This Western fixation has produced zany — and harmful — results that would be unthinkable in an ethical system that has stood the test of time.
W e need to talk about morality.
One of the most consistent trends in modern “discourse” is activists arguing that Westerners, whites, men, and members of similar large groups have a duty to do objectively insane things — allow the un-vetted mass migration of young men, for example — because “morality requires this.”
Is that true? The answer is not as simple as yes or no: It depends on which code of moral rules you are invoking. While I am no great ethical philosopher, I’d say that almost every system of human-organizing rules that I have encountered in an eventful life can be placed in one of two general baskets. Building a bit on one F. Nietzsche, we can label these Yeoman Morality and Prey Morality.
In systems based on Yeoman Morality, the focus is on the behavior of the individual. “Good behavior” can generally be summed up as “Do not become a burden who must be supported by others, and develop virtuous skills that boost your overall welfare and that of your community.” The archetypal system of this kind might be the traditional Northern European Nine Noble Virtues, which are courage (the most important), truth, honor, fidelity, discipline, hospitality/tithing, industriousness, self-reliance, and perseverance. Other examples include Japanese Bushido and other ways of the warrior globally, Stoicism, the Iroquois way, and quite arguably even muscular Christianity and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Virtually every Yeoman Morality system rates the following things as good and important: being skilled at virtuous things, being able to stop evil and/or kill its messengers, not being a burden on society, encouraging high performance and success, and prioritizing one’s immediate in-group while also being charitable, at a set rate, to others outside it — via “alms,” “tithing,” etc. As much of this indicates, a key assumption underlying YM systems is that the actors within them are free: non-enslaved people who possess free will and who are willing to accept some baseline level of risk or challenge in exchange for being able to live freely.
In contrast, the focus of systems based on Prey Morality — modern “wokeism” and the various critical theories, communism and dialectal materialism, and several others — is very different. Some of these systems were literally developed by slaves or oppressed workers or — at the very least, by rich fail-sons claiming to speak for these populations — and their foundational assumption is that people are not free. Instead, members of the particular groups deemed “good” are seen as “oppressed,” either by literal slave-masters or by shadowy forces depriving them of agency: systemic racism, “stereotype threat,” patriarchy, and “the male gaze,” among others.
In this context of present and constant unfairness, the greatest good becomes not “virtue” or “performance” but rather empathy. Do you feel for others? In fact, are you willing to curb or downgrade your own performance, to limit your innovation and joy, in order to help others — who might be failing simply because they were never given your chances to succeed (“If it saves just one life . . .”). Some “goods” consistently supported by advocates of these philosophies are avoidance of all risk to others, the experience and public display of empathy for others (both within and outside the in-group), avoidance of judgment about the behavior of others (who knows what might cause it?), and the display of suspicion for the successful.
Whether advocates of Yeoman Morality or Prey Morality guide society has practical implications. We saw this perhaps most dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic. A United States guided by the principles of the Nine Nobles or indeed by traditionally interpreted Christianity would probably never have shut down. The lockdowns were obviously going to limit the freedom, innovation, and learning/earning opportunities of hundreds of millions of people — things with a high and measurable value. It’s clearly insane to stop perhaps half of all commercial and social intercourse, in a country of 340 million people, to prevent a 10 percent increase in the one-year rate of death — concentrated among 81-year-olds.
However, in a society where empathy-based morality has become the norm, almost exactly the opposite calculus took place. Staying open and allowing people to live would cause risk to the oldest and most immuno-compromised citizens, and would require calculated, un-empathic decision-making. This could not be allowed, and it was not allowed, at least in blue America.
A similar conflict of visions — to borrow Thomas Sowell’s apt phrase — underlies the Western debate on mass immigration. From a Viking or Japanese or ordo amoris perspective, in which virtue is seen as the successful performance of the good or the improvement of a situation by free people, there would not be much of a debate about whether rich nations should admit millions of lower-performing and mildly (or extremely) hostile foreigners. Would admitting them be expected to improve or worsen the baseline situation in which we, the free and agentic citizens of the United States, find ourselves — with regard to race relations, housing costs, political climate, and more? If “worsen” is the answer, we can simply decide not to indulge in self-harm.
From a Prey Morality perspective, however, the call is equally simple to make, in the opposite direction. The primary virtue of empathy mandates that others be helped, without drawing much distinction between in-group members such as close relatives and “all people on all continents.” Moreover, not extending a helping hand would cause harm specifically to “marginalized” “people of color” — who obviously cannot be held responsible for the dire straits they find themselves in.
At present, despite a few recent setbacks, Prey Morality is still very much ascendent. Surveys indicate that many young people believe that “tolerance” and “empathy” — rather than bravery, loyalty, honor, wit/IQ, etc. — are among the highest moral virtues, although this belief is generally ignored when it comes to conservative viewpoints. This is, basically, bad. In the two scenarios given above, on Covid lockdowns and mass immigration, the choice was not between two moral systems likely to produce roughly equivalent results. Rather, it was between one that can feel a bit cold but that has been field-proven for 3,000 years, and one likely to produce completely zany results.
After years of blue American municipalities absolutely panicking about Covid-19 — filling in skate parks with 37 metric tons of sand, boarding up the basketball hoops in parks, arresting solo surfers and paddleboarders — we now know that one of the nations to perform best against the virus was brave little Sweden, which did essentially nothing beyond telling sick people to stay home and young men to “tithe” by shopping for seniors. Not only did the Scandinavian lynx avoid the worst economic and mental health impacts of the 2020–21 lockdown era, she also saw far fewer people die than in the United States and many other major nations (2,682 per million vs. 3,642 per million here).
As for immigration, similarly, we already have enough data collected to know that un-vetted migration is a disaster in welfare states. In Sweden, exactly 500 “asylum seekers” out of one recent cohort of 163,000 have so far found legal jobs. In the United States, an astonishing 63 percent of all recent immigrant families are currently dependent on welfare. More than a few continental European countries have begun paying African and Middle Eastern migrants to go back home.
It sounds a bit odd to put it this way, but we as a society need less empathy in the public square. There is a place for wonderful, “momly,” caring kindness toward all people nearby; that place is the home. But almost no one genuinely wants the United States government behaving like their own loving but heavy-handed momma.
In the open arena where the business of nations and the game of thrones take place, we need to take our instruction from Thomas Sowell and Marcus Aurelius and Milton Friedman — rather than from an ersatz version of Karl Marx filtered through therapy language.