Racial differences and attachments are real, and they can’t be educated or administered away. Family, ancestry, and history are part of who we are, so they are part of identity. People take them to heart, and that’s not going to change.
So why do respectable people get so weird about them, and claim race doesn’t exist, shouldn’t be noticed, or makes no difference whatever? Why not accept it as part of human life that should be accommodated rather than denied and suppressed? And why not apply that principle across the board rather than opportunistically, depending on who’s who?
There are lots of theories. Some say that the racial views now compulsory are Hitler’s revenge: the Nazis did horrific things, so everybody has to reject everything in any way connected to them. Or they’re a matter of status signaling that shows that the signaler—unlike all those yahoos out there—is above such considerations. Or they’re imposed by a strange coalition of rent seekers, political entrepreneurs, resentful misfits, nice white ladies, minorities who don’t like or trust the majority, and successful people who are happy to make payoffs at the expense of possible competitors.
All those explanations have something to them. Even so, there must be some reason we’re dealing with Hitler’s revenge rather than Stalin’s or Mao’s. And personal motives can’t be the basic explanation, because motives don’t change much. Status seekers haven’t always been anti-racist. Misfits, rent seekers, and insecure minorities always want a better deal, but they adjust their pitch to their audience. And nice ladies want to be nice, but they depend on signals from higher-ups to find out what that means politically. So why anti-racism instead of something else?
Maybe it’s the messiness of race that’s the problem. All it tells us is that people descend from populations that lived separately for a long time. The resulting differences are complex, and sometimes matter and sometimes don’t, so there’s no simple way to deal with the situations that arise when worldwide economic integration, backed by modern communications and transportation, entangle every race with every other.
That’s a big problem, because our rulers want a society that is organized in a way that lets them rule it efficiently, effectively, and (from their standpoint) transparently. They can’t think of a good way to sort out complicated racial issues, so they pretend they aren’t there and insist that everybody else do the same. What else can they do, when they claim they can manage things to deliver peace, prosperity, and security to pretty much everybody, but haven’t the faintest idea how to deal with something as basic as race?
That explanation adds something to the picture, but it still doesn’t complete it, since anti-racism is part of a broader movement to destroy traditional distinctions, and some of those distinctions are much easier than race to understood and bring into reasonable order.
Sex, ethnic culture, and religion have always been basic to the way the world works, so humanity has had lots of time to find out what they’re for and how to deal with them. Sex has to do with family life and making babies, and a society that wanders too far from that perspective is going to have problems. Ethnic culture is a system of habits that have grown up to facilitate cooperation, so if you disrupt it wholesale you’ll put people at odds with each other. And religion is an understanding of what the world is like and why things matter. Every society has something that functions as such, and if a society’s religion gets weird or falls apart the same will happen to the society itself.
We’re told we have to root out the effects of all those things, even though they have obvious social functions and the disastrous effects of suppressing them are visible all around us. The taboos against sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and cultural chauvinism aren’t quite as strong as the taboo against racism—that’s why people claim criticism of Islam is really a form of racism—but they too have become part of what’s considered basic human decency. If you don’t go along with them you’re stuck irredeemably in the basket of deplorables.
So at bottom, anti-racism is not about race but about comprehensive opposition to traditional distinctions and connections of any kind. But why is getting rid of those things so important?
Maybe, like our betters claim, it’s all about equality and liberation. But if equality is so important, why is the sexual division of labor so much worse than the bureaucratic or capitalistic version? If inherited cultures are so oppressive, why are corporate culture, therapeutic culture, commercial pop culture, and the culture of political correctness so much better? And if religious discrimination is a crime against humanity, why do people who are insufficiently pious about race and sex get hunted down, deprived of their livelihoods, and driven out of society?
It’s possible that “divide and rule” provides an answer to all these questions, since if you abolish people’s connections to each other they can’t resist doing what you tell them. Even so, it’s better to rule a functional society than a non-functional one, so that’s not really an answer either—at least not for a sane and grounded ruling class that knows its own interests.
All in all, it’s evident that anti-racism isn’t really a matter of calculated policy any more than it’s a matter of personal or psychological motivations. There are important personal and policy reasons involved, and there are people in philosophy departments who find abstract equality an appealing ethical principle, but none of those things can account for it. Instead, it’s based on what amounts to a religion: an understanding of man and the world that resists refutation and shrugs off practical problems because it provides the setting and defines the ultimate concerns by which people evaluate and make sense of everything.
But what religion? Where does it come from? Why has it been so successful? And since it leads to insanity, how will we ever get rid of it?
t’s important to keep in mind how bizarre that system of understandings is. We are expected to be shocked by the claim that racial differences in success are partly explained by racial differences in ability and other behavioral tendencies. If minorities are less successful in some respect, the entire explanation is bad conduct by the majority, along with mysterious structures of oppression.
Similar rules apply to sex. If someone thinks men and women are different in any way that matters there’s something wrong with him. If sexually odd people get depressed and self-destructive, the cause can’t be a disorder affecting a basic aspect of their lives, it must be the failure of others to accept everything about them as normal and even admirable.
The idea, then, is that differences resulting from many millennia of separate development under very different conditions—or even hundreds of millions of years of sexual dimorphism—can’t possibly have behavioral consequences that matter. To say otherwise demonstrates malice or psychological disorder.
We’re also expected to believe that religious and cultural differences—differences in the beliefs, attitudes, habits, and loyalties that define communities and how they carry on their lives together—have no relevance to productive, unproductive, praiseworthy, or blameworthy behavior. Such differences are assimilated to racial ones, so that when someone says something negative about Islam he’s a racist.
These rules have exceptions that mostly seem designed to undercut the position of sexually normal white Christian men. For example, the greater success of Jews and Chinese Americans isn’t thought to prove they’re exploiting other people. Instead, it proves ordinary white people are stupid and lazy.
That claim directly contradicts the basic principle, but it can be justified politically because it advances the egalitarian project: white men are mostly dominant worldwide, so allowing them to be attacked as whites and as men disrupts the overall system of group dominance.
All this is nonsense both scientifically and from the standpoint of common sense. And attempts to make people believe nonsense and act on it are perverse and destructive. Racial and sexual quotas destroy standards of performance, mismatch positions and abilities, and promote cynicism. Diversity—especially compelled diversity—disrupts the trust and cohesion that grow from common ties and understandings. And the myth that white men cause everybody else’s problems leads—among other things—to murder.
Nonetheless, people are convinced that PC views on these issues are patently correct. Nor are these people dummies in any ordinary sense. Western elites in business, law, government, academia, journalism, and high and popular culture—the people who run the richest and most powerful societies in history—consider them beyond question. If you reject them you’re considered not only deplorable but ignorant, provincial, lower class, and irredeemably stupid.
Further, these views are strongest in circles that stress rationality and expertise: among academics, and among liberals, socialists, and increasingly among libertarians. They are at least implicitly accepted among establishment conservatives, who want respectability more than anything. They’re less so among grassroots conservatives, who favor common sense and habitual ways of doing things over claimed expertise. And they’re weakest among political irrationalists, like fascists, who emphasize will rather than reason.
Also, they are thoroughly secular. They’ve advanced hand-in-hand with the weakening of traditional religion. It’s not traditionalist Catholics, fundamentalist Protestants, or orthodox Jews who promote them, it’s secular people, along with religious leaders concerned with their reputation among secular elites and ready to denounce their own followers if it advances their profile in the secular world.
So the public life of the most successful societies ever is dominated by an unintuitive, anti-scientific, and profoundly destructive view of human nature. That view is joined at the hip to secularism, to modern science and technology, and to modern forms of social organization, such as global markets and the expert bureaucracies that effectively define the modern state.
How can that possibly be? The connections are so strong it can’t be a coincidence, so there must be some connection between the factors that make the most successful modern societies what they are and an odd form of self-destructive insanity.
Since the question has to do with a malfunction in fundamental ways of thought, the discussion is now going to get somewhat abstract. It would be simpler to blame our troubles on something very concrete, like a particular historical event or group of malefactors, but the problems are everywhere and they always just get worse. So it’s evident that something very basic has gone wrong.
To answer the question we must look at the features that distinguish modern Western thought about man and society. It’s not God, honor, virtue, loyalty, or ancestral ways that people care about today. God is dead, politically speaking, and traditional ties and standards are considered mindless habits and prejudices. It follows, or so it is thought, that such things should no longer guide us.
Instead, we should look to individualism, utilitarianism, and the application of technological thinking to everything, including human life. Preferences can be observed, so they’re scientifically legitimate. They tell us what to do, so they’re available to ground morality. Further, all individuals have preferences, and preferences are equally such, so every preference of every person has an equal claim to satisfaction.
It follows, or so it is thought, that egalitarian hedonism should be the supreme political and moral standard. The rational social order is then one that maximizes equal satisfaction of everyone’s preferences, to the extent that can be achieved consistent with the efficiency, coherence, and stability of the system. And a good person is someone who helps promote that goal.
This account of current ways of thinking explains why the assumed goal of public life today is giving people what they want, with equal favor to male and female, black and white, normal and abnormal. It doesn’t explain why our rulers insist that those categories of people don’t differ in any way that matters. Indeed, the emphasis on science and reason makes that belief all the more puzzling.
Our rulers are not usually fantasists. The modern world grew out of the scientific revolution, the demands of war and state-building, and the quest for profit, and it has been supremely successful in achieving its goals. Those who run it mostly don’t inherit their positions or obtain them by force or fraud, but obtain them by convincing others they will serve its goals intelligently and effectively.
With that in mind, how can they consider it a moral and rational imperative to believe obvious falsehoods? Why the hysterical reaction when someone questions them? And why does the public accept things that go so much against nature, common sense, and the most ordinary loyalty to one’s own?
Our rulers’ project of establishing a prosperous egalitarian society on transparently rational principles would undoubtedly be easier if race, sex, and cultural heritage didn’t matter. But such things do matter, and it seems our rulers would want to understand the differences so they could take them into account. After all, doctors, engineers, and other technologists want to know exactly what they’re dealing with so they can achieve the results intended. So why not billionaires, bureaucrats, and social scientists?
The answer, of course, is that we’re talking about human beings, and technological methods can’t really be applied to human beings no matter how much people profess rationality.
Man is a religious animal. That’s almost a logical necessity, since our thoughts sort themselves out continuously and eventually form a system that enables us to deal with all the varied problems of life. To the extent they become systematic they organize themselves around basic principles that explain how to think about the world and our actions.
That raises a problem for our rulers. As secular modern men they tend strongly toward philosophical materialism, so they want to explain the world by reference to the things physicists talk about. That would make the laws of physics the basic principles in their understanding of things. But like everyone else they have moral beliefs: they believe some things are truly better than others.
That means they have, implicitly at least, basic moral principles that tie their idea of what’s good and bad to reality and so make it objectively correct. How else can they justify their position and power? Without principles that read their beliefs regarding what is right and good into the nature of reality, how can they say that those who disagree with them are wrong while they are right?
In the West the highest moral principle has traditionally been God. In China it was Heaven, or perhaps the Tao. Plato thought it was the Form of the Good. Some people have thought of it as Nature, understood not in the sense of the mechanistic system described by modern natural science but as a system that includes implicit goods and purposes, so that man has natural goods, and what is right and good for him is to realize them.
These views aren’t available to our rulers, because they don’t fit into the world of modern physical science. So in the absence of an objective moral standard to be found in the external world, people today have made subjective human experience—which, after all, does have objective existence as the subjective experience human beings actually do have—the standard. So what we want has become the highest moral principle. In effect, our desires, feelings, and choices take the place of God, Heaven, and Nature as principles that make things good and bad.
That means those things take on what amounts to divine status. They are the highest moral principles, so everything must bow down to them. Since our desires, feelings, and choices are equally desires, feelings, and choices, they all deserve equal reverence. Morality therefore means catering to each of us equally. But once basic survival issues like food have been solved, as they have throughout the West, social regard becomes the thing people care most about and are most willing to fight for. So morality has come to require equal social regard for each of us.
That is why the most morally charged goal of politics, the one that drives people to extreme measures when something seems to stand in its way, has gone from the material equality for which communists once murdered millions to the psychological equality that looms so large in the world of the coddled and feminized educated class whose sensibilities dominate our bureaucratized and media-drenched society. Religion and morality have become politics, politics have become egalitarian politics, and egalitarian politics have become the politics of equal recognition and esteem.
The result today is that it is intolerable for disabled black lesbians, whose feelings and equal social position must be viewed as sacred, to be seen as inferior in any way to sexually normal and physically and mentally functional white men. They must be seen as possessing every valuable human quality in at least as great a measure. And their victim status sacralizes them absolutely.
But in a commercial, bureaucratic, and technological society the most important traits are those that lead to occupational success and the realization of practical goals. So disabled black lesbians must have those traits in equal measure. They must receive not only equal success and pay but equal respect and consideration. And for that they must be seen to have attained their rewards on the merits, by making at least an equal contribution to social goals.
That’s very rarely the case. Hence the compulsory denial of the obvious. Because if falsehoods are not universally accepted, and the contributions of disabled black lesbians to particle physics are scoffed at, the very goal of politics and morality is defeated: the worth of some people is viewed as less than that of others.
Basically, that result comes from accepting equality and preference satisfaction as the highest social goals, together with prosperity and the consequent shift to intangible factors like reputation as the focus of concern. That shift means that politics today is concerned with redistributing social esteem rather than redistributing wealth.
But why does the tendency go to such extremes? Postwar Western politics have not generally been fanatical, and liberals have historically favored moderation and legality. Since that’s so, why haven’t respectable figures suggested rethinking a view that evidently requires extreme measures, including suppression of scientific inquiry and extralegal violence against dissenters, to uphold it?
One reason is the view’s very silliness: it would fall apart if discussion were allowed. A more fundamental reason is that questioning it implies that everyone is not in fact equal, so doing so is a direct denial of equal esteem and thus a violation of fundamental moral principle. That’s why the Left doesn’t think free speech applies to “racists”—those who think demography matters. They don’t propose something rational, or so it is thought. Instead, they do something: they help create an intolerable environment for women and minorities. They should therefore be treated as criminal enterprises.
Here we need to remember that radical egalitarianism is part of our established religion. It’s integral to understandings of human worth and moral obligation that are now accepted as basic to morality and social order. For that reason people think that if it goes everything goes.
Specifically, they believe that if you reject radical egalitarianism you are rejecting the right to equal respect, and thus saying that some people and their desires are worth less than other people and their desires. But on current ways of thinking there is no principle that limits how far that line of thought can go. It does no good to say “we are all made in the image of God so we all matter a great deal” if God isn’t a knowable objective reality, or to say “we all have the same human nature so we all have a certain basic human value” if man is simply a biological machine with no more intrinsic worth than any other machine. We can’t even appeal to common sense, which tells us we shouldn’t go too far, when common sense has been debunked as a combination of prejudice and intellectual laziness.
So if there are real differences among people with regard to socially valuable qualities, who’s to say that the differences don’t justify valuing some people the way we value dogs, chickens, or cockroaches? Current understandings don’t give a good answer, and that’s why our rulers think you’re a Nazi if you don’t accept extreme egalitarianism. On their understanding of things, why wouldn’t you be?
Beyond that, career is everything for the members of our ruling class. They see themselves as valuable because their position and qualifications put them at the center of the project of realizing a social order whose justification is universally accepted and therefore counts as objectively valid. But if the justification is denied, the rock on which they base their self-understanding turns to sand. They can’t tolerate that.
But if all this is so, what can be done?
I’ve argued that the reason equal preference satisfaction is now considered the highest social and moral good is that people believe the real world is simply the world presented by modern natural science. Modern natural science has to do with mechanical interactions among objects in space. As such, it has no room for objective goods rooted in the way things are but only individual preferences demonstrated by tendencies to act. So preferences become the sole possible basis for saying something is worth doing. But since preferences are equally preferences, everybody’s preferences equally deserve satisfaction, subject to the efficiency, coherence, and stability of the system.
If that is indeed what’s behind current moral thinking, then getting rid of equal preference satisfaction as the supreme moral standard requires abandoning the view that modern science tells us all we can know about reality. Instead, we need a view that has room for goodness, beauty, truth, and virtue as objective realities that are not determined by preferences but instead determine which preferences deserve to be pursued. On such a view, favoring Bill’s preference over Bob’s would no longer imply favoring Bill over Bob. Instead, it would imply a judgment that Bill happens to be right on the issue. Feelings would be irrelevant.
If such a view were adopted, science and technology would still be pursued as methods of inquiry and acting but would no longer provide the supreme understanding of what the world is like and what it makes sense to do. Instead, they would be part of a more comprehensive understanding of reason and rational action that accepts science, but also accepts sources like intuition, common sense, informal pattern recognition, tradition, and philosophical reasoning as sources of knowledge and standards for action. Good sense and wisdom would then replace expertise as the ultimate foundation for rational decision. Good sense and wisdom, of course, might well include respect for established usages and loyalty to one’s people.
If that is the way out of our current situation, and that situation is unsustainable because it leads to madness, then at some point social views will change in the manner suggested. The Good, Beautiful, and True will come back as objective realities that provide a standard beyond equality and getting what we want for evaluating actions and institutions. And tradition and established ties will once again play a legitimate role in social life.
How and when that happens, and what we end up with when it does, are of course highly debatable. But if my account is correct, those are the debates we should be paying attention to. They are the ones that stand a chance of telling us how to get out of the hole we’re in.