Imagine an ideal religious town where people follow God perfectly. This would be a utopia. Now imagine that something goes wrong with the water system in town and this poisons the brains of the people and makes them go insane. Because they are insane, they no longer understand religion well. A visitor to the town may see that they don't understand religion well, and assume that this is the problem, and that they just need to be taught religion better. But of course this is nonsense. The only solution is to fix the water system because this is the cause of the problem. Religion cannot fix this problem.
Adding to the story, a few people in town feel inspired by God to move out of town and they dig their own wells. So they recover and become sane. But they believe that their sanity comes from their religion when in fact it comes not drinking bad water. Living rurally, they don't deal with townspeople much and don't realize how completely crazy they are. Someone comes to these rural people and proposes promoting a water filtration system for the town, but these people reject the idea because they believe that the problem in town is bad religion.
This story is an analogy to what we face today. Instead of bad water, the problem is bad culture and bad genetics. Religion cannot directly fix these problems. But some religious groups have managed to avoid these problems by avoiding modern culture and not intermarrying with the dysgenic mainstream. And I expect that some religious groups will reject nonreligious solutions because they mistakenly believe that religion is the only thing that matters.
The Arkian idea is a general solution to these problems, a filtration system that filters people rather than water. This system can work for anyone wherever they live and whatever they believe. It does not change religion because religion isn't the issue. But it does need the support of religious communities to implement it because they are the only groups who can do it. Everyone else is just too insane.
The Arkian idea is to form a eugenic intentional ethnicity. Undoubtedly I have offended most readers already with this first sentence. But should you judge terms like "eugenics" based on popular opinion or based on truth? Clearly the starting point should be to define eugenics.
Eugenics means "of good birth" and was invented by Francis Galton in the 1800s. He was concerned about human genetics and wanted to make sure that people didn't decline in genetic quality.
"Genetics" is another term that upsets some religious people. They automatically assume that genetics assumes the idea of evolution. But this is simply not true, and whether or not you believe in evolution is irrelevant to my arguments here. Instead I would ask if you believe in breeding farm animals? If you do, then you believe in genetics. And if farm animals can be bred, why not people? We know that just like with animals, human children inherit the traits of their parents.
So now the question is do you support breeding people. For example, we know that there are many genetic diseases. If people with genetic diseases had many more children than healthy people, humanity would soon be overrun with genetic diseases. Wouldn't it be reasonable to do something about this by encouraging healthy people to have more children than those with genetic diseases? The current problem facing humanity isn't genetic diseases, but rather stupidity and bad morals. Stupid people with bad morals are currently having many more children than smart people with good morals.
But let me return to the history of eugenics and why it got such a bad reputation. This is described in the book Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction. After Galton, eugenics quickly became a progressive movement that pushed government eugenics programs that included compulsory sterilization, racial planning, pushing contraception, and pushing feminism (considered to be eugenic). Of course this contrasts with the current leftist position against eugenics, but this raises the fundamental question of what it really means to be progressive/leftist versus conservative/rightist.
I think the core difference between progressives and conservatives isn't so much their positions on specific issues as it is their general approach to thinking about issues. Progressives have infinite faith in human reason, so they have no problem using government programs and government coercion to pursue their "logical" goals. Progressives tend to be reductionist and will reduce an issue to a set of causes and then act on those perceived causes. In effect, progressives want Man to play God and to micromanage everything. In contrast, conservatives are more humble and more skeptical about human reason. Conservatives would rather trust what has proven to be true over time, and would rather trust God or the forces of nature than trust human management.
Now let's apply this to eugenics. Suppose you wanted to organize a running team. How do you select members? The progressive would study running in detail and find everything that may cause good runners, or at least what correlates with good runners. They may notice, for example, that blacks are faster on average than whites, so they would select blacks. They may look for genes that are found in fast runners and select people with these genes. All this fits the progressive approach that I just described. How would a conservative select team members? A true conservative would just time candidates and select the fastest ones without worrying about any other factors. The factors that cause fast runners can be left to God or nature, the conservative doesn't care and just wants fast runners. Jesus well expressed this conservative view in Matthew 7:16-20.
We can take this one step further and ask how can one breed a population of fast runners. The answers would again be like what I just described, with progressives using complex reductionist approaches, while conservatives would just add fast runners to the breeding group, and remove slow runners.
I am purely a conservative and I detest the progressive approach to everything. The general view on eugenics is that the Nazis ruined the reputation of eugenics and this is why it lost favor. But my view is that the progressives had already ruined eugenics before the Nazis, and that the conservative opposition (especially Catholic opposition) to eugenics was based on eugenicists playing God. I don't think these conservatives opposed animal breeding and I don't think they would have opposed a conservative form of eugenics which would be similar to animal breeding.
But it was the Nazis who ultimately ruined the reputation of eugenic. This is because of their cruel racist authoritarian progressive approach. The Nazi approach was simply wrong and ineffective. The Arkian approach is almost the exact opposite of the Nazi approach. The Arkian approach is conservative with no compulsion.
An argument against eugenics is the position that nurture (environment) plays a much larger role than nature (genetics). The nature versus nurture debate is old, and I do not want to argue it here. The Arkian idea doesn't depend on this debate. The only assumption required for the Arkian idea to make sense is that children tend to have similar traits to their parents. Whether these traits as passed from parents to children by genetics or by upbringing makes no difference. So the nature versus nurture is only a debate about the means of transmission, not the question of whether a transmission from parents to children happens at all.
Let's consider again the question of how to "breed" good runners. Suppose that genetics plays no role in how fast people run. The above conservative breeding plan of adding fast runners to a breeding group, and removing slow runners, would still work as long as parents pass on running skills to their children by raising them to be fast runners. This breeding approach only fails if parents don't pass on running skill to their children by any means.
In this case, why is Arkian described as "a eugenic intentional ethnicity"? Because I think of it that way because I believe in genetics. But if you don't believe in genetics, you can describe Arkian as "an intentional ethnicity of good breeding" where "good breeding" can cover either nature (genetics) or nurture (upbringing).
The Arkian idea selects for intelligence and morality. While I personally believe that genetics plays a role in these traits, I also believe upbringing plays a role. Culture and religion are undoubtedly important factors. The Arkian approach selects for these traits regardless of their source.
Now I would like to discuss "ethnicity". According to Wikipedia:
This should contrasted with "race" which is only based on ancestry. So race only means a genetic group. This meaning of "race" is modern. In the past, the terms "race" and "ethnicity" were more similar. But the modern distinction is clear and useful. The Arkian idea is not concerned with race, but only with ethnicity.
For an ethnicity to form, the critical thing is for people to marry within the group. This is how the shared attributes are passed to the next generation. In general, any group that mostly marries within the group will become an ethnicity, while any group that mostly marries outside the group will not be an ethnicity.
The Arkian idea is to form a eugenic intentional ethnicity. For what purpose? To produce a group of people with high intelligence, religiousness, and ethnocentrism.
It is my opinion that these traits are being rapidly lost in the general population. The next section will go into details. But generally I would ask you to name one single area that has improved since 2010. I can't think of one. In modern culture, everything only gets worse. Areas that come to mind include music, art, movies, architecture, software, politics, conversation, science, customer service, etc. The name "Arkian" comes from Noah's Ark with the idea being that the Arkian ethnicity is designed to be a refuge to preserve what is good about humanity in the face of a global dysgenic culture that is making almost all of humanity go bad.
Most religions are independent of ethnicity and serve all ethnicities. What religion wouldn't benefit from adding an ethnicity that is highly intelligent and religious? This is the value that the Arkian idea has for religions.