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Well, yes. Obviously what any committed conservative will want me to do is stop being a progressive, ultimately, just as I wish for the reverse. But I was replying to NelsonRushton, whose opening post explicitly cast his position as that of one who thought we should table the regular right-vs-left fight on the object-level questions, and focus on fighting wokeness considered as a "degenerate" form of progressivism that can and should be distinguished from mere "extreme progressivism". I am not so naive as to be asking you guys to start agreeing with me on everything; I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.
As such, I don't want to get bogged down too much in arguing about the object-level beliefs in question, because whether or not you guys agree with me on there really wasn't my point. My point was "if your problem with wokeness/cancel culture really isn't reducible to disagreeing with me on these object-level points, and you hate wokeness much more than progressive beliefs in and of themselves, then perhaps we could cooperate to get rid of cancel culture, which we both dislike".
But I do want to address this:
It's hardly your fault for assuming, given it's my 'spiciest' position relative to orthodox progressives; and I suppose it's partly on me besides, for using a term with as many different competing definitions as "racism". But I am not, in fact, a blank-slatist. "Dan" in the first section of Scott's Against Murderdism describes me pretty well. When I say that I find racism abhorrent, I mean racism as a value system; not what its opponents tend to call "scientific racism".
What I find morally abhorrent is to treat thinking, feeling human beings differently because of their race; to make them feel that they are somehow lesser, less deserving of happiness or respect, because of inborn characteristics beyond their control and which constitute part of their very identity. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are statistically significant cognitive differences between ethnic groups. I don't entirely trust the existing science in its specifics, but I would still be against racism if the Bell Curve-type science was completely convincing on all questions of fact. I oppose discrimination against neurodivergence as it is, and there the whole point is that I recognize the material existence of inborn mental differences between e.g. autistics and allistics.
I believe that my fellow progressives initially started suppressing racial science because they thought it would be an easier line to argue, than to fight the trend of sloppy, amoral thinking that draws a line from "blacks may be tend to be less good at math than whites" to "therefore slavery was okay all along". "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" being as far outside the Overton window as it is for either side is at once the result of that cowardly dereliction of moral duty, and the reason it has not yet been rectified.
Me, however, I reject g-supremacism as an ethical position. Certainly I.Q./g (yes, I know they don't exactly correlate, whatever) is instrumentally useful in certain tasks, and we want to hire high-I.Q. people to be jet pilots for the same reason we want to hire strong people to be firefighters, tall people to be basketball player, and red-haired children to play Ron Weasley. But even if we boil down all dimensions of intelligence into a smart/dumb binary, I reject absolutely the idea that, all else being equal, it is "better" to be smart than dumb; that the life of a smart human is somehow more worth living, or worth preserving, than the life of a dumb human. If a linearly-I.Q.-boosting pill existed I wouldn't particularly want to take it, any more than I especially want to be ten inches taller.
(Granted it might be instrumentally better for society as a whole if there were more high-I.Q. people around. But it would also be better for society if I ate gray slop and worked ten hours a day with precisely no more breaks than required for my bodily health. However, none of this is society's business and running a government any other way is an inhuman abomination.)
And from where I'm standing, the sooner right-wingers forsake any hint of bigotry in that sense, the sooner the saner people on my side will be able to prevail and break the scientific deadlock, secure in the knowledge that the research will no longer risk being used as ammunition for a position which I find, yes, viscerally abhorrent.
I don’t think you’ve really thought through the practical implications of your stance on race. "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?
You acknowledge in one sentence that it is perfectly reasonable and salutary for businesses to preferentially hire applicants who have the requisite skills, traits, etc. You even acknowledge that many of those traits are inborn — that the NBA can and should discriminate based on height, which, outside of desperately poor and malnourished circumstances, is nearly entirely genetically-determined.
By implication, you acknowledge that many traits along which it’s justified for at least some businesses to discriminate are unequally distributed between population groups. Perhaps the least controversial would be that if you’re looking to hire an actor to play Ron Weasley, you’re only going to be auditioning male actors of Northwestern European descent. (Or, I suppose, Udmurts, a small Russian ethnic group who also have a lot of redheads. Although good luck finding one who speaks English as well as Rupert Grint does.) This is probably somewhat hurtful if you’re an actor who is a huge Harry Potter fan, and Ron is your favorite character, but you’re black, or female, or just have jet-black hair. Although there has been, as of late, a move toward “race-blind casting” in order to prevent precisely this (supposedly unfair) outcome, most people, even progressives, appear to agree that this is silly and wrong-headed. Film studios and theater companies are making reasonable and practically-justified decisions, and the disparate impact of those decisions is an acceptable byproduct of those decisions.
Only slightly less uncontroversially, the NBA has very few players with significant Amerindian descent; while part of that is cultural — people from Latin American countries generally prefer soccer to basketball — it’s primarily a function of average differences in height between population groups. (The NBA has only had the number of Chinese players it’s had because the Chinese government decided to eugenically breed exceptionally-tall individuals to play basketball. Otherwise the number of Asian NBA players would asymptotically approach zero, Jeremy Lin notwithstanding.) We can acknowledge that this might make aspiring Asian and Latino basketball players feel discouraged and underrepresented, but we recognize this as an acceptable byproduct of NBA teams making sensible business decisions instead of using affirmative action to reserve roster spots for short guys to make them feel included.
Moving up the controversy ladder, the strong preference for physical strength is going to result in fire-fighting being a heavily male profession; female firefighters are few and far between, and the reality is that they tend to be worse at their job on average than their male coworkers. Again, this is probably discouraging for young girls who dream of fighting fires. However, because affirmative action would require putting a thumb on the scale to force the employment of less-qualified applicants into a high-stakes profession whose performance has momentous important consequences, most people are willing to let firefighters keep being overwhelmingly male, even if that makes some women sad.
And I’m sure you would agree that there are a great many professions for which mental and personality traits are also extremely relevant. Doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, quantitative analysts, take your pick. And it’s not just intelligence; traits such as diligence, selflessness, punctuality, and empathy are all very important across a wide range of occupations. In fact it’s difficult to imagine many professions wherein an employer would not have a strong preference for employees who display more of those traits, rather than less.
And if you take seriously the available psychometric evidence about racial groups, you can see that there are differences between racial groups which go beyond simple mental computational capacity. It’s not just “black people are likely to be a bit worse at math on average than Asian people are.” It’s also “black people are likely to be less fluent at written communication.” It’s “black people are likely to have poorer ability to regulate emotional impulses.” And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average.
And black people are going to notice this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s going to result in them being poorer on average, since they are going to be underrepresented in professions which pay well. They’re going to feel less empowered, less valuable to the society around them in general, because they are underrepresented in professions which provide the capacity to significantly impact political and cultural trends within society. You and I might privately understand that these inequitable outcomes are the (inevitable, barring corrective measures) of an unequal distribution of valued traits. But there will be — there already is, and has been for over a century — important policy questions raised by this state of affairs which will demand answers. Will affirmative action be imposed in order to artificially balance out these outcomes? Are the potentially negative impacts on the overall performance of the affected industries a worthwhile tradeoff? If not, and if colorblind meritocracy is a non-negotiable end goal, how do we deal with the massive cultural and political fallout resulting from entrenched, generational resentment and low performance among a large, culturally-distinct, politically-unified, and visually-identifiable segment of the population?
All of these questions have obvious and unavoidable political implications. There has to be some answer to these questions, and if you believe HBD is true, I don’t understand how you can advocate for a solution that isn’t informed in some level by what you actually believe is true. Saying “it’s wrong to discriminate, unless the qualities for which you’re selecting are important to the job” has the same functional outcome as “it’s okay to discriminate based on inborn characteristics”, precisely because different groups have different characteristics on average! A “colorblind meritocracy” has the same end result as a “systemically racist” regime, assuming that psychometric differences are real and large.
It appears you’re trying to retreat to a position of “Actually, employers shouldn’t have a strong preference for smarter employees.” I suppose that’s one way of getting equitable results. Just decide that the unequally-distributed traits on which we’ve been filtering are actually not particularly valuable or desirable. An employee with an IQ of 120 isn’t likely to be any better at a randomly-selected job than an employee with an IQ of 90! If employers stopped caring about the qualities white people and Asians have more of than black people, we wouldn’t end up with more whites and Asian getting hired than black people!
This is utterly doomed to fail, though, because those qualities do matter quite a bit. Sure, pure cognitive acuity might not give one a decisive advantage as, say, a Jamba Juice employee. (Things like “reliably showing up on time” and “not ending up getting into trouble with the law and needing to miss work because of it” are, though, and those things are also directly correlated with intelligence and impulse control.) If your concern with “racism” is only about people not calling black people racial slurs, then you’ve already won; almost nobody does that. But that’s not what anyone actually cares about when it comes to the “racism” discussion. They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. (Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?)
You've dropped the "long-term". Obviously it would have immediate political implications, of the variety "we need to get rid of misguided disparate-impact legislation and the like". But once that paradigm has been abandoned, the word "race" should have no further impact on policy decisions. If specific metrics which happen to differ between racial groups are relevant, talk about the metrics directly. My concern is that accepting the objective reality of HBD should not entail giving the ethno-nationalists anything.
Well… in the truly long term… luxury space communism? But in the shorter term, and without making any controversial predictions about future technology, I think a just society would decouple the property of "prestigious and remunerative" from "best reserved for those with a high I.Q." in how it thinks about jobs. Think of Scott's musings in The Parable of the Talents.
Regarding "prestigious", if a just society has zero-sum social status at all, it should be given to those who virtuously turn whatever talents they do possess to particularly pro-social ends - whether that's a musclebound hulk who becomes a fireman instead of a pro wrestler, or a dexterous polymath who becomes a brilliant, life-saving surgeon instead of sitting around at home speedrunning video games. (I stress that this wouldn't be some sort of Stalinist nightmare enforcing "from each according to his ability" at gunpoint - doing the prosocial thing should be incentivized, but supererogatory.) I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic wish; if anything it's almost reactionary of me. It used to be that you didn't have to be a genius to be a fulfilled, well-liked pillar-of-the-community type; it used to be the way the world worked in civilized countries, that firemen and nurses and farmers could count on the respect of their peers if they went conscientiously and honestly about the business of doing useful jobs, just as much as the doctor or the mayor.
Maybe part of the problem is that our communities nowadays are too damn big… Every day I'm a little more hostile to 'big cities' as a concept.And regarding "remunerative", if nothing else I am strongly inclined to think that a large part of the anxiety around wealth disparity is a negative desire to avoid poverty, not "greed" in the conventional sense. Hence, my preferred policies of universal healthcare, zero homelessness, a strong UBI, etc. should mitigate the sting of unequal life outcomes. I am not so naive as to think it would eliminate economic resentment completely; greed exists, jealousy exists. But would we get race riots if the difference in outcomes was "fewer blacks can afford second homes and pools" rather than "fewer blacks can afford life-saving surgery"? I think a strong welfare state makes biting the bullet of unequal economic outcomes viable in a way it isn't without one. It seems worth a try.
But if that doesn't work, if nothing else works, I will bite the bullet of "well, we need (something a lot like) communism, with wealth caps and redistribution", centuries sooner than I will bite the bullet of eugenics. What you propose horrifies me, all the moreso if it's clear that we're talking about a much broader spectrum of traits than just a linear I.Q. graph. Isn't the point of "biodiversity" that it is an inherently beautiful thing that should be preserved? I already don't think we should allow rare species of dull-as-brick newts to go extinct just because it's economically expedient; I'm sure as hell not gonna accept erasing whole human phenotypes, whole ways of seeing the world, just to make society run more smoothly. Society is meant to facilitate human flourishing, not the other way around.
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