I largely agree with you. I actually recently published an article entitled Central Moral Dilemma of the Left that makes similar points. It is part of a longer series of articles on the Origins of the Woke:
I also agree that we cannot overcome the eternal cycle of failed Leftist ideologies until we squarely confront the reality of human genetic diversity and how it makes the moral goal of Equality impossible.
Where I disagree with you is the necessity of focusing on race. The reality is that racial differences only account for a very small amount of the variance in outcomes between individuals within the same society. So even if all of society accepts that all black/white differences in outcome are determined by genetics, then it does not get us very far.
There is still a huge disparity in outcomes among whites and a huge disparity among blacks. So the Left will just shift the debate from racial differences in outcomes to disparate outcomes on other dimensions.
So rather than accepting that black/white differences in outcome are to a large extent determined by genetics, we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics.
So I believe that you are not pushing your argument for human genetic diversity far enough because you focus too much on race.
You're essentially making the Lewontin fallacy, although you're meandering around on its fringes. Lewontin stated that variation for a trait within an individual's population group was greater than that between population groups, thus supposedly proving that race is invalid.
That argument is a fallacy because race is not determined by a difference within any specific genetic allele, instead race is determined by a specific association of different alleles. It's been repeatedly proven that individuals (even anthropological remains) can be classified into different racial groups with almost 100% accuracy, by determining the frequency of alleles at certain genetic locations. I suggest you study the relevant material before making any more erroneous conclusions.
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race.
Let me quote from MY OWN ARTICLE to prove that I have “studied the relevant material:”
"Race is not a social construct; race is a biological category that is shaped by geography.
The concept of racial differences based on geography is a logical derivation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. If you believe Darwin was right about animal evolution, you must at the very least accept the plausibility of biological race.
Race is not unique to humans. Biologists have identified many races within animal species as well. They typically call them “sub-species.” Given enough time and geographical isolation, those sub-species will evolve into separate species. That is, in fact, the core of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Racial differences are not based on individual genes. They are based on slight differences in the frequency of alleles.
Using 326 AIMs, or ancestry informative markers, researchers have achieved a nearly perfect correspondence between the race that subjects said they belonged to and the race to which they were assigned genetically.
Proof of this is the ability of DNA tests to identify a person’s race with a high degree of certainty. If race were a social construct, how could this be possible?
The racial categories created by these 326 AIMs are closely related to the geography of ancestors before the year 1500 (i.e. before European expansion).
The race of a person identified by DNA tests very closely corresponds with the self-identified race of the person taking the test.
Physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, archeologists, social scientists, historians, philosophers, and regular everyday people use categories because they are useful. These academic specialties group individuals based on important characteristics and ignore less important characteristics. There is often blurring around the edges between categories because the variables are continuous rather than discrete.
Races are based on geography of origin, which is an important characteristic for humans, just as it is for all biological animals.
Just because humans have differing opinions on how many racial categories exist does not make the concept of “race” untenable. It is merely a question of how deep you want to drill down.”
If you're aware of the relevant material, then what is the point of watering down the hereditarian argument by talking about ALL differences being genetic? That approach is destined to fail, because there certainly is some degree of environmental shaping of individuals. Poor diet, for one, will certainly prevent an individual from attaining their optimal intellectual capacity.
Taken from any angle, your approach is not well thought out.
I never claimed that “all differences being genetic,” nor am I “watering down the hereditarian claim.” That is what those who obsess over only one genetic characteristic do (i.e. race).
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race. To be more specific, genetics typically accounts for 40-60% of the variation.
Of course, there are also environmental differences as well, but there are hundreds of them and we know very little about how much of the variance is accounted for by each individual environmental factor.
I seem to have finally pinned you down on your real position, since such specifics were otherwise lacking in your original comment. Ok, you now say that a maximum of 60% of variation is genetic. I don't see how that will help your position. You will get nothing but endless arguments about the specificity of that number.
Next, consider the phrase 'within the same society'. Does the same society have a uniform physical environment? The same social classes? Do its individual members all have the same opportunities to experience that environment in the same way? My god, you're just opening yourself up to endless contention. You propose to waste energy on picayune asides, instead of maintaining focus on the primary argument of innate racial differences due to heredity.
Whatever. It's obvious that Cofnas didn't go far enough in his definition of wokeness. We live in an age of narcissism, which is aided and abetted by the postmodernist, subjective aspects of wokism. Nobody can agree with anybody about anything. For a good description of the mindset, see 'Empathy and the Falsification of Narcissism', Gaius Balthar, August 23, 2023. Enough said.
You think my argument is lacking because you refuse to read the linked article.
If you know anything about social science, you would know that one causal variable accounting for 40-60% of the variation in human outcomes is utterly massive (and far higher than race). It is so massive that it drowns everything else out unless it is controlled for (which it rarely is). Particularly when every other known environmental cause is single digits at most, and most of those effects are unproven.
I don’t care about “massive contention” and “endless arguments.”
If you actually care about my argument (which I doubt that you do) read the linked article.
I honestly have no idea what your argument is at this point, and I think you are deliberately choosing to not understand my argument out of bad faith.
You have repeatedly and deliberately misstated what I actually wrote.
Racial IQ disparities are of roughly the same scale as individual IQ disparities, and sometimes larger. (According to at least a few studies, the ashkenazim/aborigine gap could be as larger as 40 points, or nearly 3 standard deviations. If that difference is mostly genetic then it *far* exceeds individual variation in either population.) Nor are genetic differences likely to be limited solely to intelligence.
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race.
If the interracial differences are comparable to or larger than individual differences, and mostly genetic in origin, how does this not refute "racial differences only account for a very small amount of the variance in outcomes between individuals within the same society"? IQ is the single strongest measurable predictor of life outcomes within both psychology and the social sciences, and black kids who grow up in mansions do about as well in life as white kids who grow up in trailer parks. Race actually has even *larger* impacts than individual IQ alone would suggest, thanks to recessive genetics and network effects.
Yeah, and 100% is larger than, e.g, 80%, but 80% is not a 'very small amount of the variance in outcomes'.
The fact of the matter is that sooner or later the brown people in the room are going to look around at eachother and say 'gee, I wonder why we're all living in ghettos', and bromides about equal opportunity are not going to cut it.
I suspect the people most obsessed with race here are those whose IQ's are on the left side of their race's bell curve. As such, they'd rather be judged by their race's average IQ than their individual IQ.
If the differences are large enough to be noticed at the group level by even the stupid among us, people will always care about them and want to know why they exist. It is of no relevance whether or not differences between individuals of the same race are larger than differences between groups. The only reason a deflection this meaningless is even used is because to reject deflection means accepting you need to have a lot of painful, unpopular conversations to have a hope of actually convincing people of what you want.
You should at bare minimum consider that you yourself are hereditarianpilled, the extent to which your being such has shaped your beliefs, and appreciate at minimum just how much less likely you would be to believe what you believe without your acceptance of hereditarianism. Why should anyone else be more likely? Because the very thing that makes them understand our point is presently unpopular? That's the whole reason we need to convince people of the truth!
No. I get it. It's just that your main point is wrong. Not answering people's questions on race -- or worse still, pretending race doesn't exist at all -- is precisely why we're in today's mess. Further quietism will just exacerbate the problems of the now.
Your proposal is literally the exact same as what's been tried in feminist circles in an effort to defeat sexism: between-group differences aren't as drastic as within-group differences, so therefore if we just stop focusing on them, we'll finally achieve harmony! Except said harmony never comes, because the differences that people are upset over are still there. It's just now, you're socially sanctioned for taking about them. So worse than doing nothing, you actively create more tension than before, because now people never learn to genuinely accept differences between themselves and others, but resent them substantially more just for existing, and become inclined to trample over anything that they think might be an obstacle to reducing disparities.
If your way could actually work, it would already have worked in at least one place. But it never does. Nor will it ever.
My claim is that race is just one of the many genetic causes of different outcomes between humans that lead to Inequality. By dwelling on just one, you are just allowing the Left to shift to another dimension.
We're not dwelling on one. We're answering the questions everyone else either refuses, or answers with deranged blood-libel conspiracy like "it's systemic racism that causes the black-white IQ gap!" You say that it's best to remain quiet on this, as if the past sixty years of remaining quiet never happened. As if we have no real-life record of the dire costs of silence and lies.
Race realism is the only possible inoculant against a further resurgence of Kendi'ism, or something worse.
I never said that “it’s best to remain quiet on this one.” You are confusing me with someone else.
Kendi'ism is only one of dozens of Left-Center ideologies that focus on equality. The Left will just shift to one of the others. Race realism will achieve nothing.
And, yes, all the people who are replying to me appear to want to “dwell on just one dimension of human genetic inequality.”
Cofnas basically wants us to accept stage 1 HBD, which is “blacks are dumb and violent so let’s end affirmative action and go Bukele on crime”.
But if you accept stage 1, how do you not go on to stage 2, stage 3, etc. HBD is a huge field touching all areas of life beyond the problem of the black underclass and lack of black elite. Exhaustion with BLM has temporarily made people amenable to stage 1 hbd, but there is no particular intellectual stopping point.
I am 54 and will be shocked if I live to see a mainstream human biodiversity movement in the U.S. Equalitarianism has been the state religion for longer than I've been alive, and has only gotten bolder, more aggressive, and more censorious in recent years. Of course, one might argue this is because it's (rightly) insecure: the data pouring in from genetic research makes a mockery of equalitarian precepts, which were already a priori unlikely if evolution is true. But religious convictions just don't disappear over night. The fight between the smarter liberal conformists and the dumber conservative dissidents has been like the fight between Catholics and Lutherans during the Protestant Reformation. They imagined themselves irreconcilable opposites, but both held on to Jesus; both in fact insisted they were the true party of Jesus. So it is with liberals and conservatives with equality. Equality is the American secular Jesus.
The hunter gatherer/christian/slave morality being dominant cancels any positive effects of implementing HBD. Free will deniers like Sam Harris and Sapolsky already are pretty aware of race differences and are still very upset about economic gaps berween races.Most left leaning elites have accepted luck egalitarian norms that no race realist views can shatter.
I don't recall that Harris or Sapolsky were calling for total equality of outcome between racial or ethnic groups, and if they've said otherwise I'd like to see your source on that.
The 'luck egalitarian' position is actually one I'm reasonably sympathetic to, though there are obvious caveats regarding feasible levels of wealth redistribution and the side-effects of maintaining eugenic fertility in a color-blind society, though if the elites want to push for designer baby subsidies or something it wouldn't be the worst of all worlds.
The left is not wrong about the top 1% absconding with most of society's economic gains over recent decades, by the way, which is something that can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs.
The argument there still isn't to bury HBD, but to convince the élites bothered by inequality of outcome that this is not a sufficient thing to worry about compared to overall wellbeing. Lower though it is than Euros, Afro-Americans of the United States still have a higher per-capita than all but the top ten-percent of nations. That number would be even higher if we dropped the shackles of race communism for our economy, whereas we could virtually end economic inequality between races by making it illegal to earn more than ten-thousand dollars a year; but outside literal commies, you sure as shit don't see people advocating that latter point.
Left hereditarian here. I think a lot of those on the right severely underestimate the psychological impact and also real world risks of unequal outcomes, even when general wellbeing is seeing improvements.
More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains. One's relative social status suffers, as does one's political power and relative market power, which makes the guarantee of protecting that current wellbeing more precarious.
The psychological responses to unequal treatment exist famously in monkeys, and when mating rights are on the table, widening resource accumulation is indeed a threat that the monkeys are correct to notice.
Relative social status IS a material concern when one can use their accumulated resources in politics, housing markets, future-proofing one's positions, tools to amplify one's speech and ideological positions, etc. No one wants to gamble their wellbeing, no matter how good it might currently be, on being a protectorate of some benevolent figure who could just as easily turn hostile competitor. Having 1 person exist with the market power of 100,000 is a threat to those 100,000. Not saying that he would, but Elon Musk could buy up all the eggs in the US tomorrow. Not saying he would, but that scenario could play out with housing, water rights, internet platforms, or all kinds of other areas where it is perfectly rational to not want capricious monopolies.
>More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not changed
No it doesn't! This is completely idiotic and the reason I reject leftist politics wholesale. It's also something you yourself assuredly don't believe in, as there are many countries in the world today with less income inequality than the United States. Countries which are both high income and with significantly lower costs of living, like Slovenia, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic; and no one ever, ever moves to them from the United States to get away from "income inequality". And these are nice countries which are in no danger of war and have excellent drinking water. You sure wouldn't see anyone consider heading to a lower-Gini country which is actually poor or dangerous to escape "income inequality", like Syria or Pakistan. They can't even get people to come to enjoy the lower cost of living.
Think about just how much better so many first worlders could live relative to others if they sold their possessions and moved to one of the countless countries much poorer than ourselves. Countries like El Salvador or Uruguay, which have much lower costs of living than the United States, lower rates of violent crime, and where most of the population speaks Spanish, which is about as easy a major language for Anglophones to learn as it gets. And yet there aren't even ten thousand American expats in these countries combined as of now! If any remotely significant fraction of people genuinely prioritized their wellbeing relative to others, countries like these should be absolutely swamped with first-worlders looking to enjoy living at a much higher social station than they do at home. But they never are. Instead, it's the opposite. There are tens of thousands of Uruguayans in the USA, and millions of Salvadorans. They would rather work at fucking gas stations here than sell their possessions and live like kings in their home countries!
The people have spoken. They want to be rich, and overwhelmingly choose to pursue said riches even when the opportunity for greater relative wealth is extremely easy. You'd think this'll cause at least some leftist reflection on the validity of their worldviews, but they never much care for the people of reality.
That doesn't come close to a rebuttal of my view that absolute wellbeing AND relative social status are both important. Obviously having sky-high opportunity and high-returns on achievement are a huge draw. We could map the foot traffic of a local casino vs. a local city park or hiking trail to make an appeal as to which is better for human thriving from the point of view of popularity. We could also map happiness index, longevity, familial ties, or all kinds of other metrics to the GINI coefficient if you want. But that's not what I was saying.
Relative social status declines when someone else in my society makes gains that do not flow to me (and those gains are expressed in terms of heightened status, spending power, resource allotment, etc). To completely write that off as an effect is a major blind spot. It simply doesn't comport with human psychology (which is adapted to notice unfairness for obvious biological reasons) or with acknowledgement of future risks to self that come from declining ability to compete across various market dynamic type social games.
Then why don't you, nor almost anybody else, move to one of the many, many countries on Earth where you'd have far higher status than you fo in the United States? You could live like a king in Botswana! Their professional class all speak English. Greencard-crazed women would throw themselves at you faster than you could track. But not only do you not do this; nobody else does neither! Not even two-thousand Americans live in Botswana. Only thirteen countries have at least a hundred thousand Americans, and half of them are first-world countries where you don't get to enjoy nearly as much status relative to others just for existing. Hence why there's more Americans in Germany alone, by a lot, than in all of Africa combined.
Egalitarianism is the sacred post-Christian belief of just about every Western liberal (in the expansive sense), esp the university-educated and people who work in culture and academia and politics.
It's like Diet Christianity Lite for our age where signals and markers have replaced actual beliefs and convictions.
One can have what I think you are calling "spiritual equality" without demanding equality of outcome.
For example, I will never bench press over 300 pounds. I lack the frame size to accumulate that much muscle, and I'm not a quick gainer in terms of adding muscle when I lift. In that sense, I am genetically inferior when it comes to developing raw physical strength. However, it is possible for me to be as strong as I can be, given my physical attributes and age.
More generally, you can believe that the human race is better off if each human is encouraged to develop his or her innate gifts to their maximal potential. That's true even if average innate potentials vary across demographic groups.
Bingo. A hereditarian belief can benefit society by diverting resources devoted to achieving false equality, i.e., equity, among the races. We should be looking into developing each person’s maximum potential instead.
I agree, although I would call it "social equality" not "spiritual equality.
And I think shifting the goal from Equality to Upward Mobility makes it possible to encourage everyone to develop his or her innate gifts to their maximal potential without believing that this will lead to a state of Equality.
Depends on what you mean by upward mobility. If you're talking about moving from the bottom quintile of income to the top quintile, that necessitates someone at the top moving down correspondingly. If one assumes equal innate ability of all humans and one could equalize opportunities, one would expect that parent/child/grandchild incomes would not be correlated at all.
But if hereditarianism is at all true, one would expect children of the top strata to end up staying there, for meritocratic reasons.
If, on the other hand, you mean "upward mobility" in absolute terms -- everyone being better off -- then that is consistent with both hereditarianism and with the notion of each person being given an opportunity to establish his or her full potential.
A thought-provoking piece. While I’ve long leaned anti-woke, this article made me reflect on the interplay between hereditarianism, environmental influences, and the broader political landscape.
My own experience as a second-generation Somali in the UK challenges strict hereditarianism. I’ve seen firsthand how peer groups, school systems, and migration policies shape life outcomes—even among siblings raised in the same household. Britain’s Somali diaspora, for example, is pragmatic rather than ideological—many leverage Black identity when useful but reject the moral logic of wokeness due to their Islamic worldview.
On a macro level, the contradiction at the heart of the liberal order is becoming untenable. Mass immigration is both an economic necessity (suppressing wages) and a growing social strain. Mainstream politicians fear a course correction, but in avoiding it, they risk losing control to a truly far-right movement—not just Reform or Trumpism, but something much more extreme.
You’re right to question whether woke ideology is inevitable or fragile—I’d argue it’s only “inevitable” as long as elites can sustain the contradictions. Once they break, the correction may be sharper than anyone expects.
> I claim that wokism is a rational response to the equality thesis (all groups have the same innate distribution of potential). Therefore, it won’t be stopped without a hereditarian revolution. Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania argue that wokism followed from a “long march through the institutions” and civil rights law, respectively. They say that it will disappear when we muscle our way back into the institutions and/or change the laws.
Those laws and institutions are the reason the equality thesis can't be openly questioned in polite company. Changing the ideology will become much easier once a company can't be sued for creating a "hostile work environment" if it doesn't fire anyone who brings up IQ differences.
It will get easier, but it's still quite painful. We, all of us, will have to have many agonizing conversations with anti-hereditarians, friends and family and even those we've only just met; many of which will be fruitless, and many others which will be downright risky to our personal and professional lives, or even physical safety. Like with being a proper missionary, every convert is a struggle, and for many of us you're lucky to get so much as one; but this will only get harder the more we put it off, and we'll never get a better opportunity than now.
I think you center race but elide sex in your discussion of the equality hypothesis. Feminism has been as strong a driver of wokism as racial justice. One needs sex realism as well as race realism to counter wokism.
Further, gender theory is not distinct from the equality hypothesis. Rather, it extends it through an additional hypothesis: gender is not binary but infinite in possibilty. The fact that only two genders are universally acknowledged is then taken as proof of inequality and oppression. The rest follows the exact same pattern. Wokeism can be extended to any domain where an inequality can be claimed.
It's also less blatantly wrong. The differences between men and women are much blunter than the differences between races. Unless you're a fully committed pronoun person, you just can't get behind sex communism; and fully-committed pronoun people, as well their ideological predecessors, have the lowest reproductive rates of any group of human beings on Earth.
Men and women are pretty similar in intelligence, though apparently fine-grained personality surveys can distinguish the two with near-perfect accuracy across cultures. Racial groups can show large differences in intelligence but personality diffs aren't as well-established, as I understand it, though they're probably not zero. I'm not sure which diffs are more prominent in any case.
Every year allow 1% of the federal budget to be directly voted on by citizens to fund new or existing institutions. Funding, innovation, transparency, accountability, democracy, markets. Let populism fund the next elite and break the lefts and big business strangle hold on tax dollars
No offense, but this is a terrible fucking idea. The general public is on the SIDE of equality of outcome between races, and to a lesser extent between sexes. That's the whole reason we're in the mess we're in today. They hate it in practice of course, but support it in theory all the same, as is often the case with populism. Hence why so many awful policies have come about in the last sixty years.
So currently maybe 95% of ideologically-driven government funding goes to wokish equality stuff. And maybe 70% of people believe in wokish equality stuff. By my math that is maybe 25% of dollars that can go to new right wing stuff. Where is the problem?
This isn't even kind of true. Most of our government spending goes towards Social Security and Medicare. The taking of money from the young to give to the old, which isn't woke at all, as the old already have more money and power than the young, as well less need for it:
95% of IDEALOGICAL government spending goes to the left. The vast majority of most government workers are left wing. By democratizing some spending there is the opportunity for right wing institutions to get some of that money so it is less massively dominated by the Left
If you are not an abstract thinker here's an example: the government provides money for research grants for scientific studies but pretty much none of that goes to researching race and IQ instead you get tons of money going to woke studies and hereditarians fired from universities. But if some of that funding money was democratized then right wing people could vote to send their money to institutions that could do more hereditarian studies.
Social security and medicare are obviously left-wing projects aimed at mitigating outcome disparities. (A significant portion of social security is paid in by individuals toward their own retirement as I understand it, but that that isn't being 'extracted from the young'.)
Young in a relative sense. Women can and do start their families in their forties, naturally as well as via medical treatment. But also, by the time you get the money, the bit you yourself paid in is already spent, due to the ponzischemic nature of American welfare state funding.
A welfare system that's focused on alleviating poverty rather than reducing outcome disparities, would be a far better system. One more accepting of capitalism. This too is ideologically motivated, as is the decision to have or not have a welfare program period. Torin McCabe is an embarrassingly stupid commentator.
I don't think the basic idea of letting the public decide what research they want to fund directly would be such an awful idea. Even if only 10-20% went to genuine right-wing causes, the state of CA spends more on social science in one month than the Pioneer Fund allocated in it's entire existence. He's right it would be a net win.
I think your last section is your strongest. In response to the Rufo claim that The Bell Curve failed to kill PC culture, your BEST retort is: The Bell Curve predated anonymous internet speech. While many on the Right agreed with Murray, fewer spoke publicly for fear of cancellation. So, Murray was effectively siloed. This time is DIFFERENT. If a few intellectuals step forward, millions can amplify them anonymously on X without being cancelled.
You should lead with this retort. It is very persuasive. Don’t bury it at the end.
The Bell Curve was also the most popular, and early “bow shot”, wrt the concept of innate differences. Such a great, but threatening concept, needs time to take hold. And yes, I respect/note academics in the field like Lynn, but they catered to small audiences at the time.
To nitpick at your woke definition, wouldn’t it be more complete to specify it’s a mix of Christian equality and social justice doctrine plus the Marxist influence of Critical Race Theory? (You do mention “race communists” later on.)
I feel like you, Hanania, and Rufo are all touching different parts of the elephant because the causal explanations you put forth are complimentary. Your racial equality ideology captured important elites who spread it in academic and cultural institutions and enshrined it in law (and judicial interpretations) as it concurrently grew in popularity throughout society. WWII and then the Civil Rights Movement’s success killed off any significant discussion in polite society of race science. Critical mass for progressives was achieved around 2012.
What will best reverse it and the order of operations is an open question, but there will have to be a shift in the law, institutions, and society at large for it to stick. Trump’s present efforts might stick, especially if the GOP retains power after him, and societal attitudes might shift. Or it could cause a backlash, though I do think the heights of 2020 will not return again.
Getting back to colorblind law via EO is a good first step at least and it’s crazy it took this long.
"a mix of Christian equality and social justice doctrine plus the Marxist influence of Critical Race Theory"
🎯
my recipe is:
Unitarian Universalism mixed with Crit Theory Neo-Marxism (where instead of one savior up on the cross comes a rotating cast of "marginalized" minorities who bear their intolerable stigma as a moral marker) and don't forget to add a healthy splash of therapeutic self-help where self-esteem (what they call being your True Authentic Self™) makes you holy and completed, the telos of our marginalized hero's journey.
I do agree. Yet the huge change that NEEDS to take place is in the heart of White people,to face and conquer their own prejudice. Many are vocal lip equalitarians but their hearts are darkened by prejudice. I know this from life experience.
"If all groups have exactly the same innate potential, how can we possibly not see it as a moral emergency to fix the environmental conditions that lead to massive disparities?"
There are massive differences between other ethnic groups, if you leave blacks out of it. Indian Americans have vastly higher median family incomes than whites, and the top-performing white groups in America (Macedonians and Jews) have very high incomes, while other white groups and various Hispanic groups are well below average.
No one thinks any of this is an "emergency" or even particularly important, as far as I can tell. It's only blacks that are the issue, and this is at least largely because of their ancestors' enslavement and post-emancipation mistreatment.
More simply, you could just take the top "group" as the group that has the highest income and education and skills, and make the other "group" the bottom half. It is at the core of socialism to think or claim to think that such differences are an "emergency," but we have nicely disposed of that belief in the non-socialist mindset, and no one thinks outside of socialism that it is an "emergency" because waiters, medical assistants, and common laborers make less than great chefs, surgeons, or contractors.
You might not need a full on revolution or full institutional capture. All you might need is for enough data out there for blank slatists to know they don't want to get involved in every battle.
If you just get a majority to think "it's complicated", and not have moral reflexes about every instance of inequality, we could go back to living our lives as people have done throughout the ages, accepting inequalities that exist around them if they cannot be attributed to direct state oppression or discrimination. Most normal people do not want to side with restless equality warriors, but they also would be perfectly happy more or less ignoring lots of unequal outcomes, or even just coming up with folk justifications (such as cultural reasons) why these observations are nothing to freak out about.
The real problem comes from the threat of insurgency from the underperforming parts of the population. Do you think they could EVER accept even cultural reasons for their dysfunction? There's a section like this in every society and distraction seems to be the only solution because heightened awareness like the kind the wokes want to push only fuels the marginalized insurgents. We should work to make their lives as comfortable and free as we can, but I don't know how to solve the problem of "noticing" without distractions.
The way to get more people on our side is to disseminate the writings of those who once took the equality thesis seriously but now no longer do. I remember reading a piece by a British documentary maker who started out wanting to show how wrong and nasty hereditarians were. She contacted Arthur Jensen (I think) and slowly realised that he wasn't nasty at all, neither was his wife. And the more she learned, the more she realised how she had unthinkingly obtained her opinions, as if by osmosis, from the surrounding culture, which was overwhelmingly anti-hereditarian.
What we need are millions of people to read such articles and to have an 'Oops, I think I see how I've been taken in' moment. It helped that the documentary maker was both very likeable and crucially, intellectually honest. Shame I can't remember her name.
It's good to see that someone with intellect and courage has gotten to the heart of the political miasma we've been plunged into. I would go further with a definition of wokism to include postmodernism and the death of objective truth, but for now, equality is certainly a key takeoff point.
Generally prior to the 19th century, there was no aspect of Christian morality that insisted all races were physically, mentally, emotionally equal. Therefore what we see today is a heresy of Christianity. There have been specific, directed efforts over the last 200 years to revise Christianity according to leftist political agendas (the Scofield Bible is one example).
The morality of equality is therefore fake morality. Traditional Christianity says that God will judge the nations in His final return, so He expects there to be distinct nations hanging around to be judged. Likewise, the parables of Christ's teachings have been politically embellished beyond recognition. Thus traditional Christian morality must be re-explicated and thoroughly understood by hereditarians, in order to have any effective arguments both morally and intellectually against wokusts. It's going to take a LOT of work. At that point, each wokust must be shamed as to their moral, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings, beyond their ability to live with themselves. Only then is there a chance of beating wokism.
...Yes, prior to the 19th century, there was no empirical insistence that all races were biologically equivalent. Nathan's point is that combining the liberal belief in the blank slate with the christian insistence on moral activism functionally leads to wokeness (and has perhaps emerged on the grounds of being well-adapted to vote-harvesting.)
Yes, and MY point is that 'insistence on moral activism' about this issue is NOT Christian, instead it is a Christian heresy which needs to be rolled back before hereditarianism can have any chance of success. If you're just talking about moral activism in general, then you might as well cite Islam, which has at least as energetic a history as Christianity.
But... is it not a Christian moral principle, more-or-less, that people with equal endowments should wind up with similar rewards? Or at least that one could expect equally-endowed groups to do so, statistically? The empirical claim about hereditary endowments can be treated separately and I agree that's not intrinsic to Christianity, but Cofnas isn't claiming that.
There is, also, a certain problem of persuasion here: Are you going to convince Christians who believe in a fundamentally just God and good world that God would design human populations with a ~3 SD IQ difference? It would seem cruel to me, but then I'm not committed to the just world hypothesis, or God being much involved.
Wrong, otherwise, to pick the most obvious, all so-called Christians would get into Heaven, which is not what Christ taught. Good grief, this is not the venue for Scriptural exegesis, so I'm not going to go any further.
Regarding Cofnas, you seem to have muddied the waters about what he actually IS talking about regarding Christianity. I've rebutted your explanations, so what's left?
People (in theory) can choose their moral conduct, but they can't choose their genetics, so I'm not sure I see the analogy. (I do think there are also problems with the concept of infinite punishment for finite transgression, but I'll acknowledge that Christian denominations vary in their conception of the afterlife, and in any case it's a separate discussion.)
I think Cofnas has stated his argument with reasonable clarity, so I would suggest reading over the article again.
“But I refer to the moral premise of wokism as 'Christian morality' because it was Christianity that first formulated and popularized the idea of spiritual equality, and the secularized version of this principle supplies the moral energy for the left’s crusade against racism.”
What exactly does 'spiritual equality' mean? "If you believe everything that our religion says to believe, then we are all equal." How in the world is that specifically Christian? There's an in group and an out group in ALL religions. I sincerely doubt that Christianity first came up with the idea. Hell, the Bible uses the word 'equality' only twice, and those in the same sentence, 2 Corinthians 8:14.
Cofnas is blaming Christianity for something it didn't do, or at least for something that is not unique to its teachings. Regardless, if you're going to counteract whatever you are blaming on Christianity, then you'd better fully understand what real Christianity consists of. To reiterate, traditional Christianity must be understood for what it truly is, so that wokism can be called out for mimicking a vile heresy. Otherwise, forget about hereditarianism. It will remain a nice idea going nowhere fast. Now enough, already.
Nathan is right to point out the hypocrisy of the Right: accepting the equality thesis while rejecting wokeism. But there is also a hypocrisy of the Left:
Mainstream liberals — for example, Scott Alexander — believe the following:
1) There are racial IQ gaps
2) These gaps are due to environment
3) IQ is highly correlated with achievement
4) The black-white achievement gap is a moral emergency
Then, shouldn't fixing the environmental causes of the IQ gap be the #1 issue liberals focus on? Doing so is vital for achieving equality. The Left should be talking about race and IQ nonstop. They should be scrambling to improve black nutrition, reduce lead in the water supply, etc. in efforts to raise black IQ... But they’re not.
(The only logical counter I can think of: discussing IQ makes people more racist. So it is better to ignore this problem and avoid an increase in racism. This is similar to the argument that it is best not to discuss black-on-black crime — despite the massive number of blacks killed by such crime — because doing so might increase white racism.)
Scott certainly knows about hbd. In the leaked emails he linked to John Fuerst's 2012 evidence review. In his recent post on national IQ, he tried to soften the blow of the genetic gaps.
Yeah, in that most recent post, he was arguing that the difference between American blacks and sub-Saharan Africans in Africa may be largely due to environmental causes, which I don't think most hereditarians would strongly object to. He said that even if the black-white gap in the US was 100% percent genetic, and American blacks were higher than Africans due to white admixture, you would expect Africans to have IQs around 80 (compared the 85 of American blacks), rather than the 60~70 (sometimes even lower) that is often found in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore the 15+ point difference is probably caused by stuff like disease, parasites, malnutrition, lack of education, possibly trauma in regions plagued by civil war and violence, etc. Which seems entirely plausible. Therefore, on EA grounds, charity to Africa to attempt to alleviate those problems is justified. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he takes it for granted that the genetic contribution to the black-white gap, at least in the US, is maybe at least 50% percent genetic.
I'm pretty sure Scott Alexander is at least *receptive* to the HBD explanations for IQ disparities, although he doesn't typically bang on about it much. He was 'outed' for this on twitter at some point.
As for the rest- the left has made *enormous* efforts to improve public schooling, nutrition, health, reduction in lead exposure, etc. over the years, it's just that all those efforts hit a point of diminishing returns around the 1970s and can no longer plausibly have more than a trivial impact on group-level disparities.
"I'm pretty sure Scott Alexander is at least *receptive* to the HBD explanations for IQ disparities": I think I saw this tweet. But SA expresses publicly the mainstream liberal opinion on the matter (all environment, no genes).
So, what if we take this thesis seriously? This means environmental factors are imposing a ~15 point IQ reduction on blacks. This is a catastrophe! This should by far the *most important* political issue. Why is lead in black drinking water (e.g., Flint Michigan) not the most discussed emergency on the Left?
This leads me to be somewhat skeptical of the Cofnas view that liberals arrive at their ideology purely through logic. If this were true, lead in black drinking water would be their #1 issue.
Paradoxically, I think Cofnas' focus on genes may be counter-productive. If you think IQ is fixed, then the Left has a justification for suppressing discussion: there is nothing we can do, but discussion might make people more racist. But, if you believe black IQ is being lowered by environment, you have a *moral imperative* as a liberal to discuss how to fix it. A ~15-point boost in black IQ would be *way better* for black outcomes than canceling people for microaggressions.
Again, where has SA ever said that the B/W IQ gap is all environment, no genes? If this has occurred, I'd like to see your source.
Did you read the rest of my post? Anyone serious on the left knows perfectly well that lead pollution or other conventional environmental handicaps are a trivial problem in virtually all modern contexts (they do make demented noises about it from time to time- I remember Steven Colbert going on about air pollution somehow creating racial education disparities a few years back- but they know it can't possibly be the main problem at this point.)
Liberal backlash to Murray, Sailer, etc. suggesting genes *might* play a role shows "mainstream opinion" is all environment, no genes (since suggestion that genes may play role results in cancellation).
I use SA as stand-in for "mainstream liberal." I don't know SA's exact beliefs. His beliefs are not relevant to my point. Point is that mainstream left claims hereditarian thesis is "debunked" yet does not behave as though this is true (else, they'd be ultra focussed on fixing environment).
Is your position that hereditarianism is mainstream on the left? Or do you disagree with using SA as example?
> Is your position that hereditarianism is mainstream on the left? Or do you disagree with using SA as example?
I disagree with using SA as an example, and my contention is that the environmental factors you were nominating for attention have already been addressed exhaustively and even leftists mostly know it- google for 'the punishing reach of racism for black boys' for an example of what I mean. (Racism would itself plausibly qualify as a kind of 'environmental factor', of course, and the left certainly haven't stopped trying to address that factor in the equation.)
Has anyone ever thought of making a Rawlsian argument to leftists against DEI? If one could show DEI slows down the economy, that means that there are less resources to distribute to the lowest person in the social contract? In a "colorblind" society, you could justify inequality between racial groups via redistribution.
I largely agree with you. I actually recently published an article entitled Central Moral Dilemma of the Left that makes similar points. It is part of a longer series of articles on the Origins of the Woke:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-central-moral-dilemma-of-the
I also agree that we cannot overcome the eternal cycle of failed Leftist ideologies until we squarely confront the reality of human genetic diversity and how it makes the moral goal of Equality impossible.
Where I disagree with you is the necessity of focusing on race. The reality is that racial differences only account for a very small amount of the variance in outcomes between individuals within the same society. So even if all of society accepts that all black/white differences in outcome are determined by genetics, then it does not get us very far.
There is still a huge disparity in outcomes among whites and a huge disparity among blacks. So the Left will just shift the debate from racial differences in outcomes to disparate outcomes on other dimensions.
So rather than accepting that black/white differences in outcome are to a large extent determined by genetics, we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics.
So I believe that you are not pushing your argument for human genetic diversity far enough because you focus too much on race.
You're essentially making the Lewontin fallacy, although you're meandering around on its fringes. Lewontin stated that variation for a trait within an individual's population group was greater than that between population groups, thus supposedly proving that race is invalid.
That argument is a fallacy because race is not determined by a difference within any specific genetic allele, instead race is determined by a specific association of different alleles. It's been repeatedly proven that individuals (even anthropological remains) can be classified into different racial groups with almost 100% accuracy, by determining the frequency of alleles at certain genetic locations. I suggest you study the relevant material before making any more erroneous conclusions.
No, I never claimed that “race is invalid.”
That would be a ridiculous argument.
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race.
Let me quote from MY OWN ARTICLE to prove that I have “studied the relevant material:”
"Race is not a social construct; race is a biological category that is shaped by geography.
The concept of racial differences based on geography is a logical derivation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. If you believe Darwin was right about animal evolution, you must at the very least accept the plausibility of biological race.
Race is not unique to humans. Biologists have identified many races within animal species as well. They typically call them “sub-species.” Given enough time and geographical isolation, those sub-species will evolve into separate species. That is, in fact, the core of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Racial differences are not based on individual genes. They are based on slight differences in the frequency of alleles.
Using 326 AIMs, or ancestry informative markers, researchers have achieved a nearly perfect correspondence between the race that subjects said they belonged to and the race to which they were assigned genetically.
Proof of this is the ability of DNA tests to identify a person’s race with a high degree of certainty. If race were a social construct, how could this be possible?
The racial categories created by these 326 AIMs are closely related to the geography of ancestors before the year 1500 (i.e. before European expansion).
The race of a person identified by DNA tests very closely corresponds with the self-identified race of the person taking the test.
Physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, archeologists, social scientists, historians, philosophers, and regular everyday people use categories because they are useful. These academic specialties group individuals based on important characteristics and ignore less important characteristics. There is often blurring around the edges between categories because the variables are continuous rather than discrete.
Races are based on geography of origin, which is an important characteristic for humans, just as it is for all biological animals.
Just because humans have differing opinions on how many racial categories exist does not make the concept of “race” untenable. It is merely a question of how deep you want to drill down.”
If you're aware of the relevant material, then what is the point of watering down the hereditarian argument by talking about ALL differences being genetic? That approach is destined to fail, because there certainly is some degree of environmental shaping of individuals. Poor diet, for one, will certainly prevent an individual from attaining their optimal intellectual capacity.
Taken from any angle, your approach is not well thought out.
I am concerned about your reading comprehension.
I never claimed that “all differences being genetic,” nor am I “watering down the hereditarian claim.” That is what those who obsess over only one genetic characteristic do (i.e. race).
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race. To be more specific, genetics typically accounts for 40-60% of the variation.
Of course, there are also environmental differences as well, but there are hundreds of them and we know very little about how much of the variance is accounted for by each individual environmental factor.
I seem to have finally pinned you down on your real position, since such specifics were otherwise lacking in your original comment. Ok, you now say that a maximum of 60% of variation is genetic. I don't see how that will help your position. You will get nothing but endless arguments about the specificity of that number.
Next, consider the phrase 'within the same society'. Does the same society have a uniform physical environment? The same social classes? Do its individual members all have the same opportunities to experience that environment in the same way? My god, you're just opening yourself up to endless contention. You propose to waste energy on picayune asides, instead of maintaining focus on the primary argument of innate racial differences due to heredity.
Whatever. It's obvious that Cofnas didn't go far enough in his definition of wokeness. We live in an age of narcissism, which is aided and abetted by the postmodernist, subjective aspects of wokism. Nobody can agree with anybody about anything. For a good description of the mindset, see 'Empathy and the Falsification of Narcissism', Gaius Balthar, August 23, 2023. Enough said.
You think my argument is lacking because you refuse to read the linked article.
If you know anything about social science, you would know that one causal variable accounting for 40-60% of the variation in human outcomes is utterly massive (and far higher than race). It is so massive that it drowns everything else out unless it is controlled for (which it rarely is). Particularly when every other known environmental cause is single digits at most, and most of those effects are unproven.
I don’t care about “massive contention” and “endless arguments.”
If you actually care about my argument (which I doubt that you do) read the linked article.
I honestly have no idea what your argument is at this point, and I think you are deliberately choosing to not understand my argument out of bad faith.
You have repeatedly and deliberately misstated what I actually wrote.
Good bye.
Racial IQ disparities are of roughly the same scale as individual IQ disparities, and sometimes larger. (According to at least a few studies, the ashkenazim/aborigine gap could be as larger as 40 points, or nearly 3 standard deviations. If that difference is mostly genetic then it *far* exceeds individual variation in either population.) Nor are genetic differences likely to be limited solely to intelligence.
That in no way refutes my claim.
My claim is that “we need to accept that ALL differences in outcome between individuals within the same society are largely determined by genetics,” not just race.
If the interracial differences are comparable to or larger than individual differences, and mostly genetic in origin, how does this not refute "racial differences only account for a very small amount of the variance in outcomes between individuals within the same society"? IQ is the single strongest measurable predictor of life outcomes within both psychology and the social sciences, and black kids who grow up in mansions do about as well in life as white kids who grow up in trailer parks. Race actually has even *larger* impacts than individual IQ alone would suggest, thanks to recessive genetics and network effects.
It simple logic:
*All* genetic variation is greater than *one* genetic variation (i.e race).
And I never mentioned IQ. That is less than *all* as well.
Yeah, and 100% is larger than, e.g, 80%, but 80% is not a 'very small amount of the variance in outcomes'.
The fact of the matter is that sooner or later the brown people in the room are going to look around at eachother and say 'gee, I wonder why we're all living in ghettos', and bromides about equal opportunity are not going to cut it.
I suspect the people most obsessed with race here are those whose IQ's are on the left side of their race's bell curve. As such, they'd rather be judged by their race's average IQ than their individual IQ.
If the differences are large enough to be noticed at the group level by even the stupid among us, people will always care about them and want to know why they exist. It is of no relevance whether or not differences between individuals of the same race are larger than differences between groups. The only reason a deflection this meaningless is even used is because to reject deflection means accepting you need to have a lot of painful, unpopular conversations to have a hope of actually convincing people of what you want.
You should at bare minimum consider that you yourself are hereditarianpilled, the extent to which your being such has shaped your beliefs, and appreciate at minimum just how much less likely you would be to believe what you believe without your acceptance of hereditarianism. Why should anyone else be more likely? Because the very thing that makes them understand our point is presently unpopular? That's the whole reason we need to convince people of the truth!
You completely miss my main point.
No. I get it. It's just that your main point is wrong. Not answering people's questions on race -- or worse still, pretending race doesn't exist at all -- is precisely why we're in today's mess. Further quietism will just exacerbate the problems of the now.
Your proposal is literally the exact same as what's been tried in feminist circles in an effort to defeat sexism: between-group differences aren't as drastic as within-group differences, so therefore if we just stop focusing on them, we'll finally achieve harmony! Except said harmony never comes, because the differences that people are upset over are still there. It's just now, you're socially sanctioned for taking about them. So worse than doing nothing, you actively create more tension than before, because now people never learn to genuinely accept differences between themselves and others, but resent them substantially more just for existing, and become inclined to trample over anything that they think might be an obstacle to reducing disparities.
If your way could actually work, it would already have worked in at least one place. But it never does. Nor will it ever.
No, that is not my argument.
I never said anything about “harmony!”
Nor do I believe that harmony will ever come.
LOL
My claim is that race is just one of the many genetic causes of different outcomes between humans that lead to Inequality. By dwelling on just one, you are just allowing the Left to shift to another dimension.
So race realism accomplishes nothing.
We're not dwelling on one. We're answering the questions everyone else either refuses, or answers with deranged blood-libel conspiracy like "it's systemic racism that causes the black-white IQ gap!" You say that it's best to remain quiet on this, as if the past sixty years of remaining quiet never happened. As if we have no real-life record of the dire costs of silence and lies.
Race realism is the only possible inoculant against a further resurgence of Kendi'ism, or something worse.
Nope. Reread my comments.
I never said that “it’s best to remain quiet on this one.” You are confusing me with someone else.
Kendi'ism is only one of dozens of Left-Center ideologies that focus on equality. The Left will just shift to one of the others. Race realism will achieve nothing.
And, yes, all the people who are replying to me appear to want to “dwell on just one dimension of human genetic inequality.”
That is pretty damn obvious.
The reason it’s hard to get people to accept race difference is that you’ll have to accept class differences as well, which are just as genetic.
And also differences within class, and differences within race.
And differences in all sorts of traits beyond IQ.
Cofnas basically wants us to accept stage 1 HBD, which is “blacks are dumb and violent so let’s end affirmative action and go Bukele on crime”.
But if you accept stage 1, how do you not go on to stage 2, stage 3, etc. HBD is a huge field touching all areas of life beyond the problem of the black underclass and lack of black elite. Exhaustion with BLM has temporarily made people amenable to stage 1 hbd, but there is no particular intellectual stopping point.
I am 54 and will be shocked if I live to see a mainstream human biodiversity movement in the U.S. Equalitarianism has been the state religion for longer than I've been alive, and has only gotten bolder, more aggressive, and more censorious in recent years. Of course, one might argue this is because it's (rightly) insecure: the data pouring in from genetic research makes a mockery of equalitarian precepts, which were already a priori unlikely if evolution is true. But religious convictions just don't disappear over night. The fight between the smarter liberal conformists and the dumber conservative dissidents has been like the fight between Catholics and Lutherans during the Protestant Reformation. They imagined themselves irreconcilable opposites, but both held on to Jesus; both in fact insisted they were the true party of Jesus. So it is with liberals and conservatives with equality. Equality is the American secular Jesus.
"Equality is the American secular Jesus."
🎯
The more Christianity withers, the stronger Egalitarianism becomes.
The hunter gatherer/christian/slave morality being dominant cancels any positive effects of implementing HBD. Free will deniers like Sam Harris and Sapolsky already are pretty aware of race differences and are still very upset about economic gaps berween races.Most left leaning elites have accepted luck egalitarian norms that no race realist views can shatter.
I don't recall that Harris or Sapolsky were calling for total equality of outcome between racial or ethnic groups, and if they've said otherwise I'd like to see your source on that.
The 'luck egalitarian' position is actually one I'm reasonably sympathetic to, though there are obvious caveats regarding feasible levels of wealth redistribution and the side-effects of maintaining eugenic fertility in a color-blind society, though if the elites want to push for designer baby subsidies or something it wouldn't be the worst of all worlds.
Harris’s response to his house burning down in LA fire is to call for more taxes and less inequality.
I haven't watched the entire podcast, but he seems to be mentioning a few other factors here, including DEI fostering cynicism toward government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MB7hx1vc_I&ab_channel=SamHarris
The left is not wrong about the top 1% absconding with most of society's economic gains over recent decades, by the way, which is something that can't be explained purely as a function of IQ diffs.
The argument there still isn't to bury HBD, but to convince the élites bothered by inequality of outcome that this is not a sufficient thing to worry about compared to overall wellbeing. Lower though it is than Euros, Afro-Americans of the United States still have a higher per-capita than all but the top ten-percent of nations. That number would be even higher if we dropped the shackles of race communism for our economy, whereas we could virtually end economic inequality between races by making it illegal to earn more than ten-thousand dollars a year; but outside literal commies, you sure as shit don't see people advocating that latter point.
Left hereditarian here. I think a lot of those on the right severely underestimate the psychological impact and also real world risks of unequal outcomes, even when general wellbeing is seeing improvements.
More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not immediately changed, and it is ridiculous to ask someone to accept material gains flowing to one's betters while asking them to be excluded from those gains. One's relative social status suffers, as does one's political power and relative market power, which makes the guarantee of protecting that current wellbeing more precarious.
The psychological responses to unequal treatment exist famously in monkeys, and when mating rights are on the table, widening resource accumulation is indeed a threat that the monkeys are correct to notice.
Relative social status IS a material concern when one can use their accumulated resources in politics, housing markets, future-proofing one's positions, tools to amplify one's speech and ideological positions, etc. No one wants to gamble their wellbeing, no matter how good it might currently be, on being a protectorate of some benevolent figure who could just as easily turn hostile competitor. Having 1 person exist with the market power of 100,000 is a threat to those 100,000. Not saying that he would, but Elon Musk could buy up all the eggs in the US tomorrow. Not saying he would, but that scenario could play out with housing, water rights, internet platforms, or all kinds of other areas where it is perfectly rational to not want capricious monopolies.
>More gains going to those above me DOES harm me even if my material wellbeing has not changed
No it doesn't! This is completely idiotic and the reason I reject leftist politics wholesale. It's also something you yourself assuredly don't believe in, as there are many countries in the world today with less income inequality than the United States. Countries which are both high income and with significantly lower costs of living, like Slovenia, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic; and no one ever, ever moves to them from the United States to get away from "income inequality". And these are nice countries which are in no danger of war and have excellent drinking water. You sure wouldn't see anyone consider heading to a lower-Gini country which is actually poor or dangerous to escape "income inequality", like Syria or Pakistan. They can't even get people to come to enjoy the lower cost of living.
Think about just how much better so many first worlders could live relative to others if they sold their possessions and moved to one of the countless countries much poorer than ourselves. Countries like El Salvador or Uruguay, which have much lower costs of living than the United States, lower rates of violent crime, and where most of the population speaks Spanish, which is about as easy a major language for Anglophones to learn as it gets. And yet there aren't even ten thousand American expats in these countries combined as of now! If any remotely significant fraction of people genuinely prioritized their wellbeing relative to others, countries like these should be absolutely swamped with first-worlders looking to enjoy living at a much higher social station than they do at home. But they never are. Instead, it's the opposite. There are tens of thousands of Uruguayans in the USA, and millions of Salvadorans. They would rather work at fucking gas stations here than sell their possessions and live like kings in their home countries!
The people have spoken. They want to be rich, and overwhelmingly choose to pursue said riches even when the opportunity for greater relative wealth is extremely easy. You'd think this'll cause at least some leftist reflection on the validity of their worldviews, but they never much care for the people of reality.
That doesn't come close to a rebuttal of my view that absolute wellbeing AND relative social status are both important. Obviously having sky-high opportunity and high-returns on achievement are a huge draw. We could map the foot traffic of a local casino vs. a local city park or hiking trail to make an appeal as to which is better for human thriving from the point of view of popularity. We could also map happiness index, longevity, familial ties, or all kinds of other metrics to the GINI coefficient if you want. But that's not what I was saying.
Relative social status declines when someone else in my society makes gains that do not flow to me (and those gains are expressed in terms of heightened status, spending power, resource allotment, etc). To completely write that off as an effect is a major blind spot. It simply doesn't comport with human psychology (which is adapted to notice unfairness for obvious biological reasons) or with acknowledgement of future risks to self that come from declining ability to compete across various market dynamic type social games.
Then why don't you, nor almost anybody else, move to one of the many, many countries on Earth where you'd have far higher status than you fo in the United States? You could live like a king in Botswana! Their professional class all speak English. Greencard-crazed women would throw themselves at you faster than you could track. But not only do you not do this; nobody else does neither! Not even two-thousand Americans live in Botswana. Only thirteen countries have at least a hundred thousand Americans, and half of them are first-world countries where you don't get to enjoy nearly as much status relative to others just for existing. Hence why there's more Americans in Germany alone, by a lot, than in all of Africa combined.
Egalitarianism is the sacred post-Christian belief of just about every Western liberal (in the expansive sense), esp the university-educated and people who work in culture and academia and politics.
It's like Diet Christianity Lite for our age where signals and markers have replaced actual beliefs and convictions.
One can have what I think you are calling "spiritual equality" without demanding equality of outcome.
For example, I will never bench press over 300 pounds. I lack the frame size to accumulate that much muscle, and I'm not a quick gainer in terms of adding muscle when I lift. In that sense, I am genetically inferior when it comes to developing raw physical strength. However, it is possible for me to be as strong as I can be, given my physical attributes and age.
More generally, you can believe that the human race is better off if each human is encouraged to develop his or her innate gifts to their maximal potential. That's true even if average innate potentials vary across demographic groups.
Bingo. A hereditarian belief can benefit society by diverting resources devoted to achieving false equality, i.e., equity, among the races. We should be looking into developing each person’s maximum potential instead.
I agree, although I would call it "social equality" not "spiritual equality.
And I think shifting the goal from Equality to Upward Mobility makes it possible to encourage everyone to develop his or her innate gifts to their maximal potential without believing that this will lead to a state of Equality.
I write more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobilityv
Depends on what you mean by upward mobility. If you're talking about moving from the bottom quintile of income to the top quintile, that necessitates someone at the top moving down correspondingly. If one assumes equal innate ability of all humans and one could equalize opportunities, one would expect that parent/child/grandchild incomes would not be correlated at all.
But if hereditarianism is at all true, one would expect children of the top strata to end up staying there, for meritocratic reasons.
If, on the other hand, you mean "upward mobility" in absolute terms -- everyone being better off -- then that is consistent with both hereditarianism and with the notion of each person being given an opportunity to establish his or her full potential.
Rather than speculate, how about read the linked article to see what I mean by “upward mobility?”
I explain more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/social-mobility-vs-upward-mobility
A thought-provoking piece. While I’ve long leaned anti-woke, this article made me reflect on the interplay between hereditarianism, environmental influences, and the broader political landscape.
My own experience as a second-generation Somali in the UK challenges strict hereditarianism. I’ve seen firsthand how peer groups, school systems, and migration policies shape life outcomes—even among siblings raised in the same household. Britain’s Somali diaspora, for example, is pragmatic rather than ideological—many leverage Black identity when useful but reject the moral logic of wokeness due to their Islamic worldview.
On a macro level, the contradiction at the heart of the liberal order is becoming untenable. Mass immigration is both an economic necessity (suppressing wages) and a growing social strain. Mainstream politicians fear a course correction, but in avoiding it, they risk losing control to a truly far-right movement—not just Reform or Trumpism, but something much more extreme.
You’re right to question whether woke ideology is inevitable or fragile—I’d argue it’s only “inevitable” as long as elites can sustain the contradictions. Once they break, the correction may be sharper than anyone expects.
> I claim that wokism is a rational response to the equality thesis (all groups have the same innate distribution of potential). Therefore, it won’t be stopped without a hereditarian revolution. Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania argue that wokism followed from a “long march through the institutions” and civil rights law, respectively. They say that it will disappear when we muscle our way back into the institutions and/or change the laws.
Those laws and institutions are the reason the equality thesis can't be openly questioned in polite company. Changing the ideology will become much easier once a company can't be sued for creating a "hostile work environment" if it doesn't fire anyone who brings up IQ differences.
It will get easier, but it's still quite painful. We, all of us, will have to have many agonizing conversations with anti-hereditarians, friends and family and even those we've only just met; many of which will be fruitless, and many others which will be downright risky to our personal and professional lives, or even physical safety. Like with being a proper missionary, every convert is a struggle, and for many of us you're lucky to get so much as one; but this will only get harder the more we put it off, and we'll never get a better opportunity than now.
I think you center race but elide sex in your discussion of the equality hypothesis. Feminism has been as strong a driver of wokism as racial justice. One needs sex realism as well as race realism to counter wokism.
Further, gender theory is not distinct from the equality hypothesis. Rather, it extends it through an additional hypothesis: gender is not binary but infinite in possibilty. The fact that only two genders are universally acknowledged is then taken as proof of inequality and oppression. The rest follows the exact same pattern. Wokeism can be extended to any domain where an inequality can be claimed.
There's some ideological overlap, sure, but I agree with Nathan that racial bolshevism has a much older pedigree.
It's also less blatantly wrong. The differences between men and women are much blunter than the differences between races. Unless you're a fully committed pronoun person, you just can't get behind sex communism; and fully-committed pronoun people, as well their ideological predecessors, have the lowest reproductive rates of any group of human beings on Earth.
Men and women are pretty similar in intelligence, though apparently fine-grained personality surveys can distinguish the two with near-perfect accuracy across cultures. Racial groups can show large differences in intelligence but personality diffs aren't as well-established, as I understand it, though they're probably not zero. I'm not sure which diffs are more prominent in any case.
Every year allow 1% of the federal budget to be directly voted on by citizens to fund new or existing institutions. Funding, innovation, transparency, accountability, democracy, markets. Let populism fund the next elite and break the lefts and big business strangle hold on tax dollars
No offense, but this is a terrible fucking idea. The general public is on the SIDE of equality of outcome between races, and to a lesser extent between sexes. That's the whole reason we're in the mess we're in today. They hate it in practice of course, but support it in theory all the same, as is often the case with populism. Hence why so many awful policies have come about in the last sixty years.
So currently maybe 95% of ideologically-driven government funding goes to wokish equality stuff. And maybe 70% of people believe in wokish equality stuff. By my math that is maybe 25% of dollars that can go to new right wing stuff. Where is the problem?
This isn't even kind of true. Most of our government spending goes towards Social Security and Medicare. The taking of money from the young to give to the old, which isn't woke at all, as the old already have more money and power than the young, as well less need for it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
95% of IDEALOGICAL government spending goes to the left. The vast majority of most government workers are left wing. By democratizing some spending there is the opportunity for right wing institutions to get some of that money so it is less massively dominated by the Left
What the fuck does this even mean?
If you are not an abstract thinker here's an example: the government provides money for research grants for scientific studies but pretty much none of that goes to researching race and IQ instead you get tons of money going to woke studies and hereditarians fired from universities. But if some of that funding money was democratized then right wing people could vote to send their money to institutions that could do more hereditarian studies.
Social security and medicare are obviously left-wing projects aimed at mitigating outcome disparities. (A significant portion of social security is paid in by individuals toward their own retirement as I understand it, but that that isn't being 'extracted from the young'.)
Young in a relative sense. Women can and do start their families in their forties, naturally as well as via medical treatment. But also, by the time you get the money, the bit you yourself paid in is already spent, due to the ponzischemic nature of American welfare state funding.
A welfare system that's focused on alleviating poverty rather than reducing outcome disparities, would be a far better system. One more accepting of capitalism. This too is ideologically motivated, as is the decision to have or not have a welfare program period. Torin McCabe is an embarrassingly stupid commentator.
I don't think the basic idea of letting the public decide what research they want to fund directly would be such an awful idea. Even if only 10-20% went to genuine right-wing causes, the state of CA spends more on social science in one month than the Pioneer Fund allocated in it's entire existence. He's right it would be a net win.
I think your last section is your strongest. In response to the Rufo claim that The Bell Curve failed to kill PC culture, your BEST retort is: The Bell Curve predated anonymous internet speech. While many on the Right agreed with Murray, fewer spoke publicly for fear of cancellation. So, Murray was effectively siloed. This time is DIFFERENT. If a few intellectuals step forward, millions can amplify them anonymously on X without being cancelled.
You should lead with this retort. It is very persuasive. Don’t bury it at the end.
The Bell Curve was also the most popular, and early “bow shot”, wrt the concept of innate differences. Such a great, but threatening concept, needs time to take hold. And yes, I respect/note academics in the field like Lynn, but they catered to small audiences at the time.
To nitpick at your woke definition, wouldn’t it be more complete to specify it’s a mix of Christian equality and social justice doctrine plus the Marxist influence of Critical Race Theory? (You do mention “race communists” later on.)
I feel like you, Hanania, and Rufo are all touching different parts of the elephant because the causal explanations you put forth are complimentary. Your racial equality ideology captured important elites who spread it in academic and cultural institutions and enshrined it in law (and judicial interpretations) as it concurrently grew in popularity throughout society. WWII and then the Civil Rights Movement’s success killed off any significant discussion in polite society of race science. Critical mass for progressives was achieved around 2012.
What will best reverse it and the order of operations is an open question, but there will have to be a shift in the law, institutions, and society at large for it to stick. Trump’s present efforts might stick, especially if the GOP retains power after him, and societal attitudes might shift. Or it could cause a backlash, though I do think the heights of 2020 will not return again.
Getting back to colorblind law via EO is a good first step at least and it’s crazy it took this long.
"a mix of Christian equality and social justice doctrine plus the Marxist influence of Critical Race Theory"
🎯
my recipe is:
Unitarian Universalism mixed with Crit Theory Neo-Marxism (where instead of one savior up on the cross comes a rotating cast of "marginalized" minorities who bear their intolerable stigma as a moral marker) and don't forget to add a healthy splash of therapeutic self-help where self-esteem (what they call being your True Authentic Self™) makes you holy and completed, the telos of our marginalized hero's journey.
I do agree. Yet the huge change that NEEDS to take place is in the heart of White people,to face and conquer their own prejudice. Many are vocal lip equalitarians but their hearts are darkened by prejudice. I know this from life experience.
I would say their hearts are darkened by pattern recognition, but what are you doing on this substack?
"If all groups have exactly the same innate potential, how can we possibly not see it as a moral emergency to fix the environmental conditions that lead to massive disparities?"
There are massive differences between other ethnic groups, if you leave blacks out of it. Indian Americans have vastly higher median family incomes than whites, and the top-performing white groups in America (Macedonians and Jews) have very high incomes, while other white groups and various Hispanic groups are well below average.
No one thinks any of this is an "emergency" or even particularly important, as far as I can tell. It's only blacks that are the issue, and this is at least largely because of their ancestors' enslavement and post-emancipation mistreatment.
More simply, you could just take the top "group" as the group that has the highest income and education and skills, and make the other "group" the bottom half. It is at the core of socialism to think or claim to think that such differences are an "emergency," but we have nicely disposed of that belief in the non-socialist mindset, and no one thinks outside of socialism that it is an "emergency" because waiters, medical assistants, and common laborers make less than great chefs, surgeons, or contractors.
You might not need a full on revolution or full institutional capture. All you might need is for enough data out there for blank slatists to know they don't want to get involved in every battle.
If you just get a majority to think "it's complicated", and not have moral reflexes about every instance of inequality, we could go back to living our lives as people have done throughout the ages, accepting inequalities that exist around them if they cannot be attributed to direct state oppression or discrimination. Most normal people do not want to side with restless equality warriors, but they also would be perfectly happy more or less ignoring lots of unequal outcomes, or even just coming up with folk justifications (such as cultural reasons) why these observations are nothing to freak out about.
The real problem comes from the threat of insurgency from the underperforming parts of the population. Do you think they could EVER accept even cultural reasons for their dysfunction? There's a section like this in every society and distraction seems to be the only solution because heightened awareness like the kind the wokes want to push only fuels the marginalized insurgents. We should work to make their lives as comfortable and free as we can, but I don't know how to solve the problem of "noticing" without distractions.
The way to get more people on our side is to disseminate the writings of those who once took the equality thesis seriously but now no longer do. I remember reading a piece by a British documentary maker who started out wanting to show how wrong and nasty hereditarians were. She contacted Arthur Jensen (I think) and slowly realised that he wasn't nasty at all, neither was his wife. And the more she learned, the more she realised how she had unthinkingly obtained her opinions, as if by osmosis, from the surrounding culture, which was overwhelmingly anti-hereditarian.
What we need are millions of people to read such articles and to have an 'Oops, I think I see how I've been taken in' moment. It helped that the documentary maker was both very likeable and crucially, intellectually honest. Shame I can't remember her name.
It's good to see that someone with intellect and courage has gotten to the heart of the political miasma we've been plunged into. I would go further with a definition of wokism to include postmodernism and the death of objective truth, but for now, equality is certainly a key takeoff point.
Generally prior to the 19th century, there was no aspect of Christian morality that insisted all races were physically, mentally, emotionally equal. Therefore what we see today is a heresy of Christianity. There have been specific, directed efforts over the last 200 years to revise Christianity according to leftist political agendas (the Scofield Bible is one example).
The morality of equality is therefore fake morality. Traditional Christianity says that God will judge the nations in His final return, so He expects there to be distinct nations hanging around to be judged. Likewise, the parables of Christ's teachings have been politically embellished beyond recognition. Thus traditional Christian morality must be re-explicated and thoroughly understood by hereditarians, in order to have any effective arguments both morally and intellectually against wokusts. It's going to take a LOT of work. At that point, each wokust must be shamed as to their moral, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings, beyond their ability to live with themselves. Only then is there a chance of beating wokism.
...Yes, prior to the 19th century, there was no empirical insistence that all races were biologically equivalent. Nathan's point is that combining the liberal belief in the blank slate with the christian insistence on moral activism functionally leads to wokeness (and has perhaps emerged on the grounds of being well-adapted to vote-harvesting.)
Yes, and MY point is that 'insistence on moral activism' about this issue is NOT Christian, instead it is a Christian heresy which needs to be rolled back before hereditarianism can have any chance of success. If you're just talking about moral activism in general, then you might as well cite Islam, which has at least as energetic a history as Christianity.
But... is it not a Christian moral principle, more-or-less, that people with equal endowments should wind up with similar rewards? Or at least that one could expect equally-endowed groups to do so, statistically? The empirical claim about hereditary endowments can be treated separately and I agree that's not intrinsic to Christianity, but Cofnas isn't claiming that.
There is, also, a certain problem of persuasion here: Are you going to convince Christians who believe in a fundamentally just God and good world that God would design human populations with a ~3 SD IQ difference? It would seem cruel to me, but then I'm not committed to the just world hypothesis, or God being much involved.
Wrong, otherwise, to pick the most obvious, all so-called Christians would get into Heaven, which is not what Christ taught. Good grief, this is not the venue for Scriptural exegesis, so I'm not going to go any further.
Regarding Cofnas, you seem to have muddied the waters about what he actually IS talking about regarding Christianity. I've rebutted your explanations, so what's left?
People (in theory) can choose their moral conduct, but they can't choose their genetics, so I'm not sure I see the analogy. (I do think there are also problems with the concept of infinite punishment for finite transgression, but I'll acknowledge that Christian denominations vary in their conception of the afterlife, and in any case it's a separate discussion.)
I think Cofnas has stated his argument with reasonable clarity, so I would suggest reading over the article again.
“But I refer to the moral premise of wokism as 'Christian morality' because it was Christianity that first formulated and popularized the idea of spiritual equality, and the secularized version of this principle supplies the moral energy for the left’s crusade against racism.”
What exactly does 'spiritual equality' mean? "If you believe everything that our religion says to believe, then we are all equal." How in the world is that specifically Christian? There's an in group and an out group in ALL religions. I sincerely doubt that Christianity first came up with the idea. Hell, the Bible uses the word 'equality' only twice, and those in the same sentence, 2 Corinthians 8:14.
Cofnas is blaming Christianity for something it didn't do, or at least for something that is not unique to its teachings. Regardless, if you're going to counteract whatever you are blaming on Christianity, then you'd better fully understand what real Christianity consists of. To reiterate, traditional Christianity must be understood for what it truly is, so that wokism can be called out for mimicking a vile heresy. Otherwise, forget about hereditarianism. It will remain a nice idea going nowhere fast. Now enough, already.
Nathan is right to point out the hypocrisy of the Right: accepting the equality thesis while rejecting wokeism. But there is also a hypocrisy of the Left:
Mainstream liberals — for example, Scott Alexander — believe the following:
1) There are racial IQ gaps
2) These gaps are due to environment
3) IQ is highly correlated with achievement
4) The black-white achievement gap is a moral emergency
Then, shouldn't fixing the environmental causes of the IQ gap be the #1 issue liberals focus on? Doing so is vital for achieving equality. The Left should be talking about race and IQ nonstop. They should be scrambling to improve black nutrition, reduce lead in the water supply, etc. in efforts to raise black IQ... But they’re not.
(The only logical counter I can think of: discussing IQ makes people more racist. So it is better to ignore this problem and avoid an increase in racism. This is similar to the argument that it is best not to discuss black-on-black crime — despite the massive number of blacks killed by such crime — because doing so might increase white racism.)
Scott certainly knows about hbd. In the leaked emails he linked to John Fuerst's 2012 evidence review. In his recent post on national IQ, he tried to soften the blow of the genetic gaps.
Yeah, in that most recent post, he was arguing that the difference between American blacks and sub-Saharan Africans in Africa may be largely due to environmental causes, which I don't think most hereditarians would strongly object to. He said that even if the black-white gap in the US was 100% percent genetic, and American blacks were higher than Africans due to white admixture, you would expect Africans to have IQs around 80 (compared the 85 of American blacks), rather than the 60~70 (sometimes even lower) that is often found in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore the 15+ point difference is probably caused by stuff like disease, parasites, malnutrition, lack of education, possibly trauma in regions plagued by civil war and violence, etc. Which seems entirely plausible. Therefore, on EA grounds, charity to Africa to attempt to alleviate those problems is justified. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he takes it for granted that the genetic contribution to the black-white gap, at least in the US, is maybe at least 50% percent genetic.
I'm pretty sure Scott Alexander is at least *receptive* to the HBD explanations for IQ disparities, although he doesn't typically bang on about it much. He was 'outed' for this on twitter at some point.
As for the rest- the left has made *enormous* efforts to improve public schooling, nutrition, health, reduction in lead exposure, etc. over the years, it's just that all those efforts hit a point of diminishing returns around the 1970s and can no longer plausibly have more than a trivial impact on group-level disparities.
"I'm pretty sure Scott Alexander is at least *receptive* to the HBD explanations for IQ disparities": I think I saw this tweet. But SA expresses publicly the mainstream liberal opinion on the matter (all environment, no genes).
So, what if we take this thesis seriously? This means environmental factors are imposing a ~15 point IQ reduction on blacks. This is a catastrophe! This should by far the *most important* political issue. Why is lead in black drinking water (e.g., Flint Michigan) not the most discussed emergency on the Left?
This leads me to be somewhat skeptical of the Cofnas view that liberals arrive at their ideology purely through logic. If this were true, lead in black drinking water would be their #1 issue.
Paradoxically, I think Cofnas' focus on genes may be counter-productive. If you think IQ is fixed, then the Left has a justification for suppressing discussion: there is nothing we can do, but discussion might make people more racist. But, if you believe black IQ is being lowered by environment, you have a *moral imperative* as a liberal to discuss how to fix it. A ~15-point boost in black IQ would be *way better* for black outcomes than canceling people for microaggressions.
Again, where has SA ever said that the B/W IQ gap is all environment, no genes? If this has occurred, I'd like to see your source.
Did you read the rest of my post? Anyone serious on the left knows perfectly well that lead pollution or other conventional environmental handicaps are a trivial problem in virtually all modern contexts (they do make demented noises about it from time to time- I remember Steven Colbert going on about air pollution somehow creating racial education disparities a few years back- but they know it can't possibly be the main problem at this point.)
Liberal backlash to Murray, Sailer, etc. suggesting genes *might* play a role shows "mainstream opinion" is all environment, no genes (since suggestion that genes may play role results in cancellation).
I use SA as stand-in for "mainstream liberal." I don't know SA's exact beliefs. His beliefs are not relevant to my point. Point is that mainstream left claims hereditarian thesis is "debunked" yet does not behave as though this is true (else, they'd be ultra focussed on fixing environment).
Is your position that hereditarianism is mainstream on the left? Or do you disagree with using SA as example?
> Is your position that hereditarianism is mainstream on the left? Or do you disagree with using SA as example?
I disagree with using SA as an example, and my contention is that the environmental factors you were nominating for attention have already been addressed exhaustively and even leftists mostly know it- google for 'the punishing reach of racism for black boys' for an example of what I mean. (Racism would itself plausibly qualify as a kind of 'environmental factor', of course, and the left certainly haven't stopped trying to address that factor in the equation.)
ah, I now see the confusion. So your position is that the mainstream left believes racism is the primary cause of IQ gaps.
Has anyone ever thought of making a Rawlsian argument to leftists against DEI? If one could show DEI slows down the economy, that means that there are less resources to distribute to the lowest person in the social contract? In a "colorblind" society, you could justify inequality between racial groups via redistribution.
Yes, I've thought about this. https://zerocontradictions.net/misc/nathan-cofnas-emails#demographic-quotas-benefits
More people should make this point too.
Rawlsian arguments can also justify eugenics, and he said as much, and I agree, but good luck persuading the left of that.