Race & Astronomy:
A Philosophical Perspective, Part 2
Jud Jackson
Part 2 of 2
If race realism is better grounded in reality than racial egalitarianism, how do racial egalitarians still cling to a false doctrine? The answer is by making ad hoc adjustments to their theory. An ad hoc assumption is simply invented to shore up a theory in the face of counter-evidence. There is no other reason to accept it; it does not simplify anything; it leads to no independent discoveries; it only makes the theory more complicated, cumbersome, and counterintuitive.
The classic example of an ad hoc assumption is the Ptolemaic epicycle. The main problem that Ptolemy and his successors encountered was that the actual observed motions of the planets were never exactly predicted by Ptolemy’s theory, which held that planetary orbits are perfect circles. In order to circumvent this problem, the notion of the “planetary epicycle” was invented. The planets were thought not to orbit the earth in perfect circles, but to execute perfect circles on top of the originally posited circle. And if these epicycles did not fully account for observed motions, then epicycles were added on top of epicycles.
William of Ockham originated the Principle of Parsimony or what is also called Ockham’s razor. The general point behind this idea is not to multiply entities unnecessarily. Another way of stating this is that, other things being equal, the simplest explanation is to be preferred over more complicated explanations. Ockham himself used this idea to criticize Plato’s theory of Forms to solve the philosophical problem of universals, but early modern scientists and philosophers of science also make use of it.
Perhaps the most important use of Ockham’s razor was made by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. The assumption that the sun is stationary improved astronomy and led to a greater understanding of many planetary motions. Once the Copernican Revolution was completed by Kepler,[1] it was seen that the epicycles were no longer needed. By supposing that the sun is stationary and that the earth and other planets orbit the sun in ellipses, epicycles were seen to be the ad hoc assumptions that they always were.
Gunnar Myrdal is the Ptolemy of racial science. Just as Ptolemaic astronomy was committed to the false idea of the perfectly circular orbit, Myrdal was committed to the false idea of racial equality. Myrdal was a Swedish social scientist who published the book An American Dilemma in 1944. Myrdal conceded that American blacks really did appear to have the characteristics attributed to them by many American whites. That is, they were more criminal, less intelligent, less future-oriented, and so on.
However, the reason for this has nothing to do with genetic differences between the races, because there are no important genetic differences between the races; the reason is the unfair nature of US society. If racism, Jim Crow, segregation, et al. were removed, blacks would basically act like whites, and America’s race problem would disappear.
It is often awkward for racial egalitarians to concede that blacks have a competitive advantage in many sports over whites and Asians. To do so suggests that the advantage may not be completely environmentally caused but may have its roots in differential genetics. So the usual answer is that blacks excel in basketball and football because the other doors of US and Western society are closed to them; they choose sports only because that is tolerated by white society. But, given a free and just society, they could exceed at theoretical physics, computer engineering, international law, or other typically white vocations.
However, this gets less and less plausible as Affirmative Action marches on. Therefore they may concede that differential sports abilities between the races could be partially under genetic control but then go on to suggest that differences in intelligence could not. For many racial egalitarians, everything is under genetic control except the mind. Note that is just another ad hoc assumption and a violation of Ockham’s razor.[2] If skin color, hair texture, susceptibility to certain diseases, receptability to certain treatments for other diseases are under genetic control, why should intelligence and temperament be exempt from this?
Another ad hoc assumption is structural racism or institutional racism or what may now be called “White Privilege.” Since the 1960s blacks have been given every advantage including Head Start, Affirmative Action, and so on, and yet they still fail in school, commit huge and disproportionate amounts of crime, have an illegitimacy rate greater than 70%, and are stuck in generational poverty. According to racial egalitarianism, there must be some environmental reason for this. The reason is institutional or structural racism. We can’t see it but it must be there or else why would blacks fail, since all races are the same. Is this not simply the racial equivalent of one more planetary epicycle?
The great philosopher of science Karl Popper thought falsifiability is the touchstone of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is falsified if the facts turn out contrary to those predicted by the theory. What should happen next, according to another great philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, is a scientific revolution or paradigm shift. Has there been a crucial experiment to test the Myrdal theory? Of course there has. It has been going on for more than 60 years. Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, and anti-white quotas in universities and the workplace, extended welfare, and so on are largely premised on Myrdal’s book. They were all supposed to upgrade blacks and make racial outcomes equal. And how has it worked out? Are blacks now just like whites? We all know the answer to that. Therefore, racial egalitarianism is false. There can be no reasonable doubt about that. What is now needed is a Kuhnian paradigm shift to race realism. Using Ockham’s razor and six simple words, “Race is genetic, and genes count” could get us there.
The purpose of scientific theories is to explain observed facts. In astronomy, the competing theories are heliocentrism and geocentrism. The facts are the observed positions of the heavenly bodies. In the race problem the facts are racial differences in intelligence, crime, and so forth. Note that Myrdal accepts the facts, but his theory that racism can explain them has been falsified. The latest evolution of racial egalitarianism (if it can still be called that) is the denial of race. Race does not exist; it is an illusion or construct.
Many writers have pointed out that those who hold this view nevertheless support Affirmative Action and seem to understand which race will be the beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and which race will have to pay for it.[3] This is certainly correct, but I think a much stronger criticism can be made. Denying race is no different than if a defender of Ptolemy, faced with the latest challenge from the Copernicans, stated that there are no planets, sun, and stars. The observed facts are no longer explained by the theory; the facts are eliminated. This is, quite simply, crazy. Such a defender of Ptolemy, if one could be found, would be carted off to the nearest insane asylum. The same should be done with those who deny the existence of race.
If my conclusions above are correct, then every reasonable person should be a race realist even before he becomes convinced of the truth of Copernican astronomy. Both epistemology and the philosophy of science show that race realism is more certain and better confirmed than Copernican astronomy. No reasonable person should be a racial egalitarian.
In fact, Ptolemaic astronomy is more rationally defensible than racial egalitarianism (not that I would advise anybody to revert back to Ptolemy). At least there is observational evidence for the geocentric view. There is none for racial egalitarianism, as is pointed out by Michael Levin. He notes that the best of the defenders of this view never cite evidence to show that average black intelligence is high, which they could do if it existed. They simply criticize the methods of Race Realists like Jensen and Rushton which purport to show that black intelligence is low.[5]
Imagine if a group of whites held conferences, published essays in journals and on websites, and made podcasts and YouTube videos all devoted to the theme that blacks were bad in basketball, could not jump high, were slow, could not shoot or rebound well, were given unfair advantages even though everybody knows they are bad, and that all of their apparent success in the game was an illusion manufactured by white liberals. It would be pretty easy to falsify this thesis, would it not? It should be just as easy to falsify the claim that black intelligence is low if such evidence actually existed.
If race realism is so well established, why aren’t we winning? The main reason is that propaganda works. There is no doubt that the Left controls the flow of information to the public and attempts to censor our views whenever it can. Witness the successful attempts to cancel American Renaissance conferences in recent years.
Another related reason we are not winning is that people, even white people, are not terribly rational and seem especially susceptible to brainwashing even in college. I wonder how many people there are who think that Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man gives the last word on race differences and the reality and heritability of intelligence. These are two big parts of the reason for the success of racial egalitarianism. There are undoubtedly others that I am overlooking.
But there are grounds for hope. Although Donald Trump does not appeal to whites explicitly, he does appeal to them implicitly (in the sense discussed by writers like Kevin McDonald), and he is whetting our appetites for more explicit appeals. Also, based on personal observation, I can tell you quite candidly that we are actually winning in Hungary. I have lived in Hungary for over 4 years, and almost all of the Magyars I have met are honest about the Hungarian race problem (i.e., the Gypsies). Almost to a man (certainly upwards of 90%), the Magyars I have spoken to dislike or despise Gypsies. They never say the kind of things that American whites say about blacks; they never say, for example, “Some of my best friends are Gypsies,” or “Yes, there are a few bad Gypsies, but every group has some bad apples.” The Hungarians are not cowed and not afraid to say what they think; they are completely different than American whites. And considering the Hungarian reaction to the Islamic Invasion, I am further bolstered in my hope that whites around the world will wake up soon. They are clearly awake in Hungary and other Eastern European countries; there is no reason why they cannot wake up everywhere.
Notes
1. Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (New York, Jason Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1971). Chapter 1 of this book makes clear that Kepler was at least as important as Copernicus to the success of the Copernican Revolution. It was Kepler, after all, who first suggested the correct theory that the planets orbit the sun in ellipses rather than circles. Probably because of the incredibly powerful influence of Aristotle, both Copernicus and Galileo were committed to the circular orbits of the planets.
2. In preparation of this sub-section I have relied on Jared Taylor’s essay “Sowing the Seeds of Destruction: Gunnar Myrdal’s Assault on America,” American Renaissance, April, 1996.
3. See Levin, p. 117.
4. See Levin, p. 19.
5. See Levin, p. 31. “. . . evidence of the equal intelligence of the races would presumably exist were the races in fact equal, and be prominently cited by the many social scientists who passionately believe they are. Yet this does not happen. Authors like Gould and Kamin tirelessly criticize studies that show black intelligence to be lower than white, but cite no black performances that indicate high mean intelligence. This is one of those cases in which absence of evidence for a hypothesis constitutes evidence against it. Everyday observation, together with the failure of egalitarians to produce evidence that the races are equal, disconfirms racial parity.”
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24 comments
I dig this article
If race realism is so well established, why aren’t we winning?
With respect to racial realism gaining ground, we are winning. (Though perhaps you’re wondering why this isn’t occurring at a faster rate.)
With respect to pro-white policies being enacted, there is no necessary connection between racial realism and pro-white policy (even if many a white race realist would desire pro-white policies). Leftists could very easily maintain that (race-realistic) racial inequality is but one more manifestation of injustice that equalitarian policies are required to redress. Socialist doyen G.A. Cohen, had he addressed himself to racial realism, would surely have taken such a line; he would not have been at all moved by the fact that such racial differences are the product of nature. Should race-denial ever become untenable, we should not be at all surprised to see leftists adopt this position en masse.
Also, based on personal observation, I can tell you quite candidly that we are actually winning in Hungary.
I’m sure it was refreshing to hear forthright expressions of racial loyalty, but this does not actually count as evidence of winning. It would only be evidence of winning if Hungarians at some earlier stage were race-deniers who indiscriminately mixed with gypsies, but having been convinced by race-realist arguments began to tailor their behavior accordingly. This is obviously not the case. If anything, the trend in Hungary is much like the trend in the Balkans, with efforts under way to better integrate gypsies into society. Even if for now it remains social death to mix with gypsies, you should take heed from the fact that American racial attitudes didn’t change overnight but change they did.
Surprised to see Levin cited as an authority on race realism given his (((Calvinist))) background. I wonder what he would think of a website like Counter-Currents referencing his work.
Levin’s a Jew, but facts are facts. His arguments and analysis stand up. I recommend Why Race Matters and his earlier book Feminism and Freedom to all my readers.
I recall that National Vanguard Books under William Pierce sold Why Race Matters — and that was the very expensive hardback edition published by Praeger. Pierce evidently thought it was an important book. He also counted on readers to educate themselves on the Jewish problem with other works distributed by National Vanguard Books.
Excellent point Greg. Both books are great. Of all the books on the race problem I have read, WRM is the best. This is not to take away anything from Taylor, Rushton, Jensen, etc. But WRM summarizes the entire problem in a way that none of these other authors do.
I also recommend Levin’s “Metaphysics and the Mind Body Problem” published in 1979. It has the best defense of “Compatibilism” in the Free Will versus Determinism problem that I have ever seen. However, unlike the books on race and feminism, I think Levin’s position of Materialism is not right. David Chalmers book, “The Conscious Mind” is to my mind (no pun intended), the classic in the Philosophy of Mind. Chalmers completely refutes Materialism.
Ptolemy’s theory agreed with a notion from Greek physics – that perfect motion was circular, and that the heavenly bodies exemplified perfect motion. It was ‘idealistic’ in a way, but was not contemptible or even dangerous – at worst, it became convoluted.
The lack of evidence for equality just spurs the warriors on, because the more tolerable ones believe that they are defending equality ‘before the law’ against all the contingencies (chiefly: wealth, status) that might pervert it. But the more inequality they find, the more work that needs to be done! And the worst of them are trying to make the modern English political tradition implode on itself. There are no brakes on this train.
I would also add that these are some of the most short-sighted people you could ever meet. They do not remember last Thursday and cannot imagine next Tuesday. They are like infants. Arguments about ancestry and (genetic) inheritance mean more to adults. Children live in the mythical.
As a child and a young adult I was attracted to movies and novels which placed the characters in difficult, high-pressure situations in which the decisions they made would have a huge impact on the lives of large numbers of people. Of such decisions, none were more important than those which related to the existence of the nation. (So WWII and the Cold War figured prominently as a theme in the books I read and movies I watched.)
As an adult I realized that not all important human decisions were quite so fateful. Something of my earlier fascination must have remained with me, though, because when I first began reading hereditarian literature, one of the main stumbling blocks to accepting their arguments was that, if true, this is of colossal importance, but if it’s of colossal importance, then surely the ‘big people’ would have been aware of it and this knowledge would have long since formed part of the ruling paradigm. When I eventually accepted the truth of heredity, I could not but regard its rejection by social, intellectual and political elites, for the most abysmal of reasons, as but the grossest dereliction of duty imaginable.
Today we live in a surreality in which, as Jared Taylor has pointed out, policy is made as though it is known that no important individual and racial differences exist. And when inequalities impertinently persist, we have no recourse but to point the finger at the class which is guilty of everything: white people.
I would venture to add that at the present time, when European man believes in no gods and also that he has thoroughly dominated nature (and in the minds of many, destroying the planet would be the ultimate proof of control), it is perfectly normal that enemies should turn our own position against us and blame us for all their suffering. If satellites can read a newspaper from space, why can’t we identify every problem before it happens?
etc.
Gregory Hood made an interesting point about conservatives hating Trump because he implies that America might not win without him. He offends their faith. Without those ubiquitous Communist spies found in those wonderful Cold War thrillers, Westerners have forgotten that it is actually possible to meet serious resistance, be destroyed, or that decadence is not merely some part of a ‘modernist aesthetic’.
The acute measures taken to thwart a possible Soviet invasion (which we now know was never a serious likelihood) seem bitterly ironic when you consider that all the while our social policies were fatally undermining the foundations of our civilization.
(Btw, I screwed up the formatting in the above post. Goddamn I hate that.)
I don’t want to seem overcritical, but just what is supposed to be the point of this essay? Without the actual evidence for race realism alluded to here this will not convince any outsider, nor help anyone to convince one, while the rest of us already agree with him. So? Is this just meant to make us feel good about ourselves?
No problem. You are not overly critical. Yes, it is a philosophy article. I am not a journalist. But I do like philosophy, logic and so on and I came across this idea somehow and Greg was generous enough to publish this essay.
I kind of think that anybody who is not a race realist would not be on this website or other websites anyway. So you might ask “What is the point of any article published on this website or race realist websites? Nobody who is not a race realist will visit them anyway.” This line of criticism would invalidate not just my article but all articles published on any race realist website. So, I don’t see how you can avoid the slippery slope.
Thanks for replying. You said:
“This line of criticism would invalidate not just my article but all articles published on any race realist website. So, I don’t see how you can avoid the slippery slope.”
Well, an article published on a race realist website which contains evidence backing up race realist positions, or counter-arguments to race-egalitarianist arguments and talking points. can be useful because it can provide intellectual ammunition to others who want to convince the people around them/discredit vocal race-deniers. At the very least it can give race realists and the like good reason to feel secure in their beliefs, despite all the ‘anti-racist’ BS they hear churned out around him on a daily basis. So my question, and it’s an honest one, is what is there of value here in these essays?
Thanks,
The essay speaks for itself. I don’t know what else to say. If you don’t see anything of value in my essay, you don’t. I guess we will have to leave it at that.
The work of Karl Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn on the philosophy of science might well be overrated — Popper and Kuhn were both Jews, and thus able to benefit from the ethnic networking for which the Jews are infamous. Kuhn’s work is reportedly one of the most cited works written in the twentieth century.
David Stove’s book Scientific Irrationalism, previously published under the titles of Anything Goes and Popper and After, might be useful as a critique of Popper and Kuhn.
Is it not suspicious that Jews, whom Arthur Schopenhauer called “the masters of the lie,” should be prominent as philosophers of science?
I’m inclined to think this way. I agree with the essay’s author that, in general, a change of procedure is at least as important as the ongoing collection of data, and that this is a problem which extends throughout all of the ‘social sciences’.
But the scientific revolution of the 20th century has not, I think, been entirely comprehended. Reaching a point in physics where the observer could not be separated from the experiment, the lofty goal of ‘scientific objectivity’ disappeared, and all that remained was a naked and ambiguous ‘technology’. Spengler said that there would be no more important scientific discoveries and, in a limited sense, he was right. The ‘deconstruction’ of modern science leads to a confirmation that science is purely a means of control – Machiavelli before Galileo and Francis Bacon.
Thanks. I kind of knew that Popper was a Jew but I had no idea that Kuhn was. Yes, I have heard of Stove (and his father or son?) but I have not yet read the book. Levin credits Stove in his acknowledgement page in WRM.
Karl Popper was a proponent of the “open society,” a term George Soros included in the name of his network of foundations for instigating “colored revolutions.”
I only recently learned that Kuhn was a Jew, although I should have guessed it: like the surnames Cohen, Cahan, Kahn, Kohn, and Kahane, the surname Kuhn indicates descent from the Jewish priestly caste, the Kohanim.
From memory, I believe that David Stove’s book Cricket versus Republicanism and Other Essays included a favorable comment from Michael Levin on Stove’s work, and that Stove’s son, R. J. Stove, has written for conservative publications.
Yes, and the evil Soros studied under Popper, I believe.
Two more excellent philosophers of science that I have long since lost track of and both are long dead I believe are Paul K. Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos. The first fought on the Nazi side in WWII and I believe was not a Jew. The second was a Hungarian and I believe may be a Jew but I don’t know for sure. I believe they were both strongly influenced by Popper and to a degree by Kuhn.
Excellent essay. I don’t understand the complaints.
Thank you Irmin. That was very huhwhite of you.
When I was in high school, we put on Inherit the Wind, the play by Lawrence and Lee fictionalizing the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” It seemed to be heady stuff, government and religion putting the hammer down on a noble public school teacher for talking about evolution. All sorts of great speeches about science and open minds against religious orthodoxy.
But why not re-stage the play, only this time around make the defendant a teacher who dared talk about (cue ominous music) race realism in the classroom! Everything else is the same. Let’s see how it turns out. Consider the big courtroom speech of defense attorney “Henry Drummond” (aka Clarence Darrow), slightly reworked and updated:
“Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like race realism and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in graduate seminars? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to tweet about it. And soon you may ban academic papers and conferences on genetics and even White nationalist Internet sites. And then you may turn nurture against nature, and nature against nature, and try to foist your own environmentalism upon the mind of man. If you can stigmatize Shockley, you can stigmatize Rushton. Because political correctness is forever busy, and needs more signalling. And soon, your Honor, with speech codes flying and with rainbow flags beating we’ll be marching backward, backward, through the ‘glorious’ decades of the mid-20th century when Boasians burned the works of eugenicists who dared bring genetic factors to understanding human civilization! ”
(cue neo-heroic music)
Your comment reminded of an article I read long ago — I think it was at the original National Vanguard website — that noted that the textbook used by John Scopes took a race realist and pro-eugenics perspective. Anyway, I looked for more information, and found the Wikipedia entry on the book on question, George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, to be rather interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_Biology
Needless to say, the obscurantists who peddle “creation science” use the book’s race realist and pro-eugenics views as a stick for bashing the theory of evolution.
Thanks. That is truly a very beautiful, original and creative statement. Far better than my original essay.
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