Waiting for the Blast

The more you study the postwar era the more you get the sense that Western civilization exists in a sort of suspended animation, or perhaps some kind of endless loop, at the very least since 1971 or so.

I was aimlessly poking through the National Review archives looking for insights, and discovered some posts clearly stolen from The Motte on page 20 of the January 1975 edition, that I felt compelled to share in defense of the above point. The first is about contemporary language:

Institutional Jargon

Educational jargon comes and goes with the seasons, and the new year's "in" phrase is "institutional racism." It was apparently coined by Dallas School Superintendent Nolan Estes during a lawsuit brought by the mother of a black student who was suspended for fighting. In the 1972-73 school year, when the Dallas schools were 61.3 per cent white, 60.5 per cent of the students suspended for disciplinary reasons were black. When asked if he could think of a reason why this should be so, Mr. Estesreplied: "Well, we are a white-controlled institution. Institutional racism, racism among individuals, the inability to match learning styles with teaching styles, inappropriate and inadequate support from the home, attitudes of students and parents, all aspects of the environment contribute."

A witness called by the plaintiff, Ruben McDaniel of the University of Texas, testified that it didn't matter so much whether the schools were actually discriminating (i.e., whether the identical offense by a black and a white would provoke the same punishment); what matters is that black children feel themselves discriminated against, which feeling leads to frustration, more hostility, and more punishment.

Buried beneath all the slush, there is a pebble of common sense here. Punishment, in the world at large, is designed to protect innocent members of society; if Texans, say, commit more robberies than the national average, one doesn't pass a law saying that robbery is part of the Texas lifestyle and as such immune from punishment.

But a major object of schools is to civilize, which may require more subtlety than imposing three-day suspensions. The more intelligent holders of the institutional-racism theory are claiming, not that the schools punish blacks for offenses for which they would not punish whites, but, rather, that the punishable offenses tend to be "black" offenses, such as truancy and talking back to the teachers. The Dallas school district's efforts to correct the bias—making clear what offenses are punishable; electing more blacks to student government on the high school level; having teachers learn about their children's home life on the grade school level— are fine. But if the blathering about institutional racism doesn't stop, it will eventually lead to the condescending position that blacks cannot help being uncivilized, and must not be credited with the same capacities as whites.

The National Review was sounding the alarm bell in 1975, but I guess it took until 2020 for the phrase to really catch on. The blast has arrived. The second article is about a blast that has yet to arrive. I apologize in advance, but I can't not share this knowing how interested The Motte would be in the historiography:

Waiting for the Blast

"We're ready for the explosion and the fallout. We can take it"—Dr. Joseph Horn.

Dr. Horn is a psychiatrist, not a nuclear scientist, but his bunker imagery is in order. After researching the question whether genetics or environment determines IQ level, he has reached the conclusion that a person's genes play the overwhelming role in determining his intelligence. Dr. Horn's procedure was simple: he compared the IQ level of adopted children with the IQs of their adoptive parents and their biological mothers. He found, according to the National Observer, "that the IQ scores of adopted children are much more often closely similar to, or identical to, their biological mothers—whom they never saw—than to the scores of their adoptive parents."

The University of Texas psychologist issued his report at a meeting in Rome of the First International Congress of Twin Studies. None of his colleagues disputed his findings, and two other scientists who were also investigating intelligence and heredity reported that they reached the same conclusion in their own research. "Our studies and others," said Dr. Horn, "clearly show that individual differences in intelligence among individuals in Western cultures are primarily determined by genetics. . . . People who refuse to look at these data are causing a lot of harm. They are wasting incredible amounts of time and money keeping us all on the same old track."

The Rome meeting took place in October, and the explosion that Dr. Horn and colleagues anticipated has yet to take place.

Yup, that's right: a contemporary article on the original twin studies. The meeting in Rome of the First International Congress of Twin Studies took place in October 1974, and the explosion that Dr. Horn and colleagues anticipated has yet to take place. People who refuse to look at these data are causing a lot of harm. They are wasting incredible amounts of time and money keeping us all on the same old track.

I don't really mean to talk about HBD. My point is merely that we've been going in circles for decades. We've made some minor tweaks, such as allowing gay marriage, which is of course significant to the gays who are married, but not so significant to the rest of us (which, incidentally, is why I support gay marriage, yet strongly believe the Supreme Court had no right to issue a unilateral mandate), yet by and large on many important societal issues we've been caught in some form of deadlock.

There are two other tangentially related points I want to make. The first is that I think it's important to study the history of the problems you are interested in, because many of them have very long histories which intentionally get swept under the rug. For example, consider the issue of campuses censoring right-wing speakers. Surely a modern problem, right? Well... no. From this same issue:

Gerald Ford's consideration of Edward Levi for the post of Attorney General is regarded by many conservatives, including Human Events and Senators John Tower and Roman Hruska, as yet another reason to form a third party in '76. The main charges against Levi are that he is a Democrat, he has never been identified with conservative causes, he lacks practical law enforcement experience, and in his youth he belonged to the Communist-front National Lawyers Guild. Opposed to these are the fine articles he has written for legal journals through the years, which come down solidly against judicial presumption; and his magnificent performance as president of the University of Chicago during the late Sixties, a period that drove so many college presidents out of their jobs or their minds. Levi, in contrast, kept his university from blowing up by the simple expedient of quiet, unfiashy firmness, maintaining discipline but never creating martyrs by overreacting. Conservatives whom the crazies prevented from speaking elsewhere were able to speak at Chicago (albeit sometimes to small hand-picked groups). No man who managed a university during those years with honor can be said to lack experience in law enforcement.

The second is related to the many discussions here about "anti-SJW" vs. "right/conservative." First, it should be obvious enough from the above articles that the "SJW-thing" isn't really new at all. Sure, the memeplex has evolved, but the core has existed and been a powerful enough force to shut down conservative speakers for a long time. BLM/Antifa are undeniably the rightful heirs to the civil rights movement (Which is, in turn, an heir to an even older movement). Similarly, at its core, modern conservatism is about anti-Marxism and anti-SJWism, and the anti-SJWs are the rightful heirs to the conservative movement, not the religious right, the neo-cons, or any other groups which I personally detest. Trump successfully tapped into this energy but is a buffoon and barely understood what he was doing. I predict the next wave of anti-SJW politicians won't be.

I also predict that as the SJW movement achieves gains for which it has been waiting 50+ years, the Republican party will have to reorganize itself explicitly as the anti-SJW party and put this at the forefront of its platform. This will make it clear that there is no difference between anti-SJW and the right. The Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe will persist and many people who post long-form anti-SJW content will be from the Blue Tribe, as is the case today, and will probably continue to support gay space marijuana like all good Blue Tribers (such as myself). In any case, it certainly feels like there is finally movement after decades of "waiting for the blast." But perhaps in another 45 years people will say the same.