Egaliarianism

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Yes, I know that Charles Murray is a bogey man to many. I ran across this article after I discussed Egalitarianism with Flint on one of the ubiqitous AC threads. If Murray is right, our Heavenly Father Science will vindicate him soon enough. In the meantime, it's best that we behave as if he is not right. (But it is hard to rationalize why so many of those magnificent NBA players are "persons of color").

Egalitarianism

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Sydney (AU) Sun Herald, May 24, 2001

The intolerable truth of genetic inequality

Perhaps we were not all created equal. However, writes Miranda Devine, think twice before you say it out loud.

In free Western democracies today there are certain ideas which are so explosive that even to acknowledge their existence publicly is to incur the most savage penalty from the reigning liberal establishment. You will be labelled a bigot, a racist, a sexist, a fascist or in some way be demonised as intolerant. Henceforth you will have no credibility. Nothing you say will be listened to.

You will cease to exist in current debate, except in the ridiculed fringe. Your persecutors will be the people who most preach tolerance. Yet they are the most intolerant of all.

In a way that is what happened to American social scientist Charles Murray after he wrote his controversial 1994 book which linked race and IQ, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

"It's not enough that they think you are wrong," says Murray, in Sydney this week to give a series of lectures for a local think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (www.cis.org.au). "You must also be evil."

Even six years later, in England last year, when he gave a lecture about a different topic, The Guardiancondemned his presence in the country, and attacked The Sunday Times, which had invited him, for daring to legitimise such a racist, eugenicist monster.

In fact, says Murray, The Bell Curve stated that both genes and environment play a part in IQ, which seems like commonsense.

And in the book he is working on, Truth & Beauty, about the nature of human genius, he points out the limitations of IQ. He says that while "incredibly high IQ" is important for certain human accomplishments, such as theoretical physics, it is not essential for musical or artistic greatness.

But once the attacks on Murray began, they took on a life of their own, and spread around the world, mostly, he says, from people who had never read the book. Perhaps, too, he was ripe for demonisation because of his past criticisms of the welfare state.

His close friend and co-author Richard Herrnstein had died just as the book was printed, leaving him grief-stricken as well as angry that he had to face the barrage alone. He suspects now that he may have spent the next six months in a state of clinical depression.

But the furore made him realise something profound: "People are scared to death of genetic difference," he said yesterday after a lunch at the CIS Crows Nest headquarters.

So he went a step further. Now he predicts that advances in genetics and neurology will lead to the death of egalitarianism within 20 years.

What he calls the "intellectual egalitarianism" of the Left actually is not about equal outcomes at all, he says. It just "hates the idea that some people are inherently smarter or more charming [and that you can't change that] by the right social program or the right liberation of people from their oppressors." Social engineering can't cure inequality.

He says a combination of neuroscientists' understanding of how our brains work and molecular biologists' understanding of what genes do will finally explain human nature. We will understand how biology and environment interact.

"The world is on the verge of knowledge which will establish that personal qualities like IQ are inherited. In the next 20 years we will see the scientific destruction of a political paradigm. The upheaval that follows, I am sure, will be convulsive."

It is the social paradigm that underpins all Left thinking that will be destroyed, he said last year in an article in the American magazine National Review.

"What we already know leads me to believe that the story of human nature as revealed by genetics and neuroscience will be [politically] conservative.

"We will learn for certain such things as that women innately make better nurturers of small children than do men and that men innately make better soldiers than do women.

"Regarding these and many other human characteristics impinging on marriage, the upbringing of children and the enforcement of social order, I am predicting that the adages of the Right will usually prove to be closer to the mark than the adages of the Left, and that many of the causes of the Left will be revealed as incompatible with the way human beings are wired."

Further, he says genetic engineering will allow people to start having better, smarter children by tweaking their genes. It will be eugenics, "tailor-made for the Left", he says with irony, "eugenics with a smiling face".

Killing off egalitarianism is unlikely to endear him to Australians, which may be why his lectures in Sydney, Melbourne and Katoomba this week have been about other topics.

Last night in Sydney he explained his libertarian philosophy. In Melbourne on Tuesday night he warned of the "the sickness of proletarianisation", whose symptoms are a coarsening of Western life, in which the elites who are supposed to be setting an example for the rest of society instead imitate the trashy behaviour of the underclass. The result is a vulgarisation of language, arts, manners, dress, and sexual behaviour.

The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky presidency was a perfect example of what he says is a "disintegrating civilisation". (Interestingly, in his new book he will say that the best art, literature and creative output have always come from civilisations on the downhill slide, though he says there's no evidence of that in the United States at the moment.)

There are people who will dismiss everything Murray has to say, simply because of who he is. But predictions which come true have an uncontestable way of vindicating their authors.

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--Miranda Devine also writes for The Sun-Herald.



-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), May 25, 2001

Answers

Any enlightened person knows that there is no such thing as race. Lars is a pinhead Repug racist.

-- (Dumbya@Divas.and_Dildos), May 25, 2001.

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