Steve Sailer: Arguing Against Reality

More on Angela Saini's Superior: The Return Of Race Science.
   I yell a lot about progressive transgender mythology, which I think is basically the clearest case of political correctness and prope-Lysenkoism there's ever been. But the contemporary middlebrow progressive account of race is close behind. It's just as ridiculous, and just a tiny bit less obviously so. Both discussions turn largely on "social constructivism," which is the all-purpose, hopelessly confused metaphysics that pervades the contemporary left. (Basically just cultural relativism in a slightly-updated form.) Both are dead-set against biology and biological differences among humans. Neither, however, is willing to simply call the differences fictional--if they were fictional it'd be harder for humanists and soft social scientists to build their entire careers around discussing them. So both adopt the expedient of saying that they're real (or at least not unreal...), but "socially constructed." Though this is much weirder than saying that they're fictional, it's a winning move, rhetorically speaking, because it adds an additional layer of baffling bullshit that helps muddle things just enough to decrease the percentage of people who can see straight through it all. And, of course, both are motivated by politics. And neither would have much chance of survival if half the political spectrum didn't have dogmatic, emotional, political reasons for embracing it. And the other side of that coin is that opposition is squelched by the PC tactic of accusing dissenters of *-ism--racism, obviously, in the case of race, and the newly-minted sin "transphobia" in the case of transgenderism. The illicit moralization of inquiry and vilification of the opposition is one of PCs most effective tactics.