were originated and dominated by members of a highly intelligent and highly educated group. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication. Each movement promised its own often overlapping and complementary version of utopia: a society composed of people with the same biological potential for accomplishment and able to be easily molded by culture into ideal citizens as imagined by a morally and intellectually superior elite [Boas and the war on IQ and behavior genetics]; a classless society in which there would be no conflicts of interest and people would altruistically work for the good of the group [Communism, socialism]; a society in which people would be free of neuroses and aggression toward outgroups and in tune with their biological urges [psychoanalysis]; a multicultural paradise in which different racial and ethnic groups would live in harmony and cooperation [the Frankfurt School]—a utopian dream that also occupies center stage in the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Chapter 7. Each of these utopias is profoundly problematic from an evolutionary perspective, a theme that will be returned to in Chapter 8.

The originators of these movements were all vitally concerned with anti-Semitism, and all of the utopias envisioned by these intellectual and political movements would end anti-Semitism while allowing for Jewish group continuity. A generation of Jewish radicals looked to the Soviet Union as an idyllic place where Jews could rise to positions of preeminence and where anti-Semitism was officially outlawed while Jewish national life flourished. The psychoanalytic movement and the Frankfurt School looked forward to the day when gentiles would be inoculated against anti-Semitism by a clinical priesthood that could heal the personal inadequacies and the frustrations at loss of status that gentiles murderously projected onto the Jews. And the Boasians and the Frankfurt School and their descendants would prevent the development of anti-Semitic ideologies of majoritarian ethnocentrism.

A palpable sense of intellectual and moral superiority of those participating in these movements is another characteristic feature. This sense of intellectual superiority and hostility to gentiles and their culture was a recurrent theme of the leftist movements discussed in Chapter 3. I have also documented a profound sense of intellectual superiority and estrangement from gentile culture that characterized not only Freud but also the entire psychoanalytic movement. The sense of superiority on the part of a “self-constituted cultural vanguard” (Lasch 1991 [15], 453–55) of Jewish intellectuals toward lower-middle-class mores and attitudes was a theme of Chapter 5. [Really, this was a prominent theme of the Trump victory.]

Regarding moral superiority, the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals is a sense that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity (SAID [16], Ch. 7). These movements thus constitute concrete examples of the ancient and recurrent Jewish self-conceptualization as a “a light of the nations,” reviewed extensively in SAID (Ch. 7). Moral indictments of their opponents are a prominent theme in the writings of political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and we have seen that the Frankfurt School developed a moral perspective in which the existence of Judaism was viewed as an a priori moral absolute and in which social science was to be judged by moral criteria. 

The “Holier than Thou” Phenomenon and the Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Anonymity

I think part of the dynamic pushing things right now is that there is a “holier than thou” phenomenon that often characterizes political and religious movements of all stripes. Strongly religious people compete with each other to be most virtuous in their local church. On the Left, we see vegan fanatics shunning vegans who even talk to people who eat meat or eat in restaurants where meat is served—even family members. I am sure there is a dynamic within antifa groups where people who do not condone violence or are unwilling to crack heads themselves are ostracized, or at least have much less status.

This is also true on the Alt Right. People often vilify me for not coming down squarely on the side of Holocaust revisionism. And I don’t have swastikas on my page, nor do I tweet pictures of Jews going to ovens, or advocate National Socialism.

I think quite a bit of this, on both the Left and the Right, has to do with anonymity made possible by the Internet, but is especially true on the Right, given the moral opprobrium to which we are subjected. I have found that as editor of TOO, it is not unusual for me to have to tone down articles from people who use pen names. And there are some who may well have felt that there will be no consequences for them personally if they engage in Roman salutes or joke about the Holocaust. This marks them as being on the cutting edge, as more authentic, and more “in your face.” Ironically, people taking these positions are often plugged into this moral dynamic of being holier than thou. They see themselves as more honest—no matter what the consequences for the movement as a whole.

There is definitely a place for such things. There are different audiences out there, and different things work better with some people than with others. We should never get caught in a “one size fits all” approach. For some people, this brash sensibility may turn them on to a whole new way of thinking and make them read more about Jewish power and influence. It may appeal to them as a young person just because it is cutting edge and “definitely not your parents’ attitudes.” My approach is doubtless too boring and academic for quite a few people—I suspect the demographic for TOO readers and certainly TOQ readers is a bit older than some. But then, people who resonate with approaches like mine quite often are repelled by any hint of advocating National Socialism.

The problem comes when people do Roman salutes in a mixed situation where some people stand to lose a lot by being associated with such things and where the media is sure to be all over it—and make sure that their readers never forget. In that situation, the moral opprobrium that a large majority of the public feels about such things gets attached to everyone present. It is unfair, of course, to suggest or imply that everyone present approves of such things, but who ever said life was fair? The media is indeed the opposition party to the Trump Administration, and that goes double for us. They care nothing for fairness.

Of course, anonymity is indispensable for many of us. We are all aware that the Left is only too eager to make us lose jobs and family ties. We see the disastrous results that can occur to people like Mike Enoch and the TRS crew when they are doxxed. But the anonymity always has to be tempered with responsibility and understanding of other people’s interests and concerns, especially when one is in a mixed group where not everyone is on the same page and where people are likely to be compromised (albeit unfairly) by media exposure. Losing livelihood and family connections are difficult, indeed.

So an obvious message is that we have to have a clear understanding of our particular audience and act accordingly.

Is It Possible to Develop a Specifically Moral Argument for the White Past of Conquest and Slavery?

A second message is that in order to appeal to a wide range of Whites, we have to fashion an underlying moral message, or at least have good rejoinders to the moral arguments of others. We already see that to some extent among conservatives who have nothing but scorn for the Alt Right. They emphasize the treatment of women and homosexuals in Muslim countries and refer to “radical Islamic terrorism”—implying that this terrorism has something to do with Islam (while avoiding the idea that jihad is central to Islam). They will bring up the criminality and lack of labor participation of Middle Eastern and African immigrants. These are effective moral arguments because they argue for immoral, unfair effects on the traditional populations and cultures.

But this doesn’t really get at the overriding moral argument that uniquely evil whites are responsible for the actions of some of their ancestors in conquering land settled by others, slavery, and so on. Of course, these accounts are carefully contextualized to ignore things like morally crusading whites who uniquely ended slavery [17] after a campaign based on empathy for far-away Africans. Whites ended slavery, passed Civil Rights, have funded endless uplift programs for blacks, and twice elected a black president—the liberal tradition so common among Northern Europeans aided and abetted in contemporary times by our hostile Jewish elite.

Also ignored are the characteristics of whites and non-whites that feed into current realities (e.g., IQ differences, the Faustian soul of the West, etc.). Apart from in the West, I have yet to hear of a movement opposed to slavery or anything else that worked by eliciting empathy. Appeals like this only work with Westerners. These movements are a Western phenomenon and the media thrives on showing photos of suffering refugees and immigrants; “we need to help them,” never mind the short- and long-term costs to our own people.

Pressing the guilt/empathy button doesn’t work in Africa or Asia despite the fact that huge swathes of humanity there (Arabs, Han Chinese, Bantu) have achieved their present territories as the result of the conquests of their ancestors. And slavery persisted in these areas long after it was abolished in the West. And even if these areas were prone to messages of guilt/empathy, you won’t see them there, because these societies are not controlled by elites hostile to the traditional peoples and cultures of those areas.

One does not see Chinese people agonizing over the fact that the Han Chinese greatly expanded their territory at the expense of other peoples—a point brought out by Ricardo Duchesne in his groundbreaking The Uniqueness of Western Civilization [18]. Nor does one see the Bantu peoples of Africa worrying about the ethics of displacing other African peoples as they spread far and wide from their homeland in Central Africa, including into South Africa, where their treatment at the hands of white South Africans became Exhibit A for white evil during the Apartheid era; nor do the Bantu-speaking peoples agonize about the widespread practice of slavery in Africa. Arabs do not apologize for their conquests in the name of Islam or their centuries-old role in slavery and the slave trade.

The lack of contextualization and the continual deluge of messages hostile to the white majority are good indications that the button-pushing is an exercise in propaganda emanating from a hostile elite, enabled because of their control over the moral, intellectual, and political high ground. It’s not just emotional buttons that are pushed. Some of these memes are much more purely intellectual—a good example is the “race does not exist” meme, although I suppose many of these terms have emotional overtones as well, because they are often linked in such a way that that they plug into the guilt mechanism. This means that they are addressed to the higher brain centers, which are able to exert substantial control [19] over the more primitive (and self-preserving) lower brain centers responsible for things like ethnocentrism. Control of the media and the academic high ground by the Left means that Americans are bombarded with messages that enjoin them to inhibit their natural self-preserving tendencies and indeed, to feel guilt for them. These messages have also filtered down to churches and schools, so that, unless they tune in to dissident media on the Internet, whites can spend their entire lives without hearing any contrary messages. It’s hard to overcome that.

Only whites have been made to feel moral disgust at their own past of conquest and expansion. And only whites—not all, to be sure, but a significant and important proportion—have felt moral outrage about slavery, to the point of banning it, despite the material benefits it contributed to the society as a whole and to a great many individuals much more like themselves than the slaves they were freeing.

But this “everyone does it” is not really a moral argument, but rather an argument based on how we understand human nature and genetic self-interest, combined with showing that whites uniquely developed moral arguments against the very things they were so good at—colonization and slavery. As an evolutionist, I am quite comfortable with these, because they have been common throughout human history, and again, whites uniquely ended slavery. But the “anti-racist” answers that whites have no moral claim to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and that present-day whites possess “white privilege” as a result of the immoral actions of their ancestors. Of course, such an argument would not apply to Europe, where we see the same phenomena of massive non-white immigration presented as a moral imperative.

So be it. Can Europeans make a moral argument to retain the lands they have controlled since the glaciers receded? Is longevity in a certain area a moral argument? I think not. But if it is, it would apply to every other people in one way or another, as Jared Taylor notes in a recent video [20]. We would find that some Native American groups displaced others, and we would talk about the Aztec empire and its subject peoples. Even the Hawaiians who came to the pristine islands eventually developed a society dominated by a particular chief who unified the islands at the expense of their close relatives who held power on the various islands, but vicious fighting took place long before that between the various islands. So when white people took it over, we suddenly have a moral crisis. It’s what they call “selective prosecution.”

Fundamentally, if we take the ethical perspective that dominates the West today, which is based on fairness and impartiality rooted ultimately in individualism and egalitarianism, we cannot make a specifically moral argument for White conquest. Such a perspective was foreign to the ancients who prized aristocratic values and were profoundly opposed to egalitarianism. In The Genealogy of Morals [21], Nietzsche sketches this alternative morality — the morality of the strong versus the morality of the weak. Nietzsche was steeped in the classics. This was the ethical world view of our Indo-European ancestors:

There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb,–is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’–It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs, as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength. (pp. 25–26)

The point of the Left is to abolish any argument for retaining control of any territory for historically white countries—open borders for whites and only for whites. There are a variety of motives: hatred for whites as ethnic competitors, monetary compensation (the massive infrastructure that incentivizes anti-white activism), and virtue signaling for many white SJWs which is made possible because the Left’s control of the media has created a morally-defined community opposed to the legitimate interests of whites. Forget about ecological arguments—that bringing in more than one million immigrants is an ecological disaster, forget about arguments from IQ, welfare dependency, criminality, not to mention the ethnic and genetic interests of whites. Forget about intellectual consistency—these people would be horrified at the thought that Korea or Nigeria ought to have displacement-level immigration. We are asked to ignore the evil effects of the racialization of politics and increasing political violence as non-whites coalesce in the Democrat Party, the disuniting of society as community ties are destroyed, less willingness to contribute to public goods, and so on. These consequences of the invasion all have clear moral overtones, and they support our interests because they have a negative impact on people who cannot control the behavior of some of their ancestors.

Was it fair to the traditional White majority to bring in these millions of non-whites given that the floodgates were opened by the 1965 immigration law, which was presented dishonestly as having no implications for the ethnic balance of the country? Was it fair given that the arguments in favor of ending the bias toward Europe were the result of scientific fraud and developed by Jewish ethnic activists who were motivated by hatred toward the traditional white populations of the West?

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would love to be able to present a specifically moral argument for why it is morally okay for white people to take over North America at the expense of the natives. I can’t do that. Being susceptible to moral arguments may well be part of our nature. But if so, we have to get over it. I suspect that the people in this room are quite proud of the accomplishments of our ancestors. And as an evolutionist, I have no problem with that.