“The young, liberal couple is having lots of sex, but they are not going to have children.”
It starts off brilliantly again on page 3 with a sentence you would not have read before in a work by a “serious” scientist. After quoting a “poem” by Larkin, he writes:
“The young, liberal couple is having lots of sex, but they are not going to have children.”
This itself is evidence that we not only become dumber and dumber, but that good breeding has vanished completely. Dutton is a crude brute.
On page 5 of this laughable book, devoid of any political theory, Dutton again claims that it may make sense to lay down your life for your own ethnic group because of the usual caboodle of genetic interests, similarity and whatnot.
I argue that it does not make sense, that genetic interests do not exist. After all, people kill or abandon their children en masse today, and further, past societies were religious, so there was a wholly different dimension to this than crude calculations of genetic similarity. No matter if such “calculations” are done unconsciously or not. Soldiers even were honored with the Bible verse that no one has more love for his friends than he who lays down his life for them. (Not to mention that you are dead, full stop, and do not benefit at all; I already mentioned this writing about his book “At Our Wits’ End”.)
He also repeats the idiocy of wealth and IQ being correlated, which I have shown to be dubious via comments by Christopher Langan and Nils M. Holm. On another page he again wrote that wealth is a strong predictor of IQ …!
On page 5 still, he simply rehashes the IQ stuff that was part of his horrible “At Our Wits’ End” already. I really do not want to know how much copy & paste there is in his books …
Then, on page 6, he notes that autistic fertility is very low due to their lack of social skills and so on. This may be true, but the fact is that most autists did not have autistic parents, at best they were mildly autistic. My point on here is that there is no sexual selection or other nonsense going on; especially nowadays, there are no checks on who has children with whom. This can only be dysgenic.
On page 9, he claims that smart people especially are good at adapting to the dominant ideology. I do not believe this, rather I think that smart people usually think outside the box, they are rarely interested in societal approval. However, he does not define what smart means. It is also wrong and unconvincing to compare today’s vulgar worldview with Christianity, a religion focused on the eternal.
The next page, 10, he writes as if pessimistic ideas did not exist before so-called woke liberals. He may of course claim otherwise, that it is just another cycle and such ideas no reappear. Still, we do have examples of despair in Holy Scripture, namely The Book of Job; or the rather pessimistic Ecclesiastes. Sophocles, too, wrote it would be best not to exist at all; and Hamlet cries out that …the Everlasting had not fix’d his canon ’gaints self-slaughter!. It is simply human nature, which does not change. Man yearns for otherworldly destinies.
That democracy correlates with intelligence is repeated again on page 11. It is ahistorical nonsense. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s criticism of democracy is valid, no matter if his own state will remain a utopia.
On page 30, he claims that conservatives feel that life has meaning, that the world is fair and are generally happier than liberals. Who cares? What does that have to do with anything? Even people who are unhappy have children; depressed people have children. That the world is fair is humbug, the Bible itself teaches that this is not the case. Dutton is an imbecile.
Skipping through this book some more, because after his previous work (“At Our Wits’ End”), I know where he is going with all this. It is just statistics, studies and naive theorising without any solid foundation in political theory, a skewed view of human nature—he does not take seriously that man is fallen—; it would only increase my depression. I would not have children for the sole reason so they do not have to suffer reading Edward Dutton.
On page 86, I found a brilliant sentence which read (not a joke!):
“[…] in which they are able to learn about their harsher, more-difficult-to-survive-in environment, and, so, be more likely to thrive.”
His claim that religion is fitness-enhancing, among others because during war, people believe that God is on our side is utter nonsense. Europe was Christian; differences in confessions do not change the fact that Christ is Christ. It is for this reason that wars were less brutal than during ancient times, as Wilhelm Stapel noted. The World Wars already happened during an age of little faith. His historical knowledge is way too deficient to write such a book.
It gets worse on page 103, where he claims that it is Gnosticism to see the world as province of Satan, when in fact the Gospel of John teaches just that: the prince of this world is Satan. Is he just uneducated or downright stupid?
On the same page, he acts as if so-called converts “make the move” from being fervently irreligious to being religious. There are dozens of religious experiences, as Vox Day, whose Jordanetics he lists in the bibliography, notes; however, only the Christian born-again experience has the same effect on everyone. Whatever one may think of Matt Slick, he wrote down his own experience [carm.org] ([archive.is], [archive.org]).
I am therefore more than sceptical about Dutton’s claims about personality, given that my own did change as well, at least somewhat. Since we read that with God, all is possible, there is no reason to believe—Joel Davis, in his ImperiumCast with Dutton, said this too—that we cannot become better people via a better society, better influences. For example, by taking Christ seriously again. Already the ancients taught how to live what they called “the good life.” Personality, as Dutton has to admit himself, is not as highly heritable as IQ (though parts of it are certainly rather hard-wired.)
On page 112, he writes that some groups on university campuses, like the Christian Union, are completely resistant to drugs, alcohol and sexual experimentation — “possibly for genetic reasons”! Is this for real? He cannot be serious!
I stopped reading it after a few pages, having read his previous book already; but on page 107, his vulgarity reaches such heights that I would not want to finish this book anyway. Quote:
“In theory, being ‘born again’ refers to a dramatic religious experience in which God somehow reveals Himself to you and you realize the truth of Christianity. In practice, this is simply an indicator of being a fundamentalist Christian, as all such Christians appear to find some evidence of having been ‘born again’, such as looking up at the stars as a young child and feeling God’s love, and later interpreting it as having been ‘born again’ (see Dutton, 2008b).’
(He references his own work, as always, in this case Meeting Jesus at University, which shows that he wants to use his own subjective experience as objective fact. This is worse than murder.)
He is at it again with his “fundamentalism”; obviously, there is no objective, neutral position, we all have a starting point in terms of our beliefs. For the Christian it is Christ. Who else?
All those studies are done by atheists anyway, so why would I trust them much?
Further, as someone who is unable to remember if I believed in God as a child, and who became a Christian at age thirty, such a born-again experience is indeed a supernatural experience that is not just a simple choice of now wanting to believe.
This is idiotic. Dutton cannot face the truth that his own materialist worldview is full of holes. The only advantage of this book is that he at least attests religion positive social value, but obviously, this is not why I believe in Christ.
Writing that all such Christians find some evidence in their past is a lie; it shows Dutton to be a sloppy thinker. Most likely, the data he presents is as skewed as his understanding of Christian born-again experiences.
I did not finish this book, it is a waste of time. According to his own subjective metric of neuroticism and whatnot, Christ would be one too. Why even bother with eternity, the soul and other stuff you cannot see? So that we can build aeroplanes (used by sex tourists)?
Dutton is married ([archive.fo]) to a priest. Not a joke! Says it all.
Closing the book with some Colombian dynamite by Gómez Dávila, a “fundamentalist Christian”:
That Christianity cures social diseases, as some say, or that, on the contrary, it poisons the society that adopts it, as others assert, are theses that interest the sociologist but are of no interest for a Christian.
A convert to Christianity has converted because he believes it is true.Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.
Even if he were to succeed in making his most audacious utopias a reality, man would continue to yearn for otherworldly destinies.
When it finishes its “ascent,” humanity will find tedium waiting for it, seated on the highest peak.
It is as stupid to “have faith” (without knowing in whom) as to yearn for “a faith” (without knowing which one).
The believer knows how to doubt; the unbeliever does not know how to believe.
It is not a restoration for which the reactionary yearns, but for a new miracle.
To proclaim Christianity the “cradle of the modern world” is a grave accusation or a grave calumny.
Man is important only if it is true that a God has died for him.
One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion’s case were not just as serious.
The problem is not sexual repression, nor sexual liberation, but sex.