To be is to be contingent: nothing of which it can be said that "it is" can be alone and independent. But being is a member of paticca-samuppada as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.

Destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, than consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no ignorance than it is no more indicatable (as it was indicated in M Sutta 22)

Nanamoli Thera

Monday, October 3, 2022

Ivor Benson on The Jewish Mystique by Ernest van den Haag


A subject which has been made topical in a number of learned journals in the United States, following the publication of Professor Ernest van den Haag’s The Jewish Myshque, is the claimed superiority of the Jewish “intellectual apparatus” as a possible explanation of the truly astonishing predominance in wealth, power and influence of a tiny Jewish minority in the Western world.

We may be sure there is some truth in the claim put forward by Dr Nathaniel Weyl  and others that centuries of “selection for intelligence” has played an important part in the evolution of a Jewish race and nation with an exceptionally high average standard of intelligence and a remarkable dearth of fools and misfits. We also know that the same “intellectual apparatus” works differently in different circumstances and in response to different stimuli, and we know, or ought to know, that the peculiar circumstances of the Jewish people, always a tiny minority in a human environment which they feel to be potentially hostile, must have the effect of prodding their minds into alertness and activity.

What we really want to find out is whether the present extraordinary disparity is the product only of a superior “intellectual apparatus” or whether there are other important factors involved. How, for example, are we to reconcile the present apparent disparity in peformance with the indisputable fact that the whole might of the West, the civilisation which has today spread its influence all over the globe, is essentially a product of the energy and creative genius of Western Christian European people, and that in 3000 years the Jews have been unable to produce anything even remotely comparable?

One of the distinguishing features of the European people, as a race, is that they are to a most unusual degree “culture builders”, with countless individuals, often at some sacrifice of their private interests, contributing to a vast shared cultural treasury. By comparison, as Spengler and Toynbee have pointed out, the Jews are basically a nomadic ‘fellah” people who accommodate themselves readily to a culture created by others.

How do we reconcile the present competitive inadequacy of the Western European with a recognition of the mighty powers of mind and spirit whose achievements in every field of human endeavour, especially in architecture, art, music and literature, represent to this day, after centuries of competitive striving, the highwater mark of human achievement?

We cannot hope to be able to understand the world in which we live and our own situation in that world if we are unable or afraid to try to find the answers to questions like these. We do know also that there have been lengthy periods in history when the inferior status of the Jewish people has contrasted markedly with the power, confidence and brilliant achievement of the people among whom they dwelt; and we are not aware that such inferior status was ever attributed to any inferiority of the Jewish “intellectual apparatus”.

One part of the explanation of the apparent contradiction can be traced to the well established fact that the human mind can function in radically different ways. It can function solely at the service of the individual, when it fully deserves the description of an “apparatus”. Or it can function almost entirely at the service of the community, when it is not so much an apparatus as a super-personal phenomenon, a sort of cyclonic funnel drawing to its centre and expressing in works the entire cultural resources of the race.

Western European achievement has never depended on a high average of intellectual activity but more often on the exceptional performance of a few gifted individuals. Those who form the bulk of the population are then naturally inclined to coast along as comfortably as possible, sharing and enjoying the benefits provided by the activated few, propping up and carrying along with them many who might otherwise fail to keep up, and carrying along with them also a genetic inheritance capable of throwing up more exceptional individuals when these are required.

This phenomenon of the exceptional individual is better known as genius, where the great tidal flow of race energy and will forces itself impetuously and turbulently through the narrow strait of the individual mind, too often at terrible cost to the individual concerned. Only by an unusual accident of circumstances has the Western European brand of originating and pioneering excellence any chance of exhibiting itself today, one example of this being space travel, which calls for rare qualities of character as well as a good “intellectual apparatus”. This may explain the resentful and vindictive condemnation of the Moon Project by writers like Norman Mailer and newspapers of America’s money establishment like the Washington Post.

What it all comes to is that prevailing historic circumstances, including the almost complete domination of the economic motive in modern life, are as advantageous to the Jewish people as they are disadvantageous to the Western European people, depriving them almost entirely of outlets for the kind of mental activity which has always been the secret of their greatness. The disparity continues to widen as private-ownership capitalism degenerates at an accelerating pace into anonymous international finance capitalism.

The “degeneration” refers, of course, to the fact that the displacement of private-ownership capitalism is one of the evil results of the betrayal by governments of one of their most important social responsibilities — that of preventing the emergence of concentrations of economic power large enough and strong enough to control government itself, all this being part of the process whereby the Western European, whether in Europe or elsewhere, has been largely dispossessed of the control of his own destiny. For this state of affairs the Western European has no one to blame except himself, because in making money and material possession the only measure of value, he has created an environment and a complex of human relationships more advantageous to the energetic and self-reliant Jewish minority than to people of his own kind. (...)

The key to this unique minority advantage is a system of institutionalised learning, hitherto reinforced by religion, which makes it possible for the Jewish people to preserve an intensely self- conscious racial and national unity in dispersion, whereas for others, national and racial unity has always depended on geographical boundaries. Instead, Jewish race-consciousness and nationalism have become all the more intense for having been confined entirely to the mind.

The science of anthropology has had to be falsified and smothered to a truly astonishing degree to prevent information of this kind being universally known and understood. Many of those sciences whose purpose it is to help man understand himself — anthropology, psychology, genetics, etc — are in the same state of eclipse today as were astronomy and other sciences in the Middle Ages and for the same reason: that their findings threaten the foundations of existing power structures, whether these be religious or political or financial.

It may, therefore, come as a suprise to some readers to learn that what is written above has long been known by scientists and thinkers who have managed to remain loyal to the highest ideals of Western intellectual courage and honesty. Whole volumes could be quoted, of which the following from the writings of the late Professor Sir Arthur Keith, world-famous anthropologist and scientist, is only a tiny sample: 

Another mark of race possessed by the Jews must be mentioned. Their conduct is regulated by a dual code’; their conduct towards their fellows is based on one code (amity), and that towards all who are outside their cirde on another (enmity). The use of the dual code, as we have seen, is a mark of an evolving race. My deliberate opinion is that racial characters are more strongly developed in the Jews than in any other Caucasian people. (A New Theory of Human Evolulion).

Political commentators and analysts who decline for one reason or another to probe below the surface for causes of what is happening in the world today, so far from making any contribution to public enlightenment, are only helping to thicken the fog of confusion in which millions of the soul-sick flounder. A strong sense of group identity, pride of race, nationalism — call it what you will — gives people a strong sense of purpose and direction which renders them almost totally immune to the culturally and morally subversive influences which are rampant in the Western world, all utterly destructive of the health and happiness of mankind. From which it follows that when a civilisation is in decline and the process of culture-building has virtually ceased, the Jewish people with their strong sense of race identity and their readiness to associate closely for practical ends, enjoy an enormous competitive advantage.

This is not a situation which can be expected to continue indefinitely.

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