Race and IQ can be an intoxicating subject. In 2015, Noah Smith called it “a brain-eating memetic parasite.” At some point in his life, a young man discovers that there are IQ differences between major populations that look similar across the world. He notices that America has vast disparities between racial groups, with East Asians at the top, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks. If you look at economic development across the world, setting aside a few oil-rich sheikdoms, you find East Asians are really the only ones to have equaled or surpassed Europeans. Then comes most of the rest of the world, with sub-Saharan Africa in last place among the major regions. Moreover, you might find out that there’s even been a study of international adoptees that is consistent with the idea that group differences are large and biological in origin, just as cross-adoption studies at home. Those are a lot of coincidences to explain. You may even go beyond IQ and also observe that groups that look alike have a set of uncanny behavioral similarities, and standard explanations as to why don’t make all that much sense.
If you were already a race and IQ obsessive, the Great Awokening since the early 2010s has likely solidified your view that talking about these things is important. The left blames racial disparities on past and present discrimination. If you show that biology has something to do with group outcomes, then their entire worldview must implode. One could even argue that the Great Awokening is a natural consequence of denying human biodiversity.
These are arguments I used to accept. But I now think that the pro-HBD crowd is basically wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations. Part of this realization has come from talking to and debating people who support publicly discussing these issues. While all kinds of individuals accept group differences, in my experience it’s very easy to predict the political views and normative commitments of those who want to talk about them, which casts doubt on the idea that they are animated by a passion for scientific inquiry.
One important thing to realize is that “race and IQ” isn’t exactly the world’s most hidden knowledge. The Bell Curve might have been the most influential conservative book published in 1993. It received an overwhelmingly positive review in The New York Times. Through personal experience and gossip, I’d say that maybe half of the smartest conservative and libertarian writers at least suspect that there are genetic racial differences in IQ, or even take it for granted, and in the era of free speech on Twitter so do many of the dumber ones. And at least a few prominent liberals are also race realists. So knowing about race and IQ or group differences more generally does not make one part of some elite brotherhood. It’s therefore worth interrogating a bit what makes those who are desperate to talk about this stuff distinct.
Aesthetics and Impulses Come First, Descriptive Beliefs Second
Nathan Cofnas says we should raise the salience of race differences because otherwise leftists will always win any argument, and be able to justify affirmative action, DEI, and white guilt. This seems to me a clear instance of putting the cart in front of the horse. It’s not the case that people have a scientific theory about inequality, so they go on and favor steps to reduce it. Rather, they begin with a dislike of inequality and then adopt whatever scientific theories make them feel good, mostly as an afterthought.
This can be clearly seen in the case of sex. In many ways, society accepts men and women are different. Yet civil rights law and programs to for example get more young girls into coding are able to easily ignore this fact when convenient. When I’ve talked to leftists about equity initiatives based on sex, and asked how they can reconcile them with obvious biological differences, they don’t find it too difficult to say ok, men might be more likely to be interested in something like coding, but there’s still so much we can do to encourage the women who do have the talent to go into the field. During the Super Bowl, I saw a Dove commercial that lamented the fact that teenage girls don’t like playing sports as much as boys do. Are there many people who are blank slatists when it comes to the question of which sex likes sports better? Perhaps, but the idea that “group differences exist, but unequal outcomes have a large societal component we should fix” is a perfectly coherent position.
If, by some miracle, society one day accepted inherent racial differences in IQ, we could imagine something similar happening. Leftists could say group differences aren’t enough to explain the degree to which we observe a wealth gap between blacks and whites. They could argue that while whites show a 15-point advantage over blacks on IQ tests, actually only 5 of those points can be attributed to nature and the rest we have an obligation to fix. Maybe at that point Cofnas will write an article with the title “Why we need to convince people that whites have a natural 15-point advantage instead of 5 to defeat wokeness.” One can imagine an acceptance of group differences even having a radicalizing effect on the left; suddenly theories about society having been built from the ground up to advantage whites sound a lot more plausible! I don’t think that the HBD crowd has enough respect for the power of this taboo. Many would give up on the whole idea of objective scientific inquiry before accepting race differences in IQ as immutable. In the most prestigious scientific journals and magazines one regularly sees content about “indigenous knowledge” and what it can contribute to our understanding of the world, reflecting how elite institutions feel the need to adamantly declare blank slatism to have been validated by science while signaling that maybe science isn’t all that great anyway. There are many paths to woke, and as long as there’s a will to get there they will find a way.
One reason talking about group differences can’t convince people of anything is that leftists have a million more experts than you do! They point to an “overwhelming consensus” among scholars who think about race for a living that any gaps are completely environmentally caused, and on that point they’re right. The blank slate consensus wasn’t formed on account of evidence, but rather because people are motivated by a vision of racial equality. Identitarians have shown that they reason in a similar way. They cite facts about IQ differences, but, as discussed below, will also swallow nonsense like “group evolutionary strategy” and the belief that every problem in society from high housing costs to global warming can be solved if you just keep foreigners out.
One can clearly see that an acceptance of group differences does not determine political opinions at the individual level. The only person who seems to love talking about race and IQ more than Cofnas is Bo Winegard, and as of 2020 at least he had center left economic views. Thomas Sowell believes that racial IQ gaps are environmental in origin, but he has more sensible political opinions. The existence of Sowell and Winegard as thinkers shows that on the 2x2 matrix of nature versus nurture, and pro- versus anti-market, any of the four combinations of views is possible. It’s very weird to believe that public discourse has to be more internally coherent than the views of individual thinkers.
Freddie deBoer and Bryan Caplan have both written books on how schooling doesn’t do much to make kids smarter or more productive workers. One says that therefore we need more socialism, and the other says we need markets. Part of this difference is a matter of what one thinks about empirical questions unrelated to genetics like how well markets respond to people’s needs and desires. But it’s also about values.
We can see something similar in the environmentalist movement. The science involved often isn’t complete nonsense, but it’s almost always being used in the service of a larger agenda. Elites feel guilty about the success of human civilization so every generation they tell a story about how progress will destroy Mother Earth. When their predictions don’t come to pass or their views are discredited, they simply move on to something else. Paul Ehrlich’s ideas on overpopulation and mass famine were popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. When he was proved wrong in the most spectacular way possible — population growth leveled off, and more people turned out to be a good thing anyway — we got concerns about things like the ozone layer and too much garbage, and ultimately global warming. Many of these movements are based on a core truth, like the fact that the temperature of the earth is actually rising. But catastrophization regarding things like climate change is driven by the same impulses that motivated concerns about overpopulation in a previous era. Today it’s normal to hear socially conscious young people say things like it’s irresponsible to bring children into a melting planet. To stop the process of jumping from one panic to another requires taking on the core impulse behind environmentalism, which is that human progress is something that is icky.
The point here is that whenever someone says we need to talk about some descriptive fact, they always want to do so as part of a larger political agenda. A writer who keeps bringing up global warming obviously thinks it’s a really big deal. People who believe that the problem is exaggerated want us to forget about it. They don’t go around screaming about how we need climate science to be at the front and center of our minds all the time. The question of whether we should talk about group differences in behavior and cognition is similar. It’s ultimately a political decision, and should be judged on that basis.
HBD is White Identitarianism
Those who want to talk about group differences have labeled their set of beliefs “Human Bio-diversity” (HBD). Yet this collection of ideas usually goes beyond the simple view that populations are not genetically identical in all aspects of cognition and behavior. If someone is into HBD, it usually encompasses the following four beliefs.
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
I know many people who only believe in 1, but not 2-4. Almost to a person, they do not want all of us to be talking about group differences, often out of fear that doing so will lead to a belief in descriptive tribalism, justify tribalism, and reinforce zero-sum thinking. Yet if someone grabs you by the shoulders and demands you talk about race and IQ, you can assume that he doesn’t only believe in group differences, but the whole HBD package.
The problem is that while 1 is true, 2 and 3 are mostly false, and 4 is a value judgement that individuals are free to accept or reject. Moreover, 2-4 are characteristics shared with other collectivist ideologies, and ideas that are not only based on falsehoods but should be actively combated.
Outside of the most primitive cultures in the world, individuals overwhelmingly care about their own comfort, status, and finances over their group identity. Sure, one can point to surveys that show people want immigration restrictionism and to stop free trade, but if day laborers show up at the Home Depot parking lot, they’re going to find work. People all over the world flee third world countries and flood into first world nations, abandoning their cultures and ways of life, because they want a higher standard of living. The fact that individuals don’t actually care all that much about their race or culture is why conservatives are always so angry and trying to pass laws to change their behavior. It doesn’t work to just tell American manufacturers to slap “Made in the USA” on their products and hope they fly off the shelves. If people can save a buck by buying from a Chinese manufacturer, they will. As they should! While leftists often wish humans were more moral than they actually are, right-wing identitarians are unique in wishing they were worse.
HBD types are often sensible when talking group averages. But when they try to scientifically justify tribalism, you see that they’re just as capable as the left is of twisting facts to fit a preconceived theory. In Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy, there is a lot of interesting history on Jewish involvement in communism and other leftist movements, but he blames this on them pursuing their “group evolutionary strategy.” At some point, MacDonald mentions how Jews have been if anything more prominent among the most famous modern pro-market thinkers, but, miraculously, this is also part of their strategy. Given that the whole point of this thing is to achieve Darwinian success, you might think that it’s a problem for MacDonald’s theory if American Jews have a low birthrate and high outmarriage rates. But guess what? That also doesn’t contradict them having a group evolutionary strategy!
It’s of course no accident that there’s a strong correlation between believing we should talk about 1 and accepting 2-4. People who get really into group differences and put it at the center of their politics don’t actually care all that much about the science. I think for the most part they just think foreigners and other races are icky. They therefore latch on to group differences as a way to justify what they want for tribal or aesthetic reasons. If only people accepted “scientific truth” they would automatically turn anti-woke and seal the border. Yet a lot of libertarians actually accept group differences but don’t think that it necessarily requires immigration restriction, because they have a better understanding of how the economy works, and freedom of association is the best way to build a community of people you are comfortable with anyway. I’ve heard rightists say that getting freedom of association is impossible, but I see orders of magnitude more energy going towards anti-immigration politics than rolling back anti-discrimination laws, and immigration remains high anyway, so maybe they should focus their efforts on being left alone and see what happens. I suspect that deep down, they know that their fellow whites, or at least the ones they’d actually want to live around, don’t share their preferences, so freedom of association wouldn’t do them any good in the quest to build homogenous communities.
In this way, the motivations for accepting the idea of group differences are similar to those for rejecting it. Leftists are committed to a certain narrative and a collection of normative values, and their scientific beliefs come second. A person who is motivated by a vision of human flourishing or futurism will, as many libertarians and rationalists do, accept what science and common sense tell us about group differences and then move on, making the case for free markets and technological progress, with a clear understanding that threats to this vision come from both ends of the political spectrum. But talking about group differences is useful if one doesn’t want to simply move beyond woke, but defeat it in an argument so we can replace one race obsessed outlook for another, whether explicit white nationalism or the implicit form of it that uses borders as a close enough proxy for race.
As discussed before, I wouldn’t say that group identity is bad under all circumstances. White South Africans and Israelis are two populations that face existential threats. But white Americans are one of the most financially and physically secure people in the history of the world, and to see them as under enough serious threat that it requires resorting to identity politics is to fundamentally misunderstand the problems plaguing society. White Americans should be able to get by with a broad multi-racial anti-woke coalition, something that is actually emerging as American politics becomes less racially polarized. Yet recent trends contradicting the “demographics is destiny” talking point haven’t convinced many immigration restrictionists to stop assuming people will always vote their race, and instead focus on winning over others based on aesthetics and ideas, because again they just want to restrict immigration and don’t really care that much about what the evidence says.
I’ve already mentioned Kevin MacDonald’s work on Jewish identity. Similarly, Steve Sailer is insightful on many things, but if you assign him an article on housing, littering, or any issue really, it will just turn into a tirade against immigration. I searched Steve’s blog for “littering” and practically every result on the first page was somehow connected to Latinos or immigrants. I tried the same with “global warming” and although the results weren’t as extreme, the pattern was similar. It’s as if whenever you brought up stamp collecting with someone they shifted the conversation to how Armenians are always trying to pass off counterfeit stamps as the real thing. You would start to suspect that this person cared more about Armenians than stamps.
Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! Obviously the whole littering obsession is a pretense, just like his solutions for housing and global warming, and the same is true for other right-wing figures who’ve talked about the topic like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. Immigration restrictionists are mainly driven by aesthetic preferences — partly in the most literal sense, that is, what people in the country should look like — and only secondarily feel the need to come up with justifications for them. For the exact same reasons, talking about group differences in IQ is not the way to influence or ultimately defeat the left.
I’ve noticed that on the right, the more individuals accept group differences between races, the more they want society organized to satisfy the preferences of the worst whites and make excuses for their behavior. Those who fret about Hispanics changing our political culture tend to be those least likely to find anything disturbing in Trump’s behavior leading up to and on the day of January 6. Immigration restrictionists are some of the people most upset about fentanyl deaths, when right-wingers had little concern with what drug addicts did to themselves until whites were perceived as victims and they could fit a crisis into an anti-foreigner narrative. All of society should forgo the benefits of immigration and trade because the people at the very bottom might end up worse off. I don’t think globalization actually does make any large group of people worse off, but identitarians need to believe that it does, and will attack mainstream institutions from the left when necessary to argue against Americans being allowed to interact with foreigners.
One can see motivated reasoning perhaps most clearly in how so many HBD types reject free trade, an issue that should in theory have nothing to do with group differences. When you buy and sell things across borders, you make both parties better off, and you don’t have to even worry about outsiders committing crimes or voting in your elections. Unlike with the anti-immigration position, where someone can at least make coherent arguments, skepticism toward trade should be treated as a form of pure irrationality. Yet “America First” politicians and their supporters are almost always protectionists. This makes sense ideologically for Elizabeth Warren types, since they hate markets more generally. Yet it’s less consistent to believe capitalism is true when people are trading within borders, but that suddenly all socialist arguments are correct when foreigners are involved. Nothing explains this except anti-foreigner bias, and standard HBD opposition to trade shows the extent to which irrational tribalism and false zero-sum beliefs are central to this worldview. One thing I appreciate about explicit white nationalists like Jared Taylor is that they rarely feel the need to be anti-trade, so we avoid some of the worst excesses of those who have to mask their tribalism.
Ideas Change by Groups Talking Past One Another
I think that a lot of the people who think we should talk about group differences have a false model of how ideas change over time. Certain individuals love to talk about race and IQ, in addition to talking about talking about race and IQ, and talking about talking about talking about race and IQ. The implied model of historical change here is that we’re all in a kind of debating club, with change occurring when one set of ideas directly defeats another.
Yet it seems to me that activist movements succeed mainly by talking past their opponents. People get excited by an idea, like individual liberty, nationalism, or a communist revolution. They are able to mobilize talented and energetic individuals on that basis, and eventually gain ground against others. When they address the main points of their opponents they do so most often implicitly and indirectly, and try to defeat them in the political arena.
To be clear, when telling you not to talk about group differences, I’m not advocating that individuals lie or even that they completely avoid the topic in all contexts. Sometimes it will be relevant to a debate. But there’s a difference between talking about something occasionally and in the most limited circumstances and talking about it in the way preferred by those who think it is a kind of magic bullet that settles all empirical and ethical questions and will solve all of the world’s problems. Those who have done the thankless and painstaking work of gathering the evidence on population differences over the years should be celebrated as heroes. Among more popular writers, Charles Murray and Bryan Caplan I think do a good job of going where the facts lead them without making this one set of findings central to everything they believe. But any politics that puts group differences at the center of the pitch it makes to the world should be rejected.
Milei talking about gender is a good model here. He eloquently takes apart lies about pay gaps between men and women, and has eliminated the diversity ministry. But from what I’ve seen, he doesn’t bother going all the way to biological causes of sex differences, because it’s not necessary for him to take on the feminists. To even debate causation in the social scientific sense would distract from his larger mission, which is to bring economic liberty to Argentina. If Milei made Men’s Rights advocacy central to his politics, he would’ve been less successful and less worth supporting. His animating ideology, and a few big facts it privileges, come first, and his answers to leftist complaints about inequality are secondary. A similar approach to race, what Amy Wax calls soft realism, is adequate to combat leftism, unless you want society to be organized around a new racial, or in the case of nationalism, quasi-racial, hierarchy.
Truth in and of itself is never a good reason to talk about something. There are many facts nobody wants to discuss. The idea of sleeping with very short men fills many women with revulsion. The severely handicapped are a drain on society’s resources. And so on. When an individual decides to put a certain fact front and center, he is actively choosing to raise its salience, and fit it into a story he is telling to the world.
Imagine that you live in a society with arranged marriages and you’re trying to make the case for allowing freedom of choice regarding who individuals are allowed to date and spend their lives with. Probably the last thing you want to talk about is how your preferred outcome is going to result in inequality, with many decent men and women being judged as low quality partners, destined to spend their lives going from one disappointment to another. And definitely don’t let anyone think too much about the fact that the men and women of some races are going to be much more likely to suffer this fate than those of others! Telling people that this kind of inequality is fine because it would result from natural evolutionary preferences isn’t going to help. If you’re talking about unequal outcomes at all you’re losing the debate, because that’s the story the other side wants to tell. When someone brings it up, like any good politician you change the subject rather than directly address the point. There’s no debate judge keeping score here.
The pro-love side in this scenario needs to tell a compelling story that shifts the focus away from arguments about equality. In politics, my preferred story is that humanity has advanced forward by freedom. A default rule that anything consenting adults want to do is allowed, with very small and narrow exceptions, is how you make people wealthier and maximize human dignity. The degree to which an individual accepts consent-based morality determines the extent to which they are my friend or enemy. We could be taller, live longer, have more fun, and enjoy deeper appreciation for artistic and intellectual life if we discarded excessive safetyism, a desire for egalitarian outcomes, and the idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to make serious mistakes even when they are the ones to suffer the consequences of doing so. Moreover, those are the things that we should want, rather than to glorify imaginary beings or achieve equality, a goal that is at heart driven by an ideology of resentment. The threat to this vision comes from, yes, an egalitarian left, but also from nationalists and theocrats on the right. As long as someone believes in liberty as their default, it doesn’t matter to me how they come to that position. To Milei, the diversity ministry was just one piece of an overly intrusive government. Whether one sees civil rights law and hate speech regulations as evil mainly because they are anti-liberal or they make white people feel bad about themselves has relevance for one’s views on many other political issues. And if you think that anti-white policies are bad because along with mass migration they’re going to lead to genocide, as many conservatives apparently do, you need to get back in touch with reality before thinking about whether society should be open about group differences or any other complicated political question.
All of this of course leads to the question of how you get people excited about liberty. Luckily, its track record as a motivating force is pretty good. The influence of libertarian ideas ebbs and flows, but since at least the seventeenth century they have always been part of Western elite discourse. This is to a large extent because other ideologies tend to very often fail, and reality has a way of intruding on false beliefs. So Eastern Europe adopts free market reforms after the Soviet Union collapses, and Argentina turned to the eccentric libertarian after decades of misery brought about by national socialism. To simplify things, and borrow from Nate Silver, Western history over the last several centuries can be seen as a constant struggle between three worldviews.
Liberalism: Individual rights and freedom.
Conservatism: Involves nationalist or religious particularism, and tribal preferences.
Leftism: We live in a world of group oppression and this is what we should focus on and fix.
Every party platform or ideology is some combination of those three forces. The Republican Party represents a merger of liberalism and conservatism. It is pro-market and individual liberty as a kind of default, until there’s some religious objection to a practice or behavior rooted in Christianity, or when it has to consider how and on what terms to interact with the rest of the world. Basically, Republican ideology is “Freedom, unless a foreigner is involved or it makes Jesus mad.” Trump turned up the anti-foreigner aspect, to the disillusionment of many in the party.
Neoliberalism is a combination of leftism and liberalism. It values individual choice and also fighting inequality, which always get priority over conservative concerns. Catholic syndicalism is a combination of conservatism and leftism, seeing individual freedom as the great enemy. When one of the three great ideologies gains ground, it’s usually not because it came up with some new argument that nobody ever thought of before, but due to some kind of political shock or because at least one of the other two was discredited by events. These worldviews aren’t debating one another as much as they’re subject to their own internal dynamics and waiting for opportunities to take advantage of. Liberalism naturally appeals to many fewer people than conservatism or leftism, but it stays in the game because, of the three great ideologies, it’s easily the one most likely to be vindicated by real world events, since it is correct. Countries that adopt libertarian ideas become like Dubai or Singapore, while the ones that lean too far into conservatism or leftism become miserable places to live.
Those who are obsessed with the idea of talking about group differences believe that they are transcending this debate. If bio-realism makes its way into public discourse, it will, like almost all empirical facts about the social world, be a handmaiden to a larger political vision. Whether you want to make its lessons more salient in the discourse ultimately depends on what you actually want to replace leftism.
"People all over the world flee third world countries and flood into first world nations, abandoning their cultures and ways of life, because they want a higher standard of living."
This is not an accurate description of reality. I don't know how it is in the US, but certainly in Europe, the people from third world countries in large part do not "abandon their cultures and ways of life" when they come here. They actively preserve these (and are encouraged to do so by the prevailing narrative and policies of "multiculturalism"), in part alongside- but often also in opposition to the prevailing host culture. This is the whole point of multiculturalism. As a result there are immense problems with integration, especially with people from Muslim countries and particular third world countries like Eritrea. There are basically parallel societies, there is very little intermarrying (again, especially between Muslim immigrant populations and non-Muslim native populations) and little shared cultural life. There is a lot of direct influence on immigrant populations from the nations of origin as well (for example, Turkish mosques in my country are directly coordinated by the Turkish ministry of religion, Diyanet). In addition, tribal conflicts are imported to European streets, as was exemplified by a mass riot between two groups of Eritreans in The Hague a few days ago. And let's not forget the mass "pro-Palestine" (or pro-Hamas, if you will) demonstrations in major Western cities.
I dispute that "HBD is just white nationalism", but let's leave that to one side. When leftists attribute racial disparities to "systemic racism", and then argue for policies like affirmative action and racial reparations, how do you respond other than by invoking HBD?