Excellent British radio program deals with race and IQ

BBC Radio has a program called The Moral Maze in which, in each broadcast, a permanent panel questions and challenges a series of guests on a given issue. Its recent show on the James Watson affair, the first time I have listened to the program, suggests that Britain is not as dead as I had thought. The participants, one of whom is Melanie Phillips, are highly articulate, argue logically, have great British accents, and they say and allow to be said astonishingly un-PC things. You would never hear a discussion as intelligent as this in the U.S. media.

The first guest in the Watson discussion was none other than Richard Lynn, one of the foremost IQ researchers in the world. He laid out the different IQ’s of the different races including the 70 IQ for sub-Saharan Africans, and no one fainted. One of the panelists challenged Lynn on a past cutting statement he had made about races who cannot make it, but the challenge was not PC, it was reasonably stated, and Lynn had a fair chance to respond. When the next guest, a woman whose name I didn’t get, suggested that James Watson’s views should not be allowed, Melanie Phillips went after her like gangbusters, revealing that the guest knew nothing about the IQ issue (she had never even heard of Richard Lynn before the program!) and was simply repeating the usual liberal slogan that IQ is a discredited subject because of eugenics and the Holocaust. It was unbelievable to hear a politically correct ignoramus mercilessly exposed as such. You would never see or hear anything like that in the U.S. media.

That’s not to say the show was entirely satisfying. The discussion mostly dealt with the abstract question whether certain things should be talked about, rather than with the substance of the race and IQ question, which it barely touched at all. For example, no one asked Lynn to expand on the racial IQ differences he outlined and to explain their practical consequences. Still, despite the show’s limitations, the participants approached ideas with such logical rigor and clarity that it was invigorating to listen to.

As for Phillips, how can a woman, who on this program was so sharp, intelligent, and courageous in exposing a false liberal position, flat-out refuse to reply to fundamental questions raised by her own incessant writings about Islam? What is there to say? Everyone has his unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, and Phillips certainly has hers.

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Spencer Warren writes:

Phillips’s excellent, probing questions favor pursuing the issue to its scientific conclusion, but she takes the opposite view on Islam!!!

That said, she sounds much brighter than the typical U.S. journalist star. Much, much brighter.

The high level of programs like this (even though, after the first witness, Richard Lynn, it danced around the issue) in my opinion is a product of Britain’s elitist, aristocratic past. NPR and PBS are dumb by comparison.

As traditionalists we appreciate this. The typical Reaganite Repub and libertarian would just complain that the taxpayer shouldn’t have to fund this.

LA replies:

“The high level of programs like this in my opinion is a product of Britain’s elitist, aristocratic past.”

What an interesting thought. It does seem that all the good things about Europe come from it’s pre-egalitarian, pre-World War II, past. Think of all the things people go to Europe to see. Few or none of them are the products of modern democracy. But how many Europeans acknowledge this? Their conscious ideology can only make them despise the past, even as they live off whatever remains of it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 24, 2007 10:16 PM | Send