Friday 17 May 2013

What would it take for the Left to accept hereditary IQ group differences?

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Quite simple.

Stop being the Left. 

Nothing short of that will work. 

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And how do you stop people being Left - what possible inducement could be offered?

Only one: religion.

(Proper, orthodox, traditional religion.)

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It all boils down to a choice between religions.

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If that doesn't happen, if that doesn't work: nothing will.

And it is a waste of time - worse, it is a a deluded distraction of effort and likely counter-productive - to suppose otherwise. 

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This post follows on from

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/understanding-leftist-iq-heresy-hunts.html

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8 comments:

JP said...

Can you cite a religious group that does not buy into equalitarianism? Most of them seem to have accommodated themselves to it quite comfortably, and are perfectly happy preaching the "we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord" drivel.

William Zeitler said...

I think genetic hereditary differences would be quite challenging to determine: considering how much mixture there has been, where does 'Caucasian' leave off and ‘Hispanic’ begin? Cultural hereditary is quite another matter, and I have personally seen that strongly in action. There is definitely a culture of Poverty, and an impoverished household very definitely teaches the child how to be poor and ignorant. The classic liberal idea of ‘all they need is a chance’ doesn’t work because by the time the State tries to intervene (5 years old plus/minus), the child has learned too many interlocking incapacitating attitudes—a complete ‘culture’, really—of how to be poor: an attitude of entitlement, ‘easy silver-bullet to wealth’ (e.g. the Lottery, or selling drugs), a time-horizon (how far out they are able to think, plan and commit) of minutes instead of months or years, a deep-seated aversion to learning much of ANYTHING; a learned helplessness, etc.—all unwittingly taught them by their home environment. Based on my own experience, an impoverished white kid and an impoverished black kid are far closer to each other culturally/cognitively than an impoverished white kid and a middle-class white kid.

How can the public school system possibly undo the constellation of dysfunctional attitudes that constitutes Poverty? Answer: it can’t. Then let all those attitudes be further solidified by the time they are an adult, and the problem is even more intractable. Certainly the State throwing yet more money at this problem does nothing but enlarge the Welfare Machine--all the middle-class and up bureaucrats provided employment by the welfare system, and by the way roughly 2/3 of tax dollars that go into the Welfare System are absorbed by the infrastructure, only 1/3 ends up in the hands of the people they are supposedly trying to help. (Now add to the mix the infernal feedback loop of the Welfare Machine voting themselves more tax dollars at the ballot box. And the Impoverished doing the same.)

Personally I wonder if Poverty doesn’t have certain cognitive similarities to, say, Alcoholism. That is, a general path to recovery is to ‘touch bottom’ when they can finally see how dysfunctional their world-view really is, and are finally open to revising all of it from the ground up. Meanwhile, as our current welfare system is constituted, it does everything possible to prevent the Impoverished from ever ‘touching bottom’.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JP - There are plenty mentioned throughout this blog - but I am not trying to persuade anybody (at least not in this post).

Note that if you are judging a religion by secular criteria, naturally it will be deficient.

But at present only the religious, and only some of them, are actually living non Leftist lives - eg. in relation to the sexual revolution, fertility, standards.

This aside, whatever secular concern takes someone up to a religion, probably it will only be adopt it for religious (including personal) - not political - reasons.

@WZ - I get the feeling you are not aware of the strength of the evidence. Also, you need to consider what you mean by poverty, and to contrast what poverty means in the Bible with what we mean by poverty nowadays

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/biblical-poor-do-not-exist-in-west.html

William Zeitler said...

RE your post on 'Biblical Poor', e.g. "The Biblical Poor worked all waking hours until they dropped, suffered chronic malnutrition and usually died of starvation: almost none of their children would survive to adulthood.

The Modern "poor" do not work at all, are obese, have more children than anyone else, and almost all their children survive to mature adulthood."
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Sounds a lot like what I was saying with "...as our current welfare system is constituted, it does everything possible to prevent the Impoverished from ever ‘touching bottom’."

That is, current policy strongly resembles Enabling, if not outright promoting, a very crippling world-view.

William Zeitler said...

If 'sloth' is genetic, can we be held morally accountable for it? The call to 'repent' implies that we are able to repent. God extends the call to repent to ALL of us, regardless of our genetic inheritance.

asdf said...

Liberals must deny IQ because most of their "accomplishments" in life are really just supply/demand rewards in the market for their genetic strengths. People want to feel their college degree and above average income are because of who they are, not because they were born lucky.

It always comes back to pride.

JP said...

If 'sloth' is genetic, can we be held morally accountable for it?

Humans are genetically predisposed to EVERY form of sin. In some people, the predisposition is stronger than others, but in no case does it eliminate the ability to choose whether or not to sin. Thus, we are, and should be, held accountable for our choices, despite genetics.

Or am I off the hook for Lust because I have a Y chromosome? =)

Adam G. said...

The "'we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord' drivel" is precisely why religious people can accept that secular equality may not exist.