More importantly, I believe there is something ominously wrong about focusing on a person's race, at least to the extent that one loses sight of a person's unique and irreplaceable attributes as an individual.
The evil of racism is that it is collectivist, meaning that the racist loses sight of a person's precious individuality. The danger of lumping individuals together is not merely an evil characteristic of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. This habit of viewing people through the lens of race is a defining characteristic of the left as well. In fact, the left is obsessed by the postmodern tendency to define individuals according to the tribe they were born into.
Let us remember that it is wrong to judge individuals by factors they can't control. Our skin tone and eye color at birth, like the very time and place of our birth, are outside our ability to control. Any matter that is outside the realm of personal choice is therefore outside the realm of morality. Whether a person's actions are right or wrong depends crucially on that person's ability to choose one action or another. Choice is therefore a crucial element in judging a person as good or bad. But the left seems to think of people only in terms of their race, class, and gender, all of which are beyond anyone's ability to control, at least at the time of one's birth, transgender surgery notwithstanding.
Let me amplify the point: judging people according to standards that are outside their ability to control is a bad thing, just as bad as old fashioned racism, insofar as it fails to regard people as fully realized and unique individuals.
Thomas Sowell is an economist and prolific author who does scholarly work at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is, not incidentally, a black man who grew up in Harlem and graduated with honors from Harvard University at a time before affirmative action made it possible for minorities to be admitted to prestigious schools without measuring up to the admissions standards traditionally required of everyone.
One of Sowell's academic specialties, on which he has published many books and a flood of articles, is precisely this matter that white populations tend to have higher IQ's than blacks.
This statistical fact of higher IQ's among whites should give no comfort to the Klan bigots who feel superior to blacks, because this statistical difference is highly correlated with environmental factors such as nutrition and the socio-economic accident of the time and place of one's birth.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where nutrition is as abysmally lacking as electrical power and safe drinking water, IQ's in some of these countries tend to average around 60! If we take any of those kids at birth and rear them in an affluent, educated home, their IQ's will certainly become dramatically higher than their siblings' and parents who were left back in Africa.
Among white men tested as Army draftees during World War One, IQ's were very significantly lower than today.
When white Europeans began sailing to the far reaches of the oceans and came upon all the backwards peoples of the world, they falsely concluded that Europeans were inherently superior to all those tribes that had never invented the wheel or developed any technology more sophisticated than open fires and canoes.
These Europeans didn't know that Homo saps have been on the earth around a 100,000 years (or, for what it's worth, is the true number closer to a million years? For the point I am making, this question does not matter much, in the context of Biblical literalists who believe that God created the universe around 6,000 years ago.) Until roughly 10,000 years ago none of our ancient ancestors had risen any higher than the primitive peoples of today.
The Europeans also could not know that the DNA evidence discovered in just the last two decades proves beyond the slightest doubt that all of our ancient ancestors are from Africa! In other words, all human beings come from the same stock. We are one species. There is no essential difference, certainly no moral difference between us, insofar as the biological roots of our most ancient ancestors.
These matters of race need to be put into a proper context.
These same Europeans, in their great age of discovery, starting around 500 years ago, could have thought about their own ancient ancestors. One thing they might have pondered is that just 2,000 years ago, almost all of the northern Europeans were living in a condition of poverty that was as abysmal as the poorest populations on the planet today. These were people who wore animal skins and lived in twig and log huts sealed with mud, who slept on dirt floors with their domestic animals beside them. They burned animal dung and wood for heat and fuel to cook, and so must have suffered horrible lung disorders from all that toxic smoke, just as modern primitives in Africa do today. Their lives embodied the very essence of that condition described by Hobbes as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Life expectancy was not even 30 years. I would not think that their IQ's could have surpassed by much the poorest populations today.
So the proper context here is to note that the difference between the savage populations of Europe and Africa is a separation of around 2,000 years. So what? Two thousand years is a long time! No, it's not ... not by the measure of how long man has been on the earth. Consider the following idea, which I heard in a lecture some years ago by the great economist, student of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, and Objectivist scholar, George Reisman:
It's clear that Homo saps have been on the planet for around a million years (backwards Biblical literalists to the contrary notwithstanding, who believe that the God of Abraham "created" the earth around six thousand years ago.)
Let's put this very starkly:
During most of his million years, man was a hunter-gatherer. It was only around 10,000 years ago that man first began to develop agriculture. So, 10,000 of 1,000,000 years equals one percent of the time man has been on the earth. In other words, it was only in the last flash of our existence that we developed agriculture.
Still briefer is the percentage of the time since our ancient northern European ancestors wore animal skins, compared to the time that man has been on the planet: 2,000 out of 1,000,000 equals just one fifth of one percent of the time Homo saps have walked the earth.
Think about that.
Finally, the insanity of judging people according to their race is confirmed by the facts assembled by such scholars as Thomas Sowell which prove that the differences among people of the same race are vastly greater than the differences between the races themselves, regarded as groups. In other words, there is a vastly greater difference between the brightest and and dullest specimens within each race than the differences between the races, measured as groups.
Finally, the insanity of judging people according to their race is confirmed by the facts assembled by such scholars as Thomas Sowell which prove that the differences among people of the same race are vastly greater than the differences between the races themselves, regarded as groups. In other words, there is a vastly greater difference between the brightest and and dullest specimens within each race than the differences between the races, measured as groups.
In short, to be white, black, yellow, or red does not reliably predict anything about an individual's intelligence or potential. But, as usual, the collectivists are obsessed by the differences between groups, and are blind to individuals and individualism.
Collectivists are pixilated by the evil fairy dust of group membership, which is to say membership in groups into which individuals are born. Collectivists do not seem to know how to consider people as the unique, precious, irreplaceable individuals that each one of us is.
Collectivism is a dull and coarse way of viewing the world, and, ironically, it is just as characteristic of the liberal left as it is of the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact, the Klan's crude bigotry is based just on the one criterion of race, whereas the liberal left adds class and gender to this evil collectivist stew into which they drop all people. To an even greater degree than the Klan, lefties regard people not so much as individuals, but as members of the groups into which they were born.
Collectivists are pixilated by the evil fairy dust of group membership, which is to say membership in groups into which individuals are born. Collectivists do not seem to know how to consider people as the unique, precious, irreplaceable individuals that each one of us is.
Collectivism is a dull and coarse way of viewing the world, and, ironically, it is just as characteristic of the liberal left as it is of the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact, the Klan's crude bigotry is based just on the one criterion of race, whereas the liberal left adds class and gender to this evil collectivist stew into which they drop all people. To an even greater degree than the Klan, lefties regard people not so much as individuals, but as members of the groups into which they were born.
Shame on all these collectivists!
To be human is to be an individual first, and a member of a group only secondarily.
The only groups that matter, morally speaking, are those in which one's membership is a matter of an individual's choice, and such choice is politically open only to those who live in societies which enjoy some degree of freedom.
You may argue that this concern with individuals versus groups is as pointless as wondering whether the chicken or the egg came first.
My answer is that this question of individualism versus collectivism has life-and-death importance.
Collectivism, treating people as good or bad according to which groups they belong, tends to promote totalitarian political systems that lead to the death camps which were the very emblem of the 20th century's worst problems.
By contrast, individualism unleashes the creative power of Homo sapiens where it lives, which is inside each person, and thereby animates this astonishing eco-system of peaceful cooperation and production, which is the free market, where we enjoy voluntary trade of values to mutual advantage. This freedom has improved the quality of life on earth as never before.
Revised 2015.0801
To be human is to be an individual first, and a member of a group only secondarily.
The only groups that matter, morally speaking, are those in which one's membership is a matter of an individual's choice, and such choice is politically open only to those who live in societies which enjoy some degree of freedom.
You may argue that this concern with individuals versus groups is as pointless as wondering whether the chicken or the egg came first.
My answer is that this question of individualism versus collectivism has life-and-death importance.
Collectivism, treating people as good or bad according to which groups they belong, tends to promote totalitarian political systems that lead to the death camps which were the very emblem of the 20th century's worst problems.
By contrast, individualism unleashes the creative power of Homo sapiens where it lives, which is inside each person, and thereby animates this astonishing eco-system of peaceful cooperation and production, which is the free market, where we enjoy voluntary trade of values to mutual advantage. This freedom has improved the quality of life on earth as never before.
E P N
Revised 2015.0801
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