More mainstream data: racism is a hoax

First, the Z-man blog post.

Happy Juneteenth everyone! Officially, this long tradition dating back to Monday is celebrated on Saturday, but the ruling regime has declared the preceding Friday as a day off for our hardworking civil servants. The rest of us, of course, will have to continue slaving away at the salt mines, but the people who really make this country work will get the day off to celebrate the people who built the country. Even as we toil, we should take a moment to think about both groups.

In a way, the ridiculousness of this new holiday fits perfectly with the absurdity of modern liberal democracy. [T]he system is nothing like it is claimed. Instead of bringing the citizens into the decision making process, it systematically excludes the majority. This new holiday is a great example of how it works. Exactly no one wanted it. Few even heard of it. The people have many higher concerns, but they are ignored in favor of this novelty.

It is also good timing for Charles Murray’s new book. The thesis of the book is that the elites need to accept biological reality or face the wrath of the angry Saxon. This new holiday is a good example of what he means. Ruling class whites pandering to blacks creates friction between whites and blacks over trivial items. It encourages nonwhites to embrace tribal politics, which discourages whites from embracing the active indifference necessary to make a multiracial society work.

There are other things wrong with Murray’s argument. The great Roger Devlin has posted a comprehensive review on VDare. There will be other reviews from dissidents in the coming weeks. Ed Dutton may have summarized it best when he said that Murray is right, but he should have written this book in 1965 or even 1985. At this point, the die is cast and there is no escaping the thing he is warning against. The fact that Washington just created this absurd new holiday is proof of that.

Of course, the fact that both parties eagerly embraced this idiotic idea makes clear that the elites will never face reality on their own. History says they will have their awakening as the trap door swings open. The system we have today is unsustainable, for the simple reason the people at the top define themselves by their hatred of the people over whom the rule. Most of the pols who voted for this new holiday did so out of spite and the rests did so to curry favor with those spiteful mutants.

The VDare review mentioned above is also pretty good.

Charles Murray’s just-published Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America is an elegantly brief (168 pages) essay devoted to summarizing the great mass of evidence for the existence and persistence of significant racial differences in two areas: 1) cognitive ability, aka intelligence, and 2) violent crime rates. Taken together, this evidence is irrefutable, and informed experts have pretty well given up contesting it.  In dramatic contrast, public debate has actually gone backward since Murray co-authored The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1994. He hopes his politely rational arguments can change that—or that the Ruling Class will heed his warning about a white backlash. Too bad he’s wrong.

Facing Reality was inspired by the slogans of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. It is Murray’s patient attempt to explain to anyone who will listen just why such incendiary charges “float free of reality,” in the words of the front jacket flap.

Murray’s focus is limited to the USA, yet he refers to American whites as “Europeans” and American blacks as “Africans.” This is due not to any recent conversion to racial nationalism, but because he hopes a more clinical terminology will “make it easier to look at some inflammatory issues with at least a little more dispassion.”

Good luck with that.

And also:

There is really nothing to criticize about Murray’s presentation of the evidence for his “two truths about race in America,” although it will certainly be ignored by those who most need to face up to that evidence.

In a final chapter, however, he goes beyond the data to speculate on what might happen “If We Don’t Face Reality.” This involves speculation and interpretation, leaving much more room for disagreement.

But let us begin with his valuable admission that racial identity politics has strong evolutionary roots:

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes.

Yet a few countries, pre-1965 America conspicuous among them, successfully developed high levels of trust independent of kinship bonds. Such countries have fostered historically exceptional levels of human achievement and prosperity.

Murray himself is a typical product of such a society in that thinking in racial terms does not come naturally to him: he invariably treats races as collections of individuals among whom non-random patterns happen to be observable rather than as (roughly) constant gene pools which perpetuate themselves across the generations.

Where does this individualistic mindset come from? Murray attributes it to the American Founders, who enshrined as in “The American Creed.” He might have profited by considering Kevin MacDonald’s argument that northern Europeans (such as our Founders) are the product of an unusual evolutionary environment in which the ability to cooperate with non-kin, including the careful maintenance of a personal reputation for fair dealing with them, was of greater importance than kinship bonds. This is inherently more plausible than seeing American individualism as the invention of a group of Enlightenment-era political savants.

One powerful reason to suspect our individualism and tendency to de-emphasize race and kinship has deeper roots is the slowness of American whites to adopt racial identity politics for themselves. Murray approves of such reluctance. He may not like minority racial politics, yet his principal fear appears to be that Whites may begin to develop something similar.

In other words, he believes the current double standard forbidding Whites (and only Whites) from pursuing their group interests—while permitting or encouraging such behavior in other groups—is a lesser evil than Whites starting to behave like everybody else and fight fire with fire. In his own words: “If Whites adopt identity politics, disaster follows.”

But disaster for whom? Not for Whites themselves, apparently. Murray acknowledges:

If a minority consisting of 13 percent of the population can generate as much political energy and solidarity as America’s Blacks have, what happens when a large proportion of the 60 percent of the population that is White begins to use the same playbook?

Maybe they start winning for a change?

But no, that is definitely not the conclusion Murray wishes us to draw. Instead, his fear is that the American government will lose legitimacy:

The federal government has enacted thousands of laws and regulations [that] apply to every family and business in the nation. They cannot possibly be enforced by the police or courts without almost universal voluntary compliance. When a government is seen as legitimate, most citizens voluntarily comply because they believe it is their duty. When people see laws as products of the illegitimate use of power, the sense of obligation fades.

This, then, is the disaster which Charles Murray fears will result from the growth of white identity politics: Non-elite white Trump-voters with American flags on their pickup trucks may stop cooperating with the sanctimonious elite whites and resentful nonwhites who rule over them! They must not stand up for themselves because it could prove to be a disaster to their enemies!

The final chapter of Facing Reality is, albeit unintentionally, the most encouraging argument in favor of white identity politics that I have ever read. 

As always, my go-to link for the data here is at Those Who Can See. The Unz Review has loads of data available too, in a long series of articles.

The reality, of course, is that diversity means actual difference. We are indeed commanded to love our neighbor, but we need to stop and think about what that means before we run off a cliff in an emotionally induced hysteria. For one thing, we can't love our neighbor if we're in denial about their nature. If we only love an abstract idea of them that assumes that they are interchangeable widgets with ourselves, then that isn't love. In fact, it's probably quite the opposite of it. We need to figure out how to love our neighbor without destroying our own posterity in an orgy of self-righteous virtue-signaling.

So far, we have absolutely no hope of accomplishing that, because most Americans, or at least most who have any kind of voice in public and social policy, are in complete denial about black and white facts like those mentioned above by Charles Murray.

UPDATE: Here's another post reviewing Murray's new books. https://www.takimag.com/article/a-book-without-an-audience/

The final chapter is where things go off the rails for Murray. His primary reason for writing the book is not to educate his friends and neighbors on the reality of race, but to warn them that their overt hatred of white people could lead to a backlash. Seeing every tribe in the country use identity politics to advance their interests could lead to whites embracing the same thing. According to Murray, that would be worse than death.

This is why Murray is the most brilliant example of the modern conservative. He fully embraces the morality of the other side, while complaining about how they are implementing their morality. In this case, his premise is the left-wing assertion that white solidarity is the worst thing possible, because white people are by nature the evilest people on the planet. In other words, he endorses the blood libel against whites.

In the end, the title of the book is ironic. It is men like Charles Murray, the old conservative guard, who refuse to accept reality. America will be a majority-minority society in a couple of decades. ed. note: This makes the unlikely assumption that current trends will have nothing to alter them, of course. No society has existed peacefully under such an arrangement, especially when a tiny minority sits at the top, maintaining itself by pitting one group against another.

If there was a time for making the points Murray makes in his book, it was half a century ago when the usual suspects were opening the gates to immigrants. America was 90% white and ready to do something about the black population. Maybe in 1985, when the country was 85% white, this argument would have been helpful. In 2020 it is just more defeatism from the people who are largely to blame for the current crisis.

Further, facts and reason are not how one deals with a partisan. This is something the long struggle with communism should have taught guys like Murray. Instead, this generation of so-called conservatives stubbornly clings to the childish notion that their ideas alone will defeat the left. They think if they present the facts the right way, their opponents will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.

Given his age, this will probably be Murray’s last book, and it is a fitting end to his career and his generation’s politics. A determined unwillingness to accept the reality of partisan politics and the unwillingness to defend the institutions of society are where the blame lies for the current crisis. Those who survive the looming demographic catastrophe and begin the task of rebuilding the West will look back at this book and wonder why it ever needed to be written.

I'm not actually sure in what sense the reviewer considers Murray a conservative, though.