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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Past peak woke? Don't count on it

(c) J. Nelson Rushton. Jan 20, 2025.

1. The culture war

In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:

  • victim identity politics: a caste system based on historical class grievances
  • authoritarianism: a feeling of being entitled to control other people, which naturally leads to censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, oppressive governance
  • radical progressivism: extreme disregard for traditional norms and values

America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.

In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.

Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.

Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.

2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism

It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
-- Solzhenitsyn (1973): The Gulag Archipelago

I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.

Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.

Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.

Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
-- Ronald Reagan: address at the Brandenburg Gate; June 12, 1987

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
-- Barack Obama: Campaign speech at Roanoke, VA, July 13, 2012.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety. And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way, and the best way, or the right way to achieve safety. This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been that you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong.
-- Kamala Harris: radio interview, June 2020.

Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?

Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.

3. The constitution of the people

So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.

In every nation, at all times, the militant, tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].

Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.

Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?

To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If we do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If we then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is coming to us.

As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.

You write:

Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism.

My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?

The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.

A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.

So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.

But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.

Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.

I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.

If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.

And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.

Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.

This is a valuable and clarifying comment. I’m by no means even close to the most right-wing person on this forum; I’m sympathetic to progressives, because I used to be one, and one of the drums I’ve beaten most consistently (both here and elsewhere) is that progressives are mostly good people, and that their terrible ideas should not be taken as reflecting any poor character on their part.

That being said, I do genuinely think your stated positions are very bad. Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.

Believing that “every human being has an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare” creates a bottomless obligation on the productive and normal members of society to subsidize the self-destructive (and socially corrosive) behavior of the most dysfunctional, mentally-unsalvageable individuals among us. It is a blank check for parasites who either cannot, by nature, contribute productively to civilization, or who otherwise elect not to. It’s a nice-sounding truism, sustained only by the fact that the people advocating it will, by and large, not be held directly and personally responsible for providing the relevant shelter and healthcare to the individuals demanding it.

“The moral imperative of LBGTQ right and acceptance” is simply a poorly-defined applause light. It could mean anything. Some plausible interpretations are fairly uncontroversial, while others are clearly extremely tendentious and enjoy close to zero popular support, which is why it’s necessary to fold them all under a superficially-anodyne umbrella statement.

Now, I also believe that the praxis of so-called “wokeness” consists of behaviors and tactics which are bad, independent of the ideological positions they’re being used to advance: coordinated bullying mobs; censorship of true but politically-inconvenient information; the use of weasel words and strategic equivocation (AKA the “motte-and-bailey” approach) wherein public statements are tailored to create a certain impression of the speaker’s meaning/intent, while in reality the speaker knows that his or her actual intent is quite different from that surface-level impression, and that the esoteric will be correctly understood by politically-subversive behind-the-scenes actors. These would all be morally-blameworthy tactics even if employed by people whose political positions I share. To the extent that right-wingers do these things, it reflects very poorly on them.

In a better, more functional, less divided country, progressives would have to compete on equal footing with every other ideological faction; I would oppose most of what they’re attempting to achieve (because their ideas produce bad outcomes, and because their analysis of the world is based on false premises) but I would recognize them as a valuable counterweight and as a complement to other factions within an ideological spectrum. I wouldn’t want them ostracized or imprisoned (even in the fanciest and most comfortable crystals) because many of them are great people who contribute immeasurably to society, independent of their political beliefs. They’re my friends, my family members, my coworkers, the men and women who create the art I consume and the products I buy. I would simply have to coordinate, to the most effective extent possible, to thwart their efforts at political change, and to demonstrate to them the profound error of their ways. (As the error of my ways was persuasively demonstrated to me, which is why I no longer hold the beliefs I used to hold.)

This will, necessarily, involve the use of political power to not only reverse the effects of progressive governance, but also in some cases the disempowerment of progressive organizations before they’re able to achieve their stated ends. This will probably appear hypocritical to you — “I thought you guys said you just wanted to grill! I thought cancelling people was bad! I thought you don’t hate black people, or gays, or women, and that you just wanted everyone to live and let live!” — and to a certain extent you’ll be correct, because there are a lot of people who haven’t fully thought through their actual core disagreements with “wokeness”. People who barely understand what “wokeness” is. People who think the Civil Rights movement was the greatest thing to ever happen to America, but that somewhere along the way people just “took it too far”. (Or, amusingly, that modern black activists have “betrayed the vision of Martin Luther King”, not realizing that King was a socialist and that his speeches were ghostwritten by a literal member of the Communist Party.) For those of us who are actually committed to opposing the ends of progressivism — rather than just whatever means Fox News and Right-Wing Twitter are able to meme into the news cycle this week — I agree that it’s important not to get distracted by chopping at the branches instead of the roots.

You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive! Stop believing in ideas that are bad, and that have bad outcomes. Channel your pro-social impulses — which I believe are real and valuable — toward ends which are actually conducive to the flourishing of civilization. Keep your eye on the prize of climate change and vaccines, and you’ll have no conflict with me. Tinker around the edges of government policy, and find avenues to expand the safety net for the people in our society who are actually equipped to be able to create a return on that investment, rather than wasting your efforts (and other people’s money and safety) on worthless schizophrenic bums who will never appreciate nor reciprocate the compassion you’re trying to extend to them. Extend personal warmth and friendship to whomever you wish, but do not demand that equitable outcomes redound to populations with severely inequitable distributions of traits. (Or, alternately, join me in supporting non-coercive eugenic policies which will actually ameliorate those unequal distributions of intelligence and aptitude.)

I hope you stick around and keep posting here. We could use a lot more intelligent progressive voices here. (And, hopefully, over time your mind will be changed, as mine was, and you will be persuaded out of your progressive commitments.)

You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive!

Well, yes. Obviously what any committed conservative will want me to do is stop being a progressive, ultimately, just as I wish for the reverse. But I was replying to NelsonRushton, whose opening post explicitly cast his position as that of one who thought we should table the regular right-vs-left fight on the object-level questions, and focus on fighting wokeness considered as a "degenerate" form of progressivism that can and should be distinguished from mere "extreme progressivism". I am not so naive as to be asking you guys to start agreeing with me on everything; I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.

As such, I don't want to get bogged down too much in arguing about the object-level beliefs in question, because whether or not you guys agree with me on there really wasn't my point. My point was "if your problem with wokeness/cancel culture really isn't reducible to disagreeing with me on these object-level points, and you hate wokeness much more than progressive beliefs in and of themselves, then perhaps we could cooperate to get rid of cancel culture, which we both dislike".

But I do want to address this:

Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.

It's hardly your fault for assuming, given it's my 'spiciest' position relative to orthodox progressives; and I suppose it's partly on me besides, for using a term with as many different competing definitions as "racism". But I am not, in fact, a blank-slatist. "Dan" in the first section of Scott's Against Murderdism describes me pretty well. When I say that I find racism abhorrent, I mean racism as a value system; not what its opponents tend to call "scientific racism".

What I find morally abhorrent is to treat thinking, feeling human beings differently because of their race; to make them feel that they are somehow lesser, less deserving of happiness or respect, because of inborn characteristics beyond their control and which constitute part of their very identity. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are statistically significant cognitive differences between ethnic groups. I don't entirely trust the existing science in its specifics, but I would still be against racism if the Bell Curve-type science was completely convincing on all questions of fact. I oppose discrimination against neurodivergence as it is, and there the whole point is that I recognize the material existence of inborn mental differences between e.g. autistics and allistics.

I believe that my fellow progressives initially started suppressing racial science because they thought it would be an easier line to argue, than to fight the trend of sloppy, amoral thinking that draws a line from "blacks may be tend to be less good at math than whites" to "therefore slavery was okay all along". "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" being as far outside the Overton window as it is for either side is at once the result of that cowardly dereliction of moral duty, and the reason it has not yet been rectified.

Me, however, I reject g-supremacism as an ethical position. Certainly I.Q./g (yes, I know they don't exactly correlate, whatever) is instrumentally useful in certain tasks, and we want to hire high-I.Q. people to be jet pilots for the same reason we want to hire strong people to be firefighters, tall people to be basketball player, and red-haired children to play Ron Weasley. But even if we boil down all dimensions of intelligence into a smart/dumb binary, I reject absolutely the idea that, all else being equal, it is "better" to be smart than dumb; that the life of a smart human is somehow more worth living, or worth preserving, than the life of a dumb human. If a linearly-I.Q.-boosting pill existed I wouldn't particularly want to take it, any more than I especially want to be ten inches taller.

(Granted it might be instrumentally better for society as a whole if there were more high-I.Q. people around. But it would also be better for society if I ate gray slop and worked ten hours a day with precisely no more breaks than required for my bodily health. However, none of this is society's business and running a government any other way is an inhuman abomination.)

And from where I'm standing, the sooner right-wingers forsake any hint of bigotry in that sense, the sooner the saner people on my side will be able to prevail and break the scientific deadlock, secure in the knowledge that the research will no longer risk being used as ammunition for a position which I find, yes, viscerally abhorrent.

I don’t think you’ve really thought through the practical implications of your stance on race. "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?

You acknowledge in one sentence that it is perfectly reasonable and salutary for businesses to preferentially hire applicants who have the requisite skills, traits, etc. You even acknowledge that many of those traits are inborn — that the NBA can and should discriminate based on height, which, outside of desperately poor and malnourished circumstances, is nearly entirely genetically-determined.

By implication, you acknowledge that many traits along which it’s justified for at least some businesses to discriminate are unequally distributed between population groups. Perhaps the least controversial would be that if you’re looking to hire an actor to play Ron Weasley, you’re only going to be auditioning male actors of Northwestern European descent. (Or, I suppose, Udmurts, a small Russian ethnic group who also have a lot of redheads. Although good luck finding one who speaks English as well as Rupert Grint does.) This is probably somewhat hurtful if you’re an actor who is a huge Harry Potter fan, and Ron is your favorite character, but you’re black, or female, or just have jet-black hair. Although there has been, as of late, a move toward “race-blind casting” in order to prevent precisely this (supposedly unfair) outcome, most people, even progressives, appear to agree that this is silly and wrong-headed. Film studios and theater companies are making reasonable and practically-justified decisions, and the disparate impact of those decisions is an acceptable byproduct of those decisions.

Only slightly less uncontroversially, the NBA has very few players with significant Amerindian descent; while part of that is cultural — people from Latin American countries generally prefer soccer to basketball — it’s primarily a function of average differences in height between population groups. (The NBA has only had the number of Chinese players it’s had because the Chinese government decided to eugenically breed exceptionally-tall individuals to play basketball. Otherwise the number of Asian NBA players would asymptotically approach zero, Jeremy Lin notwithstanding.) We can acknowledge that this might make aspiring Asian and Latino basketball players feel discouraged and underrepresented, but we recognize this as an acceptable byproduct of NBA teams making sensible business decisions instead of using affirmative action to reserve roster spots for short guys to make them feel included.

Moving up the controversy ladder, the strong preference for physical strength is going to result in fire-fighting being a heavily male profession; female firefighters are few and far between, and the reality is that they tend to be worse at their job on average than their male coworkers. Again, this is probably discouraging for young girls who dream of fighting fires. However, because affirmative action would require putting a thumb on the scale to force the employment of less-qualified applicants into a high-stakes profession whose performance has momentous important consequences, most people are willing to let firefighters keep being overwhelmingly male, even if that makes some women sad.

And I’m sure you would agree that there are a great many professions for which mental and personality traits are also extremely relevant. Doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, quantitative analysts, take your pick. And it’s not just intelligence; traits such as diligence, selflessness, punctuality, and empathy are all very important across a wide range of occupations. In fact it’s difficult to imagine many professions wherein an employer would not have a strong preference for employees who display more of those traits, rather than less.

And if you take seriously the available psychometric evidence about racial groups, you can see that there are differences between racial groups which go beyond simple mental computational capacity. It’s not just “black people are likely to be a bit worse at math on average than Asian people are.” It’s also “black people are likely to be less fluent at written communication.” It’s “black people are likely to have poorer ability to regulate emotional impulses.” And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average.

And black people are going to notice this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s going to result in them being poorer on average, since they are going to be underrepresented in professions which pay well. They’re going to feel less empowered, less valuable to the society around them in general, because they are underrepresented in professions which provide the capacity to significantly impact political and cultural trends within society. You and I might privately understand that these inequitable outcomes are the (inevitable, barring corrective measures) of an unequal distribution of valued traits. But there will be — there already is, and has been for over a century — important policy questions raised by this state of affairs which will demand answers. Will affirmative action be imposed in order to artificially balance out these outcomes? Are the potentially negative impacts on the overall performance of the affected industries a worthwhile tradeoff? If not, and if colorblind meritocracy is a non-negotiable end goal, how do we deal with the massive cultural and political fallout resulting from entrenched, generational resentment and low performance among a large, culturally-distinct, politically-unified, and visually-identifiable segment of the population?

All of these questions have obvious and unavoidable political implications. There has to be some answer to these questions, and if you believe HBD is true, I don’t understand how you can advocate for a solution that isn’t informed in some level by what you actually believe is true. Saying “it’s wrong to discriminate, unless the qualities for which you’re selecting are important to the job” has the same functional outcome as “it’s okay to discriminate based on inborn characteristics”, precisely because different groups have different characteristics on average! A “colorblind meritocracy” has the same end result as a “systemically racist” regime, assuming that psychometric differences are real and large.

It appears you’re trying to retreat to a position of “Actually, employers shouldn’t have a strong preference for smarter employees.” I suppose that’s one way of getting equitable results. Just decide that the unequally-distributed traits on which we’ve been filtering are actually not particularly valuable or desirable. An employee with an IQ of 120 isn’t likely to be any better at a randomly-selected job than an employee with an IQ of 90! If employers stopped caring about the qualities white people and Asians have more of than black people, we wouldn’t end up with more whites and Asian getting hired than black people!

This is utterly doomed to fail, though, because those qualities do matter quite a bit. Sure, pure cognitive acuity might not give one a decisive advantage as, say, a Jamba Juice employee. (Things like “reliably showing up on time” and “not ending up getting into trouble with the law and needing to miss work because of it” are, though, and those things are also directly correlated with intelligence and impulse control.) If your concern with “racism” is only about people not calling black people racial slurs, then you’ve already won; almost nobody does that. But that’s not what anyone actually cares about when it comes to the “racism” discussion. They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. (Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?)

"HBD is probably broadly correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?

You've dropped the "long-term". Obviously it would have immediate political implications, of the variety "we need to get rid of misguided disparate-impact legislation and the like". But once that paradigm has been abandoned, the word "race" should have no further impact on policy decisions. If specific metrics which happen to differ between racial groups are relevant, talk about the metrics directly. My concern is that accepting the objective reality of HBD should not entail giving the ethno-nationalists anything.

And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average. (…) They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?

Well… in the truly long term… luxury space communism? But in the shorter term, and without making any controversial predictions about future technology, I think a just society would decouple the property of "prestigious and remunerative" from "best reserved for those with a high I.Q." in how it thinks about jobs. Think of Scott's musings in The Parable of the Talents.

Regarding "prestigious", if a just society has zero-sum social status at all, it should be given to those who virtuously turn whatever talents they do possess to particularly pro-social ends - whether that's a musclebound hulk who becomes a fireman instead of a pro wrestler, or a dexterous polymath who becomes a brilliant, life-saving surgeon instead of sitting around at home speedrunning video games. (I stress that this wouldn't be some sort of Stalinist nightmare enforcing "from each according to his ability" at gunpoint - doing the prosocial thing should be incentivized, but supererogatory.) I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic wish; if anything it's almost reactionary of me. It used to be that you didn't have to be a genius to be a fulfilled, well-liked pillar-of-the-community type; it used to be the way the world worked in civilized countries, that firemen and nurses and farmers could count on the respect of their peers if they went conscientiously and honestly about the business of doing useful jobs, just as much as the doctor or the mayor. Maybe part of the problem is that our communities nowadays are too damn big… Every day I'm a little more hostile to 'big cities' as a concept.

And regarding "remunerative", if nothing else I am strongly inclined to think that a large part of the anxiety around wealth disparity is a negative desire to avoid poverty, not "greed" in the conventional sense. Hence, my preferred policies of universal healthcare, zero homelessness, a strong UBI, etc. should mitigate the sting of unequal life outcomes. I am not so naive as to think it would eliminate economic resentment completely; greed exists, jealousy exists. But would we get race riots if the difference in outcomes was "fewer blacks can afford second homes and pools" rather than "fewer blacks can afford life-saving surgery"? I think a strong welfare state makes biting the bullet of unequal economic outcomes viable in a way it isn't without one. It seems worth a try.

But if that doesn't work, if nothing else works, I will bite the bullet of "well, we need (something a lot like) communism, with wealth caps and redistribution", centuries sooner than I will bite the bullet of eugenics. What you propose horrifies me, all the moreso if it's clear that we're talking about a much broader spectrum of traits than just a linear I.Q. graph. Isn't the point of "biodiversity" that it is an inherently beautiful thing that should be preserved? I already don't think we should allow rare species of dull-as-brick newts to go extinct just because it's economically expedient; I'm sure as hell not gonna accept erasing whole human phenotypes, whole ways of seeing the world, just to make society run more smoothly. Society is meant to facilitate human flourishing, not the other way around.