My anthroplogical interests centered on evolutionary psychology and human biology. Much of my research involved human fertility and understanding the "demographic transition", and I was a member of the professional association of physical anthropologusts for a number of years. As a member of that body, I was selected to recieve a free, unsolicited abridged copy of Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life-history Perspective by J.P. Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. The gist of the work was that humans vary on a continuum from an "r" reproductive strategy (reproduce a lot and invest little in the offspring) and a "K" reproductive strategy (reproduce less but invest heavily in the offspring). According to Rushton, Africans were on the "r" end of the scale and Europeans and Asians on the "K" end. This was said to correlate as well with brain size, testosterone levels, maturation rate, intelligence and other factors.
It was an interesting theory in some ways, but from my own studies I was pretty sure that there was no evidence that Africans actually engaged in a reproductive strategy that differed from that of other similarly situated humans. Indeed, it appears that foraging people the world over have always had low fertility compared to farmers, that farmers have relatively high fertility, and that industrialized societies see a return to low fertility (a phenomenon that I attribute in large part to opportunity costs for women). This is true of populations from every continent.
Rushton seems to base his suppositions on perceived behavior patterns of people of African descent in post-industrial North America. He explains the phenomenon of black men's fathering multiple children out of wedlock as the operation of the "r" strategy. It is difficult to measure the fertility of such men, and we are left with the fertility of African-American women on which to base our conjectures. White fertility (births per 100,000 women of child bearing age) in 2000 was 65.3, while black fertility was 70.0, hardly a difference crying out for a genetic explanation. In fact, black fertility has fallen about 15 points over the last 20 years and is approaching parity with white women's low fertility. It seems to me much more elegant to attribute trends in black fertility to the social and economic factors with which fertility correlates rather than contriving an evolutionary divergence. Rushton ignores the extensive literature dealing with differences in fertility among economic classes and types of subsistence. In later work, he characterizes the evolution toward the "K" end of the continuum as "progress".
I have since discovered to my dismay that there are quite a few seemingly intelligent and articulate folks on the web who seem to me to be more than a little obsessed with biological differences among races and who are determined to explain every possible social ill in terms of human biological variation, especially putative differences in general intelligence. The Bell Curve brought this issue to the forefront some years ago and has made it a more acceptable topic of discussion and research. Several web sites seem to devote a great deal of energy to the topic, e.g. La Griffe du Lion, Steve Sailer, Gene Expression.
I do not deny the significance of race as a biological concept, since it is clear that folks with common ancestry are likely to share certain genetic legacies and to be differentially affected by disease and environmental factors. But I do deny its supposed moral and political significance. I do not deny that individual humans are endowed with varying degrees of intelligence and other characteristics; however, I deny that this has the moral or political significance that race baiters ascribe to it. Those who are poorly endowed by nature, whether they are black or white or another hue, warrant an extra measure of solicitude, not contempt. And we are all equally moral actors and citizens regardless of our other endowments.
The scientific and quasi-scientific discussions about race have been misused and misapplied by some hateful people to justify the ineptitude of the state in handling the aftermath of Katrina. The victims are seen as deserving their fate because of their inherent inferiority. The country will be better off, say they, with the herd having been culled, so to speak. The racists are coming out of the closet, and the conservative movement is exposing the racist undertones that it has been trying to deny for some time. This appears to be needed to reassure the "base" in the face of undeniable incompetence and callousness on the part of the Bush regime.
Racist intellectuals set the stage for a more intrusive and more powerful state when they suggest that some races require more "moral guidance from society". The statist cannot bear the idea of black people free to live as they please. The patronizing statist imposes regulations for black folks' own good, and the less well intentioned statist imposes regulations to protect himself from those scary black folks and, sometimes, just for the sheer joy of making people unhappy.
I do not advocate suppressing discussion of human variation, but I think that it is critical to emphasize that scientific propositions about variable human endowments and whether or not this variation coincides with "race" should have no bearing on how we treat one another as individuals. To grant moral or political significance to racial categories would be a move to an oppressive collectivism and a denial of the centrality of the individual. Then again, this appears to be what statists are striving for.
UPDATE: A commenter has inspired me to look at Steve Sailer's column that I obliquely referenced above http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm. I wish to emphasize that I did not intend to suggest that Steve Sailer defended the ineptitude of the Bush administration, only that propositions such that blacks wanted native judgment could be and are misused by others to justify allowing black people to suffer and die. Steve Sailer, in contrast, argues that, if one assumes that many of the people of New Orleans are poorly endowed, the government response should have been more prompt and more solicitous of their particular needs. Steve Sailer argues that ignoring racial issues can lead to miscalculation of needs in an emergency, and I presume that he would denounce the misuse of his statements much as I have.
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2 comments:
Hello!
A couple questions and thoughts:
1. Who's suggested the country would be better off with some culling? Has anyone come out and said the death toll was much too low? I take it that however high it goes it won't be high enough to cull much.
2. I take it the "moral guidance from society" is a reference to a recent post by Steve Sailer that has quite a few people upset. I can't think of anything Sailer has written (I haven't read all he's written) that suggests that social moral guidance is basically a matter for the state. He did comment that blacks seemed to stay on more of an even keel in smaller and more rural places, where personal, family, and neighborly connections are closer and more stable.
3. "Those who are poorly endowed by nature, whether they are black or white or another hue, warrant an extra measure of solicitude, not contempt." Why isn't the view that a population that in many places has something like 10 times the violent crime rate of the majority population and has lots of other problems too would do better in a more locally-oriented setting with a denser network of connections--that's the kind of setting "moral guidance" normally comes from--an example of an extra measure of solicitude?
4. We can all agree, I hope, that especially in thinking about difficult and inflammatory topics it's better to try to understand clearly what people actually say and do than think the worst of others on very little or no evidence because doing so seems to make the world a simpler place and gives one's own self-esteem a boost at the expense of those horrible other people.
Best wishes,
A Passerby
Dear Anonymous,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. The culling of the herd comments that I have read were on some right wing blog comment threads. I have not read any comments that the death toll was too low, only the implication that it was optimal.
I do not know whether Steve Sailer advocates more state intervention in the affairs of black people, but the viewpoint that he has expressed that black people need guidance from others, presumably white people, is fodder for statists. Given his low opinion of the capabilities of black people to reason morally, one may reasonably infer that he expects that moral guidance will have to be imposed upon them.
The view that people might be better off in non-urban settings is not contemptuous, but using the view to justify the negligence of the Bush regime is.
I agree that it is important to have candid discussions about inflammatory topics, including race, and I do not suggest that such discussions are problematic except to the extent that they are misused by the uninformed or malicious. Even if everything that Sailer writes about black people as factual propositions is assumed to be true, it is inappropriate to base normative propositions on them. Unless you are a collectivist and statist and enaged in social engineering and legislation over the affairs of others, it is morally and politically irrelevant whether any racial category differs on any dimension from another.
I am not suggesting that those who write about or research race are "racist" in the pejorative sense of the word. I hope that my post will not be misconstrued as a denunciation of those who treat the issues of race thoughtfully.
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