From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@nyu.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 04 1999 - 01:42:20 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>
> [snip]
>... if society is always going
>to "balance" the playing field, so that my natural genetic "advantages"
>(whatever they may be) do not give one a demonstrable advantage, then
>what is the point of trying to succeed at all. My general observation
>would be that this is the situation that has occured in countries
>where everyone works "equally" hard and drives "equal" benefits --
>i.e. the cream sinks to the bottom.
>
>It is a *very* difficult situation to separate the historic
>advantages from the genetic advantages from the desire
>advantages. But if the response of a society is to "level" these
>so genetic/desire advantages are deemed equal to the correction
>of historic "disadvantages", then you have a recipe for diminishing
>the progess of the society.
A few years ago there was some football announcer – I don’t remember the
details, but maybe someone else does – who lost his job for suggesting that
American blacks were inherently better athletes than whites because, back in the
day, they’d been bred for strength by slave owners. At the time there was a
terrific uproar, with people coming down on one of two sides: Either the guy was
a horrific racist and ought to be banished from polite society, or that the guy
had a point, not necessarily correct but not necessarily racist, and that the
objectors were a bunch of over-sensitive twerps trying to quash free scientific
inquiry.
It makes me cringe to think about it, and my fingers tremble as I type the
words, but maybe there’s something to it. So what though? It isn’t just a
scientific point, and I really hope most of you are uncomfortable with the
suggestion. I should be conjuring up images of skinhead pamphlets with hideous
big-nosed-Jew caricatures on the cover and Nazi scientists measuring heads with
calipers. That doesn’t rule out the fact though that there may very well be some
lingering gene pool consequences to hundreds of years of slavery.
But you can’t separate science from its social consequences. How big a step is
it from ‘Blacks are better athletes’ to ‘Blacks are less intelligent: When we
captured slaves, we obviously only brought back the ones who didn’t get away –
the least fit/clever. When we bought slaves from local tribes, we were a
lucrative and easy way of getting rid of the least productive, most troublesome
members of the community.’ Now this should really make the hairs on the back of
your neck stand up, but there are people who’ll say ‘Hey, it’s just science – it
’s objective reality. I’m not a racist, Blacks are just dumb.’ That gets turned
into social policy – we pay less attention to crime and poverty in black
communities, and put the money where it can do some good: clever, college bound,
suburban white-boys.
Don’t rely on the scientific community to debunk this sort of stuff either – the
Nazi’s backed themselves up with plenty of ‘evidence’ and peer-reviewed each
other with precise, mutual-masturbatory glee. And here at home, it was only
recently that homosexuality was dropped from the DSM.
When I said that I hoped Robert gets flamed, I was only half kidding. I don’t
necessarily disagree with anything that he’s said, and I certainly don’t mean to
associate him with any of the positions I’ve brought up. At the same time, I
hope this sort of discussion makes people very uncomfortable. These are
dangerous issues and there’s much more too it than just the science. Good
science gets mapped onto political philosophy with horrible consequences, and
very reasonable arguments are used to advance very unreasonable agendas.
-matt
>
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