Degenerate Modern Intellectuals

…by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

E. Michael Jones is right on target when he argues in Degenerate Moderns that

“The intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker. In order to apprehend truth, which is the goal of the intellectual life, one must live a moral life. One can produce intellectual product, but to the extent that one prescinds from living the moral life, that product will be more a function of internal desire—wish fulfillment, if you will—than external reality. This is true of any intellectual field and any deeply held desire. In the intellectual life, one either conforms desire to truth or truth to desire.”[1]

The moral life is essentially the substance which determines the rise and fall of any intellectual or philosophical or political project or system or movement. In that sense, failing to subordinate the intellectual life to the moral life or to what Immanuel Kant calls the categorical imperative will always end up in internal contradiction and philosophical disaster.

This is true of Baron d’Holbach, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Guy de Maupassant, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Lord Byron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche,[2] Michel Foucault, and more recently Richard Spencer and Jim Goad. Huxley himself admitted that the reason he and his contemporaries rejected morality “because it interferes with our sexual freedom.”[3]

Huxley was quite frank, for if one examines the personal lives of those who reject the moral order or even metaphysical Logos, he will discover that these people want to have the best of both worlds. They want to reject morality, and at the same time they seek to impose their own worldviews upon much of the world as if to say that objective moral principles do exist! As we shall see, this existentially worthless position always gets them into intellectual trouble, and not a single person has been able to wiggle out of that juggernaut.

For example, take the life of Jim Goad. It was reported that Goad beat up his girlfriend, Anne Ryan, in 1999, while his former wife was sick with cancer. Goad went to jail for doing exactly that. The Portland Tribune declared that it was like watching “the Jerry Springer Show.”[4] It stated:

“After breaking her eye socket with his fist and biting her thumb, he kicked her out of his car on Northwest Skyline Boulevard and fled to Washington. Two days later, he was back in town and the police arrested him. He was on his way home from Radio Shack where he had bought equipment for saving her threatening voice mails to him onto tape. Facing 15 years, he eventually copped a plea and served 29 months for assault and attempted kidnapping.”[5]

Goad admitted that “for a full two years before I knew Anne R. existed, I had been cheating on Debbie with an array of anonymous bar skanks.” He moved on to admit:

“I fully admit that it was foul to continue cheating on Debbie after her diagnosis, and that fucking Anne R. on Debbie’s bed on the night of Debbie’s cancer surgery was easily the lowest thing I’ve ever done…. I also continued the affair because I knew that it was something for which Debbie could never forgive me, and that it would finally allow us to make the complete break from each other for which I’d been craving for years.”

During a YouTube interview, which has been viewed by thousands, Goad declared that he is “a degenerate, I put my finger on everything.” Whether he was being sarcastic or not is uncertain. But we all know that a degenerate person does not want to submit his passion or appetite or lust to the moral order. The Portland Tribune continued to say:

“Asked why he likes ‘crazy’ girls, he says, ‘Sane girls are boring.’ But he says he will be more careful in the future about getting into ‘masochistic’ relationships. His whole defense was that he only hit women who were already abusing him far worse, and that society has a problem in believing that women can ever deserve to be hit.

“So have women shunned him? ‘Fifty percent of the support I got when in prison was from women,’ he says. ‘Since I got out, it’s been like Kiss on tour.’ Asked what kind of women are attracted to him now Ñ [sic] true trouble seekers, or just those who are tired of what he calls ‘emasculated hipsters’ Ñ [sic] he replies: ‘All of the above.’”[6]

Goad let his ideological cat out of the bag when he said: “I think morality clouds understanding.”[7] Goad’s idea here, whether he likes it or not, is from Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that morality inverts the way of seeing things. Goad himself invoked Nietzsche’s Beyond God and Evil to buttress the idea that “morality clouds understanding.”

But by positing that morality is unnecessary in seeing the ways things really are, Goad did not realize that he was inadvertently rehearsing his own philosophical death. Nietzsche, Goad’s intellectual father, understood that once morality or Logos is banished from the intellectual heavens (political, esthetic, economic, etc.), then man is left to his own devices, which is to say that there is no objective truth. What is true for you can be false for someone else, and there is no way of adjudicating truth claims.[8] As the late German-American philosopher and translator Walter A. Kaufmann put it,

“Nietzsche prophetically envisages himself as a madman: to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out. This apocalyptic sense of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche’s thinking like a thundercloud.

“We have destroyed our faith in God. There remains only the void. We are falling. Our dignity is gone. Our values are lost. Who is to say what is up and what is down? It has become colder, and night is closing in….[Nietzsche] felt the agony, the suffering, and the misery of a godless world so intensely, at a time when others were yet blind to its tremendous consequences, that he was able to experience in advance, as it were, the fate of a coming generation.”[9]

If objective morality does not exist, then there is essentially no difference between truth and lie. “I deny morality as I deny alchemy,”[10] Nietzsche proclaimed. As an alternative to objective morality, Nietzsche proposed the revaluation (or transvaluation) of all values, or the Antichrist, which by the way is the title of one of his books. Nietzsche has an entire chapter in Twilight of the Idols called ‘Morality as Anti-Nature.”[11] Throughout that particular chapter, Nietzsche totally misrepresents the Church’s position. For example, he writes that “By ripping out the passions by the root mean ripping out life by the root; the practice of the Church is an enemy of life.”[12]

Nietzsche knew better. As we have already suggested, passion must be subordinated to what Kant calls practical reason, and failure to do so will end up in complete chaos. For example, Israel’s passion has been very clear from time immemorial: stealing Palestinian lands, wiping out the indigenous population, and creating chaos in much of the Middle East.[13] Lest we be accused of anti-Semitism, let us bring in Israeli and Zionist historian Benny Morris, who wrote unflinchingly that:

“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[14]

Does Nietzsche mean to tell us that this passion should never be controlled? And why did Nietzsche go mad when he saw a horse being whipped by its owner on the morning of January 3, 1889? Why did he hopelessly try to stop the owner in a flight of rage? Why did the incident eventually put him in a vegetative state? If “morality clouds understanding,” why was Nietzsche so concerned about a horse?

Here we are confronted with a fundamental philosophical breakdown. Nietzsche tells us that the Church is “the enemy of life” for positing that people ought to put their passions under control, but Nietzsche wants to tell us all that he was right for trying to stop a man from exercising his passion! Nietzsche was philosophically and intellectual blind. This blindness was made possible through Nietzsche’s rejection of the moral order and Logos and through his full embrace of what he himself called the “antichrist.” What we are seeing here is that Nietzsche inexorably embraced what St. Athanasius called Satanism.

According to St. Athanasius, any metaphysical idea which ontologically denies Logos and its central place in the universe will end up being Satanic. In a Satanic universe, what is true is actually a lie and what is a lie is by definition true. In fact, opposition to Logos “was deemed to involve an active allegiance to Satan.”[15] Nietzsche himself thought that he was possessed.

“At times he claimed, half-jokingly, to be possessed by the spirit of Zarathustra, the ancient Persian prophet whose name he stole and whose views he inverted. He increasingly felt gripped by a daemon—Greek for a spirit, either good or evil. ‘If one had the slightest trace of superstition left in one, one could hardly escape the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming force.’ This was written shortly before he collapsed, early in 1889, from the third stage of syphilis. By then he was signing his letters Dionysus, or the Crucified One.”[16]

This should not be a surprise, for it has been noted that Nietzsche infected himself with syphilis in the form of a demonic pact.[17] As a Satanist, Nietzsche had to depict both Socrates and Euripides as villains because they represent rationality. In short, Nietzsche was metaphysically anti-reason precisely because his philosophical project perverts or inverts or subverts objective morality. As Kaufmann again put it,

“Nietzsche himself considers his opposition to rationalism a major point of departure from traditional philosophy; and it is undoubtedly the source of many of his most far-reaching differences with Kant and Hegel.”[18]

Nietzsche fought Kant for articulating the view that there is a universal moral law which binds human beings together. Though he praised Kant for his rational stand, he however declared that Kant lacked “intellectual conscience” and “intellectual integrity.”[19] His reasons for saying so were very shallow. For example, he risibly said that “Kant clung to the university, submitted to governments [and] remained within the appearance of religious faith.”[20] This has absolutely nothing to do with Kant’s moral arguments. In fact, one can easily accused Nietzsche of red herring here.

What we are saying here is that by rejecting the moral order, Nietzsche’s intellectual project was doomed from the very beginning. In addition, his intellectual children are logically following the same fate. This is one reason why Richard Spencer and Jim Goad are constantly floating in the realm of internal contradictions.

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Keep in mind that Goad is the author Whiteness: The Original Sin, in which he constantly summons moral terms to make his point. For example, he lambasts Salon and Mediaite for having “primitively mystical notions of morality.”[21] On the very next page, Goad is utterly terrified because there seems to be a “ceaselessly embarrassing national moral panic” in the American culture.[22]

According to Goad, there is a “chest-pounding moral panicking” in the culture because “major corporate vendors” are “banning the further sale of Confederate memorabilia.” Other examples include “the City of Memphis voting to exhume Nathan Bedford Forest’s corpse, the Dukes of Hazzard being pulled from TV syndication, and even calls to ban Gone with the Wind…”[23] And then this:

“Arguing that white-skinned Africans were the first large-scale victims of racial persecution in the world—that the original great human exodus from Africa was less a peaceful migration than it was a violent purge of light-skinned undesirables, that it was ‘less out of Africa’ and more ‘get the hell out of Africa’—gives white people a moral leg up in the stubbornly idiotic gave of racial karma and intergenerational guilt-tripping.”[24]

A moral leg? What the heck is that? I thought “morality clouds understanding.” If this is the case, then could it be that Goad’s “moral leg” clouds understanding?

Here Goad is trying to have it both ways. Like Richard Spencer and others, he is trapped in a topsy-turvy world, and this world represents the intellectual and philosophical death of what E. Michael Jones has aptly called “white guys.” Either Goad has not thought through the fundamental implications of what he was saying about morality, which would be quite shocking, or he is intellectually not prepared to follow his ideological principles to their bitter conclusions.

Either way, Goad is intellectually failing, not because he is unable understand the political climate, but rather because his metaphysical principle is built on irreconcilable contradictions. Goad and others find themselves in a Nietzschean universe which tells them that morality “clouds understanding,” but Goad wants to frame political and ideological issues in moral terms. This is a blatant contradiction. As G. K. Chesterton succinctly and persuasively put it long before Jim Goad was even born:

“The new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty…and the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it…

“As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.

“He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.

“In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”[25]

Chesterton was not alone in declaring that the modern revolutionist is constantly involved in undermining his own mines. People like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre understand that once a person abandons the moral order, then it was consequential to assert that human beings are, in Sartre’s own words, “useless passion.”^[26] If Logos does not exist, argues Sartre in Existentialism and Human Emotion, then “man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.”^[27]

Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche, again Spencer’s and Goad’s intellectual mentor, understood that once a person dismisses or ignores morality, then the notion of right and wrong is just a relic of the past.[28]

I argued elsewhere that Darwin, who again is another hero of both Goad and Spencer, could not make neither heads nor tails of morality, and ended up positing a detrimental ideology which continues to hunt his devoted enthusiasts. Darwin unequivocally declared:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes…will no doubt be exterminated…The Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”[29]

At the end of his life, Darwin triumphantly declared:

“I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is!

“The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”[30]

British biographers Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore explain:

“‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start—‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.”[31]

Desmond and Moore argue elsewhere that Darwin set the groundwork for “imperialist expansion,” which is “the very motor of human progress.”[32] Darwin, Desmond and Moore argue, “biologized” genocide, despite the fact that he had antislavery views. According to Desmond and Moore, Darwin saw genocide, invasion and struggle for existence “the honing process, the crucible” in the evolutionary scale: “the victorious ‘destroyers’ survived to breed, while they further adapted to their new-won terrain.”[33] For Darwin,

“Extermination was an axiom of nature—‘strictly applicable to the universe’—he said. Nature herself moved forward, crushing skulls underfoot. ‘The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker,’ he wrote in his journal.

“Natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. Thus it was, that ‘Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’ Europeans were the agents of Evolution.”[34]

Desmond and Moore document that Darwin’s own Diary and Journal were littered with theories which propound the view that natural selection is the engine by which the “weak” would be replaced by the “fittest.”

Well, obviously we do have a problem here. If Goad agrees that Darwin is right, then what’s the purpose of Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin? Why is Goad complaining that “whiteness” is being obliterated? Isn’t it what Darwin predicted?

Goad is hopelessly living in a contradictory world because he is probably not aware of the metaphysics of morals. I would challenge him to pick up a copy of Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals or Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Hopefully he would stop making irresponsible and intellectually vacuous claims about human nature. I honestly think that Kant would have had a hard time understanding what he and others like him are trying to say.

Kant argues quite convincingly: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[35] Keep in mind that this universal law does not depend on how you and I feel on a given day. It also is not contingent upon what we may think is right. This universal law is independent of our appetite and preference. In other words, we obviously did not make or invent this universal law; we just happen to discover it. This moral law states that raping children is ontologically wrong irrespective of what any human being feels.

The moral or universal law, says Kant, is what binds us all together as rational creatures. So, any system that seeks to dismiss that moral law must be wrong precisely because that system will inevitably be incoherent. Kant continues to say that for an action to be good, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”[36]

This brings us to an essential point here. The reason Jim Goad and others are confused because they cannot put morality in its proper matrix. One would hasten to say that any individual who dismisses practical reason in his project will inexorably end up propounding internal contradictions and incoherency. That’s what happened to Darwin, and his intellectual children have never recovered from that. Jim Goad does raise important issues when it comes to examining crimes in the black community and the ideology that pervades what he himself calls “The Gay Mafia.”[37] But those issues cannot logically be scrutinized in an immoral or amoral universe.

Finally, Goad is manifestly clueless about the history of Christianity in the West. For example, he risibly declares that “From the fall of Rome until the Renaissance, there was a dark, almost thousand-year stretch during which Christianity reigned supreme in a Europe that wallowed in disease and backwardness compared to non-Christian civilizations in the Middle East, Asia, and Northern Africa. The unpleasant truth is that for the first few hundred years and possibly the first thousand, Christianity’s rise correlated with Europe’s decline.”[38]

This is demonstrably and categorically false, and no serious historian will put his credibility on the line by espousing such a spurious idea.[39] But Goad was just beginning to make one categorical error after another. He moved on to preposterously declare:

“In the real world—the one unclouded by the fog of superstition—the West only began dominating the rest of the world when it started focusing on technology and trade to the detriment of blind mysticism and blind faith. One could likewise argue that the Islamic world—which had a leg up on Europe throughout much of the Middle Ages—ultimately languished behind Christendom due to its dogged embrace of blind faith over scientific curiosity.”[40]

Nonsense! And Goad is wrong about both Christianity and Islam here. Perhaps he needs to stop beating women and starts opening history books to realize what really happened in the past.[41] It should be noted that some Arabic countries have made enormous contributions to science, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine.[42] This is a scholarly judgment, and it is far from saying that Western culture has stolen the legacies of the Middle East. “From the eight century to the end of the fourteenth,” writes historian Toby E. Huff, “Arabic science was probably the most advanced science in the world, greatly surpassing the West and China.”[43]

Some historians—even people like Niall Ferguson—would credit the Muslim world with producing the first experimental scientist, Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, who lived around 965 till 1039.[44] Moreover, Arabic countries produced some of the most brilliant mathematicians in history. In fact, the word algebra was derived from Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s magnum opus Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, a work that was translated into Latin and was widely known all the way to the sixteenth century as a rigorous mathematical work in major European universities.[45]

It was al-Khwarizmi who to a large extent separated algebra and geometry as two distinct but compatible fields of mathematics.[46] It was because of al-Khwarizmi’s Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabilah that Europe was able to develop a field of algebraic mathematics which still carries his name.[47] This view is widely accepted among historians of mathematics.[48] Mathematician and historian E. T. Bell writes,

“While Europe slept and all but forgot Greek mathematics, the Moslem scholars were industriously translating all they could recover of the works of the classic Greek mathematicians. Several of these translations became the first sources from which Christian Europe revived the mathematics it had all but let die. For this timely service to civilization, the Moslems no doubt deserve all the gratitude they have received.”[49]

Al-Khwarizmi also contributed enormously to astronomical knowledge with detailed explanations, which “included results taken from both Ptolemy and Brahmgupta…The Algebra of Alkarismi holds a most important place in the history of mathematics, for we may say that the subsequent Arab and the early medieval works on algebra were founded on it, and also that through it the Arabic or Indian system of decimal numeration was introduced into the West.”[50]

Hence, the father of modern algebra is none other than al-Khwarizmi.[51] Al-Khwarizmi’s works, however, did not come out of thin air; they relied on earlier works of Greek philosophers and mathematicians and even Babylonian mathematics.[52]

In general, the Muslim world has made significant contributions to the West. Historian Paul Kenney of Yale writes, “For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and technologically ahead of Europe. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics, cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry—in mills, gun casting, lighthouses, and horse breeding—the Muslims had enjoyed a lead.”[53]

It is also true that much of the European scientific age had some of its early development in the Muslim world.[54] These contributions were even acknowledged by medieval philosopher (and advocate of the scientific method) Roger Bacon.[55]

What we have been told for more than fifty years by a number of writers is that monks not only drew Europe to backwardness but stopped Western civilization from progressing. In addition, science reputedly moved backward during the Middle Ages and beyond because Christianity was out of touch with scientific enterprise. This widely held view was popularized by John William Draper in his 1874 book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.[56] Draper’s thesis got refined a little by Andrew Dickson White in his 1896 book A History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.[57] Yet those ideas were shown to be demonstrably false.[58]

By the end of the twentieth century, the White thesis was completely abandoned by a vast majority of historians of science precisely because it was inadequate, unnecessary, and intellectually worthless.[59] Historian of science Ronald L. Numbers calls it “the greatest myth in the history of science,”[60] a myth that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins still hold.[61]

As celebrated historian of science Edward Grant argues in his magnum opus Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, the Middle Ages in particular were not “a time of ignorance” but “a period of striking innovation.”[62] But because myths take a long time to die out, Goad is still repeating them as gospel truth, despite the fact that scholarly studies on the Middle Ages and how the Church changed Western Civilization are widely available.[63]

Like Charles Darwin before him, White did not write the book solely on the basis of the sciences. Darwin rejected Christianity primarily on the issue of suffering,[64] and White was reportedly motivated by his antipathy toward his sister for embracing Catholicism.[65]

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Goad continues to moan and whine about “declining white demographics,” but he could never tell his readers many of the shakers and movers who historically started the contraceptive and abortion movement. The shakers were Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, and the Rockefellers. After spending some time in jail, Goad had an epiphany about inmates. He declared that they are

“shockingly illiterate. One slow-lidded, drooling troglodyte after the next. Men whose mental energy couldn’t power a wristwatch. Ugly, stupid, belching, conscienceless, unfeeling, driven-by-instinct, worthless turd dumplings whose only purpose in life is to remind us that forced sterilization maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.”[66]

Sterilization wasn’t such a bad idea, but Goad again is mortified that there is a decline in “white demographics.”

In his study The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement, sociologist Stephen LeDrew at Uppsala University, Sweden, argues that many people in the movement imbibe by an ideology which they aren’t ready to examine or question.[67] Is Jim Goad prepared to logically and truthfully psycho-analyze some of the fundamental views he has been propounding? This can only happen if he starts embracing what Kant calls the categorical imperative.

First published in February 2019.

• [1] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), 15.
• [2] For a comprehensive examination of some of those people, see Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: HarperCollins, 1987).
• [3] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1946), 273.
• [4] Joseph Gallivan, “Citizen Goad,” Portland Tribune, July 5, 2002.
• [5] Ibid.
• [6] Joseph Gallivan, “Citizen Goad,” Portland Tribune, July 5, 2002.
• [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucn-ntCzV0E.
• [8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 47.
• [9] Walter A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950 and 1974), 97, 98.
• [10] Quoted in Thompson and Rogers, Philosophers Behaving Badly, 78.
• [11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), chapter 5.
• [12] Ibid., 25.
• [13] For studies on this, see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007); The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• [14] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest: An Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, May 23, 2010.
• [15] E. Michael Jones, “The Great Satan and Me: Reflections on Iran and Postmodernism’s Faustian Pact,” Culture Wars, July/August 2015.
• [16] Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson, Philosophers Behaving Badly (London and Chicago: Peter Owen Publishers, 2004), 67.
• [17] See E. Michael Jones, Dionysus Rising: The Birth of the Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).
• [18] Kaufman, Nietzsche, 103.
• [19] Ibid., 104.
• [20] Ibid.
• [21] Jim Goad, Whiteness: The Original Sin (Stone Mountain, GA: Obnoxious Books, 2018), 215.
• [22] Ibid., 216.
• [23] Ibid., 299.
• [24] Ibid., 249.
• [25] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 52-53; emphasis added.
• [26] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 615.
• [27] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotion (New York: Kensington Publishing, 1985),
• [28] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 515–516
• [29] Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (New York: Penguin, 183-184), 201.
• [30] Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1962), 319; see also Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25.
• [31] Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 1.
• [32] Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 150.
• [33] Ibid.
• [34] Ibid., 151.
• [35] Emmanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 39.
• [36] Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Torchbooks, 1964), 390.
• [37] Jim Goad, “Stubbing Your Toe While Rushing to Judgment,” Taki’s Magazine, January 14, 2019; “The Gay Mafia Claims Another Scalp,” Taki’s Magazine, December 10, 2018.
• [38] Jim Goad, “So What If Jesus Was Jewish?,” Taki’s Magazine, January 7, 2019.
• [39] For historical studies on these issues, see for example David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 and 2007); Edward Grant, Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (New York: HarperOne, 2007); Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (New York: HarperOne, 2007); Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
• [40] Goad, “So What If Jesus Was Jewish?”
• [41] For historical studies on these issues, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam (University of Texas Press, 1997); Ahmad Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Ahmad Y. Hassan and Donald Routledge Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• [42] See Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 2.
• [43] Ibid., 145.
• [44] Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011), 51.
• [45] Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996), 146.
• [46] Ferguson, Civilization, 51.
• [47] Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: Wiley, 1968), 228.
• [48] B. L. van der Waerden, A History of Algebra: From al-Khwarismi to Emmy Noether (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985), 4; E. T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1945), 101
• [49] Bell, Development of Mathematics, 104
• [50] W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1960), 156.
• [51] Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 230
• [52] Ibid., 230-236.
• [53] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economics Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 10.
• [54] Ibid.
• [55] Ferguson, Civilization, 51.
• [56] John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1874).
• [57] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Prometheus , 1993).
• [58] See Stark, The Victory of Reason, chapter 1; Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science;
• Leclercg, The Love for Learning and the Desire for God; Edward Grant, Science and Religion,
• 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); James Hanman, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010).
• [59] See Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gary Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounters between Christianity and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
• [60] Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 1.
• [61] See Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010); Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without a Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
• [62] See Grant, Science and Religion, chapter 1.
• [63] For similar studies, see J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Edward M. Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); J. N. Hillgarth, ed., Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking centuries of anti-Catholic history (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2016); Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957); Richard C. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages (Washington: University Press of America, 1980); Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968); Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries of Misconceptions and (Some) Misfortunes (London: SPCK, 2017).
• [64] See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
• (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). I have addressed these issues elsewhere.
• [65] Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 3.
• [66] Quoted in Joseph Gallivan, “Citizen Goad,” Portland Tribune, July 5, 2002.
• [67] Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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