Daniel answers “Why is Charles Murray's white nationalist...”

Kfreed asked this question about The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life:

Why is Charles Murray's white nationalist book so intriguing to some people? The man preaches Nazi-style eugenics for Pete's sake: Southern Poverty Law Center: "Charles Murray has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority..." https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extrem

Daniel The irony is that genetics and modern science don't particularly favor conservative politics. For example in the USA, the conservative voting base lar…moreThe irony is that genetics and modern science don't particularly favor conservative politics. For example in the USA, the conservative voting base largely believes in the literal truth of Noah's Ark. Trump's approval rating has hovered mostly around 40%; and roughly the same percentage of America believes in Noath's Ark. There is evidence that these two groups overlap considerably. If you visit the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you will likely see a lot of Trump/MAGA stickers on the fossil fueled vehicles in the parking lot. (Said vehicles wouldn't even have been able to drive there had the petroleum companies tried to use "Flood Geology" to figure out where to drill - ExxonMobil clearly does not require its customers to be as smart as its geologists.)

I find it odd that liberals tend to selectively reject the biology of human differences, while (a minority of) conservatives tend to accept it (when they aren't, say, blaming the black-on-black violence in Chicago on Democratic domination of the municipal government, or standing silently by as Trump praises neo-Nazis as "very good people" when old school Nazis targeted the group with highest average IQ scores for extermination), when science is pretty much a threat to every pre-conceived ideology. All ideologies that pre-date the relevant science will be wrong to some extent, just as none of the world's thousands of diverse religions guessed correctly on Darwin's theory of evolution with their origin myths. Human imagination has never been very good at guessing what future data will reveal.

If everyone were smart enough to read and understand a book such as The Bell Curve, Trump would find himself without a gullible base of supporters to believe his non-stop lies. The real lesson of the book isn't stated in the book - we need a Moon Shot-level scientific commitment to raising everybody's IQ. If people have cancer, we don't react with prejudice or favoritism - instead we recognize cancer as a disease and we try to find a cure (or cures), even if this search requires decades or centuries. It seems obvious to me that if we have people trying to find cures for known genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease, we ought to have people trying to find cures for low IQ.

The philosopher Peter Singer (who is perhaps no one's idea of conservative) wrote a book about incorporating scientific reality into progressivism (A Darwinian Left). In it, he writes:

"If your belief in equal rights and opportunities for all – and against racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination – is based on there being no biological differences between people, then you’ll find it very hard to know what to do if clear evidence of biological differences actually appears."(less)

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