The secularist writer and podcaster Sam Harris has got into a public scuffle with Ezra Klein, “editor-at-large” of the young-adult news website Vox, over Harris’s recent interview with Charles Murray, and the more general question of the role of genetics in the distribution of traits in distinct human populations.
The absolutist “blank-slate” view of human nature is an essential tenet of the universalist post-modernism currently dismantling Western civilization. It is the load-bearing member that holds up the entire structure: globalism, radical feminism, multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, subjectivism, postcolonialism, and all the rest of it. (It is the One Ring that keeps the Dark Tower standing, and so it must be defended at any cost: this is why social panopticons such as Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become something akin to the Eye of Sauron.)
Into the fray rides Andrew Sullivan, a journalist I respect more than most. (I don’t always agree with him, but he thinks for himself, isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, and when he has something to say he says it well. That’s good enough for me.)
Mr. Sullivan has written an outstanding essay on the Harris-Klein fracas. The gist: he stands for truth. I will offer only a small excerpt, because you must go and read it yourself:
I know this is a touchy, fraught, difficult subject. I completely understand the reluctance to discuss it, and the hideous history of similar ideas in the past. But when people seeking the truth are immediately targeted for abuse and stigma, it matters. When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.
That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble. Because we are robbing liberalism of the knowledge and the moderation it will soon desperately need to defend itself.
Go and read the whole thing here.
8 Comments
Ezra Klein sometimes becomes over wrought on subjects but this one seems to be over the top, or more like below the belt. He holds a deep fear that his core belief can’t hold up to science. We have all been told that to deny science makes the denier all kinds of bad names. Klein and his fellow travelers are on the cusp of losing political and social power if just “classical liberalism” carries the day. Never mind Conservatism.
I predict more violence from the far Left as no view point but theirs can be allowed to be true.
Sullivan has been in fine form since he started writing for New York, less of a drama queen (no pun intended). I’ve noticed for instance that he doesn’t use the term “Christianist” anymore.
It’s sad that more liberals can’t be like Sullivan, since they could provide an essential ballast for absorbing and filtering new understandings in the human sciences. To refer to Whitewall’s observation, it is they who might be in the best position to resolve the tensions and paradoxes of sociobiology and classical liberalism.
Sounds like Sullivan’s mixing some nootropics with his testosterone supplements nowadays.
Jason,
That’s a very good point. But what they are up against is a religious orthodoxy no less concerned for its hold on power than what Galileo faced.
Someone once said something to the effect that had low church protestants not beat them to the punch, progressives would be the most vocal deniers of the theory of evolution.
I would say that they’ve descended into a paradoxical state from which there is no hope of escape, but until their pets start eating them for the crime of being white, I don’t think it much matters. And when it does matter it will be too late.
But in reality the problem is worse than Sullivan thinks (or claims to think). Liberalism is supposed to be a “procedural” philosophy based on “civic and moral equality”, as he says. But what exactly does that mean? How can there really be some set of fair and reasonable “procedures” or some notion of purely “moral” equality that isn’t ultimately dependent on assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of the people inhabiting a liberal order? For example, if there is some kind of procedural justice that liberalism requires, then at least all (normal or typical) citizens must share certain basic rational and moral capacities. Maybe they have to be capable of assessing evidence or applying moral standards without tribal prejudices or narrow self-interest. But then it’s always an empirical possibility that only some human groups tend to have these traits, or tend to have them to some degree sufficient for competently and justly operating these “procedures”. The same goes for “equality”. What is “moral” equality once we strip away any specific empirical basis involving psychological traits that science might reveal to be very unevenly distributed? It’s necessarily an article of faith at that point; but if liberalism depends on a faith that lots of reasonable people can reject, it’s no longer neutral and procedural; then it’s no longer just and reasonable under its own standards.
In the end liberals face a hopeless dilemma: (i) deny any empirical basis for their theory, in which case the theory has no clear meaning or implications for actual human life, and can only be given meaning if it’s grounded on some controversial transcendental belief system; or (ii) admit the empirical basis needed for the theory to be meaningful and useful, in which case no one knows whether its empirical basis is actually true and science might at any time demolish the whole thing.
Liberalism was never really neutral or purely procedural. It was always incoherent, oscillating between the tautological and the unverifiable. And that served a purpose, for a while–wielding power and imposing a substantive belief system, pretending to have no power and no beliefs. But that trick isn’t working so well anymore.
Jacques, that’s a penetrating comment, and rather than discuss it with you in this thread, I will open it up in a post of its own in the next day or two.
Left-wing truth:
Genetics works, but below the neck only.