“Jewish Genius”—and Jewish moronism

Readers who missed it when it was posted in April 2007 may find of interest my summary and discussion of Charles Murray’s celebrated Commentary article, “Jewish Genius,” especially as Murray deals with the Cochran-Harpending theory of Jewish intelligence which has received renewed attention since the recent publication of their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion. I am not impressed by the Cochran-Harpending theory, and neither is Murray. The notion that high Jewish IQ only began in the high Middle Ages, as a result of Jews’ being restricted to cognitively demanding professions, seems most unlikely to me. As I put it in my article, quoting Murray, “Are we to believe that the Bible, the greatest book in the world, ‘was produced by an intellectually run-of-the-mill Levantine tribe?’ ” It is not surprising that this obvious point did not occur to Cochran and Harpending, given their materialist-Darwinian outlook.

After following Murray’s fascinating speculations on the origins of enhanced Jewish IQ, we can contemplate the spectacle of the European Jewish Congress welcoming the Muslim takeover of Europe while damning the philo-Semite Geert Wilders as a threat to everything good and decent, because he seeks to prevent that takeover. To explain this phenomenon, we need a theory of the lowering of Jewish intelIigence as well as of the raising of Jewish intelligence. And my theory is: belief in liberalism turns smart people into hopeless morons.

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Mike Berman writes:

You wrote:

“[M]y theory is; belief in liberalism turns smart people into hopeless morons.”

That’s it! That’s it! Your theory answers a question I’ve heard so often. You were even asked a version of that question at the Preserving Western Civilization conference and I wish you had returned that response then.

The most convincing proof offered by Cochran and Harpending for their Ashkenazi gene theory is the association between those afflicted with Ashkenazi hereditary diseases and individuals with elevated IQs.

From Steve Sailer’s review:

Cochran, Harpending, and Hardy cite evidence that the victims of three hereditary diseases that primarily afflict Ashkenazis tending to be smarter than even other Ashkenazis. For example, a study of patients with torsion dystonia, which until recently put 10 percent of its victims in wheelchairs, found their average IQ was 121.

Tay-Sachs and several other Ashkenazi sphingolipid neurological diseases could be analogous to sickle cell anemia, which is the snag in nature’s initial attempt to provide genetic protection against the horrendous tropical killer, falciparum malaria.

That mosquito-borne disease appears to have only become a devastating threat a few thousand years ago, when agriculture began in Sub-Saharan Africa. Enough generations have since gone by for the sickle cell mutation to emerge and spread in tropical Africa and other warm places ravaged by this most deadly of malarias. If you inherit a copy of the sickle cell gene from one of your parents, you are more likely to survive falciparum malaria. But, unfortunately, if you inherit copies from both of your parents, you will die in infancy—unless you get modern medical care.

The sickle cell gene increases until the benefit it provides in surviving malaria is equaled by the toll it takes in sickle cell anemia.

The Ashkenazi sphingolipid disorders could be similar. In the great tradition of Einstein’s paper on theGeneral Theory of Relativity, the Utah authors have proposed a straight-forward test of one part of their theory: people with one copy of the genes that cause the Ashkenazi sphingolipid diseases should have higher IQs than their siblings who have no copies.

If validated, the implications of this discovery would be extraordinarily broad.

William A. writes:

Although I am in complete agreement with you that the Cochran-Harpending theory does not account for many, many things that we know about the history of Jewish intellectual achievement, I find the appeal to the authorship of the Bible somewhat lacking, unless you are a complete non-believer—which is fine. But if you do believe that the Bible was authored by God, either directly and explicitly word-for-word, or implicitly by inspiration, then the human amanuenses who committed the Divine words to parchment didn’t necessarily by doing so prove their high native intelligence. [LA replies: I disagree. However the Bible was written, whatever the precise nature of the divine inspiration or guidance involved in the authorship and how it was transmitted to the human authors, it was written by human beings, not by human transcription machines.]

More importantly, you are certainly correct that you have to turn yourself into a moron in order to believe the idiocies of leftism. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of the Jews in the West are so in love with the leftist zeitgeist, that they willingly turn themselves into idiots. And they may not even reach the level of “useful idiots.” Their knee-jerk leftism is absolutely useless, for them or for anyone else. [LA replies: I can’t disagree. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem here.]

Irwin Graulich (a much-in-demand speaker on Jewish issues) writes:

Almost no one knows Jews as well as I do. Without question, Jews are one of the dumbest and certainly one of the most foolish groups on the planet!!!! I mean it.

Charles Murray does not know what he is talking about.

Henry Harpending writes:

Would you accept that the Book of Mormon was produced by an intellectually run-of-the-mill European tribe?

LA replies:

The Book of Mormon is an intellectually run of the mill book, and it was not the product of a tribe, but of a religious scam artist doing a mediocre job of imitating the cadences of the King James Bible.

Why then, you may ask, is Mormonism successful? I would say that while its scripture and its theological claims are embarrassing, it offers a patriarchal way of life that appeals to human needs and that works.

Ben W. writes:

“These Jewish fools, these schlemiels, these shmendriks, these schmegeggies…”

You can add “farshtinkener” to the list (from “The Joys of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten, 1968).

Ben W. continues:

Can Jews be moronic? QED.

Israeli woman mistakenly junks $1 million mattress.

JERUSALEM (AP)—An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress with $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites, Israeli media reported Wednesday.

The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through garbage at a dump in southern Israel.

At least she hadn’t invested it with Madoff…

Leonard D. writes:

You wrote:

“we need a theory of the lowering of Jewish IQ as well as of the raising of Jewish IQ”

My guess is you were being facetious, given that you live in New York City and therefore likely know many progressive Jews (and not just intellectuals). However, my guess is that some may take you seriously. Jews are not losing IQ. Their measured IQ has not changed. What they have lost is the intelligence of tradition, education, and common sense. [LA replies: The saying among conservatives, “If Jews are so smart, why are they so stupid,” is so common, that I didn’t think it was necessary to spell it out. Of course I didn’t mean literally that Jewish IQ was dropping, but that Jews don’t think, they don’t look at reality; they just keep repeating, with great energy and ardor, the same false and destructive slogans and attitudes. ]

I certainly have a theory about that. Liberalism (including progressivism) is a species of idealism. And idealism of any kind has the effect of blinding people. This can sometimes be good; often it is not. But it always means losing touch with reality. This is the root of the endumbening of progressives, including progressive Jews.

Richard S. writes:

The Jewish propensity to see no enemies on the left clearly descends from the debt Jews owe the Enlightenment, which, let’s face it, was a leftist project. The Enlightenment opened the wide world to what previously had been a parochial people. The Enlightenment let Jews in (to the West) and out (of their straightjacket). That that same universalist Enlightenment must find its terminus in hatred for a people as particularist as the Jews is lost on all those Jews who can’t get past their gratitude for liberal tolerance of them (whether they admit it or not). The Jewish political equation: gratitude = stupidity.

Alan S. writes:

Jews: good hardware, bad software.

LA replies:

Yes. Earlier today I was thinking of saying, “It’s as though liberalism were a software program that messed up the hardware.”

But maybe it’s like Apple, where the hardware and software are one package.

Kilroy M. writes from Australis:

Liberalism is an ideology that processes its ideas and symbols through the medium of emotion. leftists may think in simple terms, but they are ultimately motivated by feeling, not deep thought. That is why even the most intelligent leftist will appear to be stupid. The resulting culture of “niceness” will turn anybody into a “moron” this way, Jewish, Christian or whatever: Kalpakgian writing in the NOR illustrates a typical example of the Christian left. It has nothing to do with low or high IQ.

LA replies:

“That is why even the most intelligent leftist will appear to be stupid.”

Yes.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 10, 2009 12:52 PM | Send