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Theorists at the turn of the 20th century wondered, “Why is the racial stock getting so dismal?” [1]

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Date: 2023-08-14

Evolutionary biologist and professor of zoology Richard Lewontin, in the second part of his lecture “Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA” (~ 16:41), described the academic scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

The public consciousness of the 19th century, both in Europe and North America, was permeated with the notion that intrinsic differences in temperament and merit will finally dominate any mere effect of education and environment. The fictional Rougon-Macquart [of Émile Zola] are seen again in the equally fictional but supposedly real family of Kallikaks, who graced virtually every textbook of American psychology until the Second World War. The Kallikaks were supposed to be two halves of a family descended from two women of contrasting nature and a common father. This piece of academic fiction was meant to convince malleable young minds that criminality, laziness, alcoholism, and incest were really inborn and inherited. Nor were supposedly innate differences restricted to individual variation. Nations and races were said to be characterized by innate temperamental and intellectual differences. These claims were made not by racists, demagogues and fascist Know-Nothings but by the leaders of American academic, psychological and sociological establishments. In 1923, Carl Brigham, who was later Secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board, produced a study of intelligence under the direction of R. M. Yerkes, professor of psychology at Harvard and the president of the American Psychological Association, which asserted among other things that “We must assume that we are measuring inborn intelligence. We must face the possibility of racial admixture here in America that is infinitely worse than that faced by any European country, for we are incorporating the Negro into our racial stock. The decline of the American intelligence will be more rapid, owing to the presence here of the Negro.”

→ It so occurred to me that it made me laugh out loud that these differences, once allowing for environmental influence, could just as easily be explained as the product of deciding arbitrarily to treat one group of people as deserving of mistreatment which, in the process, trained generations of the punishing class into behaviors of cruelty and sadism.

This would have the effect of changing the structure and functions of their brains themselves, setting into the social fabric a certain rudimentary standard or default in these persons. Such a change could easily account for the “devolution” seen in “our racial stock,” because those traits would be epigenetic and reinforced by social behaviors, customs and structures.

The “failures” of the (arbitrary) punishing class could be the inevitable (or at least predictable) result of the type of primitive consciousness that attends the authoritarian structure or worldview, to divide humankind into dominators and the dominated. Dominators would be shunted into ways of thinking and interpreting the world that feed into maintaining a mammalian dominance, not a social intelligence.

Cooperation is more likely to spur social intelligence. But those committed to a dominating, competitive worldview have not permitted inroads by the rest of society to restructure our culture such that cooperation is the key operating value.

In fact, proponents of authoritarianism design structures (or introduce flaws into existing cooperative edifices) that artificially emphasize difference. They do this in order to create and perpetuate these categories of difference so that the categories, over time, appear normal and natural—that is, innate.

That’s an illusion of permanence, propped up by policies that create and extend the unevenness of condition that produces the observed differences in the first place. These inequities are instated and instituted to justify the conditions put upon these despised classes in the first instance!

The circularity would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the fact that real lives, countless times over, have been affected by this policy predeterminism. This is not mere abstraction but stacking the deck.

So it very well could be the dumbing down of domination that caused this apparently measurable effect of lowered intellectualism in the United States, not owing to “innate racial differences”—which do not exist, as race is an empty construct—but rather to a rudimentary, prehistoric way of thinking that divides the world into dominators and dominated, leaders and led, conquerors and their concubinage, owners and the owned.

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