Daniel Larison
dances the night away.
Steve Sailer is an interesting figure in the blogging world, and particularly in the comments section of the Atlantic blogs. Like a hereditarian ghost, Sailer wheels in and out of the comments of Yglesias and Douthat, drops a few race science bon mots, and skeedaddles out again. He is a one-issue kind of guy. Sailer occasionally talks about unions or Israel in comments, and
his blog is fairly well-ranging. But in the comments sections of the blogs I read, what Sailer really likes to talk about is black people and Mexicans, and the various vagaries that the country endures because of their predilection to stupidity and criminality. This is, I think it's fair to say, a singular obsession of Sailer's. I can't tell you how many times I've read a post by some blogger that has little to nothing to do with race, and found a comment by Sailer that takes some incredibly twisted rhetorical path to include the various failings of black people and Hispanics. For Sailer all roads, it seems, lead to "race realism."
Make no mistake: Sailer unapologetically and explicitly believes that black and certain Hispanic people are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence and higher aggression and criminality. He is quite open about this; in fact, he is positively logorrheic on the subject.
On the substance of the issue, I disagree with Sailer and his intellectual comrades. But I disagree with many on many things. What rankles about Sailer, and about hereditarians in general, is how immensely important their pose is, how meticulously they've crafted their stance to at once embrace a noxious ideology but simultaneously abdicate any blame for those beliefs. Sailer's comments often take the same form: that he and his brethren are lonely, principled crusaders who, in the face of enormous bias and hostile reception, press on in service of the truth. Like Dr. Stockmann in the face of his angry neighbors, Sailer and his comrades face fierce social and public reprisals, and yet continue to righteously pursue the truth. And it should go without saying that Sailer would never
wish a predisposition for stupidity and aggression on black people, oh, heavens, no. Sailer weeps for the black and Hispanic people he has such low regard far, he does. But a sad truth is still the truth, and though he would do anything in his power to change it, he cannot.
This intellectual framework undergirds the hereditarian movement. William Saletan's
controversial series in Slate is a seminal moment in this tradition; at every turn, Saletan asserted his deep emotional pain at having to report these sad facts. A truly breathtaking example of self-aggrandizement masked as self-flagellation, Saletan's piece worked so hard to achieve a certain martyr air I half expected him to simply write "Message: I'm wounded here, people." Sailer has perfected this technique, made it his own. The only thing that rivals his iron-clad belief in race science is his own pain at it being so.
All of this, of course, is bullshit. It is a way to buttress an empirical and philosophical position with the language of martyrdom, a way to create a self-defending narrative that at once attacks large groups of people and simultaneously appropriates their grief at being attacked. In short, it is an act of leverage; repeat the cries of marginalization and intellectual oppression long enough, and the idea of it overwhelms everything else, till only the politics of aggrievement-- so mocked when undertaken by racial minorities, or women, or homosexuals-- remains.
I think it's for this reason, this meticulously crafted, rigorously disciplined pose, that Sailer has engendered such a weirdly affectionate attitude from liberal commenters. Whenever Sailer comes up, there are always leftist commenters who, while they take great pains to distance themselves from Sailers views, will tell you that Sailer's not a bad guy, that he is genuinely tortured in what he says, and (this more than anything else) that he certainly has no racial
animus in his heart, no actual anger or resentment towards black or Hispanic people. Oh, no-- whatever thoughts he may have on the natural ability of racial minorities, or on their genetic predispositions, Sailer wishes them no ill. Oh, he'd uproot decades of legislation and litigation designed to increase racial justice, but most are sure that he doesn't
dislike them.
I must confess I have never quite understood this reasoning. Whether or not Sailer or any other hereditarian has good old fashioned racial hatred in his heart is remarkably irrelevant to me. I could really care less, to be honest with you, what the average person feels about black people. What I care about is how they act towards black people and other minorities. I care what public policy they endorse regarding race and racial justice. When the Saletan series was lighting the web on fire, bloggers fell all over themselves-- left, right, and center-- to say that we needed a new definition of racism, that simply talking about racial difference had to be separated from knee-jerk thoughts of racism. I don't know; I'd like to think that I'm relatively open-minded. And yet I absolutely struggle to conceive of a concept of racism that doesn't include "I think the large majority of black people are stupid" within it. If racism is only and always a matter of slurs and burning crosses, our opposition to it is a weak brew indeed.
I am not in the habit of mind-reading and I won't try to comment on what Sailer "really believes". I certainly believe that Sailer believes that he bears no ill will towards black people, whatever his opinion of their intelligence. But his single-mindedness and his tenacity when it comes to finding the underpinnings of every American vice within our multi-racial makeup is very disturbing. I have tried many times, in the comments section of Matt Yglesias's blog, to follow his thinking down the logical rabbit hole to its logical ends. But he often demurs. I can't coax him to comment on many of the natural consequences of thinking that black people have a statistically huge likelihood (according to his perspective) of being simply mentally unfit for the standard American economic and educational life. Despite his often repeated admonition that stereotypes are stereotypes because they are true, I can't get him to say whether he thinks that Jews are wicked, greedy or conniving. And I can't get an answer as to why a man whose thoughts on racial minorities are so extreme and so all-encompassing seems to have such modest policy proposals in the face of them. I don't doubt that Sailer believes what he says he does and prefers the policy prescriptions he says he does. But there is a disconnect between the size of his rhetoric and the size of his proposals, and I wonder if it is a matter of Sailer underestimating what it would take to counter the enormous problems he says we face. Sailer's lack of classic ugly race-hating racism is important and valuable. But it is most assuredly besides the point.
And this disconnect leads to this strange dualism that I have often encountered. This is the Sailer dance, though it isn't restricted solely to Sailer, who is just a particularly vocal proponent of race science. It is the strange tendency of hereditarians to be at once incredibly open and frank and yet on some subjects withdrawn. People who quite boldly pronounce on taboo subjects (and seem to quite enjoy doing so) suddenly become shrinking violets in the face of certain questions that arise pragmatically in response to their stated opinions on race science. This combination of openness and coyness is a strange thing to encounter. In truth, I don't think this is because hereditarians are afraid to say what they "really think" but instead are afraid to consider the potentially horrific consequences of making sweeping claims about the fitness of entire races.
But what of this horrible oppression that Larison and Douthat and others have identified, this vast conspiracy to denigrate Steve Sailer? What of his many trials and tribulations at the hands of a leftist orthodoxy caught in the grip of politically correct madness? Yes, it's true, I do in some ways exclude Sailer from my intellectual framework in a way that I don't, say, Kathryn Jean Lopez, despite my vast differences with her. I continue to read him, I continue to react to what he says, and I take care to engage with the content of his arguments when I do. But, yes, I don't feel on a simple personal level entirely the same way towards him as I do other opponents. And it is true that Sailer is in many ways excluded from respectability by many in the blogosphere.
And yet what does that mean? It means that
Sailer is judged because of the things he says. Is that such a horrible kind of marginalization? Isn't that, in fact, the basic currency of any public discourse? The ways that Sailer suffers from his opinions are oblique and ephemeral. He still has a blog, rather well read. He publishes for a major American magazine. He is linked to and cited approvingly by thoroughly mainstream and popular journalists, pundits and bloggers. He makes a living as a public intellectual. Oppression should be made of stronger stuff. No one, to my knowledge, is calling for Sailer to be silenced. No one advocates that he be dragged off to the Gulag. They merely insist, as I do, that we actually interrogate the content of his work and hold him accountable for his views. He is hardly the only voice on the Internet to be somewhat marginalized. Noam Chomsky, whose crime is a critical and incredulous appraisal of American foreign policy, has been similarly banished from the Serious blogosphere. Indeed, I can't imagine a major magazine's blogger stable linking approvingly to him with anything like the frequency with which Sailer is linked to. Appearing to hew too closely to Chomsky would be to reveal oneself to be one of them, the dirty hippies, the unwashed America haters who
even those with books critical of unilateralism and American foreign policy must, for professional reasons, take care to distance themselves from. No such powerful cloud of exclusion surrounds Sailer, or so it seems. Indeed, quoting him appears to create a certain kind of conservative cache.
Larison falls into an old trap, in discussing Sailer. Like many people, particularly those who occupy ideological fringes (as the paleocons like Larison do), he assumes that a position that is controversial must be principled. Because Sailer is courageous in challenging a conventional wisdom-- and he is-- that wisdom must be wrong. Because so many of those mushy-headed liberals are quite certain that racism is a pernicious evil, a uniquely damaging and spiritually deadening social disease, there must be something to this race science, after all. This is the consequence of a public discourse that privileges anti-liberal contrarianism above all things, one which imagines that an idea's value is in direct proportion to its distance from liberal orthodoxy, one which conceives of all received wisdoms regarding equality and racial justice as just more leftist dogma. And it is precisely why all the people lauding William Saletan for his courage were so aggravating. Those who are the beneficiaries of ideological protectionism have no claims to courage.
It is not oppression to ask people to accept the social and professional consequences of what they believe. I don't know, particularly, where Douthat or Larison stand on race science and hereditarianism, nor do I suggest that they should be thrown out of respectability or marginalized for quoting him or defending him. But I do believe that their certainty that Sailer has been unfairly maligned has more to do with culture than with rationality. No one can serve two masters; you can't pursue the truth when that concern is overwhelmed with unmasking liberal belief as fraudulent and discriminating. Steve Sailer's views have political and moral content; he expresses them, to his credit, straightforwardly and openly, for the most part. What strange definition of respect would allow for this openness of opinion but shield it from vigorous dissent?
