For my penance, I'll be quiet for a while and learn from others.

Chapter 10: Language

I’ll be very brief because Wade’s ignorance of languages and linguistics have encouraged him to adopt a kind of cafeteria approach, selecting bits of theory that appeal to him or encourage genetic explanations.

Some of the points he tries to make:

1. All languages 6000 known descend from a common progenitor; thus it should be possible to draw up a stemma with chronology. I know of no evidence for the general premise and therefore find little that is useful in the conclusions drawn from it.

2. Languages have been differentiated from 5-10,000 years.

3. Languages differentiated themselves as a means of asserting antagonistic and conflicting group identities. Even if we accept 1 & 2, there is no reason to accept conflict–as opposed to linguistic drift.

4. Indo-European speakers (languages in the Latin, Greek, Indo-Persian, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic families along with Hittite and Tokharian) can be traced back to people who raised burial mounds in Russia. These people, confident in their battle prowess, spread out over much of the world. Colin Renfrew’s rival theory, that our ag skills brought us success, is too stupid to be entertained by anyone with any knowledge of the history and literature of such IE peoples as Greeks, Romans, Persians, Celts, and Vikings.

5. None of the various conjectural datings of language he cites is conclusive. I won’t bore you with the details unless you demand it, but, to take Mark Pagel’s approach, he begins with the sensible but not proved assumption that a small group of words (18) are most conservative in IE. What then? As Wade acknowledges, languages change at different rates and borrow from each other. Icelandid is a conservative version of Old Norse, Norwegian progressive. Wade likes Mark Gray’s work because it seems more quantifiable even though it is contradicted by linguistic paleontology.

About this time I grew very weary, especially his support for Joseph Greenburg’s rather sweeping theories of the proto-language-which are endorsed by Cavalli-Sforza, a brilliant and imaginative scholar. The trouble is that there are rival explanations. For example, if several unrelated language families have a similar structure or word-order for questions, is it because they all descend from a prototype or because the human brain encourages certain structures? Beats me. Then there are questions of detail. Why does Japanese and IE languages begin questions with a k word (quid, what, etc.) Now, we know in the case of I languages that an initial kw can be realized as qu- (Latin), wh- (English), and p (Greek pos, pou, etc.), so it is pretty hard to draw firm conclusions from what may be chance similarities. This comparative work, as Wade acknowledges, is Greenburg’s weakest point.

To all of these arguments, all this old philologist can say is the Scottish “not proven.”

Chapter 11: History

I quit reading this chapter when I realized that, although there is much more evidence, Wade’s limited education renders him incapable of making profitable use of it. The discussion of the Sally Hemmings/Thomas Jefferson liaison does not mention either Joe Ellis’s lies about his career, the misleading information he gave the geneticists, the recantation of some researchers, much less the devastating article we published in Chronicles. Neither he nor Ellis the self-promoter know how to pose a problem. They had an ax to grind, and they ground it.

Dog breeds, chicken breeds, etc. are not a false analogy or even an analogy. Many (most? all?) species are divided into subspecies, usually geographically separate. In the old definition of the species, it included all members that can naturally breed and produce fertile offspring. Today, I don't know because it seems to me that statistical methods are being used in a more subtle or slippery way. When I spoke of genus and species, I should point out, I was using the terms in a logical, not biological sense, thus I am a species of genus man.

Racial differences are mainly known as statistical averages, but averages say nothing about results. In a polyethnic empire like the US, the best policy is to be color blind. If forced to give preference to a racial or ethnic group, no sane person would choose to give it to any group to which his children did not belong. If we have to have affirmative action, then I want it for European Americans. When I proposed this in a letter plus article I sent to Walter Williams, he said he could not disagree.

I also agree with my friend Sid that both southerners and conservatives have been harmed by the race issue. Sometimes it has been our own fault, but, ultimately, there is no remedy. We live in a revolutionary regime based on a religion whose gods include Lincoln and MLK. To criticize either or their policies--or even to oppose Marxist notions of equality--is to be by definition a bigot. I simply do not care what I am called by enemies I do not respect.

Subspecies, as members of the same species, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring having intermediate characteristics. In the wild these are ordinarily the consequence of geographic separation, e.g., the small jungle elephant of the Congo as contrasted with the larger variety of the west and south African savannah. It is routine to describe them as subspecies. Varieties of domestic dogs and horses could be considered artificially bred subspecies. The racial types of man could also reasonably be described as subspecies, if it were possible to have a reasonable conversation about race to which participants did not bring some underlying social or political prejudice or agenda.

-- to pose the choices as either racism or anti-racism, the human-hating left or the rest of us, dwelling upon race or pretending it doesn't exist, would be that error called "False Dilemma"?

--to say that my argument is that there are no differences among human beings would be Straw Man? Differences do exist among human beings, some "racial" (i.e. physiological), some psychological, some historical. For culture, only the historical is meaningful. Just compare West Indian "Blacks" to Pre-1808 American Blacks. Or Serbs to Poles. Same race (Slav); very different cultures.

-- to suggest that that by raising the question one violates divine ordinance is Red Herring?

(I'll leave it to others wiser than I to decide if to call race another word for "subspecies", and if to call breeds of dogs "subspecies", are Begged Question, or if to compare dogs to humans is False Analogy.) King Philip Came Over From Germany on Sailing Vessels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, variation. Is "subspecies" recognized as a biological category? (maybe it may be)

I shall begin now my own silence after these words: Of course my own argumentation, now or in the past, cannot itself withstand a searching review by rhetoricians. I do know this: (1) Race has nothing to do with Real Conservatism, be it of the Aristotelean/schoolman/Neo-Thomist/Catholic Social teaching variety, or the Counter-Enlightenment/Counter-Revolutionary variety. (2) Race is The Great American Vice (one that Europeans thankfully are [now] free of). It blots and blights everything it touches in Gringoland, and has always done so. It kills sense, it kills friendship, it kills honor -- and I do fear it has killed me.

2. Re “race”. I wish to make a shocking and wonderous revelation to the world: I myself am a product of miscegenation. For I am a Borderer/Backcountry (misnamed “Scots Irish”; we are neither), we have our origin on the Borders of Scotland and England, we go back at least a millennium, and we are mixed.

Our race first was most likely the (1) aboriginal Britons, the folk that built Stonehenge. Then came the Celts, and that Celtic race that mixed with us the most were the (2) “Britons”, pushed to western England later by the West Teutons. Another Celtic race, (3) the Gaelic speaking Scots, invaded Scotland from Ireland, drove out the Picts, and mixed with us as well. The West-Teuton (“Anglo-Saxon”) race that next mixed with us were the Angles, specifically those Northumbrian Angles called (4) the Bernicians. In time (5) the Mercians, the (6) East Anglians, and (7) the Saxons (East, South, West) interbred with us. Then came the North Teutons: First the (8) Viking Danes of Danelaw, then the (9) Normans. In the reign of James I of England, some of us were moved to Ulster, a process that was accelerated by William of Orange (thus we’re called “hillbillies” to this day), and we mixed with (10) the local Irish. We started coming in droves to American c. 1717, and went straight to the Southern Piedmont and Northeastern Backcountry, and we’ve been moving west ever since. Some “indentured servants” of the VA Cavaliers, originating in (11) southwest and midland England, fled from the Tidewater to the Backcountry, and interbred with us. The (12) Aboriginal Americans (“Indians”) interbred with us too, the Indian Removal Bill notwithstanding.

When I spoke to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans about David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial book, and because Dixie’s army was largely Backcountry, I said that the audience was an good racial pool to test my mixed race thesis. I surveyed them as to eye color, hair color, body-build, facial shape, head shape, height, and whether they turned to lobsters in the sun or to Indians. Result: We’re all types. With my eye I could see a skin variety from ghostly pale to swarthy.

Just call me Mr. Mulatto.

There are not three races. Gobineau, Francis Galton, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, George Schönerer, and Adolf Josef Lanz were writers of fairy tales. Either there are 100,000+ races, or (more likely) the concept “race” is simply meaningless. And especially meaningless with respect to culture. The “race” of Oklahoma is Aboriginal American. The culture is Backcountry.

Either paleoconservatism purge itself of racialism, with which it has nothing to do, or it will get stuck by/in the Tar-Baby – by which I mean an injurious and foolish idea – and thus pass on to the remotest fringes of political seriousness.