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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

HBD and Me

The "science of human differences" often feeds an unpalatable political agenda in need of pushback.
vitruvian man

My review of Nicolas Wade’s book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, is up on the website as of yesterday. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Personally, although the actual science is beyond me, I find the whole subject of human evolution, and of the (partially) genetic bases of human behavior, personality, and cognitive capacities fascinating. I really do hope that more and more research gets funded in this area, so that we learn more about more about what makes us tick – and how we tick differently from one another. Knowing more will make us all better off – and it’ll just be interesting.

But I find the political agenda of many of the biggest enthusiasts for the “science of human differences” to be thoroughly unpalatable. So I’m committed to making arguments why that agenda doesn’t follow from their premises – and why the dominant ideology that denies the importance of such differences doesn’t actually lead to a happy liberal egalitarian outcome.

Specifically, I think it’s worth recognizing the degree to which the dominant ideology is well-tailored to the interests of the successful meritocrats. People who have already risen to the upper ranks of the meritocracy have the greatest incentive to believe, and to want others to believe, that anyone could have done the same if they had really worked for it (and not been discriminated against unfairly). The suggestion that it was all effort is an indispensable part of the syllogism that concludes: the winners deserve the spoils.

By contrast, a syllogism that concludes “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is implicitly premised on the reality not only of differences in need, but also of differences in ability.

I recognize that “you can be anything you want to be” is a valuable myth. It’s vastly more motivating to believe in effort than to believe in fate. Effort really can overcome a host of challenges; if you really want to learn to play the guitar, or to read Arabic, or whatever, you shouldn’t let dyslexia or a natural lack of rhythm stand in your way. And every now and then a true genius emerges who truly doesn’t have much native talent – and those people often have especially fruitful insights. The plodding, labored Cezanne was, to my mind, a far more interesting and fecund artist than the natural genius, Piscasso.

But it’s also valuable to remember that it is a myth. Luck, or fate, play a very large role in society, starting not only with what resources your parents happen to have, but what genetic legacy they passed on to you. And most people are ordinary, will want to expend an ordinary amount of effort, not go through extraordinary exertions, and will want to play to their strengths, not their weaknesses. Society shouldn’t be set up to punish and condemn such people.

Equality of moral concern does not rest on a foundational assertion of equality of ability. And if we take seriously the idea of an equality of moral concern, then any evidence that differences in ability are at least partly innate is an argument against the notion that we all “deserve” the complete rewards of our success – or that the only basis for redistributing these rewards is some kind of evidence of discrimination. It’s an argument for some degree of redistribution as a permanent fixture of the landscape, not a temporary way-station on the path to perfect meritocratic capitalism.

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