Right, back to business. Occidental Dissent and BHM have written responses to my anti-Racialist pieces and they do deserve something of a response. I’m going to start with BHM because, well:
I wouldn’t call him the finest rhetorician that Nietzsche could want to defend him, but his style is at least consistent and has the sort of casual superiority and self-confidence that I think most people who don’t consider him an enemy find appealingly arrogant.
Terribly sweet to him and I will hope to do that justice. However, I’m not going to repeat myself, so any arguments that come up in both pieces, so I’ll have to juxtapose those sections.
Yes, racial determinism is really a thing
There’s a constant argument that no-one is really arguing for racial determinism. Here we have BHM:
The truth as far as I or anyone can tell is that neither culture no race is sufficient to explain how a society thrives or falls.
Meanwhile, Occidental Dissent dismisses this as “de Gobineauism”, and argues the same thing.
This is where one has to see the difference between arguing on the internet and genuine scientific discussions. When I write something in a paper, long before it gets criticised by the community it’ll have been gone over minutely by the reviewers, and long before they do so, it will have been examined in detail by my fellow authors. Any lack of clarity or minor point of difference will be picked up on and criticised. Not so here.
BHM criticises me for relying solely on the peer-reviewed literature. He’s quite right that this policy doesn’t make me automatically right. What it does is set strong limits on how wrong I can be.
Huge chunks of the racialist milieu take exactly the racial determinist tack. Here is Jared Taylor:
“Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Similarly, John Derbyshire openly dismisses culture as a real force. Responding to Mark Steyn, he writes:
Ah, culture. Of course it’s not about race! Nothing is about race, because there is no such thing as race. (Repeat 100 times.) It’s about culture—the aether, the phlogiston, of current social-anthropological speculation, whose actual nature is mysterious, but whose explanatory power is infinite. You know, culture: those habits, folkways, beliefs, ways of thinking and behaving and connecting that arise from… pure chance! Or geography (see below). Or something… but definitely nothing to do with biology.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am sure Mark Steyn is sincere here. I am sure he believes this stuff about “culture.”
So when Occidental Dissent argues:
no one argues for racial determinism, let alone racial uniformism,
He is just plain wrong. I’ve already cited the stuff coming out from Radish and TheRightStuff and the rest of it. It is simply disingenuous to pretend that this is not the line being taken.
The Politics of Multiracialism
BHM first of all pulls me up on the politics, that it’s a nice theory to just ignore race, but when you have a multi-racial society where too many unscrupulous people are stirring up racial divisions, it is just not feasible. You may wish to just deal with people as individuals, but it doesn’t work when the black ‘community leader’ down the road is demanding higher taxes on you to pay for whatever, and the latino ‘community leader’ is asking for something similar, and – and so on.
Also, I don’t think enough emphasis is put on the deep biological variability in humanity. There seems to be an assumption that because I am arguing for human variability, I’m arguing for uniformity. That is, that I dismiss the black/white IQ gap in the United States. I don’t, and nor do I dismiss the implications. If the gap is real, it follows that black Americans will be underrepresented in a host of positions and will do worse on average than whites at those – and that this difference has nothing to do with currently existing racism.
Let me give a hypothetical. Societies A and societies B are racially homogeneous. B has suffered considerable famines and diseases, so when members of B migrate to A, they do worse on average. Their descendants will catch up, but the people alive at that point in time will not.
The political problems arise here because of a) a scientific problem and b) an ethical one. The scientific problem is the failure of people to understand just how variable our species is . So they deny the biological reality and assume that the only reason for the differences in performance must be some form of oppression.
The ethical one is the collectivist premise underlying so much of this. Take the subject for reparations for slavery in the United States – crudely phrased “Whites owned blacks as slaves, so they owe them money”. Now, can you find me a white slave owner in the United States alive today? Anyone even with ties to slavery (okay, the Clintons, but you know what I mean)? Or any black American who has been kept as a slave in that way?
What this argument is that people should be punished because they look similar to criminals at another point in space and time, and other people should be rewarded because they look similar to victims at a point in space and time.
Or: A violated the rights of B, so it’s okay if C violates the rights of D.
This sort of thing is racism defined. How is it any different from Upton Sinclair writing:
The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free, free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves …
That said, please read the following. Even if you correct for IQ and educational levels, blacks in America have a harder time of it than whites. I’m not even going to get into the subject of crime and punishment, but I have heard stories of miscarriages that would wring tears from a stone – and, yes, they do tend to disproportionately affect black Americans.
To the subject of immigration then: with the exception of Islamic immigration, which is the most idiotic policy implemented since 1945, I am broadly in favour if certain preconditions are met. Getting those in place is a devil of a job.
As an example, most of continental Europe still has an ethnic, rather than a civic, conception of citizenship. That is, you have to be born German; you can’t become German. I hate that that is so, but I don’t write against it. I don’t because I can’t. If two world wars, the Holocaust, and the complete destruction and rebuilding of Germany couldn’t expunge that mentality, what chance do I have?
So there is an argument for restricted immigration – that there are just too many potential problems that can arise through misunderstanding, historical legacy, or some fools willfully stirring up trouble, that there is a limit to how many people a given nation can support and so on. That needs to be remembered.
I’ve written before that I understand that point of view. However, it remains a point of view that is the result of spending too much time reading things online rather than interacting in the real world. Think about your own life: how much trouble do you really get because of racial strife? Are you really affected negatively members of other races who are determined to fight you – more so, say, than the asshole boss who doesn’t know his fucking job and is making yours impossible as a consequence?
When it comes to conflicts between different groups, in the United Kingdom it is at its absolute worst between the English and the Irish, shortly followed by the Scottish and the Welsh. I have never heard the kind of tribal hatred expressed by any immigrant than I heard from Scots towards the English – and, yes, this has political consequences.
As I also wrote, the ability of race-hucksters of all colours to stir up trouble is in a steady decline, and furthermore, we have the best of all colours on our side when it comes to opposing all forms of racialism. This is especially true since we find ourselves with a common enemy: Islam (something I shall return to in time).
Next, on the subjects of IQ scores, BHM makes the, correct, point that there is something iffy about IQ scores, that:
it seems unlikely that that is the entire story, as noted it seems unlikely that a 1900′s Dutchman was so mentally retarded as to be unable to understand soccer
True, but IQ is the tool we have. If we abandon IQ as a proper tool, then a huge amount of racialist discourse collapses.
BHM is upset with my comment about the same rate of increase in black white IQ scores, that I said seems indicative of a same or similar base level of intelligence. By counterexample, he cites the fact that Japanese children grow taller on an American diet, as do Nilotic children – but no one would think that they have the same potential for growth. I take his point, but to prove it he would have to show that the rate of gain was the same for both Japanese and Nilotic children, something that his study does not show (if anyone has any work on this, I would love to read it).
Next he criticizes my definition of the five racial groups. I have seen a great number of racialists complain about exactly that. Well, here we can see the difference between the scientific amateurs and the professionals. The definition I used was popularized in Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. Wade’s work has received widespread approval and praise in the racialist circles and none of his defenders have been willing to object at the time. They only do so when I point out the implications of this.
Finally, I don’t think BHM really gets what I’ve been saying:
. Yes, yes we get it already they’re [the racialists] Terrible People (TM), hell I might actually agree with you (they do often seem like total asshats) but everyone this side of the internet divide probably already knows that, and at least they had the balls to throw a challenge your way (plus Alexander McNabb is funny in a way I don’t think he ever intended to be).
Actually, what I said was that they’re not really that terrible. The racialists like to think of themselves as bad, baaaaad boys, but they’re not really.
Now to the Occidental Observer!
I’ve pointed out the retreat from the position from racial determinism. OD tries this writing as follows:
To show that racialism, so defined, is true one only needs to show that between the said racial groups genetic differences condition practically important outcome differences.
Actually – not. Unless racial determinism is real, the whole thing collapses. I repeat what Ayn Rand wrote, something that is still not being touched by any of the people I argue with (Radish tried, but Karl Boetel seems to be still licking his wounds…)
Even if it were proved—which it is not—that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgement of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes—or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
No one tries to answer this – because they cannot.
OD also has trouble with the Wade definition of the three main races, preferring to say that ‘race’ can mean any group of common descent. So a family could be considered ‘a race’ by this standard.
It’s not so much the argument that I find interesting, but the fact that none of the racialists bothered to make it when Wade was all the rage on the racial right.
Next OD argues that IQ differences are strongly predictive of national outcome – I don’t know what he thinks that he is proving since I have already admitted that I accept both differences between groups and that these differences have practical consequences. What I have argued is that that these differences are not racially fixed.
Despite this, OD makes some interesting points. For example, he cites a study of historical numeracy between different cultures and races and argues that China was far more advanced than, say, Peru in the 1600-1800 periods. There are, to my mind, two big problems here:
1) I’m getting tired of having to repeat this – that the Amerindian populations are descended from Eastasians (obvious when you look at them) so this doesn’t seem to support the racialist argument one iota/
2) The second problem is that it misses that China has millenia of civilization behind it at this point. Conversely, the Inca Empire had only just established itself.
Next OD mentions that Amerindians do worse than white Americans on tests. Again, you can’t really compare two peoples when one has been hounded almost to nonexistence.
I’m going to republish this graph from Occidental Descent because I really don’t think that he realizes what he’s just put up:
What’s important about this ‘hockey stick’ is not the graph but the blade. For most of recorded history, there was… precisely zero difference in accomplishment between the different races. This is even worse if you consider how long they have been in existence. Try and imagine what that graph’d look like if we extended the X-axis to 50,000 years ago, the time of the great diaspora and the differentiation of the human family. We’re supposed to believe that the racial characteristics that cause white racial superiority were just doing nothing for forty nine and a half thousand years? And only in the last five hundred have they begun to work?
The origin of our modern civilization, of everything associated with civilization worth the name – rule of law, scientific progress, the industrial revolution – is Europe. That’s an open secret. It’s just that Europe managed to figure it out before the rest of the world. But the rest is catching up, and even exceeding us.
Racialists would do well to remember that.
