Watson’s hara-kiri behavior becomes even harder to explain

Decrying the lynch mob that went after James Watson, Steve Sailer also brings out the disgraceful silence of National Review on the matter. Sailer further makes the point I’ve repeatedly made, that Watson by apologizing for his truthful comment instead of defending it sealed his downfall. However, in light of my comparison of Watson to Lawrence Summers, here’s a startling fact. According to Sailer, “in the epilogue of his new memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, Watson makes clear his contempt for Summers’ cowardice.”

Amazing. How then can we explain Watson’s Summers-like behavior in making a very un-PC comment he was unprepared to defend, which in turn inevitably led to his extravagantly apologizing for it when attacked? I don’t know.

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James P. writes:

The “disgraceful silence” of NRO about Watson shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the low quality of most of the participants on The Corner. And if they had chosen to notice the Watson controversy, what sort of commentary could one expect from pathetic imbeciles like Kathryn Lopez? Even the ones who are reasonably intelligent are more concerned with pop culture than real issues.

Jeremy G. writes:

I think the explanation for Watson’s behavior is a straightforward lack of courage. I don’t judge him for this. He was up against a mass hysteria from every direction. Since he clearly thought he could stand firm, he didn’t honestly pre-assess his level of courage. No soldier knows for sure how brave he really is until the enemy actually starts shooting at him. And I think Jared Taylor has nailed it on the head:

“[Watson] fled the field at the first sound of guns.”

LA replies:

The fear theory says that Watson knew what he was doing, but simply lacked the guts to stand when the guns started firing. The problem with this theory is that Watson’s initial comment seemed to come out of nowhere. He has not written or spoken about race differences previously, and if he did want to make this argument now, wouldn’t he have done so in a more considered way, in an article or a speech? Instead, in the midst of a long personal interview, along with many other topics, he tossed in the business about African intelligence.

What this indicates to me is that Watson did not even rise to the level of Larry Summers. Summers’s comments about the possible reasons for women’s lesser abilities in the highest level of the sciences were carefully thought out. It was a written speech, and he was making a sincere attempt to open up for discussion a topic that had been closed. Then the sky fell in on him, and, partly because the idea of intelligence differences was not HIS idea, not something he was committed to himself, but merely something he was trying to raise as a reasonable possibility to be discussed, he was not prepared to argue for that view, which, again, was not his view. He did not have a substantive position on women’s intelligence. He had an old-fashioned liberal procedural position that we ought to be open to reasonable ideas. As an old-fashioned liberal, i.e., as someone who believes in no substantive truth but wants to organize society in terms of neutral procedures, he lacked the resources within himself to resist an attack on truth by the hard left, which is consciously opposed both to the substantive truth of human differences and to old-fashioned liberal neutrality.

Watson, by contrast, did not think out his position in advance, he was just casually sounding off. Which suggests that he didn’t even think of the negative Summers example prior to making his own comments. He didn’t think, “I’m stepping onto dangerous ground here, I’d better be prepared for what happens, so I don’t screw up the way Summers did.” So, when he was attacked, he was discombobulated and retreated. Thus his initial comment was carelessly irresponsible, and his apology was carelessly irresponsible.

In short, if the Summers affair was tragedy, the Watson affair was farce.

Ran M. writes:

I’ve heard you mention several times that Watson did not write about race or IQ. You may be interested to know that Steve Sailor said in his blog (without elaboration): “…I bought Watson’s book. Sure, enough, after an hour or two of reading, I strike paydirt. The most important part of Watson’s book is directly focused on my obsessions.”

LA replies:

Also in Sailer’s Vdare article from last week, he lays out the case that Watson in his new book had a considered position on race differences in intelligence.

I agree in part and disagree in part. The quotes from Watson’s book provided by Sailer are about the general fact of genetic differences. The closest Watson apparently comes to asserting racial differences in intelligence is in the book’s penultimate paragraph:

“A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

Now, to say that “there is no firm reason to anticipate” that different races’ abilities will have “evolved identically,” is not the same thing as definitely stating that that the races differ in intelligence, nor does it state how large are these differences in intelligence. Watson’s statement doesn’t come within a thousand miles, for example, of what Michael Levin said in the Australian journal Quadrant around 1990, that blacks are “significantly less intelligent” than whites.

So, on one hand, I must retract my above comment that Watson did not make any considered statements on the issue prior to his interview. On the other hand, the considered statements he made did not go very far. His comment in his interview with the Times of London was more assertive and sweeping, and THAT was the comment that got him in trouble and that he was not prepared to defend. He carelessly went beyond what he had said in his book, and when attacked, he retreated. Then, trying to recover, he restated in a newspaper article the more moderate arguments from his book. But by then the damage had been done.

James W. writes:

Summers, and other intellectuals or opinion makers of any stripe, are responsible for what they are getting into since that is where they live. Watson’s mistake was that no matter the content of his opinion, he let loose with it in an arena in which he is unprepared and overmatched.

Some rise by sin, others by virtue fall. (Measure for Measure.)

Paul Cella writes:

I have some trouble seeing why NR’s silence on James Watson is “disgraceful.” Leaving aside the really stupid and insulting way in which he phrased his controversial remarks, this guy favors all manner of appalling neo-eugenic nostrums. He’s fully onboard with the current eugenic regime, in which an estimated 90 percent of babies with Down’s Syndrome are aborted. He has indicated that this regime should be broadened to include other human defectives. It may be too much to link him with the more forceful and brazen materialists like Richard Dawkins (who is on record calling the teaching of religion to children “child abuse”), but there is little doubt that he is in the camp of those who hail the new age of genetics and biotechnology—an age which, to anyone informed by the Christian tradition, looks like the sheerest madness.

To put it more colorfully, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, I wouldn’t p__s on Watson if he were on fire.

PS—has Derbyshire said nothing about him?

LA replies:

Watson’s other bad positions are irrelevant to this discussion, they are not the matter of the controversy, they are not why he was attacked. The significance of this event does not have to do with Watson as a person or with his views generally but with whether people can speak about racial differences in intelligence and other un-PC topics; and if they do speak about them, how they should handle themselves when attacked.

Watson’s stands on eugenics etc. are not affected in any way by this debate; so Mr. Cella’s refraining from defending him doesn’t accomplish anything. What is affected by this debate is the ability to resist liberal PC orthodoxy on an issue of great importance. Why is it important? Because the fact that racial differences in intellectual abilities are natural is not acknowledged, and so the differences are blamed on society, which must be constantly re-engineered to achieve an equality that can’t be achieved. And as long as it’s not achieved, society is guilty of racism, and so it continues to deny its own value and to allow itself to be destroyed. If we can disprove the liberal egalitarian fiction that all peoples have the same abilities, the liberal campaign to destroy Western society will be weakened. But PC still intimidates people away from making these necessary and true arguments about human differences.

And that’s why the Watson issue matters, though, as I’ve said over and over, the unserious way he approached the topic doomed him from the start.

Yes, Derbyshire has spoken about it. But on racial issues he’s so off in his own realm from the rest of NRO that I guess I was thinking of him as a separate category.

LA continues:

As for my use of the word disgraceful for NRO, Sailer made clear why that is an appropriate word in this case. Thirteen years ago NR treated the question of race differences in intelligence in serious fashion, with an entire symposium devoted to The Bell Curve, and other articles as well on that topic. And now one of the most famous scientists in the world makes one comment in an interview that black Africans are not as intelligent as Europeans, and he’s instantly forced out of his job, and NRO, as a magazine, does not consider this worthy of mention. I say that’s disgraceful, just as NRO’s closing out of America’s most important Islam critic Robert Spencer is disgraceful. And they do it for the same reason. NRO has excluded any discussion of differences between human groups that matter culturally, socially, and politically. So it refuses to publish any argument that there is something inherent about the doctrines of Islam that make that religion dangerous to non-Muslims, and it refuses to publish the idea that there may be enduring racial differences that have an effect on the socio-economic outcomes of different racial groups. So this huge PC event occurs, and NRO doesn’t notice it.

M. Jose writes:

I think you are misinterpreting Jeremy G.’s remarks.

Jeremy said:

“I think the explanation for Watson’s behavior is a straightforward lack of courage. I don’t judge him for this. He was up against a mass hysteria from every direction. Since he clearly thought he could stand firm, he didn’t honestly pre-assess his level of courage.”

I do not think he means that Watson was anticipating the outcry when he made the statement about racial differences in intelligence, but that when he made contemptuous statements about Summers, he overestimated his own ability to stand firm in a similar situation.

Put another way, I think what Jeremy meant was:

“I think the explanation for Watson’s contempt for Summers’ cowardice and subsequent similar cowardly behavior is a straightforward lack of courage… Since, when he condemned Summers, he clearly thought that he would be able to stand firm were he in Summers’ shoes, he didn’t honestly pre-assess what his courage would be in a similar situation.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2007 10:43 AM | Send