My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yet know quite what the balance is.
Read the whole thing.
I think about this issue by using a computer metaphor, with the layers of hardware, operating system and application software. The hardware is our physical bodies. The operating system is our cognitive systems, as shaped by evolution and our individual genetics. The applications come from culture, by which I mean the norms, behaviors, and technology that we absorb from others.
If you think of cognitive ability or how the sexes relate, all three layers matter. But people on the extreme left argue as if the hardware and operating system don’t matter, and people on the extreme right argue as if the hardware and the operating system are all that matter. As Sullivan puts it,
Leftists tend to believe that all inequality is created; liberals tend to believe we can constantly improve the world in every generation, forever perfecting our societies. Rightists believe that human nature is utterly unchanging; conservatives tend to see the world as less plastic than liberals, and attempts to remake it wholesale dangerous and often counterproductive. I think of myself as moderately conservative. It’s both undeniable to me that much human progress has occurred, especially on race, gender, and sexual orientation; and yet I’m suspicious of the idea that our core nature can be remade or denied. I completely respect the role of liberals in countering this. It’s their role. I think the genius of the West lies in having all these strands in our politics competing with one another.
Again, read the whole thing. Sullivan makes a complaint, which I share, that on these issues the left tries to demonize and shut down conservatives. The more vehemently the left asserts its moral superiority, the more I doubt that moral superiority.
Mr. Sullivan, welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web.
You should include the title, which is quite the important conclusion:
“Denying Genetics Isn’t Shutting Down Racism, It’s Fueling It”
Racism IS being fueled by the Democrats who deny genetics.
There are also different types of racism:
a) races are not the same, but should be treated the same under the law, and other policies;
b) races are not the same, therefore should be treated differently:
b1) blacks are inferior in some way, therefore can be treated worse than whites, (Dem Jim Crow laws; fringe racists today)
b2) blacks were unjustly treated poorly before, therefore should be treated better than whites, or Asians (for acceptance to Harvard, for instance)
c) races are the same, unequal outcomes today are the result of unequal treatments:
c1) and require change and restitution for past wrongs, like Affirmative Action
c2) but prior unequal treatment does not justify special programs.
It’s clear to most folk that there are genetic differences between people, and even average genetic differences between identity based groups of people. To individualists, this doesn’t matter so much because each person should be treated as an individual. To social types, where the group is more important than the person, group differences are crucial.
The denial about genetic average group differences is one of the earliest and still worst PC-untruths.
“. . . and people on the extreme right argue as if the hardware and the operating system are all that matter.”
Example? I mean, other than Alfred Rosenberg.
I salute him taking on this issue, its a nice article. It’s good to see him drilling down on Ezra’s slight of hand.
The squirmy “its both genetics and environment” trope seems to be a precursor to all this stuff. Maybe its socially necessary, but I’m not sure it means much.
What % is environment? Do we have any clear way to effect environment? What are the secondary effects and costs of any environmental tweaks? Are they worth it?
For instance, after the usual “you can still believe whatever you want to believe, I’m agnostic” disclaimer, Charles Murray went on to very specifically show, with math, that there isn’t any evidence of socioeconomic discrimination against blacks after adjusting for IQ. If I recall correctly he showed that things were basically “fair” by the time of the civil rights era. And that since then blacks have achieved socioeconomic status that is unfairly high compared to what their merits would imply, likely due to all the racial giveaways.
So if that’s the hard truth…it implies more then just “maybe genes could be a part of it.” It implies a major change is needed on racial dialogue, programs, and law.
I think a lot of progressives mainly just don’t want “disparate impact” applied to them. Whether legally or socially as guilty by virtue of whiteness. If disparate impact could be applied to only poor whites…well the deplorables deserve it.
Which gets back to something strange. Who are these racists? Where do they come from? Do they know anyone that believes any of these straw men?
I know a lot of hard core reactionaries, and not a single one thinks “that human nature is utterly unchanging”. I mean they can all see that North Korea has high IQ people living in a shithole. But they also see that those same IQ people living anywhere else, even authoritarian places like China, manage to do just fine. So human nature isn’t utterly unchanging, but it sure is hard to keep a good people down. They can flourish in NEARLY any condition.
By contrast, low IQ groups seem unable to flourish anywhere, no matter how favorable the conditions are. I suppose that there are scenarios of third world living that can change with environment (terrible vs very terrible), but no scenarios you would want your children to have to live in.
I think its largely the same with “racists”. Who are these people? Do you think that they are fundamentally different in their beliefs then Andrew Sullivan writes here? I’ve never met a member of the KKK, but generally most “racist” prole whites I know have met smart black people and dumb white people. They understand that bell curves overlap, even if they never learned what a bell curve is. That still doesn’t change the fact that if a bunch of blacks move in your neighborhood can go to shit.
Why exactly did people support Jim Crow? Random hatred in their hearts for no good reason? Is that he best explanation we can come up with? I’m guessing they supported it for the same reason that white people pay through the nose to live in defacto segregated neighborhoods and schools. The difference is that the segregation crowd thought that ALL people should be safe from black dysfunction, not just the rich (probably because with more blacks and less money there were fewer options then to stick together). It was a fundamental act of empathy and brotherly compassion. When it was removed it was mostly the working and middle class whites that had to pay the price of white flight from the cities in both North and South.
If the government is your problem then lets just talk about freedom of association. When someone didn’t want to lend money to have poor blacks move into a ruin a housing community, was that racist or common sense. If they applied to exact same standards to both but had a “disparate impact” on blacks not being able to get mortgages where they keeping the riff raff out or a bunch of deplorable racists? Are you willing to get redlining laws revoked because disparate impact is a bunch of garbage?
If you can’t get why people act the way they do, all of this will mostly descend into “I’m not a real racist, but those people are so get them.” Which hasn’t worked before, and won’t work in the future.
This doesn’t even get into the issue of politics (races vote as political factions, not in the whole communities self interest). Or the effect immigration has on political balance and national welfare.
P.S.
Tom G,
All these questions have morphed from “righting past wrongs” to “diversity is strength”. The act of having brown people near you makes you a better person. There is no evidence of this positive “diversity effect”, but its the sort of vague enough claim that you can be squirmy and non-falsifiable about it. Naturally, the kind of black people next to you at Harvard will be well behaved and mostly like you so it doesn’t bother you, and the kind of black people next to a HVAC tech will be stealing his kids bike.
There is arguable some scope for environmental tweaks like lead abatement, as lead poisoning does seem to happen more frequently to blacks.
The lead thesis is pretty soft, as it were.
Abatement in the US has been going on for a long time (nearly all new cars since 1974 can’t tolerate TEL, total phase-out was basically complete 15 years later), but that various crime and outcome gaps between population groups persist.
Also, there were serious lead pollution sites in the history of developed countries, and still the present day in some developed countries, but without anywhere near strong enough a signal of educational or crime discrepancies to correspond to the proposal that it is a major explanatory factor for disparities in US statistics.
Finally, other developed countries that saw population diversification more recently and well after lead-abatement regulations were well-established now report similar disparities.
I wasn’t claiming that lead abatement would erase the gaps that are seen, just that blacks do tend to suffer from lead poisoning more than other people in the US, and that is an injustice that can be straightforwardly remedied, that would to some extent ameliorate some of the gaps seen between blacks and other Americans.
According to the CDC, in 2016 only 4% of US children had BLL levels above 5 (micrograms per deciliter) and a very low rate (approx 0.0%) for 10 (compared with 23.9% for Chinese children as of 2007). From this I think it’s reasonable to conclude that:
1. The war on lead has basically been won in the US for a while, including for minoritie children (which are a fairly large percent of children today), and complaints about racial risk disparities may be true but hard to disaggregate from correlated SES effects and exagerrating in terms of their moral and practical significance, and
2. The neurological effects of exposures to lead in terms of decreasing cognitive ability and increasing criminal impulsivity are likely overblown when the predicted social breakdowns in more polluted developing countries that would be predicted by the purported effect sizes fail to materialize.
What I see is the political weaponization of lead levels as a kind of undead zombie issue that keeps looming around the discourse despite being killed long ago, periodically popping up when convenient to kick off another round of agitation by abuse of misleading or inaccurate information.
The most salient environmental factor in cognitive/personality formation is the culture a kid grows up in (including the other kids in his or her school). How do progressives propose to simultaneously change the internal culture of the homes and neighborhoods of disadvantaged minorities while avoiding anything that might be interpreted as disrespect of those very same cultures?
It’s much easier to smear lower middle class white people on the other side of town as “racists” and blame everything on them.
But they also see that those same IQ people living anywhere else, even authoritarian places like China, manage to do just fine. So human nature isn’t utterly unchanging, but it sure is hard to keep a good people down. They can flourish in NEARLY any condition.
No, they can’t. Those same IQ people, now doing so well in China, were mostly subsistence farmers for two centuries prior to about 1980. Scraping by without much to spare.
If you think of cognitive ability or how the sexes relate, all three layers matter. But people on the extreme left argue as if the hardware and operating system don’t matter, and people on the extreme right argue as if the hardware and the operating system are all that matter. As Sullivan puts it,
———–
The left is more receptive to HBD as it pertains to athleticism than intellectualism. Kenyans being over-represented in marathons is not racist but whites in STEM is.
Annie Clark isn’t male or straight. So when she sings “I can’t turn off what turns me on” she’s allowed to.
She’s permitted to acknowledge the reality of evolution. As a gay woman, or as a straight woman, or as a gay man, reality isn’t pre-emptively ruled out the way it would be for a different singer-songwriter, someone situated within the fourth quadrant of this diagram.
And yet straight male sexuality is a lot like gay male sexuality. If straight men need to undergo conversion therapy on the theory that their sexuality is a social construct then why isn’t everybody else’s sexuality a social construct too?
The social constructionists picture a vast conspiracy to trick straight men into believing that they’re not attracted to seven-foot post-menopausal bald women. But evolution is allowed to exist for the rest of the species. And for straight male chimpanzees.
Because culture is magic. The theory is that “culture” just inexplicably targets straight men and nobody else. It’s an incredible coincidence, the idea that the oppressors in this conspiracy theory are also uniquely outside of nature.
The key to the argument is to realize how many policies and programs are legally justified and predicated on the assumption on the negligible contribution of genetics to disparities between population groups.
The progressive political strategy is one of a clientalist bargain in which state power will be used to deliver tangible and social status benefits to members of its democratic coalition in exchange for reliable vote banks. It is group-based rent seeking writ large.
That strategy exists in feedback with matters of ideology and public belief, and and major hazard to that adhesive – such as prominent, high-status public intellectuals openly questioning it – threatens to make the whole rickety structure collapse and crumble. So such talk must be censored and suppressed with whatever social technologies and tactics are available.
The progressives simply have to be able to point to every disparity and claim that it derives from oppressive injustices that they can and will fix, mitigate, prosecute, and/or remedy by compensation, if they obtain state power. If those disparities are natural and innocent, even in the absence of racism and sexism, then all the subsidies and thumbs on all the scales are invalidated and the whole package of offered benefits implodes.
The classic failure mode of democracy is “robbing Peter to pay Paul” or “two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” Once the principle of unqualified redistribution is allowed, it’s hard to prevent it from running away, since the persistence of any equality at all always allows someone to advocate for even more grabbing, which eventually breaks down all the machinery of civilized prosperity (see: Venezuela).
But that was the Old Left, and the New Left is about doing the same thing, but with identity-group politics. One way the redistribution runaway is suppressed is by the widespread belief that many wealthy people deserve their property because they came about it in a virtuous manner through hard work, talent, thrift, creation of social value, innovation, entrepreneurship, and so forth.
Thinking that genetics has anything at all to do with outcome disparities provides a kind of equivalent, tempering notion. But the redistribution of social status and various positions and benefits on the basis of identity relies upon the notion that the existing distribution in unjust and undeserved. So, instead of tempering, the left has to constantly ratchet up the volume and incite their coalition with increasingly provocative agitprop and ever more extreme and grandiose policy proposals on how to make everything just and everyone equal, at long last. And all this in a particularly vicious manner which does not focus on something abstract like money or property but on the very basis of individual identity itself, which they are encouraging their constituents to associate with evil, and thus whatever happens to those people, they had it coming.
This is pushing in the direction of ideological runaway, not against it, and so things are likely to continue getting worse and worse until some kind of political discontinuity restores some kind of new order.
That new order will include tolerance of the ideas of genetic realism (as not only being obviously empirically true, but also as the only thing that can suppress the above social runaway mechanism), and if the progressives could embrace it now we could all avoid a lot of the unpleasantness to come.
But that’s how they earn their political living, and they don’t have any better options. So they won’t embrace it, and we won’t avoid the troubles. Have a nice day.
Yeah, pretty much.
I’ll add one more thing. It’s not just that they can’t question it because it threatens their living. Even progressives must understand that enough years of this will cause a pendulum swing among the white populace against it, and that could be bad for them in the long run.
However, the right side of history isn’t just about perceived morality. It has a literal demographic component. Even if you cut off all immigration today, a majority of babies are non-white. That means that the progressive coalition can maintain hegemony even without whites, especially since some whites (single women, members of favored professions, ideologically friendly whites, opportunists, conformists, the fearful) will defect to the progressive coalition for all sorts of reasons even if it gets really bad (and in some cases because it gets really bad).
That’s the reactionary view as I understand it. That if we could just have this debate for long enough, maybe another Sullivan essay or Haidt lecture or common experiences of individuals would be enough to “win the debate” based on the truth. However, in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society there is no debate and there is no truth. There is always just “who, whom”. Reactionaries see this as observation of human nature being in the same factual realm as IQ statistics, kind of like famed pragmatic realist statesmen LKY did.
The “proposition nation” wing of the right had a few decades to try and convert minorities, especially Hispanics, but the numbers showed they failed. Romney’s failure in particular being an explanation point on that idea.
Unless the demographic issue is addressed (and it would take more then mere immigration reform) don’t expect progressives to fold a winning hand.
For the time being, the New Left is about the redistribution of honor/status (identity politics) more than about redistribution of wealth from the affluent to the poor. After another generation or so, as the underclass and elderly populations explode, and the debt crisis hits, I expect Leftist politics will renew its focus on the redistribution of wealth, and we will get a Venezuela-like politics. The smug members of the affluent metropolitan Left may then have the Jimmy Kimmel smirk wiped off their faces.
As to whites consolidating in opposition to the Left as they become a minority – if this ever happens, which I doubt, it will be far too late, and too little, to make a difference. This is just a neoreactionary/alt-right pipe dream. Like the “civil war” some neoreactionaries imagine is just around the corner. Right, a civil war between the military and police and, on the other side, a bunch of 45-70-y-o men with hunting rifles and pot bellies.
This is an extremely interesting analogy. Especially if you consider ideas like Joel Spolsky’s The Law of Leaky Abstractions
I think it’s especially apt because the operating system can compensate for “errors” in the hardware, or applications for “errors” in the operating system. But also, if performance is not super-important, the higher levels dominate. But at the edges, when performance is vital, the lower levels matter a great deal, and software that works in tandem with hardware will perform much better.
That’s kind of what we see with genetics, with group differences being very stark at the edges, but not really that important in the middle-class, where one can argue that culture is more important.