Yes, "Against the Eugenicons"

"Scientific" racism is a political and intellectual dead-end

For the question of the bearing of science on life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. There is not a graph in the world that will explain the place of graphs in the world.¹

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Reader beware: A follow-up post has walked back the remarks offered below

The "science" of IQ

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Before my unfinished series on “the demise of the Mazoozoo race” continues to furthering some antiliberal ranting by Curtis Yarvin, I wish to offer comments more directly related to the controversy that prompted said ranting, i.e. the revelation that a rising libertarian race realist committed, in the past and under a flimsy pseudonym, the thought-crime of actual racism.

While Yarvin parlays this controversy into a bitter critique of liberalism (as I also did in my last post, without mentioning the controversy, since it is irrelevant), a far more cogent and cutting reply was offered by Michael Lind in Compact. It is masterful, though flawed in parts (it steps on a few rakes); and it has riled up the online coterie of statistics-mongering “scientific” race realists who follow in the footsteps of Charles Murray. I heartily recommend it.

This is the article. Compact.

Lind’s thesis

Lind’s thesis is that “scientific” race-realists are just dressing up base tribal animus with shoddy math regarding IQ (SMRIQ), or (a brilliant insight) clutching to SMRIQ to exculpate their self-interested and crassly utilitarianist libertarian ideological beliefs from class-based political critiques. I love this part:

The overlap between libertarianism and eugenic [i.e. SMRIQ-based race-realist] conservatism can be considerable. In public, libertarians usually defend their anti-statist creed in terms of individual rights or Benthamite utilitarianism, arguing that a minimal state would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Yet eugenic conservatism and libertarianism have often complemented each other. For libertarians at a loss to explain why wealth and power are concentrated in market societies, eugenicons have an answer: Rich people and rich families are genetically superior. And for eugenicons in search of a political program short of radical “ethnostate” proposals, libertarianism provides a second-best solution. The danger that resources will be redistributed from the productive, eugenic rich to the parasitic, dysgenic masses can be minimized by shrinking the state and lowering taxation. So can transferring functions from the government, where numbers count, to the market, dominated by a small number of wealthy capitalists defined as “the cognitive elite.” When Hanania, outed as “Richard Hoste,” declared that he had seen the light and abandoned eugenic racism and classism for “classical liberalism,” that is, libertarianism, this was just flipping the same coin over to the other face.

From all of this it follows that the Democratic left’s nightmare vision of rural states filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white-nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy is ludicrously wrong. The eugenicons are no friends of workers. I would guess that most democracy-despising ideological hereditarians in the United States today are well-educated professionals, investors, and heirs to family fortunes. Many live and work in the Beltway, and much of the remainder is concentrated in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, with a few in Austin. “Dissident” scenes in Miami and Lower Manhattan form their cultural meccas.

Lind is right that race-realism is not “scientific,” right that “scientific” race-realism is a dead end, wrong that race-realism is a dead end

The spectacular insight above is preceded by some sharp commentary arguing the case that culture and circumstance better explain disparate racial outcomes than do genetics. I largely agree with all of these notions, which is not to say that I believe the nature of racial “character” is something that is really discernible by scientific means — just that, so far as the “science” seems to show, there is evidence for both nature and nurture, and my natural perception tells me both are probably at play but nurture is a stronger force.

Sandwiching all of that, however, are an introduction and conclusion in which Lind seeks to yoke race realism inextricably to “eugenicon” elitist SMRIQ-ism or to an imaginary amalgamation of Progressive-era eugenics and Naziism. But this is an ahistorical non sequitur.

Suppose that race-realism is not “scientific” (which is true, it isn’t). Then obviously any politics of race-realism that purports to be based on “the science” should be dismissed as obvious nonsense. But that leaves the ethical and political salience of a “naturalistic” or “empirical” race-realism undecided.

Lind’s arguments about the deficiencies in Shoddy Math Regarding IQ tell us nothing about what to think about the claim, “As a generalization, [blank] people I know would rather not have a [blank] [blank]” (your mind is perfectly capable of filling in the blanks). So how does he seemingly narrow the universe of race-realism to pseudo-scientific Progressive eugenics and modern SMRIQ-ist eugenicons (by not even giving naturalistic race realism an ounce of oxygen in his political prescriptions for conservatives and Republicans)?

Lind is channeling and explicitly reinforcing the circular rationalization that gave rise to Progressive eugenics in the first place. Namely, that when Jefferson, channeling Locke, claimed that “all men are created equal,” he had some divine insight special and unique in all of human claims ever made. Eugenics, and now SMRIQ-ism, seek to coax Enlightenment reverence for the scientific method and “scientifically” derived truth toward conclusions that allow for nativist policy prescriptions. In other words it buys the premise that any belief in inequality must be scientific, or else somehow not compatible with the political and cultural heritage of a vague and unspecified post-War social construct.

Lind does not define to whom American Progressive-era eugenics and sterilization escapades were “discredited” due to “association with Nazi racial-hygiene theories,” but presumably he means to the segregated, WASP-dominant white monoculture of the 1950s? From my own research on the rapid forgetting of the Holocaust after World War II I find the claim dubious.²

It seems more plausible that eugenics simply became irrelevant in the US after several decades of immigration restrictions and the assimilation of more exotic Europeans (broadening of the “white” umbrella) brought racial peace of mind by other means. The Civil Right Era, like the antebellum antislavery movement, was always transparently a politics of luxury imposed by a Northern racial monoculture who, as soon as multiracialism finally came to their own doorstep, fled their own cities. In between these impositions levied at the South we have the eugenics era.

The need to dress up racism in Darwinism demonstrates that the only “repudiation” that ever took place within the American liberal tradition is of the feudalist racism of the slave-owning and later segregationist South (what Lind calls the “medieval chain of being” which was replaced by Darwinism and eugenics). But it wasn’t repudiated by organic political revelation; it was repudiated by blood.

What Lind can’t say, but what is in fact at the heart of the tacit assumption that race realism must be scientific or else disqualified as a political lens, is that the imaginary authenticity of Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” is unquestionable because otherwise the Civil War is just an incomprehensible act of violence on the part of the North. This blood obligation to repudiate the South in fact is explicitly acknowledged in the Gettysburg Address:

[W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Imagine if today, Arkansas sent several hundred thousand Irish immigrants to raze Texas. What could possibly justify that? Whatever justification was cited, would afterward be seen by everyone as some immutable element of truth, part of the fabric of the universe. And this is why coastal thinkers confronted with the social crisis of immigration in the early 1900s resorted to new, “scientific” (hereditarian) explanations for their racism — they couldn’t just affirm the vanquished and backwards Southern, feudalist rationales.

However, “scientific” race-realism will always be a political and intellectual dead-end. In so far as it ever has political salience, it will only be because the suppression of more naturalist race-realist politics has led to social conditions that drive liberal society to great heights of dysfunction (where the Mazoozoo series will pick up when it resumes). It will emerge (as an actually potent politics in liberal America) under the same conditions it did 100 years ago, totally regardless of what Nazi Germany ever did and any supposed “repudiations” of the same, and with no particular intrinsic limitations on its praxis — except “same conditions” refer relatively to what drove urban (pseudo-scientific) nativists to reach for such rationalizations 100 years ago vs. what will drive more desensitized urban societies to do the same today. But perhaps the onslaught of media propaganda in Civil Rights age has ensured there is no such boundary.

It will never have political salience, however, because it is convincing. While the first era of hereditarianism took place when “science” was still a realm of frontiers, when multiple theories of reality could hold equal standing, today “science” is a guild of credentialism and consensus which only permits one theory of reality. In other words, it will never matter to the lay reader not predisposed to “want secret racism knowledge” what IQ studies show, because there will always be an authority on the subject that dismisses those same conclusions out of hand.

Intellectually, Shoddy Math Regarding IQ will never be convincing because “science” is too blunt and error-prone a tool to use on human life. In all aspects of biology, there are gradations, and these poison what might at a 1,000 feet seem like simple questions. When we ask, “what is A like, compared to B” in biology, it turns out there is no such thing as A or B; there are many different things being lumped into either category and measured imprecisely. Lind demonstrates how this complicates racial research:

In the same way, eugenicons write about the IQ scores of “whites,” “blacks” and “Hispanics,” using conventional US Census categories or similarly loose definitions of the races. For example, drawing on his 2009 dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” the conservative commentator Jason Richwine argued for changing American immigration policy to admit fewer Hispanics on the basis of a Hispanic “immigrant IQ deficit.”

The problem is that terms like “non-Hispanic white” and “Hispanic,” even when used by the Census Bureau, are decidedly arbitrary and unscientific. Lumping together a Greek-American with a Norwegian-American to get a generic “non-Hispanic white” IQ score, and then lumping together, say, a Mayan from Yucatan with an Argentine of wholly Italian ancestry to get a generic “Hispanic” IQ score, and then comparing the two numbers as though the results tell you anything significant about “races,” is an exercise that confirms nothing except the old adage of computer programmers: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

And regarding evolutionary theorizing on racial differences:

The attempts of today’s “race realists” to come up with evolutionary explanations for real or alleged differences among today’s populations are as pseudoscientific as their statistical legerdemain. Rushton, when not theorizing about the brain-to-penis ratio, also speculated that Africans were inherently lazier and less organized than Europeans because the “cold winters” of the European Ice Age equipped Europeans with superior genes for social cooperation. Rushton died in 2012, but his “cold-winters” theory lives on. Here is another eugenicon, Bo Winegard, in “Human Biodiversity: A Moderate’s Manifesto,” published in the journal Aporia in March: “And suppose that humans have occupied cold environments for many thousands of years (a hundred generations or more). Under such conditions, those humans who were slightly more predisposed to, and better at, cooperating would likely have had better reproductive success.” Hunting wooly mammoths on the tundra required advanced planning, you see, but on the savannah you could just reach out and grab a gazelle as it ran by.

Science cannot tell us when to use science

Once he has exhausted his summary of critiques of SMRIQ-ism, Lind points out that SMRIQ-ists pose themselves as the only alternative to post-BLM absolute censorship of talking about Black criminality, obscuring as it were the alternative explanations of class and culture which provide a “third and more plausible set of answers.”

Here, again, I would agree with Lind, but point out that he has fallen into the circular assumptions that are the foundation of “scientific” race realism to begin with.

Say that I believe class and culture, rather than heredity, better explain why Black children do not excel at school (I do) — does this obligate me to affirm all, let alone any, of the premises of the Civil Rights Act? Can I not still arrive to race-realist conclusions? Could such conclusions still have salience in conservative or Republican political contexts (if I cared about such a thing)? Could they have salience in urban, leftist political contexts? Again, the implicit conclusion on Lind’s part that nurture-based influences on racial outcomes do obligate abandonment of race realist politics is simply a non sequitur. “I have proved that the only racism you may have is backwards, feudal racism; therefore you cannot have racism.” Why?

Class and culture primarily causing racial differences (as I believe) does not render false the claim, “As a generalization, [blank] people I know would rather not have a [blank] [blank]” Likewise, it does not in fact render false any race-conscious politics one can come up with. 20th-Century Darwinian racism did not in fact retroactively render all other forms of racism “obsolete” like some sort of human software update.

Backwards, feudal racism may be incompatible with “science,” and the repudiation of the same may in fact be the necessary end-point of “scientific” liberal politics — i.e., if one demands of a society that it follows Locke and Jefferson to the bitter philosophical end, they may need to abandon feudal racism. But in fact it is not incompatible with all manifestations of liberalism; Jefferson had slaves, and deemed Blacks racially incapable of intellectual function. Merely to demonstrate that “scientific” racism is a sham is not to explain why racism is incompatible with liberalism (or why, even if it is, a society in the Christian tradition, as Lind speaks to, should shun it, in blatant contradiction of the human reality of the Bible).

Lind references the mob of denunciation published by The New Republic in the wake of the same magazine’s excerpting of Murray’s The Bell Curve. Skimming the wall of text, I noticed that Leon Wieseltier made a contribution, and my eye immediately halted. In it, Wieseltier explains precisely why the “fabric of reality,” as I put it — that which makes it seem like humans should evaluate each other “scientifically” (or not at all) — is an illusion:

Or so I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics. Before Murray, I had never made the acquaintance of "visuospatial abilities" or "the digit span subtest." I do not doubt that there is such a thing as intelligence, and that there are better and worse methods of measuring it. But Murray's enterprise collapses, theoretically and morally, long before he gets to his graphs. For the question of the bearing of science on life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. There is not a graph in the world that will explain the place of graphs in the world.

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1. Wieseltier, Leon, “The Lowerers.” (October 14, 1994.) The New Republic.

2. See “The Forgetting of the Holocaust.”