The Decline and Fall of Civilisations
Page 14
Psychosocial factors affecting the “methylation quantitative trait loci across populations” represents the shared historical experience of a population which might comprise more than one ethnos, and hence, form from originally diverse elements a super-ethnos. This is typically maintained by a common mythos, whether based on fact or fantasy, or a mixture, and often assuming religious status, which might sanctify “traumatic experiences, socioeconomic status, and general perceived stress”. Hence, the mythos or religion sustains over subsequent generations epigenetic inheritance. Judaism epitomises this effect with its focus on perceived levels of stress and trauma (“persecution”), while perhaps contributing to higher rates of hysteria, neuroses, and paranoia among Jewish populations.118
In examining different Latin American groups Galanter et al stated that “even after adjusting for ancestry, significant differences in methylation remained between the groups at multiple loci, reflecting social and environmental influences upon methylation”.
“Our findings have important implications for both the use of ancestry to capture biological changes and of race/ethnicity to account for social and environmental exposures. Epigenome-wide association studies in diverse populations may be susceptible to confounding due to environmental exposures in addition to confounding due to population stratification. The findings also have implications for the common practice of considering individuals of Latino descent, regardless of origin as a single ethnic group.
“We conclude that systematic environmental differences between ethnic subgroups likely play an important role in shaping the methylome for both individuals and populations”.119
“…It is also possible that environmental exposures correlate with ancestry and that participants with certain ancestral backgrounds may have been more exposed to in utero tobacco smoke than those of other backgrounds. Several studies have shown correlations between genetic ancestry and environmental exposures, including socioeconomic status, overweight and obesity, and birth site and country of residence”.120
Certain traits acquired from the environment including those to which pregnant women are subjected, generation after generation, are inherited as acquired characteristics. These become race characteristics for good or ill, physiologically, psychologically, morally, spiritually, and culturally. The Galanter study comments:
“…[W]e find that CpG121 sites known to be influenced by social and environmental exposures are also differentially methylated between ethnic subgroups. These findings called attention to a more complete understanding of the effect of social and environmental variables on methylation in the context of race and ethnicity to fully understanding this complex process”.122
A race or ethnos becomes the conveyer of traits that are acquired epigenetically. Race is dynamic rather than static because situations are forever changing. Epigenetic changes can have destructive or constructive results over generations and help to explain why cultures collapse for reasons other than miscegenation, where the race might have remained stable as a phenotype, but epigenetically it has been destabilised.
What is of additional interest is that liberal and Marxist notions of race-denial can have adverse impact upon those ethnoi that such ideological crusaders claim to champion in the fight against “racism”. Dr. Esteban Burchard of the University of California San Francscio, commented on the implications for medicine:
“The future of medicine, Dr. Burchard argued, carefully considers genetic ancestry, race, ethnicity and culture all at the same time. He published research back in 2011 showing how far the medical research establishment is from factoring in the nuances of race and ethnicity. That 2011 research showed that 94 percent of study participants in modern genetic studies are white, Dr. Buchard said. ‘We study whites a lot, and then we try to generalize that to Sri Lankans, blacks, Asians, and other racial groups. That’s not just socially unjust, it’s bad science and bad medicine”’.123
One might say in this context that liberalism and the enforced dogma of universal equality to create a nebulous mass humanity, can be literally bad for one’s health.
Liberal Reaction
What is of concern to liberal-activist academics is that the concept of genetically fixed races might be replaced by the concept of epigenetically-formed races. Epigenetics might be used to validate not only Boas and his more dogmatic left-wing protégés and heirs, but also “reactionaries” such as Jung and Spengler.
Becky Mansfield, Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State University, sees epigenetics as an exciting new science that can be both “anti-racist” but also used as a new theory of race-formation. She claims that “racism forms race” epigenetically. As in other liberal theories, the dynamics of history are ignored. Epigenetics is a means by which history forms race.
Nietzsche had prefigured epigenetics in defining “race” in 1886, writing:
“That which his ancestors most liked to do and most constantly did cannot be erased from a man’s soul… It is quite impossible that a man should not have in his body the qualities and preferences of his parents and forefathers, whatever appearances may say to the contrary. This constitutes the problem of race”.124
Further on, Nietzsche elaborates on this race-forming process and what is at the foundation of differences among the aggregates of people that form races and peoples:
“What ultimately is common sense? - Words are sounds designating concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite images designating frequently recurring and associated sensations, groups of sensations. To understand one another it is not sufficient to employ the same words; we have also to employ the same words to designate the same species of inner experiences, we must ultimately have our experience in common. That is why the members of one people understand one another better than do members of differing peoples even when they use the same language; or rather when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, work) there arises from this a group who ‘understand one another’, a people. In every soul in this group an equivalent number of frequently recurring experiences has gained the upper hand over those which come more rarely: it is on the basis of these that people understand one another, quickly and ever more quickly … it is on the basis of this quick understanding that they unite together, closely and ever more closely …”.125
Here a people (volk) is defined not by frequency of genes, but by frequency of experience, and “groups of sensations”. Nietzsche also points to the importance of language in expressing the soul of a race, and the fundamental incommunicability between different peoples even when the race of another is learnt. Rudyard Kipling poetically rendered such incommunicability that explains more than any number of clichés on multiculturalism and the “oneness of humanity”, that today, in contrast to Kipling’s time, every people except the Westerner understand:
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk-
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell. 126
Nietzsche’s outlook, while at odds with the Nazi race doctrine that attempted to misappropriate him, is consistent with Spengler and Jung, both of whom he influenced. Nietzsche is stating that “race” is formed by ancestral experience, or what we might call “history”, and forms the race soul that Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
In the liberal’s use of epigenetics, if the patriarchal white ruling class treats Blacks in a certain manner then Blacks will acquire those characteristics projected onto them, which are epigenetically conveyed to subsequent generations. “Race” is thereby reduced to b
eing a concept by which a ruling class that lacks melanin oppresses individuals who do have melanin, and a “non-white race” is thereby formed. Presumably, all white ethnoi are mental projections of white-skinned ruling classes. What can one make of white-skinned poor? Do they epigenetically become another race on account of how they are regarded and treated by their white ruling class? Or is it only possible for non-whites to be exploited, while the most economically dire whites are regarded as somehow sharing in the legacy of the “white patriarchal system”? What is being defined is an economic class, not a race. The Leftist must resort to economic reductionism; to Marxist banalities that reduce history to the forces of production, as we have seen.
In a draft paper on epigenetics and the toxicity of fish in the diet of Blacks, Professor Mansfield, in a muddled style, laments the “intensification of racialization” that might be caused by the epigenetic theory, which otherwise should be harnessed to the “anti-racist” cause:
“What I will show is that, far from making race meaningless, epigenetic biopolitics marks a transformation and even intensification of racialization. To the extent that biology is mutable, then evidence that childbearing women of color fail to properly manage their individual and collective bodies doubly proves that race exists, and exists on the body. First, through their improper management, they show that they are indeed different: incapable of being the rational, liberal subject, always implicitly racialized as white. Secondly, this incapacity remakes their bodies and those of their children: difference becomes quite material, in the form of altered neurodevelopment. This is the process of making race a biophysical difference from a white norm, written not in practices but in the structure of the brain, the working of the body, and the remaking of the reproductive system”.127
By treating Blacks differently, even in warning Blacks as to the effects of a toxic diet on pregnancy, U.S. health authorities are perpetuating stereotypes about Blacks that will be epigenetically acquired and become transmitted race traits. This can make a social construct or “fiction” into a biological reality. A pregnant Black woman is encouraged to feel a certain way about herself, and that outlook is epigenetically passed along to her offspring, and it seems subsequent generations, thereby becoming a racial characteristic.
“Whereas race may have started as a fiction—a social construction—through epigenetic biopolitics it is made quite material, not just in phenomenological embodiment, but in the molecular-environmental development of individuals. … In this epigenetic biopolitics, in which the aim is to affect cellular processes of the developing fetus, it is the always already the pregnant woman who is racialized and who, through her actions, produces embodied race”.128
Professor Mansfield is addressing health authority programmes aiming to warn races on the toxicity of methylmercury in their diet, and in so doing reinforcing race, which is apparently to be regarded as a negative outcome. The liberal seems to be in a no-win situation:
“Risk analysis has recast the problem and solution in ways that make race more rather than less salient, and that could even lead to new biophysical differences among people of purportedly different ‘races.’ A woman’s abnormal, racialized diet is written on her child’s brain. Suddenly, racial differences in intelligence - long one of the key axes of racialization - become real. The reality of such racial differences would be especially apparent, as ‘truth,’ when measured as populations: methylmercury might only affect a small slice of, say, black people, yet still be measurable on a population basis, so that it might be possible to find significant differences in intelligence among ‘blacks’ and ‘whites.’” 129
While Professor Mansfield seems to be an “activist academic” of the Left, who hopes to see epigenetics used to counter “racism”, she sees the other course being the “intensification of racialization”. She sees white “racism”, even if well-intentioned in warning about the toxicity of diet, as epigenetically reinforcing racial stereotypes. Yet epigenetics is not a man-made construct any more than Mendelian genetics, or the law of gravity. Epigenetics shows much more than how “racism” can impact on race-formation in a negative manner. History exists beyond how Blacks in the USA might be treated by the “patriarchal white ruling class”. Epigenetics explains how history, challenges of landscape, and a myriad other factors, can be passed along through generations to form a race-type. To assume that this is negative, to aim at its elimination behind the banner of “anti-racism”, is to try to end history and impose a global, static uniformity to create a nebulous mass called “mankind”. Even differences in landscape would have to be obliterated. Ecological interaction ranging from New York Jews to Amazon Amerindians would have to be made uniform to eliminate the epigenetic curse of race-formation. All experiences, both positive and negative, would have to be somehow made uniform to achieve the same epigenetic results in creating a raceless mass.
Maurizio Meloni, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, likewise sees a bright new liberal hope in epigenetics, but also laments that it might result in the revival of eugenics, which he calls “some worrying signs”:
“Epigenetics is generally considered to be a basis for a better, more progressive, liberal and inclusive social policy. If the environment is much more important than we thought in shaping our fate, there seems to be much more space to attack inequality at its root… But is that the whole truth? To understand the darker implications of epigenetics, just think back through human history. There certainly is no shortage of war, famine, exploitation, destruction, epidemic and trauma. Knowing that some of this can leave a biological trace in our genes – which can even be transmitted to future generations – could be problematic. Even in the 1920s, some believed that the environment could influence inheritance. Some focused on the fact that we could inherit the best of our civilisation and become better humans, while others argued that certain populations had been exposed to various pathogenic environments (alcoholism, poverty, promiscuity, hot climate) for too long, becoming irreparably damaged… Around 1910, English physician, writer and maverick supporter of eugenics, Caleb Saleeby, for example, spoke about ‘racial poison’ to describe the destructive effects toxins such as alcohol could have on entire populations (‘race’). The implication was that some races, or social groups, had an acquired inferiority to others”.130
Hence, the problem for the liberals is that while there is a widespread assumption that “epigenetics will lead to a more liberal and egalitarian society”, it can also lead to new insights on race and history.
Epigenetics has the potential to explain of how responses to landscape, the impact of wars, famine, revolutions, disease, diet, climate, etc., can mould a “race”. Such shared experiences are reinforced when of long duration and inter-generational, thereby establishing a race-type.
Behavioural Epigenetics
Epigenetic studies on mice by Randy Jirtle of Duke University showed that “when female mice are fed a diet rich in methyl groups, the fur pigment of subsequent offspring is permanently altered. Without any change to DNA at all, methyl groups could be added or subtracted, and the changes were inherited much like a mutation in a gene”. Moshe Szyf, molecular biologist and geneticist, and Michael Meaney, neurobiologist, both with McGill University, Montreal, hypothesised whether severe stressors could epigenetically cause neuron changes in the human brain? This marked the beginning of a new branch of science: “behavioural epigenetics”.131
Dan Hurley of Discover magazine writes of what we might term race-history:
“According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics, traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with the
m more than just memories”.132
To the last comment, it might be add that “just memories” could be racial memories, or what Jung called the “collective unconscious”, which has levels specific to races, as well as levels that are so primal as to be common to all humans. While it is predicable that the writer refers to “every ethnicity” but only refers to Jews, Chinese and Africans, to these might be added the experiences of the Highland Clearances of the Scots; the Civil War and the Reconstruction era of American Southerners, and the Great Famine of the Irish. Such epigenetic inheritance would be reinforced by incorporation into myths and folk-tales.
Judaism is a living tradition that sustains the Jewish ethnos across time and locality by incorporating myths and experiences as shared memories. The newest mythos of “The Holocaust” has become as much part of this sustaining tradition in Judaism as Purim and Passover. In regard to the epigenetic impact of this on the Jewish collective unconscious, or race memory, a recent genetic study of 32 Jewish men and women who had experienced trauma during World War II, and of their children, compared with Jewish families who had lived outside of Europe during the war, concluded that there is “an association of preconception parental trauma with epigenetic alterations that is evident in both exposed parent and offspring, providing potential insight into how severe psychophysiological trauma can have intergenerational effects”.133
“Cytosine methylation within the gene encoding for FK506 binding protein 5 (FKBP5) was measured in Holocaust survivors (n= 32), their adult offspring (n= 22), and demographically comparable parent (n= 8) and offspring (n= 9) control subjects, respectively. Cytosine-phosphate-guanine sites for analysis were chosen based on their spatial proximity to the intron 7 glucocorticoid response elements”.134
The only way by which such behavioural epigenetic “intensification of racialization”, so lamented by liberal academia, other than when it sustains the positive self-identity of Jews, Blacks, and Asians, could be eliminated is by obliterating collective race memories, both positive and negative. This is precisely what is being undertaken in trying to impose historical forgetfulness on European ethnoi. An recent example is the campaign to prohibit the Confederate flag, reinforced by a guilt complex instilled in Southerners in identifying their heritage as founded on nothing other than slavery.