Early Antecedents of Cancel Culture

Bernard D. Davis is not a household name, unless, of course, your household happens to closely resemble those of the characters on the popular television sitcom The Big Bang Theory. He was a noted microbiologist and the 1989 recipient of the National Academy of the Sciences’ Selman A. Waxman Award in that field. He had been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he was Adele Lehmann Professor of Bacterial Physiology, since 1957. He passed away from prostate cancer in 1994 at the age of 78. He was a pioneer in the research of bacterial genetics, noted for developing a technique for using penicillin to isolate mutant bacteria strains.

In 1976 he found himself in the middle of a controversy regarding Harvard’s affirmative action policy. At first, the policy had merely been to set a quota – a minimum of fifteen places would be reserved for blacks in the medical school. Then, when they had difficulty filling those places with students who met their qualification standards, they lowered the admissions standards for black students, justifying this to eyebrow-raising faculty members by promising that graduation standards would not be similarly lowered. For the sake of expediency, however, that promise was soon abandoned. The school’s methods of evaluating student performance were also tinkered with, for the same reason. Unsurprisingly, this started to have a negative effect on the standing of Harvard’s medical graduates with the examination board that issues medical licences.

Dr. Davis, not one to put up with this sort of nonsense, fired off a memo to the Faculty Council telling them in no uncertain terms, that however laudable the goals of affirmative action may be, lowering their standards in this way and potentially turning the school into a degree mill for incompetent quacks, was hardly the way to go about it. He also submitted an article along the same lines to the New England Journal of Medicine and they published it.

That was when the stercus hit the vannus.

The New York Times, which then as now specialized in muckraking, character assassination, and the lowest, basest, sort of yellow gutter journalism, all in the service of an extreme progressive agenda, ran a hit piece on Davis. Other newspapers, with even lower standards, followed suit. Then he came under attack at his own university.

Three years prior to this Dr. Richard C. Lewontin had been appointed the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Biology at Harvard University. Like his frequent collaborator, "paleontologist" Stephen Jay Gould, who was promoted to Professor of Geology that same year, Lewontin belonged to the far left activist group Science for the People, and made accusing other scientists of racism, especially his Harvard colleagues, his pet project. The year before Davis’ article came out, another Harvard professor, entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had published a book entitled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Lewontin and Gould condemned the book, as well as the entire field of research related to it, and even founded a “Sociobiology Study Group” entirely for the purposes of attacking it. A few years later, this group arranged for a symposium to be held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both sides could exchange their viewpoints. Something called the International Committee Against Racism – a front for the (Communist) Progressive Labor Party of the United States – showed up at the symposium, and before Wilson’s scheduled speech stormed the stage, surrounded the microphone, chanting imbecilic slogans like “Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide”, and then dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head. Although Lewontin and Gould disavowed the specific actions of this group, they had obviously created the hostile intellectual climate in which such an event could take place. The “genocide” Wilson was charged with, consisted of incorporating his research from his career studying the social lives of ants and other communal insects, into a general theory about the evolutionary and genetic basis of the social behaviour of animals and human beings. For his account of the way Lewontin, Gould, et al., had responded to his theory, see his memoir Naturalist (Shearwater Books, 1994). For the history of these left wing activist-scientists’ attempts to scupper this entire field of research see Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Lewontin, as you have probably inferred from the account of him in the previous paragraph, condemned Dr. Davis, called him a racist, accused him of holding all sorts of absurd views, and refused to apologize when called upon to account for his unprofessional attacks on a colleague. Then, a pattern of events that was relatively new at the time but which has since become all too familiar, started. The calls for Dr. Davis to be sacked started coming in, radicals disrupted his lectures and organized protests wherever he was invited to speak, and colleagues started shunning him.

These efforts to destroy his career failed. Although Harvard denounced him, they did not fire him and he went on to win the aforementioned Waxman Award. Much to his credit, he did not back down in the face of this sort of bullying. In 1986, Prometheus Books published his Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment and Public Policy which expanded the thesis of his controversial New England Journal of Medicine article into a blistering take-down of this intrusion of left-wing political ideology into science and academics, which he described as a “neo-Lysenkoism.” It included a devastating review of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, the classic example of a work of left-wing political propaganda wearing the guise of “pop science” which had met with gushing acclaim from those who were least informed about the subjects it addressed and critical scorn from those who were most informed. Davis’ own book, by contrast, while dismissed by Gould, met with largely favourable reviews, and not only by those such as Dr. Edward O. Wilson who reviewed it for the November 1986 issue of Commentary and whom one might expect to sympathize due to having received similar treatment from the same people, but from the scientific community at large and even from some from whom one would have expected a more frosty reception.

In the account given above we can see what are clearly predecessors of what, in the age of the internet, has come to be called “cancel culture.” Other examples could be given. Indeed, the point could be argued that the deaths of Socrates and Jesus Christ were very early examples of “woke mobs” demanding that somebody or, in the case of Jesus, Somebody be “cancelled.” Examples that are closer in both time and detail to what happened to Dr. Davis are the examples of Dr. Arthur Jensen, Dr. Hans Eysenck, and Dr. J. Philippe Rushton.

Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, who passed away eight years ago, was the Professor of Educational Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Like Dr. Davis, his politics, ironically, were those that would have been described as progressive liberal in the United States in the period in which he grew up. In February of 1969, the Harvard Educational Review published his article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” He argued that programs like “Head Start”, which were designed to eliminate the interracial gap in academic achievement based on the assumption that it was due entirely to poverty and discrimination were failing – as they were – because they did not take into account the hereditary factor in intelligence, which Jensen called the general factor or g. Protests, death threats against him and his family, vandalism, demands that he be fired, disruption of his lectures, all ensued.

Dr. Hans J. Eysenck, who was born in Germany but moved to the United Kingdom in the 1930s out of disgust with Hitler and the Nazis, was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in King’s College, London from 1953 until his retirement in 1983. Up until his death from brain cancer in 1997 he was known as the “world’s most cited psychologist.” Like Jensen, he argued that the evidence all points to there being a large hereditary general factor in intelligence, and, indeed, published an entire book on the subject a couple of years after Jensen’s article, entitled Race, Intelligence and Education (1) which he followed up another couple of years later with The Inequality of Man. He received similar abuse, to the point where he was physically assaulted when invited to give a lecture at the London School of Economics, and at one point had to temporarily change his family name to protect his children.

Dr. J. Philippe Rushton was a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1989, he presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the evolutionary origins of the differences between races. He focused on three particular races, whites, blacks, and Asians for which he used the terms “Caucasoids”, “Negroids” and “Mongoloids” respectively, and a wide assortment of statistical differences. The point of his paper was not to argue that these differences are real – that is well-established – but to explain their existence. He did so on the basis of the r/K selection hypothesis that Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson had postulated in 1967. Liberal newspapers – which are the vast majority of them – condemned his paper as “racist”, the province’s Attorney General asked the police to investigate Rushton, left-wing student activists filed complaints with the provincial Human Rights Tribunal, David Peterson, the Liberal premier of Ontario at the time, asked the president of the University to fire him, and he received all the of the same sort of harassment than Davis, Jensen, Wilson and Eysenck had received, especially after he gave his thesis a book length treatment in Race, Evolution, and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (Transaction Books, 1995).

In none of these cases did the left-wing activists succeed in destroying the careers of the individuals they subjected to their attacks, although they made their jobs and lives a living hell. Sadly, the dawn of the Digital Age has provided them with shiny new tools for stirring up mobs to ruin people and their lives, and they have become much more successful at it. They were, however, successful at one thing. The left, which had dominated sociology since the nineteenth century, spread into anthropology and the remaining social sciences in the early twentieth century, and took over the humanities with the development of Critical Theory in the mid-twentieth century, through these tactics was able to impose at least a lip service to its thought paradigms even on those hard sciences within the STEM disciplines most resistant to their control due to their familiarity with hard data which flatly contradicts their false view of reality. This, rather than the destruction of their targets, may very well have been what they were truly aiming at all along.

(1) This was the title of the original British edition. His American publisher gave it the less-inflammatory title The IQ Question.

Antiracism is Worse than Racism

While some maintain that there is no gradation of evil, that “sin is sin” and that it is all the same there is little basis for thinking this to be the case. If we did not distinguish between greater and lesser evils there would be no basis for passing laws against certain bad acts while allowing if morally disapproving others. To be consistent we would have to either criminalize everything we considered to be bad or give up the rule and protection of law. Either option would make human existence unbearable. Out of practical necessity, at the very least, we need a hierarchy of goods and evils. Some might qualify the claim that all sin is the same by saying that while we as humans distinguish between greater and lesser evils, in God’s eyes, all sin is sin. This is not the doctrine of orthodox Christianity, however. All that the Scriptures affirm on the matter is that God does not judge as man does. This means that His criteria, for distinguishing between greater and lesser evil, is not necessarily the same as ours, not that He regards all sins as being equal. The Scriptures very much affirm the idea of a hierarchy of goods and evils. If there were no hierarchy of good and evil, statements like “this is the first and greatest of the commandments and the second is like unto it” and “these shall receive the greater condemnation” would be nonsensical.

The grounds for thinking that all sin is equal are at their best, very weak. The grounds for thinking otherwise are much stronger and so we can safely accept the proposition that there is a hierarchy in which some goods are better than others and some evils are worse than others. We will take this proposition as being established, therefore, in making our argument that antiracism is a greater evil than racism.

“Now wait a minute,” some of you might be saying “by saying that antiracism is worse than racism aren’t you saying that a good is worse than an evil?”

That racism is always an evil, and antiracism, which by definition is opposition to racism, is always good, is certainly the conventional opinion these days. The conventional opinion, however, is seldom a good guide to what is true. Conventional means that which is generally agreed upon. Like the words convene and convention, which it is closely related to, it comes from the Latin for “to come together” and suggests the idea of people getting together and coming to an agreement. However effective that process might be in helping people live together peacefully it is not how truth is arrived at.

Tradition is a much sounder guide to truth than convention. Tradition, from the Latin for “to hand over or pass on”, is that which has been passed down to us through time. Convention and tradition are both forms of established thought. Convention is that which is established because of its acceptance by the majority in the present. Tradition is that which is established because it has endured the test of time. While tradition doesn’t generate truth any more than convention does it has a much better perception of truth and is thus a better guide to truth.

Let us take a closer look then at this particular conventional opinion, considering its two parts separately. First there is the assertion that racism is always evil. Is this assertion true? The answer to that depends upon what we mean by racism.

Racism is a word that is used and overused everywhere in society today. One would think that due to this ubiquity there would be a universal consensus as to the meaning of the word. That such is not the case was recently illustrated for us here in Manitoba. Last fall a Winnipeg lingerie shop put on a burlesque show to raise funds for Osborne House, a shelter for battered women. Through e-mail, Eric Robinson, Deputy Premier and Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs in Manitoba’s provincial government and Nahanni Fontaine, an advisor to the government, discussed how they felt this was inappropriate and in poor taste. In the course of this discussion, Robinson said that it was an example of “the ignorance of do-good white people.” This summer, the content of these e-mails was leaked to Barbara Judt, CEO of Osborne House, who condemned the comment as hateful and racist and filed a complaint with the provincial human rights commission against Robinson.

This generated an ongoing public discussion and in the course of that discussion it became apparent that there was a great deal of disagreement over what constitutes racism. Robinson is of Cree descent and his comment, if racist, was racist towards white people. Some took the position that racism can only be committed by a more powerful group against a less powerful group and that because Robinson belongs to a less powerful group, historically oppressed by the group his comment was about, his words could not therefore be racist. Tim Sale, for example, took this position in an article that appeared in the August 31st issue of the Winnipeg Free Press (1) and it was echoed by several people whose letters were published in the weeks following.

Others, whose letters were also published, found this position to be absurd and offensive. They took the position that racism consists of negative thoughts about and actions toward people of other races and that racism is racism regardless of who is on the giving and receiving ends of it.

The second group probably represents the views of the majority of Canadians. Their understanding of racism is certainly more in line with the definitions found in most standard dictionaries. Where then, do Sale and the other members of the first group get off saying that racism is a one way street, going from powerful to less powerful, from white to non-white, and never the other way around?

After the triumph of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960’s, progressive academics rethought their concept of racism. The left had just won everything they said they wanted: the Supreme Court of the United States had overturned the legality of the “separate but equal” concept in Brown v. Board, the President had ordered the National Guard to enforce the integration of institutions of higher education in the deep South, de jure segregation was now illegal, and the Civil Rights bill had passed, outlawing various sorts of private discrimination, paving the way for the legal shakedown industry and the reverse discrimination of affirmative action quotas. Their total victory, however, threatened to rob progressive academics of one of their favourite pastimes, i.e., complaining about how deeply and horribly unfair and racist their society is. They therefore came up with a new concept of “institutional” or “structural” racism, racism that does not consist of conscious and overt negative thoughts and acts towards others, but which is built into the very structure of society, supposedly generating special privilege and power for white people while keeping others down. The progressives redirected their energies towards attacking this kind of beneath-the-surface “racism”, thus allowing them to maintain their image of themselves as public tribunes, fighting for the downtrodden against an unjust system, even though that system had given them everything they had demanded.

There is therefore now a vast difference between what progressive intellectuals mean by the word “racism” and how ordinary people understand the word. Most people think that racism means hating or disliking other people either because they are of a different race than you or because they are of a particular race that is the object of such hatred. Most people think of racist behaviour as ranging from mild forms, such as the use of racial slurs and insults, to extreme forms such as lynching and ethnic cleansing. Progressive intellectuals, however, tend to think that white people who do not behave like that and do not dislike people of other races are nevertheless guilty of racism for being unconscious of their “white privilege” and thus “indifferent” to the racism built into their society. Moreover, progressive intellectuals tend to see explicit statements of racial hatred towards white people and racially motivated acts of criminality and violence towards white people as not being racist but rather being understandable, if undesirable, responses on the part of the oppressed to the unfairness of society. Ordinary people, when they learn how the progressive intellectual views things, tend to think he is crazy, if not from another planet altogether.

If asked whether racism is always bad, most people would probably say yes at first, but if pressed on the subject, many would begin to quibble. Ethnic jokes might hurt someone’s feelings, they may say, but they are not on the level of genocide. If the same question were put to progressive intellectuals they would firmly insist that all racism is bad, but if pressed about verbal and behavioural expressions of racial hatred towards whites on the part of members of groups that have been historically oppressed, they would probably offer arguments why this isn’t really racism. Both ordinary people and progressives, in other words, hold to the position in theory that all racism is bad, but neither group is willing to take this position to its logical conclusion.

How is racism defined in the dictionary? Perhaps that will help us decide whether racism is always bad or not.

If we turn to the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, we find that it offers us two short definitions and a full definition with two parts. Here is the first of the two short definitions:

poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race (2)

If we accept this as our operating definition, then I would say that all forms of racism are bad and I suspect most people would agree with me. I would add the clarification however, that if racism is “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”, it is always wrong, because it is always wrong to treat people poorly and not because this particular form of poor treatment is motivated by race.

This raises the question of what constitutes poor treatment. Sometimes this is an easy question to answer. To assault or murder someone, to steal or damage his property, to have an affair with his wife, to go around town spreading malicious gossip about him – each of these things falls under the category of treating people poorly. It is wrong to treat anyone this way, regardless of his race. Sometimes, however, it is more difficult than that.

The progressive left has complicated matters by declaring equality to be the ideal standard to be striven for. If we accept equality as an ideal, then by our standards to treat people as if they were not equal is to treat at least one of them poorly. Much discussion of racism is based upon the idea that all races are equal and deserve to be treated equally and that racism is deviation from that ideal.

As I have argued elsewhere, however, equality is more of an idol than an ideal. (3) The problem with making equality into the ideal is that it clashes with justice. Sometimes it is right to treat people equally. Other times it is wrong to do so. It is as wrong to steal one man’s property as it is to steal another’s. Therefore, we should treat both men equally in refraining from taking what is theirs. Sometimes, family relationships, friendships, and other ties, place duties upon us which require us to act towards specific people in ways we are not required to act towards others. In this case it would be wrong to insist upon treating everybody equally. In theory, equality might be thought of as a form of virtuous generosity, treating a perfect stranger as if he were your best friend. In practice and in reality it is more likely to mean treating your best friend as if he were a perfect stranger.

If we accept the progressive idea that equality is the standard and that it is wrong to treat people differently this greatly changes the meaning of “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”. Here we see how the conventional idea of racism, so defined, under egalitarian presuppositions, runs up against traditional ideas of virtue and vice.

Ever since ancient times, that which the Romans called pietas has been considered to be one of the chief virtues. Pietas was an attitude of faithful duty towards one’s parents and kin, one’s country, and the gods. We will use the Latin word for it, because its English equivalent and derivative, piety, has lost much of its meaning. Pietas was piety, both filial and religious, and patriotism all rolled into one. It is the subject of Plato’s Euthyphro. (4) Marcus Tullius Cicero, believed it to be implanted in us by instinct as the law of nature. (5) Virgil made it the chief virtue of Aeneas, the last survivor of Troy and the ancestor of the Romans, in his Aeneid.

Lest it be thought to be merely a pagan virtue, note that the Ten Commandments given to Israel by God at Mt. Sinai start with duties to God and end with duties to man. The commandment to honour one’s father and mother falls between these duties and if the commandments were divided equally between the two sets of duties, would have to fall under duties to God. Note that when Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for using human tradition to nullify the commandment of God, this is the commandment to which He made specific reference. That was hardly a coincidence. St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between a pietas towards our earthly parents, which was a mere human virtue, and a pietas towards God that was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but maintained that it was appropriate to use the same word for both because the latter is directed towards God as Father. (6)

Do you see where the conflict exists between the egalitarian and conventional understanding of racism and the classical and Christian traditional view of pietas? The former teaches that we are to treat all people equally and that it is wrong to treat people differently because of their race. The latter teaches that we owe special duties first to our parents, then to our kin as a whole, and finally to our country and that the same virtue of pietas is involved in faithfully and lovingly fulfilling these duties as in fulfilling our duty to love and worship God. Since the idea of having special duties to our parents, kin, and country is not compatible with the idea that we should treat all people equally, i.e., the same, progressive egalitarianism would seem to condemn pietas as a form of racism.

This is not just speculation about where progressive teachings might lead. Antiracism promotes impious thoughts and attitudes in practice.

This leads us to the second part of the conventional opinion about racism and antiracism, the assertion that antiracism is always good. This assertion is a conclusion drawn from the first assertion, that racism is always bad. If racism is always bad, then surely antiracism, which is by definition opposition to racism, must be good.

Well, we have just seen that pietas, which was considered a virtue by pre-modern, traditional civilizations, which was considered to be the chief virtue of ancient Rome, was commanded in the Ten Commandments and considered to be a spiritual gift by St. Thomas Aquinas, would fall under the category of “racism” if we accept the egalitarian standards of progressivism, the parent ideology of antiracism. Therefore, either Moses, Jesus Christ, and all Western philosophers until very recently were wrong in insisting that we have special obligations to our parents, family, and country or the assertion that racism is always bad is simply not true. If it is not true, then the conclusion that antiracism is always good, which depends upon racism always being bad, cannot be true either.

In fact, as we are about to see, antiracism is not good at all. Rather it is an evil that masquerades as a good, a vice that wears the mask of a virtue.

Our first charge against antiracism is that it promotes impiety. It has caused people to revile and dishonor their parents, their ancestors as a whole, and their country.

This was illustrated in the television cartoon Family Guy a few years ago. In the episode entitled “Chick Cancer”, the character Brian makes a comment that contains a racial stereotype of black men. Stewie, to whom he addressed the remark, responds with shock: “Whoa! What was that?” Brian’s reply is “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that was my father talking” and is told by Stewie “You gotta work on that man”. (7)

Stewie’s response of antiracist shock to Brian’s racial slur provokes filial impiety from Brian as a self-defense. Granted this is a conversation between a talking cartoon baby and a talking cartoon dog but it mirrors reality in the sense that it reflects the kind of shame and disrespect towards one’s parents that antiracism provokes among young people.

Another form of impiety antiracism promotes is disloyalty to friends. Sometimes this is done explicitly, as in the song “Racist Friend” by Jerry Dammers, songwriter for the British ska group The Specials, which tells people: “If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.” (8) More often it is done indirectly through guilt by association which a favourite tactic of antiracists.

The most obvious form of impiety promoted by antiracism, however, is that towards ancestors and country. It is quite common these days, on college and university campuses and even in high schools, to hear “socially conscious” students express deep shame for the actions of their ancestors or for their country’s past. In the vast majority, if not all, of these cases, it is the racism of their ancestors or country for which they are expressing shame.

The students who make these impious statements are almost always white students. This brings us to our second charge against antiracism. It is not just that antiracism is hypocritical and holds to a double standard. While that is included in the charge, it is much more serious than that. Antiracism is, ironically, itself a form of racism. It promotes impiety towards parents, friends, ancestors, and country among white people alone and promotes hatred towards white people on the part of other people.

Think back to the earlier part of our discussion where we discussed the current progressive view of racism, that it is embedded in the structures, institutions, and cultures of Western countries so as to give privilege and power to whites and withhold these from other people, so that whites are guilty of racism even if they have no conscious negative thoughts or feelings towards other people and other people are not guilty of racism, even if they express hatred towards whites or commit crimes against whites based upon that hatred, because these are expressions of frustration on the part of disempowered people against an unfair system. What other effect could this idea have than to encourage white people to disavow their ancestors and their countries and to encourage other people to hate white people? To be antiracist, in practice, means to be antiwhite.

Antiracism’s antiwhite racism is not the mild ethnic joke variety of racism either. In Europe, the United Kingdom, and Canada, antiracist progressives have passed hate speech laws which make it, in some cases a crime, in other cases actionable under civil law, to express views that might expose someone to hate because of that person’s race. Although these laws are written in race neutral language, they are ordinarily only ever enforced against white people. The complaint Barbara Judt made against Eric Robinson was newsworthy because it, very unusually, concerned a comment that was pejorative to white people. Even when Chief David Ahenakew, another rare non-white defendant in hate cases, was charged in Saskatchewan with promoting hatred ten years ago, it was not white people but Jewish people he was accused of hating. In the United States of America, where the Bill of Rights theoretically prevents the passing of hate speech laws, hate crimes laws have been passed which require stiffer sentences for crimes where racial prejudice is the motivation. As with hate speech laws in other countries, in practice hate crime laws are seldom invoked unless the criminal is white and his victim the member of another race. “Hate” laws, of either variety, clearly exist for no other purpose than as forms of legal harassment targeting white people.

At this point, let us introduce our third charge against antiracism, even though we are not quite done yet with the second. Our third charge against antiracism is that it makes mincemeat out of the truth.

Antiracists treat racism as if it were a sin that was the unique property of white people. This can be seen in the way “hate” laws are enforced, in progressive theories about why only white people can be racist, and in the way antiracist watchdog organizations keep tabs on the most insignificant activities of the most obscure white identity groups while all but ignoring racist groups from other races. Yet antiracism is itself evidence that the opposite is true – that white people are, if anything, the least racist people on the planet and always have been. Antiracism draws upon many source ideas including liberal individualism, humanism, and Marxism. Whatever the merits and demerits of these ideas may be, they all have this in common, that they are the product of Western, European, civilization. They are, to put it bluntly, white ideas. Most antiracists are themselves whites who have renounced any sense of identity with their own people. The only other people group that I can think of that has a problem with this kind of internal self-loathing is the Jewish people. Yet according to physical anthropologists and population geneticists Jews are part of the same race as Europeans.

Oops. My bad. I said race when I should have said population or genetic cluster or whatever current euphemism is being used by population geneticists to keep the antiracists off their back and allow them to do their research in peace.

This brings us to the other way in which antiracism makes mincemeat out of the truth. Antiracists, like progressives in general, tend to subscribe to the founding mythology of modernity, in which the Catholic Church is believed to have held Europe in superstition and darkness before the dawn of Renaissance humanism and the “Enlightenment”, in which man threw off the shackles of religion, left the darkness, and set his feet on the path to truth, by following the light of reason and science. While much of this is pure malarkey – the foundations for the expansion of science were in fact laid in the medieval times by Christian scholars (9)– in the last half century antiracist progressives themselves have acted the way they accuse the medieval Church of behaving.

When the late Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, professor of educational psychology at the University of California in Berkeley published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review, questioning how effective IQ boosting programs like Head Start actually were by offering evidence that much of human intelligence is due to a hereditary g-factor, progressive antiracists began protesting outside his office and disrupting his lectures. (10)

When the late Dr. J. Philippe Rushton, British born professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario presented a paper to a general meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Fransisco in 1989, a police investigation was ordered in Ontario. (11) His “crime”? He had put forward the theory that racial difference could be explained by the r/K selection theory. (12)

Earlier in the 1970s, the co-author of that theory, Harvard University entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had come under attack by antiracists for his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. (13) The antiracists even went so far as to physically assault Wilson, dousing him with water at a 1978 meeting of the AAAS. (14)

My point is not that the theories these men espoused were the truth. Their materialistic presuppositions, in my opinion, blinded them to the most important aspect or dimension of reality. (15) In this, however, they were no different from their antiracist opponents. My point is that the antiracists condemned these men as “scientific racists” because their theories, and the data upon which they based their theories, contradicted the antiracist idea that the only biological differences between the races are differences in appearance, and that any other differences are cultural and/or caused by the legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in general. This idea, to which antiracists inflexibly adhere, did not arise out of scientific observation but is entirely political in origin. In 1963, Dr. Carleton S. Coon, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists when the association voted to censure a book as racist and unscientific while admitting in a show of hands that the vast majority of them had not even read the book. If materialism kept both sides in this debate from the full truth, by blinding both to the spiritual aspect of reality, the antiracists willingly removed themselves a step further from the truth, by subjecting science to political dogma, in a manner worthy of Trofim Lysenko.

What is most apparent about antiracism, in this approach to truth, is just how ideological it is. For the purposes of this discussion, we will define an ideology as a rigid set of inflexible doctrines, lacking the internal self-correction mechanism of a tradition, that are believed to contain the technical blueprint for solving most if not all of the world’s problems. Antiracism is by its very nature an ideology. It is an inflexible belief in the equality of the races and the rigid conviction that racism is the root of all evil which if extirpated will bring justice, peace, and happiness to all.

Racism, on the other hand, while it can be ideological, as it was in the case of National Socialism, more often than not is not. This is an important reason for considering antiracism to be the worse of the two evils. A racist might be a person who, for some reason or another, dislikes a particular racial group but who does not allow that dislike to overrule his sense of fairness and cause him to mistreat members of that group and who does not make his dislike of that group the most important thing in his life. While there are ideological racists, for whom race is the lens through which the world is to be viewed, who see life as a Darwinian struggle for existence between the races and build their entire life around this idea, most racists, at least in my experience, are of the former type.

Auberon Waugh had the right idea, I think, about ideological racism and antiracism when he wrote:

For myself, I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board. Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously. (16)

Of course, the Race Relations Board, like its Canadian equivalent the Human Rights Commission, has the power to impose its ideas upon people. Everyone must therefore take it seriously, if they wish to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness, whereas the National Front has no such power, and is taken seriously only by its own members the Race Relations Board. Therefore the Race Relations Board is the more harmful by far.

Nor is it merely the Race Relations Board or the Canadian Human Rights Commission that ideological antiracism has at its disposal. The schools, universities, and churches as well as the news and entertainment media have become its propaganda arms. Government child protection agencies have used the racism of parents as an excuse to remove children from the home. (17) Its attempts to root out incipient racism and nip it in the bud at younger and younger ages might be comical (18) if it were not so Orwellian.

In this ideologically driven effort to mobilize the institutions of an entire society for the purpose of indoctrinating all of its members with a simplistic message and eradicating a chosen scapegoat, antiracism resembles nothing so much as the Nazism it believes it is protecting us from.

If you think that comparison is unfair, that antiracists are the white knights protecting society from a resurgent Nazism ready to break forth the moment they let their guard down (how mighty white of them) then consider what antiracism has actually looked like in practice. In Canada, the UK, Europe and Europe a system of thought control has been imposed, that punishes white people for expressing even the mildest of racist thoughts, with stiff fines, gag orders, expulsion from schools, the loss of jobs and/or careers, and occasionally jail time. The system encourages people to turn in their relatives and friends and goes without a large public outcry, in part because the news media are complicit in the process and refuse to report on it, and in part because antiracism has dulled people’s sense of outrage by convincing them that the victims are racists, and therefore deserve what is coming to them. Meanwhile, the system metes out punishment, not just to the accused racists, but to those who speak out against the system who are lumped with the accused racists.

In other countries, the effects of antiracism have been far more severe. Here we return to our second charge against antiracism, that it is a form of racism directed against white people, and that it is not the mild ethnic joke or stereotype variety of racism either. It was antiracism, that motivated the UK and other Western countries to oppose Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia, leading to the rise of Robert Mugabe, the transformation of Rhodesia into the dysfunctional hellhole of Zimbabwe, and the murder of the white Rhodesians. (19) When South Africa gave in to the demands the world, again motivated by antiracism, was making on it, it led to the rise to power of the African National Congress, which has gradually been recreating what happened in the former Rhodesia. The murders of the white Afrikaner or Boer farmers, vastly underreported by the world press, have been classified as the start of a genocide. (20)

“Those are extreme examples.” “That sort of thing could never happen over here.”

Perhaps. It is interesting, however, that during the last several decades, as progressive antiracism has become the entrenched ideology in Western countries, white fertility rates have dropped below population replacement levels and remained low, as these countries have opened their borders to mass immigration from non-white countries, opting to replace rather than reproduce their populations. (21) The dates have already been projected for when whites will become minorities in the United States and Canada and those dates are not far off.

What do you suppose is going to happen to white people in these countries when they become minorities in countries where the official ideology, drummed into everyone from earliest childhood in schools, on television, and in popular music and film, all dissent from which is punished by social convention and/or hate laws, teaches that racism is the ultimate sin, that only white people are guilty of it, and that only non-whites are its victims?

The answer, if you have not already figured it out for yourself, can be found in Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, first published forty years ago. (22) Read it if you dare. (23)

(1) Tim Sale, “Eric Robinson may be rude, but he is not a racist”, Winnipeg Free Press, August 31, 2013, A17, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/eric-robinson-may-be-rude-but-he-is-not-a-racist-221899441.html

(2) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

(3) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/02/demon-idol-of-equality.html

(4) In this dialogue Socrates, who is awaiting his trial on a false charge of impiety, encounters a young man who thinks he is pious but who embodies impiety, by seeking in the name of the gods to lay a capital charge against his father. The two enter into a discussion of the nature of piety. While most commentary on this dialogue focuses on the arguments, do not overlook the fact that in the end, Euthyphro is dissuaded from pursuing his impious suit.

(5) Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Inventione, 2:22.

(6) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 121, Article One. See also Q. 101 on the virtue of pietas.

(7) “Chick Cancer”, Family Guy, Fox Broadcasting Company, original airdate November 26, 2006.

(8) Jerry Dammers, “Racist Friend”, recorded by The Special A.K.A. and released as a single in 1983 and on album In the Studio (2 Tone Records, 1984)

(9) James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science, (London: Icon Books Ltd., 2010).

(10) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/02/local/la-me-arthur-jensen-20121102

(11) http://psychology.uwo.ca/facultyremembrance.htm


(12) The theory basically postulates that species fall upon a spectrum between r-selection, in which parents have a lot of offspring but invest little in each particular offspring and K-selection, in which parents have fewer offspring with a larger investment in each, and that certain combinations of traits can be associated with either end of the spectrum. Rushton applied the theory to differences between populations within the same species, i.e., mankind.

(13) This book, published by Harvard University Press in 1975, like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which came out a couple of years earlier was largely made possible by the research of W. D. Hamilton, particularly that found in his two part “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. Hamilton proposed a theory that explained the paradox of how socially cooperative or even altruistic behaviour could improve the fitness of an individual organism’s genes. Wilson’s book was more ambitious than Dawkins’. He proposed a new discipline, a synthesis of ethology, anthropology, and other disciplines that concerned social behaviour among animals and humans. As the proposed name of the new discipline suggests, it is based on the idea that all social behaviour can be explained biologically.

(14) Wilson tells the story of the antiracist attack on him, led by his Harvard colleagues Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, in his autobiography Naturalist (Washington D. C.,: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 1994). See also Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(15) For an excellent rebuttal of this materialistic worldview see Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle, (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000).

(16) Auberon Waugh, “Che Guevara in the West Midlands”, originally printed in The Spectator, July 6, 1976, reprinted in Brideshead Benighted (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), p. 155.

(17) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/unrepentant-nazi-mom-aims-to-get-her-kids-back/article1365488/


(18) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139735/Babies-develop-racist-traits-aged-months-coming-contact-races.html Note the quotation from Lisa Scott about reducing or eliminating the biases.

(19) Ian Smith told the story in his memoirs Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath (London: Blake Publishing Ltd., 2001).

(20) http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html


(21) My essay “The Suicide Cult” discusses how this policy, and the ideology behind it, is an ideology of racial and national suicide: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(22) Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints (Petoskey: The Social Contract Press: 1995) which is a reprint of the 1975 Scribner edition, translated by Norman Shapiro from the original French edition published in 1973.

(23) The text is available online here: http://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

The Demon Idol of Equality

The word idol comes from a Greek word meaning “image”. An idol, in the most literal sense, is a physical image of a god used in worship. The word idol is also used to refer to any deity worshipped by man other than the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who became incarnate as Man in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. This meaning of the word idol is derived from the first, and there is yet another meaning which is derived from the second one. In the third sense of the word, an idol is anything which is given the honour, worship, praise, faith and obedience that is due to God alone, regardless of whether that thing is literally conceived of as a god or not. We sometimes speak of fanatical believers in economic liberalism, for example, as “marketolators”, because the faith they place in the free market often seems to be the kind which would be more appropriately placed in God, although they obviously do not believe the forces of supply and demand to be a living, sentient being that can answer their prayers.

The wickedness of idolatry is a major theme of the Old Testament. The Ten Commandments declare that the Israelites are to have no other god than The LORD and that they are not to make or bow down to idols. The Book of Genesis takes the things worshipped as deities in pagan religions and systematically declares them to be part of the creation of the one true God. In the plagues sent against Pharaoh and Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the God of Israel is revealed to be sovereign over the deities of Egypt. The Israelites are frequently warned against participating in the idolatrous worship of the peoples in the lands surrounding them. Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were miraculously saved from the furnace by God when they faithfully refused to bow down to the image Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself. When God’s judgement fell upon Israel it was frequently due to their turning to idols.

Some gruesome practices were associated with literal idol worship, including human sacrifice. Ordinarily this involved the sacrifice of enemies captured in war, which was horrible enough, but in some cases it went a step further. The heathen deity Moloch, worshipped by several people groups in the Near East, demanded that his worshippers sacrifice their own children to him. The Bible contrasts Moloch with the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Only once did the Lord demand such a sacrifice, to test the faith and obedience of Abraham, and He prevented Abraham from actually carrying out the sacrifice. In the New Testament, in the light of which the Old Testament must be understood, God gives His own Son to be the final, sufficient, and efficient sacrifice that takes away the sin of the world and propitiates divine wrath.

While all idol worship was forbidden to the Israelites, the worship of Moloch was singled out for specific condemnation in Leviticus. Disregard for these warnings brought quick and severe judgement upon Israel, and the sacrifice of children to Moloch so defiled the spot where it took place that a curse was pronounced upon it (2 Kings 23:10) and its name Tophet, and indeed the name of the valley in which it was located, Hinnom, became symbols of being utterly and absolutely cursed and under God’s wrath.

The most literal kind of idol worship is not very common these days, although idolatry, in the sense of placing ones faith in, worshipping, and serving something other than the true and living God, remains widespread and one of the root causes of other sins. Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, (1) discusses some of the more popular forms of idolatry out there today. One idol that he does not discuss however, is the Moloch of modern times, the contemporary false god who requires that his worshippers sacrifice their children. That idol is a devil indeed – the demon idol of equality.

A tremendous amount of blood has been shed in the worship of this false god since the beginning of the modern age. Equality was one of the counterfeit trinity to whom the French Revolutionaries offered up their libations of blood – fraternity and liberty being the other two. It was in the name of social, political, and economic equality that most revolutions of the 19th Century were carried out. In the 20th Century, attempts to build an egalitarian society brought about such horrors as Lenin’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s state-induced famines, the prison camps of the GULAG, and Pol Pot’s systematic slaughter of the educated, religious, and middle classes of Cambodia.

Now some idols are inherently evil whereas others are things which are good in their proper place but become idols and evil by being made to be more important than they really are. Which kind is equality?

It would be unfair to condemn equality as being inherently evil just because evil, even evil of the sort mentioned above, has been committed in its name. Evil has been done in the name of virtually every good cause that has ever existed. To demonstrate that there is something inherently wrong with equality we would have to demonstrate that the evil committed in its name was a natural and necessary consequence of the idea of equality itself.

That such a relationship exists between equality and certain kinds of evil is a theme that has long existed in traditional folklore. In ancient Greece, for example, the legend of the hero Theseus, tells of how his mother sent him to his father’s kingdom in Athens, and on the way he entered into a number of adventures. In one of those adventures, he encountered the giant Procrustes, who offered hospitality to travelers, but insisted that they be made to fit the bed he had constructed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too tall, he cut something off. Several lessons are contained in this legend, including a warning against the folly of trying to force people to fit a model they do not naturally conform to. That egalitarianism is an attempt to do just that was made clear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in his short story “Harrison Bergeron”, a modern day retelling of the Procrustean legend. The story is set in a futuristic version of the United States, where a bureaucracy makes sure all the citizens are fully equal, by handicapping anyone who possesses an advantage which others do not have. (2)

What is recognized in this tradition of story-telling is that people are not naturally equal and that attempts to make them equal against their nature, do violence to them.

This is the opposite, of the sentiment Thomas Jefferson famously expressed in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” If we reflect upon it, however, it is not difficult to see that reality is better reflected in the tradition warning us against the egalitarian ideal than in Jefferson’s wartime propaganda. It is not at all self-evident that all men are created equal, indeed, it is self-evident that they are not.

Some men are tall others are short, and while it is possible to find two or more men of equal height, it would not be true to say that all men in general are “equal” in terms of height. What is true of height is also true of weight, and of strength, intelligence, beauty, talent, and all other such measurable traits. In none of them is there a general equality and when two people can be found to be equal in any one trait, it is very unlikely that they will be equal in many of the other traits as well.

Now some might come to Jefferson’s defense by saying “that isn’t what he meant, he wasn’t talking about equality with regards to measurable qualities, but equality with regards to intrinsic worth or value and possession of natural rights”. The problem is, that while it is undoubtedly true that Jefferson had some such concept in mind, it is also true that this concept of equality is in no way “self-evident”, but can only be arrived at through revelation, philosophical deduction, or speculation.

As a matter of fact, this concept of equality is not true at all but is a perversion of the concept of justice. To be just to people, to treat them right, is to give them that which is due them. If justice, a virtue which men are supposed to practice, is giving each person their due, it necessarily follows that there are things which people are due, or entitled to. Those things are what we refer to when we speak of somebody’s “rights”. The idea that people have rights is therefore a necessary part of the concept of justice. What is not a necessary part of the concept of justice is the idea that what Person A is entitled to is identical or equal to what Person B is entitled to. Indeed, the idea which equates justice and equality and declares that what one person is entitled to, the next person must be entitled to as well, makes no sense. If two people enter into an enterprise together, in which one person contributes 80% of the investment and his partner contributes 20%, justice requires, not that they split the profits equally, but that they divide them in proportion to their investment. If peoples’ rights, in accordance with justice, can be said to be equal, they are equal only in the sense that no person is any more or any less entitled to what is his own than any other person, not in the sense that any one person is entitled to the same status, wealth, and power as every other person. As Edmund Burke put it “In this partnership [of civil society] all men have equal rights, but not to equal things”.

One form of justice is legal justice, in which a judge settles disputes between two or more parties or hears accusations of criminal wrongdoing and passes judgement on the basis of the evidence. This kind of justice is traditionally depicted as being blind. This is to indicate that in the administration of this kind of justice, only the facts of the case should be considered, and not the rank or wealth of the parties. The idea that justice should be impartial has been around since ancient times and it can also be expressed as an ideal of equality – the ideal that all people be equal in the eyes of the law. It may be best not to express the ancient concept of impartial justice in this way, however. The administration of legal justice is imperfect because it must be administered by human beings who are imperfect. When the ideal of justice is expressed in terms of equality this creates a temptation for people to blame the imperfections in human justice, not on the imperfection of the human heart, but on differences of rank and wealth between people in a society, and to demand that these differences be eliminated.

Attempts to level society in this way, however, can never bring about the perfect justice hoped for, because they misdiagnose the cause of injustice for which there is no human cure. Attempts to create a just society by artificially engineering equality are themselves acts of injustice, often injustice on a large scale. Hence the warnings against the egalitarian ideal in traditional folklore.

The ideal of equality is a favorite tool of revolutionaries. A revolution is an attempt to alter the order of society by force. Revolutionaries may be sincere in their belief that they can bring about a better world, although more often than not they are just interested in seizing power for themselves. If they are sincere, they are deluded, because evil and suffering are part of the human estate which they are powerless to change, which is why revolutions typically produce nothing but massive amounts of violence and misery.

Revolutions typically draw their supporters from the young and naïve. The idea of equality lends itself to fomenting revolutions because it presents as ideal a condition which is completely foreign to human nature and which is therefore tailor made to generate discontent.

Equality is not something like which is good in itself, but which becomes bad when we make an idol out of it. It was itself a perversion of something good, justice, before we ever made it into an idol. After we made it into an idol, it quickly became the new Moloch.

Consider the doctrine of racial equality, which has become official dogma in the Western world in the decades following World War II. In those decades white liberals in Western governments have introduced liberal immigration policies encouraging mass immigration from non-white countries, laws against racial discrimination which are selectively enforced against whites alone, and de jure discrimination policies in favour of non-whites which are euphemistically called “affirmative action”. They also began a major propaganda campaign in the media (news and entertainment) and the public education system designed to teach people that the greatest evil in the world is “racism” and that “racism” is committed solely or primarily by white people. Opposition to all of this was discouraged by quick accusations of “racism” against anyone who dared open their mouth, and in some cases by laws against “hate speech” which are never enforced against violently anti-white language but only against white people.

During that same period the fertility rates of white people groups dropped below the level needed to sustain their populations and have remained that low ever since.

What all of this amounts to is the collective sacrifice of their children on the part of white people. White people are not having the children they should be having to sustain their population. They have introduced policies that artificially handicap what children they do have to benefit other peoples’ children. They are indoctrinating their children with an ideology that renders them helpless against the hatred of other people by instilling in them a sense of collective guilt for the “racism” of their ancestors.

In the name of what god is this sacrifice of the future well-being of the children of an entire race taking place?

It is taking place in the name of racial equality. The anti-racist movement has had “racial equality” as its ideal from the beginning. Just as equality is not the same thing as justice, but is a perversion of the concept, so racial equality is not the same thing as racial justice, the idea that different races should treat each other fairly, justly, and well, but is a perversion of that concept and one which, as we have just seen, is itself the source of a major injustice against future generations of white people. (3)

Another example of how the idol of equality demands the sacrifice of children can be found in the feminist movement. The feminist movement counts as its first wave the suffragist movement which sought the vote for women. The second wave began in the 1960’s as a demand for full social and economic equality between men and women. Second-wave feminism had two wings – a radical wing, which was formed by women who had joined other radical left-wing movements and were unhappy with the way the male radicals treated them, and a more mainstream liberal wing. The demands of the two wings of feminism were often quite different, but one area where they overlapped, was in the demand for legal, unrestricted, and free and easy access to abortion. This has remained a central demand of feminism in all of its subsequent waves, albeit one which the movement has long achieved as the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada gave in to this demand decades ago.

Abortion is the deliberate termination of pregnancy resulting in death to the unborn fetus. While ethicists debate the personhood of the fetus, by splitting hairs over the definition of “person”, it is undeniable that the fetus is a) living and b) human – it possesses a full set of human chromosomes from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. Abortion is therefore the termination of a human life. Since it does not fall into any justifiable category of homicide it clearly belongs in the category of murder. Why is the demand for something this awful so central to the feminist cause?

It is central to the feminist cause, because feminism’s ideal is “equality of the sexes”. This ideal is contrary to human nature, however. Human beings are a sexual species – we are divided into two sexes, and it is through the union of the two sexes that we reproduce. The burden of reproduction does not fall upon both sexes equally, however. Pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body and lasts for nine months. After birth, a human child is helpless to fend for itself and must be looked after for years. The mother’s body is designed to produce milk to nourish the child in its initial state of helplessness before it can be weaned and move on to solid food.

Human societies have traditionally insisted that men share this burden with women, by marrying the women who bear their children and providing for them. Feminism, however, demands a different solution. Feminism demands that women be fully independent of men in a society in which they are fully equal with men politically, socially, and economically. Such a society cannot exist so long as women bear the burden of pregnancy and childbirth as a consequence of sexual activity. Thus the central place abortion has held in feminism’s demands.

Progressives today, treat the victories of the feminist and anti-racist movements in the last six decades as if they were the greatest human achievements of all time, upon which the future happiness of humanity depends. The reality is that both movements, by demanding equality rather than true justice and making equality into an ultimate good, have set up the worst kind of idol possible, the kind which demands the sacrifice of its worshippers’ children.

The Letter of Jeremiah warned the inhabitants of Jersusalem who were about to be taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, against the idols they will find there. These idols should not be feared because they are not true gods, the letter explains, they cannot raise up a king, or send rain upon men, or redress a wrong. The letter ends by saying that these idols “shall be a reproach in the country” and that:

“Better therefore is the just man that hath none idols: for he shall be far from reproach.” (verse 73, Authorized Version)

The idol of equality is our reproach in the modern Western world.

(1) Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton Adult, 2009)

(2) The first paragraph reads “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” The title character has the misfortune to be born with all of these advantages. The short story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science in October 1961, and was later republished in the Vonnegut anthology Welcome to the Monkey House.

(3) Racial equality is also a nonsensical concept. No two individuals are absolutely equal, i.e., equal in every respect. If two individuals are equal in height, they will be unequal in some other area such as weight. The same thing is true of groups as well, racial and otherwise. In the comparison of groups it is averages which matter and the averages of different groups vary. This does not mean that one group is absolutely superior to any or all others. There are areas in which one group is stronger and another weaker and areas in which it is the other way around. The dogma of racial equality hinders intelligent discussion of this matter. In 1989, J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled “Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)”. In this paper, and in his later book Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, originally published by Transaction Publishers in 1995, subsequently expanded and republished by the Charles Darwin Research Institute, Rushton argued that racial differences could be explained by the r/k selection theory. He was demonized by the press, denounced by the government of Ontario, and even investigated by the Ontario police. The anger his paper, address, and book generated, was not due to his theory, which was, after all, only an explanatory hypothesis, but rather due to the facts that theory purported to explain, i.e., the existence of racial differences. Lost in the controversy was the simple truth that whether or not his theory was right or wrong, the differences it attempted to explain are real and well-documented, and that vilifying Rushton would do absolutely nothing to change that fact.