* Richard Spencer’s White nationalism is a product of the European melting pot of America, but there is no evidence that it is particular or culturally specific enough to be able to create a deep-rooted sense of identity that tugs at the heart in the way that being English or French does. In fact I sometimes wonder whether the ‘white guilt’ religion of white liberals in American society is itself a curious attempt to create a racial identity in a land where whites have lost much of their old European national and regional identities. But whether that is the case or not, it is a mistake to transplant the racial situation of the New World onto Europe, which, while there are paralells, is also quite different.
In reality the EU is bad for whites and bad for European civilisation. One only has to look at the enemies ranged against the Brexit vote–Obama, Merkel, the IMF. It’s like a who’s who of ISteve.
The EU is a Utopian dream, as was the Soviet Union. Totalitarian societies are created by people who, like Merkel with her refugees–’if I can’t do this then this isn’t my Germany’ believe so strongly in the goodness of their own feelings and instincts that it allows them to over-rule any law or restriction that stands in their way. If you accept the logic of the EU then you will probably accept the logic of a one world government and the steamrollering of race, culture, family, and morality that this will carry in its wake by those who will will enfore their rule with ruthless piety. For me a world stripped of all the glorious quirks of human culture for the sake of global capital and leftist religion is a nightmare not a fantasy. It’s like wanting to see all the rainforests and all its natural wonders pulled up and covered in tarmac. I want the globalists to lose, and it can’t come soon enough.
So I’m voting to leave.
* It’s a mistake to transplant the white nationalism of America onto Europe which still has particular ethnic identities which seem to have a depth and emotional pull that ‘whiteness’ has not yet proved itself to have in America. In fact I do wonder if the ‘white guilt’ religion of white American liberals is an attempt to try and fill this void with what amounts to a new basis for a shared sense of history and common future of white Americans.
The EU is a utopian dream just as the soviet union was. Totalitarian societies are created by the kind of leftist idealists who are dangerous because they have such a high regard for their own idealism and moral goodness that it allows them to over-rule any law or restriction because they trust so deeply in the goodness of their own instincts, just like Angela Merkel and her ‘if I can’t do this it’s not the Germany I know’ approach to re-writing German immigration law–the liberal version of the ‘Fuhrer principle’ if you will. Such are the people that govern the EU. If you accept the logic of one-Europe government you will also probably accept the logic of one world government, and the steamrollering of all race, culture, family, religious and moral difference that will come in its wake and which will be enforced with ruthless piety.
So I’m voting to leave to put a spoke in the wheel of international capital and left wing religious utopianism.
* In the EU, crops that were not on a list of approved varieties were forbidden. It takes a considerable amount of money to get a vegetable variety on that list, so anything people aren’t willing to shell out huge amounts of money for cannot be sold.
And when I say “cannot be sold”, I mean that gardening businesses that sold old ‘heirloom’ and open-pollinated varieties were raided by armed men wearing body armor and carrying assault weapons. Because they were selling types of beans and peas and rutabagas that weren’t approved.
These weren’t foreign plants being brought across national borders, these were old and familiar vegetables that had been grown for decades if not centuries and posed no conceivable risk to anyone. All those gardeners were turned into criminals.
I don’t understand why the British thought entering the EU was a good idea, and I have no idea why they’d think leaving wasn’t the obvious choice. They should regain their own sovereignty in all matters, from immigration to what sorts of seeds should be sold, and scrap trying to centrally plan their economy.
* I’ve been expecting all along that Remain would win by a slim majority, similar to the Scottish referendum recently. I am absolutely committed to escaping from the EU, but I just think the referendum was called too soon, before we had achieved significant Parliamentary representation for the Leave camp. Such a vote will always in Britain tend to stick with the status quo, imo, and especially when the leadership hierarchies of all the mainstream political parties are arguing for that.
But I have been pleasantly surprised by the strong showing of the Leave campaigners in the polls. It seems clear they have won the arguments and shifted opinion. It feels like a cruel dangling of hope, though, for me.
Whatever the result though, it ends nothing. The goal was never to have, or to win, a referendum. The objective was always, and remains, to escape from the birthing United States of Europe before we are faced with only the options available to Carolinans and Virginians in 1861. There’s a long way to go from even a reasonably strong Leave victory (55%, say) to actually getting out, when the forces against getting out are so powerful and so entrenched in the business, media and political high ground. A referendum result, of course, is not binding on Parliament. And even then of course, having dealt with the priority threat, we have to face the issues of getting out from under US “influence”……
It won’t be the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it might perhaps be the end of the beginning (to use my favourite political quote yet again).
Much the same applies, of course, to a defeat for the British patriots, if that is the result tomorrow. The fight goes on, because it must go on. There can be no compromise or acceptance of defeat when the very existence of the nation as an independent entity is at stake.
* I would counter that the EU is not only anti-nationalist but also hostile to indigenous Europeans. The machinery of the EU is designed to break down national barriers and blur individual European identities by bringing in non-Europeans and mixing up the different European ethnicities the best they can. I hope that the UK exits the EU and this causes a domino effect where other nations break away until the EU finally crumbles. I don’t see this happening, call me cynical (and I hope I’m wrong), but I think the vote will be rigged. The political elite has a lot riding on this experiment.
A united Europe of course can be a great thing, but this Union is dangerous to Europeans as a whole. Especially with people like Merkel and Junker in charge.
* There is a certain irony, I think, in the fact that mass immigration from outside the EU, in the end, might prove to have been (hopefully) the final downfall of the Eurocrats. (Whichever way this particular vote goes, I think the resurgence of nationalist politics in Europe will hopefully eventually do for the EU project, one way or the other).
Free movement within the EU is a necessary part of their superstate project, but there’s nothing driving their dogmatic (and positively demonic, imo) insistence on backing mass migration from other continents except their own antiracist and internationalist ideologies. British moaning about Poles and central European complaints about gypsies, etc, would in itself probably have been containable. If they’d been a little more pragmatic and cynical (Lord knows, they are certainly cynical enough on other issues and in other ways), they might have gotten away with it.
Perhaps it really was just sheer arrogance.
* I will venture a prediction that the age of cynicism has drawn to a close and we all don’t know it yet. Brexit wins by a comfortable (i.e. unexpectedly large) margin. Global stock markets initially take a big hit but soothing tones emanating from Yellen and Draghi coax them back into the sideways channel that they’ve been plowing through for the last two and a half years. For the time being, and for several months into the future, nothing much else seems to change. There’s a lot of inertia in the system and no one, not even those in favor of the Brexit, know quite how to adjust to the new reality.
Those of us who support Trump should take careful note of this. Trump will win, but initially nothing will seem to change. The effects of these massive, narrative-shifting events will take years to manifest. It will be very difficult for we who are part of these processes to understanding them in the offing, for we ourselves are the events.
And let’s not forget my first (variously formulated) iron rule of sociology: All true social change is fundamentally driven, but fundamentally driven social changes take much longer to eventuate than originally supposed.
* I am a Finnish nationalist. I care more about Finns than I care about other people. And I care more about Europeans (“whites”) than non-Europeans. “Concentric loyalties” I believe is the term.
I certainly don’t want to fill my country with Iraqis, Somalis, or Afghanis, but neither do I want to fill it with immigrants from other European countries. Of course, if it must happen, I’d much rather have European immigrants. But I’d rather not.
Spencer says a lot of stupid shit about the EU and ethnic nationalists (he refers to us as “petty nationalists”). He sounds almost as bad as anti-nationalist open borders advocates. He’s just plain wrong about many things, e.g. saying that the EU has nothing to do with the refugee/immigration disaster, that the nation states are wholly at fault. For one, the so-called “freedom of movement” (i.e. lack of border controls) within the EU is a huge reason for it. The vast majority of the asylum seekers simply wouldn’t be able to reach their desired destinations in Northern Europe without it. We Finns wouldn’t have gotten 32,000+ asylum seekers last year without it. Spencer is just an ignorant armchair general with no skin in the game.
I hope that Brexit happens. It should make the federalists who control the EU less arrogant, less utopian, and less aggressive about pushing their stupidity on Europeans. It’s no panacea, but it’s a step in the right direction.
* 4 observations about from a British born Israeli.
1) Brexit can’t win. Google, Youtube, Facebook and a few others have the ability to influence voter turnout by way more than the margin of victory in the even the most optimistic polls. Given the importance of this referendum to the Cathederal its frankly inconceivable that they won’t exercise this power.
2) This referendum has been useful in distilling the latent divisions in the new politics. Right on millenials have spent the last month repeating IMF propaganda as if it was holy Writ, George Osborne has been calling everyone waysist so much would imagine he was smoking a bong. The Left and the globalists will, of course, try to go back to their phoney “1% way” after this, but it will be much harder after a an orgy of mutual backslapping consisting of ever more lurid attempts to demonstrate their disgust for ordinary indigenous Britons. This of course gives opportunities for a new anti-Left alliance. My preference is that this will take a Misesian free-market form, but, of course, other options are possible.
3) Similarly this referendum has been useful in separating the good from the crap in the alt-right. What a narcissistic twerp Spencer is. The independence of a millenium old country with arguably the greatest cultural heritage in the world is just some “petty” issue getting in the way of realizing his gaylord fantasies. More broadly, I think this demonstrates the real weakness of the WN variant of alt-right thought. White nationalism is both too broad and too rigid. It can’t accommodate “petty” nationalisms that actually mean something to people and so provide a basis for a decent social order, nor can it replace them because it can’t deal with the real issue that people actually quite like having a friendly Hindu running the corner shop and, as such, the basis of national identity, of which shared descent must play a part, must accommodate him too. I suggest, and I’m partly trolling here, that Jewish nationalism is a better model. In principle anyone can join, but its really hard, its you not them who gets to pick, and it’s understood by all that converts don’t make the rules. Now of course, getting to such a model is no easier than just going full white nationalist, arguably even harder, but it’s a more desirable destination.
* If one accepts the reality of the Deep State in Europe and North America as core to the world-wide Anglo-Saxon Empire (the United States, Britain, Australia and their European provinces), then it follows that MI5 and MI6 would be acting to skew the polls and otherwise take action to ensure that Britain continues to serve the interests of the Deep State. Hence, whether Britain stays in or leaves the EU will be determined by the interests of that State. “Facts” are impossible in the short term to prove this hypothesis one way or the other since it is usually years or decades before historians can dig out the facts.
All one has to do is look at the unfolding “real history” of Europe from the height of the British Empire through the post-WWII era as documented by historians to support the hypothesis of the Deep State. Indeed, Britain paved the way for Western industrial countries with the models for a “double” government as well as financialized, mercantile economies — in this case the government for public consumption (Parliament) and the hidden government making strategic economic and foreign policy decisions (the elite-ruled civil service).
* It’s time to leave. The UK participated in, and contributed enormously, to the historic experiment. The results are in and the experiment failed.
Unelected bureaucratic mandarins represented wildly divergent interests from the UK’s. Elected officials from other European countries represented wildly divergent interests from the UK’s. The European experiment denied the British people their fundamental right of democratic participation. It enforced confiscatory taxation on Britons. It literally, not figuratively, initiated a population replacement program of the native British people.
European Union was an enticing, romantic vision. Many, or most of us fell under its heady spell at one time or another. Free trade and free movement of our peoples. Cheap vacations to sunny beaches. Liasons with available, good-looking foreigners in exotic towns and villages. What could possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, the native common sense of each country’s common people was over-ridden by the base instincts of those cultural and political elites who always find a way to line their own pockets. Those elites never do so without snidely discounting the legitimate fears and concerns of the common people.
A better future for the UK lies ahead. Independence and self-determination will bring political responsibility closer to home and closer to the commons. Local power will enforce political accountability and serve the best interest of the British people.
A representative government is an accountable one. An accountable government is a stronger one. The British will negotiate trade and strategic agreements with every remaining European Union country. None of those countries can afford the luxury of ignoring Britain – the fifth largest economy in the world. Britain will enhance its strategic relations and trade agreements with the Anglosphere – USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – as well as the fast-growing economies of India with its 125 million English speakers and African nations with 150 million English speakers. Global powers China and Russia will discover a new-found respect for Britain in its independence from the Eurocracy and its strategic solidarity with the Anglosphere. Really, it’s all good. Bring it on. It’s time.
It’s time for the Euro elites and the Eurocrats to thank Britain’s people for all they have given in The Great European Experiment. The blood, sweat and tears of our parents and grandparents who gifted Europe its freedom from tyranny – along with our Anglosphere brothers. The untold amounts of treasure Britain gifted Europe from its Exchequer – paid for with the brilliance, hard work and integrity of its industrious people. Britain’s ongoing and extraordinary contribution to science and technology. The outstanding, shining example of British political and social civility…Really, it’s ok, Europe.
* I am watching the BBC streaming on my PC. Several talking heads are lamenting about the falling Pound. But how many times do markets make large swings over a day or two only to come back to equilibrium in a few days? Does anyone seriously think the Pound’s drop tonight is permanent? I remember when the London subway was bombed and the US market dropped a couple percent. I was able to buy a stock I’d been wanting and within five trading days dumped it for a nice profit. The fear mongering never ends.
Heck if BREXIT wins tonight, then I will win tomorrow. I am sure there will be some buying opportunities tomorrow in the market.
* When the shooting happened there were still at least 6-7 hours of voting left. My (conspiracy) theory is that the German government didn’t want to remind British voters why they needed to get the hell out of the EU. The press seems to have really clamped down on refugee stories lately, probably for much the same reason.
It’s interesting to wonder how lopsided the vote for independence would be if the press and oligarchs didn’t have so many people fooled.
* Some American analysts on Fox Business Net, Stuart Varney and others, are pretty happy about the Exit while their guest, a silly little man who writes for the “Economist,” is quite chagrined. They just told him, “While everyone else was telling them to worry about the survival of the EU, the Brits just told them, “Worried about the EU? Hell, no, we’re worried about ourselves!”
Nice to know the country of Churchill still has it in them.
* Its tough for Jews in the West. Its like being a white Rhodesian. You know you are way smarter than the natives. You are too polite to say so. You know if Mugabe/Trump ever gets in office and you have to leave, everything will go to hell.
You tell the natives (nicely) that the infrastructure is going to crumble, the power plants shut down, the hospitals go dark, the food go unplanted and natives go hungry. Yet they look you in the eye, smile, and say “we know, but we would still rather rule ourselves”. How the hell do you deal with that?
* Please tell me this is satire.
You don’t really think “everything will go to hell” without jews in America, do you? Do you know that there are many European nations with small or almost non-existent jewish populations that haven’t “gone to hell,” or if they have gone to hell it’s solely because of third world immigration? Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Italy (the northern part at least), the United Kingdom, Ireland? What about the United States before 1900 when they hadn’t even arrived in large numbers yet? We were doing pretty well. Why else would they show up?
The comparison with Rhodesia is totally foolish. Whites built a civilization for blacks which they couldn’t handle. Whites built a civilization for themselves which the jews invaded. Whites build and Whites maintain.
“You tell the natives (nicely) that the infrastructure is going to crumble, the power plants shut down, the hospitals go dark, the food go unplanted and natives go hungry.”
Wow, just wow. Get this, everybody: If Seth Rogen weren’t here blessing us with his presence, we couldn’t maintain a power plant or a hospital or even harvest crops. Mother of God.
* BTW, if Americans ought to know that so many self-made billionaires are Jewish, shouldn’t they also be told that Jews cured polio, created 95% of popular superheroes, and wrote roughly half of the most popular Christmas songs out there? (oh, and created everyone’s favorite web site, “unz.com”).
For example, I remember some weird Fox News segment about a Jewish mother protesting against Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but I don’t recall anyone mentioning that Rudolph was created by a Jew, the song was written by a Jew, etc.
* Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Trotsky and the Frankfurt School; and BTW David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel, Jonathan Gruber and Ben Rhodes. Oh, and the ACLU, the SPLC, the law profession and funding the leftwing idiocy with our money.
We would not mind the disproportionate influence if it wasn’t accompanied by the relentless anti-Americanism, the demonization of whites and shifting the costs of social engineering from your fellows onto the middle class, while simultaneously rent-seeking to make yourselves fabulously wealthy (cf. Larry Ellison).
But when you need someone to arrest the progress of the demons you have summoned – you will find that the well-meaning, honest and virtuous northern European descendants you would have been able to rely upon are sitting on their hands.
Which is really too bad for you. Because it did not have to be this way.
* Tongans were lumped in with “Asia-Pacific Islanders” for decades. When the University of California limited “Asian” enrollment, the smartest “Asians” were accepted. One problem: Tongans are as dumb as a box of rocks. As a result, they never made the cut at UCLA. Koreans and Chinese always beat them out as the “smartest Asians”. So the Tongans asked to be separated out from the “Asia-Pacific Islander” quota group and given their own racial quota. UCLA agreed. It worked. Tongan enrollment jumped.
Europeans are the “dummy” white people … as compared to Jews, anyway. As long as Jews and Europeans are lumped together as “whites”, Europeans are always going to get the short end of the stick. When qualified “whites” have to give up seats at Harvard/Yale/Stanford to make room for lesser-qualified NAMs, it is the Europeans who are going to lose their seats, not Jews. Heck, even the Tongans could figure that out!
It truly is inevitable. Everyone is going to want their own quota category, which Macklin Fleming pointed out in his prescient 1969 letter to Louis Pollack (p. 47):
Think of proportional representation this way: does a US Supreme Court with four out of nine Jewish justices (and no WASPs) really “look like America” (to use SJW quota-speak). Four of nine justices is over two thousand and one hundred percent (2100%) Jewish “overrepresentation”! Yikes!
* Just look at how conservative all those countries with relatively little Jewish political influence turned out to be in comparison to the U.S. (i.e. Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc.).
* On immigration policy (i.e., what counts), they’re all way more “conservative” than the US, and long have been. Check demographics for details.
You guys should stop shooting yourselves in the foot on this issue.
I’ll take any of those countries’ demographics and political situation, any day of the week.
* South Africa is a tragedy. It’s the full on “should have picked our own damn cotton” debacle. They could have had a marvelous beautiful white nation there if they’d adopted a very hard “this is our land” policy and chased off the blacks from the get go. Since scattering of blacks who were there decreased substantially with the mfecane, the Boers might have been able to just push ‘em out. But you can’t really do any sort of slavery and still end up your own nation.
When apartheid became unsustainable was the time to be bold and realistic. Falling back to a white state in the Western\Northern Cape would have been the sustainable option. I suppose it was too hard for whites–living well–to give up their homes and businesses and for their community to reverse the Great Trek and all that. But taking the PC, kumbaya singing option means that in the long run they will all have to leave and have no nation at all. Whites can live around blacks when whites are in charge. But anything black run will decay to a level of disorder and dysfunction well below the norms most white people will want to tolerate.
* The proportion of Jews (or half, quarter, eighth Jews) in any position is an irrelevant topic because the Jews want the same policies as the gentile elites for basically the same reasons. If there are fewer Jews (Scandinavia, France) in positions of power or where the Jews lean conservative (Britain) the liberals still win with elite gentile support.
Desegregation would have definitely happened without Jews: The WASPy Earl Warren wanted to force the South to desegregate schools immediately during the Board v Brown implementation hearings in the 1950s. The only reason the South was able to fight against it for another decade was because Frankfurter inserted ‘with all deliberate speed’ into the ruling and against Warren’s initial preferences.
But of course, inconvenient facts such as the liberal WASPy SCOTUS from 1969 to 1994 had no Jews on it and WASPs were half of the liberal wing of the court from 1994 to 2009 never get mentioned by Stevie.
Nor does he ever mention the fact 80% of the Communist revolutionary leadership was gentile – only Jews are held collectively responsible as an ethnic group for their liberalism.
The fact gentiles ruined themselves, and that Jews participated with similarly negative consequences for their community, doesn’t raise tips.
Professor Linda Gottfredson writes:
No subject in psychology has provoked more intense public controversy than the study of human intelligence. From its beginning, research on how and why people differ in overall mental ability has fallen prey to political and social agendas that obscure or distort even the most well-established scientific findings. Journalists, too, often present a view of intelligence research that is exactly the opposite of what most intelligence experts believe. For these and other reasons, public understanding of intelligence falls far short of public concern about it. The IQ experts discussing their work in the public arena can feel as though they have fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland.
The debate over intelligence and intelligence testing focuses on the question of whether it is useful or meaningful to evaluate people according to a single major dimension of cognitive competence. Is there indeed a general mental ability we commonly call “intelligence,” and is it important in the practical affairs of life? The answer, based on decades of intelligence research, is an unequivocal yes. No matter their form or content, tests of mental skills invariably point to the existence of a global factor that permeates all aspects of cognition. And this factor seems to have considerable influence on a person’s practical quality of life. Intelligence as measured by IQ tests is the single most effective predictor known of individual performance at school and on the job. It also predicts many other aspects of well-being, including a person’s chances of divorcing, dropping out of high school, being unemployed or having illegitimate children.
Correlation of IQ Scores
… with occupational achievement suggests that g reflects an ability to deal with cognitive complexity. Scores also correlate with some social outcomes (the percentages apply to young white adults in the U.S.).
By now the vast majority of intelligence researchers take these findings for granted. Yet in the press and in public debate, the facts are typically dismissed, downplayed or ignored. This misrepresentation reflects a clash between a deeply felt ideal and a stubborn reality. The ideal, implicit in many popular critiques of intelligence research, is that all people are born equally able and that social inequality results only from the exercise of unjust privilege. The reality is that Mother Nature is no egalitarian. People are in fact unequal in intellectual potential–and they are born that way, just as they are born with different potentials for height, physical attractiveness, artistic flair, athletic prowess and other traits. Although subsequent experience shapes this potential, no amount of social engineering can make individuals with widely divergent mental aptitudes into intellectual equals.
Of course, there are many kinds of talent, many kinds of mental ability and many other aspects of personality and character that influence a person’s chances of happiness and success. The functional importance of general mental ability in everyday life, however, means that without onerous restrictions on individual liberty, differences in mental competence are likely to result in social inequality. This gulf between equal opportunity and equal outcomes is perhaps what pains Americans most about the subject of intelligence. The public intuitively knows what is at stake: when asked to rank personal qualities in order of desirability, people put intelligence second only to good health. But with a more realistic approach to the intellectual differences between people, society could better accommodate these differences and minimize the inequalities they create.
Extracting g
Early in the century-old study of intelligence, researchers discovered that all tests of mental ability ranked individuals in about the same way. Although mental tests are often designed to measure specific domains of cognition–verbal fluency, say, or mathematical skill, spatial visualization or memory–people who do well on one kind of test tend to do well on the others, and people who do poorly generally do so across the board. This overlap, or intercorrelation, suggests that all such tests measure some global element of intellectual ability as well as specific cognitive skills. In recent decades, psychologists have devoted much effort to isolating that general factor, which is abbreviated g, from the other aspects of cognitive ability gauged in mental tests.
The statistical extraction of g is performed by a technique called factor analysis. Introduced at the turn of the century by British psychologist Charles Spearman, factor analysis determines the minimum number of underlying dimensions necessary to explain a pattern of correlations among measurements. A general factor suffusing all tests is not, as is sometimes argued, a necessary outcome of factor analysis. No general factor has been found in the analysis of personality tests, for example; instead the method usually yields at least five dimensions (neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to ideas), each relating to different subsets of tests. But, as Spearman observed, a general factor does emerge from analysis of mental ability tests, and leading psychologists, such as Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley and John B. Carroll of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have confirmed his findings in the decades since. Partly because of this research, most intelligence experts now use g as the working definition of intelligence.
The general factor explains most differences among individuals in performance on diverse mental tests. This is true regardless of what specific ability a test is meant to assess, regardless of the test’s manifest content (whether words, numbers or figures) and regardless of the way the test is administered (in written or oral form, to an individual or to a group). Tests of specific mental abilities do measure those abilities, but they all reflect g to varying degrees as well. Hence, the g factor can be extracted from scores on any diverse battery of tests.
Conversely, because every mental test is “contaminated” by the effects of specific mental skills, no single test measures only g. Even the scores from IQ tests–which usually combine about a dozen of specific cognitive skills–contain some “impurities” that reflect those narrower skills. For most purposes, these impurities make no practical difference, and g and IQ can be used interchangeably. But if they need to, intelligence researchers can statistically separate the g component of IQ. The ability to isolate g has revolutionized research on general intelligence, because it has allowed investigators to show that the predictive value of mental tests derives almost entirely from this global factor rather than from the more specific aptitudes measured by intelligence tests.
In addition to quantifying individual differences, tests of mental abilities have also offered insight into the meaning of intelligence in everyday life. Some tests and test items are known to correlate better with g than others do. In these items the “active ingredient” that demands the exercise of g seems to be complexity. More complex tasks require more mental manipulation, and this manipulation of information–discerning similarities and inconsistencies, drawing inferences, grasping new concepts and so on–constitutes intelligence in action. Indeed, intelligence can best be described as the ability to deal with cognitive complexity.
This description coincides well with lay perceptions of intelligence. The g factor is especially important in just the kind of behaviors that people usually associate with “smarts”: reasoning, problem solving, abstract thinking, quick learning. And whereas g itself describes mental aptitude rather than accumulated knowledge, a person’s store of knowledge tends to correspond with his or her g level, probably because that accumulation represents a previous adeptness in learning and in understanding new information. The g factor is also the one attribute that best distinguishes among persons considered gifted, average or retarded.
Several decades of factor-analytic research on mental tests have confirmed a hierarchical model of mental abilities. The evidence, summarized most effectively in Carroll’s 1993 book, Human Cognitive Abilities, puts g at the apex in this model, with more specific aptitudes arrayed at successively lower levels: the so-called group factors, such as verbal ability, mathematical reasoning, spatial visualization and memory, are just below g, and below these are skills that are more dependent on knowledge or experience, such as the principles and practices of a particular job or profession.
Some researchers use the term “multiple intelligences” to label these sets of narrow capabilities and achievements. Psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University, for example, has postulated that eight relatively autonomous “intelligences” are exhibited in different domains of achievement. He does not dispute the existence of g but treats it as a specific factor relevant chiefly to academic achievement and to situations that resemble those of school. Gardner does not believe that tests can fruitfully measure his proposed intelligences; without tests, no one can at present determine whether the intelligences are indeed independent of g (or each other). Furthermore, it is not clear to what extent Gardner’s intelligences tap personality traits or motor skills rather than mental aptitudes.
Other forms of intelligence have been proposed; among them, emotional intelligence and practical intelligence are perhaps the best known. They are probably amalgams either of intellect and personality or of intellect and informal experience in specific job or life settings, respectively. Practical intelligence like “street smarts,” for example, seems to consist of the localized knowledge and know-how developed with untutored experience in particular everyday settings and activities–the so-called school of hard knocks. In contrast, general intelligence is not a form of achievement, whether local or renowned. Instead the g factor regulates the rate of learning: it greatly affects the rate of return in knowledge to instruction and experience but cannot substitute for either.
The Biology of g
Some critics of intelligence research maintain that the notion of general intelligence is illusory: that no such global mental capacity exists and that apparent “intelligence” is really just a by-product of one’s opportunities to learn skills and information valued in a particular cultural context. True, the concept of intelligence and the way in which individuals are ranked according to this criterion could be social artifacts. But the fact that g is not specific to any particular domain of knowledge or mental skill suggests that g is independent of cultural content, including beliefs about what intelligence is. And tests of different social groups reveal the same continuum of general intelligence. This observation suggests either that cultures do not construct g or that they construct the same g. Both conclusions undercut the social artifact theory of intelligence.
Moreover, research on the physiology and genetics of g has uncovered biological correlates of this psychological phenomenon. In the past decade, studies by teams of researchers in North America and Europe have linked several attributes of the brain to general intelligence. After taking into account gender and physical stature, brain size as determined by magnetic resonance imaging is moderately correlated with IQ (about 0.4 on a scale of 0 to 1). So is the speed of nerve conduction. The brains of bright people also use less energy during problem solving than do those of their less able peers. And various qualities of brain waves correlate strongly (about 0.5 to 0.7) with IQ: the brain waves of individuals with higher IQs, for example, respond more promptly and consistently to simple sensory stimuli such as audible clicks. These observations have led some investigators to posit that differences in g result from differences in the speed and efficiency of neural processing. If this theory is true, environmental conditions could influence g by modifying brain physiology in some manner.
Studies of so-called elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs), conducted by Jensen and others, are bridging the gap between the psychological and the physiological aspects of g. These mental tasks have no obvious intellectual content and are so simple that adults and most children can do them accurately in less than a second. In the most basic reaction-time tests, for example, the subject must react when a light goes on by lifting her index finger off a home button and immediately depressing a response button. Two measurements are taken: the number of milliseconds between the illumination of the light and the subject’s release of the home button, which is called decision time, and the number of milliseconds between the subject’s release of the home button and pressing of the response button, which is called movement time.
In this task, movement time seems independent of intelligence, but the decision times of higher-IQ subjects are slightly faster than those of people with lower IQs. As the tasks are made more complex, correlations between average decision times and IQ increase. These results further support the notion that intelligence equips individuals to deal with complexity and that its influence is greater in complex tasks than in simple ones.
The ECT-IQ correlations are comparable for all IQ levels, ages, genders and racial-ethnic groups tested. Moreover, studies by Philip A. Vernon of the University of Western Ontario and others have shown that the ECT-IQ overlap results almost entirely from the common g factor in both measures. Reaction times do not reflect differences in motivation or strategy or the tendency of some individuals to rush through tests and daily tasks–that penchant is a personality trait. They actually seem to measure the speed with which the brain apprehends, integrates and evaluates information. Research on ECTs and brain physiology has not yet identified the biological determinants of this processing speed. These studies do suggest, however, that g is as reliable and global a phenomenon at the neural level as it is at the level of the complex information processing required by IQ tests and everyday life.
The existence of biological correlates of intelligence does not necessarily mean that intelligence is dictated by genes. Decades of genetics research have shown, however, that people are born with different hereditary potentials for intelligence and that these genetic endowments are responsible for much of the variation in mental ability among individuals. Last spring an international team of scientists headed by Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London announced the discovery of the first gene linked to intelligence. Of course, genes have their effects only in interaction with environments, partly by enhancing an individual’s exposure or sensitivity to formative experiences. Differences in general intelligence, whether measured as IQ or, more accurately, as g are both genetic and environmental in origin–just as are all other psychological traits and attitudes studied so far, including personality, vocational interests and societal attitudes. This is old news among the experts. The experts have, however, been startled by more recent discoveries.
One is that the heritability of IQ rises with age–that is to say, the extent to which genetics accounts for differences in IQ among individuals increases as people get older. Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins, published in the past decade by a group led by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., of the University of Minnesota and other scholars, show that about 40 percent of IQ differences among preschoolers stems from genetic differences but that heritability rises to 60 percent by adolescence and to 80 percent by late adulthood. With age, differences among individuals in their developed intelligence come to mirror more closely their genetic differences. It appears that the effects of environment on intelligence fade rather than grow with time. In hindsight, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Young children have the circumstances of their lives imposed on them by parents, schools and other agents of society, but as people get older they become more independent and tend to seek out the life niches that are most congenial to their genetic proclivities.
A second big surprise for intelligence experts was the discovery that environments shared by siblings have little to do with IQ. Many people still mistakenly believe that social, psychological and economic differences among families create lasting and marked differences in IQ. Behavioral geneticists refer to such environmental effects as “shared” because they are common to siblings who grow up together. Research has shown that although shared environments do have a modest influence on IQ in childhood, their effects dissipate by adolescence. The IQs of adopted children, for example, lose all resemblance to those of their adoptive family members and become more like the IQs of the biological parents they have never known. Such findings suggest that siblings either do not share influential aspects of the rearing environment or do not experience them in the same way. Much behavioral genetics research currently focuses on the still mysterious processes by which environments make members of a household less alike.
g on the Job
Although the evidence of genetic and physiological correlates of g argues powerfully for the existence of global intelligence, it has not quelled the critics of intelligence testing. These skeptics argue that even if such a global entity exists, it has no intrinsic functional value and becomes important only to the extent that people treat it as such: for example, by using IQ scores to sort, label and assign students and employees. Such concerns over the proper use of mental tests have prompted a great deal of research in recent decades. This research shows that although IQ tests can indeed be misused, they measure a capability that does in fact affect many kinds of performance and many life outcomes, independent of the tests’ interpretations or applications. Moreover, the research shows that intelligence tests measure the capability equally well for all native-born English-speaking groups in the U.S.
If we consider that intelligence manifests itself in everyday life as the ability to deal with complexity, then it is easy to see why it has great functional or practical importance. Children, for example, are regularly exposed to complex tasks once they begin school. Schooling requires above all that students learn, solve problems and think abstractly. That IQ is quite a good predictor of differences in educational achievement is therefore not surprising. When scores on both IQ and standardized achievement tests in different subjects are averaged over several years, the two averages correlate as highly as different IQ tests from the same individual do. High-ability students also master material at many times the rate of their low-ability peers. Many investigations have helped quantify this discrepancy. For example, a 1969 study done for the U.S. Army by the Human Resources Research Office found that enlistees in the bottom fifth of the ability distribution required two to six times as many teaching trials and prompts as did their higher-ability peers to attain minimal proficiency in rifle assembly, monitoring signals, combat plotting and other basic military tasks. Similarly, in school settings the ratio of learning rates between “fast” and “slow” students is typically five to one.
The scholarly content of many IQ tests and their strong correlations with educational success can give the impression that g is only a narrow academic ability. But general mental ability also predicts job performance, and in more complex jobs it does so better than any other single personal trait, including education and experience. The army’s Project A, a seven-year study conducted in the 1980s to improve the recruitment and training process, found that general mental ability correlated strongly with both technical proficiency and soldiering in the nine specialties studied, among them infantry, military police and medical specialist. Research in the civilian sector has revealed the same pattern. Furthermore, although the addition of personality traits such as conscientiousness can help hone the prediction of job performance, the inclusion of specific mental aptitudes such as verbal fluency or mathematical skill rarely does. The predictive value of mental tests in the work arena stems almost entirely from their measurement of g, and that value rises with the complexity and prestige level of the job.
Half a century of military and civilian research has converged to draw a portrait of occupational opportunity along the IQ continuum. Individuals in the top 5 percent of the adult IQ distribution (above IQ 125) can essentially train themselves, and few occupations are beyond their reach mentally. Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 110) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. In contrast, adults in the bottom 5 percent of the IQ distribution (below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability. Serious problems in training low-IQ military recruits during World War II led Congress to ban enlistment from the lowest 10 percent (below 80) of the population, and no civilian occupation in modern economies routinely recruits its workers from that range. Current military enlistment standards exclude any individual whose IQ is below about 85.
The importance of g in job performance, as in schooling, is related to complexity. Occupations differ considerably in the complexity of their demands, and as that complexity rises, higher g levels become a bigger asset and lower g levels a bigger handicap. Similarly, everyday tasks and environments also differ significantly in their cognitive complexity. The degree to which a person’s g level will come to bear on daily life depends on how much novelty and ambiguity that person’s everyday tasks and surroundings present and how much continual learning, judgment and decision making they require. As gamblers, employers and bankers know, even marginal differences in rates of return will yield big gains–or losses–over time. Hence, even small differences in g among people can exert large, cumulative influences across social and economic life.
In my own work, I have tried to synthesize the many lines of research that document the influence of IQ on life outcomes. As the illustration above shows, the odds of various kinds of achievement and social pathology change systematically across the IQ continuum, from borderline mentally retarded (below 70) to intellectually gifted (above 130). Even in comparisons of those of somewhat below average (between 76 and 90) and somewhat above average (between 111 and 125) IQs, the odds for outcomes having social consequence are stacked against the less able. Young men somewhat below average in general mental ability, for example, are more likely to be unemployed than men somewhat above average. The lower-IQ woman is four times more likely to bear illegitimate children than the higher-IQ woman; among mothers, she is eight times more likely to become a chronic welfare recipient. People somewhat below average are 88 times more likely to drop out of high school, seven times more likely to be jailed and five times more likely as adults to live in poverty than people of somewhat above-average IQ. Below-average individuals are 50 percent more likely to be divorced than those in the above-average category.
These odds diverge even more sharply for people with bigger gaps in IQ, and the mechanisms by which IQ creates this divergence are not yet clearly understood. But no other single trait or circumstance yet studied is so deeply implicated in the nexus of bad social outcomes–poverty, welfare, illegitimacy and educational failure–that entraps many low-IQ individuals and families. Even the effects of family background pale in comparison with the influence of IQ. As shown most recently by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the divergence in many outcomes associated with IQ level is almost as wide among siblings from the same household as it is for strangers of comparable IQ levels. And siblings differ a lot in IQ–on average, by 12 points, compared with 17 for random strangers.
An IQ of 75 is perhaps the most important threshold in modern life. At that level, a person’s chances of mastering the elementary school curriculum are only 50-50, and he or she will have a hard time functioning independently without considerable social support. Individuals and families who are only somewhat below average in IQ face risks of social pathology that, while lower, are still significant enough to jeopardize their well-being. High-IQ individuals may lack the resolve, character or good fortune to capitalize on their intellectual capabilities, but socioeconomic success in the postindustrial information age is theirs to lose.
What Is versus What Could Be
The foregoing findings on g‘s effects have been drawn from studies conducted under a limited range of circumstances–namely, the social, economic and political conditions prevailing now and in recent decades in developed countries that allow considerable personal freedom. It is not clear whether these findings apply to populations around the world, to the extremely advantaged and disadvantaged in the developing world or, for that matter, to people living under restrictive political regimes. No one knows what research under different circumstances, in different eras or with different populations might reveal.
But we do know that, wherever freedom and technology advance, life is an uphill battle for people who are below average in proficiency at learning, solving problems and mastering complexity. We also know that the trajectories of mental development are not easily deflected. Individual IQ levels tend to remain unchanged from adolescence onward, and despite strenuous efforts over the past half a century, attempts to raise g permanently through adoption or educational means have failed. If there is a reliable, ethical way to raise or equalize levels of g, no one has found it.
Some investigators have suggested that biological interventions, such as dietary supplements of vitamins, may be more effective than educational ones in raising g levels. This approach is based in part on the assumption that improved nutrition has caused the puzzling rise in average levels of both IQ and height in the developed world during this century. Scientists are still hotly debating whether the gains in IQ actually reflect a rise in g or are caused instead by changes in less critical, specific mental skills. Whatever the truth may be, the differences in mental ability among individuals remain, and the conflict between equal opportunity and equal outcome persists. Only by accepting these hard truths about intelligence will society find humane solutions to the problems posed by the variations in general mental ability.
IQ Tests on the WWW: Web Directory
Intelligence and Personality Assessment: A Study Guide by Jon Potter
IQ: A Structure for Understanding by Timothy Bates, Macquarie University Sydney
Great Ideas in Personality — Intelligence by G. Scott Acton, Northwestern University
Intelligence and IQ: Book reviews, commentaries and links to other Net resources.
LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON is professor of educational studies at the University of Delaware, where she has been since 1986, and co-directs the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She trained as a sociologist, and her earliest work focused on career development. “I wasn’t interested in intelligence per se,” Gottfredson says. “But it suffused everything I was studying in my attempts to understand who was getting ahead.” This “discovery of the obvious,” as she puts it, became the focus of her research. In the mid-1980s, while at Johns Hopkins University, she published several influential articles describing how intelligence shapes vocational choice and self-perception. Gottfredson also organized the 1994 treatise “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” an editorial with more than 50 signatories that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal in response to the controversy surrounding publication of The Bell Curve. Gottfredson is the mother of identical twins–a “mere coincidence,” she says, “that’s always made me think more about the nature and nurture of intelligence.” The girls, now 16, follow Gottfredson’s Peace Corps experience of the 1970s by joining her each summer for volunteer construction work in the villages of Nicaragua.
Shouldn’t they want more testing? As a progressive and Radical Jew, I want as much peer-reviewed testing as possible to prove once and for all that evolution didn’t lead to any variance in brain development and cognitive ability between races/breeds/tribes of humans. Why don’t they trust in the limitations of the last few millions of years of evolution the way I do?
Goy Philosopher says: “Just noticed your brief post on Janet Kourany’s disgusting anti-scientific views. Sadly, people like this are now pretty much in charge of academic philosophy. In other words, academic philosophy is not a kind of philosophy anymore. It’s interesting that she is saying some “knowledge” should be forbidden. Knowledge has to be true. You can’t know that 2 + 3 = 4. So she seems to be tacitly or unconsciously conceding that much of the research she wants to shut down is actually true. But she thinks it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, I guess.”
Should Some Knowledge Be Forbidden? The Case of Cognitive Differences Research
Janet Kourany
Prof. Janet Kourany (jkourany@nd.edu)
Education:
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1977
Areas of Expertise: Philosophy of science; Science and values; Feminist philosophy; Agnotology/epistemology of ignorance
