I’ve just read a fine paper by Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, on the censorship. suppression, and misrepresentation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the heritability of intelligence and the statistical distribution of intelligence in different human populations.
The gist is this: that a great deal of evidence has already been gathered in support of the commonsense idea that intelligence (along with other cognitive qualities) is indeed substantially heritable, and will naturally be distributed somewhat differently among long-isolated populations subjected to greatly different selection pressures. Efforts to “falsify” this hypothesis, meanwhile, have not succeeded, and have in fact met with stubborn failure. Mr. Cofnas argues that the evidence from genetics and neuroscience is likely, before long, to become overwhelming, and that the responsible thing for scientists and philosophers, as well as cultural and political leaders, to do is not to try, with increasing desperation, to sweep the truth of human diversity under the rug, but rather to think about its moral and social implications, and how to adapt ourselves and our societies to it all honestly and fairly.
Mr. Cofnas considers first the science itself, and then the moral and philosophical questions it naturally raises. Are there truths we shouldn’t seek? Perhaps, says Cofnas, but this isn’t one of them — and like it or not, research into genetics and neuroscience is going to proceed anyway whether we like it or not. The truth will out.
Moreover, there is a question of justice:
Linda Gottfredson observes that “currently, racial parity in outcomes is often treated as the ultimate standard for fairness and lack of parity as a measure of White racism”. Those who deny that there is evidence in favor of hereditarianism are forced to conclude that phenotypic differences between groups “must be artificial, manmade, manufactured. Someone must be at fault”). However, if hereditarianism is true, then it may be that no one should necessarily be blamed for different average outcomes among groups. There is no theory of justice that says it is right to falsely blame a group of people for wrongs they did not commit because confronting the exculpatory evidence causes us discomfort.
The paper was published in the journal Philosophical Psychology. I expect that Mr. Cofnas is already feeling the heat for writing it; it was brave of him to do so. Read the whole thing here.
19 Comments
“ There is no theory of justice that says it is right to falsely blame a group of people for wrongs they did not commit because confronting the exculpatory evidence causes us discomfort.”
It’s true that progressivism is more of a distributed Manson family than a theory of justice, but they do use the word “justice” for exactly that idea.
Well, almost, except they wouldn’t say “falsely”. And there’s the rub. (I let the split infinitive pass in silence.)
Though I agree entirely with Cofnas (and David Reich, who wrote about this in the New York Times) — that is, as a society we must come to grips with this hard truth the way an individual must (in a normative sense) confront hard truths in his life — I can understand the difficulty many people have had in coming to accept race realism, especially differences in average intelligence among racial groups that evolved in different environments. Just think if Group A were physically subjugated and enslaved for centuries, and when freed (though not brought out of their relative impoverishment), they failed to achieve parity with the rest of their society, including with descendants of the group that had enslaved them. If we had no indicators of native intelligence and had to judge only by history, we would not feel at a loss for an explanation, indeed we would not feel harried to look farther than environment. No huge mystery here, it would seem: it is not as if the historically prosperous group is the one mysteriously lagging in test outcomes. Where evidence did arise to suggest a doubt to us about the environmental explanation, our moral indignation might override our reason.
If one were to devise a situation the truth of which humans would struggle to assimilate, it would be hard to rig something more nettlesome than race realism seen through the lens of our own history. Consider: reality appears to have delivered a terrible double whammy against blacks and non-Spanish Hispanics: they both compare unfavorably in the natural endowments conducive to economic success (in an information economy) AND have a history (as a people, obviously, not each individual), in recent centuries, whose dominant note is one of woe rather than jubilance, with aggressive acts of domination by others a legitimate explanation of the latter. It is almost too terrible to fathom — but it seems to be the situation. It is what it is, as they say. It is made no more palatable by an aspect of having to admit the Nazis and racists were right about some things, indeed about the first premises on which their systems were built. (As A.N. Wilson says in his biography of Hitler, he is the “Demon King” of history who controls modern thought by delimiting which positions are unacceptable and are to be combated, to the point that the whole structure of globalism is a reaction against his animating nationalist principles. That race realism, another of his core doctrines, should prove true, in general if not exactly as he framed it, is antithetical to the anti-Hitler project that has defined the modern world.)
We may need a day, week, month, year, decade, or century of mourning officially promulgated for the rejection of the egalitarian thesis. I say that only half-jokingly. Some real process of mental adjustment at the societal level will need to unfold. And it will need to involve everyone: a large measure of grace and humility from those Nature has graciously endowed, a heroic measure of acceptance from the others (cf. the temperance Plato saw as the underclass’ defining virtue), and all this somehow done while acknowledging anomalous outliers in each group. I believe humor can help, a shaking of the head and a chuckle over the weird hand we have been dealt. As well, some Stoic wisdom about striving to change only what we CAN change (which is not clear, as it raises the question of transhumanism and tinkering with IQ, perhaps the new chapter of human history after our time). It may be wise and necessary, in light of race realism, to bring about an end to the correlation between economic standing and the genetic lottery, if this can be done without too badly damaging the incentive structure the makes society go. This cuts against some of my instincts, but it would be preferable to living under the cloud of an all-embracing lie. For five-hundred years we have been pushing hard at boundaries humans never conceived as anything but fixed. The next five-hundred may find us gradually developing an acceptance of those boundaries that are deeply etched deep where we’d rather they not be.
Merry Christmas!
Casey,
Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I too have for some time now viewed the grotesque self-abnegating contortions of the modern world as the result of its “anti-Hitler project”; it explains a great deal. The destruction of Europe by mass immigration is a good example. “Hitler’s revenge”, someone called it.
You lost me with this, though:
It can’t, and the problem would be far more extensive than economics. As the Durants wrote:
We’d need a Diana Moon Glampers on steroids to make that leveling project work in a place like America, and it would cause far more problems than it would solve. Moreover, you can’t crush natural inequalities except with power, which after all just introduces another set of inequalities. As the Durants said: in the end superior ability has its way.
Much of this problem would go away tomorrow if we stopped making an imaginary equality that has never existed in Nature our highest aim. People vary in every imaginable way, and we have always accepted this quite naturally as it applies to variation within groups. That there may be variation in the distribution of traits between groups still says nothing whatsoever about any individual; it is up to each of us to be the best we can be with what nature has given us.
On the issue of justice… It’s not only that white Europeans are wrongly blamed for the (relatively) low achievement of some other groups, but that we are never given credit for our own achievements. It’s important to emphasize that this aspect of current thinking is unjust even if race realism is false or not yet adequately justified.
Suppose for the sake argument that the dominant ideology is true. (Of course it’s not true but just suppose.) Then we would still have this situation: White Europeans are responsible for oppressing certain other groups over the last few centuries, but they are also responsible for creating virtually the entire modern world–almost everything that almost everyone values. The science and technology and medicine, the art and literature and music, the architecture and infrastructure. Almost all of that was created by us.
We even invented the language and concepts and moral framework used by our enemies to condemn us. Without our world-historical influence it’s very unlikely that anyone would think that slavery or conquest or oppression of racial others was immoral. They probably wouldn’t even notice these things or think about them; slavery and oppression (etc) would simply be taken-for-granted features of human life as they generally were for most people throughout human history.
And yet, within the dominant discourse, all of our distinctive achievements are credited simply to “humans” or “mankind” or “humanity” or “people”. Our achievements are credited to everyone while we alone are blamed for our sins. And even when everyone else did the same bad things.
Given that this is how people have been trained to think, it seems doubtful that empirical facts alone can solve the problem. People already accept an internally incoherent anti-white-European ideology. Would new empirical facts cure them?
Jacques,
A very important point, that — and one that is almost never made, even on the identitarian Right.
Quite so. It is also worth noting the pair of simultaneous assumptions needed to support such an attitude: first, that the astonishing, world-making achievements of white Europeans were possible only because the Europeans conquered, harnessed, and plundered the other peoples of the world; and second, that the Europeans were able to do all that conquering, harnessing, and plundering despite there being no intrinsic differences at all among human populations.
Yes, each one of those assumptions is inherently implausible. They’re jointly super-implausible. And then, in “reasonable” current year thinking, people derive inconsistent conclusions from this super-implausible basis. So it seems hard to believe that any amount of scientific evidence would make much difference to what most people think. People who already accept _this_ are probably not going to be troubled by results in genetics (for example) which are unintelligible to the layman without lots of expert commentary. And the experts will no doubt find ways to confuse and mislead just as they did in the past. (Lewontin’s fallacy being the best known example.)
There’s something absurd in the project of seeking cutting-edge genomic evidence for race realism. It’s as if people were waiting to find out more about string theory before deciding whether water runs downhill. (Or, I guess, whether it is the physical nature of water that makes it run downhill rather than people’s beliefs about water or some funny additive in all water samples so far observed.)
Imagine intelligent aliens landing on earth anytime in the last 500 years, or 2000 years for that matter. In some places they find humans living in mud huts and fighting each other with sticks and stones. In other places they find roads and sprawling cities and aqueducts and bridges and harbors, etc. This pattern persists over many centuries. Eventually the second group has nuclear weapons and super-computers and rockets that go to outer space, while the first are still living in mud huts when left to their own devices. And these different human groups are clearly genetically distant from each other. Would the aliens really think it was _equally likely_ that the differences were partially hereditary as opposed to being purely environmental? Would they think it was even _somewhat likely_ that the differences were purely environmental?
When human scientists go out into nature and find distinct sub-species that behave differently over many generations, and regardless of where they are, they don’t regard it as _equally likely_ that these differences are hereditary as opposed to being purely environmental. Instead the default assumption is always that the differences are at least partially hereditary. No normal person thinks that pit bulls and golden retrievers would be just the same psychologically or behaviorally if not for the effects of “culture” or “stereotype threat” or whatever.
From a rational perspective the onus lies with “egalitarians” to offer some evidence for the outlandish theory that all these differences are purely environmental in origin. But instead we have people like Cofnas trying to make the case that maybe, just maybe, there will someday be evidence strong enough to support the race realist or hereditarian hypothesis.
I wonder if there was ever a time prior to maybe the last 100 years when intelligent people believed that there were “no intrinsic differences at all between human populations”. But now most of them believe it, for no discernable reason whatsoever. It’s just how the world _has to be_ apparently. We’re up against some kind of mass psychosis.
Again: it’s Hitler’s Revenge. I really do believe that much of this mass delusion is the result of the crisis of evil that the Nazis brought upon the world (and also, of course, it has to do with who was in charge of re-educating the West in the years after the war).
I wrote a post about this in early 2017, arguing that this hyper-reaction against the idea of human biodiversity in the wake of Nazism was in part a result of secularism:
I don’t think racism is anathema because of what Hitler did. As you say, Stalin did worse and yet Marxism is still taught in our universities. Since Marxists were allowed to disavow Stalin as an aberration, I see no formal reason why Power could not have discovered a “Trotsky” of racism, even a Nazi “Trotsky.” If Power had wanted to do that (which it evidently didn’t), the universities and media would today boast a sizable cohort of “Trotskyite” Nazis (which it evidently doesn’t).
The Power behind this is not at all simple, but I’ll note two aspects that I think are important. Both relate to what you say about secularization. The first is that Progress becomes far more doubtful if the propositions of the race realists are true. The Myth of Progress always depended on great alteration of human beings through environmental changes (mainly education). The glorious future of god-like men and women evaporates if the race realists are correct. (Eugenics tries to save Progress on race-realist assumptions, but Progressives turned against it.)
The second thing I would note is that anti-racism offers people what we religious types call “cheap grace.” Anti-racism at first defines its opposite as a homicidal hatred that almost no one feels, and then awards indulgences to everyone who is not guilty of this very rare sin. As the very name “anti-racist” (or Antifa) reveals, this is a negative identity without any real substance.
We on the Right have some experience with negative identities, and of perils of “cheap grace.” Conservatives were right to oppose Communism, but when their negative identity of anti-communism became obsolete, their positive identity was too weak and fragmented to resist the spurious neo-cons.
But to repeat my main point, racism is anathema (and Hitler is Satan) because the hope and moral complacency of so many powerful people requires its falsehood. If it is true, their bright future suddenly turns bleak, and their moral balance sheet suddenly turns negative.
Professor Smith,
I must stick to my guns here. The Second World War marks a sharp divide between the commonsense understanding of human biodiversity that prevailed up till then, and the hypersensitivity toward any whiff of ethnic/racial identitarianism that took over in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is quite clearly due to what Hitler did, I think, and not at all about what Stalin or later despots did.
The difference is that while Stalin’s atrocities were committed against faraway peasants, Hitler’s took place in the heart of the West — and struck down an enormously influential artistic and intellectual class. Members of that same group were in the forefront of the program to re-educate a shattered Europe after the war. In the wake of the horrors of Nazism, they were in a position to exert an outsized cultural influence throughout the West, and had (and still have) an obvious interest in promoting multiculturalism and tamping down any tolerance of identitarian sentiment in majority populations. (One can hardly blame them.) The evil of Nazism was so enormous, and so close to home, that this reaction, which has itself done great harm to Europe, seems, if not inevitable (it’s always a mistake, I think, to look back at history and call things “inevitable”), then at least understandable.
Now the massive pendulum begins to swing the other way again.
Boasian anthropology predates Hitler. It was the leading school in that field before WW2.
chedolf,
Yes, it’s a fair point to bring up Boas. There is a certain irony it it also, because Boas was a consummate particularist, whose criticism was directed in large part against what he saw as overly generalist theories of race (and in particular, teleological theories of cultural development). His method of argument was to find falsifying counterexamples, which are by themselves sufficient to knock down too-general theories. Racialist academics back then spoke less of group differences in terms of varying distributions of traits than as monolithic populations, and Boas was right to push back against this. He also saw that various non-genetic factors (poverty, conquest, etc.) could keep a population below its potential.
As a Darwinian, though, it would have been inconsistent for him not to understand that selection could affect more than superficial traits. So much is made of his resistance to racism that I am not aware of what he had to say about this.
But the real point in the context of this discussion is that Boas’s influence did little to move the needle in the general culture; his battles were mainly fought in academia.
The irony here is that to present Boas as the singular exception that falsifies the general theory (in this case, that it was the Holocaust and its aftermath that brought racism to the forefront of a rapidly secularizing culture’s list of deadly sins) is itself exactly the sort of thing Boas himself would do.
Here an article discussing “Hitler’s revenge”, with excerpts from Diana West and Peter Brimelow (who, I think, coined the term).
I think it is at the very least fair to say that the reaction to the Holocaust was broad and deep — and that regardless of the extent to which universalist tendencies were abroad prior to the war, they rapidly became dominant, with near-religious fervor, in its wake. (Perhaps “near”-religious even understates the case.)
Malcolm,
I try to be concise to make comments readable, but I should have spelled out that I agree the Holocaust had a powerful accelerating effect on the campaign to make equalism our civic religion.
We disagree, though, on the significance of the intellectual groundwork produced before the war. It doesn’t make sense to dismiss Boasian anthropology as a singular example. You seem to be writing off an entire field that purports to speak authoritatively on the relevant matter (race) by reducing it to Boas, an individual professor.
I’m also surprised that someone like you who values Moldbug minimizes Boas and company because their “battles were mainly fought in academia.” Where do you think the ideas at the heart of our mass psychosis originated? NYT writers and MSNBC hosts just preach what they learned in school. It’s unclear what the solution could be, but I do admire Moldbug’s joke that driving “a tank or two into Harvard Yard doesn’t sound like such a bad idea at all.”
chedolf,
Well, good, I’m glad we agree about that, and I do thank you for your comments.
Whatever “equalism” was before the war, it certainly wasn’t our “civic religion” yet, with today’s mandatory professions of faith and persecution of heretics. (We’ve had other civic religions, before and since, most of which have also bubbled up from Harvard and the descendants of the Puritans. I’m fine with those tanks.) One need only look at the depiction of race in pre-war popular culture — movies, books — to see how different things were. While Boas was making his case, people were lining up to see Al Jolson in blackface, and as late as 1939, Agatha Christie published a novel called Ten Little Niggers.
Whatever “equalism” was before the war, it certainly wasn’t our “civic religion” yet…
Yes, it takes decades for an academic ideology to become the ruling class ideology, because 20-yr-old college students don’t run the world. Why do you think that’s an argument against the significance of the academic stage of the process?
Full article is worth reading, but this part stood out:
– Frank Salter, “The Ethnic Predicaments of the Shrinking White Majority“
chedolf,
I haven’t denied the importance of academic influence on the general culture, and of course universalist ideas had been gradually taking hold, starting in places like Harvard, since the late 1800s.
It is important also, however, to look at who it was that brought Gramscian ideas to the American academy “by the 1930s and 1940s” — notably members of the German intelligentsia who had fled Hitler.
Malcolm,
Great point about the Germans arriving in the 30s and 40s.
chedolf,
Thanks. Things might have been quite different in the West had the Nazis not chased them over here. More than just Europe was left in rubble, I’m afraid.