A conservative writer, whose name escapes me, once wrote that liberalism is basically a religion, except there’s no Jesus and no God, but there is a devil: Hitler. Thus, anything that Hitler might have remotely supported or is thought to have supported becomes, by association, itself evil. Liberals aren’t exactly consistent on this score (as Hitler was a socialist and an antismoking zealot), but suffice to say that liberals never let consistency become a stumbling block in the way of power: especially power for virtuous liberals who are better qualified to judge right and wrong because of their unequaled hatred of Hitler and everything Hitler stood for that liberals don’t like.
Since liberalism remains the reigning paradigm, many young earth creationists have attempted to triangulate this feature of the ideological terrain by using variations of the argument that Darwin=racism=Hitler. I’ll refer to these particular young earthers as liberal young earthers (for liberalism is the logical extension of the absolute human equality their position demands). The most notable organization, Answers in Genesis, goes even further, parading around charts of mixed race couples (the only heterosexual union favored by the mainstream culture) and explaining how opposition to interracial marriage is driven by Darwinian racism. So eager to please the mainstream (that nevertheless still regards them as toothless, ignorant hillbilly Bible-thumpers), they omit the simple fact that the people who have historically most opposed interracial marriage, white Southerners, have also been the group least likely to believe in evolution and most likely to believe in a young earth.
The great Southern Presbyterian Robert L. Dabney, a strident opponent of interracial marriage, was among the first to offer critiques of the evolutionary and geological arguments for an old Earth (see Dabney’s Systematic Theology).
Nevertheless, many sincere Christians may be moved by the Darwin=Hitler=racism device. This would be unfortunate, as I view an understanding of the realities of human biodiversity (the view that different groups of people differ in average ability) as the pre-eminent suppressed political truth of our time. If we ever hope to reestablish some sort of Christian liberty, then we must recognize all of the limitations of fallen man, including variance between groups. To characterize one of these limitations as forbidden simply because Darwinism provides a convenient explanation is illogical. Here’s why I believe human biodiversity to be independent of considerations of atheistic evolution:
1. Let’s attack the Hitler argument head-on. Yes, Hitler was an evolutionist, and a believer in human biodiversity (though an inaccurate one, badly mistaken, to his ruin, about the relative abilities of Germans and Slavs; the triumphs of the Cosmonauts, despite being hobbled by an inefficient Communist system, also disprove Hitler’s anti-Slavic prejudices). What separates Hitler and Stalin was their willingness, along with homicidal personalities, to take their atheism to its logical conclusion. If there is no God, then we can do what we want, and what Hitler and Stalin wanted to do was kill people. We’re lucky that most atheists are restrained from such acts by personality and temperament. The critical factors of Hitler and Stalin’s crimes are independent of any belief in human biodiversity (a belief shared by a majority of the Americans and British who fought them).
If, as the liberal young earthers argue, a belief in human biodiversity is the critical, unique factor in prompting Hitler’s abuses, how can they explain Stalin, whose crimes exceeded those attributed to Hitler by an order of magnitude? For Stalin and the USSR were stridently anti-evolutionist and anti-human-biodiversity. Marxism is an ideology that simplifies every relationship to economics, and one of its enabling assumptions is that all men are absolutely equal. If they were not, then that might imply that inequality, such as develops in a free enterprise system, is natural and benign rather than exploitive, the linchpin of Marxist belief.
The Soviets were so wedded to the primacy of equality that they adopted agricultural practices based on a pseudoscience called Lamarckism; Lamarck was a scientist who opposed Darwin by explaining all purported evolutionary effects as being conditioned by the organism’s environment. Thus they reasoned that certain strains of wheat most appropriate for warmer regions could indeed be grown in colder regions if it were simply exposed to the proper environment, notions they took seriously to the ruin of Soviet agriculture. Today, we laugh at this, as even liberal young earthers admit that selective breeding of say, corn, can result in microevolutionary changes that improve the species. The Soviets, however, took their anti-genetics stance very seriously, as they clearly saw the implications for Marxism if biodiversity played a significant role.
Therefore, since the Soviets murdered 20 million people, we could conclude, if we follow the liberal young earther methodology of argument-by-body-count, that anti-human-biodiversity Lamarckian materialism is many times worse than Darwinian materialism. We could even conceive of an evil scenario where neo-Soviets convince a group of people, in their own country, that they are “racist oppressors”, and subject them to dispossession, rape and murder by foreigners in the land their ancestors built. Oh wait…nevermind, that would never happen. Much better to fret about Nazism, because we all know that human-diversity-believing neo-Nazis, not powerful Marxists ensconced in every significant institution in our society, are the greatest threat to our lives and liberties…
Let us also consider the Nazi regime’s crimes against the mentally ill. To save the socialist state money, thousands of institutionalized people were euthanized because of mental illness. We can condemn the Nazis for this act without denying the existence of mental illness. What made it wrong was the murder, not the motive. Liberals and liberal young earthers commit the fallacy of denying human biodiversity because Hitler used his warped version of it as one of his reasons to commit murder. This is absurd. Some rapists pick their victims based on immodest dress, reasoning that “she was asking for it.” Does this mean that teaching young women that they have a responsibility to dress modestly somehow justifies rape? Such is the analogous charge of liberals and the liberal young earthers.
2. I can test the reality of gravity. If I let go of my pencil, it will hit the ground. I can be completely ignorant and agnostic about the mechanism of gravity and yet still recognize the fact that, absent a compensating force, what goes up always comes down. Similarly, the primary and most relevant claims of human biodiversity are independent of questions of origin. For example, analysis of SAT scores reveal three critical things:
A. The SAT successfully predicts success (i.e. GPA) in college, better than any other single factor.
B. The hierarchy of SAT scores is Asians at the top, followed closely by whites, then at some distance Hispanics and at a further distance blacks at the bottom.
C. The SAT more-or-less predicts the success of each racial group in college. If anything, due to cultural differences (propensity to study, respect for education) it slightly underpredicts white and Asian performance and overpredicts black and Hispanic performance.
These three facts contradict the two main arguments against racial differences in academic performance. Liberals claim a) that the SAT is a meaningless test that cannot possibly predict performance better than a committee of liberals on an admissions committee, or b) the SAT is biased against blacks and Hispanics (curiously enough, this argument is never deployed to deconstruct the slight lead of Asians over whites; Asians are better because they’re superior to white people, but whites only appear better than blacks and Hispanics due to institutional white racism). As shown above, both of these arguments are fallacious, as the SAT does predict college performance better than any other measure (most likely because it is objective, fair and avoids exactly the kind of subjective discrimination liberals claim to oppose) AND if anything, the SAT is biased against whites and Asians, who often overachieve in college relative to their intelligence. If the SAT is biased towards blacks, then life itself would seem to be biased towards blacks (in fact, such is now pretty much the orthodox liberal view, chalking up all minority underachievement to unfalsifiable claims of institutional racism).
Human biodiversity is simply a belief that the evidence implies that these differences are mostly genetic, or biological, in origin. While not proven by the SAT alone, when combined with other objective research (such as adoptive and demographic studies showing that, on average, the wealthiest black children have lower IQ’s than the poorest white children), it is clear that the HBD position is a reasonable one. If anything, the fact that the entire liberal institutional apparatus of our society, the very people threatened with having to seek gainful employment if HBD is true, cannot produce environmental research refuting a mostly biological explanation is compelling. The data are true independent of anyone’s opinions of evolution. It would not contradict the data nor an honest young earth position to simply acknowledge that these differences are supernaturally created. To deny the data because some people explain the data by appeal to evolution is illogical. If I mistakenly believe gravity is driven by the invisible efforts of fairies, this has no bearing on the data showing that gravity is real, even if fairies are not.
This is the fundamental what of human biodiversity, and a vitally important truth. This truth leads inevitably to the conclusion that the differences between racial groups in economic terms are intractable (one of the components to IQ is time preference and the ability to delay gratification, both keys to building wealth; in fact, IQ predicts income almost as robustly as academic performance). Combine this unequal distribution with a one-man-one-vote democracy with unlimited taxing capacity and you have the death of liberty. Why? Depraved men will not accept a lassiez-faire system that shows their group is simply less able to produce economic value due to biological differences. Fallen men will grasp onto anything but such a conclusion, instead fanning their envy by claiming that they are less successful because they are oppressed. Liberalism has already supplied such a narrative, and most minority individuals believe it. Once they become a voting majority, liberty is dead.
If this is true, then the only hope of liberty is either racial separation or a non-democratic government. The latter is unlikely (about 30-40% of whites are certifiably politically crazy, and will resist, along with minorities, any transition to a non-democratic form of government), unsustainable (the demographics of minority population growth lead to a South African scenario, where there are simply too many of them for a non-democratic government to enforce the rule of law and rights of property from general mayhem) and undesirable (the South African government had to engage in increasingly distasteful, immoral acts to sustain itself against the demographic time bomb; it should be noted, however, that the ANC terrorists fought by the South African government were themselves no innocents).
I should pause here to consider whether there is a contradiction on the one hand between my a) sympathies for the Confederacy, a mixed-race non-democratic society (much more “diverse” demographically than the South is today) and b) my conclusion that racial separation is the most humane solution to resolving ethnic conflict. The simple answer is the game has changed in a big way with the advent of contraception. Simply, because it involves foresight and planning (and time preference is of the essence of intelligence), contraception ensures that the less intelligent, poorest people will have higher birthrates than the most intelligent, wealthiest people. It used to not be this way, quite the opposite in fact; in England, the aristocracy left proportionally more descendants historically than the lower classes. The new factor of contraception guarantees that a modern Confederacy would within a few generations degenerate into an utterly disordered state like South Africa.
Thus, racial separation remains as the least worst solution to the rabid inter-group envy that will persist in a mixed society. It seems that familiarity breeds contempt, as men will gladly welcome trade with more successful groups abroad, but will not tolerate more successful ethnic groups occupying their same territory. South African blacks, for example, aren’t particularly enraged that the Chinese in China are doing well for themselves lately.
At core, I think these are the logical and necessary conclusions of a) a generally conservative orientation that accepts the depravity of man, which is typical of the liberal young earthers, and b) the measurable reality of human biodiversity. Because the liberal young earthers don’t like the conclusions, they attack b) as morally unacceptable, avoiding a need to engage with the data.
Another issue with the liberal young earthers is that they have a somewhat other-worldly orientation. With the notable exception of Rushdoony (who was not a liberal, opposed interracial marriage and taught a world-conquering sort of faith) and his theological heirs, most young earthers buy into the fundamentalist disengagement with the world of politics, where the questions of HBD, blood and soil work themselves out. Many of them think the world is about to end and simply don’t care what happens to their people or the land their ancestors built. Hitting human biodiversity adherents with the Hitler stick is just one more Powerpoint slide to convince their followers that the-world-must-absolutely-be-only-6000-years-old-or-you-can’t-call-yourself-a-Christian. The liberal young earthers are not unique in this idiosyncrasy; it is common for white people to get caught up in arguing over abstractions rather than looking out for their own self-interest.
3. All liberal young earthers claim to believe in microevolution, to an almost extreme degree, as they believe all animal life today is descended from a relatively few samples present on Noah’s ark during a worldwide flood. While wielding the Hitler stick, does it never occur to them that the ideas of human biodiversity are themselves questions of microevolution? No HBD adherent has claimed any human differences of extreme absolute significance, comparable to the spontaneous generation of a flagellum. HBD simply says that people differ slightly in their cranial capacities, mental efficiency and physical traits, and that genetic differences account for differing averages between groups; these differences are naturally derived and are considerably less absolutely genetically significant than the differences between breeds of dogs.
These differences appear significant from our perspective, because (surprise, surprise) our people enjoy certain adaptations that make them particularly suited to creating Western-style advanced societies, just as we should not be surprised when a bassett hound is outpaced by a greyhound. When other groups show themselves less able to sustain our type of civilization, this matters a great deal politically, for it has big implications for major liberal policies like mass immigration and what exactly constitutes a nation. But biologically these differences are not all that significant, and really present no problem for an enlightened young earth view that acknowledges the self-evident reality of microevolution in humans and sheds the need to please the liberal mainstream by showing themselves to be doctrinaire equalitarians.
4. Lastly, due to overwhelming evidence, a great many honest liberals have retreated to a culturalist position, the last ditch of HBD-denial. This view acknowledges real, seemingly intractable racial differences but chalks them up to cultural differences (which is undoubtedly true to some extent). They sidestep the genetic question by portraying culture as an accident of history independent of any biological drivers. This view was recently put forward in the bestseller No Excuses.
Steve Sailer has mocked this view by noting how it conveniently creates lots of employment opportunities for “nice white ladies” with liberal arts degrees to engage in taxpayer-funded uplift projects in the ghetto. Liberalism has essentially admitted that closing the “achievement gap” means separating black children from their parents as much as possible. Of course, the results from Head Start and other similar efforts have proven to be illusory and temporary, disappearing entirely by age 17 on IQ and achievement tests.
I believe many honest conservatives also embrace this view. It allows one to acknowledge racial reality without coming to any uncomfortable conclusions about biology. But really, how is this view any kind of solution?
Would not changing people’s culture involve every bit the tyranny of changing their genetics? Would it not, as exemplified by the prototypical efforts of Head Start, involve placing liberals in charge of the raising of children? Do we even have the right to deprive minority parents of the dignity of raising their own children in their own culture, however dysfunctional? The level of paternalism involved would make a Confederate slaveowner blush. The level of tyranny is Orwellian.
Thus, we see that practically, there is little difference whether we regard ethnic differences as biological or cultural, as both are intractable. The same solution, that of national separation, is implied by both. It could be argued that national separation is the ordinary means God provides to minimize conflict between groups of men. I can understand why the secular globalists would resist such a solution, but not orthodox Christians. Let us shed the remaining vestiges of the globalist worldview and accept the judgment of history and Providence. Men are separated by God into nations for a divine purpose and we ignore these distinctions at our peril.
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