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What I notice is that this delusional fantasy is shared by many, possibly most, leftists as well, which is what many of them say justifies the immense amount of censorship efforts to prevent HBD from being an acceptable thought. But as you say, leftist ideas are resilient, and it always struck me as both as naive and as counterproductive. Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief. And counterproductive, because it creates the false notion that the correctness of leftist ideas are contingent on some empirical reality about genetics, leaving those ideas open to appear to be falsified by facts about genetics coming out. And for what gain? None as far as I can tell, since leftist ideas actually aren't contingent upon HBD being false.
Is sociological research really needed, beyond the examples of history? I'm reminded of a piece from "crunchy con" religious right-winger Rod Dreher where he first acknowledged that HBD — he specifically singled out Steve Sailer — is probably correct, scientifically; but then argued that we, as a society, must pretend it is not, actively censor it, and maintain instead a "noble lie" (Dreher explicitly called it that) of egalitarian blank-slatism, because it's "proven" that human beings simply 'can't handle the truth.' The proof being the Jim Crow South and, of course, 1930's Germany.
I seem to remember ame_damnee back at the old place once making a similar argument in response to someone asking whatever happened to 'the pursuit of excellence.' To draw attention to "excellence" would also draw attention to it's lack, and that, it was argued, automatically and inevitably leads to people donning jackboots and building death camps. Again, "the Mid-Century Germans," as some like to euphemize, are all the proof necessary to show what happens when the egalitarian veil receives the slightest puncture.
(Meanwhile, this ignores that the bulk of settled societies throughout human history were quite inegalitarian and believed in hereditary differences, without descending into coercive or genocidal projects of eugenic "improvement." For example, it's hard to find a philosophy more hierarchical and inegalitarian than Confucianism, but AIUI when eugenics came to China, the (greatly weakened) Confucians were pretty much in opposition. And in the West, the now-deleted third verse of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" persisted enough in cultural memory that I remember once hearing it performed in a Bob Hope movie. So there's something more needed beyond just "people are born different" to get to "therefore we must exterminate the lower orders.")
As Neema Parvini said in his New Years stream, the core of the dominant ideology of the present day is that we're still fighting Hitler, if only 'the little Hitler inside each of us.' Letting people "realize people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior]" led to Nazi's once, and we all swore "never again." So what more social science is needed beyond that?
This is my core objection, that this isn't what led to Nazis. I don't believe the Nazis' rise to power in Germany was due to scientists dispassionately admitting to a populace that has only ever lived in a Western society of egalitarianism that they are forced to conclude something that they didn't expect or at least know to be true before they did the research, that there are different distributions in important traits such as intelligence when analyzing different groups of people, grouped by what we refer to as "race." I think it was closer to telling people that the Sciencetm proves that those people you already despise really are despicable. Which is far more similar to modern idpol than to HBD, which is one of the main reasons I reject idpol so much, though even then I wouldn't go as far as to censor them.
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There’s an important distinction here between the fantasies of “if people realized” and “if people believed”. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a leftist who espoused the former.
Regardless, beliefs about race can and will be used to justify racial animus. Historically, this has happened with phrenology, linguistics, sociology, geography, comparative religion, and especially intelligence. Why would this time be different?
It probably wouldn't. But justifying racial animus isn't the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to happen but for that justification being as available as it is, or the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to be, on net or in sum, greater than if that justification were not as available. And when a claim is that this idea is so dangerous as to justify censorship, I see it as necessitating at least the former, if not the latter in order to support. Notably, I don't think I've seen any historical examples that look similar to where entire generations of people were force-fed egalitarianism since a young age and then were told that the weight of the data has forced scientists to acknowledge that the distributions of certain traits, including intelligence, are different between various groups of people that we already group together in the class of "race" (as well as "sex"). They always appear to be some variation of where people were already living in what is basically the historical default, i.e. under the belief that different races of people are fundamentally different in a way that makes egalitarianism more of a punchline to a joke than an idea worth serious consideration, and justifying that pre-existing supremacist view by finding convenient pieces of information in science.
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There are people right now calling for policies leftists don't like and/or consider racist (restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment). Some of those people (Murray) have explicitly linked these things to their take on HBD. But, even without them, you can easily connect the dots because history didn't start yesterday and none of these arguments are new.
In terms of political intuitions people continue to hold without strong empirical backing...this doesn't seem that egregious.
Sure, but policies that we don't like or even consider racist is different from "bigotry, racial hatred, or dehumanizing," because we had to expand the definition of "racist" in order to categorize things like "restricting immigration, cutting welfare, harsher crime punishment" within it. So that's just a whole different category of things.
People keep saying this, but every time I see the dots actually connected, I notice that the threads held there by sheer force of will rather than any sort of actual underlying connection.
As damning of political intuitions as this statement is, it's true. What gets me is that "not egregiously bad in a category of things known for being incredibly bad" is not the standard I want my side to live up to; in fact, I try to make it so that it's only because my side lives up to a higher standard than the other that I choose that side. One of those higher standards is one of epistemology; that the left is more correct than the right because we perceive the world more accurately than the right. Perceiving the world more accurately isn't a matter of believing more true things like "the Earth is closer to 4 billion years than 6,000 years old" but rather about the process by which we discriminate between what is true and what is false. And if we're willing to say that this bit of political intuition is a high enough bar to censor HBD, then that calls into question our epistemic standards in general, which calls into question my belief that ours is actually the better side.
Both things can be true: the Left could be prone to expanding the definition of racist and "black people are just dumber" is generally seen as racist for a reason.
And yes, I've heard all of the alternate phrasings (X million blacks are smarter than the average white, people as individuals) . It just doesn't play well for a reason. I think there's a general discomfort with "X is (irremediably) stupid", which combines quite well (or badly) with "blacks are less intelligent". People do see worth in intelligence (and success in the market), its absence matters.
Because, not too long ago, all forms of segregation and dehumanizing talk were justified using these very arguments? Not just "cut welfare that encourages single parent homes" but literally "we can't live around these people because they're prone to degeneracy and violence" (and not always put that politely). This isn't hypothetical, is it?
To me this is like living in post-Christian Rome where exposing babies has been banned for decades and is now taboo. Some people start using the exact same arguments as the exposers used to, but insist nothing that bad will happen this time. In fact, they're offended you'd think they are like those people and annoyed you won't take them at their word that, after you strip fetuses and children of their ensouled status, nothing will change and the status quo that was born out of an explicit rejection of their ideas will continue.
To hear tell, the connections are just paranoiacs connecting dots
I never said anything about censorship, just that the reaction is not some doeish naivete. Quite the opposite.
I don't see what this statement has to do with anything, since the policies we don't like or even consider racist has nothing to do with "black people are just dumber."
I don't see what this has to do with anything either. Sure, it doesn't play well. It doesn't then follow that if this kind of information became common knowledge, then that would cause greater racial hatred or the like.
This is what I mean by sheer force of will. First of all, no, they weren't using these very arguments; they were using claims about fact that were similar to the facts that are being claimed now. Arguments are something different altogether. But either way, whether or not these forms of segregation, dehumanizing talk, and, let's be honest, plenty of straight-up murder and genocide, were justified by such arguments doesn't answer the question of whether or not more such bad behavior were caused due to the availability of such arguments.
When I say the dots have no actual underlying connection, this is what I mean; I see societies that were already extremely racist projecting their racism onto science and taking out what they wish. Despite the best efforts of many people, our current Western society has largely based itself around egalitarianism, as imperfectly as it may be.
I think the strongest argument to be made about this is that our egalitarianism is imperfect, and there's plenty of latent and not-so-latent racism hanging around, and HBD being available can "activate" that latent racism and exacerbate it. This would have to be weighed against the value we get from HBD in explaining phenomena more accurately which also help to reduce the rates of racist acts. The calculus on this can never be properly done, but I can see how someone would be convinced that, on net, this would cause more racism than less, and perhaps also worse racism or pushing society in general into a more racist direction, to the extent that censorship is justified. I would disagree vehemently and believe that the person has far too high an opinion of their ability to do this kind of moral calculus, but it's a defensible position. It's not the position I hear from the overwhelming majority of people who want to suppress HBD, sadly, who seem to overwhelmingly just poo-poo the idea that HBD, even if true, could have any sort of positive influences whatsoever.
My original comment was about leftists believing that HBD is so dangerous as to justify censorship of it, so that's the context I was writing into. Maybe it's not doeish naivete, I don't know and I honestly don't care. I think the reaction is naive, but likely more hawkish than doeish, to mix metaphors. If we're not talking about censorship, then I don't know what the conversation is; do you agree with me that it would be better if people on the left didn't believe that HBD was an idea that was dangerous to an extent to justify censorship of it?
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Leftists are perennially terrified of rightists, though, it's one of those eternal political dynamics. The right should be more scared of the left, but the opposite happens because the left is more neurotic and sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid; the right often becomes complacent in power, the left often purity spirals.
That said, most progressives worried about HBD rhetoric aren't secretly worried it's actually true. Some are, Ezra Klein is probably one of them, but most believe it actually is racist pseudoscience or whatever.
I've bloviated on this before, so I won't go into it too much, but I have been saddened by the fact that the left sees fascist takeovers as a constant possibility that requires extreme vigilance and action to avoid and then didn't come to the obvious conclusion that this vigilance must be primarily directed at ourselves, rather than our perceived enemies, because obviously if we are won over by fascism, it will be in a form that we are biased towards, rather than biased against. When I was a youth, there was a pretty well known saying, that "If fascism comes to the United States, it will be wrapped in an American flag," or some variation of the like. This sort of thinking, unfortunately, seems to have led people to thinking that detecting fascism is about detecting the American flag or similar concepts and symbols, rather than the actual point of the line, which is that fascism will be wrapped up in [something we are predisposed to like], with the American flag merely being the example at the time (the culture in which I grew up treated the American flag as an object of derision 99% of the time, but I'm guessing the line was a carryover from the then-recently ended Cold War when the flag probably had higher status).
How do you distinguish vigilance from the more pedestrian infighting that comes from zero-sum status games? It’s possible to view every Bernie Bro, every college cancellation, every instance of a snake eating its own tail as the noble policing of establishment tendencies. Or you can be more cynical, and assume that anything and everything is just signaling; the radical is merely adapting to a different ecological niche, and once he has cleared out the old guard, he will set down roots and promptly become an authoritarian. Realistically, the truth has to be somewhere in between. Sometimes freedom fighters are grifters, and sometimes they’re painfully sincere.
I guess I’m asking—what sort of evidence would make you think “the left” is actually concerned with fascism from the ingroup?
This is a fair point, and certainly it's possible to interpret those in that way, but my perspective is that it's usually easy to distinguish between self-vigilance and pedestrian infighting by observing how the status of oneself or one's own preferred ideology would be affected. Which is to say, if you're not pushing in the direction that leaves you more open to having your status lowered, then you're not applying that vigilance to yourself, you're applying that vigilance to someone else.
For instance, with college cancellations, when Middlebury students mobbed Charles Murray and the professor who invited him to give the guest lecture in one of the earlier high profile cases a lifetime ago now, were those students doing so with the belief that, through their actions, they would be challenging own sets of beliefs, i.e. most likely what we call modern social justice, CRT, idpol, "woke," etc.? Perhaps things played out that way in a certain point of view, but I would argue that it's clear that their vigilance was directed at an "other," i.e. the Murrays of the world who have beliefs about scientific inquiry regarding hereditary differences in intelligence that conflict with their own, not at "themselves," i.e. the people who believe that Murray giving a talk in some official college capacity (unrelated to The Bell Curve, IIRC - I think it was about his more recent book Coming Apart?) would cause harm.
To use a made-up example, if Ibram X Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how people buying into his lessons - and not in the "oh they're misinterpreting it and applying it wrong" kind of way - could lead to a tyrannical (perhaps not literally fascistic) society in which, say, individuals are forced to submit to others based purely on what races they belong to, and as such, he's pushing forward research to figure out these potential harms and how to mitigate them, this would appear to be vigilance towards oneself. Arguably, this would raise his status and that of his ideology, but that would be done by changing his ideology to a better one through corrective actions; the unchanged one would lose status as that older ideology that we no longer use, because we have a better, fixed one now.
On the other hand, if Kendi came out and said that he's worried about how the Democratic party isn't taking his scholarship seriously enough and, as such, they could inadvertently allow the latent white supremacy of the party to recreate Jim Crow in 21st century America or the like, that would appear to be obviously infighting between two different parts of the left. If Kendi got his way in this fictional example, the result wouldn't be that his preferred ideology gets attacked, damaged, and rebirthed into a better version of itself, it would be a peer ideology that did that, while his own just gained more status by becoming more influential in a powerful institution.
I do think there must be edge cases, and there's probably no simple binary test to check, but in most cases, it's not all that ambiguous.
I’ll agree that in most cases, it’s not ambiguous. It is a much cheaper and easier signal to take shots at the outgroup, so we see more of that.
I find the threshold you describe to be overly restrictive. Consider excommunication, where a heretic is explicitly removed from ingroup membership. Even if none of the ingroup are criticized, I’d consider this to be self-vigilance or self-policing, because the alternative is a tacit endorsement.
The political analogy would be—say a major California Democrat suddenly espoused National Socialism. You’d expect a huge scandal. Loss of support from the DNC, cancelled donations, scathing op-eds. It’d be safe to say that the target is a former Democrat rather than a current one. He has been moved to the outgroup. Democrats, then, aren’t criticizing their own. They aren’t taking a risk with their status, either; this is strictly safer and more politically valuable than continuing to endorse the guy. And yet, I’d still describe this action as self-vigilant.
For a more realistic example, look at the Hillary/Bernie split, which featured accusations that Hillary was a DNC stooge. That was obviously status-jockeying, because the two blocs were at odds, and only one could actually get the candidacy. Competition between peer ideologies. But it was also exactly what you’d expect from healthy ideological vigilance within the general category of Democrats. Now the risks are aligned. It’s exactly the kind of situation you describe with Kendi, where personal preference is risked to strengthen the overall project.
These are scenarios where peer competition on one scale parses as self-policing on the higher level. I think that’s true whenever the marketplace of ideas is working as intended. I’ll go as far as to say this is usually true within the United States! It’s just so adaptive as long as you’re trying to win the next competition up. Me vs. my brother, me and my brother vs. the Hillaryites, me and the Hillaroids vs. the Republicans, me and America vs. the world.
I think in your made-up example, the relevant detail is that it was Nazism, an openly fascistic ideology, that the California Democrat was espousing, rather than that this was a case of excommunicating a heretic. But also, I wouldn't really describe that as "vigilance," though trivially it is, I suppose. When I think about some group of people being "vigilant" in watching out for the rise of fascism, I'm thinking of behavior that's beyond just noticing someone saying "I'm a fascist" and telling them, "Okay, bye."
I don't think there's a "general case" of excommunication of heretics, but I'd say that, very very imprecisely speaking, it seems unlikely to be aiding in vigilance against one's own ideology turning towards fascism, because detecting heretics tends to involve checking if someone is sufficiently submitting to whatever ideology our team likes and then expelling them if they fall short, which is the type of behavior more in-line with fascists than against them. But the specific details matter way too much to say more than that.
In terms of the IRL example, I do agree that what we saw in 2016 was evidence of some sort of ideological vigilance within the Democratic party (dunno if it was "healthy" given that we lost - but without it, perhaps Trump would've won in a landslide instead of merely edging by?). I do think the left in general and the Democratic party in particular has its share of such forms of vigilance, and I'd even guess that it does it better than the right and the Republican party, though my judgment is too biased to be meaningful in that regard.
But when it comes to being vigilant against fascism, I don't think something like "this big tent ideology that I and almost half the electorate follow have lots of sub-ideologies that are in healthy competition with each other" really counts as such vigilance, since that's largely a consequence of the mostly free society and culture in which we live, rather than a specific way to manage the ideology or party. Rather, it's about watching for the ideas that you specifically like and you specifically believe will bring forth a better future; because, for you, it's that ideology that is your metaphorical "American flag" that will wrap up the fascism that you will inadvertently push and bring forth.
If a Bernie Bro (which I was in 2016) said, "By pushing for Bernie to defeat Hillary in the primaries, I am being vigilant about fascism taking over the USA, because this is part of the healthy ideological diversity within our Democratic party by having multiple competing factions attacking one another," I would consider that deluded. That's not vigilance, that's just plain old picking a side, which is perfectly cromulent but not much more*. If he said, "I'm pushing for Bernie, but I'm concerned that if he does gain power, all the great ideas that I want him to implement will lead us towards fascism in ways that I and all his supporters didn't anticipate, and so when Hillary or Trump call him out, I'll listen and investigate," I would consider that at least a significant meaningful gesture towards maintaining vigilance against fascism.
* I think there's a version of this which is vigilance against fascism; if someone with control over the DNC pushed to make it so Bernie and the other underdogs of the world had a better shot, so as to increase the viciousness of within-party competition of ideologies, that seems to be a form of vigilance against fascism. Perhaps even in the case that it's just a DNC voter who is ambivalent about the choice but errs towards Bernie because they figure that bringing up an underdog will help to prevent ossification of ideas within the party. This would have to be balanced against the possibility of allowing an uber-charismatic
TrumpHitler-like figure coming in and stealing the party from under us, which is the kind of thing you would expect to lead more towards fascism, but the opposite could be the case, of course, and the specific details likely matter a great deal here.More options
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Given the sizable fractions of Western electorates who, based on their placement on a social-axis-vs.-economic-axis "political compass," would likely vote for "fascism" if given the opportunity, why shouldn't they hold this view?
There’s more than a few problems with using political compass (memes or otherwise) as a proxy for fascist support. Sampling bias, for starters, but also “skin in the game” and ability to pattern-match. Cheering for fascist aesthetics on Twitter won’t necessarily translate to votes.
I’d expect very low real-world support for an openly fascist candidate. The American cultural memory is so instinctively against it.
I'm not talking about aesthetics, or an "openly fascist candidate," I'm talking about, on the "social axis"/"economic axis" plane, that even though we hear a lot from the "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" libertarian quadrant, that is actually the quadrant with the smallest fraction of the electorate, and there are a lot more voters in the (opposing) Fascist quadrant.
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