Listen now | This conversation is too good to paywall, so I’m sharing it with the world. My last conversation with Amy Wax, which focused a lot on immigration, went viral (see podcast and video and transcript), and since she recently reviewed my book for The American Conservative
This conversation seems to be driven by the strong priors of the two participants. It seems to ignore history and the role public policy has played in many of these differences. For example, the black out of wedlock birth rate climbed in response to several changes: first, the change in the welfare rules increased black dependency on the state; second, the expanded welfare encouraged young black women to form families without being married, furthermore, the rules discouraged male participation in the family; finally, these public policy changes were accompanied by cultural changes which reduced or even eliminated the stigma associated with having children out of wedlock--think the Murphy Brown effect. Blacks were the subject of a massive social experiment pioneered by white liberals that if not intended led to lower rates of marriage, decreasing participation of fathers in the lives of their children. Misguided liberal public policy is implicated in many of the group differences between blacks and other groups. The same kinds of combination of liberal experimentation and cultural changes is implicated in the higher levels of criminality among blacks compared to whites. However, looking at all blacks and all whites or all Asians as if they represent homogeneous groups is itself incorrect and leads to inaccurate conclusions. Interestingly, many elite colleges fill their diversity quotas not by recruiting black Americans but by bringing blacks in from Africa and the Caribbean where the so-called intellectual disparities between blacks and whites doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent.
Ethic groups that excel and test higher seem to have a couple of things in common: they're in high-trust. cohesive communities and have intact families. You have to build on a solid foundation. The black family has been under attack for decades, by the government and now from inside the black culture.
I've often wondered if there are IQ differences between Nigerian immigrants and American blacks, as this was my experience at university. I also wonder if the policy prescriptions that you describe have led to overall decreasing IQ in the lower classes, although it seems that one would need a longer time frame to see those genetic changes?
you dont hear about the black/white gap from elsewhere because there are no white people there. those countries are not bastions of intellectual thought, you just see the intellectual, hard-working ones who make it out
You’re correct pre great society the out of wedlock birth rate was higher for blacks compared to whites. However, the real change was in family formation. Prior to 1965 the black and white marriage rates were similar. After 1965 the black marriage rate relative to whites started declining rapidly. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850739/
This meant there was a huge decline in black family formation and stability. The data on marriage shows that on every important economic and social indicator children raised in married households do much better than those raised in non married households.
1. Talking about needing a theory to fight a theory, couldn't Thomas Sowell's "Black rednecks" theory work well as an alternative to wokism that isn't hereditarian? It place emphasis on culture rather than genes, and honestly it seems just as plausible to me as hereditarian theories.
2. Near the end, when discussing school, Wax makes a common error conservatives make when discussing school LGBT organizations, which is to treat LGBT issues as somehow inherently sexual. This obviously isn't true. A gay couple who have both pledged to stay virgins until they are married is still a gay couple. Reading a story to kids where one character has moms or dads isn't any more sexual than a story where a character has a mom and a dad.
Even if a school avoided all discussion of sex, LGBT issues would still come up occasionally. Some young kids will realize they are gay and might want to go on dates or to a dance, even if their relationship is chaste. The conservatives who are acting like exposing kids to LGBT issues is the same as exposing them to sex at young age are either idiots or lying demagogues.
LGB are inherently sexual because their difference is due to who they want to have sex with. The norm is heterosexual because they are the overwhelmingly part of society and the ones who have children.
Once you introduce LGB, children naturally ask about having children. This leads to other topics that parents don't want to discuss at an early age, such as IVF, surrogacy, adoption, etc.
I agree -- hard to open the door even to LGTB accommodation or acknowledgment-- eg reading books on same-sex relationships, allowing same sex prom dates, etc -- without meddling with parents' prerogatives to mold their childrens' attitudes to sexuality and family matters in general, eg the desire of some parents to stress the primacy of heterosexuality in our society etc. Childrens' attitudes get shaped by the government through the school and prevailing zeitgeist, and that is what some parents want to avoid. And have the right to avoid
I like to approach issues like this by imagining the situation being reversed. Imagine some parents start demanding heterosexuality be removed from schools, either because they are some sort of fanatical TERF lesbian separatists, or because they are religious prudes of some sort. They demand teachers not mention that heterosexual marriage is a thing. They demand books depicting men and women falling in love, like "Snow White," "Cinderella," etc be removed from the book shelves.
To me it seems like those parents are demanding something unreasonable. Parents have some right to influence their children, but they don't have the right to turn their homes into North Korea, or demand that society accommodate them in doing so. Children have a right to learn from the rest of society.
One particular issue I'm focused on that I feel others have avoided is the de-stigmization of anal sex. It was once considered something taboo (disgusting and weird). Once you had to discuss anal sex in HS sex ed to accommodate gay boys , you can had talk about it in a non-judgmental way to avoid offending and stigmatizing the alphabet mafia. What this does is normalize anal sex for all, including girls.. Now when their boyfriends pressure them to have anal sex, they can say it's totally normal and fine and their girlfriend is just being a prude. The taboo around it is mostly gone. What parent wants to discuss anal sex with their children? Now you're forced to because your children are learning about it in HS and in ways you object to.
Like most parents, I am concerned about teen pregnancy. If teens are aware of a type of sex that reduces the risk of pregnancy, I'm not concerned, I'm glad. I can understand why many parents find it uncomfortable to discuss sex with their kids, but I don't see anal sex as any more uncomfortable to discuss than vaginal, oral, or anything else. Even if it is harder to discuss, parents just need to toughen up and do their jobs.
If a girl (or a boy) doesn't want to have anal sex, the correct response is to say "No, I don't want to," the same way it is for every other kind of sex. I cannot fathom the boundless sense of entitlement it takes to say "I don't like having to tell my boyfriend I don't want to do this, so I'm going to demand Orwellian control over all of society in order to reduce the odds of him being exposed to the idea, so that the odds of him thinking to ask me are lower." That's insane.
Imagine if anyone else demanded that. Imagine if bosses were uncomfortable with telling their employees they couldn't have raises, so they instead demanded that schools and the media censored all mention of raises so people would grew up not knowing to ask for raises. Imagine if men demanded knowledge of the female orgasm be censored so that their girlfriends wouldn't demand one during sex.
This is all very logical, but the facts on the ground are that men ask for sexual favors that young women sometimes don't want to give. For various social reasons, those requests can be hard to resist. I agree that girls should be taught and encouraged to say 'no' (certainly my generation was, with society's backing -- more than exists now). but that doesn't always work. How is this relevant? Some parents are not ready to counsel their teens on sexual practices and believe they shouldn't have to. They want to shelter their children from sexual activity and sexual ideas as long as possible, and the schools and culture should make sure there is a private protected sphere in which they can do that. That means not exposing kids to sexual subjects or sexuality in school. And such exposure is unnecessary. In my schools in the 1950s and 1960s there was a very strict separation of private and public life -- it didn't have to be expressed, everyone understood it. Teachers etc did not talk about their families, their partners, their social life. They were there to teach. Things could get dicey in high school with dances, proms etc -- then perhaps some decisions would have to be made about LGBTQ issues. But I know my HS principal would have said "No same sex couples at our prom." That may sound outrageous, and perhaps another school would call it otherwise. But it is not a completely unjustified choice. There are parents who would be unhappy with a different rule and would believe (rightly, I think) that their authority over their children was being diminished by being exposed to those "alternative" lifestyles, that the school was not only normalizing homosexuality but celebrating it, contrary to their values. Bottom line: sex belongs to private life and private morality, not in school. This is not always easy to do, but should be done as much as possible. (BTW: schools can "discriminate" because they are dealing with minors).
Dr. Wax, I don’t recall your considering the possibility that the Left will simply incorporate race realism as yet another justification for equalitarian AA policies, reasoning that innate inequality must be mitigated against because life is inherently unfair for POC. I think that would be the Left’s reaction. It’s always and forever about who-whom. So the softer realism that provides explanation without causation will thereby avoid providing yet another basis for rationalization for further anti-White discrimination.
So anal sex is a social positive for girls because they can avoid pregnancy? You'e got to be kidding me. Ladies - forget vaginal sex unless you want to get pregnant. Anal's the way to go!!!!
De-stigmatizing anal sex is a bad thing. If gay men want to do it, its their business but they don't get to publicly proclaim it as having social or moral value. You completely disregard and ignore the value of social prohibitions and taboo because it suits your worldview - nothing can be forbidden. You are imposing your own value system on society and controlling it. You just pretend you're not.
It's not a social positive for all girls, since there are other ways to avoid pregnancy they might prefer, but it's good that they are aware of the option. Some women like anal and are able to orgasm from it, other women don't and can't, so the decision should be up to each woman based on their own circumstances.
I'm not imposing my own value system on society and controlling it. I'm stopping others from doing that. Are you seriously claiming that you are being oppressed and controlled because you are being prevented from oppressing and controlling others? Does that mean that the First Amendment is actually one of the worst tyrannies in the world because it stops one religion from forcing everyone else to practice it, and stops speech from being censored?
It seems to me that gay men should be able to proclaim that anal sex has social and moral value, both because they have freedom of speech, and because it's true. It has social value because, as I mentioned, it's a way to have sex with reduced risk of pregnancy. It has moral value because it makes people happy. I'm not some crazy hardcore utilitarian who thinks happiness is the only moral value, but happiness is an important moral value.
You're theory here is that if children aren't exposed to any information about same sex couples in school then they won't realize those people exist? We all grew up that way, with zero mention of gay people in school. They still existed.
If you decrease the stigma around a subject you will obviously get more of it. But as a conservative I'm surprised that you think the government has the ability to override culture.
Also just checking, you agree that discussing a gay couple is inherently sexual but discussing a heterosexual couple isn't? That is clearly a logical fallacy.
Of course people know gays exist. The point is normalization and now celebration. This is what many parents oppose. They also don't believe that heterosexuality and homosexuality are equal socially, biologically and morally. This belief is counter to the equality narrative, which demands that all differences are ignored and vocally opposed. So that's how we get LGBT, which are a tiny minority of the population, but must be given the same exact accommodation and treatment as everyone else.
How does them being a tiny minority affect their right to equal treatment? The whole point of a civil society with equality under the law is that everyone has a right to equal treatment.
Equal treatment before the law. If two men commit the same exact murder and the law imposes a higher sentence on the black man, that is legally prohibited.
Equality does not mean all things are treated equally in all ways.
You are fine with society legalizing commercial surrogacy as it promotes the propagation of good genes and more wealthy people having children and this is a social good, but you are not fine with society prioritizing biological families because this is unequal and Orwellian control.
Wrong, LGB are not inherently sexual because their difference is who they want to date, fall in love with, romance, pine after, and sometimes have sex with. Just like straight couples, sex is only one part of a relationship, an important part, but just a part. When discussing homosexuality with young kids it can be easily left out, the same way it is when discussing heterosexuality with young kids. You don't need to discuss sex to mention that gay couples can't naturally have children, any more than you need it to discuss barren straight couples.
Would you consider it wrong for a teacher to read the fairy tale of Rapunzel to children, since a major point of the plot is that Rapunzel's parents were barren before they had her? Is it inappropriately sexual for a Sunday school teacher to discuss how miraculous it was that Abraham and Sarah conceived Isaac, or how Rachel was barren for years before giving birth to Joseph and Benjamin? What about discussing why Mary was called the Virgin Mary?
On this blog Richard and others talk a lot about how woke leftists want to force all of society to make them feel comfortable at all times, but American parents make them look like amateurs. So many parents would rather try to control society and all information that their kids are exposed to instead of just ripping off the band-aid and talking to their kids. Sure, it's uncomfortable for parents to talk about sex with our kids, but its our job, we need to toughen up and do it!
I have one daughter, as it happens. I am committed to answering every question she asks, when she asks it, with complete honesty, the same way my parents did for me.
Sex is the sole difference between the two. All the other stuff is cultural bullshit. It also ignores all of human history, except the recent contemporary belief.
People like you want to force everyone else to discuss what you want, when you want and how you want. My job as a parent is to protect my children from the world and to instruct them about the world in the manner I see fit, when I see fit and how I see fit. You think it is your right to teach my children your values, mores and beliefs in a public school system and in society generally. You don't get to dictate how I raise my children and what values they should have.I'm fully aware they may not share my values and I know they won't in some or many ways, but I get to teach them, not you. You complain about control but if schools were teaching about the virtues of abstinence and keeping one's virginity until marriage I'm sure you would oppose it or are you all for it because you know, kids should get all the information.
I hear the stupid rip the band aid approach all the time, including from some of my own family members. The idea that children will learn about things anyways so we should fast forward it all is insanity. Should we teach children about rape because you know, some kids are conceived during rape and they shouldn't be stigmatized? We must be inclusive. Some topics are completely inappropriate for young children. Other topics involve social and moral judgment and are best left for discussion at home.
You've commented how surrogates are like paid employees. No different from a nurse or doctor. Sounds like a man who paid a surrogate for a child.
Very thought provoking! Our society has become feminized. Particularly in academia & sciences. The end result is that safety and perceived fairness trumps truth. In a very general way, good or bad, this is a feminine trait. We see it in scientific journals. White males are characterized as the mean, authoritarian who should be railed against for the sake of innocent, helpless groups. Ironically, it's actually infantilizing the groups it claims to defend & protect. A trade-off for increased power and preference.
“she sees the only potential salvation as coming from conservatives, while I see the theocratic right as another radical egalitarian monster that needs to be dealt with, and is in many ways worse.”
The Wokels have already introduced a theocracy of sorts. Amy Wax is correct that the delusional egalitarianism of Wokeism is rooted in Christianity, so the Left & Right are spiritually connected in that regard. We liberals truly are between a rock and a hard place.
Completely agree. Conservatives at their core just want to preserve a previous form of egalitarianism rooted in Christianity devoid of the more abrasive Woke iteration of Christian morality that we see today. To defeat Woke extremism the entire Christian morality of radical egalitarianism needs to go in the bin. In a way, conservatives are a bigger enemy. At least Woke leftists will be honest about their radical egalitarianism where as the conservative Christian will offer up their return to Christianity as the cure to Wokeness when it was the cause of the disease to begin with!
What is the Christian radical egalitarianism? That each human life has inherent dignity?
I'd say progressivism is the bigger enemy, not Christianity. All this nonsense about perfecting humans and society as if such a thing could ever happen.
The last will be first and the first will be last. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The Gospel is full of it.
Yes but the focus on equality is primarily about how those who worship and obey God are all treated equally in the eyes of God. Being rich doesn't make a man a more worthy Christian, just as being poor doesn't make one a less worthy Christian. There's certainly an anti-materialism in Christianity and hostility to wealth (at least in Catholicism, less so in Protestant sects, cannot speak about the Orthodox). That's not surprising in religion given the focus should be on God and not earthly matters.
I just read Rausch's Kindly Inquisitors and he draws a similar connection between conservative Christians and modern left-wing challengers to free speech.
I wonder if "soft realism" is really the ideal answer. On one hand, just talking about things like IQs and crime rates already strongly goes against the taboo as I understand it. On the other hand, the consequence of "soft realism" without attempts to make genetic explanations acceptable would probably be, in the case of "success" a strong desire to change the culture/environment in order to finally "close the gap" and end the disparities. One obvious problem is that, apart from some changes that would probably be useful, it would probably inspire lots of doomed, wasteful efforts. One could still argue that such a detour is necessary until people get at better answers, but I don't think that this is the most likely outcome. People will question whether such large disparities can be explained by cultural group differences, and a negative answer will lead to people reembracing the racism/discrimination hypothesis.
I think ultimately, it will be important that genetics are accepted. As long as this happens, there will be many wrong-headed, wasteful, and damaging policy initiatives, e.g. people will conclude that the social/income class of parents and their children correlate to some degree as evidence that children of rich parents have an unfair advantage - even in cases where race and ethnic differences are irrelevant. This could be advanced by further progress with genetics - even though it is now very difficult to conduct genetic research relating to group differences, progress about individual genetics (e.g. twin studies) can also help getting the idea that genetics is irrelevant for group differences seem implausible.
Apart from that, I think it would be better if people just stopped caring about disparities than if they further saw it as something to fix, but now not in the area of racism/discrimination, but the culture of these groups (except that there might be some things that could and should really be improved). Maybe it isn't as unrealistic as it seems at first sight. Other countries don't care about such disparities (e.g. French people about the representation of people of North African descent, it is not even allowed to have official data of the kind that could show disparities), in many cases there is no affirmative action and not necessarily a strong expectation that the representation in certain powerful positions must correspond exactly to the percentages in the population. Also the US itself does not care that much about the representation of groups according to different plausible subdivisions of the population. This kind of idea is consequence of white Americans feeling guilty about slavery and Jim Crow, but maybe people of all races could come to the conclusion that it was an understandable, but unhealthy and unhelpful reaction.
Well, and we have an odd fixation with certain disparities. There's something about IQ that really scares people, but conscientiousness is also partly genetic and is also very important to life outcomes, and it makes sense that people who are higher in conscientiousness would be more successful in life than those low in it. I'm not sure why it is so scary to folks that people who are smarter would probably be more successful in life. People who are taller are more likely to be successful basketball players, and certainly to play at the NBA you'd have to be a minimum of 6'5". No one gets freaked out if you point that out.
Wax is right when she says true meritocracy would hollow out the black elite, but the scope of the problem is much broader than that. There’s a chart that circulates pretty often in certain corners of Twitter showing that the wealthiest black children achieve SAT scores — a solid proxy for IQ — that are about equal to those achieved by dirt-poor white kids, while middle-class black kids are outscored by the poor whites. The numbers are maybe about 20 years old (I don’t remember because I haven’t seen them in a while), but there’s no reason to believe scores have changed since then.
So if we get rid of all official and unofficial racial preferences, there will be a complete hollowing out of the black middle class, which has been artificially propped up by our affirmative-action culture for 60 years. Even in the current context, the obvious fact of racial inequality already leads to deadly riots every generation or so — not to mention constant racial anxiety as reflected in entertainment and news media — so this level of stratification would be untenable.
Where does that leave us? I don’t know. If meritocracy returned it would probably need to be accompanied by a heavy-handed approach to any dissent that remotely approaches violence. It would be worth it, but it would be ugly. As they say, things would have to get worse before they get better.
Where did the SAT stat come from? I’ve never seen any data that compares differences by both race and class. Interpreting stats like this are tricky. Because of the historical limitations placed on black advancement many of those identified as black elites are not really elites. They are first generation climbers from working class and poor households and families. True black elites would involve the children and grandchildren of families who have been economically and socially successful over a long period of time--for example, Condolezza Rice’s family might be an example of a true black elite or W.E.B. Dubois. Many of the so called black elites are newly emerging middle class who benefited from the dropping of Jim Crow barriers and university affirmative action programs. Moreover many of these blacks education backgrounds are in such soft subjects as education or sociology--where politics rather than scholarship and intellectual achievement are rewarded. The use of group averages is not helpful because it assumes that each group is best described by an abstract average person. This is precisely not true for any group--particularly because the boundaries of group identity are not fixed. In short blacks, like other demographic groups, are not a monolithic , there are important class, family history, and culture differences that play a crucial role in determining economic, social, and intellectual success.
By "black elite", black people who grew up in households with high income--not any measure of generational wealth or socioeconomic background (which is much harder to get data about and therefore less studied).
I'm skeptical that there still exists a bourgeois, generational black upper middle class a la DuBois. My impression is that the bougie blacks was a product of segregation: they were not accepted into white society, but also wanted to escape the trappings of black poverty. Now that socially ascendant blacks can integrate into white neighborhoods seemingly, the black bourgeois class has disappeared.
Because affluent blacks live in white neighborhoods and go to predominantly white schools, there are significant rates of intermarriage--which will again impede against the existence of a black upper class distinct from the rest of upper class society.
While I think you are correct that the processes that produced the traditional black elite under segregation no longer exist with the legal repeal of Jim Crow, these elite families still exist. Analytically, the black middle class are different than the black elite (or bourgeoisie). The black middle class generally reflects first or maybe second generation college graduates their family backgrounds are usually working class. There are also blacks who are second or third generation college graduates. Their family backgrounds are often professional or small business owners (shopkeepers).
I went to undergraduate school with the children of both groups. To determine what the effects of a true turn to meritocratic society would mean for the black elite depends on which of these two groups you are talking about.
Another consideration is that as economist Roland Fryer discovered in his research is that black high achievers often limit their success to fit in with their black peers. If future economic and social success is governed by merit rather than politics or sentiment, many, maybe not all, of these blacks would not limit their performance to stay in sync with lower achieving black peers. This is of course speculation but so is the hypothesis that the black middle class and elite would be unable to successfully compete in meritocratic society.
"And what I find, and I can’t explain it entirely, is that these kids almost immunize themselves from even looking at this stuff on the internet. There’s almost a kind of anti-inquisitive, anti-curiosity ethos that you just don’t go there. I call it this kind of PC zapper." >> THIS is the problem that top minds need to be working on. Facts & logic & reason only work for a small population of (heavily male) autists. Genuine progress in sociology of knowledge depends on finding a way to get the large & influential population of midwit single childless college-educated white women to embrace ideas that are less crazy and destructive than their current preferences.
I got into an online discussion where a woman used an odd phrase ("chocolate people") to describe the black/brown population and a bunch of radical leftist white women jumped all over her case, denouncing her as a racist and so on. I defended her use of the phrase, which I saw as ambiguous and just another descriptor, even if it was a little odd. I asked several times, how is that racist? What about it is racist? Not one person could answer that question, they just knew it was and clearly thought their initial perception couldn't be wrong.
Let me tell you, trying to get these women to at least put a space between "triggering descriptor" and "must denounce person as racist" is downright impossible. It's interesting, because these women likely have a lot of experience with cognitive behavioral therapy, and yet they seem completely incapable of applying in these types of scenarios.
Richard mentioned something similar when he discussed how AI would make people more reliant on institutions instead of less, so this would indicate that he probably was right about that. I do think there is a certain logic behind protecting your mind from constant bombardment of bad ideas, that's how propaganda works right? Tell people something often enough and they start to believe it, even if they should be able to tell logically that it isn't true. But if you refuse to engage with different ideas of course you are just accepting someone else's propaganda. And it's not like conservatives who only watch fox news are actually better at engaging with different ideas than all these woke kids.
For someone who recognizes the importance of heredity, Richard is incredibly blase about the effect of being raised by your biological mother vs. a random unrelated woman who purchased you from a catalog. You "know" from an early age that there is a existential gap between yourself (as shaped by your DNA & 'blood') and the nice 'parents' whose house you live in. At a minimum, one should follow Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy on Twitter) and read some of the perspectives of kids who were raised by their purchasers rather than their actual mom and dad who gave them their very physical selves:
"So how are we going to sell that to the public.".. How are you going to sell that to minorities? Why are there no black oncology professors or whatever, cardiology professors or people in prestigious tech positions? Why are there so few blacks at Google, etc? What’s our explanation for that?" >> Key point (as both discussants are aware) is that it's not "the public" at large that cares about these things, but the college-educated, opinion-forming classes (think 'college grads' / NYT readers) that care about these things. The average voter cares about gas prices, housing prices, etc, and has no idea who is or isn't a cardiologist. But the college grads who drive politics absolutely do.
John McWhorter's respectful 2010 review of Race Wrongs and Remedies in THE NEW REPUBLIC is an index of how far the derangement has progressed:
Through most of history people’s family members died early. The idea that people need their biological parents is nonsense. They need good genes, that’s what matters, and stupid social cons want to stop people with good genes from being born. That Katy Faust woman has the IQ of a turnip.
Parents died early because life expectancy was so short. They also got married earlier and had children earlier. People had larger families so small children were raised by older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
It sounds like you want to stop people with bad genes being born. Rather than advocate for forced sterilization and forced abortions, you want rich people to have more children through surrogacy so they can govern and rule. I find people who advocate for "good genes" believe themselves intellectually superior so see it was a battle between the goodies and the baddies.
Let's start out fresh, naked and afraid but bringing what you know, in the 100 acer wood and use as a simple metric how many great grandkids people have 100 year later.
If I was sitting behind Rawl's view of ignorance, waiting to be born, and Mr
Hoober-Bloob gave me a choice between a mother who "purchased me from a catalog" or a random biological mother, you can bet your ass I'd pick the former. I'd prefer a certainty of being wanted by loving parents, having good genes, and having well-off parents, to a mere possibility of it. If someone is willing to pay that much money to get me they must really want me. A biological mother, by contrast, might have wanted me, but she also just might have wanted an orgasm.
The "random unrelated woman" is that child's mother, their real mother. The surrogate and donor are just employees who help the process along, no different than the doctors and nurses who help with delivery. That "knowledge" from an early age that there is an "existential gap" is nothing more than paranoid delusions.
That "adoption trauma" sounds similar to that "recovered memories" nonsense we had back in the 80s. The idea that forgotten childhood trauma negatively shapes our adult personalities is false, but it is still widely believed in our culture. It is unsurprising that some adoptees would latch onto it and conclude that the forgotten childhood trauma that is making them unhappy is their adoption. I'm sure they believe it, just like people really believed they had "recovered memories," but it's all just apophenia.
sure, there is lots of made up and exaggerated trauma -- but the quest to know and connect with our biological parents, relatives, ancestors, offspring is strong and durable. People place special value on biological family. Call it irrational, but it is there and has been since time immemorial. I doubt we can argue people out of it entirely.
thanks for introducing me to the word "apophenia" -- didn't know it!
I think the question is *how much* it matters to grow up with your biological mother vs an adopted one. I'm sure everyone would agree that it's preferable to be raised by your biological parents all else being equal, but since all else is never equal how do we compare it? I haven't researched this but my guess is that there aren't any measurable indicators showing a significant difference here. If it is actually important then it should negatively affect people in some way.
I definitely feel some curiosity about my roots. I occasionally discuss it with my family, and I shelled out $60 for one of those Ancestry DNA tests. But if my curiosity was thwarted it wouldn't traumatize me. I wouldn't consider it a major harm.
Surrogate and donor are employees? Way to denigrate women and reduce them to mere brood mares and objects to be taken apart and sold. Gimme your eggs, gimme your womb so you can grow a baby for me which you cannot grow yourself. Sounds like deep seated envy and resentment to me. First from women who are infertile and second from gay men who cannot bear a child themselves.
You focus on money being a proxy for good parents. People who earn money likely have better genes so double score. That's what this come down to - contempt for the poor as undeserving of children. It's the rich that are better human beings and deserve it all.
The other day I had someone change the oil of my car. Clearly I have a deep-seated resentment of trained mechanics and am denigrating them and reducing them to mere objects. If I was a decent human being I would learn to change the oil of my car myself, as soon as I was done learning to grow all my own food, smelt my own silverware, and program my own computer. Wait, maybe I'm denigrating plants by growing my own food, better learn how to integrate chloroplasts into my cells!
Division of labor is how societies work. Everyone does what their comparative advantage. It isn't denigrating anyone to hire them to perform honest work, whether that's as an auto mechanic or as a surrogate.
The poor aren't undeserving of children. Odds are that a poor person will be a good parent. A rich person just has slightly better odds. Imagine that LeBron James and I are both trying to get a free throw into a basket, and we both have 100 tries. Odds are that we'll both make it, we probably both won't miss all 100 times. But LeBron James has better odds than I do.
Changing oil in a car is the same as bearing a child - really?
Finally you acknowledge you are renting a body for your own selfish purposes. Also, buying a body part. You think it's a good thing because there's an exchange of money so the woman is earning a living.
I'm saying that your argument against hiring a surrogate is a fully general argument against hiring anything to do anything. It is wrong because it proves too much. Changing the oil and bearing a child are very different jobs when it comes to nitty gritty details, but not morally.
Yes, I am renting a body for my own purposes, although I wouldn't say that they are selfish purposes since they are for the benefit of a baby. Again, how is that a problem? I just ordered dinner from GrubHub, as a result, a woman used her body to drive food to me. Doing so technically put her life and body in danger since, during the drive, she could have been T-boned by a drunk driver. I selfishly hired a woman to risk her life to bring me dinner, but it's fine because I paid her a price that she agreed on.
I'm not buying a body part. The woman gets to keep her uterus after the baby leaves it. It's not like she has to take it out and give it to me in a jar. Or do you mean buying an egg cell? That seems fine too.
And yes, I absolutely think it's a good thing because there's an exchange of money, so the woman is earning a living. Earning an honest living is a good thing.
I hope someone brings this to Mary's attention. It's usually the Blank Slateist, "humans are interchangeable widgets [meat legos]" crowd that is so naively enthusiastic about cyborg reproductive technology.
To what extent do these places really depend on federal money? Don't they all have massive endowments that yield a good ROI?
The usual problem surfaces in this discussion, of "the right" being a useless term that conflates totally different things. I wish we could bin it. You have conservatives whose philosophy is just "in the good old days everything was better". They just want to live in the world they grew up in, preserved in amber. Amy Wax is a pure example of that and even uses the phrase good old days towards the end when asked how she'd improve things, because her answer is literally "make everything like it was when I was young". OK, fine, but not a political philosophy. It doesn't actually mean anything. Conservatives in the USSR wanted to preserve Leninism, conservatives in Iran want to preserve Islamic theology, conservatives in the USA want to preserve the Puritan small-Federal-state America of 1900. These social visions are all totally different but they are all conservatives in the local reference frame.
Then you have the left, and you have libertarians (or "classical liberals" in some parts of the world). Unlike conservatism, these are genuinely specific visions of how the world should be.
This problem is especially confusing in the context of America because of the "Christian right". Christian morality is essentially just left wing morality. Jesus was big into class warfare and hating on the rich, or spun differently, protecting the meek and the mild. Not much different to the ideology of Karl Marx. But because Christianity is old, conservatives want to conserve it or bring it back. This puts them in a terrible state of confusion where their conservative instincts makes them desire what is basically just an older and differently presenting form of leftism, but society tells them that they're the opposite of leftists. Hence the observation in the discussion that the American right seem to so readily adopt the tactics of the American left. Sure, because they're actually BOTH left wing.
Once you recognize that wokeness is just "Christianity 2000", a software upgrade that refreshes the skin without changing the underlying engine, most stuff that seems confusing starts making sense.
For the free market libertarians then, is there good news or bad news? I think in the long arc of history they are actually winning. It may not appear that way because society is still very far from their preferred ideal, it's still very much dominated by left wing thinking. So as times change, leftism changes and remains powerful, and that can be easily interpreted as things getting worse. It becomes easier to be hopeful when taking the long view.
For example, 150 years ago it was common for companies to be called "Smith & Sons". Not much meritocracy there. Nowadays the family dynasty as a concept has mostly died out, and the few that remain hide themselves in shame (see the behaviour of the New York Times which doesn't like to talk about how it has been a family business). Certainly, nobody is advertising it in the name of the company anymore.
150 years ago hating on the rich was pretty much the default state of society, as it had been since the time of Jesus, so much so that many countries would go through violent Marxist revolutions over the next century. Nowadays Marxism has died out completely. The fall of the USSR crushed the credibility of overtly "soak the rich" socialism, so the left pivoted and abandoned their destructive economics. That's a win! They also accepted the need to pay lip service to the basic logic of meritocracy even as they undermined it along racial and gender lines, often stating that their motivation for doing so was because diverse teams function better (have more merit), and not the explicit "meek and the mild" protectionism of earlier eras.
Oppression olympics has dominated humanity for millenia so there's no reason to think it will go away within our lifetimes, but society is slowly getting better at diverting it into less and less destructive cul-de-sacs. Diversity casting and preachy Hollywood movies are annoying but don't threaten the food supply, for example. Argentina of all places just elected a libertarian president. So things slowly inch forward.
Fascinating conversation. I'm glad that these issues can be discussed here and it's sad that having them at an elite university is so challenging.
I find it strange though that both of you seem to agree that IQ is the most important thing you can measure to determine a person's potential for human achievement, but then you take the group with the highest average IQ (white liberal academics) and completely discount almost every single thing they believe. If Richard got his way and DeSantis became president and started going after colleges I'm sure we would end up with affirmative action for conservatives, there would be no other way to really achieve this. You would be choosing to expel high IQ people to make room for lower IQ people that believe more in free-speech (at least as it relates to conservative ideas. If your preferred speech is about CRT then not so much). IQ is the most important thing until...it isn't.
I suspect that if you measured the IQ of Asians vs Europeans in the 19th century you would probably end up with some extremely low scores in the Asian population, yet today's Asian Americans outperform whites. I have a hard time believing that white Europeans would score higher than Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age either. The idea that IQ scores and differences between populations is rigid in this way doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly to anyone who is aware of the Flynn effect. And assumptions about the future of an entire group of people based on their status in a single snapshot in time will eventually look very silly, given enough time.
One of the best nuclear power plant operators I ever worked with couldn't pass a written test to save his life. On paper he looked like an eight year old. Knew another guy who aced all the tests but they wouldn't even let him near the control room. Egalitarianism doesn't mean we actually think that all humans have equal abilities. It's an acknowledgement that humans are very bad at measuring and predicting human potential. Beliefs about the potential of different groups always tend to lead to rules about who is or is not allowed to do what. You can't hold on to libertarian beliefs without a certain level of egalitarian beliefs. Undermine them at your peril.
Agreed, but then why worry about black vs white IQ levels when they will inevitably change over time. Amy suggests that there will NEVER be black people in positions that require an extremely high IQ, which seems like an incredibly implausible statement when you can see how IQ levels shift over time.
Finally getting around to reading this after having the tab open for three weeks, and I'm glad I did. This comment from Amy sums up one of my biggest frustrations - that discussion of IQ so often devolves into a race-ranking fight - better than I can do myself:
"I am more concerned about the fact that high IQ is so beneficial in our society that ordinary people, average people can’t create a decent life for themselves, that we don’t honor ordinary people in ordinary roles doing ordinary jobs, and that’s somehow considered to be a sort of failure. I think that is really a moral problem in our society."
Parenthood in the U.S. is responsibility without power; the parents have to pay all the bills, but the State makes the pivotal decisions (esp. with the non-negotiable mandate of 12 years of schooling). Being a parent looks like being a sucker and a sap.
I loved this talk because from a very young age, this is the way I've always thought about race differences. Now, I'm not on the level of the 130+ iq, but I'm not on the lower levels, so I wonder if this is just recognizable by some people. I will say this: I do not believe most white people (especially) believe everyone is equal. My wine mom friends and I don't, but we will NEVER say that aloud because we have no one in a power position saying it. What I chose to do was have kids and raise them. I got lucky and had males. I picked a smart husband. So, I spent my life raising an intelligent family and focusing on the males. I pushed and I coached and I moved and I saved. It has worked well for me. Women don't want to own this power anymore. They think it is beneath them. I think you'd both be very surprised at the amount of support your ideas have.
Great stuff. You should have Amy on more often, she has a brilliant mind!
This conversation seems to be driven by the strong priors of the two participants. It seems to ignore history and the role public policy has played in many of these differences. For example, the black out of wedlock birth rate climbed in response to several changes: first, the change in the welfare rules increased black dependency on the state; second, the expanded welfare encouraged young black women to form families without being married, furthermore, the rules discouraged male participation in the family; finally, these public policy changes were accompanied by cultural changes which reduced or even eliminated the stigma associated with having children out of wedlock--think the Murphy Brown effect. Blacks were the subject of a massive social experiment pioneered by white liberals that if not intended led to lower rates of marriage, decreasing participation of fathers in the lives of their children. Misguided liberal public policy is implicated in many of the group differences between blacks and other groups. The same kinds of combination of liberal experimentation and cultural changes is implicated in the higher levels of criminality among blacks compared to whites. However, looking at all blacks and all whites or all Asians as if they represent homogeneous groups is itself incorrect and leads to inaccurate conclusions. Interestingly, many elite colleges fill their diversity quotas not by recruiting black Americans but by bringing blacks in from Africa and the Caribbean where the so-called intellectual disparities between blacks and whites doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent.
Ethic groups that excel and test higher seem to have a couple of things in common: they're in high-trust. cohesive communities and have intact families. You have to build on a solid foundation. The black family has been under attack for decades, by the government and now from inside the black culture.
I've often wondered if there are IQ differences between Nigerian immigrants and American blacks, as this was my experience at university. I also wonder if the policy prescriptions that you describe have led to overall decreasing IQ in the lower classes, although it seems that one would need a longer time frame to see those genetic changes?
you dont hear about the black/white gap from elsewhere because there are no white people there. those countries are not bastions of intellectual thought, you just see the intellectual, hard-working ones who make it out
You’re correct pre great society the out of wedlock birth rate was higher for blacks compared to whites. However, the real change was in family formation. Prior to 1965 the black and white marriage rates were similar. After 1965 the black marriage rate relative to whites started declining rapidly. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4850739/
This meant there was a huge decline in black family formation and stability. The data on marriage shows that on every important economic and social indicator children raised in married households do much better than those raised in non married households.
1. Talking about needing a theory to fight a theory, couldn't Thomas Sowell's "Black rednecks" theory work well as an alternative to wokism that isn't hereditarian? It place emphasis on culture rather than genes, and honestly it seems just as plausible to me as hereditarian theories.
2. Near the end, when discussing school, Wax makes a common error conservatives make when discussing school LGBT organizations, which is to treat LGBT issues as somehow inherently sexual. This obviously isn't true. A gay couple who have both pledged to stay virgins until they are married is still a gay couple. Reading a story to kids where one character has moms or dads isn't any more sexual than a story where a character has a mom and a dad.
Even if a school avoided all discussion of sex, LGBT issues would still come up occasionally. Some young kids will realize they are gay and might want to go on dates or to a dance, even if their relationship is chaste. The conservatives who are acting like exposing kids to LGBT issues is the same as exposing them to sex at young age are either idiots or lying demagogues.
LGB are inherently sexual because their difference is due to who they want to have sex with. The norm is heterosexual because they are the overwhelmingly part of society and the ones who have children.
Once you introduce LGB, children naturally ask about having children. This leads to other topics that parents don't want to discuss at an early age, such as IVF, surrogacy, adoption, etc.
How many children do you have?
I agree -- hard to open the door even to LGTB accommodation or acknowledgment-- eg reading books on same-sex relationships, allowing same sex prom dates, etc -- without meddling with parents' prerogatives to mold their childrens' attitudes to sexuality and family matters in general, eg the desire of some parents to stress the primacy of heterosexuality in our society etc. Childrens' attitudes get shaped by the government through the school and prevailing zeitgeist, and that is what some parents want to avoid. And have the right to avoid
I like to approach issues like this by imagining the situation being reversed. Imagine some parents start demanding heterosexuality be removed from schools, either because they are some sort of fanatical TERF lesbian separatists, or because they are religious prudes of some sort. They demand teachers not mention that heterosexual marriage is a thing. They demand books depicting men and women falling in love, like "Snow White," "Cinderella," etc be removed from the book shelves.
To me it seems like those parents are demanding something unreasonable. Parents have some right to influence their children, but they don't have the right to turn their homes into North Korea, or demand that society accommodate them in doing so. Children have a right to learn from the rest of society.
One particular issue I'm focused on that I feel others have avoided is the de-stigmization of anal sex. It was once considered something taboo (disgusting and weird). Once you had to discuss anal sex in HS sex ed to accommodate gay boys , you can had talk about it in a non-judgmental way to avoid offending and stigmatizing the alphabet mafia. What this does is normalize anal sex for all, including girls.. Now when their boyfriends pressure them to have anal sex, they can say it's totally normal and fine and their girlfriend is just being a prude. The taboo around it is mostly gone. What parent wants to discuss anal sex with their children? Now you're forced to because your children are learning about it in HS and in ways you object to.
Like most parents, I am concerned about teen pregnancy. If teens are aware of a type of sex that reduces the risk of pregnancy, I'm not concerned, I'm glad. I can understand why many parents find it uncomfortable to discuss sex with their kids, but I don't see anal sex as any more uncomfortable to discuss than vaginal, oral, or anything else. Even if it is harder to discuss, parents just need to toughen up and do their jobs.
If a girl (or a boy) doesn't want to have anal sex, the correct response is to say "No, I don't want to," the same way it is for every other kind of sex. I cannot fathom the boundless sense of entitlement it takes to say "I don't like having to tell my boyfriend I don't want to do this, so I'm going to demand Orwellian control over all of society in order to reduce the odds of him being exposed to the idea, so that the odds of him thinking to ask me are lower." That's insane.
Imagine if anyone else demanded that. Imagine if bosses were uncomfortable with telling their employees they couldn't have raises, so they instead demanded that schools and the media censored all mention of raises so people would grew up not knowing to ask for raises. Imagine if men demanded knowledge of the female orgasm be censored so that their girlfriends wouldn't demand one during sex.
This is all very logical, but the facts on the ground are that men ask for sexual favors that young women sometimes don't want to give. For various social reasons, those requests can be hard to resist. I agree that girls should be taught and encouraged to say 'no' (certainly my generation was, with society's backing -- more than exists now). but that doesn't always work. How is this relevant? Some parents are not ready to counsel their teens on sexual practices and believe they shouldn't have to. They want to shelter their children from sexual activity and sexual ideas as long as possible, and the schools and culture should make sure there is a private protected sphere in which they can do that. That means not exposing kids to sexual subjects or sexuality in school. And such exposure is unnecessary. In my schools in the 1950s and 1960s there was a very strict separation of private and public life -- it didn't have to be expressed, everyone understood it. Teachers etc did not talk about their families, their partners, their social life. They were there to teach. Things could get dicey in high school with dances, proms etc -- then perhaps some decisions would have to be made about LGBTQ issues. But I know my HS principal would have said "No same sex couples at our prom." That may sound outrageous, and perhaps another school would call it otherwise. But it is not a completely unjustified choice. There are parents who would be unhappy with a different rule and would believe (rightly, I think) that their authority over their children was being diminished by being exposed to those "alternative" lifestyles, that the school was not only normalizing homosexuality but celebrating it, contrary to their values. Bottom line: sex belongs to private life and private morality, not in school. This is not always easy to do, but should be done as much as possible. (BTW: schools can "discriminate" because they are dealing with minors).
Dr. Wax, I don’t recall your considering the possibility that the Left will simply incorporate race realism as yet another justification for equalitarian AA policies, reasoning that innate inequality must be mitigated against because life is inherently unfair for POC. I think that would be the Left’s reaction. It’s always and forever about who-whom. So the softer realism that provides explanation without causation will thereby avoid providing yet another basis for rationalization for further anti-White discrimination.
So anal sex is a social positive for girls because they can avoid pregnancy? You'e got to be kidding me. Ladies - forget vaginal sex unless you want to get pregnant. Anal's the way to go!!!!
De-stigmatizing anal sex is a bad thing. If gay men want to do it, its their business but they don't get to publicly proclaim it as having social or moral value. You completely disregard and ignore the value of social prohibitions and taboo because it suits your worldview - nothing can be forbidden. You are imposing your own value system on society and controlling it. You just pretend you're not.
It's not a social positive for all girls, since there are other ways to avoid pregnancy they might prefer, but it's good that they are aware of the option. Some women like anal and are able to orgasm from it, other women don't and can't, so the decision should be up to each woman based on their own circumstances.
I'm not imposing my own value system on society and controlling it. I'm stopping others from doing that. Are you seriously claiming that you are being oppressed and controlled because you are being prevented from oppressing and controlling others? Does that mean that the First Amendment is actually one of the worst tyrannies in the world because it stops one religion from forcing everyone else to practice it, and stops speech from being censored?
It seems to me that gay men should be able to proclaim that anal sex has social and moral value, both because they have freedom of speech, and because it's true. It has social value because, as I mentioned, it's a way to have sex with reduced risk of pregnancy. It has moral value because it makes people happy. I'm not some crazy hardcore utilitarian who thinks happiness is the only moral value, but happiness is an important moral value.
You're theory here is that if children aren't exposed to any information about same sex couples in school then they won't realize those people exist? We all grew up that way, with zero mention of gay people in school. They still existed.
If you decrease the stigma around a subject you will obviously get more of it. But as a conservative I'm surprised that you think the government has the ability to override culture.
Also just checking, you agree that discussing a gay couple is inherently sexual but discussing a heterosexual couple isn't? That is clearly a logical fallacy.
Of course people know gays exist. The point is normalization and now celebration. This is what many parents oppose. They also don't believe that heterosexuality and homosexuality are equal socially, biologically and morally. This belief is counter to the equality narrative, which demands that all differences are ignored and vocally opposed. So that's how we get LGBT, which are a tiny minority of the population, but must be given the same exact accommodation and treatment as everyone else.
Both are sexual.
How does them being a tiny minority affect their right to equal treatment? The whole point of a civil society with equality under the law is that everyone has a right to equal treatment.
Equal treatment before the law. If two men commit the same exact murder and the law imposes a higher sentence on the black man, that is legally prohibited.
Equality does not mean all things are treated equally in all ways.
You are fine with society legalizing commercial surrogacy as it promotes the propagation of good genes and more wealthy people having children and this is a social good, but you are not fine with society prioritizing biological families because this is unequal and Orwellian control.
Wrong, LGB are not inherently sexual because their difference is who they want to date, fall in love with, romance, pine after, and sometimes have sex with. Just like straight couples, sex is only one part of a relationship, an important part, but just a part. When discussing homosexuality with young kids it can be easily left out, the same way it is when discussing heterosexuality with young kids. You don't need to discuss sex to mention that gay couples can't naturally have children, any more than you need it to discuss barren straight couples.
Would you consider it wrong for a teacher to read the fairy tale of Rapunzel to children, since a major point of the plot is that Rapunzel's parents were barren before they had her? Is it inappropriately sexual for a Sunday school teacher to discuss how miraculous it was that Abraham and Sarah conceived Isaac, or how Rachel was barren for years before giving birth to Joseph and Benjamin? What about discussing why Mary was called the Virgin Mary?
On this blog Richard and others talk a lot about how woke leftists want to force all of society to make them feel comfortable at all times, but American parents make them look like amateurs. So many parents would rather try to control society and all information that their kids are exposed to instead of just ripping off the band-aid and talking to their kids. Sure, it's uncomfortable for parents to talk about sex with our kids, but its our job, we need to toughen up and do it!
I have one daughter, as it happens. I am committed to answering every question she asks, when she asks it, with complete honesty, the same way my parents did for me.
Sex is the sole difference between the two. All the other stuff is cultural bullshit. It also ignores all of human history, except the recent contemporary belief.
People like you want to force everyone else to discuss what you want, when you want and how you want. My job as a parent is to protect my children from the world and to instruct them about the world in the manner I see fit, when I see fit and how I see fit. You think it is your right to teach my children your values, mores and beliefs in a public school system and in society generally. You don't get to dictate how I raise my children and what values they should have.I'm fully aware they may not share my values and I know they won't in some or many ways, but I get to teach them, not you. You complain about control but if schools were teaching about the virtues of abstinence and keeping one's virginity until marriage I'm sure you would oppose it or are you all for it because you know, kids should get all the information.
I hear the stupid rip the band aid approach all the time, including from some of my own family members. The idea that children will learn about things anyways so we should fast forward it all is insanity. Should we teach children about rape because you know, some kids are conceived during rape and they shouldn't be stigmatized? We must be inclusive. Some topics are completely inappropriate for young children. Other topics involve social and moral judgment and are best left for discussion at home.
You've commented how surrogates are like paid employees. No different from a nurse or doctor. Sounds like a man who paid a surrogate for a child.
Very thought provoking! Our society has become feminized. Particularly in academia & sciences. The end result is that safety and perceived fairness trumps truth. In a very general way, good or bad, this is a feminine trait. We see it in scientific journals. White males are characterized as the mean, authoritarian who should be railed against for the sake of innocent, helpless groups. Ironically, it's actually infantilizing the groups it claims to defend & protect. A trade-off for increased power and preference.
“she sees the only potential salvation as coming from conservatives, while I see the theocratic right as another radical egalitarian monster that needs to be dealt with, and is in many ways worse.”
The Wokels have already introduced a theocracy of sorts. Amy Wax is correct that the delusional egalitarianism of Wokeism is rooted in Christianity, so the Left & Right are spiritually connected in that regard. We liberals truly are between a rock and a hard place.
Completely agree. Conservatives at their core just want to preserve a previous form of egalitarianism rooted in Christianity devoid of the more abrasive Woke iteration of Christian morality that we see today. To defeat Woke extremism the entire Christian morality of radical egalitarianism needs to go in the bin. In a way, conservatives are a bigger enemy. At least Woke leftists will be honest about their radical egalitarianism where as the conservative Christian will offer up their return to Christianity as the cure to Wokeness when it was the cause of the disease to begin with!
What is the Christian radical egalitarianism? That each human life has inherent dignity?
I'd say progressivism is the bigger enemy, not Christianity. All this nonsense about perfecting humans and society as if such a thing could ever happen.
The last will be first and the first will be last. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The Gospel is full of it.
Yes but the focus on equality is primarily about how those who worship and obey God are all treated equally in the eyes of God. Being rich doesn't make a man a more worthy Christian, just as being poor doesn't make one a less worthy Christian. There's certainly an anti-materialism in Christianity and hostility to wealth (at least in Catholicism, less so in Protestant sects, cannot speak about the Orthodox). That's not surprising in religion given the focus should be on God and not earthly matters.
Good for Christ!
Go inherit the flames for all I care, because you kraterocratic fuckwads are not fit for the Earth.
That's interesting
Thanks, I will be writing more about this in the future!
I just read Rausch's Kindly Inquisitors and he draws a similar connection between conservative Christians and modern left-wing challengers to free speech.
Read Tom Holland's Dominion. That will explain a lot.
I wonder if "soft realism" is really the ideal answer. On one hand, just talking about things like IQs and crime rates already strongly goes against the taboo as I understand it. On the other hand, the consequence of "soft realism" without attempts to make genetic explanations acceptable would probably be, in the case of "success" a strong desire to change the culture/environment in order to finally "close the gap" and end the disparities. One obvious problem is that, apart from some changes that would probably be useful, it would probably inspire lots of doomed, wasteful efforts. One could still argue that such a detour is necessary until people get at better answers, but I don't think that this is the most likely outcome. People will question whether such large disparities can be explained by cultural group differences, and a negative answer will lead to people reembracing the racism/discrimination hypothesis.
I think ultimately, it will be important that genetics are accepted. As long as this happens, there will be many wrong-headed, wasteful, and damaging policy initiatives, e.g. people will conclude that the social/income class of parents and their children correlate to some degree as evidence that children of rich parents have an unfair advantage - even in cases where race and ethnic differences are irrelevant. This could be advanced by further progress with genetics - even though it is now very difficult to conduct genetic research relating to group differences, progress about individual genetics (e.g. twin studies) can also help getting the idea that genetics is irrelevant for group differences seem implausible.
Apart from that, I think it would be better if people just stopped caring about disparities than if they further saw it as something to fix, but now not in the area of racism/discrimination, but the culture of these groups (except that there might be some things that could and should really be improved). Maybe it isn't as unrealistic as it seems at first sight. Other countries don't care about such disparities (e.g. French people about the representation of people of North African descent, it is not even allowed to have official data of the kind that could show disparities), in many cases there is no affirmative action and not necessarily a strong expectation that the representation in certain powerful positions must correspond exactly to the percentages in the population. Also the US itself does not care that much about the representation of groups according to different plausible subdivisions of the population. This kind of idea is consequence of white Americans feeling guilty about slavery and Jim Crow, but maybe people of all races could come to the conclusion that it was an understandable, but unhealthy and unhelpful reaction.
Well, and we have an odd fixation with certain disparities. There's something about IQ that really scares people, but conscientiousness is also partly genetic and is also very important to life outcomes, and it makes sense that people who are higher in conscientiousness would be more successful in life than those low in it. I'm not sure why it is so scary to folks that people who are smarter would probably be more successful in life. People who are taller are more likely to be successful basketball players, and certainly to play at the NBA you'd have to be a minimum of 6'5". No one gets freaked out if you point that out.
Wax is right when she says true meritocracy would hollow out the black elite, but the scope of the problem is much broader than that. There’s a chart that circulates pretty often in certain corners of Twitter showing that the wealthiest black children achieve SAT scores — a solid proxy for IQ — that are about equal to those achieved by dirt-poor white kids, while middle-class black kids are outscored by the poor whites. The numbers are maybe about 20 years old (I don’t remember because I haven’t seen them in a while), but there’s no reason to believe scores have changed since then.
So if we get rid of all official and unofficial racial preferences, there will be a complete hollowing out of the black middle class, which has been artificially propped up by our affirmative-action culture for 60 years. Even in the current context, the obvious fact of racial inequality already leads to deadly riots every generation or so — not to mention constant racial anxiety as reflected in entertainment and news media — so this level of stratification would be untenable.
Where does that leave us? I don’t know. If meritocracy returned it would probably need to be accompanied by a heavy-handed approach to any dissent that remotely approaches violence. It would be worth it, but it would be ugly. As they say, things would have to get worse before they get better.
Where did the SAT stat come from? I’ve never seen any data that compares differences by both race and class. Interpreting stats like this are tricky. Because of the historical limitations placed on black advancement many of those identified as black elites are not really elites. They are first generation climbers from working class and poor households and families. True black elites would involve the children and grandchildren of families who have been economically and socially successful over a long period of time--for example, Condolezza Rice’s family might be an example of a true black elite or W.E.B. Dubois. Many of the so called black elites are newly emerging middle class who benefited from the dropping of Jim Crow barriers and university affirmative action programs. Moreover many of these blacks education backgrounds are in such soft subjects as education or sociology--where politics rather than scholarship and intellectual achievement are rewarded. The use of group averages is not helpful because it assumes that each group is best described by an abstract average person. This is precisely not true for any group--particularly because the boundaries of group identity are not fixed. In short blacks, like other demographic groups, are not a monolithic , there are important class, family history, and culture differences that play a crucial role in determining economic, social, and intellectual success.
The SAT stat comes from graphs like this one: https://images.app.goo.gl/JQLiXv2EknKusXpZ8
By "black elite", black people who grew up in households with high income--not any measure of generational wealth or socioeconomic background (which is much harder to get data about and therefore less studied).
I'm skeptical that there still exists a bourgeois, generational black upper middle class a la DuBois. My impression is that the bougie blacks was a product of segregation: they were not accepted into white society, but also wanted to escape the trappings of black poverty. Now that socially ascendant blacks can integrate into white neighborhoods seemingly, the black bourgeois class has disappeared.
Because affluent blacks live in white neighborhoods and go to predominantly white schools, there are significant rates of intermarriage--which will again impede against the existence of a black upper class distinct from the rest of upper class society.
While I think you are correct that the processes that produced the traditional black elite under segregation no longer exist with the legal repeal of Jim Crow, these elite families still exist. Analytically, the black middle class are different than the black elite (or bourgeoisie). The black middle class generally reflects first or maybe second generation college graduates their family backgrounds are usually working class. There are also blacks who are second or third generation college graduates. Their family backgrounds are often professional or small business owners (shopkeepers).
I went to undergraduate school with the children of both groups. To determine what the effects of a true turn to meritocratic society would mean for the black elite depends on which of these two groups you are talking about.
Another consideration is that as economist Roland Fryer discovered in his research is that black high achievers often limit their success to fit in with their black peers. If future economic and social success is governed by merit rather than politics or sentiment, many, maybe not all, of these blacks would not limit their performance to stay in sync with lower achieving black peers. This is of course speculation but so is the hypothesis that the black middle class and elite would be unable to successfully compete in meritocratic society.
"And what I find, and I can’t explain it entirely, is that these kids almost immunize themselves from even looking at this stuff on the internet. There’s almost a kind of anti-inquisitive, anti-curiosity ethos that you just don’t go there. I call it this kind of PC zapper." >> THIS is the problem that top minds need to be working on. Facts & logic & reason only work for a small population of (heavily male) autists. Genuine progress in sociology of knowledge depends on finding a way to get the large & influential population of midwit single childless college-educated white women to embrace ideas that are less crazy and destructive than their current preferences.
I got into an online discussion where a woman used an odd phrase ("chocolate people") to describe the black/brown population and a bunch of radical leftist white women jumped all over her case, denouncing her as a racist and so on. I defended her use of the phrase, which I saw as ambiguous and just another descriptor, even if it was a little odd. I asked several times, how is that racist? What about it is racist? Not one person could answer that question, they just knew it was and clearly thought their initial perception couldn't be wrong.
Let me tell you, trying to get these women to at least put a space between "triggering descriptor" and "must denounce person as racist" is downright impossible. It's interesting, because these women likely have a lot of experience with cognitive behavioral therapy, and yet they seem completely incapable of applying in these types of scenarios.
Richard mentioned something similar when he discussed how AI would make people more reliant on institutions instead of less, so this would indicate that he probably was right about that. I do think there is a certain logic behind protecting your mind from constant bombardment of bad ideas, that's how propaganda works right? Tell people something often enough and they start to believe it, even if they should be able to tell logically that it isn't true. But if you refuse to engage with different ideas of course you are just accepting someone else's propaganda. And it's not like conservatives who only watch fox news are actually better at engaging with different ideas than all these woke kids.
For someone who recognizes the importance of heredity, Richard is incredibly blase about the effect of being raised by your biological mother vs. a random unrelated woman who purchased you from a catalog. You "know" from an early age that there is a existential gap between yourself (as shaped by your DNA & 'blood') and the nice 'parents' whose house you live in. At a minimum, one should follow Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy on Twitter) and read some of the perspectives of kids who were raised by their purchasers rather than their actual mom and dad who gave them their very physical selves:
https://twitter.com/Advo_Katy/status/1256052166818594817
https://thembeforeus.com/yes-surrogacy-is-wrong-even-when-straight-couples-do-it/
And why not read *The Primal Wound* about what it is really like to be adopted: https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Wound-Understanding-Adopted-Child/dp/0963648004
Not sure if the link was in there but Amy's Gofundme is here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/amy-wax-legal-defense-fund
donate today!
"So how are we going to sell that to the public.".. How are you going to sell that to minorities? Why are there no black oncology professors or whatever, cardiology professors or people in prestigious tech positions? Why are there so few blacks at Google, etc? What’s our explanation for that?" >> Key point (as both discussants are aware) is that it's not "the public" at large that cares about these things, but the college-educated, opinion-forming classes (think 'college grads' / NYT readers) that care about these things. The average voter cares about gas prices, housing prices, etc, and has no idea who is or isn't a cardiologist. But the college grads who drive politics absolutely do.
John McWhorter's respectful 2010 review of Race Wrongs and Remedies in THE NEW REPUBLIC is an index of how far the derangement has progressed:
https://newrepublic.com/article/76403/what-hope
More recently, McWhorter has embraced denialism:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed#_ftnref34
Through most of history people’s family members died early. The idea that people need their biological parents is nonsense. They need good genes, that’s what matters, and stupid social cons want to stop people with good genes from being born. That Katy Faust woman has the IQ of a turnip.
Parents died early because life expectancy was so short. They also got married earlier and had children earlier. People had larger families so small children were raised by older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
It sounds like you want to stop people with bad genes being born. Rather than advocate for forced sterilization and forced abortions, you want rich people to have more children through surrogacy so they can govern and rule. I find people who advocate for "good genes" believe themselves intellectually superior so see it was a battle between the goodies and the baddies.
Sounds like genetic capitalism to me. Shouldn't the best genes win in an honest competition? What's wrong with that?
Surrogacy, IVF, etc aren't honest competition. It's cheating.
Nope.
Let's start out fresh, naked and afraid but bringing what you know, in the 100 acer wood and use as a simple metric how many great grandkids people have 100 year later.
If I was sitting behind Rawl's view of ignorance, waiting to be born, and Mr
Hoober-Bloob gave me a choice between a mother who "purchased me from a catalog" or a random biological mother, you can bet your ass I'd pick the former. I'd prefer a certainty of being wanted by loving parents, having good genes, and having well-off parents, to a mere possibility of it. If someone is willing to pay that much money to get me they must really want me. A biological mother, by contrast, might have wanted me, but she also just might have wanted an orgasm.
The "random unrelated woman" is that child's mother, their real mother. The surrogate and donor are just employees who help the process along, no different than the doctors and nurses who help with delivery. That "knowledge" from an early age that there is an "existential gap" is nothing more than paranoid delusions.
That "adoption trauma" sounds similar to that "recovered memories" nonsense we had back in the 80s. The idea that forgotten childhood trauma negatively shapes our adult personalities is false, but it is still widely believed in our culture. It is unsurprising that some adoptees would latch onto it and conclude that the forgotten childhood trauma that is making them unhappy is their adoption. I'm sure they believe it, just like people really believed they had "recovered memories," but it's all just apophenia.
sure, there is lots of made up and exaggerated trauma -- but the quest to know and connect with our biological parents, relatives, ancestors, offspring is strong and durable. People place special value on biological family. Call it irrational, but it is there and has been since time immemorial. I doubt we can argue people out of it entirely.
thanks for introducing me to the word "apophenia" -- didn't know it!
I think the question is *how much* it matters to grow up with your biological mother vs an adopted one. I'm sure everyone would agree that it's preferable to be raised by your biological parents all else being equal, but since all else is never equal how do we compare it? I haven't researched this but my guess is that there aren't any measurable indicators showing a significant difference here. If it is actually important then it should negatively affect people in some way.
I definitely feel some curiosity about my roots. I occasionally discuss it with my family, and I shelled out $60 for one of those Ancestry DNA tests. But if my curiosity was thwarted it wouldn't traumatize me. I wouldn't consider it a major harm.
Things that are there since time immemorial are perfectly rational and serve a purpose.
Surrogate and donor are employees? Way to denigrate women and reduce them to mere brood mares and objects to be taken apart and sold. Gimme your eggs, gimme your womb so you can grow a baby for me which you cannot grow yourself. Sounds like deep seated envy and resentment to me. First from women who are infertile and second from gay men who cannot bear a child themselves.
You focus on money being a proxy for good parents. People who earn money likely have better genes so double score. That's what this come down to - contempt for the poor as undeserving of children. It's the rich that are better human beings and deserve it all.
The other day I had someone change the oil of my car. Clearly I have a deep-seated resentment of trained mechanics and am denigrating them and reducing them to mere objects. If I was a decent human being I would learn to change the oil of my car myself, as soon as I was done learning to grow all my own food, smelt my own silverware, and program my own computer. Wait, maybe I'm denigrating plants by growing my own food, better learn how to integrate chloroplasts into my cells!
Division of labor is how societies work. Everyone does what their comparative advantage. It isn't denigrating anyone to hire them to perform honest work, whether that's as an auto mechanic or as a surrogate.
The poor aren't undeserving of children. Odds are that a poor person will be a good parent. A rich person just has slightly better odds. Imagine that LeBron James and I are both trying to get a free throw into a basket, and we both have 100 tries. Odds are that we'll both make it, we probably both won't miss all 100 times. But LeBron James has better odds than I do.
Changing oil in a car is the same as bearing a child - really?
Finally you acknowledge you are renting a body for your own selfish purposes. Also, buying a body part. You think it's a good thing because there's an exchange of money so the woman is earning a living.
I'm saying that your argument against hiring a surrogate is a fully general argument against hiring anything to do anything. It is wrong because it proves too much. Changing the oil and bearing a child are very different jobs when it comes to nitty gritty details, but not morally.
Yes, I am renting a body for my own purposes, although I wouldn't say that they are selfish purposes since they are for the benefit of a baby. Again, how is that a problem? I just ordered dinner from GrubHub, as a result, a woman used her body to drive food to me. Doing so technically put her life and body in danger since, during the drive, she could have been T-boned by a drunk driver. I selfishly hired a woman to risk her life to bring me dinner, but it's fine because I paid her a price that she agreed on.
I'm not buying a body part. The woman gets to keep her uterus after the baby leaves it. It's not like she has to take it out and give it to me in a jar. Or do you mean buying an egg cell? That seems fine too.
And yes, I absolutely think it's a good thing because there's an exchange of money, so the woman is earning a living. Earning an honest living is a good thing.
The entire segment about surrogacy had me thinking of Mary Harrington clawing at the walls like a demon lol.
I hope someone brings this to Mary's attention. It's usually the Blank Slateist, "humans are interchangeable widgets [meat legos]" crowd that is so naively enthusiastic about cyborg reproductive technology.
To what extent do these places really depend on federal money? Don't they all have massive endowments that yield a good ROI?
The usual problem surfaces in this discussion, of "the right" being a useless term that conflates totally different things. I wish we could bin it. You have conservatives whose philosophy is just "in the good old days everything was better". They just want to live in the world they grew up in, preserved in amber. Amy Wax is a pure example of that and even uses the phrase good old days towards the end when asked how she'd improve things, because her answer is literally "make everything like it was when I was young". OK, fine, but not a political philosophy. It doesn't actually mean anything. Conservatives in the USSR wanted to preserve Leninism, conservatives in Iran want to preserve Islamic theology, conservatives in the USA want to preserve the Puritan small-Federal-state America of 1900. These social visions are all totally different but they are all conservatives in the local reference frame.
Then you have the left, and you have libertarians (or "classical liberals" in some parts of the world). Unlike conservatism, these are genuinely specific visions of how the world should be.
This problem is especially confusing in the context of America because of the "Christian right". Christian morality is essentially just left wing morality. Jesus was big into class warfare and hating on the rich, or spun differently, protecting the meek and the mild. Not much different to the ideology of Karl Marx. But because Christianity is old, conservatives want to conserve it or bring it back. This puts them in a terrible state of confusion where their conservative instincts makes them desire what is basically just an older and differently presenting form of leftism, but society tells them that they're the opposite of leftists. Hence the observation in the discussion that the American right seem to so readily adopt the tactics of the American left. Sure, because they're actually BOTH left wing.
Once you recognize that wokeness is just "Christianity 2000", a software upgrade that refreshes the skin without changing the underlying engine, most stuff that seems confusing starts making sense.
For the free market libertarians then, is there good news or bad news? I think in the long arc of history they are actually winning. It may not appear that way because society is still very far from their preferred ideal, it's still very much dominated by left wing thinking. So as times change, leftism changes and remains powerful, and that can be easily interpreted as things getting worse. It becomes easier to be hopeful when taking the long view.
For example, 150 years ago it was common for companies to be called "Smith & Sons". Not much meritocracy there. Nowadays the family dynasty as a concept has mostly died out, and the few that remain hide themselves in shame (see the behaviour of the New York Times which doesn't like to talk about how it has been a family business). Certainly, nobody is advertising it in the name of the company anymore.
150 years ago hating on the rich was pretty much the default state of society, as it had been since the time of Jesus, so much so that many countries would go through violent Marxist revolutions over the next century. Nowadays Marxism has died out completely. The fall of the USSR crushed the credibility of overtly "soak the rich" socialism, so the left pivoted and abandoned their destructive economics. That's a win! They also accepted the need to pay lip service to the basic logic of meritocracy even as they undermined it along racial and gender lines, often stating that their motivation for doing so was because diverse teams function better (have more merit), and not the explicit "meek and the mild" protectionism of earlier eras.
Oppression olympics has dominated humanity for millenia so there's no reason to think it will go away within our lifetimes, but society is slowly getting better at diverting it into less and less destructive cul-de-sacs. Diversity casting and preachy Hollywood movies are annoying but don't threaten the food supply, for example. Argentina of all places just elected a libertarian president. So things slowly inch forward.
Fascinating conversation. I'm glad that these issues can be discussed here and it's sad that having them at an elite university is so challenging.
I find it strange though that both of you seem to agree that IQ is the most important thing you can measure to determine a person's potential for human achievement, but then you take the group with the highest average IQ (white liberal academics) and completely discount almost every single thing they believe. If Richard got his way and DeSantis became president and started going after colleges I'm sure we would end up with affirmative action for conservatives, there would be no other way to really achieve this. You would be choosing to expel high IQ people to make room for lower IQ people that believe more in free-speech (at least as it relates to conservative ideas. If your preferred speech is about CRT then not so much). IQ is the most important thing until...it isn't.
I suspect that if you measured the IQ of Asians vs Europeans in the 19th century you would probably end up with some extremely low scores in the Asian population, yet today's Asian Americans outperform whites. I have a hard time believing that white Europeans would score higher than Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age either. The idea that IQ scores and differences between populations is rigid in this way doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly to anyone who is aware of the Flynn effect. And assumptions about the future of an entire group of people based on their status in a single snapshot in time will eventually look very silly, given enough time.
One of the best nuclear power plant operators I ever worked with couldn't pass a written test to save his life. On paper he looked like an eight year old. Knew another guy who aced all the tests but they wouldn't even let him near the control room. Egalitarianism doesn't mean we actually think that all humans have equal abilities. It's an acknowledgement that humans are very bad at measuring and predicting human potential. Beliefs about the potential of different groups always tend to lead to rules about who is or is not allowed to do what. You can't hold on to libertarian beliefs without a certain level of egalitarian beliefs. Undermine them at your peril.
Nel, group traits change over time as population genomes change. This can happen well within the time spans you reference.
There is a negative feedback loop that discriminates against conservatives in academia. Most don’t even try to make it a career path anymore.
So it's ok to use affirmative action to correct for anti-conservative discrimination but not for anti-black discrimination?
Agreed, but then why worry about black vs white IQ levels when they will inevitably change over time. Amy suggests that there will NEVER be black people in positions that require an extremely high IQ, which seems like an incredibly implausible statement when you can see how IQ levels shift over time.
Forget about differences in ability, what about moral differences?
Is any race group greater or lesser than another based on their abilities?
Do blacks deserve to be in poverty because they are dumb (assuming that they are actually dumb)?
Do Jews and Asians deserve to be rich because they are smart (assuming that they are actually smart)?
Finally getting around to reading this after having the tab open for three weeks, and I'm glad I did. This comment from Amy sums up one of my biggest frustrations - that discussion of IQ so often devolves into a race-ranking fight - better than I can do myself:
"I am more concerned about the fact that high IQ is so beneficial in our society that ordinary people, average people can’t create a decent life for themselves, that we don’t honor ordinary people in ordinary roles doing ordinary jobs, and that’s somehow considered to be a sort of failure. I think that is really a moral problem in our society."
Parenthood in the U.S. is responsibility without power; the parents have to pay all the bills, but the State makes the pivotal decisions (esp. with the non-negotiable mandate of 12 years of schooling). Being a parent looks like being a sucker and a sap.
I loved this talk because from a very young age, this is the way I've always thought about race differences. Now, I'm not on the level of the 130+ iq, but I'm not on the lower levels, so I wonder if this is just recognizable by some people. I will say this: I do not believe most white people (especially) believe everyone is equal. My wine mom friends and I don't, but we will NEVER say that aloud because we have no one in a power position saying it. What I chose to do was have kids and raise them. I got lucky and had males. I picked a smart husband. So, I spent my life raising an intelligent family and focusing on the males. I pushed and I coached and I moved and I saved. It has worked well for me. Women don't want to own this power anymore. They think it is beneath them. I think you'd both be very surprised at the amount of support your ideas have.
I don't know whether or not you're really an anti-Semite. But you are way too obsessed with Jews.