The most career-destroying, toxic heresy in today’s hypersensitive world is attributing highly valued traits such as intelligence to a person’s genes and then saying that these and other biologically hard-wired traits were unevenly distributed across population groups.
To say, for example, that the Chinese disproportionately succeed academically due to their genes, not unearned privilege, luck, or any other environmental factor, violates this taboo.
The opposite is the blank slate theory of human nature. Here everything is environmentally determined and according to Steven Pinker, the blank slate view of human nature dominates today’s intellectual life.
Those rejecting this blank slate ideology will be punished regardless of evidence or expertise. James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning co-discover of DNA was fired from his position and widely excoriated for speculating sub-Saharan African economic dysfunction might reflect their lower and genetically determined IQs.
Meanwhile, countless scientists anxious to remain employed will twist themselves into knots to avoid even hinting of biological differences across population groups to explain unequal outcomes in educational attainment, crime, health and elsewhere.
In principle, this taboo is entirely amenable to scientific inquiry. We are not in the 15th century where contrarian views on impossible-to-prove religious dogma such as free will vs. determinism, might get you burned at the stake. In fact, thousands of scientists do study the role genes play and publish their findings, though nearly all of this research focuses on plants and animals, not humans.
Why the fear of documenting the impact of genetics on human behavior?
Ironically, biological explanations have historically dominated. Victorians frequently explained the criminality of the poor by their defective genes while innumeracy among women resulted from their smaller brains.
Plausibly, banishing genetic explanations reduces unfair discrimination, so, for example, if women were thought be genetically inclined to being innumerate, they would be excluded from jobs requiring math.
Or perhaps, viewing negative traits as biologically hard-wired is judged offensive or might discourage people from even trying to advance economically.
Huge risks exist when misapplying the blank slate vs. genetic explanations.
Between 1928 and 1940, millions of Russian peasants were uprooted from their farms and re-located to collective farms.
Soviet leaders, as per the Marxism they practiced that presumes total human malleability, believed that the re-located peasants would happily boost Soviet agricultural production, thanks to industrialization.
The result was disastrous, as grain production fell and farmers neglected the collective farm’s crops and grew what they needed on tiny private plots while selling that surplus to hungry city folk. Livestock production similarly collapsed. Despite escalating coercion, Russian peasants by their innate nature refused to be converted into communists and million died of starvation.
On the other hand, women were once thought biologically unsuited for business due their emotional temperament and lack of mental toughness.
Today, however, women constitute 43% of all those enrolled in MBA programs and are expected to soon reach parity with males.
The question of aligning visions of human nature and goals is an empirical one to be decided by research. Mother Nature took a dim view of Soviet collectivization but looked more kindly on American women entering MBA programs. Unfortunately, ideological fanaticism, not scientific evidence, pushes the blank-slated, especially on the campus, and the outcome is totalitarian creep.
On today’s academy, this belief in human malleability takes the form of advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DIE). It is axiomatic that everyone regardless of race, gender or other human traits has the same potential to excel academically.
Unfortunately, reality says otherwise, and despite massive spending and countless remedial programs, schools must still lower their standards to admit blacks and Hispanics. Moreover, this lingering inequality cannot be hidden. Just look at who majors in demanding subjects versus who just scrapes by in “gut” courses. The gap was made crystal clear when black enrollment suddenly fell after a recent Supreme Court decision largely banned racial preferences in college admissions.
What can be done? One option is to confess failure, admit that Mother Nature gave dissimilar populations different abilities, and restore the merit principle.
Alas, the blank slate ideology is tenacious and contemporary college administrators, like past Soviet commissars, often use deception and coercion to create the appearance that everything is going according to plan. As the defunct Soviet Union once fooled millions by claiming to be a “workers’ paradise,” American universities can be brilliant at providing the illusion of success.
A particularly common deception is to admit less qualified blacks and Hispanics but nevertheless assert that they are “highly qualified.” Then further create special programs such as Black Studies for those struggling academically or tolerate inflating grades to boost graduation rates. Then add support services like extra tutoring, segregated housing, and huge Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies to rescue those overwhelmed academically.
A more draconian measure is to eliminate dissent by recruiting only faculty who embrace the “diversity is our strength” mantra and further insist that all professors, even those in the hard sciences and engineering, sign DIE pledges and submit statements explaining how their course promotes the school’s diversity mission.
Meanwhile “party line” adherents are rewarded with large salary increases and extra research funding.
Particularly onerous, a throwback to deadly wars of religion, is to criminalize “bad thinking” apart from actual behavior. Now, professors who believe that minority students are not academically competitive might be fired for “hate.” Tellingly, it makes no difference how these “hateful” professors treat their minority students. Thinking, by itself, is the crime.
The campus orthodoxy is further sustained by refusing to invite non-believers to lecture or disrupting the talks of those like Charles Murray who do manage invitations.
Then add speech codes to silence skeptics who might utter “hateful” statements, e.g., racial preferences are illegal. Student “bias response teams” will then inform the administration on those privately uttering “offensive” remarks. If a professor assigns The Bell Curve, bring him up on charges of creating a “hostile leaning environment” that “triggers” students of color. If the offending professor refuses to cooperate, remove him or her from the classroom under the guise of “helping” struggling minority students debilitated by this alleged pseudoscience.
Then add Orwellian language to distort reality — being colorblind is racist, silence is violence — and award academic credit for left-wing political activism. If that is insufficient, require mandatory implicit bias training and compulsory lectures on white privilege, the impact of systemic racism, and how even the most innocuous remarks to protected minorities will academically incapacitate them. For professors who run afoul of the woke mob, publicly harass them in ways reminiscent of Chinese communist struggle sessions.
The correct diagnosis for many of the ills plaguing today’s college campus is that school functionaries mistakenly embrace the blank slate theory of human nature where everybody is equal intellectually. That this is a demonstrable fantasy hardly matters. In principle, this is the same error that plagued the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, however, by the 1980s, reality set in and Marxism collapsed.
It is ironic that genetic determinism, the great bogeyman of today’s liberals and often falsely associated with Naziism, may in practice deter tyranny by discouraging doomed-to-fail social engineering. Campus administrators might benefit from a mandatory course called “Failed Social Engineering.”
The wisdom of the Roman lyric poet Horace (65 B.C. – 8 B.C.) is worth heeding: “You may throw out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.”
We can only wonder when today’s universities will face this reality.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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