T.S.:

"Re: 'a system that recognizes the full spectrum of human biodiversity.'

America already had such a system. In theory for many decades, but in deed only in the 1960s. Free market in people. Meritocracy. No institutionalized discrimination on account of race, gender etc. From each according to his proven talents to each suitable job according to society’s needs as expressed in a free employment market."

The 1960s thru a looking glass.

Re: a system that recognizes the full spectrum of human biodiversity. 

America already had such a system. In theory for many decades, but in deed only in the 1960s. Free market in people. Meritocracy. No institutionalized discrimination on account of race, gender etc. From each according to his proven talents to each suitable job according to society’s needs as expressed in a free employment market.

Most blacks fail at college entrance exams? Fine, maybe they ought to try the stockroom or the sales counter at Macys, or Arthur Murray’s dance school. Equal opportunity. Let the outcome be up to each individual.

Whites fail to gain a “fair share” of glamor NFL and NBA slots? Forget the racial bean counting;  let the best shine. No women firefighters? Too bad. Sooner or later one will be found who can bench press 220 lbs. Give her a chance then – and only then.

We twisted, adulterated and prostituted that meritocratic system out of all recognition, yet it was the very best core of America and the mainspring of its success. That mainspring is shattered now.

One more thing. Except if you be disabled or independently wealthy, you work or you starve, just like in Hong Kong. That’s how you turn even the muddy swamp that was HK into a giant economic engine.

I think there are two reasons why high IQ doesn't propel a country to scientific and technological prominence.  The first is the role of testosterone.  In low IQ people high testosterone is associated with criminality; in high IQ people it is associated with creativity.  And Oriental Asians have the lowest testosterone rates of any of the major groups.  IQ is important, but the reductionist approach should be avoided.

The second reason is cultural. For instance, both Argentina and Bulgaria are within intelligence parameters for whites. But neither has exactly been a hotbed of scientific or technical innovation.

Having studied American slavery pretty thoroughly, particularly the brilliant work of Eugene Genovese, I think Fjordman is being a little hard on bonded labor systems. 

If we assume we were NOT all created equal, then slavery and serfdom at least become comprehensible.

 IQ is about intelligence, which is about the ability to deal with abstractions like past and future.  In particular, high IQ is associated with lower social pathology rates, and with the ability to make good decisions.  It is also the case that IQ is largely inherited, and there is little we can do to raise low IQ's.

Unlike pre-modern societies, modern societies have yet to learn to recognize human biodiversity, much less deal with it well.  Our prison and welfare systems are hardly paragons of success.

Bonded labor is how pre-modern societies dealt with low IQ people.  These low productivity societies simply did not have the money to build prisons en masse or to provide welfare to those too lazy to work.  These people had to be made to work like everybody else.

Capitalism only exacerbates the problem as it benefits the most capable, while largely leaving the less capable to fend for themselves, which historically is at the root of revolution and social instability.  Human inequality means that capitalism will guarantee socialism.

Bonded labor systems, including socialism, suffer from the opposite problem.  Since all the slave, "comrade", or serf has to do (at least in theory) is what they are told to be taken care of, this system is of great benefit to the least capable; it means slaves and serfs don't have to think, something the least capable aren't good at.

I'm not at all sure how to accomplish such a thing, but we need a system that recognizes the full spectrum of human biodiversity.  This would mean guidance for the least capable so they can stay out of prison and be productive citizens while allowing the more capable to reach their full potential.  This system has not yet been created.

I don't have all the answers; I'm not sure I have any of them.  What I am sure of is that the first step to solving a problem--any problem--is seeing that problem for what it is.

 "The Church has morphed into a school of pedophilia, as Alexandra Colen’s article reminds us, or a training prep for dhimmis, as the daily news adduces."

No, since Alexandra Colen and others who are willing to fight the good fight are also members of the Church, Dr Colen's article does not "remind us" of any such metamorphosis.

Thanks for the references. “Not an accident” is a key precept here. It’s not an accident either that this watering down of education, literacy and the ability to think happens alongside similar degradations in practically every other area of Western society. Starting at the hard end, warfare has now evolved into pretend-warfare, at least against barbarian foes. Industrial activity has been replaced by e-mailed orders to Chinese manufacturers of low-cost, low-quality products. Economic activity has been supplanted by printing many more pieces of multicolored, official-looking paper, shuffling this paper between the right pocket and the left one, and surfing on the resulting pools of phantom liquidity. Governance has morphed into a three card monte game run by malignant narcissists. Art has been transformed into a multi-modal codification of serial humping, serial dismemberment or serial libel of the Western heritage. Gender has been transformed into a social construct, injecting humongous confusion and tearing noise (in the Norbert Wiener sense) into the most fundamental element not only of man but of the universe. The Church has morphed into a school of pedophilia, as Alexandra Colen’s article reminds us, or a training prep for dhimmis, as the daily news adduces.

It’s impossible to keep up with the scope and magnitude of all this coordinated destruction. And, returning to the City subject, it’s impossible to mount a proper defense – in deed rather than talk -- except if people who are still literate, discerning of reality and antagonistic to this New World Order revive the historical function of at least a few still-salvageable cities. The history, economic and cultural capital, infrastructure and sociable arrangements of a city, particularly and old one, are necessary so that consolidation of a counter-fulcrum and germination of a new West can take place.

CDU Berlin speaker Peter Trapp and CSU Europe Expert Markus Ferber outed themselves by demanding an intelligence test for immigrants (unfortunately not for politicians). 'Canada demands a higher intelligence for immigrant children than for their own' and 'human reasons cannot be the only criterium for immigration', are the splendid arguments. This Alien-IQ-Test remembers Henry Herbert Goddard, who already in 1913/1914 attested low intelligence of immigrants from Russia and Italy and ... Jews. That wouldn't be politically correct nowadays, would it? Herrnstein and Murray detected other ethnic group to wear the low-IQ label. Hopefully there is a test on the Trap/Ferber species.

Responding to Takuan Seiyo:

I have published quite a bit since the mid-1990s concerning college student literacy, or rather the literacy-deficiencies of college students. It is a truism, but nevertheless a truth, that anti-literate instruction methods in K-12 are responsible for much of the typical college student’s inability to read. But there is one additional factor, among many, that is relevant here. Most of what is offered to students in high school and again in college as literature or simply as reading material is insipid propaganda – like the titles on the “common reading” list – the healthy reaction to which is: “I would rather be water-boarded than read this!” Consequently the idea that the typical college student forms about books is that they are all as boring as Enrique’s Journey or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, two titles from the list.

I have often voiced the opinion that the mere functional literacy and logical confusion of the typical freshman is not an accident. That is to say, it is not the case that educators are urgently trying to produce some other, better condition but are failing for some reason to do so.

Rather, the result that one sees is the intended result. This method of sealing the mind against actual thought is close to the “Newspeak” strategy in Orwell’s novel, but at the same time subtler than what Orwell depicts because it requires no active suppression of the Great Books. The Great Books disappear, even though they continue physically to exist in libraries and private collections, because no one is capable of reading them.

On “gluttony and sluttony”: I too found this to be evidence of a kind of mental activity, not literate, but oral. The orality-literacy distinction enables us to return to Fjordman’s “Cities” topic because literacy was both a cause and a condition of the European city right through the first half of the Twentieth Century. Walter Ong wrote of “the alphabetic consciousness.” Neil Postman wrote of “the Typographic Mind.” Today’s urban masses are not literate, but they are not exactly oral in their thinking either. They possess neither an intact literacy nor an intact orality. They are image-oriented and, to coin a phrase, kinetic-mimetic in their communicative style.

For more discussion, search for Bertonneau + Can’t Read, Can’t Watch, Can’t Comprehend. That is the title of the first of a three-part article for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education policy. Links should take interested parties to parts two and three of the series.

I agree with your point about ‘racist’ but I think that we ought to reclaim this word, like many others. I use it in the non-pejorative sense to indicate an attitude of race-determinism. I do not see anything morally wrong with it, but I see something that is conceptually and factually wrong. To say that the Chinese are shorter than the Dutch is no more “racist” than to say that the Blacks have a lower IQ than Whites. Both are borne out by empirical reality. But it is racist, i.e. conceptually wrong, if you do not bring statistical notions into this – simply because the two tallest men in the world are Chinese, and the man with whom you are having this conversation may turn out to be Walter Williams.

It’s time to stop flinching and cowering when the demented Left starts flinging about its R missiles. At the same time, it’s proper to educate our own primitives that comparisons between groups of people are valid only if you frame them statistically and do not apply deductive reasoning with respect to individual members of such groups. The standard dictionary definition invoking ‘superiority’ ought to be purged too, without necessarily criminalizing the notion of superiority. Superiority in what? Verbal agility or numerical facility? Basketball or fencing?

@T. Bertonneau

I rather like the rhythm of gluttony and sluttony. You have here the transition of our culture from the more left-lobe centric to the right-lobe centric like the African one (the latter being my own observation in situ, can’t cite supporting authority). It’s not longer the nimbleness of the mind flitting between nuances of concepts, but the agility of the hips.

I should very much like to hear your opinion about the “Common Reading List” shared by many US colleges. It would benefit all if someone with your CV took the time to expose the incredible cheapening of the intellectual content, the determined tunneling under Western civilization that’s embodied in this list due to its obsession with books dealing with the Third World or written by writers other than the nonwhite and nondead. No other way to avoid DWM, dead white males like Homer, Virgil or Camoes, is there? I happened upon this subject at the ‘Common Reading and Liberal Bias’ entry in the Pur si Muove blog of a much-too-mild philosophy prof.

I would not dream of disagreeing with Takuan Seiyo. To demonstrate my hearty agreement, I offer the following: The syllabus of my classics-in-translation course (versions of which I have taught at three different institutions) includes Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Iphigenia, Plato’s Symposium, Virgil’s Aeneid, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Augustine’s Confessions, a handful of Icelandic stories including Hrafnkel’s Saga, and two items concerning early Christianity in the British Isles – Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert and the anonymous Voyage of Saint Brendan. The following snippets come from the various final examinations, on which uniformly over the years I have asked students to write an essay discussing the theme of order, as it works itself out in the succession of books. Incidentally, the main character of The Golden Ass is named Lucius. Despite the fact that this name occurs hundreds of times in Apuleius’ story, no student has ever spelled it correctly.

Introductory paragraph for an essay: “Literature is the key foundation for all types of litercy. Without litercy there would be no means of proper communication.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “In the Odessey, Odysseus expects a marvelous homecoming, is slowed down by various absticals, including the island of the cylcopese, and the plod of the suitors to kill Odysseus’ son, which escapes me.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “Odysseus kills the suitors after a lack of proper behavior, which happened again in Virgil’s The Aeneid, written roughly around the time of ca. 400 BC, in the fifth and fourth centuries. Along the way, Virgil is haulted by numerous things, like the stay of Dido in Carthage and hostilities on the land of which we now call Italy and Cecicilli. While in a fight with Tiresias, the death of Tiresias brings some order to the people.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “By examining the books read this semester, I can flush out several quotes. In the first book studied, the Odyssey, by Homer, we examine how our hero, Odysseus is on his way home after saving Troy.”

On Homer’s Odyssey, more or less: “Most of Athens took place in the Labronze age after time emerged again, giving rise to Plato. But first Homer had to write down his Odissy in the alphabet, which The Golden Ass would also use in telling the story of Lucious.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “Athene helps Telemachus and Odysseus to be reunited and restore order to Troy. This all took place around 450 B.C. but it was not written down until 800 B.C.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “Odysseus, the main character, though having the hand of Venus (Venus-Isis) right on his side, is faced with much despair when he has to leave his wife and son’s behind before he goes on many ‘adventures’ and encounters things. He defeats the Cycalopse after barely being eaten and meets Nausicaa while naked then stumbling over Calypso who holds him prisoner and gives him all of the winds.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “Beginning with Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ written down around 800 BC, when infact the events took place in the 4th century. There are many examples of order, tragedy, and some triumph.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “In Homer’s Odyssey while Odyssus is gone for ten years trying to get home from Calypso’s isle about 700 B.C. and enduring the many abstacles he faces along the way, the entire time’s he’s trying to restore order with in his selfs life.”

On Homer’s Odyssey: “The Odessy, written down around 800 B.C., its events are said to actually take place around 500 B.C.”

On Euripides’ Iphigenia: “The Greeks were told by the gods that Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia would need to be sacrificed in order for the winds to blow. After Iphigenia was sacrificed and the winds were blowing again allowing them to continue on to Troy order began to be restored because the Greeks saw their experience with disorder was for a reason and they must trust their leaders and things will be fine in the end.”

On Virgil’s Aeneid: “Had Aeneas disobeyed and stayed in Carthage, he would have never gone on to win the Trojan war, and the country of Italy would not exist. After death, no progress was made on Dido’s part.”

On Virgil’s Aeneid: “A large wooden horse is brought by Aeneas from Troy, which Queen Dido thinks is a sign of appreciation. When the wooden horse is opened up and a number of Greek soldiers jump out, Dido is in shock. Thankfully, Aeneas and his men show up and promise to restore her disorder.”

On Apuleius’ Golden Ass: “Disorder was also present in Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass. This was where Lucius was a young man who lived in the Byzantine Empire. Lucius was about to be forced to have sex with a donkey in front of people. Fortunately he was fond of his own horse and was saved.”

On Apuleius’ Golden Ass: “The story of Lucious, wrote in the second of two centuries AD, has gluttony and also sluttony.”

On Apuleius’ Golden Ass: “In 1517 Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass.”

On Augustine’s Confessions: “Much like Odyssus Augustine, who at one time was reared as a saint in Hippo, is tempted by pretty women as well as by a pear tree. But later he loses his self-control problem and converts into a Christian.”

On Hrafnkel’s Saga: “Thorbjorn rounded up a posse that hacked Hrafnkel to death eventually leaving him tortured. This showed their uncivilized erges.”

On Hrafnkel’s Saga: “Anonymous is the author of Hrafnkel’s Saga but which is never named, showing how weak he was when compared with Homer who was named.”

On Hrafnkel’s Saga: “Hrafnkel’s Saga of the tenth century was written in 1839, the same year as The Voyage of Saint Brendan.”

On Hrafnkel’s Saga: “It is feudalism that causes chaos and halts the further progression of progress.”

On Hrafnkel’s Saga: “Hrafnkel was a great leader because he was understanding and treated animals with kindness as well. He also knew how to kill which was important for a leader.”

On the Vikings generally: “During the ice ages the Vikings diminished and then evaporated.”

[From a Similar Course Dedicated to Medieval Literature]

On The Quest of the Holy Grail: “In ‘The Quest of the Holy Grale’ Galahad, which was by Jean de Joinville of the 17th century, was going around looking for piece of mind. Around this time the enlightenment also occurred.”

On Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis: “The Crusades was a war fought over in the holy land by the Romans, Catholics and Protestants.”

On Camoes’ Lusiads: “About the same time as this there was a renizance in Italy with Greeks, and depth prespective and also numerous changes in moors and the types of thought that was allowed. There costumes were very colorful about this time. One of them, I forgot his name had a telescope.”

Doesn't the very existence of a large number of university towns , each with what might pass as goldilocks' populations call into question placing too much emphasis on numbers as either the source of the problem or the solution?

'Numbers' on this  issue is what is commonly referred to as a distractor answer in standardize testing. While it appears to be a perfectly acceptable answer, the right answer, the more comprehensive answer probably has more to do with morals and ethics, than math and demographics.

BTW, the OSS found IQ tests less then satisfactory in assessing how well an individual would do in the real world; life and death situations, they found it necessary to add tests for what they called "effective," later "practical" intelligence. In other words, a bit of a distractor, when it came to choosing between right and wrong. 

@mpresley – You mentioned an interesting point; what a disappointment the African residents have turned out to be to the Chinese. Of course, the Chinese who are not merely racialist but racist knew what to expect from the beginning, but commie ideology, economic interests in Africa, and a need to acquire a veneer for the sake of trading with the fool West overrode deeply seated prejudices.

@TBertonneau – I believe that the modern American university is to higher education what modern American government finance is to fiscal and monetary probity. It’s a giant bubble full of empty noise and easy gratification. It has grown so for these reasons, among others:

1. Since IQ tests are illegal, for prospective employers a college diploma is a substitute for what a HS diploma (from a real HS) plus IQ test could once ascertain.

2. It’s a major tool for equalizing outcomes rather than opportunities between the races, what with Affirmative Action admissions etc.

3. It serves well the “self-esteem” cult when morons who can’t spell or calculate percentages are given tasseled caps and parchments.

4. It’s a giant re-education camp where a Socialist–Third World Liberationist professoriate can properly orient successive managerial generations.

BTW, I would include law school as a major in purely ideological studies.

@ Prof B & Mpresley

Thank you gentlemen for a good laugh with my morning coffee. Now where is that Takuan S fellow? Is that him with a counter and census form strolling the streets? What's that he is saying? "One, too many posters on this site." ?

Fjordman writes: “Perhaps we had reached a point at the mid-twentieth century where most of the people with very high IQs in the West already took higher education, whereas those who joined later slightly lowered the average IQ of those with a university degree. Critics claim that too many people spend years of their lives at higher education, even those who do not strictly speaking need it.”

The second sentence corresponds to my three decades, more or less, of observing the American university from within, with a few qualifications. (1) Some students are emotionally and intellectually out of place in college, where they have been propelled by peer-pressure, parental pressure, the requirements of affirmative action, or simply by the prospect of a good time as represented on TV and in the movies. These students should be somewhere else – working in a job, taking technical or vocational training, or doing a combination of both.

(2) Some students are marginally prepared for higher education but manage to learn something, a mixture of general and special knowledge, in a marginally coherent way; they leave the institution with a veneer, at least, of civilization. It would probably be no great loss to society if these students joined those in the first group by skipping college for some more meaningful occupation, but at the same time the admittedly less-than-coherent education that they do glean from their studies is not harmful and might constitute a small net gain for civilization.

(3) Some students are competently prepared for higher education, but major in purely ideological subjects. (I would include education studies.) Despite the appearance of their cumulative records (they have higher grade point averages than the students in the second group), the students in this group have nothing constructive to offer society and they likely represent a net decline in the level of civilization.

The charge of gigantism laid against the modern, dysfunctional Millionenstädte is equally applicable to the modern, dysfunctional universities and university-systems. When cities reach a certain population size, quantity, which is already a quality, becomes the opposite quality, and civic order de-coheres (Los Angeles, Detroit, Buffalo). When I attended UCLA for the first time as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, the student population was something like thirty thousand. Some state university campuses, like the one in Columbus, Ohio, boast larger numbers than that. With twenty or thirty thousand students – larger than the population of most European cities in 1700 – there is no possibility of coherence. But there is plenty of opportunity for mischief and manipulation.

The Founding Fathers would have done well to include a second Constitutional stricture on the model of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of education.”

From the “Economic History of Philadelphia”:

“By the 1770's Philadelphia had a population of 30,000 and was the third most important business center in the British Empire, exceeded only by London and Liverpool.”

What strikes one familiar with the city is that the people who formed the dynamo from which sprang many salutary features of American life and of its subsequent republican system lived within walking distance from each other and from the public places they frequented. Benjamin Rush could stop by the Franklin household to collect Ben, walk with him to Christ Church to pick up Robert Morris after morning service, on the way passing by London Coffee House to say hi to Haym Solomon, and continue the small circle via Betsy Ross’s front door to lunch with Thomas Jefferson at the City Tavern. Philadelphia was a sprawling place already then, but the concentration of the people who counted and the walkability of their terrain must have helped in the alchemy that resulted.

I'm a little skeptical of density playing a determinative role , though I understand that hasn't really been asserted by most commentators. A factor yes, but why hasn't places like Syracuse, Buffalo, etc., managed to turn things around after all these years? Shouldn't the density factor be working in their favor? 

Demographics tends to be more a symptom of other problems cultural and moral than the problem in and of itself. (Which you and others on TBJ have noted)

Unless we are talking a sudden, massive influx or exodus of people, I think demographics tends to be more part of the 'what' rather than the 'why' of History.

Note that in my first entry in this thread I wrote:

“We have abandoned the cities to the indigenous and immigrant “visible minorities” of lower cultural development and to the socialist machines that draw them there via income and power redistribution schemes.... To progress – in the non-leftist, non-demented sense of the word – we have to repopulate and regain at least some cities from the socialist mafia and its clientele. Some alchemy is possible in a European-culture city that’s not possible otherwise. And by “European culture” I mean a non-socialist culture.”

All this precludes the examples you bring forth. BTW, I’ve visited in Shenzen and lived for five weeks in Guangzhou. The former is an artificial Frankenstein, but the latter does excel in the only areas in which the Chinese culture still excels: commerce and gastronomy. Anyway, neither the size nor the location of those is applicable to a West-centered discussion of sub-mega cities.

Well someone had to ask it before the google ad popped up. Perhaps even more offensive here on this site is a suggestion that Henri Pirenne might be a good writer to bring into this discussion.

As a refuge from a destroyed City, Buffalo, NY, I'm very familiar with what the good Doctor is talking about. Anyone familiar with the SUNY system and other botched attempts around the country to impose the best and brightest on local populations should not be surprised that one Paris educated quack might muck up everything.

Does size matter? Yes and no, is my kappertian perspective on the matter.

Just one final query. As a teacher yourself, why do YOU think pupils today "find it hard to detect why they should learn"? Whose fault is that? And what would YOU suggest as a viable solution to the problem?

Thank you. 

Perhaps you'd also be kind enough to answer my original question. I'll ask it again.

Q: Are you suggesting that there is too much, or too little discipline in the classroom nowadays?

Cities in 1700 were pretty small: Boston 4000, Edinburgh 5000, Freiburg 8000, Genève 26000, Heidelberg 5000, Leiden 15000, Oxford 12000, Philadelphia 11000 (biggest US City (no exact numbers for Cahokia), Pisa 19000, Uppsala 4000, in comparison the European big ones: Paris 425000, Milano 246000, Istanbul 164000, Kyiv 155000, London 139000, Venezia 132000, Firenze 132000, Praha 109000, ... Only after 1820 began the big rush to the cities and its explosive demographics. In China and India things were different. Beijing reaches the million mark in the 14th century and had its up and down in the following centuries (1700: 1,35 Mio.). In 1700, 5 Chinese cities pass the 500000 mark, and cities like Kyoto, Tokyo, Ayutthaya, Ha Noi, Delhi count more tha a quarter million. Biggest city in the Mediterranean is Cairo with 255000 inhabitants.
Atlanticist: a) Pupil and teacher behaviour has changed over the decades, harsh authoritarian structures were abandoned, the generalistic approach was substituted with focussed teachings. Nowadays, pupils find it hard to detect why they should learn, that's the challenge for education policies. b) I mean perspective in the sense of the word.

Responding to Fjordman and Takuan Seiyo:

I attempted an Internet search, but could not adequately define the parameters, to discover the answer to the following question – What was the population in these cities in 1700 AD?

Boston (North America)
Edinburgh
Freiburg
Geneva
Heidelberg
Leiden
Oxford
Philadelphia
Pisa
Uppsala

I feel absolutely sure that the answer in every case is under 100K; at the next step down in surety, under 50K; and at the next step down, under 25K.

Cities are important. Small cities, shading into large towns, might be especially important. If resisters to the New World Order want to be effective, perhaps they should begin concentrating themselves in cities like Syracuse, New York, or Malmö, Sweden.

Part of the pathology of swollen megalopolitan cities is the college- and university-system that rides on them. The colleges and universities are among the most perniciously anti-civilized pseudo-institutions of the contemporary dispensation. All ten of the cities in my list are conspicuous for their anciently established institutions of higher learning. A single doctorate-holder from the Ecole normale in Paris furnished the ammunition for destroying almost every literature program in almost every North-American college and university.

Further to Dr. Bertonneau’s comment, the small-is-good principle holds true not only for the old days, when world population was much smaller, but for modern times too. The pre-war city of Lwów that I adduced in the previous comment had a population under-300k, and its intellectual, artistic and scientific output was such that Wikipedia has several entries on it. If you look nowadays, the output in these areas in under-300k cities with good universities, such as Montpellier, France (265k), Madison, Wisconsin (208k), Leiden, Holland (117k), Fribourg, Switzerland (34k) etc. seems to be on a per/capita basis many times that of any in the 2 million+ cities.  At least it’s a testable hypothesis. Another one is that the percentage of autochthons is positively correlated with such metrics of accomplishment.

Fjordman writes: “Even if we adjust for population size and measure accomplishments per capita or per thousand individuals, cities still predominate over their rural surroundings.”

Even in Hellenistic times careful observers could see that the dominant megalopolis-type of city differed from the polis-type of city of the Greek world prior to Alexander the Great. Pre-Macedonian Athens, with its property-holding class of fifty thousand adult males – the context of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention the tragic poets – was obviously a distinct and limited phenomenon in comparison with Antioch under the Seleucid dynasty or Alexandria under Ptolemaic dynasty. The population of Alexandria in the time of Julius Caesar might have been as high as half a million. Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius might have supported as many as a million people. Similarly the European burgher-cities of the Fifteenth Century were quite small compared to the Millionenstädte of the last half-century. The burgher-cities had populations in the tens of thousands only. Those were the cities that produced the magnificent articulation of European civilization between the Eleventh and the Nineteenth Centuries. I incline to agree with Oswald Spengler’s sense that the modern Millionenstädte represent an aberration in which the quantitative increase of population translates inevitably into a qualitative decrease in livability on the one hand and a loss of cultural articulation on the other.

My native Los Angeles offers a case in point. In 1954 when I was born Los Angeles was still only a Zweimillionstadt, as it had been in the late 1930s. When I left California in 1989, the population of the city had at least doubled in the meantime; more than that, Los Angeles had merged physically with its many satellite cities so that, even where the city as legally defined ceased and another civic polity began, physically speaking no such frontier was noticeable. Today a monstrous swath of threatening cityscape stretches from the San Fernando Valley to Pomona in one direction and San Diego in another; there is no civic spirit but only the cynical regime of the pro-Mexican city government under its radical mayor.

If Western Civilization has a future, I imagine not to lie with the Millionenstädte, with their metastatic pathologies, but rather with smaller civic polities with populations in the range below a half a million, and perhaps also in small towns with populations in the tens of thousands.

@Kappert

Your post, (as all your posts do), confirm that the Kappert Syndrome does indeed take place. Congratulations!

@Atlaticist

Your prospect for obtaining a coherent reply?

Start flapping your arms, mutter Zionist terrorist epithets and Kappert Airlines will have you landing on Kappert Isle where coherency is always soley dependent on Kappert's perspective.

What do you mean by the phrase "changes in discipline and zealousness"? Are you suggesting there is too much, or too little discipline in the classroom nowadays? Also, when you say "loss of future perspective", did you actually mean to say loss of future PROSPECTS? The latter would suggest all the fault lies with society and the student a completely innocent 'victim' in the process, while the former tends to place at least some of the blame firmly in the lap of the errant student. Which one is it?  

I think one has to 'widen' the pathology you identify even more. The expansion of the welfare state and its mentality that so devastated American cities especially in the NE and the Midwest was simply part of a political patronage system that the Democratic party and their allies exploited to maintain power. Yes a large part, a major component of their blat system, but the ethnic make-up of that network of recipents was hardly confine to African-Americans. The destruction and collapse of America's urban landscape was a multi-ethnic, multicultural undertaking.

Kappert is here making an interesting assertion: 

"As human population grows and will continue to grow, the conclusion which is to be drawn shows that the bigger the population density less intellectual competition will be produced. Means, humanity is going duller."

Unfortunately, I think Kappert, in a fit of Gnostic self-righteousness, is attempting to impose "a secondary reality" on the real world. Hence, on Kappert Island, where Kappert is the only permanent and 'intelligent' life form, it is true that if one was to add a second Kappert to the population  less intellectual competition would be produced. (The headline in the Kappert Castaway Gazette might read: "Kappert Island Dullard Via Second Coming." )

However, whether humanity is doomed to be made duller by an increase in population density, that must remain an open question for the non-Kappertian mind.

Having experienced and explored how this process works in the United States, I reached the conclusion that the Muslim syndrome you cite is just the most extreme manifestation of a wider pathology. The same process has taken place in the U.S. long before Muslims and other 3rd World immigrants started arriving in large numbers. It was the result of the largesse of deluded “progressives” such as Mayor John Lindsey of New York. The largesse attracted black “internal immigrants” from the South, where they had to work for a living, to the large cities where the governing elite lavished welfare on them.

The only city beheaded by Muslims in the U.S. is Dearborn. But the cities beheaded by Blacks are many, and quite a few are beheaded by Latino migrants. Philadelphia, where Whites are a minority and the entire government is black, is now known as Killadelphia. The stories come out of Detroit daily, and they are hair-raising. Los Angeles, if not beheaded, is being strangled by its ethno-nationalist Mexican mayor, with giants swathes of it occupied territory where a hot war is being fought between various groups of foreign invaders and the police tiptoeing out of fear of being labeled "racist."  

BTW, I no longer travel to London or Paris or Amsterdam, though I used to. Those cities are no longer in Europe as far as I am concerned.  

Reconciler: There is very strong evidence in favor of treating IQ as the single most important factor in determining a country's economic level. I'm merely suggesting that isn't the only one.

Takuan Seiyo: As I stated in my older post Beheading Nations http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1183 , We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s “head,” the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this “head” is cut off from the rest of the body? In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia. For some reason, this eradication of unique, urban cultures is to be celebrated as “cultural diversity.”

So, can we learn from this essay? Lacking a definition in the text, here are some clues to show the wide-ranging scientific research and fantasy on the subject. IQ is a Gaussian curve, though flexible and needs constant normalization upgrades, invented by Alfred Binet (1889). Diagnosis for intellectual learning capacity was (is) a top hobby of psycho scientists, like Jürgen Guthke from Leipzig, the Russian School of Psychoanalysis, Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence, Damasio's behavioural neuropsychology. Nicolas Humphrey and Frans de Waal adopt the theories of Machiavelli on Chimpanzees and Bonobos, coming to the conclusion that the thriving force in the development of higher intellectual capacities is the competition within a social group. This brings us to cities. The dimension of a city is of great importance regarding their inner competition structure. Medieval European cities of 20-50.000 inhabitants proved to be most competitive, compared to smaller African villages with around 1000 members and larger Asian cities like Damascus, Baghdad or Beijing with hundreds of thousands inhabitants. Therefore, societies will develop in a different way. It is still pertinent that smaller cities with universities work better than mega-universities in mega-cities. Geography and well-being of the population is a prerequisite for intellectual work and does not affect genetics. Discoveries and inventions will happen, we have many achievements in history worked out by several scientists simultaneously in different geographical sites. Even the non-existence of Newton or Darwin would have postponed the knowledge only a few years or decades. As human population grows and will continue to grow, the conclusion which is to be drawn shows that the bigger the population density less intellectual competition will be produced. Means, humanity is going duller.

There is no scientific basis for the claim that IQ lead nations to thrive better than others in science, technology and cultural development. The relationship is exactly the opposite. The IQ is something that you cannot measure as a potential of unconditioned humans. It is absurd to assume that the IQ is an independent factor from rather than a collective measure for a whole range of human cultural traits and techniques.

Humans irrespective of their nationality or ethnic origin have a potential intelligence at birth that varies across any given population according to a natural probability distribution (Gaussian bell curve). Throw a sample of 100 nigerian and of 100 jewish babies together, they will exhibit the same intelligence distribution as the unmixed samples. Furthermore, there will be no significant difference in intelligence between both groups. Anyone who claims that has absolutely no clue about human genetics, anthropology and science in general or has an agenda.

The Jewish cultural peculiarities alone are the reasons for their high percentage of achievers in science, art and other fields. The nigerian cultural backwardness alone accounts for their lack of achievers. Any Nigerian would have the possibility to become an achiever by our standards, if he had the "right" upbringing. Unfortunately very few Nigerians will ever have the opportunity to grow up in a jewish family. Most of them will be conditioned by their environment to be good Nigerians with Nigerian thinking methods and Nigerian cultural techniques.

Fjordman has opened here an important window, and one we should look through when seeking to regenerate the West. We have abandoned the cities to the indigenous and immigrant “visible minorities” of lower cultural development, and to the socialist machines that draw them there via income and power redistribution schemes. Euro-origin people of accomplishment and of the means that come with that have abandoned the cities, except if they be a part of the socialist system that thrives off the urban dysfunction. However, to progress – in the non-leftist, non-demented sense of the word – we have to repopulate and regain at least some cities from the socialist mafia and its clientele.

You have to add the city now known as Lviv to the class of cities that belonged to different countries at different times and that are linked to the pattern of German –Slavic shifts. As the Austrian Lemberg and Polish Lwów it was the home of the famous Polish School of Mathematics (a few names would be Herman Auerbach, Stefan Banach, Kazimierz Bartel, Stanislaw Ulam, Richard von Mises), renowned economists (such as Richard’s brother Ludwig), scientists like Adolf Beck and Rudolf Weigl, countless artists and thinkers on the order of Martin Buber, Zbigniew Herbert, Emanuel Ax, Paul Muni, on and on.

Some alchemy is possible in a Europen-culture city that’s not possible otherwise. And by “European culture” I mean a non-socialist culture. The same city of the above paragraph produced little of renown in its Soviet reincarnation as Lvov or the Ukrainian one as Lviv. But then, the Germanics, the Jews and the Poles were gone, and that matters too...