I am writing this essay shortly after finishing a good book, longish by modern standards, which discusses two personality types in European peoples—especially those of the Northwestern countries. These two types of aristocratic individualist and egalitarian individualist have formed the liberal orders of Europe. That book is Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Kevin MacDonald. It references a great number of historical and scientific works but organizes the mass of detail into a coherent analysis with narrative elements. MacDonald is an emeritus professor of psychology at California State University—Long Beach; he has specialized in the subfields of evolution and personality. That’s good because we have a complex and easily-confused situation due to the mixing of the three major peoples who participated in various migrations and invasions, into Europe and within Europe. There is a convenient time-horizon of 10,000 years which has entered into my thought, and the thoughts of others exploring these events; that time-horizon came from a book I’ve mentioned in past writings and will mention quickly later in this essay: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending which explores the explosive growth of intelligence which came about as certain peoples formed more complex communities.
Europeans are largely a mixture of three ancient peoples:
- Indo-Europeans (IE’s) were an `Armenian-like’ people who evolved genetically and developed specific cultures in the region of what is now eastern Ukraine and southern Russia extending toward Central Asia.
- Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG’s) were descendants of the peoples indigenous to Europe by at least the end of the last glaciation (starting about 115,000 years ago and ending about 12,000 years ago); having retreated to some safe regions near the Mediterranean Sea during the worst of that period, those hunter-gatherer peoples moved back into other regions of Western and Central Europe as the glaciers retreated.
- Early Farmers (EF’s) were various peoples in Southwestern Asia who adopted the farming techniques and the related social organizations, of initially small but complex communities capable of, for example, building and operating irrigation systems.
These groups mixed to form the various peoples of Europe in a complex and complicated series of events taking place over the past 10,000 years or so when European peoples (and some others) organized complex societies to deal with more complex problems and opportunities such as surviving on the Scandinavian peninsula (think of WHG’s) or the steppes of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia (think of the pastoralists/warriors we know as IE’s) or farming in regions with dry lands or dense forestlands (think of the EF’s of Southwestern Asia moving into the dense forests of central Europe). You can read The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending for a discussion of how complex communities turned human beings into evolutionary machines of a sort—not as impressive as cockroaches and flu viruses, to be sure. The evolution of something which could be described as an intelligence-culture structure allowed us to move into environments in which earlier humans could not have survived, allowing, for example, the development of new or improved weapons faster than prey-animals or more primitive human beings could respond.
There are European peoples who differ not only in directly observable physical characteristics but also in characteristics which define different types of minds and personalities. The Basques carry a lot of the genes of one such group of WHG’s, though their male sex-genes—carried on the Y-chromosome, are largely Indo-European; I don’t know what difference this makes in the types of minds and personalities found among that people. My ethnic group, the Gaelic Celts, are a mixture of IE’s and EF’s with relatively little from WHG’s. Scandinavians have relatively heavy amounts of WHG genes mixed with some from the IE’s and little from EF’s. Germans are a mixture of the three peoples but having relatively heavy amounts of genes from EF’s.
I don’t know why these mixed peoples evolved and developed so that they have strong tendencies to develop specific types of minds and personalities. How is it that specific European peoples developed particular traits? MacDonald and others have done much but we have much more work to understand ourselves that we might better develop our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses and faults. I can say this much in the way of specific examples:
- Germans are one of the best, if not the best, farming peoples in Europe and they have a relatively heavy load of genes from EF’s. Makes sense.
- My people, the Gaelic Celts, have tended to the pastoral (sheep and cattle raising) forms of farming and have also tended to a fighting style which might be described as `aristocratic warrior’ and they have a relatively heavy load of genes from IE’s who lived a pastoral life, including mobile forms of farming, on the Pontic steppes of what is now the eastern Ukraine and southern Russia. But the Gaelic Celts also have a lot of genes from EF’s and aren’t nearly the farmers that Germans are.
- Scandinavian peoples have been good at a mixed-living strategy: farming when possible in some seasons and some years, fishing, hunting, and raiding other peoples when necessary. This strategy worked well in the harsh environments of the Scandinavian peninsula, the western coast of modern-day Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland.
A variety of more or less plausible speculations could be made about the results of these various migrations and invasions over the past 10,000 years. It’s good to open up the mind with such forms of thinking but useless, maybe dangerous, to speculate too much unless you have reliable empirical information about the stages of formation of, say, a proto-German people from some mixture of IE’s, WHG’s, and EF’s. How did the peoples from early and final stages of this process become a good farming people and also a people who took to the discipline of soldiers in massed armies? I don’t know enough to wish to even speculate—in public; it might be fun to weave fictions over a mug of beer.
None of the above comments should be taken as a claim that, for example, a European people without genes from EF’s couldn’t independently evolve into a farming people. Longer-term evolution and shorter-term development of skills not displayed in a people’s ancestors can produce new results in an existing people.
Before moving on to the specific subject of MacDonald’s most recent book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, I’ll note something of interest—the contemplation of which might help in understanding this general field of understanding peoples, even their current problems and ongoing achievements by understanding their origins and plausibly speculating about ongoing developments and possible evolutionary events.
Not only are people different from each other, peoples are different from each other and a mixing of peoples tends to form a particular people different from any one of its ancestral groups—though perhaps having important characteristics from one particular group in the mixture. What is human, what is embodied in our individual and communal selves, isn’t stagnant but it is real and much of that which is important is particular to particular persons, much is part of a spectrum of possibilities defined best by reference to particular peoples.
I’ve read a good number of articles by geneticists who have, for example, estimated the percentage of Neandertal genes in Europeans or the percentages of IE’s, WHG’s, or EF’s in Irish Gaels. I’ve read interesting and plausible books of history written as experiments in integrating the analyses of those studying ancient genes into historical analyses and narratives—the field was finding and analyzing new information so fast that some of the early experiments in sociobiological history were, sort of, outmoded within a decade or even less. Yet, most of the efforts resulted at least in higher levels of skill in historical analyses of genetic knowledge and often in questions which geneticists and historians had to answer. On the whole, these efforts will stand up well at least in histories of human thought. To be sure, historians perhaps have an upper-hand in such efforts since they’ve spent part of their time over the past 200 years or so integrating analyses from archaeologists and literary scholars (especially of the Bible or Shakespeare) into their histories and biographies.
As I’ve already noted, Professor MacDonald specializes in evolutionary theory and in studying human personalities. Using this background well, having digested a wide variety of serious scientific works in those fields specifically dealing with the origins and traits of European peoples, he has presented an interesting analysis of two personality types common in Europe and rare elsewhere, both of those types being classified in one dimension as `individualistic’:
- Aristocratic individualists who viewed, and still view, human beings in terms of strata—respecting those with high abilities in fields held in high esteem of the aristocrats (fighting or making weapons or forming coalitions in ancient times, adding engineering and entrepreneurship and art and music and even scholarly fields as Western Civilization developed). Call them high-achievers or even geniuses if you will.
- Egalitarian individualists who viewed, and still view, human beings as all alike in the truly important ways and tending who tended to fear and despise those who stood above other men in their hunting or fighting skills or any other skills. Call them levelers if you will.
The first type of individualistic personality characteristics, aristocratic, comes largely from our IE genes and the second, egalitarian, from our WHG genes. (The more speculative questions as to the origins and structures of the communal aspects of our European personalities will be discussed in an essay I’ve not yet written but will write—God willing.)
Two groups of people of individualistic dispositions have clashed over the previous millennia so as to produce great bloodshed and destruction in the West. Their struggles produced two historical periods, overlapping as is usually the case in any efforts to divide longer periods of time into well-defined shorter periods:
- the aristocratic period which began in prehistoric days (more than 4,000 years ago) and probably peaked in the early Middle Ages and came to an end in much of Europe, at least in political realms, in the period from the French Revolution through the great World War (1914-1945),
- the egalitarian period, which began developing during the collapsing years of the aristocratic period.
Both periods were politically dominated by different sorts of individualism, justified in ideological terms but more truly due to the two of individualist personalities, that is, manifestations of the two genetic types: Indo-European and WHG’s.
Note that the original peoples inclined to these two different personalities are found mixed in some peoples, though Scandinavians, currently destroying their countries in their efforts to bend over backwards as they bring in ever larger numbers of ever more hostile immigrants, are very biased toward egalitarian individualism. The aristocratic individualists included, and to some extent still include, the royal and aristocratic families—many of them no longer holding the power built up by their ancient and modern ancestors or the relatives of those ancestors, nor do they often display the abilities of those ancestors. It’s likely that most high-achievers in Western history were, and are, probably aristocratic individualists—Michelangelo and Newton as well as Alexander the Great and King St Louis IX. (See At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie and The Genius Famine by Edward Dutton and Bruce G Charlton for a different take on the issue of genius, a take fully compatible with my views and, so far as I can judge, with the views developed in MacDonald’s book: Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition.)
There are family lines of human beings with well-defined personality types and such family lines likely won’t support and maybe won’t even tolerate one another’s political and social systems—though genetic variation allows for such outliers as an egalitarian individualist being born to parents who are aristocratic individualists.
In my next essay, I’ll speculate about the effects of egalitarian individualism on the West and what that might tell us about the viability of such ways of organizing human communities.