Victory without a Hereditarian Revolution?
My opening remarks from my debate with Eric Kaufmann
Video of the full debate is posted (behind a paywall) at Aporia.
Wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Suppose you believe that all groups have exactly the same distribution of abilities. Any disparities in outcome must be the result of environmental factors that could theoretically be corrected. As long as there are enormous gaps in IQ, wealth, health, crime rates, and so on, there is a moral emergency to correct the environment and achieve equal outcomes.
In reality, the equality thesis is false. With all the money and good will in the world, there are limits to how much we can correct for nature’s unfairness. But if you rule out hereditarianism a priori, people who care about inequality will double down on the search for environmental solutions. In practice, that means they’ll blame increasingly microscopic and/or imaginary expressions of bigotry. Society will be in a permanent state of war against racism and sexism. In wartime, you can’t expect free speech, academic freedom, or due process.
The taboo against hereditarianism makes it impossible for conservatives and classical liberals to resist the logic of wokism. Intelligent, morally sensitive people see massive race and sex disparities, and they demand a solution. Saying that we should “treat everyone as individuals” or strive for “colorblindness” doesn’t address the issue. From the perspective of the environmentalist, whites or men have constructed a system in which certain groups cannot reach their potential. There’s a moral imperative to fix the system immediately.
In his fantastic book, The Third Awokening, Eric Kaufmann proposes a 12-point plan to fight wokism, focusing on legal activism: strengthen protections for free speech, command schools to be politically neutral, and so on. These are all important things to do. But without a direct attack on the root cause of wokism—the equality thesis—I don’t see how the plan can be successful.
Kaufmann says that wokism began with the “big bang” of the race taboo around 1965. I agree with that. But he doesn’t have a clear explanation for what caused the big bang, which is what we need in order to understand where wokism came from and how to resist it. The race taboo is wokism. The question of what caused wokism is the question of what caused the race taboo.
The race taboo arose in response to the fact that, contrary to the predictions of the environmentalists, legal equality in the 1960s failed to produce equality of outcome. We started with affirmative action and hypersensitivity to underperforming minorities. Since that didn’t work, we eventually resorted to tearing down statues and canceling people for microaggressions. With every failure, the taboo intensifies.
Kaufmann says that the race taboo needs to be “reformed into a proportionate norm like any other.” He says that the “equity, diversity, and harm protection dials” should be turned down “from today’s eleven out of ten to an optimal five out of ten.” But I don’t think this argument has the moral force necessary to turn people away from wokism. It’s essentially asking people not to care too much about the fact that environmental conditions have caused black Americans to have a 15-point IQ deficit, one-tenth the wealth, and 4 times the incarceration rate compared to whites.
Kaufmann provides very discouraging data regarding the extent to which the young generation has drunk the DEI Kool-Aid. Politically, zoomers are far worse than even millennials. If current trends continue, in a few years they will start taking over our institutions, and they will vote for politicians to implement a woke fascist regime. We need a very powerful weapon to change the trajectory of our culture. Exhorting people to turn the dial down on their moral concerns isn’t going to be enough to counteract the passion of the woke crusaders—not even with the help of conservative activism and legal warfare.
If a critical mass of elites comes to accept hereditarianism, that will make wokism impossible. It will also completely undermine the moral authority of the reigning left–liberal establishment. When people realize that they’ve been lied to about something as fundamental as race, they will become open to new values. For reasons we can discuss, I don’t believe that colorblindness is the solution. My vision is a society in which communities are granted more freedom to organize themselves according to different values. Divisions won’t necessarily be made along racial lines, although when people organize themselves spontaneously, there is often a degree of homogeneity. A society that has absorbed the truth of hereditarianism should be open to this alternative.
When will Cofnas grow out his curly hair like Eric Zuckerberg did?
I think the arguments by Nathan and by Eric Kaufmann about the roots of woke are compatible. Both of them argue that the component energizing wokeness is a similar motivational one: 'Christian morality' (Nathan), 'bleeding heart liberalism' (Eric).
In fact, two motivations are involved: the first one can be described as empathy or compassion, as a reaction to blacks' problems and the existing disparities between blacks and other groups in the population.
The second motivation is guilt, underlying which is the idea that whites have caused those problems.
Thus, Nathan and Eric essentially agree in identifying the roots of wokeness. The main difference between Nathan and Eric lies, in my view, in the solutions that they propose.
Nathan focuses on the second motivational component: guilt. He says that if it can be proven for woke people that whites are not responsible for blacks' problems (by showing that those problems have their causes in the genetics of blacks), this will remove the guilt component energizing wokeness which will cause it to disappear.
Eric's solution doesn't seem to deal with the above motivational roots at all: he wants to suppress wokeness at the governmental and legal level, e.g. by regulating universities, distributing funds based on compliance to none-wokeness standards, etc.
Probably both of these solutions should be pursued. However, one should note that, first, none of these two solutions explicitly addresses the problems of the black population. Second, though Nathan addresses the motivational component 'guilt', neither of the authors deals with the other motivational component: empathy/compassion. This motivation, together with the continually existing black problems / disparities will continue to be present and might provide fuel for future woke waves. Will the knowledge that these problems are caused by black genes (Nathan's solution) or the government measures to suppress wokeness (Eric's solution) be able to counteract wokeness' revival? I am not sure.