Such Is The Stuff That Bigotry Is Made Of

Anyone who believes that IQ is anything but a scientific superstition and delusion either doesn't know what it's claimed to be or they are an idiot.  Or they're a self-interested social-scientist or someone who wants to use their bogus claims for no good purpose.  Idiots in the scribbling profession have the shield of their general stupidity and ignorance, the social scientists have no such excuse.  IQ is as much a constructed fiction as natural selection is and almost as dangerous.  Originally, it was conceived, in France as a tool of trying to improve peoples' knowledge, under the use of those who adopted it, it immediately became a tool of eugentic-racism and discrimination.  And, surprise, surprise, it became so by linking it to natural selection.   The two, together, with the use they've been put to from the time of their invention are a good starting point to study the dangers of that kind of scientific malpractice.  Especially as those are absorbed by the a-scientific general culture, journalism and the law and politics. 

Bret Stephens is a bigoted idiot.  His list of geniuses in his NYT op-ed the other day is a really dumb one for making the claims he made.  Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx. 

Several of them are undoubtedly geniuses,  Einstein, Disraeli, Marx are all genuine geniuses.  I didn't say they were all swell guys, but these three produced work of genuine genius.  

One was very fine scientist who was cheated by sabotage and theft by a member of her lab working with a rival, Rosalind Franklin.  

One Sarah Bernhardt, was a legendary actress but who knows if she'd get laughed out of the audition room today.  I suspect that her acting would seem as ridiculous today as some of the recorded acting from seventy years ago does.  . 

And one was a writer who would probably be more famous for recording his symptoms on paper than as a literary genius in a less freak-show oriented milieu than 20th century modernism is,  Kafka.  I read a lot of Kafka when I was young.  I don't consider him a genius, I consider him mentally ill, a literary Adolf Wölfli.  

Most of them came from either solid middle-class or affluent childhoods. Bernhardt, the daughter of one of the highest class prostitutes in Paris had the good luck to have had her father, of unknown heritage, support her, whether from a sense of obligation or blackmail, who knows.  She went to good schools from which she started her career as an actor.  We have little to no record of her acting except a recording of her voice and silent movies from when she was very old.  I imagine her in her prime as a kind of more melodramatic Marie Bell, but that's just my imagination. 

Kafka, Einstein, and Marx were beneficiaries of the rigorous German educational practices and the milieu of wider German culture of their times.  The role of that cannot be ignored and it's not due to genetics nor is it attributable to Ashkenazi Jewish culture - I wouldn't even call it attributable to "German culture" but to decisions made by those who wanted to make Germany a united world power.  The results of those who had the benefit of it - which they would have had to choose to take advantage of - however that might have also figured into individual cases, can't be generalized on the basis of ethnicity.  

Oddly, I'm not that versed in Marx's earliest biography but none of those figures seems to have been that steeped in the heritage they are assigned to.  When I saw Einstein's name as used by Stephens, all I could think of was the time he said it was unfortunate that for Germans he wasn't considered a Swiss Jew and for the English he wasn't considered an example of German science.  I wonder what he'd have said of the use that Bret Stephens made of him. 

Disraeli is the closest any of them come to being a "self-made" man though his upbringing was certainly not without educational opportunities nor was it an example of Ashkenazi culture, his father's family being Sephardi and even his father's nominal religious Judaism ended when he had a fight with the Rabbi and converted to Anglicanism, which the young Benjamin entered when he was still young.  He went on to read the law instead of to a university and then went on to writing trashy popular novels and then to politics.  He certainly had an interesting life, none of which makes the point Stephens wants to use him for.   But you can't try to tease out the life and culture and thinking of a person, especially one who has produced work of genius, to claim some genetic or "cultural" attribution of it. 

The idea that any of these people are a product of an identifiable "ethnic" genetic or cultural heritage is as absurd as I mentioned yesterday in noting that every one of us certainly has a very similar genetic heritage and it isn't until you get back into the untraceable past in all of our African parents that you can talk about something like a narrow range of that.  AND THAT "PURE" HUMAN HERITAGE WILL NEVER, EVER BE DEFINED ADEQUATELY TO LEGITIMATELY CALL THE RESULTS "SCIENCE".  Only, that kind of pure science is never done except within a very limited part of physics and chemistry and in biology only in a few areas such as physiology and by then the systems are so complex that I'm really stretching the definition.  When it comes to any aspect of behavior and any part of the unobservable, untraceable past, the claim is as delusional and superstitious as a belief in IQ.   I have seldom seen such absurdly simplistic appeals to ethnicity, culture or "genes" that wasn't malignant in both its effect and in its intent. 

The extent to which we are still in the late 18th, 19th century, romantic period of science is rather discouraging.  We should have junked the idea of "pure ethnicity" as soon as people thought about how many ancestors they'd have had to have in even the absurdly short time period such claimed definitions are made in.  The fact is that all of us are the product of so many things, including our own thinking, that the illusions of what we call "culture" are ridiculous.  The differences among writers, actors, political theorists, even people in the exact sciences and ESPECIALLY those in the inexact sciences of the same general heritage, ethically and cultural, is probably great enough to make any talk of attributing such characteristics to ethnicity ridiculous.  

"Genius" is such an elusive thing, based on individuality that to make a general claim for it - WHICH IS WHAT A GENETIC CLAIM WOULD HAVE TO BE - flies in the face of what it is.  I would certainly never think that the great historian and one of my heroes, Howard Zinn, had much in common with many of the figures he shared much of his family, local, cultural and chronological background with, someone who wrote about many of the same things.    Irving Kristol, roughly his contemporary,  comes to mind.   

Given the time it would be possible to come up with many long lists of people who are of the same definable background who are too different to find much in common among them. I'd guess you could come up with lists of people from the same family who were very different.  That kind of generalized classification of ethnic "types" is dangerous and stupid and never was valid.  It isn't science, it's malicious folk lore.   It is the stuff that bigotry is made of.