Ricpic said: “Race is naturally fascinating because it is so obviously a factor if not the factor in the organization of the world. And yet we are living in an age in which the topic is taboo. This anomaly – that something inherently fascinating must not be noticed or discussed – cannot hold.”
Anon replies: Of course it can hold. Sex is inherently fascinating, yet some cultures haven’t discussed it in ages. And those are actually the healthiest cultures around. Death is inherently fascinating, yet the healthiest cultures deny it completely, believing in the fairy tale of eternal life instead. I think that unlike religious fairy tales the leftist fairy tale about race is harmful to society. But that’s separate from the question of whether or not humanity can ignore fundamental truths for thousands of years on end. Of course it can. If it couldn’t, it would have probably gone extinct long ago…
A lengthier, more competent pan of Wade by H. Allen Orr is up at The NY Review of Books, behind a pay wall.
Orr mostly concedes the first half of the book.
He pans the second half. Some examples:
“[Wade’s] much taken, for instance, with the difference between tribal and modern societies, but one of the most tribal peoples on the planet, the Scots with their clans, are now identified with some of the most modern of ideas and attitudes. Were David Hume and Adam Smith precocious carriers of a mutation that swept Edinburgh?”
(Fair question, but pretty glib as a counterpoint. The ancestors of Hume and Smith were probably lowland agriculturalists.)
“Geneticists have had an extraordinarily hard time finding genes that make substantive contributions to complex diseases like Type 2 diabetes. This doesn’t bode well, to put it mildly, for finding the genes that allegedly underlie subtle differences in predisposition to middle-class behavioral traits.”
(I’m not qualified to assess this, but this is why you want to rely on, for the time being, rigorously documented patterns a la psychometrics. It was a mistake, as Cochran noted, to skirt psychometrics as a field of evidence and instead, say, speculate freely on East Asian creativity.)
“Wade responds that while the genes for violence are unknown, murder rates in the industrialized world are lower than those in sub-Saharan Africa, “a difference that does not prove but surely allows room for a genetic contribution to greater violence in the less developed world.” But if the issue is whether people differ innately in a behavioral trait, a material line of evidence cannot be that people differ in the trait. They may easily differ for other reasons.”
(But if they persist on differing in a trait, even if placed in disparate environments with various governments spending billions trying to eliminate the difference, *that* should count as evidence.)
It’s not that so many Jews see the world through Jewish-centric lenses. That’s fine. It’s that they’re not even aware of how much their Jewish neuroses prejudice their judgments. Which problem is amplified because none of the rest of us are allowed to suggest that Jewish neuroses might be worthy of criticism or a prejudicial factor.
