by Andrew Brons
Politicians see themselves as wielding significant power and of being an autonomous force for social and economic change. Others recognise that political events do not take place in a vacuum; they are affected by other forces.
Marxists see economic change as the driving force, changing society and ultimately politics. Hegel, more realistically, saw ideas developing, colliding and producing synthesised new ideas. Perhaps ideas do not emerge and mutate in a vacuum as envisaged by Hegel but develop according to the relative power and influence of different population groups and individuals within those groups. There is a quotation attributed to the appalling ‘cultural anthropologist’, Margaret Mead that was recently quoted with approbation by the EU High Representative, Baroness Ashton. It ran:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
‘Cultural Anthropology’ is a branch of ‘Social Anthropology’, which was invented by Franz Boas. Social Anthropology was originally seen as a new branch of Anthropology but it has now, like a cuckoo, supplanted the original inhabitants of the nest. If you seek to study Anthropology, you will find that you have enrolled on a course of Social Anthropology. Indeed, if my memory serves me well, the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, studied (or was fed) just that subject.
The assumptions underlying Social Anthropology are the same as those underlying modern Sociology: that human beings are born with a ‘clean slate’ onto which their nurture prints everything from their ability to their personality and behaviour.
There is everything to be said for this assumption except for supporting evidence. Indeed, all the evidence points to the contrary conclusion: that observed, measurable differences are attributable to variations in heredity rather than variations in environment. These were the consensus findings of anthropologists, geneticists and psychologists. However, the political left had an interesting intellectual tool to use against their findings. They organised mobs to attack these experts physically and assault them in front of their audiences. Professor Hans Eysenck had been brought up in Hitler’s Germany and was one of a handful who had been brave enough to refuse to join the Hitler Youth. It is perhaps ironic that, after having moved to Britain as a young man, he was attacked at the end of his career by a leftist mob whose bravery allowed them to engage in a mob attack on a man of advanced years.
Physical attacks on ageing academics might not be very noble but they have proved to very effective. Nobody in the academic world refers to the copious evidence that supports the nature argument over the nurture assumption or to the lack of evidence to support the conclusions of the nurturists. The sword (or the boot) has proved itself to be infinitely mightier than the pen.
The result is that the Zeitgeist in the academic world and in the wider world of Politics and even inconsequential discussion, embraces the nurture assumption leaving the nature argument unworthy even to be mentioned. This is particularly noticeable when the perpetrator of an especially nasty offence has been convicted. Conversation in the popular media, not to mention academic circles, asks the question: “What was there in the perpetrator’s upbringing that caused that person to act as he (or occasionally she) did?”
This was the case when eighteen year old Sean Mercer was convicted of the murder of eleven year old Rhys Jones in a suburb of Liverpool. Mercer had mistakenly believed that Rhys was a member of a rival gang, when in fact he was just an eleven year old playing on his bicycle. Reams of paper were written on explaining how this aspect of Sean Mercer’s upbringing, as distinct from that experience in childhood, might be responsible for his conduct. The Daily Mail’s discovery that his great great grandfather had been hanged for murder in 1929 was seen as something that would satisfy a low interest among the readership but of no relevance.
We, as political activists (but without a credible party to our name) are working in an atmosphere that is as conducive to the success of our opponents as it is inimical to our own. The nurturist assumption has not only infected the academic world but also the worlds of journalism – serious, popular and red top; the entertainment industry from literary works to soap operas; and even popular gossip. Even the best of our people –those who are most receptive of our message – find themselves referring to people of other cultures.
We have been concentrating on the battle in the political arena and have largely ignored the battle in the academic one. Where we have been aware of false information being peddled, we have attributed it to people of political motivation. In the 1970s it was countered with leaflets such as ‘How to Spot a Red Teacher’. My recollection of this leaflet was that it contained some useful insights but its headline was potentially misleading or it would be today. Many teachers and academics in higher education would not see themselves as political activists and would be genuinely horrified to be accused of imparting false information or of brainwashing their students. They would see themselves as purveyors of truth and clarity of understanding against prejudice and misinformation. They have been told that their conclusions are supported by evidence and that is enough. Few of today’s ‘academics’ have the energy or ability to look at the ‘evidence’ for themselves.
If they did, they would be tempted to view it selectively. Academics in subjects with ‘sensitive’ areas have had effective Orwellian crime-stop mechanisms installed into their consciousness. They know instinctively the consequences of stumbling across, and admitting to have stumbled across, research that is not consistent with the conclusions that they must impart. The consequences might initially be social with a careless thought being met with a stony silence and hostile stare. The next step would be professional investigations and appraisals leading to lack of promotion and eventually loss of position. In some countries the final sanction might even be criminal prosecution.
Few would wish to articulate this process because it would portray them in an unflattering light. People do not like to see themselves as fools, people who delude themselves or as moral and intellectual cowards. If you do not want to see what is in the locked room leave the key where it is.
Our job must be to force academics and others in the chattering classes to challenge the assumptions on which whole careers have been based. We can carry out this very necessary task ourselves and be seen as people in, or associated with, one or more political parties. However, political parties invariably taint those with whom they are associated.
It would be better for ‘think tanks’ to be established that are seen to be academic rather than political. The individuals publicly associated with such ‘think tanks’ should be people who are free of current (and if possible past) political association.
Unless we (and others on our behalf) are able to influence the ‘atmosphere’ in which the political system operates, we shall suffer continue to experience insurmountable difficulties.
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You state that few of the academics have the energy or the ability to look at the ‘evidence’ themselves.
A topical case in point is that they never comment on the rather ‘strange’ fact that in the Olympic games you never see:
A. A white runner in the 100 or 200 metre finals.
B. A white male winning the Marathon
C. A black swimmer of any note.
D. A black rower
E A black sailor
F. A black equestrian.
Come to that have you ever seen a black cyclist, or even an Asian, in the Tour de France?
Surely people might actually think there must be some reason other than lack of opportunity or prejudice?
The lack of top white sprinters was in fact discussed on the BBC Olympics coverage. I think it was to fill some slack time waiting for the 200m final. The fascinating statistic was produced that of the 80 or 82 runners who have broken the 10 seconds barrier for 100m only one is a white man. The panel of commentators did not get very far in discussing the whys and wherefors, but it was something that they mentioned it at all.
Yes, leftist mob action has been very successful in excluding the nature or nature-and- nurture theory frorm academe. The cultural marxist bias of those in charge of the universities, teacher training colleges etc and fear of reprisals from them also ensure that the marxist – favoured nature theory is in more or less sole possession of the public ear. John Stuart Mill must be turning in his grave.
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Here is a run-down of some examples of the persecution of academics and others who have dared to flout liberal / leftist censorship:-
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Academic Persecution in the USA and Canada
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Larry Summers: Summers was President of Harvard, possibly the USA’s most prestigious university, when in 2005 he dared to suggest that women were underrepresented in the top echelons of the Hard Science Faculties in Universities, not because they were discriminated against but because that compared to men, they simply weren’t good enough. They had ‘different availability of aptitude at the high end.’ He called for clear thinking on these matters, including race. Summers paid the penalty for his candour. He subsequently ‘resigned’ from his position. He was though appointed as an economics advisor by Obama.
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James Watson: Watson is the Nobel-prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who suggested in 2000 that dark- skinned people had stronger libidos than lighter-skinned ones. Extracts of melanin – which gives skin its colour – had been found to boost subjects’ sex drive.” On October 25, 2007, Watson had to resign from his position as head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York after he was reported as saying ‘I am inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa (because) all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.’ Watson had apparently made similar remarks about women.
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Kevin B. MacDonald: Macdonald is a professor of psychology at California University, Long Beach. Using evolutionary psychology, he has developed a theory of Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy.” According to this theory, traits attributed to Jews such as higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentrism have eugenically evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to conspire to out-compete non-Jews for resources while undermining the power and self-confidence of the white majorities in Europe and America. These, he insists, Jews seek to dispossess, working indirectly through such ideologies as neo-conservativism which, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, uses arguments that appeal to non-Jews, rather than appealing explicitly to Jewish interests.
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MacDonald questions claims that racial differences are unimportant or illusory and that racial and cultural assimilation will be an easy process.He believes that blacks and Latinos are by and large genetically intellectually inferior to whites and Asians. Mass immigration of peoples with historic grudges agaisnt whites is he thinks the ultimate foolishness—an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.’
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The University Senate and his colleagues in the university’s psychology department have formally dissociated themselves from his work. The Senate described his views as Anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric. Apart from this condemnation on the grounds of Political Correctness, no substantive criticism of the correctness of his opinions appears to have been offered.
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Arthur Jensen: Jensen is Professorof Psychology at U.C. Berkeley. He is a major proponent of heriditarian position in the nature / nurture debate. He concluded from his studies that the Head Start programmes designed to boost African-American IQ scores had failed, and that this was likely never to be remedied, largely because, in his estimation, heritability of IQ was over 0.7 of the within-race IQ variability, and the 0.3 left over was due to non-shared environmental influences.
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After Jensen’s paper was released, students and faculty staged large protests outside his University of California Office He was denied reprints of his work by his publishers and was not permitted to reply in response to letters of criticism—both extremely unusual policies for their day.
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Jensen’s 1998 ‘The g factor: The Science of Mental Ability’ suggests that a genetic component is implicated in the white-black difference in IQ .
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In 2005, Jensen’s article, co-written with J Philippe Rushton named ‘Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability”, was published in the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law. They present ten categories of evidence in support of the notion that IQ differences between whites and blacks are partly genetic in origin.
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Michael Levin: Levin, a Philosopher, was Professsor of the History of Science at City University, New York. His book ‘Feminism and Freedom’ which demolished feminist arguments attracted much opprobrium. So too did his subsequent 1984 article published an the ‘The Monist’, ‘Why Homosexuality is Abnormal’. He and his wife (also a philosophy PhD) wrote a letter to the New York Times arguing that Store Owners were justified in ‘racial profling’, ie refusing to open their doors to young blacks they were afraid might rob them. They pointed out that the New York Times, while worried about the exclusion of blacks who might be innocent of intent was unconcerned that whites might suffer from racial preferences.
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‘Anti-Racist’ activists circulated the letter at his university and picketed his classes Then, there was an immense uproar when his views on American education were published in an Austraian magazine. He said there that, ‘there is now quite solid evidence that …the average black is significantly less intelligent than the average white’.
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Demonstrators disrupted his classes and physically prevented him from speaking. The Faculty convicted him in absentia of ‘racism’ and the University President did his best to break Levin’s tenure.
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Glayde Whitney: Glayde Whitney was a behavioural genetics and psychology professor at Florida State University. Whitney drew the wrath of the liberal establishment when in his Presidential address to the Behavior Genetics Association in 1995 he suggested that there was a need to investigate the possibility of genetic factors behind the high incidence of black crime in America.
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Whitney caused further controversy when he wrote a sympathetic foreword to David Duke’s autobography, ‘My Awakening’. He described it as ‘’a painstakingly documented, academically excellent work of sociobiological-political history … provid[ing] on the order of a thousand references and footnotes.’ He wrote,” I discovered that Duke’s ‘racism’ was not born of hatred, but of science and history. In reading Duke’s work, Whitney noted, “As the hard scientific data came in, it became more certain that genetic differences (heredity) played a large role in the discrepancy. But in public it became politically incorrect to even to acknowledge that there was a difference.”
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Whitney argued that opponents of genetic research into racial differences are positioned against the scientific tradition of open inquiry, maintained even when one detests another’s subject. When he received death threats he stated that “races are different for many genetic systems that influence everything from behavior and psychology to physiology, medicine and sports […] Screaming nasty words does not change the reality.” Whitney’s views regarding race and intelligence prompted the Florida Senate to pass Resolution 2742 in 1999, “condemning the racism and bigotry espoused by Florida State University Professor Glayde Whitney.”
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J Philippe Rushton: Rushton is Professor of Psychology at The University of Western Ontario. His book ‘Race, Evolution and Behaviour’ which applies the r-K life-history theory to racial differences in IQ and other racial traits was greeted with widespread hostility and criticism, such as that of Robert Sussman the Editor of the American Anthropologist. When he refused to place ads for the book in the Magazine, Sussman said in explanation that
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‘This is an insidious attempt to legitimize Rushton’s racist propaganda and is tantamount to publishing ads for white supremacy and the neo-Nazi party. If you have any question about the validity of the “science” of Rushton’s trash you should read any one of his articles and the many rebuttals by ashamed scientist’.
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Academic Persecution in the UK
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Chris Brand: Brand was a lecturer in Psychology at Edinburgh University. After an almost year-long investigation by the University, he was sacked from this tenured post which he had held for 27 years because of his views on Race, IQ and women and because of remarks he made about paedophilia.
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His 1996 book ‘The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications’ led to accusations of ‘scientific racism’ and sexism and his lectures were protested and closed by the Anti Nazi league of Edinburgh. Brand describes himself as a ‘race realist.’
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Geoffrey Sampson: Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. He was elected as a Tory to Wealdon District Council in 2001. In 2002 he resigned having been attacked by Labour Party and Lib Dem ministers and councillors for publishing an article on his website, ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Racism (Except the Name)’. The Conservative Party Central Office endorsed his resignation saying that it was “in the best interests of all concerned …the Conservative party is opposed to all forms of racial discrimination”.
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Satoshi Kanazawa: Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics. He got himself into serious trouble when he published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries. Kanazawa was accused of ‘reviving the politics of eugenics’ by publishing the research which concluded that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compared IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claimed that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.
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‘The Guardian’ said that ‘the reaction to Kanazawa’s paper would ’reopen the simmering debate about whether academics are entitled to express opinions that many people may find offensive’. No surprise there. The Guardian will always be opposed to the expression of the truth if it is less than flattering to some non-white male group which will be ‘offended’ by it. Apparently truth should be concealed or never revealed or isn’t truth, if this is the case. If you buy The Guardian, you won’t get the truth. So why bother?
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Kanazawa has survived, quite possibly because, not being white, he was held to be less guilty than if a white person had made the same arguments. He has subsequently made some less than flattering observations about the sexual attractiveness of black women following research into the subject, for which he has also got himself into trouble with the University authorities.
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Armand Leroi : Leroi is Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College, London. He attracted much hostile attention when in 2005 he published an article ‘A Family Tree in every Gene’ which underlined the importance of gene expression in confirming the reality of Race. Naturally, any scientific work which serves to deny that race is merely a ’social construct’ must be not just wrong, but evil, because leftist ideology says it is. So far, Leroi has survived academically.
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Frank Ellis: Frank Ellis is the lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at Leeds University who dared to support the ‘Bell Curve’ theory. This theory of course holds that black people are less intelligent than whites – enough to have Ellis figuratively burned at the academic stake. But Ellis also believes that women do not have the same intellectual capacity as men and backed the ‘humane’ repatriation of ethnic minorities. Whilst the University appeared initially to have tried to back Ellis, in the end, it seems, it failed to hold out against the pressure from protesting students and teaching staff. Ellis took early retirement.
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Richard Lynn: Richard Lynn, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster is currently probably the most prominent British Scientist in the field of IQ and other racial differences. Among his writings are ‘IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Human Evolution, Behaviour and Intelligence)’ co-authored with Tatu Vanhanen), ‘The Global Bell Curve’ and ‘Race Differences in Intelligence.’
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It is no coincidence that Lynn’s prominence in this field arose after his retirement from the University with the honorific title ‘Professor Emeritus’. As with the others mentioned here (those who have not been sacked, that is) Lynn was gagged from discussing racial matters whilst actually in post. Like J Philippe Rushton, he has only managed to get his work known through small private Publishers.
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Academic Persecution Elsewhere
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An example is:-
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Helmut Nyborg: Nyborg, Professor of Developmental Psychology at Aarhus University is probably Denmark’s best know and most controversial Psychologist. He has identified a 5-point average IQ difference in favour of men. Through research, Nyborg has also concluded, inter alia, that white people tend to be more intelligent than blacks.
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In 2005, Nyborg published his paper, ‘ Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status’. Even though this passed peer review in an expert scientific journal, Aarhus University investigated accusations of scientific fraud in the results. The resulting report concluded that there although there was some statistical errors (which were not in fact of major significance in the results) there was no evidence of fraud.
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Notwithstanding this, the University reacted to the report by suspending Nyborg in 2006.
And so on and on.
Useful summary of leftie bias within academia, for which thanks, Vita.
In the first paragraph of my post I talk about the ‘marxist – favoured nature theory’.
This should of course read the ‘marxist -favoured nurture theory’.
Apologies
Here are further key examples of prominent academics who have been persecuted by leftists / liberals because their research turned up results which fly in the face of the leftist ideology of environmentalism and ‘equaIity’.
Leftism simply cannot bear any scientifc results which serve to show that individuals, the sexes and the races differ intellectually and in terms of temperament and other tendencies, because such results undermine the ideology of ‘equality’ and ‘oppression’ according to which socio-economic inequalities develop, not because the less successful are less capable, but because they are ‘oppressed’ by unfair social structures.
In the absence of reasoned arguments against such results, leftist / liberals often resort to mob violence or what amounts to terrorising rearchers by other means.
Richard Herrnstein
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Herrnstein was a Professor of Psychology at Harvard where he was a colleague of B. F. Skinner, the behaviourist. His interests are described thusly by Wikipedia: ‘Herrnstein’s research focused first on natural concepts and human intelligence in the 1970’s and peaked in profligacy with the publication of his and Charles Murray’s controversial best –selling book ‘The Bell Curve’.
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(NB. Profligacy, from profligate, ‘recklessly extravagant or wasteful, licentious , dissolute.’ (OED). The thrust of ‘The Bell Curve’ is that black people are less intelligent than whites.
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Herrnstein received death threats and had to cancel lectures after he published an article that discussed the connection between heredity and crime.
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E.O Wilson
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Wilson was a Professor of Biology at Harvard. He is known as the ‘Father of Sociobiology’. Sociobiology may be defined as the scientific or systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behaviour, in all kinds of organisms including man.
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Wilson faced ostracism from his colleagues and disruption for his students when in 1975 he published his book ‘Sociobiology’, which argued that evolutionary biology had influenced many aspects of human behaviour.
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Thomas Bouchard
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Bouchard is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and the USA’s leading authority on twin studies.
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In 1979, Bouchard came across an account of a pair of twins (Jim Springer and Jim Lewis) who had been separated from birth and were reunited at age 39. “The twins,” Bouchard later wrote, “were found to have married women named Linda, divorced, and married the second time to women named Betty. One named his son James Allan, the other named his son James Alan, and both named their pet dogs Toy.”
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Bouchard arranged to study the pair in what became known as ‘The Minnesota Study of Identical Twins reared apart’.
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The findings of his team ‘continue to suggest a very strong genetic influence on almost all medical and psychological traits.’ Bouchard’s conclusions included that shyness, political conservatism, dedication to hard work, orderliness, intimacy, extroversion, conformity, and a host of other social traits are largely heritable.
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Bouchard was harassed by egalitarians who handed out leaflets calling him a ‘racist’ and demanding that he be sacked.