Saletan’s solution to racial differences in intelligence

George writes:

William Saletan has come out with his follow-up to his article in which he admitted that the racial differences in IQ are genetic. I am not impressed. For instance, he claims:

“Intermarriage is closing the gap. To the extent that IQ differences are genetic, the surest way to eliminate them is to reunite the human genome [emphasis added]. This is already happening, including in my own family. In 1970, one percent of U.S. marriages were between blacks and nonblacks. By 1990, it was 4.5 percent. It may be the best punch line of the IQ debate: The more genetic the racial gap is, the faster we can obliterate it.”

Except of course that intermarriage is closing the IQ gap at the expense of whites where non-half-Asian mixed race children tend to have lower IQs than their white parent. And Jews don’t count as a fully separate race. The original Jewish ethnic group doesn’t really exist anymore because the Jews have picked up so much European DNA over the past two thousand years.

The left is going to have to try harder.

LA replies:

Amazing. Yesterday I predicted that Saletan’s response to the recognition of inherent racial differences in intelligence would be some vastly expanded racial quotas scheme involving an endless commitment by society to equalize racial outcomes despite inherent racial differences of ability. But he’s gone beyond mere racial quotas, to a more primal “solution” that I should have predicted because I have often written about it before.

As I said in my 1994 American Renaissance speech, racial intermarriage is the first and last resort of liberals to the difficulties caused by racial liberalism (scroll down to where I say, “Ultimately the pursuit of race-blindness…”). Liberals start by taking the following positions: (1) race does not matter; (2) all races are of equal abilities; (3) all races are equally assimilable into the same society; (4) we must not discriminate between races and must not exclude any race but must be race-blind; and (4) anyone who is race-conscious is a morally defective human being who must be re-educated or purged. On the basis of these beliefs, liberals integrate blacks with whites and they also open the nation’s borders to tens of millions of Hispanics, who are all believed to have the same abilities as whites and to be completely assimilable into America. But then when it turns out that all races are not of equal abilities and that non-discriminatory racial inclusion and the resulting racial diversity has created insoluble dilemmas for society, what’s the liberals’ response? Wipe out all the races via mass racial intermarriage. Suddenly race, which didn’t matter at all (and anyone who thought it mattered was a defective human being), matters so much and creates such intractable problems that the only way to solve those problems is to eliminate all the existing human races by “re-uniting the human genome” and creating a new, blended human race that no one has ever seen before. The admission of permanent racial differences not only makes liberals give up their belief in race blindness, it also makes them give up the value they place on high intelligence. Because blacks and browns can’t assimilate with and perform intellectually the same as whites, the whites must blend themselves with the blacks and browns and thus go out of existence. Because the intrinsically lower intelligence of some groups is unacceptable, the answer is to get rid of the groups with the higher intelligence along with the groups with the lower intelligence. Meanwhile the liberals never admit that it was their own belief in racial sameness, racial equality, and racial inclusion that led to these intractable problems and that now makes necessary this unprecedented social-and-racial engineering scheme, which includes the elimination not only of our own race but of all other races.

Even Hitler never proposed the systematic erasure of all the historic races of mankind. But liberals like William (“re-unite the human genome”) Saletan do, without blinking an eye.

—end of initial entry—

Sage McLaughlin writes:

All I can say is “wow.” The devotion of liberals to the notion of a white debt to nonwhites now extends to their very daughters, who are to be given over as quickly as possible to nonwhites in order to pay some genetically-bequeathed debt to those of lesser IQ. This is truly horrifying stuff, when you break it down and look at it in its essentials. The “problem” of white versus black IQ is to be solved by simply liquidating whites as a race. This is the logic of Marxism applied to race.

Aren’t liberals the ones always sanctimoniously reminding us that whites are a minority on this planet? Well, in my opinion whites ought to start acting like a minority, and at least begin to take exception to the notion that they have some cosmic moral obligation to interbreed themselves out of existence.

Paul Gottfried writes:

There are two types of liberals I have encountered: the fake ones who are Jewish, Irish and members of other white ethnic minorities, who dislike and fear the white Christian or Protestant majority; and the WASP liberals, who are morally arrogant and truly suicidal. If race mingling were to become the order of the day, in all probability the Protestants I work among would practice it with religious intensity. But somehow I doubt that the staff of the ADL or AJC or the Catholic masses who support Kerry, Pelosi, Kennedy, and Dodd would be terribly eager to have their kids intermarry with inner city blacks.

Mark A. writes:

This is decadence. The white left represents what Freud would call a death cult. They do not have Schopenhauer’s “Will to Live.” The white left is so decadent, they now wish to terminate themselves. To borrow a phrase from Jim Woodhill’s post on C-WMDs (cultural weapons of mass destruction), this is “auto-genocide.”

We live in interesting times.

LA writes:

Let’s note that Saletan’s proposal shoots down George’s optimistic prognosis that was posted last night. Among other positive developments that George thought would result from liberals’ recognition of inherited racial IQ differences was a rejection of low IQ immigration. But it turns out to be just the opposite. If the aim is to re-unite the human genome through systematic intermarriage of all races until the entire human species is blended into one race, then white liberals will want to increase Hispanic and other non-white immigration so as to facilitate the process of racial blending between whites and nonwhites.

These thoughts lead to a consideration of the imposing practical difficulties presented by the intermarriage scheme. For one thing, even if there were a huge amount of intermarriage, there would still be lots of distinct racial types remaining within this mixture, and those distinct types would still socially differentiate themselves from and discriminate against the other types. So the only way the true elimination of human racial differences could be carried out would be through a multi-generational controlled process (and it would require a global totalitarian government to carry this out) of forcing people of different racial types to intermarry with other racial types until literally all the distinct racial types had ceased to exist.

However, even if mankind embarked on this multigenerational, totalitarian process, it would break down after one generation. Why? Because after one generation of white-nonwhite intermarriage, the white race would have come to an end, and, with the end of the white race, white liberalism would have come to an end. There thus would be no people remaining who would care about equalizing the whole human race. Therefore the only thing the intermarriage scheme could achieve would be the elimination of the white race. The nonwhite races who have not yet intermarried would continue to exist, along with the blended white-nonwhite types who had resulted from the first generation of intermarriage.

While this result may seem to represent a failure of Saletan’s hopes, it is in fact consistent with the real purpose of modern liberalism, which is not to make literally all human groups equal to each other, but rather to get rid of the white West, and, by doing so, to get of white superiority vis a vis nonwhites.

Paul Gottfried writes:

You are the one of the few people I know who takes on such issues day and night, with brutal honesty and without descending into mere horror stories about black crime. Actually Saletan is to be commended for recognizing the demonstrable in terms of cognitive differences among the races.

Robert C. writes:

The two big outliers are Jews and Africans. [Outlier: an extreme deviation from the mean.] So, as a modest suggestion, all Jewish women should take only black husbands (too bad for the men), and all African women should take Jewish or China/Japan wives. (Not enough Jewish men for all those Africans, so we have to resort to men from China/Japan.) Then Jews and Africans would have more typical IQs. Except … after one generation there would no longer be any Jews or Africans.

Would Saletan accept that or would he make an unprincipled exception?

Perhaps we should wait until science comes up with gene therapy to improve intelligence. Then the other aspects of the race/cultures can remain the same. Same for Europeans.

LA replies:

I hope Robert C. sends his comment to Saletan.

Karen writes from England:

Isn’t this the final meltdown of liberalism? If Saletan’s proposal succeeded, and I don’t think it ever would, the white race would be extinguished. This is a genocide proposal worse than anything the Nazis ever dreamt of. Is there no way that people who incite genocide can be prosecuted and jailed?

It seems from the discussions on your site, that there are plenty of people who have conservative views and oppose mass Third World immigration; but who is going to formulate a plan of action and execute it? There is a pressing need for prompt action to expel Third World immigrants from the West and remove the liberals from power. And there is no sign of that happening in the USA.

The suicidal WASP liberals that Paul Gottfried talks of are most likely the English descended Chuch of England Episcopalians who exhibit the same behavioural pattern that eventually led to the fall of the British Empire. They have a need to have a group of people they can look down upon, and if this group behaves in an utterly dysfunctional manner, they like them all the better. They then embark upon “civilising missions” to elevate the dysfunctional group and try to turn them into “Englishmen.” This was carried out to disastrous effects in India, Nigeria and other countries of the British Empire. The result was the rise of a “British educated elite” who led a drive for independence. The lesson is that you cannot transform another people and all attempts to change or improve them will lead to your own destruction.

Kristor writes:

Saletan’s solution to the diversity problem has already been put into effect in India, Haiti and Latin America. The result is that people who look European enjoy social advantages, and dominate the ruling classes, while the people who look more Dravidian, African, or Amer-Indian are at the bottom of the ladder. In between the top layer, who are almost indistinguishable from their European ancestors, and the bottom, are layer upon layer of jealously guarded “races” such as quadroons, octoroons, etc. The “problem” cannot be “solved,” because there will always be people who are—genetically—better and more meritorious than others. The fact that people are not equally competent to succeed is the whole basis of human courtship and mate selection. It is also a form of diversification of the human genetic portfolio. That’s why I use the scare quotes. The “problem” of difference is not a problem, but a source of richness and adaptability.

LA replies:

Kristor persuades us of the complete unworkability of the intermarriage option. Short of a literal merger of the whole human species into one race, massive intermarraige would not lessen the problems of diversity but vastly exacerbate them, by increasing (not lessening) the number of racial types.

Liberals such as Saletan don’t think. Their thoughts are not guided by the real world. They just have verbal formulas going through their heads, with all the formulas pursing equality. If one egalitarian formula is finally, definitively, and undeniably disproven (e.g. all races have potentially the same intellectual abilities), the liberals just pick another egalitarian formula to replace it (e.g., let’s have global intermarriage to eliminate racial differences). The second formula is as unreal as the first, because they both proceed from an ideological requirement, not observation of reality.

Alan Levine writes:

Despite my own skepticism about your position on race and intermarriage, I found the item on Saletan a corker.

It evidently did not occur to this dope that to the extent intermarriage takes place, it is, and will be (I am assuming it is voluntary, but perhaps he has the Sabine women in mind somewhere) between people of relatively similar levels of intelligence, so intermarriage could have little if any effect in eradicating any racial differences in intelligence. [LA replies: But how could it be voluntary? How do you get entire populations intermarrying without totalitarian control? Therefore the same coercion that would be making people marry individuals of different races, would also make people marry individuals of a different level of intelligence.]

The whole business reminds me of Nietzsche’s prescription for breeding supermen—mating Prussian officers with Jewish women—but that made more sense than seeking a prescription for breeding the mediocre. [LA asks: Did Nietzsche say that? I’ve never seen that statement.]

It also reminded me of an exchange I had with one of my professors at NYU, back in 1968. Although a Marxist and New Leftist, he confided to me that he thought there would always be racial conflict and prejudice until everyone was intermarried and was the same brown color. Even then, I was struck by the cart-before-the horse reasoning involved, the crude procrustean-bed passion for making everyone the same, and the curious pessimism behind the “Marxist” utopianism.

Alex H. writes:

From chapter 47 of “The Camp of the Saints”:

“Also present was a rather large number of white women, married—like Elise, for example—to gentlemen of color. Everyone listened to what they had to say, though a few whites were noticeably less than enthusiastic, seeing them as symbols of the death of the race. A number of years before, Ralph Ginzburg, the famous American publisher, had printed a series of photos in his magazine Eros, which had caused not a little ink to be spilled. They showed an interracial couple—white woman, black man—in various stages of nude embrace. With a caption that read as follows: “Tomorrow these couples will be recognized as the pioneers of an enlightened age, in which prejudice will be dead and the only race will be the human race.” Yes, that’s what it was all about. And everyone listened with an almost religious awe, because, in point of fact, they spoke in the name of death. Only a white woman can have a white baby. Let her choose not to conceive one, let her choose only nonwhite mates, and the genetic results aren’t long in coming.”

Felicie writes:

My parents met at the university. My mother married my father because he was the smartest boy in the program, and my father married my mother because she was the smartest girl there. In doing so, according to Saletan, they are guilty of racism. My mother should have married the dumbest boy, and my father—the dumbest girl. What an absurd idea. People have a strong biological investment in propagating their genes and try to marry with the view of optimizing their children’s genetic makeup. According to Saletan’s modest proposal, we should ignore the most powerful stimulus of sexual selection that gives meaning to all our competitive endeavors. We might as well commit suicide.

LA writes:

Can you imagine this discussion at, say, The Corner? The boys wouldn’t even have the vocabulary to approach this subject.

Alan Levine writes:

Was a bit puzzled by Karen from England’s comments on the British elite during the empire trying to make everyone like themselves and admiring the most dysfunctional of their subjects. They did no such things. This is a very strange picture of the Victorian British. They rarely intervened in their subjects’ lives except to prohibit the most grotesque and evil customs involving loss of life—human sacrifice, cannibalism, suttee, and thagi—and slavery. The development of an Anglicized class of Indians was a natural response to the needs of civil service, military and economic requirements and was very much a process in which the Indians took the initiative, but which the British did not obstruct. The same process took place in every other empire, but more slowly, because the rulers were less tolerant and the peoples involved less advanced than the Indians. I can’t think of a case where the British admired the most dysfunctional of their subjects. Some of them admired the more primitive ones in a patronizing manner, but even then for some genuine virtue such as bravery. I would not comment at such length, but it bothers me to hear such things from a conservative who should know better. To me this sort of thing (I have seen it before) is sad evidence of the extent to which Western self-loathing is internalized even on the right.

LA replies:

While Mr. Levine’s points about the relations between the British and their Indian subjects strike me as accurate, it also seems to me that there is a core of truth in what Karen said, though she may have applied it incorrectly. And that truth is that modern liberal elites require dysfunctional and unassimilable Others upon whom they can demonstrate their own liberal virtues of non-discrimination, tolerance, and inclusion—the more dysfunctional and unassimilable the Other, the greater the liberal virtue of the elite in tolerating and including them. While this is just a guess, it seems to me that Karen may have been taking that truth about modern liberals and projecting it backward in time on the British Raj, which was not modern liberal.

George replies:

You wrote:

“If the aim is to re-unite the human genome through systematic intermarriage of all races until the entire human species is blended into one race, then white liberals will want to increase Hispanic and other non-white immigration so as to facilitate the process of racial blending between whites and nonwhites.”

I did not claim left-liberals as a group would renounce nondiscriminatory immigration, though some individual left liberals may eventually throw in the towel on immigration.

My theory is that ordinary white Americans will stop believing in and/or acquiescing to nondiscriminatory immigration and other aspects of liberalism. The left has no power over white Americans if whites themselves stopped believing in nondiscrimination. When whites openly reject left policies, the political power the left has over Western civilization will break down.

Proving that IQ varies by race will threaten nondiscriminatory immigration because it throws into question whether low IQ races and their descendents can ever truly join the middle class. The left doesn’t care about assimilation, of course. But ordinary whites do expect non-white immigrants to assimilate because the left is always assuring them that modern immigrants are just like the European immigrants of old. If science proves that those immigrants will forever be welfare and cultural burdens on the nation, support among whites for legal immigration will be put in jeopardy.

In the case of miscegenation. Saletan is now proposing a mad Frankensteinian global experiment to equalize IQs through intermarriage. But how in the world is Saletan going to get more whites willingly to intermarry when science eventually proves mulatto children tend to have lower IQs than the children’s white parents? Unless the government forces whites at gunpoint to reproduce with non-whites, interracial pairings will drop through the floor the day this discovery is announced.

The left may become angrier and more tyrannical, but without public support for nondiscrimination, the left’s days will be numbered.

The key to our future is what we ordinary Americans do, that was what I was focusing in on.

On a side note, Saletan in his seventh and tenth points seems to give credence to my speculation that psychometrics will lead to the left embracing some forms of genetic engineering/Eugenics to raise minority IQs:

“Genes can be changed.

“Hereditarians point to phenylketunuria as an example of a genetic but treatable cognitive defect. Change the baby’s diet, and you protect its brain. They also tout breast-feeding as an environmental intervention. White women are three times more likely than black women to breast-feed their babies, they observe, so if more black women did it, IQs might go up. But now it turns out that breast-feeding, too, is a genetically regulated factor.”

He doesn’t openly call for things like screening minority embryos for intelligence and then implanting the embryo into the womb. But you can see how the desire on the left to equalize life is so strong that this is the direction they are heading towards.

LA replies:

George’s distinction between ordinary Americans and the cultural-leftist elite (which I had missed when commenting on his earlier statement) is well taken. His argument is persuasive and stimulates a feeling of hope that we may become free of the rule of modern liberalism. At the same time, we must also remember that the independence of the American people from the leftist elites has often been over-estimated by conservatives.

Pete P. writes:

Alan Levine, in claiming that Nietzsche advocated interbreeding between Jewish women and Prussian officers, may be referring to Chapter 251 of Beyond Good Evil:

[T]hey thirst for some place where they can be settled, permitted, respected at last and where they can put an end to the nomadic life, the “wandering Jew”—; and this urge and impulse (which in itself perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts) should be carefully noted and accommodated—in which case it might be practical and appropriate to throw the anti-Semitic hooligans out of the country….

It would clearly be unproblematic for the stronger and more strongly delineated types of new Germanism (the officers of noble rank from the Mark [Brandenburg] for instance) to get involved with them: and it would be very interesting to see whether the genius of fortune and fortitude (and above all some spirit and spiritedness, which are in very short supply in the place just mentioned—) could not be added into, bred into, the hereditary art of commanding and obeying—both of which are classic features of the Mark these days.

LA replies:

Most interesting. I just checked out the whole chapter of BG&E. Nietzsche doesn’t specifically speak of intermarriage but of “relations,” but that seems to be what he’s getting at. Nietzsche is pretty complicated on the Jews. He (1) harshly criticized them as the originators of the “slave morality of resentment”; (2) talked them up as one of the great peoples of history; (3) strongly and repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism; (4) condemned the German state; (5) called for Prussian officers to marry Jewish women so as to add Jewish “spirit” to the Prussian talents for command and obedience; and (5) gave birth to the nihilist, radically anti-Christian philosophy that paved the way to Nazism and the extermination of European Jewry.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2007 11:44 AM | Send