Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye
John Derbyshire, as probably everyone but me already knew, has been fired by National Review. The firing was in response to a calmly written but injudiciously frank piece on Takimag on what to tell American children about race relations. Rich Lowry, in slipping the knife into his colleague's back, was surprisingly polite, confining himself to words like "nasty and indefensible." Compared to the nasty and indefensible name-calling that has been the hallmark of NR, this is almost a compliment. Wanting to think as well of Lowry as I ought to, I can only assume that he deliberately avoided terms like "racist" and "bigot" in order to avoid harming Derbyshire's damaged reputation.
On the other hand, the worst thing that John Derbyshire has done to his reputation with serious people is to associate with NR. He is intelligent, reasonably well-read, possessed of a decent prose-style and the courage of his convictions. What in the world was such a man doing in such company?
I have been telling Mr. Derbyshire this, admittedly at long intervals, for over a decade. I have also advised him that he has been too candid on race matters. There is hardly a subject on which Americans can stand to know the truth or even hear it discussed, and race heads the list of taboo subjects, taking precedence even over sex and gender issues. Even Rich Lowry, as ill-informed as he appears to be on everything under the sun worth knowing, must know that Derbyshire's arguments are the result of statistical studies, not of racial prejudice. The fact that Lowry--or anyone else at NRO--does not even try to refute them seems pretty clear proof.
Long before Rich Lowry went to National Review, the founder of the magazine had excommunicated the Birchers, Murray Rothbard, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobran. Those were the good old days, when NR still had men on the staff who would commiserate, if only in private, with the victims. I had several reassuring conversations after Mr. Buckley threatened to "excrete" Chronicles and its editors from the wholesome body of conservatism. I supposed he picked up this charming diction from the father of John Podhoretz and his friends.
I searched for comments on NRO and found none. Of the tweets I looked at, most made no comment and of those that did it was 20 to one critical of Lowry for being too polite. A million such readers add up to exactly nothing. "I'm glad I'm a beta," I can almost hear them saying, "alphas have too much responsibility and gammas are stupid."
John Derbyshire is no doubt unhappy to be out of a job, but his friends and fans can only congratulate him on his good fortune in getting away from these awful, stupid people.
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jack; i think you'd feel safer strolling "the poor side of Warsaw" in lederhosen, than ped(dling)aling a fuji in camden.
The author of Freakonomics (if I remember what I read many many years ago) said that he posed no value judgment on the matter, but merely discussed cause-and-effect.
The purpose of the book was to discuss the Law of Unintended Consequences. That bad consequences occur from well meaning things and good ones from bad things is certainly reflected in the word "unintended".
Certainly, awareness of unintended consequences is not meant to change human behaviour. Shaking hands has the unintended effect of spreading diseases more quickly, but that does not change the welcome-ness of the warmth and connection that a good handshake brings.
Actually, the days of Smith girls marrying anything but other girls is probably long gone. I used to know a distinguished professor there who got fired for let us say sororizing with the girls. I maintain he was just doing a public service in teaching them about heterosexuality.
As to the rich, I know too many of them to want to be like most of them. People who inherit their money often waste their fortune and their lives, but people who make their money often don't know how to do anything else. Hardly a day goes by that my wife and I, thinking about some rich friend or acquaintance, don't thank our lucky stars for being poor.
We don't have an aristocracy or even what John Lukacs likes to call (inaccurately, in my view) a patriciate. We have rich people, some with degrees from prestigious schools (I prefer not to call them educated), some without. Some have nice manners, most do not. Only a tiny few have any sense of patriotism or civic responsibility. They and their spoiled children are as vulnerable to mass culture as ghetto rats, If they don't watch CNN or MSNBC, they are addicted to FOX. If leisure is the basis of culture, one must remember that it takes training, breeding, discipline to be able handle leisure.
Sometimes I distinguish between people who are unintelligent (that is, they have low IQs) and people who are dumb, no matter how high their IQ. Most of the people I knew in college were reasonably smart, let's say on an IQ range from 125-140, but they were then and are even more so really dumb. Americans as a nation are as dumb as the !Kung Bushmen who don't come in out of the rain because they are too stupid and lazy to construct a hut. Americans can buy a hut but are incapable of amusing themselves on even the level of Bushmen and Pygmies.
I used to have a half-Jewish editor who was always going on and on about how stupid and violent blacks are. I finally had to tell him one day the painful truth. That given half a chance, a rural black male lived more life in one week than this Wasp/Jew prisspants would in his entire life. I am not referring to the old black adage that "Sir, you ain't never lived if you ain't been a Mississippi N-Word on a Saturday night," but simply to the greater zest for ordinary life, love, friendship that Southern blacks enjoyed. I was speaking yesterday with a Jewish friend from New York, and he was complaining about how boring are the racist Jewish academics he knows. What this Jewish guy has is ordinary human affections and loyalties that preclude the whining, racism, and corrosive resentments of too many academic Jews, conservative as much as liberal. They also tend to be anti-Catholic and anti-Southern, because at their best, Catholics, Southerners--black and white--have real lives, with non-rational attachments and affections that cannot be explained away by humbugs like Michael Levin or--you fill in the blanks-- who live only in a world of desiccated abstractions. I don't dislike them particularly, but it is very hard not to pity such nebbishes.
That is why I am dismayed when I hear the same whining resentments from young non-Jewish racialists or advocates of the rights of the chromosomal males that no one in his right mind would confuse with men.
As to the rich, I know too many of them to want to be like most of them. People who inherit their money often waste their fortune and their lives, but people who make their money often don't know how to do anything else. Hardly a day goes by that my wife and I, thinking about some rich friend or acquaintance, don't thank our lucky stars for being poor... We don't have an aristocracy
But that's the whole point. If becoming bourgeois is the price of becoming rich, perhaps it is not worth it, but still, all things equal, anyone would rather take the ten million than not take it. I realize in real life it is never that simple (it is never "all things equal"), but I meant my "be like the rich" in the sense of "make as much money as they do." Certainly to control such a vast portion of so much of the world's resources many of them are far from unintelligent or even dumb, whatever else may be said of them. (The deeply unintelligent among the rich end up losing their fortune.)
Sometimes I distinguish between people who are unintelligent (that is, they have low IQs) and people who are dumb, no matter how high their IQ. Most of the people I knew in college were reasonably smart, let's say on an IQ range from 125-140, but they were then and are even more so really dumb.
Of course. IQ is a measure of cognitive capacity, of problem solving speed; it is not meant to measure experience or metaphysical clairvoyance, the lack of which is undoubtedly at the root of what makes the "dumb" classmates you speak of dumb (would "generally unwise" be a more precise word?).
I remember Thomas Fleming saying a couple of years back, "If we could invite 500 million intelligent, industrious, respectful, law-abiding Martians to settle in our lands, would that be good for this nation and if so, what do you mean by nation?"
Good response, friend Nicholas, but not quite right. In the first place, our rich people are by and large not bourgeois. The bourgeoisie had standards of behavior, education, dress, morality. Late Medieval Florence and Siena were very bourgeois, and so was 17th century London. Those people were not contemptible, while Bill Gates is--and dumb, too.
The desire to get rich is itself evil, both from the Platonist-Aristotelian perspective and in the Christian tradition. Pleonexia, says Aristotle, is an unnatural desire because money is artificial; pleonexia, says Paul, is not only the root of all evil but an unnatural vice like sodomy. Every time you find yourself wanting, seriously wanting to be rich, remind yourself that it is like wanting to have sex with a boy.
Sexual desire is not evil and properly channelled it confers many blessings in this life. The desire to have sufficient wealth and property to be able to lead a good life is also good, but lust for strangers and for improper objects and the desire to get rich are evil in themselves. That is why a healthy person does not want to be like rich people, because he does not want to waste his life making more and more money.
Someone who inherits money has a responsibility to use it, exactly as someone who inherits power or a farm full of livestock. Running away from that responsibility--as Prince Siddhartha did--is cowardice. That much we can learn from the Taoists, by the way. Interestingly, the Hellenic pagan guru Apollonius of Tyana is said to have contradicted philosophers who told Vespasian he was wrong to seek power. The wiser Apollonius, at least as portrayed in Philostratus' largely fictional biography, told Vespasian that he could not abandon his ambition without betraying friends and family and exposing the Empire to even greater danger.
But to seek, obsessively, for money is a vice. It is hard to escape. I know I would like to have a modest $2 million put aside from which I could draw 5% annually. And if anyone out there wishes to contribute to this retirement fund, I'd be more than happy to send you a token expression of my gratitude. But I am not and have never been, except in a few odd moments, willing to devote my energies to so sordid an object.
No one but a saint can enjoy penury, but the poverty that Roman poets like Tibullus and Horace complained of or celebrated, was a modest income with a house and a few slaves that permitted them to lead their lives as they wished. Interestingly, Plotinus, who is one of the nearest things to a saint the pagan world produced, was a careful steward of the wealth of wards and orphans that had been entrusted to him. As Porphyry says, Plotinus argued that while a true philosopher needs little, he could not expect the kids to grow up to be philosophers, however he might try to educate them.
Dr Fleming,
I know as my good friend and mentor on this down hill slide towards eternity, you do not always share my total admiration for Hilaire Belloc, but sometime when I read some of your prose such as the post above about Smith Girls, Kung Bushmen, Jewish friends, Southerners -- black and white, I canot help but recall what a friend of the old cantakerous Belloc said about the Old Bull :
"Time and again I have seen him throw out a sufficiently outrageous theory in order to stimulate his company, and, be it said, for the pleasure of seeing how slowly he might be dislodged from a position he had purposely taken up knowing it to be untenable...Of course Belloc was prejudiced, but there were few who knew him who did not love his prejudices, who did not love to hear him fight for them, and who did not honor him for the sincerity and passion with which he held to them. Once the battle was joined all his armoury was marshalled and flung into the fray. Dialectic, Scorn, Quip, Epigram, Sarcasm, Historical Evidence, Massive Argument, and Moral Teaching --of all these weapons he was a past master and each was mobilised and made to play its proper part in the attack. Yet he was a courteous and a chivalrous man. A deeply sensitive man, his was the kindest and most understanding nature I have ever known. In spite of a rollicking and bombastic side he was as incapable of the least cruelty as he was capable of the most delicate sympathy with other people's feelings. As he himself used to say of others in a curiously quiet and simple way, 'He is a good man. He will go to Heaven.' "
People who know you or have had the privilege to know you more than a mere acquaintance, can feel nothing but gratitude for the actual grace.
Dr. Fleming, what you say about some of the wealthy you know being susceptible to mass culture is probably quite true for many of them.
However, in the research of Charles Murray who wrote The Coming Apart (whose contents I know only from reviews and summaries, so forgive me), it was found that the wealthy have relatively less propensity for watching television (many of them having no television sets at all), less propensity for reading newspapers, less propensity for voting, and less propensity for eating outside home unless it's a really fancy place.
I can only say for certain that Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have non-television-viewing and non-computer-using households (yes, shockingly, Gates does not keep a PC at home), based on their interviews.
According to Murray, part of what makes the wealthy so out of touch is that a good number of them are divorced from mass culture i.e. watching Oprah or Super Bowl.
It would seem that a part of what has kept the wealthy wealthy is that they have avoided the temptations of mass culture and put the much-freed energy, time, and effort elsewhere.
Unfortunately, that "elsewhere" has often been pursuit of money across many years of their life.
In the first place, our rich people are by and large not bourgeois. The bourgeoisie had standards of behavior, education, dress, morality. Late Medieval Florence and Siena were very bourgeois, and so was 17th century London. Those people were not contemptible, while Bill Gates is--and dumb, too.
I was speaking of "bourgeois" in its post-Industrial Revolution form, which existed to some extent in centuries prior but which has become the dominent element of so many livelihoods today: a profession and a LIFE even centered around money in the way a soldier depends on his sword or a peasant on his farm. Indeed, money is the dominant element in society.
Bill Gates is not, however, unintelligent, and intelligence can certainly be of use in the creation of wealth, which is I think what I meant when I said "I would rather have money than not have it, all things equal." I would have more truthfully said that I would rather have the things money can buy than not have them, all things equal. I don't want to be "rich" so much as I want the means to educate my children as I see fit, to trek around the country, to have a beautiful house to go back to in a well-cultivated province, to eat and drink the food and wine I like very regularly, and in general to avoid the people I dislike and more frequently associate with the rather spread out network of those I like. And not have to work for some douchebag in the interim. Lofty desires, of course, and I certainly don't count on all of them in THIS life.
My point was about IQ being of practical utility and real value to society, insofar as one can quantify human capital. We would in all likelihood be both materially worse off and culturally less interesting without individuals of high IQ.
I'm not saying that one who is capable of high cultural achievements is necessarily one who will produce great material wealth, or vice-versa. Even quantitative studies show that the positive correlation between income and IQ becomes rather flat after 120. What does this mean? We can't be sure, but we can offer several guesses. Perhaps the generation of material wealth requires a modest amount of cognitive power but not all that much genius after all (not implausible given the wealth/intellect overlap of Warren Buffet). Perhaps the highly intelligent find the excess of such activities boring or daft or even, as you, repulsive (not uniformly, as the example of Bill Gates shows).
I would be the last to deny that there is a serious danger to overquantify the world around us - indeed, what is "money" but the quantification of wealth? and what is pleonexia if not the insatiable craving for a greater and greater quantity of this wealth to the point where it is desired for quantity's sake? All the same, if we balance these quantities with healthy quality to remind us what really matters, quantity can help us to shed light on and validate various qualities. I am definitely not in agreement with those who think that IQ is some leftist academic conspiracy and measures nothing more socially significant than "what you can do on this particular test."
"Indeed, money is the dominant element in society."
By which I mean the contemporary Western society in which we live.
Good grief, Charles Murray. He has a PhD in Poli Sci from MIT, titles--along with his published work--that put him beyond the pale of civilized life. Being a slave of mass culture is not a question of how much TV people watch. Have you ever heard Gates talk? His sloppy English, entirely platitudinous and erroneous opinions, his effeminate voice?
I did not say Gates lacked intelligence, but he is extremely dumb, dumb as a the proverbial rock.
I have said it a thousand times and will say it again: If they so rich, why ain't they smart? And why have they so little courage, these robber barons who rule the world? Why are the opinions of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates drawn exclusively from the NY Times (at second hand in executive summaries no doubt). Some rich foundation executives once asked me to recommend someone who could write executive summaries for them, thinking I had such people at my disposal. I had to confess I didn't know what they were talking about and when they clued me in, I had to tell them, shamefacedly, that I would never use such a person and would have nothing to do with someone who would stoop so low. It was a lot like Chuck Colson's people who wanted me to ghost-write for him. When I asked if this meant conceiving an idea? Doing the research? Writing it up? They answered, "all of the above." So Colson's career consisted of putting his name on other people's opinions and writings. How do you get a job like that? First by being an immoral tool of the White House and then turning into a Holy Joe.
Jeeze.
Young Nicholas is fudging. Words like bourgeois have a meaning, a history, and I could not care less what lies sociologists and political scientists and economists make up. Even in the 20th century, Thomas Mann in deriding the bourgeoisie had, nonetheless, to deal with the conventional image--as in the first chapters of Buddenbrooks. Even the Marxists gibes against the "bourgeois" imply a cultural and moral tone they are trying to destroy. Read Lawrence's "How beastly the bourgeois is, especially the male of the species."
It really helps, in a conversation of this sort, to admit error and then move on. One learns a lot faster that way than by clinging to errors simply because are one's possession. You are simply on the wrong side, and no amount of wiggling can change it.
Then in that case allow me to admit error, though in reading your posts, Dr. Fleming, I'm wondering whether my errors are more semantic than anything else, since you haven't said anything that I would have disagreed with at heart before reading them.
Or if I have erred without knowing it...
On the TV bit, I meant it as more of a synecdoche of what is wrong with cultural dissemination in this era. There are far more pernicious venues, but the idiot box is a convenient foil for frustration. On the other hand, maybe this contentment with occasional imprecision and polemics for self-amusement is indeed part of where I err... I suppose I internalized the discussion as a question of where I stand or ought to stand and that's not really important at all, in the short or long run.
Anyway, my apologies. To resume: IQ is important and useful, but not everything; money can buy some fun but so can prostitution; Bill Gates is dumb (but Warren Buffet is dumber) regardless of his IQ, and National Review has displayed its historic treacherous idiocy once again. Whatever I have said to contradict any of these truths was clearly in error and I heartily retract it.
Never mind; I spotted my error. I used "bourgeois" wrong. How's this for a corrective:
If becoming a bumbling superficial twit worthy of mention on the front page of the New York Times is the price of becoming rich, perhaps it is not worth it.
Much better. And, no apologies required or desired. Your contributions are always--or almost always--welcome. The reason I want to stick to a traditional understanding of bourgeois is because it is truly a class term as opposed to a measure of wealth. John Adams was bourgeois, even petit bourgeois, while most lawyers and executives today are simply well-to-do, readers of the WSJ from which they take their notions of style, proper vacations, books to read, and nothing is more mass-culture--not even People Magazine--than the Wall Street Journal. Is Mitt Romney bourgeois? I don't know, certainly not in his cultural tastes but then politicians lie even in their dreams.
IQ is important and useful
But it is highly artificial and useful only in an underhanded way trying to quantify the unquantifiable. In the same way as we have had misgivings about the tradition of Scottish economists that introduced the use of graphs and formulas to explain simple things. Nowadays we are surrounded with an avalanche of useless economic data in our everyday lives, most of which could not be anywere near the truth. Employment is 8%, it is 15% or is 20% or there isn't any. Or every person needs to know on a daily basis what the price of gold is even if they have none and don't know who sets the prices or how.
So there is an obsession with IQ tests, people that get close to perfect scores on the LSATs are considered geniuses. The results of these tests are closely guarded secrets (which is why we will never find out Obama's and Bush's) It is OK to get average grades, but it is bad manners to have low IQ and SAT scores..
The blockbuster film "Social Network" about the boy who started Facebook I think accurately portrays the atmosphere that is prevalent at the elite universities and about how they wish to be perceived from the outside. Everyone is so brilliant and intelligent that they don't really need to go to classes. President of Harvard says in it that Harvard men create their own jobs and the Facebook founder has trouble getting into a certain secret society as his brilliance is not apparent.
The film is a great propaganda tool to keep the whole IQ and SAT industry going for years to come. Just because of the brilliance of being able to create something special like Facebook we are supposed to forget all the fraudulent products for which we have to thank Harvard academics with their supposed high IQs.
Yes indeed. But I would not wear anything of the kind to the aftermath of Ruch Chorzow vs Legia Warszawa.
And, no apologies required or desired.
When one has been a cocky jackass mouthing off after too many hours of alternately being shoved around by his superiors or shoving his subordinates around, it is however a safe move.
Your contributions are always--or almost always--welcome.
That made my day.
The reason I want to stick to a traditional understanding of bourgeois is because it is truly a class term as opposed to a measure of wealth. John Adams was bourgeois, even petit bourgeois, while most lawyers and executives today are simply well-to-do, readers of the WSJ from which they take their notions of style, proper vacations, books to read, and nothing is more mass-culture--not even People Magazine--than the Wall Street Journal. Is Mitt Romney bourgeois? I don't know, certainly not in his cultural tastes but then politicians lie even in their dreams.
What would you think of the neologism "bourgeoisie de la robe"?
I don't believe, by the way, that I'm the first to coin that neologism, though I hadn't heard it from anywhere else when I first used it back in 2008 in a private litany among friends, lamenting the state of American culture. Here was my original quip:
"sprawling tracts of McMansion exurbs from which your foolish ex-bourgeois class commutes to McWork in its Saudi-fueled S.U.V.s"
"Ex-bourgeois" was analogous to "exurb." In the French translation I wrote "bourgoisie de la robe" as of course analogous to the (often degenerate) "noblesse de la robe" and found it to be more deliciously insulting to the target.
Marking this class out as "well-to-do, readers of the WSJ" seems to me at least a fitting decent definition.
But it is highly artificial and useful only in an underhanded way trying to quantify the unquantifiable. In the same way as we have had misgivings about the tradition of Scottish economists that introduced the use of graphs and formulas to explain simple things. Nowadays we are surrounded with an avalanche of useless economic data in our everyday lives, most of which could not be anywere near the truth. Employment is 8%, it is 15% or is 20% or there isn't any. Or every person needs to know on a daily basis what the price of gold is even if they have none and don't know who sets the prices or how.
I'm not completely in agreement about the utility of IQ or the quantifiability of cognitive power, but you do have a point about its practical utility. As a personal coach in the field I can usually guess within about ten minutes of directed conversation and carefully placed questions whether my interlocutor will have an IQ below 100, between 100 and 120 or above 125, and that is good enough for about 99 percent of all practical applications that would require sorting out people with a fair amount of cognitive ability. For many purposes, though, it is not practical to have on hand a person capable of making estimations, or even if one is available it is not possible for him to meet personally with everyone. Furthermore, in today's culture you open yourself up to serious discrimination charges if you don't have impersonal notions to back up such judgments.
I will concede that this implies that the practical utility of psychometrics hinges in no small part on an intrinsic perversity of modern society (namely, the sheer and impersonal levels on which so many socially important relationships are conducted). On the other hand, the beauty of economic graphs and data is that an honest man who knows what he is doing can turn them on their heads to point out all the errors and self-contradictions in the Scottish position. Martin Hutchinson, though himself not always completely consistent in what he says, is generally fairly adept at this. In like manner, whatever the sinister underpinings of the invention of quantifiable intelligence, the fact that it is with us now means that we should not hesitate to take advantage of honest numbers to expose the tenuousness of the technocrats.
The blockbuster film "Social Network" about the boy who started Facebook I think accurately portrays the atmosphere that is prevalent at the elite universities and about how they wish to be perceived from the outside. Everyone is so brilliant and intelligent that they don't really need to go to classes.
Keep in mind that these days, going to class and getting an education isn't the reason why most people at institutes of higher education are there. Speaking of Martin Hutchinson, he has an article up right now on "The Higher Education Money Pit" touching on that issue (though while he castigates the modern notion of higher education pretty thoroughly, he fails to call out the universality of "college prep" high school as a contributing factor to the problem):
"The traditional idea of higher education was to train the literate for the Church, whether Catholic, Episcopalian or other Protestant. However a hundred years ago, for the elite on both sides of the Atlantic, a very different approach had been devised. This was best illustrated in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal 'Brideshead Revisited' in which the protagonist Lord Sebastian Flyte wanders round Oxford with a teddy bear, drinking champagne, eating quail’s eggs and occasionally throwing up onto other students’ carpets. Americans will scoff at this depiction, but really the Harvard of Theodore Roosevelt was not very different, except in that it involved the occasional life-threatening game of football.
"Flyte’s Oxford was not intended to train him for real life, it was intended as a highly enjoyable 3- or 4- year holiday before real life intruded. For the middle classes whose fathers were not Marquesses – a majority at Oxford even in Flyte’s time; there are only 34 Marquesses – the system applied a gloss of social polish and connections that was useful in later life, but did not impart more than a modicum of knowledge. Certainly the education provided was not expected to involve a huge amount of work, or to be useful in a subsequent career."
I guess my problem with IQ tests is that they seem to me like opinion polls in the sense that the answers you get depend on what you want to get. If we want to call a test of this sort an IQ test then we are depending on the subjective perception of its creator. We will do well if we intuitively respond to the underlying algorythm that the creator favors.
Now I'm starting to feel like a shill for Cambridge Psychometrics! Yes, the manipulability of the results can be a problem on tests. However, good psychometricians - and they are rare - are sensitive to this issue and it is a very hot topic in a field constantly having to defend itself from critics who either rightly cite the excessive proliferation of "tests" of questionable utility or wrongly claim that tests of any kind don't actually measure anything.
There are tests that are better-constructed and tests that are worse-constructed. One must constantly ask onesself - and you'll hear this in psychometrics seminar - whether a particular answer on a given question means the same thing for each person who chooses it and how to account for that as widely as possible.
Naturally, IQ cannot measure moral worth in any way and its correlation with cultural value is shaky at best; otherwise, we would be constrained say that the U.S. is a more highly-cultured land than France.
Still there is a vast difference in comportment between now and 50 years ago. Let's say Gregory Peck, although a notorious leftist or Grace Kelly versus Brad and Angelina. There are traces of bourgeois upbringing in the former versus none in the latter. I suppose it ends somewhere in the sixties. By the time Whit Stillman got to reminisce about it, it was all over.
Thanks for another nice article Tom. This reminds me of when Pat B. was canned from MSNBC. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. Pat's association with MSNBC did his reputation no good anyway. John D. is better off also.