A few days ago Dennis Mangan posted at his website, Mangan’s Miscellany, some remarks of mine about a notion he had been discussing: the restriction of immigration on the basis of race. This gave rise to a long comment-thread. The comments were of varying quality, but nearly universal in their agreement that anyone who might suggest, as I did, that race is hardly a desirable or respectable criterion by which to filter out prospective immigrants must be a naive and deluded Pollyanna in the grip of an infectious liberal madness. I was told that to hold such an opinion meant that I was in the “kindergarten stage” of understanding the problem, that I lack “fundamental insight”, that I was an “escapist sloganeer” who, having mouthed “nice-sounding phrases”, imagined that I had “handled the issue”. I learned that I “just want the ideal liberal world”, and that I should “dream on”. I stood in the dock as an exemplar of “liberal, blank-slade [sic] thinking” (Really? moi?? see here, here, here, and most recently, here).
Moving on to actual clinical diagnosis, I learned that I “clearly suffer” from an “infantile disorder” that the blogger Mencius Moldbug (who is, just as an aside, certainly an interesting fellow, and worth reading) has called “human neurological uniformity”, which is:
…characterized by the belief that “modern human subpopulations are neurologically uniform… genetic differences between races… are of no behavioral significance… [and] genetic differences between individuals are of no behavioral significance.” People who do not suffer from this disorder consider that what people look like is, in fact, associated with how they behave.
Although it builds character, no doubt, to offer a thoughtful remark in a public forum and find oneself pelted with rotten vegetables, it is not, as it turns out, an unalloyed pleasure. Perhaps I am too thin-skinned.
Anyway, all of this happened while I was working sixteen-hour days, and had no time even to outline a response, let alone write and post one. Now that I have a few quiet moments, I’d like to make some clarifying remarks. (This is rather a long post, by the way; for that I apologize in advance.)
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