The Cofnas Manifesto

The social consequences of hereditarianism

A long time ago, when I was a 36 year old assistant professor, I reviewed a book by Snyderman and Rothman (1988) titled, The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. The authors administered a flawed questionnaire to a very non-representative sample of academics. One of the questions was about the the heritability of black-white differences in IQ, and 45% endorsed that it was a “product of both”. (53% said that it was entirely environmental, insufficient evidence to support a reasonable conclusion, or declined to answer. Only 1% said it was entirely genetic. The real conclusion is that scientists don’t like saying anything is 0% or 100%)

All in all, I think 36 year old me, still trying to figure out how to fit in as a behavior geneticist, was too sympathetic to the book. But at the end, I wrote a paragraph about race differences that has been quoted many times:

Bias in journalism and inaccuracy in science are always deplorable, and this book deserves praise for exposing the bias and inaccuracy surrounding the intelligence controversy. Scientific caution is another matter. The theory of intelligence may be adequate, but it is far from complete, and, for the rational scientist, skepticism about its conclusions must depend, in part, on the consequences of being wrong. Seventy-five years ago, a survey of testing experts might well have concluded that immigrants from southern Europe were intellectually inferior to the resident majority. If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment. (Turkheimer, 1990)

The atomic bomb figure gets thrown in my face by hereditarians. If I wrote that today I would find a more measured way to say it, but I stand by the paragraph in general. Notice that when I refer to the consequences of racial hereditarianism, I don’t say what the hereditarians always insist that I said: that we have to reject hereditarianism, even if it is true, because of the awful consequences. I said that the awful consequences mean that we should be damn sure hereditarianism is true before we accept it. That is not the often-cited moralistic fallacy, but simply an argument from inductive risk— if the consequences of a particular conclusion are terrible, it is rational to set a high standard for reaching it.

Enter Nathan Cofnas. This post is not about Jason Arday, or what should happen to Cofnas at the University of Ghent. It is about a substack post he wrote titled, A Guide For The Hereditarian Revolution: How to win the elites and create a better world. I urge you to stop and read it, especially if you are prone to thinking that Cofnas is a “conservative” who is being targeted by intolerant liberals. It is important to understand just how radical he is. I’ll get to the particulars below.

You would think that a piece of this kind would start with a justification of the hereditarianism that is the basis for his political revolution, but he doesn’t: he assumes hereditarianism is true, accepts it as a round-earth normie point of view. And the hereditarianism he endorses is not the simple rMZ>rDZ kind, it is an explicit assertion that Black people are innately less intelligent than White people. I’ll call that race-hereditarianism. He also calls it “hard realism.” Here is his explanation, in full, of why we should believe it:

“But we should not forget that hard realists have an ace up their sleeve: the fact that hereditarianism is true!”

I kid you not, that’s it. How can he assert something so baldly false? Whatever else you may think about this question, one thing that is true beyond any reasonable doubt is that race-hereditarianism is not obviously and consensually correct. Cofnas uses the same watertight strategy as Hanania: he insists that anyone who disagrees with him actually believes in race-hereditarianism privately, but is too chickenshit to admit it. Hanania focused on the geneticist David Reich, who described race-hereditarianism as, “hateful ideas and old racist canards.” But, you see, he doesn’t really mean it. Cofnas goes so far as to use the strategy on Charles Murray, of all people. Murray has always couched his assertions about race in uncertainty about scientific results that do not yet exist. Cofnas (who says he admires Murray), nevertheless puts Murray among hereditarian scholars who are “timid about stating their views” and says: “this is not what trying to destroy the taboo on hereditarianism looks like.” (In the next paragraph, I notice as I grab the quote, he compares hereditarians to the early Christian martyrs.)

The rhetorical strategy is Trumpian. How many times have you heard Trump make some crazy claim, and then say, “You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.” Cofnas is saying, race-hereditarianism is true! You know it, I know it, David Reich knows it, Charles Murray knows it. Also like Trump and Trumpians, Cofnas uses “woke” as a cheap rhetorical advice to denigrate anything he doesn’t like. Some version of “woke” is asserted 48 times in a mid-length essay.

So the Cofnas post is not a justification of race hereditarianism: it is an exploration of its social and political consequences, conditioned on an assumption that race-hereditarianism is true. And like I said at the outset, the “better world” he imagines is truly awful. Here is a list of his proposals, generated with some help from Claude.

On what a merit-based society would look like

• Elite institutions would become effectively all-white and all-Asian — “blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students,” and the number of black professors “would approach 0%.”

• Black Americans would vanish from public life outside two domains — they “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

• This outcome is not to be mitigated but accepted: “end the war on nature, accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups.”

On the liberal order

• Core liberal commitments must be revisited: “certain core liberal values will have to be reexamined.”

• Both available race policies are rejected — he does not “advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism,” and colorblindness is “probably not tenable.”

• Multiculturalism and open borders go: “we will probably have to rethink ideals like multiculturalism and a borderless world.”

• The whole political order is the target: hereditarian acceptance “will undermine the reigning left-liberal order as we know it,” and “crumbles a central pillar of our moral–political system.”

On race as a political category

• Race becomes a legitimate object of legislation: “legislators should take into consideration how their policies will influence the racial makeup of society.”

• Race becomes a legitimate basis for private conduct: “racial realities will inform interpersonal behavior and public policy.”

• Racial solidarity is endorsed as natural and useful — a race is “like an extended family,” “racial tribalism can sometimes be the key to solving collective-action problems,” and “if whites are attacked qua whites, it makes sense for them to fight back as whites.”

• Racial distinctions are to be actively preserved: “those who truly value diversity should favor the preservation of racial distinctions.”

On separation

• Barriers between races are required, in the strongest normative language in the essay: “there must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius.”

• The long-run arrangement is communal self-sorting: grant communities “more freedom to organize themselves according to different values” — and “it’s likely that many self-segregating communities will be relatively homogeneous.”

• Interim measure, which cuts the other way: “it may be necessary to guarantee some minimal representation in certain leadership positions to major demographic groups.”

On moral change

• Moral intuitions are expected to follow the empirical claim: once people learn they were lied to, “their moral intuitions will change, and they will become receptive to new moral authorities.”

• A transition on the scale of decades, ending in a settled new order: a “multidecadal transition period” leading to a “new, reality-based system,” after which “our cultural values will change. A new equilibrium will arise.”

Thanks, Claude. Here is how I would put it. Cofnas thinks race-hereditarianism requires overturning the entire broad-sense liberal order. I would characterize that understanding of the historical past and its implications for the present as follows:

Five-hundred years ago, Europeans created a civilization that was capable of generating great military power and the ability to explore the world. In so doing it encountered people who had not developed those abilities, and it conquered, enslaved and colonized them. Eventually slavery was abolished, but even after slavery, a system of Jim Crow discrimination and oppression was created that lasted another 100 years, at least until the Civil Rights act was passed in 1964. Since that time society has made ongoing efforts to right the historical wrongs and overcome their consequences. Progress has been frustratingly slow, and the efforts create thorny political problems, but we continue to make an effort to create an egalitarian and fair society.

The race hereditarians want to retell this story:

Five-hundred years ago, having evolved the capacity for greater cognitive ability, Europeans explored the world, and discovered populations of people who still had genetically-determined primitive cognitive abilities. Naturally, they took the opportunity to conquer, enslave, and colonize these people. Although they eventually realized that slavery was wrong regardless of genetic differences [benefit of the doubt here], the inferior cognitive ability of these people meant that they were generally incapable of being absorbed into European cultures, so they were shunted into separate residential, educational and occupational systems that were better suited to their low ability. Then, tragically, “wokism” emerged, leading to the false conclusion that the lower status of Africans and other immigrants was caused by a history and culture of discrimination. The Civil Rights Act was passed, and society headed down a hopeless path of trying to remediate things that could not be remediated. Finally, woke society followed a truly delusional impulse and allowed wave after wave of low-IQ immigrants into our countries, guaranteeing our own destruction.

Does Cofnas have a right to say that? Of course he does (at least in the US; Belgian laws are different), but it is awful. Radical and reprehensible, destroying everything that is worthwhile about “Western” culture. Is it an atomic bomb? Maybe not, but it is as close as I can imagine coming in a scientific, social, and political domain. And at least the atomic bomb is real, an undeniable product of scientific physics. Cofnas’ dystopia is based on nothing more than an imagined consensus about a racist canard.