We need to talk about this. Now.
Charles Murray has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to the bullying students at Middleburry College who viciously disrupted a lecture he was set to give, a lecture which itself turns out to be have been fairly moderate in tone. The whole ruckus raised up the usual spectre of free speech on campus, and you could see the usual suspects on the right rallying to his defense against the PC bullies.
While I believe their defense of free speech is right, their continuing insistence on ignoring the elephants in the room regarding Murray is dooming conservatism as a philosophy worthy of being peddled in the post-Enlightenment public square. I intend to forcefully address the matter here and, hopefully, start a reasoned conversation about one of the right’s biggest blind spots in the twenty-first century.
Let me begin with a necessary caveat: I am not a scientist. I don’t even play one on TV. I possess neither the skills nor the training to be able to evaluate the work of researchers in the fields of psychology or genetics. This article is not about debunking or confirming morally controversial scientific hypotheses. I am far more concerned about the right’s utter blindness to the moral and philosophical ramifications of the whole issue.
Human Moral Equality
Two of the core foundations of American conservatism are the vision of the Founding Fathers and the Western religious understanding of humanity as being created in God’s image. Both unequivocally affirmed that human beings are free, moral agents capable of choosing their own actions and responsible for their deeds, good and bad. This is the basis for the granting of political equality to all, for the pro-life movement, as well as the support for political liberty and free markets rather than a paternalistic government ruling over the helpless children that constitute the multitude of humanity, as other versions of conservatism would have it. It is the basis for equality before the law, the abolition of discrimination, and many other welcome advances of the modern age.
Yet the conservatism of today seems to me to be moving away from that towards a genetically (and thus philosophically) deterministic view of humanity which pretty much rejects this vision bag and baggage. The most obvious case of this are the articles discussing essentialism in gender identity. And until recently, under the surface, there was an increasing embrace of genetic determinism as regards racial and ethnic groups.
Before 2016, with the rise of the alt-right and sundry groups, people on the right could legitimately argue that discussing Murray’s thesis on racial differences in intelligence, right or wrong, would only attract more attention to odious views best left confined to the fever swamps of the right. But now that the right has been taken over by the fever swamps, the failure to seriously understand why so many non-White racial groups would oppose Murray demonstrates a moral autism or a hypocrisy which is simply impossible to ignore.
What Everyone Hears Matters Far More Than What Murray Actually Wrote
Understand something: when a Black or Hispanic or any non-White member of American society sees rightwingers defend and wink-nudge about racial genetic determinism and yes, inferiority, they rightly disbelieve anything and everything else the right says about being in favor of minorities at the policy and rhetorical level. All that nice stuff about providing opportunity and helping them out sounds more like calming words for Whites that they’re not racist and really care about someone beyond their tribe.
Deep down, it does not seem to me and I’m sure to many other people that those on the right really believe in their own shpiel about being in favor of helping all Americans, and that in private they tell themselves that’s it’s all race and IQ, anyway. It’s the instant “scientific” excuse for all the abuses to which especially Black Americans are subjected or when efforts to help non-Whites fail.
Then there’s the hypocrisy. After all, IQ is IQ, yet the treatment of relatively lower IQ working class whites and Down Syndrome (white) babies is far more sympathetic on the right than any understanding of people with non-White skin color. And don’t think that most intelligent people (especially if they’re non-White) don’t notice the nudge-wink of using Asian success to justify Black and Brown failure. It’s a dog whistle that could shatter glass.
It Will Not Stop There
But the right does not seem to realize that this game it is playing with determinism will not stop at race or gender. Scientific determinists have been launching an unrelenting assault on the very concept of free will, the core concept without which none of American conservatism makes any sense (the progressive and Old Conservative visions of paternalism do, but not the Founders’ vision). Many other core philosophical beliefs which conservatives believe in are under similar criticism on much the same basis. You can’t ride the genetic tiger when it works for you and then get off when it doesn’t. In for a penny, in for a pound.
In 1994, the right adopted an uneasy tango with ideas like the Bell Curve, trying to push moral equality and other humanistic and religious ideas, while kind of trending towards or playing footsie with ideas of fundamental differences between human beings more reminiscent of the Old conservatives who opposed democracy or even education for the barbaric “rabble,” who should instead be governed like animals be their superior betters.
Those days are over. That tango is now a marriage, and an utterly incompatible one. The right, especially the intellectual right, must choose whether it believes in the old concepts of human moral equality, freedom, institutions, traditions, and dignity, or whether it indeed buys into the progressive/Old conservative vision of humanity as an inherent (and at this point, atheist-materialist) caste system devoid of any higher meaning or value.
I’ve made my choice. What about you?
