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Entry: Neocons and the Left: Know Your Enemies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/neocons_and_the_left_know_your_enemies#2473 Post contents: 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"? Sent at: 2008 05 16