Madam, - Desmond Fennell is one of Ireland's most notable public intellectuals. The reading public surely expect more from him than the ignorant and embarrassing farrago he presented in your edition of August 21st.
Dr Fennell laments that "the white race in the West is a dying breed" on account of declining fertility. He should know that no definition of the "white race" is possible. For example, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans are indistinguishable from white people in skin colour. Are these members of the white race, or not? Is he a believer in the "single drop of blood" doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan, which asserts that the slightest tincture of black descent excludes a person and their descendants from the "white race" forever?
If races exist, they cannot be defined by skin colour. Dr Fennell starts with a major category error, and his article goes quickly downhill after that.
His views are straightforward 19th-century Social Darwinism. He believes, apparently, in a "struggle for existence" among races which will be won by the race with superior fertility and virility. But he does not even get the history right.
While Europeans did populate the American continent, it was not because of any superior urge to reproduce, as Mr Fennell believes. It was shown by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) that it was because the first newcomers carried contagious diseases such as smallpox to which the inhabitants had no immunity. Millions of Native Americans died, leaving a mainly empty land for the later whites to populate, assisted by technological superiority.
Australia was already a largely empty, underpopulated land. Despite some temporary dominance, whites failed to populate Africa and Asia because there it was the inhabitants who carried immunity to the most virulent diseases.
If any achievement of Western peoples exists, it resides in cultural and legal norms which are universal. "Race" is an artificial, social-cultural construct. Ideals such as common citizenship, civil rights, gender equality, civil decency and universal humanity are birthrights of all mankind. It is nonsense to suppose that "civilisation" is exclusive to a certain combination of genes, and can be transferred selectively by sexual reproduction. - Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE, Navan, Co Meath.