Glazer wrote:

“society is at fault and we must try harder”

Translation: Racism is deeply embedded in all our institutions, and we will never make society OK until we change everything, discard all standards, misteach history to overrate non-European contributions to Western civilization, discard the notion of individual responsibility for members of “disadvantaged groups”, etc.

There is nothing conservative about this. It’s pure white guilt and leftism.

There is no need to lie nor in my view to censor. Like St.Paul, American law and institutions should
not “respect persons.” Law would apply equally to the president as well as to illegal immigrants.
This whole Obama-IQ-get-Raimondo pile on has been genuinely obscene, demagogic, and opportunistic.
We all know what the real problem is. Mr. Spencer, why not level the playing field and let the S.A. katzenjammers back in?

There’s plenty of room between the two extremes you’ve proposed.  James Flynn, the foremost “environmentalist” in the debate, appealed to Cardinal Bellarmine.  Flynn wrote:

However, the adaptation of humane-egalitarian ideals [if hereditarianism is believed correct] would not be without pain, and therefore, the evidence for unwelcome theses should be convincing. Galileo is so often
championed against Cardinal Bellarmine that equity de-
mands a word or two in defence of the latter. The evidence
about whether the sun is at the center of the solar system
was mixed. The predicted stellar parallax was not there;
Galileo needed more epicycles than the old astronomy did;
he had the earth circling not the sun but a point in space
somewhat removed from the sun! Bellarmine did not deny
that the thesis might be true; he did not deny that it should
be tested against evidence. He argued that it should not be
asserted to be true until the evidence was decisive, given hat it required a reinterpretation of scripture unsettling to
those of simple faith. Bellarmine likened the Devil to a
wily angler and people to frogs with mouths gaping, ever
ready to take the Devil’s bait. Humane ideals can adapt to
significant genetic differences between the races, but there
are a lot of frogs out there with mouths gaping for the bait
of racism. Those who believe in such differences should be
very, very certain before they stamp them as proven. Need-
less to say, those skeptical of such differences should not
disgrace themselves: They must not follow Bellarmine so
far as to try to silence opponents whose confidence, argu-
ably at least, outruns the evidence. The indefensible sup-
pression of Chris Brand’s book is a case in point.

Yikes, sorry about all the line breaks in that post!  Should have been more careful cutting and pasting.  Um, it would be nice to have a Preview button, Mr. Webmaster.  Sorry again.

What exactly needs to be “grappled with”?  Haven’t there always been smart and less smart Americans?  Haven’t the less smart among us been, often times, the moral bedrock of our society, being not smart enough to fall for the latest social fashions emanating from the Ivy League?

I would submit that grade point average is not a reliable marker of smartness.

Anyone who has been around people, whether of one race or many, notices that some people are smart, polite, hard-working, and industrious.  Others are surly, dull, violent, callow, unproductive, and a bit scary.  Some people are smart and evil.  Some people are dumb and have a heart of gold. There are many combinations. 

We also notice, in groups, that some groups have more of one and less of another trait.  Sometimes we notice very subtle differences.  Sometimes they’re undeniable.  And sometimes these differences are noteworthy and doubly interesting when we find an exception to the rule.  Life and people and groups are kind of complicated, but there are trends and patterns, and we won’t not notice them because Nathan Glazer doesn’t want us to. 

The myth of the noble lie-makers is that we only believe what we’re taught and have no everyday life experience with which to test, refute, and undermine the official lies.  This may true of many people, particularly the dull or those who aim to please authorities.  But every society, thank God, also produces muck-rakers who like to stir the pot and have a passion for the truth.

There is a huge difference between being polite and encouraging--which we should, even to those who have odds stacked against them--and lying and suppressing basic facts.  The latter is common in all totalitarian societies, which put politics above the truth, rather than subordinating politics to the truth. 

It’s noteworthy that the “noble lie” comes from Plato who engineered a totalitarian society without any distinction of the private and the public realm in his Republic.

Mr. Roach,

Your view of The Republic as “totalitarian” follows the line of Karl Popper in his tendentious Open Society and its Enemies.  This is as grotesque and reductive a deformation as Leo Strauss’s reading: Thrasymachus is right all the rest is Socrates’ gambit to get boys.

The Noble Lie in The Republic is fairly transparent and anodyne: all men are brothers in their origin from the earth so to “manufacture assent” to the hierarchy the guardians are said to come from gold, the auxiliaries from silver, and the farmers and such from bronze.  These are not castes since (unlike say, projects for the state’s manipulation of IQ data) there is no heredity involved.

The guardians are not, (needless to say?), intellectual hustlers with high IQ s but those who have achieved the highest apperception of reality and its relation to the soul.  The utopian aspect of The Republic is merely formal or heuristic rather than politically prescriptive.

In Voegelin’s view The Republic it is a scientific (!) breakthrough in human self-knowledge: a differentiation of the soul in its relation to the transcendent ground of being. There are after all forms of knowledge, or science in the sense used by Plato and Aristotle beyond those permitted by positivism.

Another reason I’m a libertarian.  Big government wants to deal with statistical groups, not individuals.  Monoculture - be it corn, cattle, or clerks are more efficient.

But we are not called to deal with statistical groups of humans, we are called to deal with individuals.

Jesus did not say the Levite - who probably was rushing to a crime victims compensation committee meeting showed mercy, but the Samaritian.  And “When I was hungry, you did or did not give me something to eat” - was “to the least of these”, but not to a statistical group.

In this, generalization is the lie when it causes you to look at a specific person as what he is not.  On average some can be smarter or dumber according to some metric which might not measure what you think it does - the exercises on the track, field, and in the gymnasium are not Basic Training - and both athletes and soldiers earn medals - but for very different things.

And a second lie is that such a measure is static.  One who applies himself will do far better than one with more raw but undeveloped talent.

The scales which measure our weight daily have a more accurate and proper accusation of gluttony and sloth - and will shorten our lives - more than any of these surveys, yet that truth is ignored, rationalized, or rejected.

And thus one more lie - I would consider it an act of kindness to point out one of my faults so I might improve, but such things allow us to become snipers hiding behind a wall of statistics to condemn others so we might think better of ourselves, while not looking at what we might do better ourselves.

Data might be fascinating and interesting, but isn’t a moral agent.