A major problem for “paleocons” is that our utilitarian culture is drenched in the delusion that every problem has a solution. Conjuring up Grand Programs and Policies run counter to genuine traditional conservatism, yet electoral viability requires it. Hence the birth and continuing appeal of neoconservatism.

Yet, paleos add to their own misery with quirky agendas like; the often sneering, petulant criticisms of Israel that you cite,the Romantic-pining for a return to the glories of the Old Confederacy, and your call to explore the wonders of “genetic endowment”. Any movement saddled with that kind of agenda will find itself rightly marginalized, if only by the last flickering embers of decency residing in our body politic.

A traditionalist Right can mount an effective challenge to our current regime. First, though it must challenge the sterile rationalism that has drained our culture of it’s moral energy, while also jettisoning any malign preoccupations with racial superiority.

Do we have the courage and the faith to do so?

As always, Professor Gottfried, you’re writing in precisely the right spirit and mood. I see less than no sign in my small corner of the universe that attention is turning toward a possible renewal and restoration of acceptably conservative patterns of thought and behavior. None of the professors or students at my small Midwestern liberal arts college can talk themselves out of a basic acceptance of whatever is the current installment of egalitarianism—“inclusiveness” and “multiculturalism,” the last time I checked. This is true of campus “conservatives” as much as it is of self-identified Leftists. No one can answer basic, obvious challenges to a left-brained reading of history. No one can answer basic questions about history at all. No one can explain what makes a liberal a liberal or a neoconservative a neoconservative. Since knowing about these matters would help a great deal in understanding current social, intellectual, and political reality, they are precisely the matters that never enter public discussion. And why would they? It’s not in the interest of any public figure to address them.

I also agree that traditionalists ought not to oppose the forays into the biological sciences you mention. Biological concerns may not be every traditionalist’s cup of tea, but then, neither are rocket science nor viticulture. Why radically oppose potentially worthwhile research in areas outside of one’s focus, especially when they might be able to offer us useful knowledge? Aristotle, for one, did not share an aversion to biology, nor did he keep its insights sealed off from philosophy and politics.

At the moment, however, I’m unable to rise even to your level of optimism when it comes to what you call the “paleo movement.” Is there such thing as a paleo house to put in order? Was there ever? “We,” whoever we are, have yet to prove that we can build our house on modern soil, and that the house would matter at all if we built it.

The boxing analogy also fails to inspire. Where is there a fight worth entering? Where is there a match that offers the possibility of even a well-fought loss? Doesn’t public debate and discussion operate on premises that ensure “our” ideas will never be heard in any meaningful way? A boxing analogy presupposes the equity of an athletic contest, and this condition exists in no place that I have visited.

Assume we find ourselves with loads of funding and influence with the “public.” What would this mean? We would still be working with modern ideas, through institutions formed and run on modernist assumptions. Looking out over the contemporary landscape, I have a difficult time imagining what a “movement” would look like, much less what it would be doing if it were “doing well,” to say nothing of “winning.” Tell me more about the Europe where a “Right” is “doing splendidly”—I can’t get my head high enough above the waves to see that far.

Just curious, what “useful knowledge” do you expect from the “biological sciences” and how might it be applied in a humane way? Our society seems to have lost any sense of personal responsibility or restraint when handling the power of technology. Sheer knowledge unencumbered by moral restrictions has often been disastrous.

What do you have in mind?

In response to Kevin, I would answer that the
highlighting of evidence of cognitive
differences between genetically restricted groups may be useful in changing bad contribute to overthrowing oppressive public policy
and counteracting the guilt trips that the media and
public admnistrators are laying on white Americans.
Such genetic findings might also be used to
demonstrate that our educational institutions have
lowered academic standards at least in part to deal
with cognitively underequipped tuition-bearers.
Although I am not especially drawn to such
applications of science, I am appalled by the refusal
of traditionalists to take them into account. Either
fear of being politically incorrect or an exaggerated
noncorporeal understanding of human nature, one that
would have been foreign to Aristotle, seems to drive
this cultivation of blissful ignorance.

I appreciate what you are saying in yoiur article regarding the paleo-cons espousing negative groups like Hamas, Bathists, et, but what are we to do?  These are the hot button mind control enemies that both the left and the neo-cons set up as the current day boogey men.  When we point that much of this is fear and hate mongering to self serve opponents of free speech and society we come off as defending negative groups.
.  The reason for this is simple.  Our enemy is clever.  They bait us into what appears to be support of what are seen as negative groups, when all we are really trying to do is defend American’s basic rights and freedoms.

Paul, we can establish the fact that academic
standards have been lowered for a host of reasons
without resorting to testing of “genetically
restricted groups” I suspect you already know this,
hence your reticence to be “drawn by such
applications”.

In working for a just social order, traditionalists
naturally eschew methods that dehumanize members of
that order. We’ve learned our lessons from the last
century and have no interest in reducing our fellows
to white mice in the laboratories of ideologues.
Your call for genetic testing is still searching for
justification.

I don’t think Professor Gottfried issued any call for genetic testing. He simply recommended that paleos not waste their energy opposing it. My own suspicion is that complete refusal to allow such biological ideas into the conversation evidences lingering traces of allegiance to the weird politics of abstract anti-racism, less than any more admirable moral hang-up.

Great article, but I’m not sure there is anything currently like the old paleo revival of the late-1980s to mid-1990s. Those who follow Jared Taylor and American Renaissance are interested in advocating for whites and our history and culture. Part of this is to point out that intelligence and other traits are inherited to a large degree. Therefore, black failure should not be blamed on whites, nor should hatred of whites be tolerated.

Of course, devout Catholics (perhaps best represented on the paleo right by Chronicles) are bothered by this and feel it takes God out of the equation. They note that many racialists are hostile to Christianity. They may also feel closer (or at least say they feel closer) to a black Catholic than to a white atheist or Jew.

The paleolibertarians (LewRockwell.com) are mostly just concerned about foreign policy right now and don’t appear too interested in debates on culture, race or domestic policy.

TAC has some good writers but seems very confused about the possibility of a coalition with the left. It will never happen.

The number of people who feel comfortable among all of these groups is very small. We may all hate the war and the Bush presidency but that’s about it.

1. the wonders of “genetic endowment”

Amen to Kevin!  Has Gottfried, with his Jewish Austrian roots, forgotten Georg Schönerer, not to mention his distant admirer, a Linzer postcard painter contemporarily resident in Vienna? 

I part with you, Kevin, regarding the Old Confederacy.  It must seem as quixotic to you as“the king over the water”; Jeffersonianism isn’t.

weird politics of abstract anti-racism ?.  Sorry, Evan.  It’s the The Turner Diaries that’s weird, and also repugnant.

2. My advice here to paleoconservatives is to play down Middle Eastern politics and to throw their moral capital into fighting the immigration invasion and the use of PC as a tool of government control.

But the Iraq debacle is in fact the burnt dinner out of the Neocon version of Waffle House.  Immigration and PC are in fact the special stack of pancakes from the Cultural Marxist IHOP.

3. [...] is anyone silly enough to believe that all of the neoconservative celebrities [...] will suddenly (God willing!) go away and never be heard from again?

Call me silly.  The Neocon day is done. Their sun is setting in their Iraq version of the Athenian Syracuse expedition, as it set in Vietnam for Vital Center “Liberals” and Lyndon Johnson’s retread of the New Deal. 

The Cultural Marxist day is dawning, and their sun will break through the haze come 20 Jan 2009, when Nurse Ratched takes over.  Then we Tories will need all the Whig and Libertarian allies that we can get.  Let’s not be looking backward and nursing old slights and grudges (and I have my share), and let’s instead look forward to the dark battle ahead.  Paul Gottfried and I either need find allies or expect to be tried in the Star Chamber on charges of “hate speech” and share in neighboring cells in the Supermax.  Cultural Marxism must be destroyed.

The US population is still sleeping, snugly insulated from reality by the entertainment and mortgage refinance industries. Its going to take serious jolts to the system that deliver real pain to everyone, before our fellow citizens turn off auto-pilot and re-engage the senses. Where these jolts come from, when they occur, whether they are manufactured for effect or occur naturally, and most importantly, who successfully defines the events for the masses, these factors will determine the future political reality. I don’t believe the future Right will appear related at all to the current species of conservative, paleo or neo. I see a Right reduced and refined by dire circumstances, dependent again on instinct for its very survival.

the reason peolpe like bill kristol not only still have jobs but get hired by Time magazine is that the beltway is the new hollywood.  TMZ is even opening an office there.  the pundits need big government to cause problems so they have topics tr to tread water on.  hardball is for scandals about mitt romney and hillary clinton, not philosphy. 

and yes, the reglion of washington is globalism and both sides worship it.  natavism a la buchanan is ugly to them.  partially because they know those solutions work and theirs don’t

also, let me point out a key difference bewtween hollywood and the beltway:  lindsey lohan, spielberg and co actually create things, namely movies.  washington makes nothing!

Two immediate benefits of not opposing investigations into the genetic and heritable quality of intelligence and allied traits are:

1) We could dispense once and for all with nonsense like “No Child Left Behind.” Some children necessarily MUST be left behind, because they are not educable beyond a certain point. This does not mean they should be treated callously or inhumanely, but rather that they should have a place in society’s educational priorities that is in keeping with their condition.

Much more emphasis should be placed on cultivating the abilities of the gifted than is now the case, as Charles Murray pointed out some time ago in his 3-part series of articles in the Wall Street Journal. Failure to identify and prepare children on the right-hand side of the bell curve for the positions of social and economic leadership they are suited to fill has resulted in a shocking waste of talent. To do so in order to satisfy egalitarian scruples is a luxury our society can ill afford.

2) Recognition is overdue that, in a society maintaining unemployment below 5%, the poor are not poor because they lack employment or suitable training for employment - they are poor because they lack the native intelligence, drive, or character to hold jobs or to manage their lives providently and prudently.

Furthermore, no government program can instill such traits.The modern American welfare state was founded during the Great Depression, under vastly different economic conditions than those of the present day. When unemployment exceeded 25%, there were many of the unemployed who had the skills and motivation to work; they simply didn’t have jobs. This became the underlying assumption of the New Deal and of every subsequent welfare measure. Whatever else may be said of those measures, it is clear that the premise is now incorrect and the failure of programs to improve the condition of the poor has followed in due course. As has been observed, in LBJ’s War on Poverty, poverty won. Reality-based welfare policy must reflect the fact that the poor are poor in most cases because they are on the left-hand side of the bell curve, and that no government program can fix that.

What is called for, accordingly, is not social engineering, but Christian charity. This accepts that inequality is a natural and normal feature of human society, and recognizes that it is both possible and desirable to comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable.

RE: “Equally problematic is the excessive enthusiasm that the paleos have shown in beating up on the Israeli side in Middle Eastern affairs and in sometimes imitating the far Left as rabid critics of the war in Iraq.”

Let’s see, the Israeli Lobby has gotten us into a war in which thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. It is also a war that is rapidly bankrupting us and robbing us of our civil liberties. Doesn’t Israel deserve to be justly criticised for these incredible outrages or should we just shut up to protect Jewish sensitivities. This comment also smells more than a bit of racism. It appears that paleos should not be entitled to criticise Israel simply because citicism of Israel (by non Jewish paleos at least) is by nature anti-Semitic and therefore forbidden.

Israel deserves to be “beaten up” for a ever expanding number of reasons involving things other than just the war in Iraq. Here are but a a few examples: 1) the Israeli government controlled Anti-Defamation League has been instrumental in foisting “hate crime” laws on numerous countries both in Europe and North America. 2)The Israelis through their minions in Washington have so throughly corrupted American politics that our founding fathers must be spinning in their graves. 3) The Israeli government has hijacked our foreign aid program. How else would it have been possible for a country of only six million people to have managed to end up receiving 20-40% of our country’s entire foreign aid budget. This largesse the part of the US taxpayer allows Jewish emigres to Israel can get free government subsidized condominiums (with nearby community swimming pools of course) while others in the third world die from starvation because there is no foreign aid money left for them. I found it amazing that Gottfried has sympathy for a country that is openly racist, rabidly (and increasingly openly) anti-Christian, and perpetually expansionistic. 

For those whose memory is short, remember that it just a few years ago, during the time of the USSR, that Israel was called “the most heavily socialistic country outside the eastern bloc.” Who subsided this little experiment in social planning? The US taxpayer of course with little or no opposition from those very fearful conservatives who at the time were generally considered “budget hawks” politicans in the US congress. 

Maybe Gottfried should make a trip to Israel and put on a sign on his chest once there saying he has converted and is now a Catholic. Then he should take a walk into one of those ever increasing number number of fundamenatlist Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank.I think he would be amazed at just how intolerant a group that will soon make up a majority of Israeki citizenry can be to those, who like himself, who have strayed from the fold. By the end of the day, if the experiences of Catholic nun and pries residents of Israel are any indication, he would come out of one of these neighborhood at least covered with spittle or maybe with actual physical injuries. If he thinks claim this is an exaggeration, he should contact Mordechai Vanunu so that Vanunu can explain to just how “free, open, tolerant, and democratic” Israel really is.

It might be time for Gottfried to read (re-read) Israel Shahak’s books in order to get a better understanding of what “this brave little country” has been up to.

Maybe Gottfried should make a trip to Israel and put on a sign on his chest once there saying he has converted and is now a Catholic. Then he should take a walk into one of those ever increasing number number of fundamenatlist [sic] Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank.I think he would be amazed at just how intolerant a group that will soon make up a majority of Israeki [sic] citizenry can be to those, who like himself, who have strayed from the fold. By the end of the day, if the experiences of Catholic nun and pries [sic] residents of Israel are any indication, he would come out of one of these neighborhood at least covered with spittle or maybe with actual or maybe with actual physical injuries.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.

1. Oh, no!  Not Judeophobia and race AGAIN!  (Oh, yes ... again.)

“Charm is the great English blight.  It does not exist outside these damp islands.  It spots and kills anything it touches.  It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

Thus the serpent-tongued Satan in Brideshead Revisited (1960 ed. p. 246).

“Genetic endowment” and the “genetic and heritable quality of intelligence” is the lipstick on the pig of racialism.  American historical sensibility reaches its far horizon in five minutes. For Scientific Racialism did not enter the world with the bang of Blitzkrieg, the brawl and bellow of the Horst Wessel Lied, the thumbing jackboots of the Badenweiler Marsch, the ghastly flicker of the SA torchlight parade through the Brandenburg Gate, the Satanic revelries of the Nürnberger Parteitag, or the stench from the ovens of Auschwitz.  It also did not begin in Scottsboro (or with the Trenton Six, you Yankees).  It began, rather, with the soft gentle tingle of the harpsichord obligato and the mellifluous and dulcet strings strokes in the chamber music of Sweet Reason, all in the shady “Olive Grove of Academe/[...] where the Attic Bird/Trills her thick-warbl’d notes the summer long; /There the flow’ry hill Hymettus with the sound/of Bees’ industrious murmur oft invites/to studious musing” (thus Satan Proper, Paradise Regained, iv. l. 244f).  It began, in other words, with the work of the Count de Gobineau. 

We know how it ended.

Note kindly that I am not calling anyone a “racist”; that tactic I’ll leave to Cultural Marxist McCarthyites. That said: 

Race is the g-g-great American vice. It does not exist (anymore) outside the egg-frying asphalt and tick-infested garden lawns of this land.  It blots and blights everything it touches.  It kills High Culture; it kills schools (I saw it!); it kills friendships; it kills calm intellectual debate and serious “studious musing” (be it on blogs or the boob-tube); it kills any reception of a proper understanding of Lincoln’s War and Reconstruction; it killed the Civil Rights Movement; it killed Vital Center/New Deal “liberalism”; it killed The New Left; it has killed Paleoconservatism; David Frum thinks it will kill Cultural Marxism (“multiculturalism” tipping over into neo-nationalism); it will kill utterly any chance for an “Old Right” revival; and I greatly fear, my dear posters on this blog, that it has k-k-killed some of you.

Sad.

2. To say something positive, inasmuch as my favorite books are Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I actually like the idea of a Heaven View Holiness, Old Time Gospel, True Vine, Four Square, Missionary Alliance, Primitive Old Right revival, – the camp meeting gathered at the river, under the tent, with Kirkan testimonials, Bourbon Democrat altar calls, Charles Lindbergh shape note singing, John T. Flynn righteous shouting, Ayn-Rand Amen corners, Barry-Goldwater total immersions, Frank-Meyer missionary appeals, the slain in the Albert-Jay-Nock spirit, the speaking in Buckley-tongues, Hell-Fire-and-Mencken preaching, Richard Weaver sermonics, Charles Coughlin foot-washings, and a place where the true believers can touch the relics of Bob Taft.  Maybe, in a spot relegated way far out back by the ice cream truck, Robert Welch snake-handling.  Why, I think I’d feel right at home.  How many sinners it would convert I can’t say.

“It also did not begin in Scottsboro (or with the Trenton Six, you Yankees). “

What, no mention of the Duke lacrosse team or the Tawanna Brawley hoax? Wonder why.

Sorry, but I’d take a neocon over guys like Simian.

MSS,
Who would administer the regime of genetic testing?
You may cloak it under the guise of charity,
but I’m hard-pressed to imagine any Christian leaders
endorsing it, let alone working for it.

And please, if you can, elaborate on what a place
“in keeping with their condition” might look like for
those found intellectually deficient.

True paleos are intrinsically wary
of Utopias driven by class or racial considerations.

Genetic testing has been put to thoroughly evil uses for some time now, and the uses will get more evil as knowledge of genetics increases and tests become more sensitive.  Genetic testing is already being used to accomplish the inter-uterine extermination of Downs syndrome babies and others with hereditary defects.  The definition of defects, currently determined by the doctor and the parents, may well someday be in the hands of the government.  In much of east Asia, the female is considered defective, and this has brought about such a campaign of extermination against unborn girls that there are now grotesque gender imbalances in the populations of those areas.  Until genetic testing is used to heal rather than kill, I think it would be an excellent idea for paleos and any other decent people to oppose it.

Clearly, Gottfried isn’t referring to genetic testing pre-birth, but rather the kind of academic testing that is common in Europe and Japan to determine the future course of employment of citizens, be it executive, professional or of a more practical elbow grease variety.  I fail to see how it is either kind or Christian to tell individuals who lack the qualifications for the former but only for the later that they are being denied a higher status position due to the evil bigotry of white male Christians, which is what many leftists claim currently.  More broadly, accepting that a certain percentage of citizens will fulfill the duties of a working class is consistent with a conservative and Christian concept of a stable human nature in contrast to the dishonest statements of men like McCain and Bush who imply that working class Americans are defective and lacking in “ambition” (i.e., contacts) and must be replaced by alien helots.  Not aiming to be a “master of the universe” and accepting that most of us won’t be doesn’t imply a rejection of our common humanity.

Edmund the 3rd,
I knew Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke was a friend of mine. You’re no Edmund Burke.

If you were, you would reject the modern day “sophists and calculators” who see the science lab as a place for salvation.

Clearly what has been proposed here is not the standardized IQ tests that take place in classrooms.

Furthermore, reforming our educational system, defeating reverse discrimination and building a humane economy does not require racial theories or “forays into the biological sciences”.

As Simian All Too Simian said earlier, let’s spare the pig her lipstick and set her to grazing.

I don’t suggest that the state or anyone else administer a “regime of genetic testing.” However, the state should stand aside from all levelling efforts and society should deal with the indigent (including the mentally deficient) as a matter of charity rather than on an egalitarian basis. This is best done by religious insitutions. As Belloc noted, England did not need poor laws before the Reformation. The church, and especially the monasteries and convents, took care of the poor. Poor laws, the ancestors of today’s welfare state, were enacted only after the church ceased to fulfill its responsibility in this area.

People of limited mental abilities, above the level of severe dysfunction, and of sound body, should be encouraged to find work that is within their grasp rather than being subsidized in idleness and vice as they are today.  In all candor, society needs hewers of wood and drawers of water, and should let those who can only do such work, do it.

The criminal underclass should not be idly warehoused in prisons where they only learn worse behavior, but set to useful labor (e.g., on chain-gangs), as a punishment in cases of such crimes for which it is inappropriate to punish them corporally or capitally.

Those utterly unable to support themselves, for reasons having nothing to do with moral failings - fatherless infants, the indigent aged in their dotage, the mentally deficient - obviously need compassionate care at a standard equivalent to or better than what they receive under the current regimen.

The natural and unhindered rise of persons having superior qualities of intellect and character will result in an organically developed aristocracy, such as that which developed and persisted for centuries in Western civilization prior to the advent of radical egalitarianism. It persisted as long as it did because the traits necessary for leadership are largely inherited - and they will reassert themselves naturally if only the perverse influence of egalitarianism is eliminated. People of this class should be suitably educated for leadership as they historically were from the time of Quintilian (if not earlier) until the advent of cultural Bolshevism.

The founders of this country would be astonished at today’s universal suffrage, one-person-one-vote “democracy.” They envisioned a society in which the franchise was confined to freeholders, who then paid all the taxes. There is nothing inherently “racialist” about a tax-qualified franchise, notwithstanding how poll taxes may have been used in the past. Persons who receive subsidies from the state (as opposed to due compensation for services rendered or goods sold) should be disqualified from exercising the franchise, just as a judge or juror who has a financial interest in the outcome of a lawsuit is disqualified from ruling on it.

For a view of how these points are compatible with Christianity, see not Gobineau but Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. His “Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII” lists numerous Christian authorities, including the named late Pope, who have endorsed the idea that inequality is a natural and normal feature of human society and that it is both possible and desirable to comfort the afflicted (which is Christian charity) without afflicting the comfortable (which is not Christianity, but Jacobinism, Bolshevism, New-Deal-ism, etc.).

I see that Kevin likes to quote the vulgar uninspired attacks of left wing Democrats.  But my comments follow those of Burke, who attacked the left of his day for transforming a contended working class into a mob.  And no, American students don’t face IQ tests as demanding as those in Europe or Japan.  Larry Summers (the former president of Harvard, ousted for his observation that women were less likely to excel in the same percentage as men at high level technical fields) is a perfect example that statistical thinking isn’t considered just politically incorrect but also immoral.  Kevin echoes that irrational viewpoint here, one that he learns not only from the priestly class on TV but no doubt also from local sources.  The famous Edmund Burke didn’t believe that all men were equal in talents either, but again, this didn’t bring into question their common humanity.  Kevin may wallow in his hysterical sentimental humanitarianism, but that doesn’t make his feelings true, moral or rational.

MSS, you want the benefits of: “investigations into the genetic and heritable quality of intelligence”, you just don’t want to get into any messy specifics that might alarm us. Sounds like more neoconnery to me; reassuring platitudes wrapped around a vague program.  Kinda like invading Iraq.

Edmund the 3rd vainly tries to appropriate his namesake into a cause that won’t dare speak it’s name; racialism. Please have the courage of your convictions. You aren’t merely suggesting more rigorous IQ tests. Such a common sense approach would have been ruinous to your hero, Dan Quayle!

I didn’t stop beating my wife because I didn’t beat her in the first place (i.e., I never endorsed “racialism” whatever that means). It is true that the tests students take in Europe and Japan are more than IQ tests (I used the term as a shorthand), but I do endorse such exams (the European/Japanese style exams) for use in the USA, not only to weed out the unqualified but to force the qualified to work harder.  And I do endorse, within limits, statistical thinking, which is one of the foundations of science.  When left wing “reformers” like Kevin start to abolish things, they begin with thoughts and ideas, which they typically mislabel, and move on to institutions but with the inevitable failure of those efforts they end up attempting to abolish mankind.

I think I’m with Kevin in suspecting a certain dishonesty on the part of those who call IQ tests genetic testing.  I certainly have no problem with IQ tests as one way of determining individual competence in certain areas.  But I suspect if the aggregate of IQ tests revealed significant racial imbalances that those who advocate the tests now would simply advocate dropping the tests and using race as a marker for IQ or over-all ability.  And no, Mr. Gottfried was not advocating interuterine genetic testing, but this is the testing which is actually being done and it is being used to identify and wipe out large numbers of people pre-birth.  We may expect much more of this testing and much more of this use in the future.  Compared to this Satanic nightmare, IQ and academic placement tests are a triviality.

Thank you, Mr Higdon, for an even-handed comment after a wave of bile, and for noticing that we just endured a whole bunch of ranting against ideas Paul did not raise.

I think the question is, simply, whether we are to behave like some of the previous commenters, running and screaming “racialism!” whenever the idea of genetic endowment is mentioned. The other option would be to carefully assess whether or not the information under review is in fact worthwhile information, whether it is usable, in what sense, and so on, with all due scrutiny paid to the problems of interuterine genetic testing, and any other potential problem.

Kevin, I’ll thank you for noticing that I never suggested that defeating reverse discrimination or building a humane economy “requires” the sort of interest in biology we’re considering. In fact, I never suggested that it be a requirement for anyone.

The only dishonesty I’ve noticed is the imputation to people of things they haven’t said and don’t believe by double talking leftists.  If Kirt wants to add to his anti-war protests an effort to prevent sex selection abortions in India and China more power to him.  But that has nothing whatsoever to do with adopting vigorous substantive (i.e., beyond IQ tests) academic testing in the United States, as is done in Europe and Japan.

Of course IQ tests are not “genetic testing.” What troubles some people, like Kevin, is the fact that IQ statistics suggest strongly that intelligence is as much a heritable quality as, say, skin color. He especially dislikes the idea that IQ, skin color, and the heritability of both should be considered at the same time, as they are by (for example) Charles Murray.

What I understand Prof. Gottfried to be saying is that we should not object to the scientific investigation of these matters. I agree with this. I also believe, and I think that Prof. Gottfried would agree with me, that scientific pursuit of such enquiries does not and should not necessarily have anything to do with the way the country is governed. Science is about what is; to know what ought to be, we must look to morality, which ought to proceed from religion. Even so, we must make our moral judgments after considering the facts.

I’m accused of writing vague platitudes. What is vague about what I’ve said? It is hardly flannelmouthed to assert that people are unequal in intelligence and character and that social and economic inequality is the natural and normal consequence of this. That is my proposition; I think it is plain as a pikestaff and as acute as a pin. You’re free to try to contradict me, but please adduce facts rather than just emoting if you wish to do so.

Furthermore I assert that because scientific evidence tends to show that intelligence and character traits are largely hereditary, efforts on the part of governments to equalize their subjects by taxation and redistribution of wealth are swimming against the tide of human nature. They are doomed ultimately to fail, but there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and Procrustean egalitarianism such as that of the Jacobins, Bolshevists, New-Dealers, and other utopians has been the principal cause of human suffering in the world for the last two centuries.

Its American version is not quite as bad as Jacobinism and Bolshevism, but it is the same Procrustean egalitarianism that lay beneath those obscene ideologies which here taxes estates at rates up to 55%, and which here deliberately neglects the education of the gifted whilst lavishing public funds on “special education” for the mentally deficient.  These are wounds inflicted not only on the affected individuals, but on the society to which they could otherwise have so much more effectively contributed both their capital and their ingenuity.

John Randolph of Roanoke once said, “I am an aristocrat; I love liberty, and I hate equality.” A more concise expression of the essence of conservatism could not be uttered. Social and economic inequality are natural consequences of liberty, and egalitarian efforts to “remedy” these conditions are accordingly attacks on liberty.

There has never been and never will be a society that does not have an élite. Procrustean egalitarianism only holds down the natural aristocracy and replaces it with a perverse faux-elite, like those of Jacobin France, the old Soviet Union, or Maoist China. We should get used to this idea, and instead of complaining about “élitism,” concentrate our efforts on trying to make sure that our society’s élite is virtuous and properly constituted.

It is, after all, eighty years of New-Dealism that have given America a nomenklatura in place of the aristocracy it once had. Isn’t that at the root of the justified grievance of people who complain about “neocons”?

“I think that Prof. Gottfried would agree with me, that scientific pursuit of such enquiries does not and should not necessarily have anything to do with the way the country is governed”

Then why bother to expend so much energy on this issue? Is it just a parlor game without public policy implications or social consequences?

This thread , with it’s confusion, hair-splitting, qualifiers and what might appear to be back-pedaling by some, confirms what I said at
the beginning. A paleo agenda has no room for
advocating genetic testing (pre or post natal)to
explore hereditary endowments associated with race or
ethnicity. The Welfare State has already crushed the
spirit of millions. No need to increase it’s hideous
capabilities to sow strife, discord and demoralization.

Instead, paleos should expose the issue of
“genetic endowment” for what it is; another tool for
our overseers to manipulate, commodify and control.

“Aryans” can make common cause with Margaret Sanger’s
odious heirs. We stand in opposition to them both.

We’re NOT talking about “Aryans” vs. other “races” here, but about the significance of IQ testing and the recognition that personal traits such as intelligence and character are heritable.

One consequence of accepting this fact must be an acknowledgment that the welfare state is a failure precisely because many of the poor are stupid and shiftless by nature. These are conditions the state can do nothing to remedy; trying to do so is a waste of the taxpayers’ money.  Trying to “rehabilitate” habitual criminals is, for similar reasons, a blind alley.

Taking account of these points in formulating public policy is not the same as imposing crude racialist laws. People should be judged under law as individuals rather than as members of groups. However, our judgment of those individuals can and ought to be improved by the light science sheds on human nature. Would you ignore it?

How many of us need “science” to judge an indiviual,
let alone human nature? You seem to have done just
fine in arriving at your conclusion on the “stupid and
shiftless” with the scientific insight already at
your disposal.

And what do you propose to do with them once they are
certified as such by this scientific project?

What I propose is that relief for the poor be granted on the basis of individual merit. I propose that those who are poor because they are orphans, cripples, aged and infirm, etc., be given compassionate relief. I propose that we waste no more of the taxpayers’ money on those who are poor because they are merely stupid and shiftless.

Why try to educate the ineducable or find responsible employment for the unemployable? These are vain hopes. Give such people simple menial tasks to do that are within their capacities and let them eke out whatever humble livings they can.

IQ testing is less important in identifying the dull, whose dullness is often obvious, than it is in finding the gifted, whose gifts may not be so obvious. There is no reason why egalitarian scruples should be allowed to prevent our recognizing that different educational programs are appropriate for persons with IQs of 90 than are for those with IQs of 130. The former may be fit only to clean floors or chop wood - give them brooms or axes and be done with them. Great pains need to be taken with the educatiions of the latter to help them live up to their potentials as future leaders of society. What is wrong with that?

Of all the nightmare scenarios that face us, this one; a regime that weeds out life’s winners and losers based on rigorous IQ/Genetic tests and then cultivates the former while allowing the latter to “eke out” an existence is probably this least likely to come to fruition. There are just enough of us left who will resist handing over such power to anyone.

Thank you for your candor.

Kevin—
You sound like you’re buying the neocon-liberal putdown of paleos.  Does “petulant” criticism of Israel, mean the usual thing, that is, ANY criticism of Israel?  Is the exploration of genetics automatically an “indecent” enterprise, as you suggest?  I think it’s a futile enterprise, given the mental conditioning of the general population.

“M.S.S.” claims that “Recognition is overdue that, in a society maintaining unemployment below 5%, the poor are not poor because they lack employment or suitable training for employment - they are poor because they lack the native intelligence, drive, or character to hold jobs or to manage their lives providently and prudently.”

After such data had been proven in genetic research, and widely publicized, who in this society would care about such facts? Wouldn’t such information make most multicultural-oriented Americans feel even more sympathetic and open to serving this benighted population via government?  And, given Professor Gottfried’s observations about the Latino invasion and their growing influence on the left, I must disagree with him that “evidence of cognitive differences” would matter one twit or affect public policy.  Recognizing the reality of the changing demographics, where would traditionalists get the power and influence to alter public policy based on such scientific data?  Perhaps traditionalists don’t fear being politically incorrect by ignoring this field; they just sense the futility of getting involved in it.

Victoria,
I often criticize Israel, always mindful though of her tragic history and the complex situation in which she is placed. Some on the Right are less than charitable in their perspective, or too sneering in their approach. Surely, you have seen it.

The discussion on genetic testing is past it’s shelf life, but such a project is thankfully doomed to failure for many reasons. Not the least of which is, our innate distrust in empowering the Hive with such a weapon.

Can anyone imagine a Burke, Kirk, Weaver, or Voegelin supporting a “meritocracy” based on genetic testing? Hell, can anyone who has been to Wall Street or Washington claim our elites morally capable of administering such a Beast? 

Your point, that few would pay such a proposal heed is a small consolation, countering the chagrin that such a fevered fantasy could be presented as “Christian charity” or consistent with conservative principles. Please.

The problem that many traditionalists have with discussing race is that they see it as a Modernist construct, and thus reject it.  Some aspects of racial theory certainly are modern, but such inquiries were also brought about by the ease of transportation and contact with non-Western peoples.  They somehow fail to see that Pre-Enlightenment Europe was not a colorblind propositional nation, but rather a collection of ethnocentric tribes.

Perhaps a better approach with these people is to stress the ethnocentric nature of pre-Modern Europe, to stress ancient concepts like kith and kin, and the fact that ‘nation’ as the Latin ‘nascere’ suggests implies link by blood.  Both Greek democracy and Roman republicanism were predicated upon tribal systems, and the very basis of Roman conservatism, the ‘mos maiorum’, stressed ancestral traditions (’ancestral’ being the operative word).

A resuscitation of “the ancestral” would probably be more persuasive with these people than talking about race and IQ, although there is a time and place for the latter.

My kinsmen may be stupid, but we’re not that stupid. Any clerk caught subjecting members of my tribe to some “test” cooked up in a Darwinist hell-hole will wish the 2nd Amendment had been revoked a long time ago.

How’s that for ancestral?

At any rate, your argument is with those proponents of genetic testing who insist; “it’s not about race”. Maybe they lack your courage, but I’m sure you can sort it out.

The above discussion persuades me all the more that the entire higher education system ought to be dismantled and disposed of, taking all of these pointless and distracting arguments about “measuring intelligence” into the dustbin with it.

At this point it hardly matters anymore which proportions of any races get degrees or are admitted to prestigious universities, because the degrees are so bloody inflated anyway.
What good is it if exactly equal proportions of races get PhDs, if the PhD
is no longer an insignia of a real education or real scholarship, let alone of real intelligence?

Today there are more American lawyers than ever before, almost all of whom have a JD, Juris Doctor.  (I am one.) Yet the overall quality of American lawyers’ education and writing skill was a lot higher in the 1700s and early 1800s, when not even a bachelor’s degree was required to practice law.  And more generally, in America and England until well into the 1800s, a university degree was not a prerequisite for a career as a scholar, and even less so was it required for a career as a statesman or a man of letters.

Bring back apprenticeships and the old way of evaluating intelligence by the quality of work performed rather than by artificial tests.

Let’s not confuse IQ testing with genetic testing. However, let’s bear in mind that IQ data show that intelligence is largely an hereditary trait.

What light does this shed on human nature? Precisely that inequality and hierarchy are natural to human society and that the conservative defense of traditional social order is soundly based in fact.

Will someone tell me what is wrong with using IQ tests to identify children who have superior abilities, so that they may be educated in a fitting manner? Trying to “mainstream” the gifted and the subnormal with the merely average is what our public educational system does now. It is a failure, for that among other reasons. Lavish amounts are spent on “special education” for the ineducable, while the gifted are left to fend for themselves. Many of the latter become soured on the kind of education they receive as they are prevented from racing ahead of the plodders by the rigidity of the age-based grade in which they are placed. This leads to a sad waste of talent. Does “Kevin” really wish to perpetuate it, just to satisfy his egalitarian scruples?

MSS,
Don’t waste anymore cyber-ink on this issue. Instead,
approach your local school board. Assuming your
community receives federal funds, you will be happy
to learn that they operate under a Strategic Plan
with a testing, tracking and placement program not far
removed from what you propose. While, the members of
the board will have little interest in the writings
of Brazilian political theorists, you will find
kindred spirits there.

Please report back on the progress you’ve made in due
time. But be forewarned, at any moment reactionaries
(the kind that never truthfully fill out the Census
forms) may storm an open meeting. And, the result may
be the same as occurred in my mid-to-upper middle
class community; a slaying of the beast. My kids are
now in Catholic schools, but I enjoyed my small role
in beating Big Brother, if just for one time.

“Kevin,” who are you to tell me how to express my opinions, or how much “cyber-ink” to expend? You really haven’t answered any of my points, but have just emoted violently. Much luck to you with your children. I hope they receive an education that enables them to reach their full potential, whatever that may be.

I agree with Mr. Ball that the current public educational system is deeply flawed. If I had school-age children today, I would not put them in Catholic schools, at the mercy of American Catholicism’s sodomitical clergy. I would carefully screen and hire tutors and home-school them at a level appropriate to their capacity. I’m personally grateful that, in my case, IQ testing at age 6 enabled me to skip a couple of years of the stultifying public educational system - back in the ‘fifties before it got as bad as it is now - to enter college at age 16, and to finish with it at age 19. My biases in this matter have something to do, you see, with personal experience.

Turning to Mr. Ball’s suggestion that we “bring back apprenticeships and the old way of evaluating intelligence by work performed instead of by artificial tests,” this probably would work for some disciplines but not for others. Law could be taught by apprenticeship as it still is, for example, in England, where the qualification for being called to the bar is not a university degree, but rather is based upon having worked under a barrister in chambers and dined at the Inns of Court for a specified number of terms. It might well be the case that an eighteenth-century solicitor/writer to the signet or barrister/advocate, were he to be revived like Rip van Winkle, could practice law effectively today after a short period of private study to bring him up to date. On the other hand, can we really take seriously the suggestion that medicine, the physical sciences, or many types of engineering could successfully be taught to present-day standards? I should not wish to be treated by a person whose medical training was by apprenticeship in the eighteenth-century fashion.

As for “the old way of evaluating intelligence by work performed instead of by artificial tests,” this may be well and good when evaluating an adult. It is, however, difficult to evaluate the intelligence of a schoolboy of 6, 8, or 10 years of age by work performed, when he has barely learnt how to perform meaningful work.

The subjective evaluations of schoolmasters are notoriously inaccurate. J. J. Berzelius, whose memory we honor whenever we write and balance a chemical equation using the symbols he invented, as a schoolboy was judged a dunce by his headmaster. Albert Einstein had a similar experience. Nobelist Norman Borlaug, who has just been honored again (at age 93) for his work in the genetic engineering of agricultural crop plants, was so poorly prepared when he graduated high school that he was placed in a remedial course - the so-called “general college” - before being allowed to proceed with further studies at the University of Minnesota.  Borlaug has probably done more to feed the world’s hungry than all the chattering pundits and bureaucrats in think-tanks, quangos, and the United Nations put together ever did.

IQ tests determine native ability, not achievement, and are useful objective measures to determine whether youngsters have abilities like those of Berzelius, Einstein, or Borlaug, the existence of which has escaped the perception and subjective judgment of those who have been set to instruct them.

To M.S.S:  Don’t let this thing of guile (“Kevin”) drag you down the backside of the bell curve into his dark abysm of nihilism.  He and the itinerant S-S-Simian, the aping aesthete, can wallow in their bile and stutter in their rage, while Taki’s vipers with cloven tongues do hiss them into madness.

The quotations are puzzling, so too some of the assertions made here.

MSS resents the days of his early childhood when he had to share a classroom with the “average” and the “mentally deficient.”

This personal experience has lead him to promote an agenda that would concentrate
more power in the hands of educrats, therapists and other officials of the Nanny State. All because his genius was once or continues to be unrecognized.

Rising to his support is a self-described viper who endorses such poisonous rhetoric as; “American Catholicism’s sodomitical clergy.”

For me to continue with this thread would be an occasion for sin, so I depart confident that some of the noxious opinions expressed here are in no way representative of either Taki’s site or the paleo movement. Only neocons and the Left would wish it to be otherwise.

As M Stanton Evans said so often, we conservatives form our firing squads in a circle.

“Kevin” has not read what I wrote very carefully. Rather than having “resented [my] early childhood when [I ] had to share a classroom with the ‘average’ and ‘mentally deficient,’ I am grateful that early IQ testing accelerated my education and enabled me to graduate from high school at 16 and from college at 19. As for whether my “genius was once or continues to be unrecognized,” genius is one thing I have never claimed - but I’m glad my gifts, such as they were, WERE recognized when they were. Boastfulness is distasteful, but let’s just say that since completing my education a couple of years sooner than average, I’ve been successful to an extent that confiscatory income and estate taxes are among my concerns.

Unfortunately, “educrats, therapists, and other officials of the Nanny State” do not take much cognizance of the gifted today. It’s politically incorrect. Grade-skipping, as employed in my case in the ‘fifties, is not often done now. The formulae by which federal and state financial aids to local public schools are distributed positively discourage it, because they are based on the number of pupils attending school and the numbers of days they have attended.  Allowing a bright student to finish school earlier accordingly takes money away from a public school district. The gifted, accordingly, get short shrift; there is very seldom any educational accommodation specific to them.

On the other hand, there is a positive incentive to classify pupils as mentally or physically handicapped, because this results in the receipt of extra subsidies for “special” education. Then there is the “attention disorder” fraud, by which many boys ("ADD" kids are very seldom girls) are doped into a docile trance by the use of drugs, when all that most of them need is teaching techniques and discipline that is suited to them. “One size fits all” is not an appropriate maxim by which to provide education. 

On the subject of “American Catholicism’s sodomitical clergy,” all I’ll say is that not to far from where I live, a pedophilic priest murdered two men that he thought were going to expose his molestation of numerous boys, and then compounded all of his previous sins by committing suicide. The truth came out after a protracted and careful police investigation. Local prelates have yet to make satisfactory amends to the families of the victims. A bit further to the east, the notorious theologically and politically liberal archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, was not too long ago forced to step down after the exposure of his ongoing homosexual liaison with a much younger man, whom I believe was also a priest. Perhaps the poster boy for clerical pedophilia was Paul Shanley, a diocesan priest in Boston. This worthy was once a favorite of the local media, a “hip” young cleric ministering to “street kids.” With another queer clergyman he owned a “resort” in Key West for people of his sexual persuasion, at which “nude sunbathing” and other activities best left unmentioned went on.  When the Vatican caught wind of this miscreant and complained to the Boston archdiocese, what did they do? They transferred him to other duties! In a just society he’d have been turned over to the secular arm, with the traditional admonition to “shed no blood.”

If these and the literally hundreds of other clerical persons - I hesitate to call them “men” - cannot be described accurately as “American Catholicism’s sodomitical clergy,” how, pray, should we describe them? It is small and overdue redress for the victims of their actions that the Vatican is finally taking action to root out the corruption of the past thirty or forty years; too late for the slain who lie in their graves just across the river from where I write this.

Some of you fellows who profess to know so much about genes, intelligence, intellectual achievement, race, ethnicity, and pub-lick skuuls need to try you hand at high-schoolmastering.  Then you’d discover

1. Gender and race have nothing to do with intelligence and achievement. Girls do better in high school largely because they are less engrossed with sweaty sports, and partly because boys learn that smart isn’t cute in boys.  West Indian Blacks do considerably better than pre-1808 Gringo Blacks (vide #2 infra).  Class in itself is also nugatory.  The issue of our upper middle class do poorly in pub-lick skuuls, and do rather well in private.  In the former, the parent treats the teacher, usually of a lower class, as a servant to abuse when their brat isn’t waited on hand and foot, and thus regard the work done in school as only a credential to hinder supposedly downward mobility, a lesson not lost on the child; such parents only wish high grades for little work, and are the real cause of grade inflation.  In private schools, the parent is on the kid’s case if the son or daughter doesn’t do his homework, loafs, or mouths-off to the teacher: “I’m paying all this money, and you’re doing this?” Gringos take seriously only what they pay for.  And that leads to ...

2. Ethnicity (which is something in one’s thoughts, not in one’s genes) has much to do with intellectual achievement.  Groups working out of the Jewish, Confucian, and Hindu wisdom traditions, and who thus think erudition and smarts are cool and sexy, and uneducated as contemptible, do well in schools, even in our pathetic pub-lick skwells.  Groups that value more greatly basketball and football for their male offspring, and dance lessons for their teenaged girls, do not; and will demand their amusements at the taxpayer’s expense. 

2. Teach school and you’ll also discover that the biggest fools and madmen have, more often than not, very, very high IQs. And in this judgement I am supported by St. Flannery O’Connor and her boyfriend Nathaniel Hawthorne.  High IQs (and atheists) are also much more superstitious.

Ummmmmm.... Why should the government be taking ANY note of the IQ of any individual. I wasn’t aware that a conservative program could include government sorting of individuals by categories of usefulness to the state.

“I wasn’t aware that a conservative program could include government sorting of individuals...”

It’s not truly conservative, but such an ideology that allows for right-wing social engineering is usually called neo-conservativism, or big government conservatism. Would love, if just for laughs, to see what a genetic character test would look like and how long it would take for many of this site’s readers to wind-up in re-education camps.

To point out that IQ data support the view that social and economic inequality is natural and normal - that the state can and should do nothing to interfere with it, that wealth redistribution and social levelling will produce only evil consequences in the long run, because they run against nature’s current - is hardly the same as suggesting “government sorting of individuals by categories of usefulness to the state.”

Public education today has as one of its principal goals the promotion of an egalitarian agenda. Recognizing that children have different capacities for learning, and learn at different paces, is a step away from this, and ought to be encouraged. It is something that was recognized in every one-room schoolhouse a century ago. A mass-production approach to education, with its rigidly age-based grade structure, fails to allow what the one-room schoolhouse did. This is true whether the school in question is privately or governmentally operated.

Government-operated schools are a fact of life and will continue to exist whether we like them or not. If they can be encouraged by the use of IQ data to educate each child to the extent of his capacity, rather than on a one-size-fits-all basis, why should not conservatives support that?

You have a solution in search of a problem, or are seeking to address a problem that is without a solution.

Leveling is a defining feature of mass society and occurs in education too. But, state schools do give IQ tests and advance accordingly. Whether the knowledge being transmitted by the schools is worth much is another question left unchanged by your proposal.

IQ tests are used and students are advanced
based on those results State schools. Is the record of advancement perfect? No. Leveling of standards is a key feature of mass society and exists within all it’s institutions. A far more troubling aspect of education is it’s utilitarian philosophy and soulless content.

I’m afraid your solution is in search of a problem.

Mass society has an impulse for levelling and this is
found in all it’s institutions, up to a point. Still,
IQ tests are given and students are rewarded
accordingly.

Modern education is a ship-wreck. Utilitarianism has
reduced it to an assembly-line turning out
consumers. Hard to see how more IQ tests you tout
achieve anything other than empowering the State.

Doctor Gottfied’ agenda is sound. Except this part
of it.

M Nucci:
“negative groups like Hamas, Bathists, et, but what are we to do?  These are the hot button mind control enemies that both the left and the neo-cons set up as the current day boogey men”

Not true in Europe, where the Left is highly supportive of Hamas and in some cases (UK Respect party) sympathetic to the Ba’ath.  Hamas is supported because of its unyielding anti-Israel stance.

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