When I first got onto Twitter back in 2013 and began my journey into becoming an extremely online radical right anon some of the more interesting and novel accounts were run by the HBD crowd. That’s Human Bio Diversity. It’s what we all know deep down, that people and races are fundamentally different, but these people pursued it with an intensity that was very interesting. The scientific side of racism TM. This kind of research gets the most attention usually when people look at the obvious differences, between Africans and Europeans, but I always found the differences within Europe the most interesting. Perhaps the more famous one that readers might know is the Hajnal Line. Proposed by John Hajnal in 1965 it splits Europe in a single line (with some notable exceptions on the map below) with important differences in how marriage and families form.
On the Western side of the line:
Women marry later (usually in their mid twenties)
The age gap between spouses is usually very small
A larger %age of the population does not marry (up to 1/3rd)
Following a marriage the couple move to a new household and establish their own household. They are extremely unlikely to remain in the household unit of the groom as East of the line.
Now the Hajnal line is a theory and has some notable exceptions. You can see Ireland bucking the trend of white North Western Europe for example. So we continue to see variance and there naturally has been more research on this subject. In fact it is a topic worth digging in to in relation to what I really am writing about here that is the evolution of society and the changing of traditions. Britain in particular and other wealthy North West countries like The Netherlands really are markedly different from places like Tuscany in Italy. There are reports contrasting that in 15th century Tuscany a girl of 18 was considered old for marriage and 15-16 year olds were marrying men 10-12 years her senior in contrast to British women marrying at 20-22 to men of similar age. Very different. Genetically these groups aren’t too disparate but the familial structure and way of life on Sicily is just markedly different from that of Norwich.
The question for the traditionalists (small t not Evola and his loons) actually ends up becoming which tradition. To expand on a significant point of variance above regarding the family unit. If upon marriage the expectation from society and your own family is that you will take your bride and start a new household immediately this creates a subtly different form of patriarchy to the notion that your bride would move in to your larger extended family unit dwelling and live there with you for at least a few years. This cultural practice of forging a new neolocal family unit appears to be uniquely Western in contrast to either the patrilocal or matrilocal traditions of the rest of the world. In the Western model of neolocal patriarchy the married man leaves his fathers house or family compound to establish himself with his wife and have children. He alone becomes the head of the family. In the patrilocal tradition of course the married man is NOT the patriarch of the family. He is still bound within the confines of his father’s authority and does not really have his own full authority and autonomy. As a social practice it has to be argued that neolocal family units seem to create higher trust and more open societies in a lot of cases. In some ways the neolocal tradition of Western peoples is a bit anti-tribal in this sense. That is not to say it is necessarily completely anti-generational living though. My own family ancestry research has often revealed census data of grandparents and great grandparents living post retirement with their son who is the true head of a household. The elderly move to live with the younger in a fair number of cases.
The Hajnal line still influences research areas and on Twitter I was interested to be directed to a thread that continued to build on some of the differences between Western and Eastern Europe with regard to women and household formation as this is an interesting topic and way of understanding things. I’ll defer to screenshotting the tweets from the thread I found most interesting (direct paper link):
This seems to suggest that women in the workforce in the West contributed to greater economic development and growth. That in some respects there was more wealth in those societies and women were willing to work in service. This could be as simple a trend as there was increased urbanization in the West versus the East (would need to verify I am just speculating). An increasingly urbanizing, and this could mean small towns, population with more wealth would increase servant opportunities for women. It could also be that as we see in the last image the growth of neolocal nuclear families instead of patrilocal ones in turn leads to more women entering the workforce. My assumption is also that there would have been more economic opportunity for a man to be self supporting outside of his fathers home in the West to allow the neolocal practice to develop and itself become tradition. That goes back to my point now though, it has become our European tradition for neolocal family formation. To leave that would in some ways be revolutionary in this day and age. How far back are we going to emulate what the rest of the third world does? Why would we want to? Is this simple practice critical for a return to a more tribal existence?
Tribalism can mean many things to people. Clearly we can act tribally without requiring a return to patrilocal family structures but the important question for anyone on the path is to still ask themselves what exactly their version of patriarchy looks like. When people talk of valuing the elders does that now mean listening to the nonsense of Boomer parents? In our Western societies the power of the father over his family tends to decline and outright end when his son either starts his own family or his daughter marries into another. This for all intents and purposes has become our tradition and understanding of patriarchy. Men may consult their fathers of course but they have separate households and it is understood who has dominion over each. This is different to the patrilocal tradition where the patriarch remains in control for much longer and his son and daughter in law are subsumed into a larger family. Those are two very different models of organizing society. When looking further back to what is known versus unknown we also find that there are natural limits. In part we are just limited by the evidence that remains and is passed down. The Romans and their writings win again…
Tradition is a tricky thing once you get into the nitty gritty details of it. It makes for great memes and sound bites. “We must retvrn”. Few seem to examine in as much depth the variances in tradition or even the uniqueness of peoples. If we take the view that we in the West are more advanced, which is feels hard not to do seeing our contributions to modern technology and culture then how do we look at theoretically more traditional remaining societies? Faith of course plays a role here and some might be surprised by its absence but Europe during most of those divergences was Christian and we see splits even within shared regions of Catholicism. No doubt though part of the changes in North Western Europe DO stem from the Reformation (itself sometimes seen as in fact a rejection of Christianity by a more pagan people…) and the impact that had. My underlying assumptions remain that Europeans are different from the rest. Our high trust culture societies are unique and not accidental. They are a result of certain traditions dying out and being replaced with new ones that were preserved until very recently. It is the influx of more backward people into our societies that has been our main undoing. That is not to let liberalism off the hook (130iq Anglos will know) but it is to point out without mass immigration from the third world - who retain entirely different traditional attitudes and practices - things would be pretty different. Perhaps even mostly fine.
This tension to me remains unanswered. Ted K had the confidence in his beliefs to elevate and argue for the return to the nomadic ways of say the Hadza bushmen of the Kalahari. His primitivist thought is perhaps the ultimate in returning to traditionalism. He was at pains to point out the lies of the leftist anthropologists of the myth of the peaceful past. He though still saw that life as more desirable. It was shed of so many superfluous notions, it was a return to raw survival and primitive living. The kind man endured for tens of thousands of years. Not just on the savannahs of Africa but in the heavily wooded forests of stone age Europe. If you want to go back this seems the logical point of return. Yet we are not Ted K’s acolytes. Instead we don’t see the baseline as the goal but our baseline as a goal. It matters what tradition of patriarchy you elect to follow, what family organization you want. We should be cautious not to adopt the structures of the non-Europeans in a quest to return to tradition. We have our own traditions and divergences that made us what we are. These things separate us and pull human populations in different directions. That is the real diversity of humans.