One of the psychometric mysteries is why high IQ people tend to be liberal, even though a lot of liberal ideas are clearly nonsense. Eminent scientist and intelligence blogger Bruce Charlton has proposed that many high IQ people are clever sillies, meaning they use abstract novel problem solving to solve problems that are better solved with common sense, and as a consequence, come up with ideas like liberalism that seem silly to many people.
I think there are four main reasons why intelligent people tend to be liberal (or tend not to be conservative):
1) High IQ people are less criminal. It’s long been accepted that criminals score about 10 points lower than non-criminals, even when reared in the same home. I think the negative correlation between IQ and conservatism (and thus positive correlation between IQ and liberalism) is largely just an extension of the negative correlation between IQ and crime. I’m not saying that conservatives are criminal, but they often are more criminal than liberals. For example, conservatives are more likely to support war, and war involves killing people (a criminal type behavior). Rich conservatives also don’t feel they should pay their “fair share” in taxes which is arguably theft (another criminal type behavior). Just the act of getting rich sometimes involves behavior that some people would consider borderline criminal; hence the saying “behind every great fortune lies a great crime”, and thus the conservative worship of wealth (which I’m more guilty of than anyone, even though I’m not a conservative or a liberal) is to some extent a worship of crime (though intelligent crime). As to why IQ is negatively related to crime, I elaborated on the causal mechanism in one of my earliest blog posts. So just as an IQ 90 might look at an IQ 115 as a “clever silly” for paying for an expensive sweater when he could have just shop-lifted it, an IQ 115 might look at an IQ 130 as a “clever silly” for voting for politicians that promise to raise his taxes.
2) A second major reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal (related a bit to the first reason), is that conservatism is the default position. As Charlton once wrote on this blog “conservatism is natural and spontaneous”. I agree with this; conservatism is natural because conservatism is all about our most primitive self-serving impulses: tribalism, family and children, greed etc. Evolution has predisposed us to feel emotions that enhance our genetic fitness, and these are the conservative emotions, so conservatives are disgusted by immigration because it threatens their gene pool. They worship wealth because historically, the ability to acquire resources enhanced the survival of one’s self, one’s family, and one’s tribe. They are disgusted by feminism because feminist daughters threaten their genetic fitness by being too focused on career to give them grand-kids. Similarly, they are disgusted by gays because openly gay sons also don’t give them any grand-kids. So evolution has programmed us to feel conservative emotions, and thus only people who are intelligent enough to think critically about their evolutionary programming and rebel against it, tend to have the option of being liberal.
3) A third major reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal is that intelligence is the mental ability to adapt and liberalism is all about change. By contrast, those who are not intelligent enough to adapt to a changing society or just new ideas, may fear it, and thus prefer conservatism which seeks to preserve tradition.
4) A final reason why intelligent people tend to be liberal is that liberalism is more complex and ambiguous. By contrast conservatism seeks simple solutions and simple dichotomies like good vs evil, us vs. them. However just because liberalism is more intellectually demanding than conservatism does not make it more correct. I find a lot of smart people really are “clever sillies” in that they embrace theories and ideas that are unnecessarily complex and this is probably a major problem in the IQ 120-140 range that so many of our elites are drawn from. Such people are smart enough to think of complex answers to questions, but they’re not smart enough to understand why the complex solution is wrong. They suffer from bounded cognition, because they haven’t internalized Occam’s razor.
However I suspect clever silliness completely vanishes at extremely high IQ levels. The only person I’ve ever known with a genuine IQ above 180 (one in 30 million level), embraced simple elegant explanations of the world, and communicated with great clarity, succinctness and precision, not the pretentious long-windedness of the clever sillies. I never did ask him if he was a liberal or a conservative. We had far more important issues to discuss.
Brain Size 
Funny, the only person I’ve ever known with a genuine 180 IQ was completely irrational and resistant to change, and would repeat the same arguments verbatim whenever confronted.
I didn’t know the Duke’s IQ was 180 🙂
…because you didn’t understand them the 100th time.
Conservative is just another word for “closet homosexual, sophistical hick”.
Listening to a radio program in the car recently a woman from Sweden said her country’s parliament was no longer majority socialist. The American host the paraphrased her by describing Sweden’s current parliament as “conservative”.
“No. No.” she said, “Just not majority socialist. There are NO conservatives in Sweden.”
Anglo-America is the focus of EVIL in the modern world. The queen is a chav and so is David Cameron. And so are most of the American elite.
@Pp – I think you are on a wrong track here in regarding US Republicans as ‘Conservative’ – what I mean by ‘Conservative’ (although I don’t really use the word nowadays) is very different and is based on a world-historical idea of political views; so would regard US Republicans as *extremely* liberal/ Leftist on a world-historical scale.
http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/
Therefore, from my perspective you are merely discussing differences between two slightly different types of extreme Leftist radicals.
However, I would certainly agree that Leftism is a product of intellectuals, just as the mass media (which originates and sustains the modern form of leftism) is the product of intellectuals
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
Therefore, from my perspective you are merely discussing differences between two slightly different types of extreme Leftist radicals.
Interesting perspective & interesting links. Some of the leftists I know would go absolutely ballistic if they read your comment, because they feel very passionately that modern U.S. Republicans and Democrats are BOTH conservative by historical standards, and they get furious when I even refer to U.S. Democrats as left-wing.
Yes people do love to assume others are moving the goal posts on them don’t they? To me it isn’t that the US parties are really more liberal or more conservative, maybe they just aren’t enacting policies that would create any actual change because they prefer to, in general, keep things as they are. Sure they’re willing to pay lip service to this or that idea but the end result of the political process is invariably a watered down nothing.
If someone truly believes in the political process then one way to rationalize the constant failure to achieve meaningful change to the right or left it is to assume the parties are really more liberal or more conservative than they claim to be. Of course the fact that most US politicians are career politicians whose primary goal is to get on and stay on the gravy train could have something to do with it as well. I’m sure there are some political movers and shakers out there who really want to enact meaningful change but I doubt they are the majority. The mere existence of seniority rules in the house and senate is quite telling. It’s a very good way to minimize the impact of newcomers while they’re new and not yet accustomed to the way things get done (or don’t).
No, I don’t believe we’ll see meaningful change in the United states until we finally balkanize (which will be fought tooth and nail by America’s elites, this country is much more lucrative as one powerful entity) or have a popular revolution. The latter I find exceptionally unlikely though in an age where people who are foolish enough to express revolutionary sentiment can so easily and quickly be found and disappeared.
Of course the fact that most US politicians are career politicians whose primary goal is to get on and stay on the gravy train could have something to do with it as well. I’m sure there are some political movers and shakers out there who really want to enact meaningful change but I doubt they are the majority. The mere existence of seniority rules in the house and senate is quite telling. It’s a very good way to minimize the impact of newcomers while they’re new and not yet accustomed to the way things get done (or don’t).
Correct. The U.S. political system is broken, partly because politicians are more concerned about their careers than about the issues, and partly because media power & money trump democracy.
However, I would certainly agree…
And no one should care. You form the possessive of “Williams” either “William’s” or simply “Williams” (HUH?).
It’s “Williams’s”.
And YOU ARE A HICK.
I’ve addressed this before. The problem with the kind of right-wing ideology you promote is that it’s not “natural and spontaneous” or “the default position” at all. Reactionaries have *always* been radical, even self-consciously so, in their opposition to progressivism. Have you ever read people like Joseph de Maistre or Julius Evola?
Most intelligent men are liberals because the upward trend for modern science, technology and economic growth all bias the intelligent person toward a perception that progress is universal and easily applied to all other areas of life. The intelligent young man has the imagination to see how life could be better in a hundred thousands ways. The dumb man doesn’t have that imagination. He just sees what’s in front of him. He may want to improve his relative position, but he broadly accepts the world as it is.
But the intelligent liberals are fooling themselves about these matters no less than the dunderheads. As the conservative G.K. Chesterton pointed out in this beautiful quote, we’re attracted to the future because it is a soft job.
Most men are idiots about politics, and the smartest men tend to be some of the biggest idiots of all. God knows how many bloodthirsty commies and fascists have been nurtured by the university system worldwide, but the number is substantial. If you want to read an excellent account of just how stupid smart men can be when their minds turn to politics, read Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals.
G.K. Chesterton?
You’re not an RC. Are you?
Whatever its Anglo-American mutation, the One Holy Roman Church is socially arch conservative and ecomically both anti-right and anti-left yet not in the middle.
Its position on birth control and abortion before 2d trimester are SATANIC, but otherwise…
“The smoke of Satan had entered the Church” said Paul VI.
Indeed. And it entered in no small measure through Humanae Vitae. Sex without the possibility of procreation is evil. But having children you can’t support is even more evil. The former is a venial sin the latter a mortal one.
…economically…
but wordpress is shit.
Dookie,
No, I’m not any variety of Jesus Christer. Nor am I one of those silly militant atheists, like Richard Dawkins or Chris Hitchens.
But I admire Chesteron’s writing and occasionally his insights.
I remember a quote from Father Brown read by Lady Marchmain:
“Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
Crede ut intelligas, Pinky.
Black folk can be geniuses too.
Most intelligent men are liberals because the upward trend for modern science, technology and economic growth all bias the intelligent person toward a perception that progress is universal and easily applied to all other areas of life. The intelligent young man has the imagination to see how life could be better in a hundred thousands ways. The dumb man doesn’t have that imagination. He just sees what’s in front of him. He may want to improve his relative position, but he broadly accepts the world as it is.
Excellent point! This also very likely contributes to the IQ-liberalism correlation; perhaps even more than most of the points I mentioned.
It also needs to be said that liberals can be remarkably resistant to change once some idea about how to make the future better sets down on their mind and takes hold.
In brief, those liberals become very much like hide-bound conservatives – except they are wedded to a particular vision of the future rather than the current circumstances of life. And no empirical data will alter their views in the slightest.
Rare is the man who will argue a certain political view for years and then immediately drop it as soon as the evidence piles up against him.
…hidebound conservatives…
In my experience “liberals” don’t exist in the sense that “conservatives” use the term. They’re a straw man, just like “environmentalists” (as opposed to hereditists).
All of this is consonant with the…how does one put it…the uniquely Anglo-American and especially Confederate-David Cameron…
I know…
THE HICK WORLDVIEW (or weltanschauung).
Vermont vs West Virginia.
Anglo-America is the focus of evil in the modern world. And more precisely, the former Confederacy and white trash Brits with pseudo-“posh” accents.
Dookie,
Pish-posh. You sound like Susan Sontag declaiming that the white race is the cancer of human history – until she got cancer and decided that wasn’t the best analogy to use. Anglo-Americans are the coolest people in the universe – although it looks like their day at the top is done.
Liberals and conservatives not only exist. They often self-identify as such and react in predictably ideological ways to new controversies, thereby reinforcing their identity.
That scat reminds me of Monk as performed by…someone else.
The liberal conservative thing is so Anglo-American…in this prole-sphere mass media is reality, advertising cannot tell a lie.
In France…
Do people go to “English restaurants”? “American restaurants”?
QED!
Oo! Oo!
They do go to American restaurants.
Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, …
Anglo-America is “the focus of evil in the modern world”, as the jelly bean eating president might have said…if he’d eaten real food.
“The liberal conservative thing is so Anglo-American…in this prole-sphere mass media is reality, advertising cannot tell a lie.”
Except that the left/right political orientation was first developed in France and therefore is NOT an Anglo-American invention.
But let’s forget about those serious matters of political philosophy and instead talk about all the evil of world residing in Ronald McDonald.
Good post! I am never able to fit in either ideology of liberal and concervative. Bottom line, I am a scientist who only respect facts and data. I do not believe complete equality like communism (will make people lazy). But I am also against zero redistribution of wealth (desperate people will become violent).
Politically, I favor feudalism over democracy over socialism over communism.
Democracy is to popular opinions rule. But popular opinions are not the same thing as correct or truth. Popular opinions can kill some one like Galileo or Darwin.
Under feudalism, successful lords pick intelligent people to high rank and encourage productive people immigration into their territory. Kick losers out of land. Successful lords are protectors of minority like Jews who are useful to the lords. Democracy, however, is mob ruling which lead to ethnic cleasing or genocide in recent history like Germany, middle east, or Africa.
Dumb lords will not last long since smart lords know how to make their states strong.
Today, only business world shares similarity to feudalism, in which people with larger shares (instead large territory or kindom) have more power over minority share holders. In corporate world, democracy does not work. There is reason why no companies run like democracy which is not the best idea to be successful.
If democractic rule even applied to business, then you would get socialism or communism at end.
If country runs like a corporation, then you get feudalism.
Well then you should come to America. It’s a corporate state if there ever was one. Except it’s not officially a corporate state. Everyone mostly pretends it isn’t, and stupid people actually think it isn’t.
Vladimir Putin could be the savior of western civilization 😉
You prefer Feudalism? Wow, that is a new one for me! Well, my dear, I believe Somalia has something of what your heart desires. Feudal Lords fighting for territory. I don’t understand why these different variants of regression strike the fancy of so many these days. Feudalism, Libertarianism, Anarchism, etc. It’s truly puzzling.
I would like to add that some incredibly successful companies are run in a socialist fashion, rather than a feudalistic one. It’s called a worker owned ‘cooperative’. The reason most companies don’t operate like this is because in this sort of company the profits are distributed in a more equitable manner. That is not preferable to the controlling entities of the feudalistic business structures you speak of. CEO’s like making 300X the median employee wage.
You should read up on German style work councils. It is an incredibly effective method of democratizing business structure. With all of that said, please, let’s not advocate for silly things like feudalism any further.
I suppose I am one of the few that did not find this article particularly enlightening. Perhaps that is because I do identify as a Liberal, and I find it to be the only sensible position one could take.
I have a very strong sense IC is an Eastern European.
It’s all a matter of trying things and going with what works. That’s what an Open Society affords, but of course such “affording” is by force. That is, the Open Society folks have to beat the Closed Society folks.
I might say that I wouldn’t call myself a “liberal”. But, perhaps, just as Heidegger rejected the label “existentialist”, I reject “liberal”.
I’d say I’m for Popper’s “Open Society”, like Soros; not because it’s perfect, but because whatever the “revelation” of what perfect is I’d be a skeptic; and not only a skeptic of the “revelation” per se, but much more a skeptic of the ability of human kind to implement it.
Perfect can’t come at once, if ever. But the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. Society may evolve too. As Friedman might have said Utopia would require that politicians be angels, better than any human.
That is, one must admit that government and society can’t be much better than the governed and the individuals members of the society.
I guess such sentiment makes me a “conservative” by the (dim) lights of some.
In what sense is it true that highly intelligent people are liberal? James Thompson’s Five Tribes of Intellect correspond closely to the British socio-economic classes: ‘High Risk’ and ‘Uphill Battle’ are E and D, ‘Out Ahead’ and ‘Yours to Lose’ are B and A, yet the ABs are the least likely to vote Labour and the most likely to vote Conservative. Although support for the Lib Dems also rises with social class there are still more AB Conservatives than AB Lib Dems.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-7-tribes-of-intellect.html
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/2613/How-Britain-Voted-in
I take it that your post is a sequel to Are HBD Bloggers Stupid? and concerns ‘liberal’ issues such as those discussed in the linked post by Razib Khan, Social conservatives have a lower IQ? Probably
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/social-conservatives-have-a-lower-i-q-probably
But why should the social attitudes quantified there be thought the touchstone of conservatism? Beware of circularity, of defining conservatism in terms of questions on which working class people tend to be right wing to the exclusion of the economic matters in which they are reliably left wing and which predict their voting behaviour.
High IQ people are more economically liberal but less socially liberal (in deed though perhaps not in theory).
That is, the high IQs have low divorce rates, very low rates of bastardy, very low rates of drug addiction (with the exception of alcohol and even then it’s not that bad), and…few have tattoos or wear legible clothing, etc.
The conservative/liberal dichotomy is false just like ALL psychological trait dichotomies.
Psychology is a pseudo-science, an arrant pseudo-science. And it’s effect on politics and economics, broadly construed, is always pernicious/evil.
In an ideal world all psychologists, who are all very stupid in their own terms (IQ terms), would be working menial jobs and would have no ideological influence.
Sorry,
And its effect…
But wordpress is shit.
Duke, I have to agree with you on people with psychology major. Most of them are not very intelligent. A lot of their dissertations do not make any sense.
Visually their heads are kind of small comparing to PhD in natural science majors. Several of them I am close to had their head sizes measured only produce average value.
http://magoosh.com/gre/2013/gre-scores-for-social-science-programs/
http://magoosh.com/gre/2013/gre-scores-for-science-programs/
Just look at their GRE requirement, not very impressive compared to majors in natural science.
Yet, these people feel so smart about themselves since they carry PhD on their title. http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
Here you can see. People in social science is not very high comparing to other science. Their idiocracy just too evident.
“Visually their heads are kind of small comparing to PhD in natural science majors.
Hahaha !
It’s often hard to tell whether people here are joking or not, but that doesn’t make their comments any less enjoyable.
I can just imagine some of the fellows here running around American campuses with calipers, measuring the heads of various graduate students in the social sciences and trying to determine if anthropology students have larger craniums than psychology students.
High IQ people are more economically liberal but less socially liberal (in deed though perhaps not in theory).
That is, the high IQs have low divorce rates, very low rates of bastardy, very low rates of drug addiction (with the exception of alcohol and even then it’s not that bad), and…few have tattoos or wear legible clothing, etc.
Ideologically I think high IQ people seem to be more socially liberal than economically liberal and that’s partly because high IQ people tend to be wealthy atheists and thus have a vested interest in conservative business and investment friendly policies yet consider conservative religious opposition to gay marriage to be irrational. In addition, high IQ STEM types like numbers, systems, & Darwinism and thus can appreciate capitalism on purely aesthetic grounds.
However the academic left, particularly in non-STEM fields tends to be aggressively economically liberal. While they claim this is because they are fighting for the poor, it’s really because they’re elitists who deeply resent uneducated but business savvy proles getting super-rich while their own academic salaries make them only mildly high income. It’s also because much of academia is government funded.
Behaviorally, I agree that high IQ people live more socially conservative lifestyles as Charles Murray pointed out.
Duke, I have to agree with you on people with psychology major. Most of them are not very intelligent. A lot of their dissertations do not make any sense.
Visually their heads are kind of small comparing to PhD in natural science majors. Several of them I am close to had their head sizes measured only produce average value.
I agree with IC 100%, even though I majored in psychology myself. Psychology students at my Canadian university had an average IQ of 105. I was always the only person in the class who could ask intelligent questions or raise my hand when the prof asked a question. The prof was constantly trying to start class discussions, but it would just turn into a dialogue between me & the prof with the rest of the class just sitting there looking stupid.
By contrast my friend majored in computer science and you could tell his classmates were way smarter than mine just from looking at them. They were generally tall scrawny nerds with big heads & glasses. Although they also didn’t participate in class discussions but for the opposite reason. They were too smart to waste time with class discussions, while most of my classmates couldn’t participate.
We pretty much had the full range of normal human intelligence at my university, from IQ’s below 70 to IQ’s above 160.
Wow, I just looked at the IQ comparison site IC linked and my confidence in Steve Hsu just plummeted.
Some years ago, Hsu made a post about Roe’s IQ study of eminent scientists in which he wrote:
“Overall normed scores:
Test (Low / Median / High)
V 121 / 166 / 177
S 123 / 137 / 164
M 128 / 154 / 194
Roe comments: (1) V test was too easy for some takers, so top score no ceiling. (2) S scores tend to decrease with age (correlation .4). Peak (younger) performance would have been higher. (3) M test was found to be too easy for the physicists; only administered to other groups.
The lowest score in each category among the 12 theoretical physicists would have been roughly V 160 (!) S 130 M >> 150. (Ranges for all groups are given, but I’m too lazy to reproduce them here.) It is hard to estimate the M scores of the physicists since when Roe tried the test on a few of them they more or less solved every problem modulo some careless mistakes. Note the top raw scores (27 out of 30 problems solved) among the non-physicists (obtained by 2 geneticists and a psychologist), are quite high but short of a full score. The corresponding normed score is 194!
The lowest V scores in the 120-range were only obtained by 2 experimental physicists, all other scientists scored well above this level — note the mean is 166.
The data strongly suggests that high IQ provides a significant advantage in science. Some have claimed that IQ is irrelevant beyond some threshold: more precisely, that the advantage conferred by IQ above some threshold (e.g., 120) decreases significantly as other factors like drive or creativity take precedence. But, if that were the case it would be unlikely to have found such high scores in this group. The average IQ of a science PhD is roughly 130, and individuals with IQs in the higher range described above constitute a tiny fraction of all scientists. If IQ were irrelevant above 130 we would expect the most eminent group to have an average similar to the overall population of scientists.”
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/annals-of-psychometry-iqs-of-eminent.html
But if you adjust for the Flynn Effect, then the Roe scores are;
V 105 / 150 / 161
S 107 / 121 / 148
M 112 / 138 / 178
Average: 108 / 136 / 162
So the median IQ of Roe’s eminent scientists (she studied people near the top of the field) was “only” 136. Hsu tries to claim that the Flynn effect is irrelevant here, but it’s not. Because in his own post, he states that “average IQ of a science PhD is roughly 130” and then cites a study done *within the last decade* as evidence. He’s comparing IQ data collected within the last decade against IQ data collected in 1952. Of course the Flynn effect matters!
And when you do the Flynn adjustment, the median IQ of Roe’s eminent scientists isn’t all that much higher than the IQ of the average science PhD today. Spearman’s law of diminishing returns seems vindicated by Roe’s study. Hsu is being disingenuous and letting his ideology blind him.
Hsu’s post then discusses Richard Feynman’s purportedly modest IQ of 124. But in light of the above, Feynman’s IQ is not that bizarre at all. He’s in very good company.
I think the real problem with Hsu and many other HBDers is that they seriously underestimate just how powerful an IQ > 130 or even > 120 can be. They naively assume that the greater the scientific accomplishment, the higher the IQ of the scientist, but I doubt that reflects reality. Of course, there’s a minimum IQ required for any kind of success in the hard sciences. I don’t deny that. I just don’t think all of the geniuses that HBDers worship would’ve had the astronomically high IQs ascribed to them.
Kronos,
Hsu is correct in telling you the FE is irrelevant to the issue he’s looking at. Your mistake is similar to those poor fellows who use the Flynn Effect (FE) to argue that the generation of our great-great-grandfathers was populated by a bunch of morons.
The average IQ of scientists today doesn’t affect the highest IQ scores of the top scientists sixty years ago. Hsu wants to compare scientists within a generation, not scientists of different generations. He’s not comparing the IQ scores directly, which would require him to use the FE. He’s comparing them indirectly by making an analogy.
The question Hsu wants to know is How much smarter were the eminent scientists of Roe’s study than both the average scientist and average person of their day, and what is the likely analogy to today’s situation? That’s it. No FE need be applied.
If you truly believe that the most eminent scientists of Roe’s day had IQs as low as 108, then you must think that the cohort of PhD students at Columbia Teacher’s College, who Roe used to norm the tests, were filled with a bunch of morons, and that the average population of the day was simian in their intelligence.
Pincher writes: “How much smarter were the eminent scientists of Roe’s study than both the average scientist and average person of their day, and what is the likely analogy to today’s situation?”
Except that Roe’s book cites a study of the median IQ of science PhDs from her time, which Hsu mysteriously fails to mention.
“For persons who went on to take a Ph.D. Wrenn found a median IQ of 141″ (Roe, 1952, p.164). Those individuals would have gotten 125 in 1986 tests.”
Hsu has no reason to use the 130 figure. He does it because it gives him the conclusions he wants.
Pincher writes: “If you truly believe that the most eminent scientists of Roe’s day had IQs as low as 108, then you must think that the cohort of PhD students at Columbia Teacher’s College, who Roe used to norm the tests, were filled with a bunch of morons.”
The average *low* number isn’t important, since, as mentioned, “it is unlikely that any one scientist got the lowest (or highest) scores on each of the three areas, and therefore, it is unlikely that the average low and high scores were achieved by any particular person.” You have trouble reading, don’t you?
The average median is much more relevant and interesting for comparison’s sake. That’s what I emphasized.
Furthermore, even an IQ around 110-120 for people working in the natural sciences is not quite as uncommon as you imply. See here:
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx
Look at the range given for “Natural science – physical, life, and math.”
Likewise, look at the range for occupations such as Engineering-related Occs, Computer Occs, Electrical Engineers, College Professors, Social Scientists, etc.
There’s absolutely nothing absurd about the numbers.
Kronos,
You still avoid the substantive issue. Hsu is not making a direct comparison. Therefore he does not need to apply the Flynn Effect to Roe’s numbers.
“Except that Roe’s book cites a study of the median IQ of science PhDs from her time, which Hsu mysteriously fails to mention.”
Such information would’ve been interesting to include, but it changes little. You can argue that it shows Hsu’s analogy doesn’t quite work, since the average scientist (141 IQ) was so much smarter back in Roe’s day compared to that generation than the average scientist is today (130 IQ) compared to the present generation, but that’s a different argument from saying Hsu made a technical error.
““For persons who went on to take a Ph.D. Wrenn found a median IQ of 141″ (Roe, 1952, p.164). Those individuals would have gotten 125 in 1986 tests.””
Again, it doesn’t matter what that group would’ve got in 1986 or in 2014. It’s irrelevant to Hsu’s point.
Roe’s generation:
Population Median – 100
PhD Median – 141 –
Eminent Scientists Median IQ – ~160 (I didn’t see a composite score, so this is a guess.)
Hsu’s generation
Population Median – 100
PhD Median – 130
Eminent Scientist Median – ? (But Hsu predicts very high.)
*****
That’s the analogy. Hsu doesn’t need to adjust for the FE to make that argument by analogy. He’s showing the relationship between people who are just smart and really talented people in the same fields.
_________
Kronos links to a chart of occupational IQs and writes:
“There’s absolutely nothing absurd about the numbers.”
Those numbers don’t segregate by quality. For lawyers and MDs, they include every ambulance chaser and small clinic operator. For college teachers, they include every PhD teaching at a community college.
So, yes, there is every reason to believe that when you segregate by quality, that the numbers will move upwards. And that was Hsu’s point.
But why should the social attitudes quantified there be thought the touchstone of conservatism? Beware of circularity, of defining conservatism in terms of questions on which working class people tend to be right wing to the exclusion of the economic matters in which they are reliably left wing and which predict their voting behaviour.
Very good point. Most of the research claiming conservatives are less intelligent has defined conservatism by social attitudes, not actual voting behavior. I suspect the latter shows a much smaller correlation, though perhaps not if you control for income.
All these idiotcy reminds me the arguments of the egg-headed and the round-headed of J.Swift.
@Pincher Martin
It is easy. Just to have them do bicycle trips with you.
You should do it too. You will find correlation with their education achievement. No kidding. Size matters.
Size matters. “Hahaha”, to quote Pinky.
Haven’t compared with Pinky on the usual acceptation of that phrase. But if he’s NE Asian…
IC,
Size does indeed matter, but you guys make a fetish of small differences and highly questionable correlations.
I still enjoy this blog, both the blogger and his commentators. I have high hopes that some of you guys grow into your IQs.
For the Canuckistanis:
A(n)…what’s the word…engorged? purple? excited? I don’t know…example of:
1. the bullshit that is hereditism AND
2. who American “conservatives” really are
Vermont vs West Virginia
1. Both are almost 100% white.
2. Vermont has near the highest educational attainment of the states.
3. W. Virginia has THE lowest.
4. It is only slightly exaggerated to say there are no Republicans in Vermont.
5. It is only slightly exaggerated to say there are no Democrats in W. Virginia.
6. Median household wealth (NOT income) is highest in Vermont of all states.
7. It is lowest or near it in W. Virginia.
All of these claims are easily verifiable.
So, obviously, a self-hating black man like Jayman would say…
That’s ’cause Vermont and W. Virginia were settled by different (European) people.
Yeah. Vermont by English and W. Virginia by relatives of Greg Cochran. Pretty similar.
You have no argument against Gregory Cochran whatsoever, in fact, you will find next to no criticism of Greg Cochran in academic journals whatsoever, his hypotheses for various things are essentially the best and most plausible, especially for things like Ashkenazi intelligence and homosexuality. His works have been also commended by the likes of Peter Frost, Razib Khan, Amir Sariaslan, Robert Plomin, JayMan, hbdchick, Andrew Sabisky, Emil Kierkegaard, Greg Clark, and the list goes on…
You have no argument that aren’t fallacious.
[user name edited by pumpkinperson, sept 26, 2014]
Race isn’t everything. A lot of variability exists even within some families. Culture sometimes matters. So does government policy on (rare) occasion.
But none of that invalidates the general findings of the race realists.
Here’s an interesting new study for you all.
“Does Learning to Read Improve Intelligence? A Longitudinal Multivariate Analysis in Identical Twins From Age 7 to 16
Stuart J. Ritchie1,*, Timothy C. Bates1 and Robert Plomin2
Evidence from twin studies points to substantial environmental influences on intelligence, but the specifics of this influence are unclear. This study examined one developmental process that potentially causes intelligence differences: learning to read. In 1,890 twin pairs tested at 7, 9, 10, 12, and 16 years, a cross-lagged monozygotic-differences design was used to test for associations of earlier within-pair reading ability differences with subsequent intelligence differences. The results showed several such associations, which were not explained by differences in reading exposure and were not restricted to verbal cognitive domains. The study highlights the potentially important influence of reading ability, driven by the nonshared environment, on intellectual development and raises theoretical questions about the mechanism of this influence.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12272/full
Evidence from twin studies points to substantial environmental influences on intelligence,…
Indeed. HBDers systematically ignore all such results. But the MZT/DZT study is irremediably meaningless whatever its results.
I’m impressed that you’re honest enough to acknowledge #1. It certainly is true that conservatives throughout the centuries have not only embraced war as a positive good, but also explicitly celebrated violence in their writings and speeches. Lots of internet conservatives I see these days try to sweep those aspects of their ideology under the rug.
I disagree that all liberal ideas are “clearly nonsense” and think you may be conflating liberalism with the fringe left, i.e. people who promote complete gender and cultural relativism and stuff like that. Most liberals I know are not that unhinged. Also remember that liberals in the past fought for lots of the luxuries you now take for granted: equality before the law, the right to a fair trial, freedom of thought and conscience, meritocracy, universal education, the franchise, welfare and entitlement programs like social security, vastly improved working conditions, racial and religious tolerance, limitations on state power and coercion, alternatives to war for resolving conflicts, and lots of other things.
Meanwhile, conservatives throughout history have not only opposed all of the above at some point, but have also defended ideas and institutions now considered beyond the pale, like slavery. In fact, there are some internet reactionaries who think chattel slavery should be revived and that all of the changes I listed above have been a grave error.
Likewise, conservatives more often than not have been the party of irrationalism and obscurantism. This is most clearly expressed in the contempt many of them share for rationalism and the scientific method, despite occasional appeals to science to justify inequality. I’m not making that up. You might cite right-wing HBDers as an exception, but 1) HBDers are a subset within the alternative right, which is itself fringe, and we’re talking about overall trends 2) lots of HBDers become uninterested in science that doesn’t support right-wing beliefs, and will leap into irrationalism if they feel their beliefs are threatened.
Again, there’s lots of precedent for this. The same combination of scientific racism with mystical racism is found in Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Madison Grant, Hans F. K. Günther, and yes Adolf Hitler. All of these people appealed to biology and anthropology when convenient but ignored scientific findings they didn’t like. As luck would have it, with the exception of Gobineau, all of them blamed those dastardly Jews for spreading the lie of racial equality. A tradition that continues today with the invective directed towards “Cultural Marxists” and Jews like Boas, Montagu, Ruth Benedict, Gould, Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Jonathan Marks, et al.
There might be some liberal HBDers, but all the HBDers I’ve seen who claim to be liberal ended up drifting further and further to the right. Again, I think racialism has inherently illiberal conclusions (though not everyone follows ideas to their logical conclusions). You can find historical analogues here as well: people like Ludwig Woltmann and Alfred Ploetz who started out on the left, but drifted towards the right as they became more obsessed with racialism.
Likewise, conservatives more often than not have been the party of irrationalism and obscurantism. This is most clearly expressed in the contempt many of them share for rationalism and the scientific method, despite occasional appeals to science to justify inequality. I’m not making that up. You might cite right-wing HBDers as an exception, but 1) HBDers are a subset within the alternative right, which is itself fringe, and we’re talking about overall trends 2) lots of HBDers become uninterested in science that doesn’t support right-wing beliefs, and will leap into irrationalism if they feel their beliefs are threatened.
I agree. I find a lot of HBD types are not true science people, but rather political people who are using science to justify their political agenda and that’s why we see so much scientific and statistical illiteracy on so many of the HBD blogs..
One exception was Arthur Jensen who was actually a liberal who embraced HBD purely on the scientific merits. I remember an interview where Jensen said he didn’t care whether civilization continued in the West or in East Asia, as long as humanity’s great scholarship was preserved. The HBD person interviewing him could not relate at all to Jensen not caring whether civilization continued in the East and West, feeling that as a white, Jensen should be more loyal to the West.
What this HBD person didn’t get was that for Jensen, HBD was about science, not tribalism. But Jensen was extremely rare that way.
Kronos has swallowed, whole and hard, the liberal premise that liberalism is responsible for nearly all the good things in history and conservatism for nearly all the bad things. He writes:
“Also remember that liberals in the past fought for lots of the luxuries you now take for granted: equality before the law, the right to a fair trial, freedom of thought and conscience, meritocracy, universal education, the franchise, welfare and entitlement programs like social security, vastly improved working conditions, racial and religious tolerance, limitations on state power and coercion, alternatives to war for resolving conflicts, and lots of other things.”
Kronos is…how shall I put this?…very light on the details supporting this sweeping statement. Indeed, he doesn’t name a single conservative in his post – not one name ! – until he segues about halfway through to a list of scientific racists, which of course are not the same thing as conservatives.
G.K. Chesterton, to cite the example of the man I quoted above, was an implacable enemy to the eugenics movement and the scientific racists. He was also a conservative whose opposition to eugenics was derived from that so-called obscurantist cult called Roman Catholicism.
Chesterton’s intellectual opponents were almost entirely men of the left. The socialist and playwright George Bernard Shaw, for example, who wrote “[t]he only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Or how about the socialist Beatrice Webb, another contemporary of Chesterton’s, who wrote that “no eugenicist can be a laissez-faire individualist.” Or how about the socialist and novelist HG Wells, another prominent eugenics supporter of the left. Or Bertrand Russell, who wanted to issue breeding tickets to get rid of the “inferior human beings.”
The eugenicists were not uniformly of the left, of course. The movement drew widely from the educated and upper classes. But it was a progressive idea mainly supported by the kind of good-thinking, well-educated liberals Kronos now praises. Nor is eugenics a wholly bad idea in theory. The problem at the time was that it relied on a strong element of coercion that ran well ahead of what it had proven – a coercive element that liberals were fully prepared to support, just as they have always supported coercion when it’s deployed on behalf of their political aims.
*****
Kronos writes:
“I disagree that all liberal ideas are “clearly nonsense” and think you may be conflating liberalism with the fringe left, i.e. people who promote complete gender and cultural relativism and stuff like that. Most liberals I know are not that unhinged.”
One doesn’t have to be unhinged to believe in complete rubbish. Many well-educated, high-IQ people are quite capable of believing the stupidest things while otherwise being remarkably productive and sane members of society. Ideas are mere accouterments to most of these people, something they picked up at school before moving out into the great world of work and family.
Indeed, the exposure to liberal ideas in higher education is mostly a process of socialization, a subtle form of priming or brainwashing. A well-educated man may tell you with a laugh that of course he doesn’t believe in complete gender equality, but he’s prepared to allow women in combat on an equal basis with men because he’s been primed by his education to believe it’s the right idea. The advance of liberal ideas is situational and generational, not rigorously ideological.
“Meanwhile, conservatives throughout history have not only opposed all of the above at some point, but have also defended ideas and institutions now considered beyond the pale, like slavery.”
It’s true that some conservatives, particularly American conservatives, have defended slavery in the past as a positive good. But this is not at all indicative of most conservatives or the conservative movement.
And I don’t see how it’s no different than many liberals defending the worst excesses of the tyrannical left, who would have enslaved us all if they had their way. When the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm said that if communism had succeeded it would have been worth the twenty million deaths under Stalin, that’s as bloodthirsty a calculation as anything any prominent conservative has ever said. But then didn’t Hobsbawm’s hero, Karl Marx, say that no great movement was born without shedding blood?
Kronos probably doesn’t know anything about the conservative movement other than what has been filtered down to him by liberals. But the patron saint of many conservatives today is Edmund Burke, a man whose positions are far from the caricatured parody of views that Kronos accepts as representative of the conservative type. Burke did not call himself conservative or a man of the right – those terms would only come later to the Anglosphere – but his positions during the French Revolution are indistinguishable from many of the positions conservatives have habitually taken ever since.
If Kronos wants to read a fair exposition of how Burke’s views fit into the modern typology of conservatism, he should Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. It treats both the left and right fairly, which is more than I can say about how Kronos treats them.
CORRECTION:
“And I don’t see how it’s *ANY* different…”
Pincher Martin is a sterling example of the rigid, bigoted, and *hypocritical* mind of the conservative. And like many conservatives, he’s either ignorant of his own intellectual tradition or is trying to whitewash it. I’m going to have fun demolishing his arguments here.
Pincher the Bigot writes: “scientific racists, which of course are not the same thing as conservatives”
Not necessarily, but every single person I named (Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Madison Grant, Hans F. K. Günther, Adolf Hitler) was indeed affiliated with the political right. That’s why I mentioned them. Unlike you, I’ve read their books. They’re full of tirades against liberalism, egalitarianism, democracy, cosmopolitanism, miscegenation, and so on. Which political faction is more likely to see those things as evil? Historically, both scientific racism and Social Darwinism have dovetailed nicely with conservatism. After all, both of them offer solid justifications for hierarchy, ethno-nationalism, and worship of power, all of which appeal to right-wing sensibilities. This doesn’t mean that people on the left didn’t occasionally show interest in them, which brings me to…
Pincher the Bigot writes: “G.K. Chesterton, to cite the example of the man I quoted above, was an implacable enemy to the eugenics movement and the scientific racists. He was also a conservative whose opposition to eugenics was derived from that so-called obscurantist cult called Roman Catholicism.”
Chesterton was an eccentric man. You may have forgotten passages like these from Orthodoxy (1908), which reveal his ambiguous and sometimes contradictory sentiments:
“As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals. I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because, having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, I think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity.”
Remember that Orthodoxy was written while Chesterton was still an Anglican. Lots of Chesterton fans don’t realize that Chesterton didn’t convert to Catholicism until quite late in his life.
But even if I grant that Chesterton was in some senses a conservative (and I think he was, especially after 1920), I would’ve thought that someone obsessed with group differences and statistical averages would know better than to cite exceptions as if they were the norm. I mean…you are aware that Chesterton and Belloc (who was a Liberal MP during his time in government, not a conservative) were limited to a small following of their fellow eccentrics in Britain? Their fanbase in continental Europe was even smaller. The Distributionist meetings attracted meager numbers. They had little influence over any conservative party in their era.
To illustrate the problem with trying to pass off exceptions as the norm, take slavery. Sure, you can find some conservative abolitionists like William Wilberforce, but it remains true that conservatives of the time were more willing to accommodate or explicitly support slavery while the left was more vehement in its opposition. As evidence, I’ll marshal a source close to your heart: Charles Darwin. From his personal correspondence:
“The Captain does every thing in his power to assist me, & we get on very well – but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles: I would not be a Tory, if it was merely on account of their cold hearts about that scandal to Christian Nations, Slavery.”
— To Revd. John Henslow 18 May 1832 from Rio de Janeiro.
“It does one’s heart good to hear how things are going on in England. Hurrah for the honest Whigs. I trust they will soon attack that monstrous stain on our boasted liberty, Colonial Slavery. I have seen enough of Slavery & the disposition of the negros, to be thoroughly disgusted with the lies & nonsense one hears on the subject in England.”
— To John Herbert on 2 June, 1833 from Maldonado, Rio Plata.
I think you’d agree that Charles Darwin was a highly educated man and probably kept abreast of current affairs. And when he looked at the political debates of his time, he concluded that the Tories were much more inclined to defend slavery while the Whigs were much more inclined to oppose it. This does not mean that there were no *individual* Tories who opposed slavery or *individual* Whigs who supported it. We’re talking about general tendencies here.
You know, just like your usual bloviations about statistical averages and group differences. Of course not all Black people are violent criminals with a two digit IQ. They’re just more likely to be so than White people. And if I said that African-Americans are a solidly Democratic voting bloc, countering with Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams would do nothing to vitiate the truth of my statement.
For some reason, when negative generalizations and stereotypes involve a group to which you belong, this logic flies out the window. All of a sudden, exceptions really do become the norm! Dogs ride bicycles! Maybe you need a lesson in consistency? Or maybe a lesson in empathy too?
cont’d…
And good on them.
I not only support eugenics. I think anything less is EVIL.
That one even uses the terms “liberal” and “conservative” shows him to be an imbecile! Unless he makes the context very clear.
Politics and “ideas” is not a context.
Burke’s fine as interpreted by David Brooks.
Robespierre and his confreres were total NUTS. Duh.
Revolutions fail. Duh.
Take it slow or it’s misery for all. Duh.
So what’s wrong with a Fabian?
Well if Chesterton were a genuine conservative he couldn’t be a Roman.
Das right y’all. Buckley was just an old queen. He didn’t really believe anything.
To be a Roman Catholic is to be:
1. An uber social conservative
2. Anti capitalist
2. Anti Communist
Chesterton was fat and had a moustache.
The End.
“Das right y’all. Buckley was just an old queen.”
No, Buckley was the crypto-fascist. Vidal was the queen.
“Chesterton was fat and had a mustache.”
Fat is not interesting. Chesterton was a walrus in a land of toothpicks and square men. Now that’s interesting.
No!
It’s the full Osama or haredi Jew or NOTHING.
Big moustache (Stalin) or little moustache (Hitler)?
Better…no moustaches.
Unless you’re Martin Heidegger.
FAT + MOUSTACHE = BOOOOOOOOOOOORING
cont’d…
Pincher the Bigot then really shows off his, uh, intellectual chops by regurgitating Glenn Beck’s arguments about Shaw, Wells, and the Webbs and their support for eugenics. No, I’m serious. Glenn Beck used this exact argument, almost verbatim, when he had his Fox News show. Isn’t that hilarious? Pincher fancies himself this sophisticated intellectual, but he barely rises above Fox News boilerplate.
Needless to say, this argument wasn’t convincing when Beck made it and it’s not convincing now.
First off, you’ll notice I didn’t mention eugenics at all in my previous post. It’s a complex and incendiary topic, so I’m not surprised conservatives have seized upon it with an *extremely simplified* narrative and out-of-context quotes in order to score cheap points against progressives. There are entire books of the topic.
Not all eugenicists were the same. Not all eugenicists maintained the same views over their lifetime, e.g. both H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell renounced their support for eugenics by the late 1920s and became passionate defenders of universal human rights. I also find it telling that the same names, like Shaw and the Webbs, appear over and over again in this discussion. It’s almost as if conservatives are scraping the bottom of the barrel for their tu quoque arguments.
I also have to remark that communism is NOT the same as liberalism/social democracy even if they share similar foundations in Enlightenment thought. This is another topic that would require a lengthy post to explain adequately, but real Marxists and anarchists today would tell you frankly that they’re not liberals. Most of the worst crimes of the left were committed by communists rather than liberals/social democrats, even if the latter haven’t always been angels (but who is?). There is no liberal/social democratic equivalent to the Soviet Union or Maoist China. If you tell me that I’m being unfair to the right in this respect, I’ll just point out that the many negative and destructive tendencies one finds in, e.g. Nazi Germany, are also present in many other right-wing factions.
re: Eric Hobsbawm’s views are fringe by any reasonable measure. How many liberals or even leftists actually state that “if communism had succeeded it would have been worth the twenty million deaths under Stalin”? On the other hand, I could be here all day listing quotes from conservatives which support my claims about them. Again, read what I wrote about about group tendencies, averages, exceptions, etc.
con’td…
re: Karl Marx, you may want to read him a little more carefully. Marx said that while that revolutionary violence might be necessary, if revolution were possible through peaceful means, that course should be taken. The left usually considers violence instrumentally, as a means to a particular end rather than as an end in itself. It’s the right that considers war and violence as positive goods *in themselves* (because they promote heroism and sacrifice, and without war we will become hedonistic and degenerate, you see…).
Joseph de Maistre: “Once you leave the world of insensible substances, you find the decree of violent death written on the very frontiers of life. Even in the vegetable kingdom, this law can be perceived: from the huge catalpa to the smallest of grasses, how many plants die and how many are killed! But once you enter the animal kingdom, the law suddenly becomes frighteningly obvious. A power at once hidden and palpable appears constantly occupied in bringing to light the principle of life by violent means. In each great division of the animal world, it has chosen a certain number of animals charged with devouring the others; so there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fish of prey, and quadrupeds of prey. There is not an instant of time when some living creature is not devoured by another […] War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular, consequences little known because they are little sought but which are nonetheless indisputable. Who could doubt the benefits that death in war brings? And who could believe that the victims of this dreadful judgment have shed their blood in vain?”
Maistre again: “Now the true fruits of human nature – the arts, sciences, great enterprises, noble ideas, manly virtues – spring above all from the state of war. It is well known that nations reach the apex of the greatness of which they are capable only after long and bloody wars. Thus the most glorious hour of the Greeks was the terrible era of the Peloponnesian War; the Age of Augustus followed immediately the civil war and proscriptions; the French genius was roughhewn by the League and polished by the Fronde; all the great men of the age of Queen Anne were born amidst political upheavals. In a word, it could be said that blood is the manure of that plant we call genius […] I know very well that, in all these discussions, we are assailed continually with the wearisome picture of the innocents who perish with the guilty. But, without penetrating far into this extremely profound question, it can be considered solely in its relation to the universally held dogma, as old as the world itself, that the innocent suffer for the benefit of the guilty.”
Heinrich von Treitschke: “It is war which fosters the political idealism which the materialist rejects. What a disaster for civilization it would be if mankind blotted its heroes from memory. The heroes of a nation are the figures which rejoice and inspire the spirit of its youth, and the writers whose words ring like trumpet blasts become the idols of our boyhood and our early manhood. He who feels no answering thrill is unworthy to bear arms for his country. To appeal from this judgment to Christianity would be sheer perversity, for does not the Bible distinctly say that the ruler shall rule by the sword, and again that greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friend? To Aryan races, who are before all things courageous, the foolish preaching of everlasting peace has always been in vain. They have always been man enough to maintain with the sword what they have attained through the intellect.”
Treitschke again: “The next essential function of the State is the conduct of war. . . without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is multiplicity of States. The laws of human thought and of human nature forbid any alternative, neither is one to be wished for.”
Houston Stewart Chamberlain: “This work of Teutonism is beyond question the greatest that has hitherto been accomplished by man. It was achieved, not by the delusion of “humanitarian” impulses, but by sound, selfish power; not by contentedness with little, but by insatiable ravenous hunger. . . from the earliest times down to the present day we see the Teutons, to make room for themselves, slaughtering whole tribes and races, or slowly killing them by systematic demoralization. Everyone must admit that in the very places where they were most cruel — as for instance, the Anglo-Saxons in England, the German Order in Prussia — they laid by this very means the surest foundation of what is highest and most moral.”
Otto von Bismarck: “The great questions of our time will not be settled by resolutions and by majority votes—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “A long peace always breeds cruelty, cowardice and crude, flabby egoism and principally mental stagnation. During a long peace, only the exploiters of peoples grow fat.”
Dostoevsky again: “War raises the spirits of the People and their awareness of their own dignity. War makes everyone equal in the time of battle and reconciles the master and the slave in the most sublime manifestation of human dignity — the sacrifice of life for the common cause, for everyone, and for the fatherland. Do you really think that the masses, even the most benighted masses of peasants and beggars, do not feel this urge for an active display of noble feelings? And how can the mass show its nobility and its human dignity in time of peace?”
Oswald Spengler: “Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous colored races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immortal, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars.”
Spengler again: “like France in 1793, we will have to live through this misfortune to the very end; we need a good castigation, the likes of which will make the four years of war seem harmless in comparison, until the time has come for the small group that was called to leadership in 1813 and in 1870 alike: the Prussian nobles and the Prussian civil servants, the thousands of our technicians, apprentices, craftsmen, workers with Prussian instincts; until, above all, the terror also generates such indignation and despair that a dictatorship, something Napoleonic, is generally perceived as the salvation. But then blood must flow, the more the better.”
Julius Evola (This comes from his book “The Metaphysics of War” which is, as the title suggests, a celebration of war…): “Fascism appears to us as a reconstructive revolution, in that it affirms an aristocratic and spiritual concept of the nation, as against both socialist and internationalist collectivism, and the democratic and demagogic notion of the nation. In addition, its scorn for the economic myth and its elevation of the nation in practice to the degree of ‘warrior nation’, marks positively the first degree of this reconstruction…the next step would be the spiritualization of the warrior principle itself.”
Raymond Cattell (Remember to take your Cattell Culture Fair IQ test today!): “The Atlantic democracies are bewildered, envious, and hostile at the rise of Germany, Italy, and Japan, countries in which individuals have disciplined their indulgences as to a religious purpose. These nationals fear the gods even though they are partly false gods, in comparison with the vast numbers in our democracies lacking any super-personal aim. Their rise should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed to sink into stagnation or adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution.”
re: State coercion. It’s simply not controversial to say that historically conservatives have been outwardly hostile towards the rule of law, and even written constitutions. You find this in Joseph de Maistre just as much as in Carl Schmitt. Conservatives are far more likely to support censorship and police state measures such as arbitrary arrest and detainment. It was true under Klemens von Metternich. It was true under Tsarist Russia. It was true under Napoleon III. It was true during the Drefus Affair. It was true under Miguel Primo de Rivera’s and Franco’s Spain. It was true under Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
I’m on a Treitschke kick, so here he is again to spell it out for you: “There must be no question of subjects having the “right” to oppose a sovereignty which in their opinion is not moral. We must always maintain the principle that the State in itself is an ethical force and a high moral good.”
And please don’t tell me the “censorship” suffered by HBDers is somehow equivalent. Last I checked, you can still buy the books of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Nicholas Wade on Amazon without any legal repercussions. None of those men have been thrown in jail for their views.
Pincher the Bigot writes: “One doesn’t have to be unhinged to believe in complete rubbish. Many well-educated, high-IQ people are quite capable of believing the stupidest things while otherwise being remarkably productive and sane members of society.”
I cited complete gender relativism, i.e. that there are no significant psychological or biological differences between the sexes, as an example of an asinine idea that many self-identified liberals would probably reject. Here is an example of what a thoughtful liberal would say on the topic:
“You’re just one of those feminist game deniers who think sex differences don’t exist.
Nope! Actually, I am going to take this FAQ from the POV that game tactics all work exactly as stated by their advocates. What I hope to show is that even if you assume that Heartiste is totally right about his practical advice– if you should neg, qualify, do takeaways, send women ‘gay’ as a response to their text messages, and all the rest– his conclusions about how the dating marketplace works simply do not follow.
In addition, I do actually think that sex differences exist. I think that level of violence, libido, probably certain aspects of sexuality such as getting off on narrative versus getting off on visuals, and probably some stuff with emotions are all inherent, biological gender differences. I am not willing to rule out other differences nor to state that I believe in them.
It is a very boring prediction of feminist theory that the genders behave differently from each other. After all, if you divide children into two random groups and tell half of them to be courageous and half of them to be gentle, one half is probably going to be courageous and the other is going to be gentle. It is tiresome when people (both feminists and antifeminists) pretend that the existence of gender differences proves that these gender differences are not socialized. Over the course of this article, I will highlight legitimate gender differences which I think are probably social in nature rather than biological. Of course, all complex behavior has both social and biological elements: for instance, I will argue that women’s lack of interest in casual sex has both a biological and a social component.”
Now, she might be partially or totally wrong here. You’re entitled to disagree. But her positions are a far far cry from the absurd straw man of the gender-bending pansexual that conservatives often attack.
“A well-educated man may tell you with a laugh that of course he doesn’t believe in complete gender equality, but he’s prepared to allow women in combat on an equal basis with men because he’s been primed by his education to believe it’s the right idea. The advance of liberal ideas is situational and generational, not rigorously ideological.”
As with all ideologies and movements, you have your true believers and those along for the ride and those somewhere in the middle. This tells us nothing about either liberalism or conservatism per se. Also, the suggestion that liberalism is “situational and generational” but conservatism somehow isn’t is possibly the most risible statement you’ve made yet, and not for lack of competition. Conservatives throughout the last two centuries have defended both majority rights (lots of obvious examples…there’s even a White Nationalist website called MajorityRights) and minority rights (Confederate slaveholders, apartheid South Africa, etc.), both localism (the Carlists, the early Action Francaise, the Southern Agrarians) and centralization (Bismarck, the Russian Tsars, the later Action Francaise, the Fascists), both nationalism and pan-Europeanism, both neo-feudalism and laissez-faire capitalism, and so on and so forth.
I’m not uncritical of the left, but I reject the idea that every criticism of the right needs to be balanced out with a criticism of the left. As obnoxious as SJWs on the left can be, their opponents on the right are even more gleefully cruel and malevolent. I think right-wing intellectuals can be interesting *to read* and they’re often talented prose stylists, but their ideas have little to offer the modern world — too much casuistry and they’re frequently impractical and utopian. Yes, the right-wing is almost as utopian as the left in their yearning for some fantastical Golden Age and anti-modernism. The difference is that the left is expected to be utopian and idealistic while right-wingers fashion themselves as hard-headed realists. That’s what makes it ironic when they turn out otherwise.
…and became passionate defenders of universal human rights…
On a finite planet procreation is NOT a human right.
I also have to remark that communism is NOT the same as liberalism/social democracy…
They are the same in only one country. Les Etats Unis Merdeux.
Another interesting and seemingly universal correlation is the one between high density urban cities and liberalism. Basically, big cities are more liberal while rural areas are more conservative. You find this across time and place. NYC, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, Madrid, etc. Even in ancient Rome, to some extent! It’s never a mystery which way these places are going vote in national elections (local elections are more complex) or what their overall political attitudes are.
Perhaps the “conservatives” are not only more drawn to the relative solitude of the country but also feel much more independent. Green acres is an earlier way of life than Park Avenue.
But, of course, we all the real reason.
It’s grand caniches vs pit bulls.
@pumpkinperson
Remembering I said judging someone’s intelligence by impression or guts feeling is wrong? Only objective way is standard tests or physical measurement of head size.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests
Obviously, Steven Pinker has similar idea “We have already seen that test scores, as far up the upper tail as you can go, predict a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments. They’re not perfect, but intuitive judgments based on interviews and other subjective impressions have been shown to be far worse.”
Also I said we might commit fallacies ourself when we debate with others. Here Pinker putted: “Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.”
As educated people, we should first check our own fault or ignorance first.
Pinker is an emetic if the ipecac didn’t work.
Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech.
Me talk pretty one day. This is an Americanism or in Pinker’s case a Canadianism or Yiddishism.
There is intentional obscurantism or Fashionable Nonsense — almost all of it French, but Joyce and Pound and even that mouth breather Eliot fit the bill.
Intelligibility is the death of philosophy.
or
Let’s not talk baby talk. Let’s not talk to babies.
Kronos says he is going to have “fun demolishing my arguments.” I hope for the sake of his enjoyment that his demolition went off better in his head than it did on the page.
Kronos begins by compounding the error of his original post. Instead of describing conservatives as they are – and were – he names a grab bag of infamous scientific and political racists, everyone from Madison Grant to Hitler, and then seeks to smear all of conservatism by association.
Kronos claims he’s read these authors and knows their works, and so he feels confident in describing them as conservative. But quite apart from Krono’s fundamental error in using the fallacy of composition by focusing on one small group of men from various countries and periods of history to explain a larger, long-running political tradition in the Anglosphere, he fails to even properly understand these men he calls conservative – or what conservatism might have meant when those men were alive.
Look at Krono’s American example. In what sense was Madison Grant a political conservative?
Grant had two obsessions during his life: eugenics and the environment. He wanted to save both the Nordic Race and the American buffalo, to preserve both the U.S. as a white nation and the last of the California redwood trees.
Neither of these concerns was widely shared by the political conservatives of Grant’s day. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, for example, had some vague eugenic notions in common with Grant, because those ideas were floating around everywhere back then, but they were inchoate compared to the very fixed and enthusiastic ideas of the progressives of that era, like Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger.
In his excellent book Defending the Master Race, Jonathan Spiro frequently refers to the progressive tradition Grant was working within.
Wikipedia even quotes Spiro on the question of Grant’s ideology:
So Grant was a progressive, not a conservative.
(And, no, just because the name “conservationists” shares a Latin root with the word “conservatism” does not make them the same.)
So why does poor Kronos believe that Madison Grant was a conservative? I think it’s clear Kronos’ odd categorization has less to do with Grant’s actual beliefs than it has to do with Kronos knee-jerk assumption that all bad men must be conservatives.
Since Kronos believes Grant is obviously a bad man, Kronos assumes the well-known progressive must also have been a conservative. It’s a syllogism worthy of Aristotle !
*****
Kronos is not yet done with his demolition of my arguments. He moves on to mention a flood of irrelevancies about G.K. Chesterton, as if it really matters when Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism and how eccentric he might have been.
Chesterton’s instincts were always conservative. He wrote scathingly about eugenics, for example, at a time when nearly the only major organized opposition to eugenics came from the Catholic Church. When Unitarian and Episcopalian ministers were helping to line up the masses to check their family pedigrees, the Catholic Church was in opposition from the outset and Chesterton was perhaps the most articulate spokesman against the movement.
Kronos also argues that just because Chesterton and Belloc were so-called conservatives doesn’t mean most conservatives followed their arguments or even knew who they were. I agree. But the Catholic Church had much greater influence, and it was against eugenics from the beginning.
(And I have no idea why Kronos mentions Belloc’s political affiliation with the Liberal party, since political affiliation is not a good indicator of political conservatism before the modern era. Burke was a Whig, for example.)
By making this argument, I’m not suggesting that most things the Church did were good. I’m simply pointing out that the Church’s conservative instincts served it well in this particular case, just as Chesterton’s own conservative political instincts served him well in this debate. Chesterton was not, as Kronos suggests, some eccentric conservative on the issue of eugenics. He was working within a larger tradition that opposed these new progressive ideas on the left as unnecessary and oppressive to the lower classes. And Chesterton knew that, even if Kronos does not.
That sums up the problem with Krono’s analysis. He wants to tar an entire political ideology over two hundred centuries without being bothered to look at the facts of the case. He doesn’t want to deal with the uneven historical record that might show a mixed record for each political orientation, and so he just invents a dichotomy of “good liberal/bad conservative” and then makes up his history to fit it.
Kronos will also have to explain what Charles Darwin has to do with anything. The naturalist was a powerful anti-slavery advocate, but otherwise not terribly political. And Darwin’s strong anti-slavery positions did not prevent him from holding views on the races later in life that were very much like his infamous cousin Francis Galton’s views.
But since Darwin is neither a conservative nor an expert on politics, his views are irrelevant to this debate.
Pincher is more tiresome than French class.
…long-running political tradition in the Anglosphere…
That is Prole-sphere, Chav-sphere, Hick-sphere.
The UK:
1. is the poorest Germanic language speaking country in Europe.
2. is the most unequal
3. has the least social mobility
4. sucks at football
5. at one time in the recent past 20% of its workforce was in finance
6. Etc.
The US:
1. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the developed world even for its whites
2. same as that damp dump off the coast of Europe
3. same as …
4. same as …
5. spends more on its military than all other countries combined
6. has the least vacation
7. is 37th in median household wealth
8. is FAT
9. is short lived
10. is the least meritocratic country in the developed world, but its people believe it’s the most meritocratic
11. Etc.
Les Etats Unis Merdeux et Le Royaume-Uni Merdeux.
…the focus of evil in the modern world…
Dookie,
Yeah, yeah, America is EVIL because of Ronald McDonald, big prisons, short vacations, and economic stats that you have no idea what they mean.
Could you provide a more clichéd list of horribles?
The cranky, drunk editor of Harper’s Monthly, Lewis Lapham, had more originality, and he churned out the same damn column every month for an entire decade.
That old queen Gore Vidal had a more novel column of national pathologies and he pretty much stopped thinking in 1975.
I don’t mind you trashing America, but you could at least do so with some creativity rather than rehash every putdown that was already stale by the end of the eighties.
Find some fresh material.
I know those pesky facts get in the way. Don’t they? N Korea is a paradise!
Hmmm…
Fresh? What’s more fresh than FACTS?
You’re a tired old queen Pinky.
Pincher: Yeah, I love guns.. but I ain’t no Commie, and I certainly ain’t no homosexual (riiiiight). Could I join?
Bob: Sorry, no. We’d love to talk guns with you, but unless you took the next logical step of becoming gay and Communist, I don’t see much chance. Do you?
Dookie,
“I know those pesky facts get in the way.”
Nobody cares about your dumbass facts, doofus. Not even you care about them. They’re the kind of stuff you can find in little brown fading Socialist pamphlets from the seventies.
Woe is America ! Little Norway and Finland and Liechtenstein have higher incomes than the U.S. !
Do you think we’ll survive with that knowledge, Dookie? Will we make it as a nation?
You see, no one cares about your facts. It’s the lack of music in your tune, not your stale lyrics.
The most pathetic thing is, the U.S. actually does have some serious problems. But it’s not as if you’ll ever find them.
More scat and scatting from Pincher.
Who said, “Chesterton has thoughts, but he doesn’t think”?
Let me clue you in…BIG TIME, not Gangnam style, Dick Cheney style:
America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.
Race…race…race…
650k dead Americans for…race.
America is…shit.
Why?
The worst from Europe + indigenes + black slaves =
Why even try?
Here’s Wikipedia:
One estimate of the death toll is that ten percent of all Northern males 20–45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40 perished.
Race…a war about race…or to save the Union…
Lincoln will not, but should go down in history with Stalin and Hitler.
And this “precious” South which he saved has led the “conservative movement”, or what would be better described as the “closet homosexual sophistical hick movement”.
As Stalin might have said…
No south. No problem.
Join us! The Scandinavian socialists. We have no illusions about non-Scandinavians but…
Trade your Corvette in for a Volvo, and pepper your speech with ooftah!
Lagom ar bast, Pinky.
I first thought Dookie’s comment at 7:47 AM was indecipherable.
But then I figured out that Dookie’s a rapper in the best tradition of Eminem.
Don’t believe me? Sing the following lyrics in the manner of your favorite rapper:
See? It finally works.
No one can really read and understand Dookie’s arguments. They’re meant to be rapped.
“Lincoln will not, but should go down in history with Stalin and Hitler.”
Horse pucky.
But rap it out, Dookie, and maybe it will finally start making sense.
See? It works much better, doesn’t it?
See? It finally works.
No one can really read and understand Dookie’s arguments. They’re meant to be rapped.
LOL!
Me:
1. 800 on the GRE verbal (and 800 on the other three too)
2. 99th percentile on verbal SAT,GMAT, WISC (and … too)
3. Dad Harvard English
4. Mom MA English
5. Granddad Princeton AB PhD English and English professor.
Pinky. If you’ve not understood me, it’s because your IQ is too low. Especially your verbal IQ.
The End.
You forget, Dookie. I was the man who never cared about your GRE scores. I was never impressed by them. And I know a similarly unimpressive person who scored just as high. He, too, is a BGI participant.
But I am impressed by your rapping, Dookie. I think that’s your true calling.
My first response to Kronos is still in moderation.
Has it appeared yet? I’m going to adjust the settings so that people can post more links without being sent to moderation.
I adjusted the wordpress settings so now comments should be able to include as many as 9 links before being sent to moderation
“Has it appeared yet? I’m going to adjust the settings so that people can post more links without being sent to moderation.”
Yes. Thanks.
Dude, the demolition continued above. I’m not even started yet. it’s become really obvious you’re a putz and this is not going to be pretty.
Pincher the Idiot: “I have no idea why Kronos mentions Belloc’s political affiliation with the Liberal party, since political affiliation is not a good indicator of political conservatism before the modern era. Burke was a Whig, for example.”
Wow, you are dumb. The modern left/right political divide begins with the French Revolution. So, I agree, Burke’s pre-Revolutionary Whig affiliation is meaningless…but Hilaire Belloc lived in the early twentieth century when Whig and Tory had become synonymous with liberal and conservative respectively! How ahistorical can you be? You have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about.
“But since Darwin is neither a conservative nor an expert on politics, his views are irrelevant to this debate.”
What do you mean by “expert on politics”? I pointed out that Darwin was a highly educated and worldly man who kept abreast of political news. Do you disagree with that? You don’t need to have a PhD in Politics in government to figure out the basic positions of the political parties of your country. Plenty of Americans can tell you the general stances of the Democrats and the Republicans on issues like abortion, gay marriage, universal healthcare, affirmative action, etc. Are you saying that someone needs to be “an expert on politics” to know that information? If so, on what basis? If not, then there’s no reason to assume that Darwin would have been ignorant of the general stances of the Whigs and the Tories of his day. And his conclusion was that the Tories had “cold hearts” on the issue of slavery. On what basis do you assume Darwin was wrong?
And if Darwin’s observation is not enough, I’ll repost the words of Viscount Palmerston. Not only was Palmerston a politician, but he was even a Tory at the time he uttered these words:
“it is by the stupid old Tory party, who bawl out the memory and praises of Pitt while they are opposing all the measures and principles which he held most important; it is by these that the progress of the Government in every improvement which they are attempting is thwarted and impeded. On the Catholic question; on the principles of commerce; on the corn laws; on the settlement of the currency; on the laws regulating the trade in money; on colonial slavery; on the game laws, which are intimately connected with the moral habits of the people: on all these questions, and everything like them, the Government find support from the Whigs and resistance from their self denominated friends.”
Note “on colonial slavery.” Was Palmerston delusional about the Tory stance on that topic as well? This is not looking good for you, Pincher.
Kronos,
“Dude, the demolition continued above.”
Well, it’s good you can be your own biggest fan. Few people have that kind of…confidence.
” I’m not even started yet.”
Yes, I see I’ve inspired you to write a book. You must think your argument gets better with each increasing pound of your verbiage. Apparently, you had nothing better to do on your Friday night.
I promise you I’ll do you the respect of reading every word, although I suspect I’ll be the only person who does. But since you have a tendency to wander off the main course of the argument into strange little mental cul de sacs, I’m only going to hit the highlights in my responses.
But think of it this way. My brief responses will mean you will have less to write in your own future responses, which means you can still pretend to have a social life and a girlfriend.
Yes, I see I’ve inspired you to write a book
LOL! Yes you have inspired an extremely strong reaction & from someone who just a few weeks ago claimed to be neutral with no stake in this fight. I guess you just bring out the partisan in people, LOL.
You are an impressive human being. Your arguments are amazing, and you are incredibly well read. You’ve even inspired me to read some of the folks mentioned in your arguments! My brain feels so small right now lmao!
re: “Chesterton’s instincts were always conservative. He wrote scathingly about eugenics, for example, at a time when nearly the only major organized opposition to eugenics came from the Catholic Church. When Unitarian and Episcopalian ministers were helping to line up the masses to check their family pedigrees, the Catholic Church was in opposition from the outset and Chesterton was perhaps the most articulate spokesman against the movement.”
You tell me Chesterton’s instincts were always conservative, but then offer as proof his opposition to eugenics, even though you’ve already admitted that eugenics was complex and received support from the right-wing as well. Then you insinuate that to be Catholic is necessarily to be conservative, which is itself dubious. Most Catholics would tell you that the Church is beyond left and right. Many conservatives even denounced Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum as dangerously “socialist”!
I would agree that in places where Catholicism was closely tied with the State (e.g. in France and Spain), the majority of Catholics were conservative. However, in places where Catholics were a minority (i.e. Protestant countries), and often subject to discrimination, this was not the case. And even in countries like France, you could find prominent exceptions like Robert de Lamennais, Marc Sangnier, Maurice Blondel, and Jacques Maritain (who laid much of the philosophical groundwork for the Church’s embrace of liberal democracy).
Another complication: during the early twentieth century, the main targets of anti-immigration sentiment and the eugenics movement in the U.S. were often Italians, Poles, Irish, Portuguese, and other heavily Catholic populations. Since there was a large overlap between Nordicists and eugenicists (Grant and Stoddard fit the bill), these Catholic populations were considered “inferior stock.”
It’s also true that some Catholics actually supported eugenics. To name one example, Samuel Donovan argued that since the Church approved of capital punishment, it could also approve of the sterilization of criminals. The Church was also much more lenient towards “positive” eugenic measures. It was primarily the forced sterilization of “undesirables” that received the most vocal opposition.
But, as I noted way above, the subject of eugenics is fraught, and it was not even mentioned by me in the first place because it would lead to an endless digression. And that’s exactly why conservative love to bring it up.
re: “Grant had two obsessions during his life: eugenics and the environment. He wanted to save both the Nordic Race and the American buffalo, to preserve both the U.S. as a white nation and the last of the California redwood trees. Neither of these concerns was widely shared by the political conservatives of Grant’s day.”
First off, you’re wrong that conservatives of the time were unconcerned with the environment. You might want to read up on the Wandervogel, Ludwig Klages, and the Nature worship of many Völkisch movements. Not to mention the cult of agrarianism that was embraced by many conservatives in both America and Europe. FWIW, I think a concern for environmental depredation caused by industrialization is one of the more positive aspects of certain types of conservatism. You can find a modern version of it in “Red Toryism”, but that’s a marginal movement. Most conservatives today don’t give a damn about the environment. And according to you, I can’t even give conservatives proper credit!
In any case, I agree that wildlife conservation is not inherently a political endeavor.
But you know, it’s weird. The biggest fans of Madison Grant these days seem to be right-wing White Nationalists like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer. Why might that be?
They also really like Lothrop Stoddard, who was, along with his friend Grant (who wrote forewords for his books), one of the faces of American Nordicism and eugenics. Now with titles like “The French Revolution in San Domingo” (Stoddard doesn’t like the consequences of the French Revolution or its principles) and “The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man” (Stoddard really despises egalitarianism and the poor), that Stoddard was also a progressive. If you want, I’ll provide quotes from those books that prove otherwise.
I mentioned another one of Grant’s pals above, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who translated “The Passing of the Great Race” into French. Here are some quotes from Lapouge:
“Some people, believing in the mystical principle of human equality, cannot bear it when one speaks to them of superior races. I am not even going to take the trouble to contradict them. It is perfectly useless to reason with minds that are thus turned toward the supernatural; only fictions have value in their eyes. I address myself only to those for whom facts have meaning, as do numbers, which are also facts, grouped and counted.”
“I take a malicious but vivid pleasure in catching the myriad errors in a number of recent articles that have appeared in the socialist, anarchist, or so-called democratic journals. In Darwinism, or in more general terms, in scientific doctrines on the origin of the species of the world, they have seen, above all, an argument with which to oppose religion and, here in France, an argument with which to oppose the church, which is creationist and dedicated to the text of Genesis.”
“They only had a choice between a return, pure and simple, to the theological doctrines from which they had come or the acceptance, pure and simple, of the scientific explanation of social phenomena and the abandonment of all philosophical principles on which their political doctrine had rested. It is not toward science that they went. Their psychology is that of men who in times gone by would prostrate themselves in churches and light heretics on fire, and we are not the least surprised, as they are their descendants. Already liberals, socialists, and anarchists treat Darwinians as barbarians. So be it! The barbarians are coming, the besiegers have come to be besieged, and their last hope of resistance is to lock themselves up in the citadel they were attacking. The near future will show our sons a curious spectacle: the theoreticians of the false modern democracy constrained to shut themselves back up in the citadel of clericalism.”
“Man, in losing his privilege as a being ‘set apart’ and created in the image of God, has no more rights than all the other mammals. Even the idea of right is a fiction…All men are brothers, all animals are brothers, to one another and to man, and fraternity extends to all beings, but that they are brothers does not get in the way of their eating one another. Fraternity, so be it, but too bad for the victims! Life is only maintained by death.”
But I’m sure you can tell me that Lapouge was somehow writing all this from a liberal perspective.
Bizarrely, Spiro also reports this:
“It was in Germany that Grant and his book were received with the most enthusiasm. Grant’s Nordicism landed on fertile soil in Weimar Germany, where popular anti-Semitism was taking on a harder, more “scientific” edge and theorists were beginning to argue that the laws of biology rendered the Jews unassimilable…
German eugenicist Kurt Holler, echoing the observations of Lapouge, told readers of the Eugenical News that the books of Grant and his disciple Lothrop Stoddard had found a “large circle of readers” in Germany…By 1928, Grant could not contain his excitement that “Germany has awakened to the importance of increasing its proportion of pure Nordic blood.”
German eugenicists eagerly established close ties with the Grantians in the 1920s. They were full of admiration for the success of their American counterparts in restricting immigration, passing anti-miscegenation laws, and implementing coercive sterilization acts…In return, the Grantians worked hard after the Great War to reintegrate their German friends into the international scientific community, and they practiced what they preached by attending eugenics conferences in Germany.
Thus, by the time the Nazis rose to power, the party’s policy makers were thoroughly familiar with the Grantians’ legislative program….
Adolf Hitler’s closest advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism. Hitler himself…sent Grant a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him “the book is my Bible.” Mein Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race, in particular the chapters titled “Race and People” and “The State,” which encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought (including the primacy of race, the worship of modern science, the subordination of the individual to the state, millennialism, the need for positive and negative eugenics, and the connection between eugenics and animal husbandry)…
Alfred Rosenberg, in his masterpiece The Myth of the Twentieth Century…commended Grant and Stoddard as the two “enlightened” Americans who had blazed the way toward the acceptance in the United States of scientific racism. And in 1936, when the Nazi Party ” published its official recommendation for essential reading in the field of human heredity, it mentioned only two books by non-German authors: Gobineau’s Inequality of the Human Races and Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race.”
Weird! Why all these connections and similarities if, as you insist, they had only superficial links with each other?
By the way, Grant shared the discomfort with Christianity that the Nazis and many other hardcore racialists did. Christianity is universal and promotes miscegenation!:
From The Passing of the Great Race: “Early ascetic Christianity played a large part in this decline of the Roman Empire as it was at the outset the religion of the slave, the meek and the lowly while Stoicism was the religion of the strong men of the time. This bias in favor of the weaker elements greatly interfered with their elimination by natural processes and the righting force of the Empire was gradually undermined. Christianity was in sharp contrast to the worship of tribal deities which preceded it and it tended then as now to break down class and race distinctions.
The maintenance of such distinctions is absolutely essential to race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.
Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.”
And no, this not a comment sentiment among progressives of the time. Here is the much demonized H.G. Wells on the topic of racial purity:
“Mankind from the point of view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible admixture…All races are more or less mixed.”
Race idolatry, an obsession with racial purity, a distaste for cosmopolitanism (especially when it involves large cities and immigrants), disregard for the weak and the poor in favor of the strong and successful, and paranoid fears of decline and “degeneracy” are all predominantly encountered among people on the political right. Again, see everything I wrote above tendencies, exceptions, etc. I shouldn’t have to explain something so simple.
In the hubbub of our earlier exchange, I forgot to respond to this comment by Kronos.
He writes:
“You tell me Chesterton’s instincts were always conservative, but then offer as proof his opposition to eugenics, even though you’ve already admitted that eugenics was complex and received support from the right-wing as well.”
I made several separate but related comments about both Chesterton and eugenics: 1) Chesterton was a conservative opposed to eugenics. 2) Chesterton was conservative long before he converted to Roman Catholicism. 3) Roman Catholics (like Chesterton), in general, were more likely to oppose eugenics than were others. 4) Progressives (like Grant), in general, were more likely to support eugenics than were others.
What difference does it matter that Chesterton wasn’t always a Roman Catholic? What difference does it make that he was an eccentric man? What difference does it make that *some* conservatives supported eugenics or that *some* progressives opposed it?
Kronos writes:
“Then you insinuate that to be Catholic is necessarily to be conservative, which is itself dubious. Most Catholics would tell you that the Church is beyond left and right. Many conservatives even denounced Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum as dangerously “socialist”!”
If the Catholic Church is not a conservative institution, then conservative institutions do not exist.
And where did the Catholic Church and most of its members stand on eugenics?
Even when the Church was earlier in its history defending slavery – another manifestation of its natural conservatism – it still was more likely to maintain a color-blind Church in which attending members filling the pews at any particular church were of multiple races.
But such apparent contradictions are found everywhere in history. They don’t tell us anything. That the Church has never been overly concerned with low marginal tax rates doesn’t mean it’s not conservative.
Kronos writes:
“It’s also true that some Catholics actually supported eugenics”
Of course there were Catholics who supported eugenic policies, just as there were progressives who did not. So what?
Even the Catholic Church said in 1930 that it wasn’t opposed to eugenic knowledge being disseminated so long as natural procreative processes (no abortion, no contraception, no sterilization, etc.) were respected.
Kronos writes:
“But, as I noted way above, the subject of eugenics is fraught, and it was not even mentioned by me in the first place because it would lead to an endless digression. And that’s exactly why conservative love to bring it up.”
No, but you did bring up scientific racism because you wanted to show the close relationship between it and conservatism. You also first mentioned Madison Grant as an example of these conservative scientific racists.
Well, in the twentieth century, there was no better example of scientific racism than eugenics. Eugenics wasn’t only, or even primarily, concerned about race, of course, but everyone agrees that was part of it. And Madison Grant was an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics.
So where did the American progressives and conservatives of that day line up on eugenics?
You don’t want to answer that question because you know it undermines your case.
Kronos writes:
“First off, you’re wrong that conservatives of the time were unconcerned with the environment. You might want to read up on the Wandervogel, Ludwig Klages, and the Nature worship of many Völkisch movements.”
Every time I try to make an apples-to-apples comparison, Kronos wants to mention some Kraut or Frog or Dago no one has ever heard of. I said “political conservatives,” and the specific names (Harding and Coolidge) I mentioned were both Grant’s contemporaries and prominent American conservatives.
Madison Grant was an American. He was politically active, politically connected, and politically motivated *in the U.S.* He was a scientific racist and an environmentalist. So it’s pretty easy to identify Grant as a progressive. One doesn’t need to go find some obscure German academic to make the tendentious claim that Grant was really motivated by the same kind of conservatism that has its roots in young naked Germans yodeling at the top of the Zugspitze.
For the love of God, Wandervogel has more to do with American hippies than it does with American conservatives. And it has nothing to do with Madison Grant.
Kronos writes:
“Most conservatives today don’t give a damn about the environment. And according to you, I can’t even give conservatives proper credit!”
Facts are facts. It was the Progressive movement in the U.S. that set in motion the political machinery of creating national parks and wilderness areas. It’s hardly controversial to say that environmentalists Theodore Roosevelt or Gifford Pinochet were progressives (and eugenicists).
And Madison Grant was a good friend, and often political ally, of both men.
American conservatives were more concerned with preserving the protection of private property than they were with
Kronos writes:
“Adolf Hitler’s closest advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism.”
Hitler liked fast cars and fast highways, too. Does this mean NASCAR and the Interstate highway system are to be linked to either conservatism or Nazism?
How about Vegetarians? Can they escape your broad brush?
Or Ford’s manufacturing process? Hitler like that, too, you know.
Such guilt by association is tediously misleading. Nothing in Grant’s history showed he was ever inclined to violence to support his political aims.
Kronos writes:
” The maintenance of such distinctions is absolutely essential to race purity in any community when two or more races live side by side.”
But such ideals were not created by scientific racists. Caste systems were quite common in many societies long before the scientific racists ever showed up, and the persecuted minority often happily agreed with maintaining the castes. In other words, purity was not just a majority concept.
*****
The problem with Kronos’ thinking about the history of political ideology is that he believes liberals have always been good and conservatives have always been bad. I don’t start off with a similar assumption. I think you have to look at the particulars to know. Any ideology, including a studied political moderation, is susceptible to abuse if taken to an extreme.
CORRECTION
I forgot to finish this line:
“American conservatives were more concerned with preserving the protection of private property than they were with [preserving wilderness areas].”
It should be noted that even if all that HBDers believe were true, this has NO “conservative” political consequences. Quite the opposite.
HBDism is just a reiteration of predestination. Religion loses credibility so salvation becomes status. What a “bummer” when Steve Jobs died so young. (…laughter…)
But just as predestination could only be the dispensation of an evil God, so too would a social system for which “three generations of imbeciles are (NEVER) enough” be EVIL.
And it should be clear to thinking people that the deep reason for opposition to eugenics is…
any government powerful enough to institute it is a threat to capital’s hegemony.
Just imagine, HBD-schmuck, if the Soviets, of all people, had instituted eugenics. Let’s see:
Free market. Job creators. Individual responsibility. Ayn Rand. Jesus. Jelly beans.
vs
The Evil Empire of genius Darth Vaders.
Use the free market Luke…
Dookie,
You don’t know how to argue.
You start off by saying that even if HBD were true, it wouldn’t have any conservative consequences.
You then proceed to argue as if HBD weren’t true.
Do you not see the flaw in that logic? Has the gin taken such a strong hold of your mind that you can no longer distinguish non sequiturs from logical deductions?
Thanks Pinky. But I do know how to laugh at vulgar people, as Eco might have said.
Intelligibility is the death of philosophy.
Pinky is intellig…ible?
I was looking for another quote of Chesterton’s, but maybe it was Belloc’s. It was one of those English coverts to papism.
I found this:
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Indeed. But one can’t be blamed for contemning its American variety.
Fun fact: it was Viscount Palmerston (while he was still a Tory!) who first christened conservatives the “Stupid Party” way back in the 1820s:
“it is by the stupid old Tory party, who bawl out the memory and praises of Pitt while they are opposing all the measures and principles which he held most important; it is by these that the progress of the Government in every improvement which they are attempting is thwarted and impeded. On the Catholic question; on the principles of commerce; on the corn laws; on the settlement of the currency; on the laws regulating the trade in money; on colonial slavery; on the game laws, which are intimately connected with the moral habits of the people: on all these questions, and everything like them, the Government find support from the Whigs and resistance from their self denominated friends. However, the young squires are more liberal than the old ones, and we must hope that Heaven will protect us from our friends, as it has done from our enemies.”
Notice how he includes “colonial slavery” in that litany of abuses. Hm, I wonder how Pincher will explain that away.
Kronos,
”Pincher the Bigot then really shows off his, uh, intellectual chops by regurgitating Glenn Beck’s arguments about Shaw, Wells, and the Webbs and their support for eugenics. No, I’m serious. Glenn Beck used this exact argument, almost verbatim, when he had his Fox News show. Isn’t that hilarious? Pincher fancies himself this sophisticated intellectual, but he barely rises above Fox News boilerplate.”
If Kronos saw Glenn Beck make this argument on TV, then that means Kronos has watched more Glenn Beck than I have ever tuned in to see. Even if that particular show where Beck made those arguments is the only show Kronos ever watched.
But then it’s hardly an original argument for me or anyone else to claim that the most prominent eugenists were largely made up of progressives. As I already showed, there’s plenty of historical material on the topic to make use of, and even liberal historians, like Jonathan Spiro, admit the validity of the argument.
So if Glenn Beck truly did that make that same argument, then it only means that some TV talk show host is well ahead of Kronos in his knowledge of early twentieth-century intellectual history.
This probably explains why Kronos quickly changes the subject by writing, ”First off, you’ll notice I didn’t mention eugenics at all in my previous post.”
Kronos is right that I was the first to mention eugenics. I did so because Kronos alleged that scientific racism and conservatism were bunk mates. I did so to counter his claim that liberals are always the good guys in history and conservatives always wear the black hats. I did so because this is an HBD blog. It was an appropriate response to Krono’s line of argument.
Kronos writes:
”Not all eugenicists were the same. Not all eugenicists maintained the same views over their lifetime, e.g. both H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell renounced their support for eugenics by the late 1920s and became passionate defenders of universal human rights.”
So what? Did the people we would today call liberals support, nurture and promote what we would today call scientific racism? Did the people we would today call conservatives fight against this same movement?
Yes or no?
I’m well aware that eugenics is a complex subject, but I won’t be lectured about it by some knobhead who believes Hitler was a conservative.
Most people of the early twentieth-century, both conservatives and liberals, were racists. So eugenicists reflected this widespread sentiment, and gave it scientific credence, but they did not amplify it.
Most white eugenicists, however, were not focused on racial superiority. They took that for granted. They were more concerned with maintaining or even improving racial greatness *inside* the white race – just as those non-white eugenicists were concerned with fostering racial greatness inside their own races.
Hence, white South African eugenicists, who most people today would probably assume cared a great deal about race, focused exclusively on improving the white race. They cared not at all how black people in South Africa bred.
Similarly, the southern United States, where one would expect would have been in the front of the eugenics movement because of the racial caste system, was instead a laggard. Outside of Virginia, most southern states were far behind states like California and Indiana and the New England states in considering and enacting eugenics legislation. Ironically, the southern states finally caught up to the eugenics movement in the thirties, when most other places around the world were already starting to leave it behind.
The African-American intellectual W.E.B. Dubois was also a supporter of eugenics and fostered black baby competitions to increase awareness of eugenics in the black community.
So, yes, the history of eugenics is very complicated. But so is the history of just about everything else, including the history of conservatism.
[pumpkin person: comment edited, I responded to wrong person, sept 6, 2014]
Continued…
Kronos writes:
”I also find it telling that the same names, like Shaw and the Webbs, appear over and over again in this discussion. It’s almost as if conservatives are scraping the bottom of the barrel for their tu quoque arguments.”
Shaw and the Webbs were respected figures, both in Great Britain and abroad. They were members/founders of the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. They were not the bottom of the barrel. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Kronos writes:
”I also have to remark that communism is NOT the same as liberalism/social democracy even if they share similar foundations in Enlightenment thought. This is another topic that would require a lengthy post to explain adequately, but real Marxists and anarchists today would tell you frankly that they’re not liberals.”
I never claimed they were the same. But many prominent American liberals and lefties have always felt a pull towards the extreme left. Read Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society for numerous examples of this.
I bet it’s far easier for me to find twentieth-century American liberals who supported virulently violent regimes of the left than it is for Kronos to find twentieth-century American conservatives who supported virulently violent regimes of the right.
Kronos writes:
”re: Karl Marx, you may want to read him a little more carefully. Marx said that while that revolutionary violence might be necessary, if revolution were possible through peaceful means, that course should be taken. The left usually considers violence instrumentally, as a means to a particular end rather than as an end in itself.”
(Snort.)
So you mean to say that Marx wanted to achieve a stateless, classless, propertyless end of history *peacefully*, but it was okay to pull out the guns when people resisted this new society.
Sounds like a sure-fire recipe for violence to me.
Continued…
Kronos quotes the nineteenth-century French conservative Joseph de Maistre on the glories of war and violence.
But continental conservatism had very little influence on the Anglo-Saxon strain of conservatism. Not one in ten thousand conservatives could probably even tell you today who Maistre was and what he stood for. If you check out Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Maistre is mentioned only twice in the index.
I anticipated Kronos was going to be a little more clever than this and focus on the southern conservatism of John Calhoun, since the conservative philosophy of that nineteenth-century American statesman sought to justify slavery and states’ rights, and since there are still trace elements of his ideology in American conservatism today.
Our resident rapper, Dookie, is correct that conservatism and liberalism need to be contextualized in order to be properly understood. American conservatism, for example, was always different from European conservatism because there was no aristocracy or established religion. Instead, a particular vision of the U.S. Constitution became the object to be conserved.
And British conservatism, despite possessing an aristocracy and established religion like other European states, had a strong tradition of liberalism in it from the beginning, which made it distinct from the starker continental version. Burke reads nothing like Maistre.
Some conservative arguments make the transition from one tradition of conservatism to another, but many do not. Burke’s defense of aristocracy sounds tinny to the ears of most American conservatives, just as Calhoun’s stout defense of states’ rights finds no fertile ground among British conservatives.
Continued…
After Maistre, Kronos besieges me with countless long quotations from various figures who I think he believes represent the conservative tradition.
But from the Anglo-American tradition, they do not. Bismarck and Treitschke were German nationalists who supported a strong German state. In fact, for that very reason, it was American progressives, not American conservatives, who were most likely to admire Bismarck’s decisive actions in support of a strong welfare state. Woodrow Wilson, for example, greatly admired Bismarck. The other German Kronos mentions, Oswald Spengler, was also for socialism, but too pessimistic to believe it would work.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was a mystic Russian novelist. What does he have to do with Anglo-American conservatism? If he’s admired by anyone at all in the Anglosphere for his ideas, it’s by liberals who admire the misfit characters found in his novels.
I’d never heard of Julius Evola before, but apparently he was an Italian philosopher with many bizarre ideas.
Of course none of this has anything to do with staid Anglo-American conservatives, few of whom get into Eastern religions.
And what the hell is Raymond Cattell doing on this list?
Kronos writes:
”It’s simply not controversial to say that historically conservatives have been outwardly hostile towards the rule of law, and even written constitutions.”
Horseshit.
American conservatives think the U.S. Constitution is their Northern Star. Almost all the ideas animating American conservatism, with the exception of social conservatism, are animated by it. States’ rights or Federalism; the idea that freedom should be defined by distance from government power, not the freedom from want; the importance of property – are all derived from the U.S. Constitution.
British conservatism was very different, and European conservatism much different still. But the U.S. didn’t have the aristocracy and established religions that were common in Europe, and so American conservatives focused on the U.S. Constitution as the idea to be conserved.
Continued…
Kronos writes:
”You find [support for state coercion] in Joseph de Maistre just as much as in Carl Schmitt. Conservatives are far more likely to support censorship and police state measures such as arbitrary arrest and detainment. It was true under Klemens von Metternich. It was true under Tsarist Russia. It was true under Napoleon III. It was true during the Drefus Affair. It was true under Miguel Primo de Rivera’s and Franco’s Spain. It was true under Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.”
Yeah, state coercion became much less of a problem in Russia when Tsar Nicholas was overthrown and eventually replaced by the Bolsheviks.
And note what happened to freedom in the United States around the same time when the progressive Woodrow Wilson was replaced in 1921 by arch-conservative Warren Harding. Why Harding even threw socialist Eugene Debs in jail. Or something like that.
Kronos writes:
”And please don’t tell me the “censorship” suffered by HBDers is somehow equivalent. Last I checked, you can still buy the books of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Nicholas Wade on Amazon without any legal repercussions. None of those men have been thrown in jail for their views.”
What a jump ! From continental Europe as early back as the mid-nineteenth century to present-day HBDers ! As if anyone in their right mind argues that they are close to the same.
Of course liberals today don’t have to throw anyone in jail when they can just as effectively remove the means of their support in academe or isolate them and impugn their integrity to the point their lives are significantly altered. When Jensen is forced to walk around Berkeley with a security detail, they make their point.
Kronos writes:
”I cited complete gender relativism, i.e. that there are no significant psychological or biological differences between the sexes, as an example of an asinine idea that many self-identified liberals would probably reject.“
And I pointed out to Kronos that he is framing the issue incorrectly. Liberals don’t have to win ideologically to win the everyday political battles and to advance their agenda.
Other than that, I have no interest on the particulars of Kronos’ argument. I don’t read Heartiste nor do I care about the details of feminist theory.
”As with all ideologies and movements, you have your true believers and those along for the ride and those somewhere in the middle. This tells us nothing about either liberalism or conservatism per se.”
Actually, it tells us everything about those ideologies. How a set of political ideas is operationalized, how it works in real life with its followers, is probably more important to understanding it than how it is philosophized. To understand the views of Catholics, even highly articulate and well-read Catholics, Kronos needs to do more than read St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
This explains why many so-called conservatives in different parts of the world can appear so different and have such different aims. Or why American progressives can admire and choose to emulate so-called conservative German nationalists.
Kronos writes:
”Also, the suggestion that liberalism is “situational and generational” but conservatism somehow isn’t is possibly the most risible statement you’ve made yet, and not for lack of competition.”
I made no such claim. Kronos has misread my argument. And by this point in my response that should be clear to him. Context matters for both.
I assumed that was so obvious that I originally didn’t even stress it. That was probably my mistake. I just assumed Kronos knew I was talking about the Anglo-American tradition of conservatism.
Kronos writes:
”I’m not uncritical of the left, but I reject the idea that every criticism of the right needs to be balanced out with a criticism of the left.”
It doesn’t. But when Kronos tries to attribute the so-called sins of Madison Grant to conservatives, or suggests that conservatism is equivalent to obscure scientific racists, or assigns Hitler to the conservative column in a discussion about Anglo-American conservatism, then Kronos has already shown that he’s willing to heavily stack the deck in favor of his preferred ideology.
Kronos wrote:
”And please don’t tell me the “censorship” suffered by HBDers is somehow equivalent. Last I checked, you can still buy the books of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Nicholas Wade on Amazon without any legal repercussions. None of those men have been thrown in jail for their views.”
Actually Kronos, Rushton almost was put in jail for his views. There was a massive criminal investigation to determine whether his theory qualified as hate literature. He was eventually cleared, but his name was dragged through the mud in the process.
Until liberals start throwing the HBDers in the gas chambers, Kronos will simply claim that conservatives were much worse to their political opponents.
How do Pincher or Kronos have so much patience/sitzfleisch/autism to write so copiously to no one? And the WHOLE time showing their stupidity by arguing over the meaning of words, to wit, “conservative” and “liberal”?
Or rather Kronos argues and Pincher tells bad jokes, really bad jokes.
I’m thinking they’re both mental patients or prisoners.
Am I right?
Dookie,
Perhaps neither one of us struggles to write. You’ve certainly shown those high GRE scores don’t necessarily translate to a fluid prose style, even if you still do rap with the best of them.
You’ve got no idea whatever what “prose style” means.
You’re a hick.
And you’re also laboring under the delusion that argument matters.
Argument is IRRELEVANT.
How many angels can fit on the head of a pin? Let’s argue about it. Or not.
THERE ARE NO FUCKING ANGELS!
And there’s another name for “fluid prose style”.
Diarrhea of the mouth.
Lapidary style, like the Bible or Bruce Chatwin.
Everything else is headache causing, nauseating, tiresome, boring, etc.
But no worries Pinky.
Saying a citizen of the Anglo-sphere is a hick is like saying a member of the KKK is white.
Dookie,
You may have the boys here fooled, but you and I both know you’re not that smart.
You can’t write. You can’t argue. But you CAN rap.
We all have gifts. Your gift, apparently, is that you’re the first rapper to score 800 on the GRE verbal.
“THERE ARE NO FUCKING ANGELS!”
[Love them CAPS. Did they teach you that at Harvard? You know, for emphasis?]
I bet if I asked you how many Ronald McDonalds are on that head of that pin, you’d have a ready answer.
“Everything else is headache causing, nauseating, tiresome, boring, etc.”
No, Dookie, repeating juvenile phrases like “Cockring” and “Professor Shoe” is tiresome. Getting yourself kicked off of numerous HBD blogs for being repetitive is tiresome.
You may think of yourself as some sort of lost American aristocrat driven to enlighten the hicks of the online world with your higher truths, but you’re just a saucy and soused-up old boy living on your test scores.
So tiresome. So very tiresome.
Prof. Shoe and Cockring deserve less respect than I give them.
They’re hicks.
Just like you.
One speaks to hicks in the language of hicks or not at all.
Pincher,
You’re a moron and especially compared to me.
You’ll have to earn anything less than the most vulgar abuse.
You’re a herd animal, not a human.
MOOOOO!
It’s not that I can’t write Pinky.
YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND.
Heidegger and Hegel are accounted mountebanks and obscurantists by Anglo-America.
Why?
BECAUSE ANGLO-AMERICANS ARE HICKS, CHAVS, PROLES, AND WHITE TRASH EVEN AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL.
Dookie,
I’m honored to be put in the same class as Cochran and Hsu. I’m not deserving of such an honor, but “hicks” learn from a young age not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“It’s not that I can’t write Pinky.”
You can’t write, Dookie. Even worse, you can’t argue. You’re guilty of a thousand hypocrisies every time you engage with an idea. “Social science is shit – except for anthropology !” No argument is ever provided for these strange deviations.
Saying “America is shit,” capitalizing WHOLE SENTENCES FOR EMPHASIS, dropping the names of Heidigger and Hegel in your posts, and complaining constantly about the “hicks” doesn’t make you Henry Adams, bub.
I still like you, Dookie, because you’re a cautionary tale that the devil is at the bottom of every gin bottle, and I like my morality tales clear and simple.
You should delete this article because, in leaving it up, you look silly. Until you can describe social politics on the level of pure politics, you shouldn’t discuss social politics. It’s clear that you lack a basic understanding of what conservatism is (admittedly, as do many professed conservatives) and its particular democratic function. Also, I’d be interested to read you explain liberalism’s democratic function. It’s unlikely that you know one function without knowing the other. Your current understanding is that of the common liberal misunderstanding based on woefully incomplete knowledge (to include history, political science, and anthropology). It’s much more complicated than you know, and conservatism is inherently much more complicated than liberalism. Liberalism is, politically speaking, a social uncoupling toward an emphasis on the individual. In what other system is a loss of complexity a state of greater complexity? You have it exactly backwards. Your issue is that you haven’t the faintest idea of what you are publicly writing about. That’s embarrassing, no offense intended (and hence my sincere suggestion that you remove the article). I haven’t scratched the surface here, as I won’t do your work for you. My suggestion is that you stick to commenting on established science and leave the shady realm of politics alone for now.
For context, I’m a higher IQ (130+) former liberal. Liberals never know what they don’t know, which is the ironic shame of today’s political divide.
I know what the most knowledgeable liberals know and, while I know a lot about conservatism (much of which was able to be concluded logically due to the natural structure inherent in conservatism), I am still learning due to said complexity. Most university educated liberals (the implication being that higher education is responsible for liberalism rather than intelligence – ever think of that huge, gaping variable in the room?) are, far and away, less politically informed than your average lesser educated conservative. They understand you but you don’t understand them. Part of the reason for that is that their political beliefs are more complex than are yours. Yours are easy to grasp, and theirs are not. This is why you fail to grasp them. You only think that you do. The truth will blow your mind should you ever come to it. Think about what democracy and politics are. If you accurately answer that for yourself, you’ll abandon your liberalism.
I found this interview of Pincher:
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Excellent text!! I also believed in many these things but i think now biopolitics is more profound than we imagining.
I know many smart people here, with higher iq (and higher technical intelligence) and as we thinking, great majority them are ”leftist”.
Why??
You can do most logical arguments to convince them about sociopathic nature of their politicians but they never change their point of views. Why it happens??
Because ”liberal” tribe have biological similarities among them like higher technical intelligence, higher creativity, lower fertility (organic and statistic), lower sexual dimorphism, relatively lower sex approach. They are phenotypical tribe and also have similarities with underclass as psychoticism and sensation seekers.
Even when you show them about corruption and lack of honesty and logic to public discourse (racism is only or specially when white people discriminate non-white people, specially, black people) they deny change at least 2% of their assumptions.
…Because they are like conservatives, they are phenotypical tribe while that conservatives are genotypical tribe.
Don’t exist other objective explanations to understand why technically smart people do and thinking in stupid things. Like sexuality, biopolitics is something that we do not have control. Is irrational like any competitive behavior. Why we competing among us, what’s the propose of the competition?
This biological causes of leftism in higher technically intelligent people is more hierarchically important than ”personal choices” based on ”free will”.
Conservatism is a fertility ideology while leftism is a non-fertility ideology.
Silly clevers suffering by abstract thinking prison, when you enjoy abstract answers to explain world but you not have mental capacity to understand abstractions. Leftism is more common in humanity where higher verbal iq is more common than in other faculties. Higher verbal iq can cause ”abstract prison”.
Degree of real intelligence and real stupidity is the real capacity to understand hyperreality, when all things can be created, including human biopolitics.
Clever sillies talking about ”racism” without understand that
racism is only a word, in other words, don’t exist in real world,
abstractions are polidimensional (well, like all abstracts and concrete things)
and
neutrality, because when they move in group to ”fight” against ”racism”, are based on ideological point of views of reality, ingroup ideological point of views,
partially correct but partially true, real true is all (multiple) perspectives, it is to be really rational.
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Reblogged this on stacygturner and commented:
Great post.
Thank you so much!
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WRONG WRONG WRONG …the FACTS are as follows NINETY FIVE PERCENT OF ALL LIBERALS HAVE AN EDUCATION LEVEL OF GED OR LESS AND A PAYCHECK OF 8.15/HR OR LESS..Liberals are the BOTTOM of the educational,economic,social and intelligence gene pool… This is is UNMITIGATED IRREFUTABLE FACT…What hippie scum bag ninth grade educated, mom’s basement dwelling, ding fries are don career having, moron wrote this . ? EVERY ONE older than 8 is laughing uncontrollably
Obviously, you have a low IQ. You can’t understand simple concepts.
And you seem to have difficulties to control your emotions, even in writting.
BUT ITS FACT JUNIOR NOW GO MAKE ME SOME FRIES BEFORE I PUT YOU OVER MY KNEE IN PUBLIC JUST ON PRINCIPLE, AND GIVE YOU THE EDUCATION YOUR LOSER PARENTS NEVER DID
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This article is complete fiction.. here are some ACTUAL FACTS… NINETY IFVE PERCENT OF ALL LIBERALS HAVE AN EDUCATION LEVEL OF GED OR LESS AND A PAYCHECK OF 8.15/HR OR LESS. THE MEDIAN IQ FOR A LIBERAL IS 98 (THREE POINTS ABOVE CRETINISM) THE MEDIAN IQ FOR A CONSERVATIVE IS 120. HERE ENDETH THE REALITY LESSON
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Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented:
High IQ does not equal liberal.
High IQ measured on tests highly correlates to a personality trait of Openness to Experience (which is yes, very stupid) and it is this openness makes them apply too much “nice” theory over “hard” practical reality. They live in a dreamworld of few consequences and at the high IQ levels the conservatives start coming out because openness is over-rided by sensibility.
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There is no doubt that there are plenty of lefties in the 120s – 140s range. These leftists appear, for the most part, to be unaware that their ranks thin out considerably in the more rarified 150s – 160s range where a propertarian, libertarian, conservative tendency takes over (if my admittedly anecdotal and unscientific experience and reports of the Promethean Society hold up when better data and analysis become available). Lefties usually forget to mention that they also dominate the left tail of the bell curve: the 73% of mostly low IQ imprisoned felons that would vote democrat if they could.
Astonishing generalities….you discuss IQ without even defining it, and notably no exposition of the various kinds of intelligence and what IQ attempts to measure. I would argue the same for your glossy treatment of Liberal and Conservative, Right and Left and the sociological flows of same in the US over the last 2 hundred years. I’m reminded of Lakoff’s cognitive arguments as well. There is a lot of meat on this bone, almost none of which is touched up here.
I’m a dumb conservative. My IQ is only 88. So I only know what I know and what I know is that the only thing that matters isn’t whether someone is conservative or liberal. But whether they can exchange ideas peacefully and recognize that our country is a large one and that everyone deserves a share of the American pie.
With the number of responses, I admittedly took the lazy road and am simply posting my response to the article and not to any other post. If my thoughts have already been stated, then please excuse my lack of dedication with my time.
First of all, I am surprised at the lack of first defining liberal and conservative. While the idea of change versus status quo once was the well-understood broad definitions of the two, the current state of political dichotomy in the U.S. reflects a different view that almost requires a statement of position on each issue individually. Having said that, I will acquiesce to the author’s opinion of what is liberal and what is conservative for the remainder of my rant.
Secondly, the proposition that rich = low IQ is laughable. In fact, research shows a strong correlation between income and IQ, although not necessarily a causative one. With that in mind, knowing that affluence (typically higher IQ individuals) tends to be more associated with conservatism and that lower income (typically lower IQ) tends to be associated with liberalism, should the title and topic not be “Why are low IQ people more liberal?”
Next, the qualification of “criminal” is rather interesting. War is a criminal activity, but the use of illegal drugs is not? Attorneys (typically both intellectual and liberal) are notorious for questionable ethics, yet that type of conduct would not be considered criminal? Serial killers are known for their higher intelligence; are they liberal or conservative? What about the fact that incarcerated individuals tend to have more liberal views? I would think that incarceration would represent a pretty sound definition of what “criminal” is.
As for the dichotomous tendencies of conservatives, this is a function of human nature, not conservatism. Liberals simply have a different set of criteria and/or different system of classification altogether. George Bush is evil because he sent people to war, but Ali Khamenei is just a victim of circumstance.
Interestingly enough, A political survey of the Triple Nine society revealed some interesting ideology. On some aspects, these intellectuals preferred what are currently viewed as conservative ideas (government subsidies, gun rights, business regulation, death penalty), but liberal ideas on other points (marijuana, gambling, internet regulation, genetic engineering and research). I think this reflects the true tendency of highly intellectual individuals: to engage multiple solutions and evaluate their potential outcomes. In my experience, the tendency towards liberalism or conservatism is more often than not a result of personal experience resulting in an emotional – often egocentric – response to a situation.
For those of you who have taken the time to read this far, you are probably curious about my own condition. I am not sure of my IQ as I have maxed out the tests I have taken thus far (160 being the highest) and have not found it significantly worthwhile to continue the pursuit at this time. I have both liberal and conservative tendencies, depending upon the topic. Using it’s original definition of change, I believe that there are many changes necessary in our system and society, some of which tend to be viewed as liberal, others as conservative. I vote across multiple party lines, sometimes voting my conscience, sometimes voting in practicality. I am willing to adjust my position should hard evidence prove contrary to my current views.
The most intelligent people actually tend to be centrist/conservative.
The methodological problems with Roe are so extensive as to make their use questionable at best. The test used was normed against education graduate students and therefore can be expected to exhibit a fat tail. Depending upon the degree, one would expect the composite men score of 152 to equate to a D15IQ of between 144 and 148. This approximately matches the estimates of Nobelists of around 146. Most studies of PhD holder’s suggest that their mean D15IQ is around 125 or about the same as academics.
So, the proper numbers are probably,
Average 100
PhD 125
Eminence 145
Or so. Also, the SD for eminence appears very small (6 or 7), meaning that the eminent scientist with a 160+ D15IQ is rare.
This should not be surprising, given that the evidence from several sources indicate that D.K. Simonton’s 1.2 sigma persuasive sweet spot applies in practical, organizational contexts. It is also the differential between PhD and Eminence, above. Leta Hollingworth’s 30 point limit on leader/follower IQs would place a limit on eminece of about 155 D15IQ.
Because of all this, we see a correlation between moderately high IQ and political liberalism, not necessarily one with extremely or profoundly high IQs.
I offer an alternative, non-IQ related explanation to the liberalism of Academia. It is highly subsidized by government. Consequently, favoring programs involving government funding of ‘worthy social activities’ is simply self-serving.
Men, who tend to be slightly more intelligent, and far more knowledgeable about world affairs in surveys, also tend to be more conservative.
My belief is that conservatism is correlated with perceived threat level. Men as protectors have more worries in this regard.
High IQ people tend to live in safer neighborhoods, have more insulation from threats due to their success and networks, and therefore can ‘afford’ to be more liberal. My high IQ sister (Stanford, near-perfect SAT) is a great politically liberal example. She chooses to live in a tiny house in an ultra-exclusive neighborhood (her tiny house in Palo Alto is worth 2 MM). She intensively pursued EU citizenship in case the US doesn’t work out. She is extremely protective of herself and family and only associates with fellow elites. She can shield herself from all manner of threats in ways most people cannot.
This also explains the huge leftward drift as technological progress have made the world less threatening for most people.
Question. How do those who push ”Higher IQs Are More Liberal” address the Pacific Rim nations, which happen to have some of the highest national IQs in the world while also not being what the SJW crowd would call ”Progressive”?
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