Heretics, Kulaks, and Witches: All That's Old is New Again

Haunted by his own thought crimes, baffled by the zombies spouting dogmatic nonsense all around him, today's American is lost.  He reaches into the mists of history and gropes for a comparison.  What has his country become? What is this?

     Is this like the persecution of the heliocentrists?

     Is it like the witch trials in early modern Europe?

     Is it like the Soviet fight for doctrinal purity?

I. KULAKS

The Soviet comparison is tricky, as their brain-washing was truly a top-down affair, crafted by powerful bureaucrats and enforced via schools, media, and the workplace thanks to the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.  How can we compare the U.S. today to that?  Our brain-washing seems a wholly different animal--born and bred in private academia, egged on by private special-interest groups. How is it, then, that the results can take on such an eerily similar cast?  Hungarian Communist chief Imre Nagy's self-criticism, 1956:

What sort of political morality is there in a public life where contrary opinions are not only suppressed but punished with actual deprivation of livelihood; where those who express contrary opinions are expelled from society . . . the leaders have made virtues of self-abasement, cowardice, hypocrisy, lack of principle, and lies... (1)

Deprivation of livelihood?  Expulsion from society?  In 21st-century America?

Hadley Cantril (1960) describes a cognitive dissonance in the average citizen which may or may not sound familiar:

This inconsistency or contradiction may be further differentiated psychologically into two types: first, an inconsistency between the "positive" symbols (such as "proletariat," "collective," "Soviet democracy," etc.) ["diversity," "multiculturalism," "tolerance"], that are supposed to describe what is good, laudable, and workable and the facts of life as they are experienced; and, second, an inconsistency or contradiction between what "negative" symbols ("the West," "bourgeois democracy," "individualism," "Private property," etc.) ["racism," "intolerance," "xenophobia," "white privilege"] are supposed to stand for and the way people learned from experience that these "negative" forces are by no means the cause of the shortcomings of Soviet [American] life.  (1)

Soviet science took an odd turn that we today may find amusing.  We shouldn't.

According to [Soviet-approved biologist] Lysenko, there is no intraspecies competition, that is, there is no class struggle between members of the same species. On the contrary, all members of the same species "help" each other: "There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition." (2)

It is to laugh?  Sociologist Ann Morning,  2007:

Evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves (2001:5) claims, "Today, the majority of geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists agree that there are no biological races in the human species," and reports that two American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) panels of philosophers, biologists, and social scientists have reached the same conclusion.  (3)

Joseph Graves and the AAAS are not alone:

Statements by the American Sociological Association, American Anthropological Association, American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) all suggest that a constructivist definition of race enjoys wide reach across the disciplinary spectrum.

From this perspective, scientists who insist that race is rooted in biological difference (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Risch, Burchard, Ziv, and Tang 2002; Rushton 2000; Sarich and Miele 2004) may seem to constitute the minority practitioners of a "rejected science" (Collins 2000) that operates on the margins of interdisciplinary agreement about the social roots of race. (3)

'There cannot be class struggles in any animal species.'

--Official Scientific Opinion in the USSR, 1940.

'There cannot be classes within the human species.'

 --Official Scientific Opinion in the USA, 2012.

One more aspect of Soviet life that gets more familiar to us every day is what Orwell memorably called 'Newspeak.'  It's the private media and not the state which pushes this double-language on us today, but we are left with the same funny taste in our mouth. Hadley Cantril, 1960:

'Various techniques are used by the Soviet regime in their attempt to present a consistent front: the technique of "de-emphasis", in which a fact is played down if it cannot be ignored;...' (1)

Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic, told the police that he shot Trayvon in self-defense after an altercation. The teenager was walking home from a convenience store, where he bought iced tea and Skittles, when he was shot once in the chest.

'..the technique of using "half-truths" in which a fact may be reported but the cause of the fact or the situation is concealed;...'

Since the start of February, "flash mobs" have struck with violence in downtown Minneapolis six times. ... Pieter and his 23-year-old nephew were downtown to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. ... While walking, Pieter and his nephew were "blindsided" by "20 to 30 juveniles."

...When the beating finally ceased, Pieter was left with a bloody face, no short-term memory, and significant brain injuries. 

'...the technique of "oversimplification," by means of which the complexities of [...] situations are kept from the Soviet people;...'

As exposed by Fox News and media watchdog site NewsBusters, the [NBC] "Today” segment took this approach to a key part of the dispatcher call:

    Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Here’s how the actual conversation went down:

    Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

    Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

    Zimmerman: He looks black.

'...the technique of "creating myths," such as the myth that the World Peace Council is a more important organ than the United Nations because the former speaks for the "peoples" of the world rather than merely for the "governments."'

Immigrant-led innovation is key to creating U.S. jobs. According to statistics from Partnership for a New American Economy, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants or their children. Further, between 1995 and 2005, 25% of high-tech startups in the United States had at least one immigrant founder, and these companies have created more than 450,000 jobs.

II. HERETICS


The anti-heresy battle could also seem an apt comparison.  But again, like the Soviet Politburo, the Church was an institution, whose word was law.  Civil authorities may have squabbled with her, but her real power was enormous.  No body of comparable influence enforces today's Blank-Slatism. And yet...how have its disciples come so naturally to take on the language of Inquisitors? The Archbishop of Pisa declared that

these [heliocentric] opinions, in addition to being silly, were dangerous, scandalous, and rash, being directly contrary to Scripture. (4)

Cardinal Bellarmine also called them

'a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture as false.'

The notion that the earth turns around the sun instead of the other way round may indeed be 'dangerous.' What other beliefs are 'dangerous'?


Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in 1942:

The idea of "race" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time, and one of the most tragic. [...] Race is the witchcraft, the demonology of our time, the means by which we exorcise imagined demoniacal powers among us. It is the contemporary myth, humankind's most dangerous myth, America's Original Sin." (5)

The idea of human races being roughly analogous to that of dog breeds, let's try Montagu's quote again:

The idea of "dog breeds" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time, and one of the most tragic. [...] Dog breeds are the witchcraft, the demonology of our time, the means by which we exorcise imagined demoniacal powers among us. Dog breeds are the contemporary myth, humankind's most dangerous myth, America's Original Sin."

[Ashley Montagu's birthname: Israel Ehrenberg.]

Both 17th-century holy men quoted above decried Galileo for contradicting the greatest authority of their era-- 'Holy Scripture.' The average Blank-Slatist today does the same.  A man of his age just as surely as Cardinal Bellamine was a man of his, today's Blank-Slatist seeks support for his soothing egalitarian fantasy in that bulwark of  modern rightness--'Science.'  That same bulwark to which have appealed global coolers and global warmers, carb-eaters and paleos, breast-feeders and bottle-feeders, Lysenko and Darwin.  As should come as no surprise, Science, like Scripture, often says just what we want it to say.


American Anthropological Association Statement on Race, 1998:

At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are.

[...] Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.

The National Science Foundations's charming web page on race:

Traditional race concepts give an inaccurate picture of human variation.  The picture is inaccurate because these concepts suggest that each group has a significant level of uniqueness. However, as the diagram to the left makes clear, the genetic variation in populations such as Europeans and Asians are actually subsets of the variation of the African population.

What is this 'Science' upon which modern Blank-Slatists depend to prove themselves right?  No deity, as it turns out, no monolith, just a bunch of men and women who, like men and women everywhere, are products of their time and as often as not in disagreement.

Ann Morning:

In 1984-1985, they [Lieberman et al.] surveyed 725 professors of biology, anthropology, and psychology. ... When asked for their opinion of the statement, "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens," 74% of the biologists surveyed agreed with it, whereas 49% of the physical anthropologists agreed and only 31% of the cultural anthropologists did.  (3)

Morning asked this same question sixteen years later, in 2001. What did 'Science' say?

 53% of the biologists interviewed in 2001-2002 agreed that biological races exist, compared to 38% of the anthropologists.

[...] When the sect of respondents' religious upbringing was taken into consideration, those from Jewish and Catholic backgrounds were most likely to reject the Lieberman statement [that biological races exist], at rates of 86% and 57%, respectively, compared with 20% of Protestants.

[...] Whereas 44% of male professors defined race in biological terms, only 29% of female faculty did so, and the women were almost twice as likely as the men to describe race as socially constructed (50% versus 26%, respectively). (3)

But when Authority--be she scriptural or scientific--is breached, forgiveness must be sought.


Galileo, 1633:

    'I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, […]

    'With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, [...] and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me.'

James Watson, 2007:

    'I have had my share of controversy, as many of you know. But I am mortified about what has happened. More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have.

    'To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.'

III. WITCHES

Comparing to the European witch trials is also tricky.  The differences are many: Witchcraft accusations were mostly one-on-one, while modern racism accusations tend to be group-on-group or occasionally group-on-individual.  Witchcraft, as a phenonemon, very likely does not exist; racism very likely does.

One similarity does jump out: the bottom-up path.  The witch trials in early modern Europe were by no means imposed by the Church or civil authorities at first; they rose from petty squabbles among villagers whose witchery-superstitions Christianity hadn't quite squashed.  Early Church fathers condemned not witchcraft but those who believed in witchcraft as hopelessly deluded, as did many Medieval and Modern clergy.

'It is amazing', commented the Italian humanist Galateo when the witch-fear began seeping through southern Italy in the early sixteenth century, 'how this fantasy has seized on everyone through being spread by the poorer classes.'  (6)

Only around the 15th c. did the Church begin to take these complaints seriously, and from there embarked on true 'witch hunts' which do mirror the 'racism hunts' we see around us today.

The origins of witchcraft accusations seemed always to come from personal misfortune--a ruined crop, cows  dropping dead, a stillbirth--for which no natural explanation could be found.

May it please you to weigh what accusations and crimes they lay to their charge, namelie: She [my neighbor] was at my house of late, she would have had a pot of milke, she departed in a chafe because she had it not, she railed, she curssed, she mumbled and whispered, and finallie she said she would be even with me: and soon after my child, my cow, my sow or my pullet died, or was strangelie taken. [1584]  (6)

Someone, somewhere, must have cast a spell.  Someone, somewhere, wishes me ill.  Someone, somewhere, has used his mysterious power to cause me misfortune, and that someone must pay.  Despite the glaring differences, the commonality is evident--inexplicable misfortune (dead livestock / low test scores), unable or unwilling to blame the real culprit (Mother Nature), and thus accusing the invisible superpower (witchcraft / racism) of a visible enemy (an unliked neighbor / white people).

One other common point is that many of Europe's accused did in fact believe themselves to be witches.  Although they could not control it, they admitted their terrible malefic power did exist.

The testimonies show that many witches [in Essex] really believed in their own magical powers, and were convinced that they had been transported to Sabbats and had had sexual intercourse with the devil. (6)

Similarly, many of today's accused thought criminals are convinced of their own 'sub-conscious racism' and admit its malefic power over colored people they have never met.  An entire industry has sprung up to help these guilty wash away their unconscious sins:

In his Macon Miracle school improvement plan, Superintendent Romain Dallemand said he wants to hire the Pacific Educational Group to close the achievement gap between white and Asian students and those of color, primarily blacks and Latinos.

The mission statement of PEG, founded in 1992 by Glenn Singleton, is fairly straightforward: “At Pacific Educational Group we believe systemic racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished capacity of all children, especially black children, to achieve at the highest levels, and contributes to the fracturing of the communities that nurture and support them.”

Singleton co-authored “Courageous Conversations About Race” with Curtis Linton in 2006, which Singleton said provides a blueprint for people to identify racism and overcome it. [...] One chapter is titled “Let’s Talk About Whiteness” with a subsection called “White Privilege.”

From Georgia to Minnesota, expiation for your accidental sins is finally coming:

A new anti-racism campaign focusing on what white people can do to help reduce racial disparities in the Twin Ports [Duluth, MN / Superior, WI] will make its public debut today.

“It’s hard to see racism when you’re white” is the slogan for the Un-Fair Campaign, sponsored by 15 local organizations. The campaign’s goal is to raise awareness about white privilege in the community and to provide resources to help overcome the problem. ... Organizers describe white privilege as white people receiving advantages in life simply because of the color of their skin. Or, as the campaign’s literature puts it: “See It, Know It, Stop It.”

[...] “Generally, white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it,” scholar Peggy McIntosh has written.

*       *       *

It is unwise to preach atheism to religious men, and it is perhaps unwise to preach human biodiversity to Blank-Slatists.  But one good reason for doing so is that the State is reaching daily into your pockets to fund un-closeable Achievement Gaps (caused by your powerful racism-rays), money that would be just as well spent on figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

So this is not just a philosophical question, but an eminently practical one. It involves a direct financial loss to you the taxpayer, to say nothing of the simmering racial cauldron your society has become as a result of telling people who can't compete that they can, and telling them the reason they're not cutting the mustard is that people who look like you are holding them back.  This is a recipe not for racial harmony, but for race war.


But one should be careful trying to open the eyes of a fundamentalist Blank-Slatist.  Their beliefs on human equality are more precious to them than gold; they give them the strength to get out of bed each morning.  The change in worldview required by accepting HBD would be traumatic for these people, causing them to re-think their relationships, their job, their whole understanding of human history and current events.  Such radical transformations are on a par with religious conversion and are not to be taken lightly.  They can shake a human soul to its very core.  They can leave scars.  Ideology is as high-stakes a game as it ever has been.




REFERENCES:
(1) Cantril, Hadley, Soviet Leaders and Mastery over Man. New Brunswick, Rutgers U. Press, 1960.
(2) Birstein, Vadim J., The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Boulder, Westview Press, 2001.
(3) Morning, Ann, ''Everyone Knows It's a Social Construct': Contemporary Science and the Nature of Race", Sociological Focus. 40:4, 2007.
(4) Shea, William R. and Artigas, Mariano, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius. NY, Oxford U. Press, 2003.
(5) Montagu, Ashley, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, NY: Columbia U. Press, 1942.
(6) Kamen, Henry, Early Modern European Society. London, Routledge, 2000.