More Bad News: MAGA genomics
It isn't a culture-war issue
I know there is enough awful news around already, but this is important enough to call out. Recently, a couple of alt.right hereditarian figures, the philosopher Nathan Cofnas and the blogger Emil Kirkegaard, have issued calls for MAGA thinking to be applied to scientific genomics, in support of a “hereditarian revolution.” I don’t recommend the articles, especially right now, but they are HERE and HERE. They are long, and mostly bluster and bullshit. I don’t have a lot of expertise in the interface between government and higher education, but it is hard to imagine that right-wing governments are going to be running faculty searches in psychology and biology departments anytime soon. Though, of course, it is difficult to be too pessimistic right now, and higher ed is certainly a major target for the new right.
I also don’t want to get into a fight over the particulars of the hereditarian position on IQ, race, and genetics. Chapter 9 of my new book lays out my position on the question at some length. For now, I want to address a particular aspect of the Cofnas/Kirkegaard line. Both of them suggest that hereditarianism, especially about IQ and race, is accepted by serious scientists, who are afraid to talk about it out loud lest they be cancelled by censorious leftists. I have seen quite a few more or less well-intended heterodox sorts of writers fall for this line. Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter, Jesse Singal. People like this have a way of assuming that when there is a serious disagreement between rational-sounding rightists and a leftist-consensus, it must be the case that the left is closing political ranks around an untenable position. This may well be true for other issues, I don’t know, but it is not true about hereditarian claims about IQ and race.
The most glaring example of this kind of thinking was back in 2017, when Sam Harris had Charles Murray on his podcast. I wrote about it with Paige Harden and Dick Nisbett here, and got wound up in the worst internet firestorm I have ever been a part of. I keep mentioning things I don’t want to get into, and I don’t want to start another argument with Sam Harris. I don’t think Harris went into the podcast figuring he was going to sign on to hereditarianism about race. But Murray sold him on the idea that the big kids know that this is a hypothesis that needs to be taken very seriously. Like most heterodox thinkers, what better way to show how open you are open to scientific findings without fear or favor than to calmly work through the “evidence” that some racial groups are cognitively inferior, while writing off revulsion at the idea as “moral panic.” The first article to appear in the Journal of Controversial Ideas was an endorsement of hereditarianism, and they are still at it. Haidt included “heritability denial” and “IQ denial” among the sins of the left.
In one sense I am in a good position to think about consensus scientific opinion on racial hereditarianism. On many issues, I am an outlier in the Behavior Genetics Association. If you were to poll the members on a question like, “How important is genetics for arriving at a scientific understanding of alcohol abuse?” I would expect the average response to be “very important,” while my response would be, “not very important.” (With qualifications, but never mind.) If someone argued against an anti-hereditarian position on alcohol use by saying that the consensus among major scientists was that genetic models were broadly correct, they would be right.
This would not be the case on race and intelligence. I would say the vast majority of BGA would say that socially-defined race is not a suitable construct for scientific analysis, and that it is impossible to ascribe genetic causes to racial differences in behavior. I suspect the younger people in the organization take this stance even more strongly than I do.
Are there a few racial hereditarians in the organization? Probably, and there are more who would say that while there is no good evidence now, the hereditarian hypothesis should be actively and freely pursued by those who want to pursue it. And, before anyone brings up the occasional surveys of scientists that have been conducted over the years, they don’t show anything important. For one thing, they have been conducted at the International Society for Intelligence Research, which I think it is safe to say is the most hereditarian more or less mainstream scientific organization in the world. Second, they play a common rhetorical trick by asking people to endorse the statement that genetics has nothing, zero, to do with racial differences in behavior. That is what I think, but even I recognize that science is very bad at proving that something is zero. You can’t prove the null hypothesis. (This is the main theme of my book chapter.)
So race-hereditarians are entitled to their views, but the suggestion that they represnet some kind of silent majority among scientists is just wrong. They are a fringe minority. If hereditarianism is ever imposed on science departments, it will be against the common will of scientists.
It's my impression that the "race realist", "hereditarian", neofash Right doesn't have nearly the traction within the Trump base that the Democratic Party opposition thinks. I know, Charlottesville...but Donald Trump didn't order that torchlight parade, and his remarks about "good people on both sides" were directed at both sides of the argument about the Confederate statues, not at the torchlight paraders. Trump also said there were "bad people on both sides", but the news media was too busy making him wrong to give him a fair hearing. I've never voted for Trump once, but I know railroading when I see it. I make up my mind about what incoming Presidents do when they do it., and not before.
I also have to note that my impression of the MAGA Trump base is that the majority of the ones commenting online are actually deeply insulted by the racist accusation, and also welcoming nonwhite support. Racism is an accusation that's been reflexively leveled against them as a group so often that it's treated as wolf-crying. The principal difference from Democrats is that the occasional racist comment or racist commenter tends to get more of a pass from a Trump-heavy comment section. I call out the clear examples of racism, when I find them. There aren't that many outright racist comments. They do show up. They're typically ignored by the majority, and rarely praised. That might sound insufficiently antiracist to some, but I view it as overall preferable to the call-out culture of the Democrats, where race can only be brought up to valorize--or patronize--black people, and indulge in performative excoriation of white people. (I don't even like color labels as applied to the topic; they're so noisy that it's hard to overlook the insult to ordinary common sense. But, convenient shorthand. Pathetic, but useful in ordinary conversation. Up to a point.)
Neither Nathas Cofnas or Emil Kirkegaard are Americans; Cofnas is in the UK, and Kirkegaard is in Denmark. I don't know how seriously either of them are taken in Europe, but they just don't have that much pull in the American scene. They're riding Trump's jock in hopes of drawing more recruits to share their obsessions. And, to be candid, I don't think they deserve any extra publicity on this side of the pond. The anti-Trump media have already acted as a force multiplier for ideas that need to be left to wither on the vine. Ever notice what happens when the blooms are pruned from a plant? A similar mistake is made with every call for preemptive censorship of some lunatic fringe idea. It just encourages it to grow back with even more vigor.
For every avowed white supremacist "influencer" on the Internet who has claimed support for Trump, I can find several nonwhite Trump boosters--and, crucially, the black and brown Trump supporters draw much bigger audiences. They're just plain better at the job; they're more well-spoken, more personable--and, agree or not, their arguments in favor of Trump policies are neither unreasonable or unpleasant, much less unhinged. Meanwhile, the most extreme white supremacists are lukewarm about Trump, at most. Too pro-Jewish, for one thing. (Trump seems more at ease with black people than a lot of American liberals, frankly. Culturally whitey all the way and doesn't even try to code-switch, but he's his own person. And he gets street respect for that.)
This is the first time I've heard the name Nathan Cofnas. Emil Kirkegaard comes off as a fixated , alienated, and not especially healthy personality. Steve Sailer is what passes for an American thought leader for the scientific racist cause: he's a mediocre cheap shot sniper who specializes in piling on every Woke misfire, and punching down at every opportunity. Moreover, he's just plain bad at statistical analysis. I once caught him out in a NY Times comment with a misinterpretation of statistics so blatant that anyone with competent 11th grade math skills could have caught it. (But NY Times readers don't do math, so it isn''t like I was deluged with upvotes. Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems with defeating the pseudoscience of racists is that too many liberals are allergic to math. They'd rather hurl accusations of Racism! than do the work to convincingly refute a rotten claim, or even to take notice when someone has done it. That's at least as much of a problem as any ignorance at the MAGA end of things.)
Curtis Yarvin has a bad habit of reifying IQ as if it was some probative measure mainly influenced by heredity, but that's Yarvin at his least intelligent, clutching what's probably his weakest point. And I only bring up Yarvin because he's the only one I know of associated with that position who writes with any wit. The rest of the Racist Right just sounds like grim, paranoid, antisocial personalities. (I've certainly read my share of them, including on Substack. Who knows what Algorithm Almighty makes of me for doing that...)
I'll be monitoring the situation, but it's important to bear in mind that just because a few fringe racists are bidding to jump on the Trump bandwagon, that doesn't mean that their opportunism is going to be rewarded.
“If you were to poll the members on a question like, “How important is genetics for arriving at a scientific understanding of alcohol abuse?” I would expect the average response to be “very important,” while my response would be, “not very important.” (With qualifications, but never mind.)”
This is the problem in a nutshell. This consensus around the “genetics” of alcohol abuse is not consistent with the evidence from genetic studies, which do not support this assumption. It is bolstered by the bias of the members, so in both cases the science doesn’t support it, but the shaky positive consensus for alcohol abuse taints the integrity of the negative race consensus.