Z0MG Races Are Natural Kinds!!!
This caused a big dust-up, of course, since the leftier left officially adopted "social constructionist" pseudoscience about...well...basically everything. Including race. Reich tries to appease the progressive powers that be by asserting that races are "socially constructed" while simultaneously arguing that they aren't. This is actually a smart rhetorical tactic--"socially constructed" is such a vague, ambiguous, protean term that it barely means anything at all. Might as well say the magic words and let the progressive cultural superstructure acclimate itself to the facts again. As Rorty suggests, the cultural left is more devoted to making up new words than it is to actual argument. (Well...one could argue about whether he thinks that second part...but I think he's got to say something like that. He's right, I think, when he says (in Achieving Our Country) that the cultural left ascends to "theory" too quickly. Much of what's wrong on the lefty-left can be traced back to postmodernism, poststructuralism, the excesses of critical theory, and all that Continental-y stuff.)
It's really kind of interesting once you ditch the "social construction" stuff. So far as I can tell, what we end up with is a bunch of fuzzy, indistinct patterns of not-particularly-important similarities and differences that roughly correspond to roughly the idea of race that most ordinary people have. Of course white, black and Asian can be broken down into smaller clusters, but that doesn't matter much. And of course we've "drawn lines" differently for different purposes, but that doesn't matter either. Both of those facts are cited as evidence that race is "socially constructed"...but either those arguments are invalid or x is socially constructed is perfectly consistent with x is a natural kind.
But the most important point in this vicinity is the metatheoretical point that questions about the reality or unreality of races have to be settled on purely scientific (broadly construed) grounds. Questions about the impact of various answers on debates about racism can't be allowed into the discussion. And there's simply no doubt that the recent ascendance of social constructionism about race to orthodoxy was driven primarily by such moral/political considerations. It's possible--though unlikely--that nominalism about races will turn out to be right in the end. Nominalism (though not: social constructionism) about races is a respectable position. Though it's probably wrong. The dangerous position is the leftist position that allows scientific conclusions to be determined by political considerations. Neo-Lysenkoism is the essence of political correctness, IMO.
It's really kind of interesting once you ditch the "social construction" stuff. So far as I can tell, what we end up with is a bunch of fuzzy, indistinct patterns of not-particularly-important similarities and differences that roughly correspond to roughly the idea of race that most ordinary people have. Of course white, black and Asian can be broken down into smaller clusters, but that doesn't matter much. And of course we've "drawn lines" differently for different purposes, but that doesn't matter either. Both of those facts are cited as evidence that race is "socially constructed"...but either those arguments are invalid or x is socially constructed is perfectly consistent with x is a natural kind.
But the most important point in this vicinity is the metatheoretical point that questions about the reality or unreality of races have to be settled on purely scientific (broadly construed) grounds. Questions about the impact of various answers on debates about racism can't be allowed into the discussion. And there's simply no doubt that the recent ascendance of social constructionism about race to orthodoxy was driven primarily by such moral/political considerations. It's possible--though unlikely--that nominalism about races will turn out to be right in the end. Nominalism (though not: social constructionism) about races is a respectable position. Though it's probably wrong. The dangerous position is the leftist position that allows scientific conclusions to be determined by political considerations. Neo-Lysenkoism is the essence of political correctness, IMO.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:27 AM
3 Comments:
" It's really kind of interesting once you ditch the "social construction" stuff. So far as I can tell, what we end up with is a bunch of fuzzy, indistinct patterns of not-particularly-important similarities and differences that roughly correspond to roughly the idea of race that most ordinary people have."
I think this is yes and no. When you look at the methods of the race and genetics research, they are using fairly sophisticated algorithmic techniques to determine the relationship. Here's one that I am familiar with (because I had to implement an algorithm for it once): clustering. Clustering basically involves generating a set of mutually exclusive sets that minimize some measure. For genetics, the measure is genetic distance. What has been found is if you cluster the human genome across as many clusters as there are continents, the result is extremely predictive of race. That's pretty strongly indicative of race being derivative of higher order genetic patterns. Importantly, other statistical techniques prove out the same thing from what I've seen.
It's important to realize those aren't "fuzzy" in any meaningful sense. They are in fact extremely well-defined mathematically. You can literally formalize it. What it is is information dense. To run a clustering algorithm, you literally have to process an entire population of data. So when that sort of pattern is distilled into a normal human conversation, it becomes clunky and fuzzy. It's more an issue of data loss when you go to the level of discourse (interesting corollary: this is why popular discourse is often so damn stupid, because conversation is so lossy).
Other interesting note, cultural evolution doesn't have that sort of problem. The iterative process of refining our opinions of the world and adjusting to other people's refinements actually matches the clustering and ML algorithms remarkably closely (basically they work by randomly seating elements in a cluster, checking if moving an element to any other cluster can improve the solution, and repeat until no improvement can be found. Knowledge evolution begins with a random opinion about an event, then is iteratively improved by incoming information and the incorporation of information from others until it reaches a social equilibrium).
It's really only when we cast off that accumulated knowledge because you can't explain why it's right in a 5 paragraph essay that we become stupider and think a phenomenon like race that is obviously derived from phenotype difference is purely social.
The trouble with your choice of races is that "black" or "African" represents roughly half the genetic variation in humans. Take a look at this:
https://pjt111.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/campbell_tishkoff_fig-2.jpg?w=625
I think there are two broad issues at work here. One, we generally tend to think in terms of either/ors. Two, affirming the reality of essences is conflated with"essentialism" in the pejorative sense, i.e. in which said essences are ahistorical, fixed, and have clear boundaries. Combine these two issues and you get left with the disjunct that race is either wholly socially constructed or essential in the sense of the "bad" essentialism stated above. The truth is much subtler. You can be a realist without being an essentialist in the "bad" sense. This is seemingly missed by the majority of social constructionist folks. They tend towards nominalism, and their positions are often self-defeating. Saying that 'x' is socially constructed ends up meaning something like 'x' is unreal, yet they (often rightly) want to talk about the effects of things like race in the world. Ultimately I suppose my point is that "x is socially constructed" *is* perfectly consistent with "x is a natural kind," though I would prefer to just call it a "kind" rather than a "natural kind," as I do think kinds are socially mediated in relevant ways, and the word "natural" here might give the wrong impression about that. The point of the above, however, is that this doesn't make kinds unreal, nor unnatural. It is ultimately a both/and, rather than an either/or phenomenon.
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