Race: Still Real

The debate about race is one of the best illustrations of the central error (and danger) of political correctness: the subordination of reason to politics. Or we could say, the subordination of facts / evidence / objective inquiry / science thereto. PC is, at its core, neo-Lysenkoism. These sound like the kinds of claims you might find on a nutty far-right blog...but...well...they're true. So. We're stuck with 'em, crazy as they might sound.

   I continue to think that the most illustrative example is transgenderism, because that involves--once you clear away the ground clutter--only relatively simple ideas / concepts. Those simple ideas are obfuscated by bad (more accurately: dumb and dishonest) terminology...but that can be cleaned up with a bit of attention. 

   However, though the ideas are a more complicated, race is also a pretty good example. The attempt to convince people that races are not natural kinds is almost entirely motivated by left-wing political obsessions and preferences. It does gain strength from the nominalism that's an unfortunate part of much of contemporary consciousness...though it could be argued that that, too, is associated with the left's obsession with trying to make everything out to be social / linguistic. But that might be a stretch. Nominalism is a view that captures people everywhere on the intellectual / political spectrum. It's one of those views that's easy to understand, has a kind of natural allure, and just seems to come readily to people's lips when they are forced to say something about kinds and abstract objects. IMO that's partially because it sounds sophisticated in virtue of sounding rather skeptical.

   At any rate, an objective look at the evidence and arguments clearly indicates that races are real. New evidence and arguments may, of course, emerge. But right now, the more reasonable view by far is that there are real, biological patterns of sameness and difference that correspond closely enough to our ideas of races to count. There's no perfect fit, of course. But were that our criterion, I'm not sure any commonsense category would be real.

   Anyway, the real point of this post is: behold, JayMan's blog on the topic! This is a really nice piece of work.

   Anyway: the race debate, like the debate about transgenderism, is largely driven by political commitments and pressures, not rational, detached philosophical and scientific ones. The academic and intellectual left has become committed to the reality of transgenderism and the unreality of race as moral / political points. If you fail to toe the appropriate line in these cases, you are the moral equivalent of a racist. (An actual racist in the latter case; a "transphobe" in the former. A brand new sin!) It's the political, quasi-religious fervor of the left that's driving these views, not the arguments. They are passionately committed to tricking and bullying people into believing them. Refuse to do so, and you will be vilified and dogpiled. The talk page on race at Wikipedia is a great place to see how some of this operates. Lefty editors who spend their whole lives prosecuting leftist cases on Wikipedia use every trick in the wikibook to suppress contrary arguments and advance the politically correct view. When the facts finally take over again, we might really learn something by acknowledging how out of touch with reality the left is about this, and how blatantly they worked to suppress contrary arguments. But I expect that it'll just go down the memory hole.

   I continue to think that, if the more centrist left realized how this sort of bias / pressure permeates the cultural superstructure, they'd be appalled. But they kinda don't know, and kinda don't want to know.