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  Strakon Lights Up, No. 55

UFOs to blame for racial differences, scientist declares

A couple of columns back, I wrote about how racial and civilizational decline might spoil the promise of the human-genome project. But in that column, I hardly mentioned Our Enemy, the State. So here's the rest of the story, as I see it — how the wheels could come off even faster than we feared, thanks to Big Government Science.

As state apologists never tire of telling us, and as we all surely understand by now, we owe almost everything we have in the modern world to Big Government Science. Yes, if it weren't for leviathan and its characteristic proving ground — war and substitutes for war such as government space programs — airplanes would still resemble the Wright Flyer, and your ophthalmologist would arrange a psychiatric consult for you if you showed up and started babbling about "laser" treatment. We'd have no computers or radar, penicillin would never have become widely distributed or affordable, and you could forget anything that depended on infrared beams or microwaves. In fact, you could just forget modern electronics altogether.

No, sir, no call would ever have arisen in the market for big, fast planes or consumer electronics or modern antibacterials and pesticides or lightweight materials or advanced surgical techniques. Government magic created all those wonders, even though — a messy, confusing detail — private companies did a lot of the actual work.

It is sort of funny that, once introduced, those things did  find quite a market. But in order for them ever to be invented and developed, it's obvious that Our Friend, the State, had to wage huge wars and substitutes for war. It had to bomb a bunch of universities, research institutes, industrial R&D departments, hospitals, libraries, and museums to smithereens. It had to wipe out thousands upon thousands of bright, curious young minds, as well. And at home, it had to cartelize the economy, substitute government wastefulness and corruption for market mechanisms, bureaucratize education, discourage innovations that were temporarily inconvenient, and cripple what remained of the market with regulation, distorting subsidies, taxation, inflation, and rationing. Clearly, that was the only way to produce scientific and technological progress, on net.

It's all been very utopian and satisfying — not to mention exciting! — and I'm sure we're all thankful to our rulers for making our lives so wonderful. But it is possible to quibble, at least for those who are failures of the state-school system. A schooling-failure who was feeling rather wry, as well as ungrateful, could even describe Big Government Science as Political Science. Our irresponsible extremist might go on to remind us of all the mind games Political Scientists typically like to play — most notoriously, perhaps, with respect to AIDS, but also with respect to second-hand smoke, the ozone layer, "wetlands," asbestos, marijuana as "killer weed," and endangered species that — like the "Northern Spotted Owl" — are so endangered that they never even existed.

Our fever-swamp madman might point out how peculiar it is that Political Scientists in the field of developmental psychology, while continuing to rely like everyone else on IQ as a predictor of performance, tell everyone outside their labs that there's no such thing as IQ. And it's even worse, our extremist might claim, in the area of behavioral genetics, where honest scholars find it extremely difficult to avoid the evidence on heritability of IQ and temperament among racial groups, and at the same time extremely dangerous to expose their politically incorrect findings to Red Guard Lysenkoists on campus, in the media, and in the regime.

In Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe,  Roger Pearson — a certifiable extremist — writes, "In an environment in which education and educational research are dependent upon government or upon gifts from corporations and tax-exempt foundations, suggestions that [a scholar's] research is immoral will not only cause funding to dry up but may also place the researcher in disfavor with the institution that employs him." (p. 292)

An extremist might conclude that, as a result, the progress of behavioral genetics has been seriously damaged, at least in the West. In the introduction to Pearson's book, research psychologist Hans Eysenck flatly refers to "sixty years of suppression of unbiased research." But as the Red Guard mobs who have bayed after Eysenck's blood would testify, that's certainly an extreme view!

***

I'd better resume my own authentically extremist voice now.

Political Science takes different forms in different countries and at different times. In Nazi Germany, "Aryan science" justified and fortified the Master Race, and "Jewish science" was deprecated simply for being "Jewish," independently of traditional Western ideas about objective truth. In Stalinist Russia, Lysenkoism lent scientific authority to the project of "growing" New Soviet Man simply by changing his environment. Today's U.S. Empire enforces a type of Lysenkoism as well, influenced by a maniac egalitarianism, and the result is that Political Science in America actually anticipates and celebrates the dissolution of white Western civilization. From some of the state-directed publicity about the mapping of the genome, I'm afraid our Political Scientists may not be satisfied with celebrating but might actually try to accelerate that dissolution.

Writing in 1991, Pearson eagerly anticipated the completion of genetic mapping, writing that the findings already in hand at that time "have significant implications for eugenics. As the study of medical genetics advances, it is inevitable that common sense will eventually lead to the acceptance of some degree of eugenic practice as a necessary and moral basis for medical decisions." (p. 302) Some of us may not be comfortable even with voluntary eugenics, but I think we'd be positively uncomfortable if faced with a state-directed program of dysgenics.  We've already had a taste of that, after all, with decades of state subsidies for welfare mothers. Nazi Germany purported to be pursuing coercive eugenics. Our own regime has already established a record of actually pursuing coercive dysgenics.

To continue pursuing it, the regime must steer, limit, and publicize advanced genetics research very carefully indeed. Pearson's expectations about the social fallout of genetic research must be expertly manipulated, lest the regime, its captive institutions, and its subjects come face to face with some horribly embarrassing truths about racial differences, exploding the regime's egalitarian fantasies. I've got faith in our rulers, though: they'll pull it off, just you wait and see.

Covering the June 26 news conference presided over by Bill Clinton, the Associated Press reported some remarks by J. Craig Venter, chief scientist of Celera Genomics:

"We have sequenced the genomes of three females and two males who have identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African-American," said Venter. The variety was selected, he said, "out of respect for the diversity that is America, and to help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis." ("Scientists Announce DNA Mapping," June 26)

Note well: that slogan-chanting was performed not by the state's own gene-mapping bigwig, Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health, but by the private-enterpriser. It's a good example of Polite Totalitarianism, and its self-censorship, at work.

A friend asks sourly, "Now, just to make sure I got it right, does that mean that if a Negro man and a Negro woman have a baby, there's actually some chance that the baby will be an Eskimo?" From now on, I guess it does, but first we'd better check with Comrade J. Craig Lysenko. Maybe he'll tell us that the observable, persistent, well-clustered biological differences among human groups are really determined by space aliens. Or maybe by the radon level in your basement.

It is darned confusing, though, because at the very same news conference, Clinton "cautioned that the genetic map must never be used to segregate, discriminate, or invade the privacy of human beings. Legislation is circulating in Congress that offers such protection."

I certainly hope that legislation stops circulating long enough so that we can get a good look at it. In any event, if logic were still a valid tool, we'd have to assume that Our Beloved Leader and Greatest Scientist of All Time Greater Even Than Algore wasn't talking about racial  segregation or discrimination, because we now know that races don't exist. But if it turns out to be easier or cheaper to fix certain genetic problems in Those of European Ancestry than in Those of Non-European Ancestry, or if Those of Non-European Ancestry decide they have more genes that need fixing than Those of European Ancestry, I somehow suspect that the existence of the races in all their genetic, biological, hereditary glory will suddenly be rediscovered.

You'd think that if the races really didn't exist the regime wouldn't make such a fuss about them, wouldn't you? That it would take a shot at being race-neutral, instead of obsessively recording everyone's race and privileging members of some races over others? But there's that obsolete, repressive logic, raising its ugly head again.

Doublethink is doubleplusgooder than logic. So if you don't mind my exploiting old George Orwell for the thousandth time, I guess the rule is that all races don't exist, but — even in advance of their actual demographic implosion — some races already don't exist more than others.

July 5, 2000

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