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When I discuss Critical Race Theory with leftists, I often make the point that, while I'd rather public schools not encourage students to speculate on the causes of racial disparities, I'd be amenable to a compromise where systemic racism is taught as one possibility, alongside cultural and biological explanations.
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution. This is kind of true, in that I am asking that ideas I like be taught alongside ones favored by the academic establishment. However, when you take social desirability out of the equation, HBD is more similar to evolution because it literally IS just applied evolution, and systemic racism/CRT/disparate impact/wokeness/social justice/anti-racism/whatever label we're using this week is analogous to creationism in that we have little direct evidence it exists, but we assume it must exist because the current state of affairs would make sense as its outcome, even though it would also make sense as the outcome of other processes.
I doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to say that the Pastafarian explanation for gravity (an invisible, non-corporeal Flying Spaghetti Monster physically pushes us onto the ground) has no less evidence supporting it than the woke explanation for half-Asian, half-white children having a mean IQ between that of Asians and that of whites (stereotype threat impacts them half as much).
I also doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to draw a comparison between creationists who acknowledge microevolution while denying Darwinism to leftists who acknowledge within-group heritability while denying between-group heritability.
However, a thought occurred to me today that frightened me, and my hope is that when I voice it, you will unanimously dismiss it as ridiculous, because if it's in any way true, then I'm going to be devastated.
What if the truth value of Darwinism had little, if anything, to do with its acceptance by the academic establishment, and the falsehood of intelligent design had little, if anything, to do with its rejection by the academic establishment? If truth was that important, we'd expect CRT to be seen as equivalent to creationism, but it's not.
You know the Schmitt meme about how all disputes can be reduced to friend vs. enemy? Well.. maybe that's what happened with the debate over evolution in public schools. Maybe evolution was pushed specifically because the religious right objected to it, and not because it was real. That evolution actually WAS real was incidental at best.
Promote evolution and CRT because they hurt the right. Eliminate intelligent design and HBD because they hurt the left. This is how a Schmittposter would describe what happened, and maybe that literally is what happened.
Please tell me I'm just mindkilled. I'm not being rhetorical here. I would find that reassuring.
I think your thought is kind of true. To illustrate, consider Blue-team friendly pseudoscience, such as crystal healing, homeopathy, chiropractics, obsession with "chemicals" and "radiation" - not the real kind, like what supposedly comes from power lines and cell phones and such. That sort of thing.
IME, these kinds of pseudoscience get a moderately serious disapproval from the hard science types, and the mainstream culture attitude seems to be somewhere between, they might kind of have a point and it seems cool and interesting, and they're harmless nutters that we'll stick in a corner somewhere and ignore.
Meanwhile, pseudoscience that is perceived as friendly to Red team such as Intelligent Design gets the oh-my-god-terrifying-fascist-threat-to-our-democracy-kill-it-with-fire reaction from the Blue mainstream culture. More mainstream Reds seem to have the same reaction to it as the Blue team does to their pseudoscience - they're harmless nutters that we'll let do their own thing and basically ignore.
CRT in this view occupies an odd position as Blue-coded sociological pseudoscience that mainstream Blue is crazy obsessed with pushing. The Blues that aren't that into it take the position that it's all imaginary and nobody is really pushing it. HBD is even weirder as probably at least sort of real science that Blue doesn't dare to acknowledge the existence of, and even Red mainstream shies away from.
Blue vs Red and pro vs anti establishment are almost orthogonal axes in political space (remember that the military, the police, small-town local elites, organised religion and Fox News are all objectively part of the establishment). Blue political activists are just as committed to the idea that they are the Voice of the People TM against the Corrupt Establishment TM as Red ones are.
"Crunchiness" including anti-vax is driven by opposition to big Pharma and big Agriculture, so you see it on the anti-establishment ends of both tribes.
This can't be a general rule - look how often establishments get military coup'd in Africa. Do you mean specifically in America 2023?
Yes - I was pointing out the sorts of places where pro-establishment Reds hang out. The Red/Blue model is exclusively American - the urban/rural political divide exists everywhere, but there is no equivalent of the suburban White South in most countries.
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Real radiation does come from power lines and cell phones and such; but it's just low-frequency low-intensity EM, not ionizing radiation. And IMHO it wasn't crazy to fear possible health impacts anyway, a priori, so I'm glad we keep looking for a cancer link. It just seems like the harder we look the less chance of a link (and the lower the likely maximum effect size) we find.
Oh I know, I just didn't feel like typing up 3 more paragraphs on the difference between ionizing radiation and non-ionizing and the sources and effects of both etc.
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Eh, I'm under the perception that Blue Tribe is pretty damn split on alternative medicine and pseudoscience. On the one hand, large swathes of Blue Tribe go all in on it, but on the other, the rest are kind of horrified at the harm it can cause. The Blues are lucky that the political polarization over COVID shook out the way it did, because now they can jettison anti-vax from their memeplex (where previously it was an alt-medicine mainstay that was causing Measles to resurge).
Similarly for the Red Tribe/conservatives, I have to wonder if anyone even pushes Intelligent Design anymore; am I wrong for saying that it always seemed like a way to smuggle God into the secular realm? But now that Christianity has been on the backfoot for so long, conservatives and the like don't really care for whitewashing their beliefs like that.
Polls that I've seen on this subject, like this one, indicate that there's basically no traditional partisan split on "alternative therapies" between Dems and Reps. (Note that this is from 2019, preceeding Covid.) Alternative healing has generally been neither a blue-tribe or a red-tribe thing, as a rule, though I'd say that at this point the "blues" have probably come down quite strictly against it and in favor of "only scientific method works, otherwise you're just injecting horse paste or something".
To be more exact, I wouldn't bet that there's much daylight between the overall approval rates of most types of alternative medicine between registered Republicans and registered Democrats. But I would bet that the great majority of people enthusiastic about most types of alternative medicine (possibly aside from things Covid-related) would code as highly Blue team based on their overall interests and values etc. They might not necessarily bother to actually register and vote for various reasons, or may claim to support one of the third parties more Blue/"crunchy" than the Democrat party.
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Not even that; it's just the pronouncements of Scientific Authority.
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I think strong opposition to 'alternative medicine' was, pre-pandemic, more of a græy-tribe thing; ["Alternative medicine has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work."](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U)
(The past 3+ years have driven home the point that the gap between 'not been proved to work' and 'been proved not to work' is big enough to fit the Ever Given through edgewise.)
I continue to hold that the gray tribe was never really a thing. It was just the part of the blue tribe (and, by various cultural indicators, often the super blue part of the blue tribe) that, for various reasons, just didn't want to associate with the rest of the tribe.
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I'd argue that the situation with the antivax movement supports the grandparent's point. Doctors and epidemiologists have always been against it but for the rest of the Blue Tribe the standard reaction was always "roll your eyes and move on" rather than TPTB doing everything in their power to crush it.
Obviously the red/blue coding isn't the only thing that's caused the change, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.
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Blues generally have a worldview that is very uncomfortable to reconcile with HBD, so that makes sense.
Reds' aversion to HBD is a little harder to figure out. My theory is that conservatives as "progressives driving the speed limit" is broadly true, but that mainstream conservatives don't realize that they've absorbed many progressive axioms and that, consequently, they have sabotaged many of their strongest arguments against leftist programs like CRT. When you're a conservative who believes in deeply in Equality, hates Racism, and believes in Women's Rights (but all "only to a certain extent and not as far as those crazy libs take it!") you've already given up the game.
So while a conservative from 1963 might have been comfortable with HBD, a conservative from 2023 has ceded too much ideological ground to feel comfortable with the idea.
Red's aversion to HBD is trivially easy to figure out. They are the true believers in both the civic religion and the old-time religion. The words on the paper do not say "after careful consideration of the available data we have concluded..." they say "we hold these truths to be self evident". Likewise, Jesus didnt say love your neighbor unless he is a nigger and therefore less intelligent than you. He said love thy neighbor.
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I guess I would mostly code as one of those Reds that's modestly adverse to HBD. I don't quite agree with any of my siblings here. If I had to characterize my actual beliefs briefly, I'd say:
I think that color-blindness is the right way to run a society of fixed population size (immigration being a separate discussion). Even if HBD is strongly true, what of it? Capitalism and individualism has already proven to be mostly adequate at slotting people of varying skill levels into appropriate jobs, and giving appropriate punishments to individuals who commit crimes. I don't think we should discriminate by race at the society level at all - either to give an artificial boost to people who some may feel have been unfairly discriminated against in the past, or to artificially suppress people who, based on their race and HBD research, may be more likely to be less intelligent than average or more inclined to short-term thinking, i.e. more likely to steal, assault, murder, etc. If one race appears to be less likely to be CEOs and more likely to be murderers, and HBD suggests that this is likely to be a perfectly legitimate outcome given genetic tendencies, then I'd say society is working correctly and no intervention is needed.
I don't necessarily think HBD is wrong, but shouting it from the rooftops too loudly IMO tends to encourage policies I don't agree with, and increase racial tensions. In case you haven't noticed, racial tensions are already kind of high. Some have already called for a race war, which doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Perhaps I am a fool and it's already too late. But I'd like to say we at least tried to find a way to live together before anything like that kicks off.
One of the things driving wokeness is differences in racial outcomes and the lack of any acceptable explanation for them aside from "The Man is keeping black people down". And wokeness increases racial tensions.
We did. The racial detente failed, and it didn't fail due to Nazis and HBD types. It failed because it didn't produce the racially uniform outcomes expected by those who don't believe in HBD. But I'm told that even if HBD is true it is not reasonable to expect blacks to accept statistically worse outcomes. In which case there is no peaceful solution, there is only conflict.
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It is very easy to figure out.
Red tribe defines itself as pro capitalist, and primary popular argument for capitalism is: "In capitalist society all are equal. The rich are succesful because they WORKED HARD, the poor are losers because they are worthless lazy scum. Stop whining and pull yourself by your bootstraps!"
(no one except nerds cares about economic calculation and efficient allocation of capital)
Acceptance of HBD torpedoes and sinks this talking point.
Now there are only two ways out:
a/ The winners are superior because they were BORN superior. Bow to your evolution given masters, peasant, and be grateful they let you live in their world.
(this means outright repudiation of last 250+ years of Western history in general and whole American national myth in particular, few people want to open this can of worms)
b/ The winners are superior due to their undeserved lucky strike, it would not be unjust to ask them to share some of their wealth with the less lucky.
(and this is even less acceptable to Red Tribe)
Conservative from 1963 could be comfortable with raw white supremacy, but would find all modern HBD science with its bell curves and IQ tables even more disturbing.
See this classic racist writing of the time.
Impeccably polite, but pure and hardcore racism so far.
But, why? What makes, according to Buckley, "White community" the "advanced race"?
Nothing about "blood", nothing about "birth", nothing about genes, nothing about IQ.
It is mere "cultural superiority". While lazy negroes were eating watermelons, Southern whites were studying and learning hard.
Yes, even to conservative racist in chief of the time, white supremacy is not something permanent and desirable for its own sake, but mere temporary expedient, a method of teaching and educating the black folks until they become as cultured and civilized as whites, especially southern whites.
When racism had such defenders, it is no surprise it ended on the trash dump of history.
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The obvious answer that comes to mind is that they're terrified of being called racist, and they have a few mental fig leaves that allow them to deny being racist - being colourblind, treating people as individuals, etc. To further torture the metaphor, HBD doesn't just remove the fig leaf covering the penis of racism, it gives it viagra and supercharges it. "Oh, yeah, black and brown populations are just genetically stupider and more criminal" - this is not the kind of belief you can hold and still pretend you are judging people by "their character, not the color of their skin."
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
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Of course it is. The same way you can judge a marathon runner by their time and not the color of their skin, but damned if the top ones aren't black every time.
I think "hold explicitly" is a better way of phrasing it. People act in ways that suggest they actually believe in HBD all the time (even and especially on the left), but few of them will actively state that when asked.
You can hold it explicitly and still judge people -- individually -- by "their character, not the color of their skin."
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If you watch 500 marathons and every time the winner is black, then when marathon #501 comes around and you’re getting ready to place your bets, you would be a complete moron to approach those bets with the attitude, “I have no opinion about which race the winner will be from. It could be the white guy this time, we have no way to know beforehand!” When surveying the slate of runners, you are completely justified in looking at the white guys and saying, “Bad bet, safe to ignore.”
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes. If the only information given to me about two competing candidates is that one guy’s name is Connor Przyewski, and the other guy’s name is Anquon Washington, I have to use outside information - like my observations of patterns - to supplement the explicit info I was provided. This means that I have to judge the candidates based on the information I have, which, if skin color has a demonstrated correlation with observable disparate outcomes, would include skin color as a useful proxy for important information.
In reality, you would have more information than just the applicants' names. This being a white-collar job, there would presumably be detailed resumes. You can judge the candidates based on that. Either the Black candidates' resumes would be weaker, or their resumes would be of a similar quality to Whites, but they would be underrepresented relative to the population.
Likewise with racial profiling in policing. A police officer usually has much more information than just race. In a true Bayesian inference calculation, race would end up mattering very little. Instructing police officers to racially profile would probably just cause them to give too much weight to race and ignore other relevant information. Note that even race-neutral policing results in Blacks being disproportionately arrested etc., because they commit crime at a higher rate than Whites.
My understanding of HBD, in general, is that the takeaway should be that a non-racially-discriminatory system will produce unequal outcomes, not that racial discrimination is justified. That is, the current system is non-discriminatory and disparate outcomes are because of HBD, not that the current system is discriminatory and that's fine because of HBD.
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I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
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I blame Christianity for that one on the "mainstream" right. Until "we" shake free from the Abrahamic memeplex we aren't getting rid of "driving slowly in the leftism lane".
What do you expect to save you?
Neohellenistic religions? Atheism?
Some religious cult with even less of a pedigree?
How have those worked out already?
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Why? When Christians gained power, they never ever tried to create world of free anarchist communes.
They built world of feudal kingdoms based on "divine right" "noble blood" and strict hereditary hierarchy and kept it this way for 1500 years.
christians upvoting this as if it does not prove that they are part of a corrupt religious tradition when the bible contains passages like this:
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Tabula rasa didn't spring out of the ether fully formed all on its own. Further major Christian and Muslim denominations are the prime sources of jackasses who value a person being of the faith over all other features of that person including class, nationality, ethnicity, race or even being a criminal or not.
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Absolutely, Christians are fundamentally leftists.
I don't believe that you know what either of those words mean.
If you accept any egalitarian premises you are a leftist. Is it not the case that salvation through jesus and his sacrifice is posisble and was for everyone? That would seem to be a fundamentally egalitarian and open religious doctrine.
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Oh no, has someone been hoisted by their own petard?
Very possibly.
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