Passages uit bijdrage van Toby Young    over de egalitaire ideologie van de sociaal-constructivisten:  uit  Toby Young (zoon van Michael Young) in OPINION: 2017 : Liberal Creationism Toby Young

With a bit of luck, Post-Modernism will be the last gasp of one of the 20th Century’s most toxic ideologies.

The Post-Modernist doctrine of ‘social constructionism’ isn’t common-or-garden hostility to hereditarianism; this is super-charged environmental determinism. Any suggestion that society is shaped by human nature, as opposed to shaping it, is to invert the Post-Modern pyramid; any hint that the differences between classes, races, genders, the sane and the mentally ill, and so on, have a scientifically-discoverable basis that is in some sense pre-social – that these group differences are real, as opposed to ‘fictitious’–is to a violate a sacred nostrum. You are heretics and you must be driven from the Temple. Let us start with individual differences.

One of the reasons the claims of intelligence researchers so often provoke a hostile reaction is because their assertions about the heritability of Spearman’s g are often mistakenly understood to be a defence of the status quo. How does this misunderstanding occur? When a progressive liberal listens to a behavioural geneticist talk about the biological basis of IQ and the positive correlation between IQ and socio-economic status, what they think they are hearing is a Social Darwinist argument in favour of the current distribution of wealth and power. The poor deserve their low SES because of their low polygenic scores and the rich deserve their high SES because of their high scores.That is,they assume the intelligence researcher is breaking Hume’s Law: because something is, it ought to be.

And there is another, even more fundamental reason why this is a fight to the death as far as they are concerned – their utopian, hard-left political project. …They believe in the Marxist ideal of hard, end-state egalitarianism – equality of outcome rather than opportunity – what they call ‘equity’. …Its version of original sin is the power of som identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege”, and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if youarewhite ormale orstraight, that aprofound conversion is required.

Now, the obvious objection to this fanatical egalitarianism is that it is incompatible with liberal democracy, as we know from the bitter history of the 20th Century. It can only be brought about – and maintained – in a totalitarian dictatorship….. Why does the attempt to impose end-state equality always end with the curtailment of free speech,the imprisonment and torture of political dissidents, widespread starvation and –insome cases–state-sanctioned mass murder?

Because the hard left’s political project is incompatible with everything the human sciences teach us about mankind. I do not just mean socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, with their Darwinian explanations of why selfishness usually trumps altruism, of why we put the interests of our immediate family above those of our extended family and our friends, why we put their interests above those of the tribe, the interests of our tribe or group above that of other tribes or groups, and so on. I also mean everything we know about the differences between us and the inextricable link between our individuating characteristics and our unique polygenic sores.

If it is an unalterable fact about human beings that some are more genetically gifted than others, better able to exploit their environment, to profit where others fail, then the only way to create – and preserve – end-state equality is through the constant use of coercive state power. So long as men are not born equal (in the ability sense, rather than the moral sense), so long as the lucky sperm club retains its exclusive membership policy, the only way to maintain hard equality is through the curtailment of human freedom by an all-powerful state, a state that is constantly intervening to ‘correct’ the inequities of nature. To paraphrase Kant, you can only build something straight with the crooked timbre of humanity if you are constantly smashing down heads and cutting off limbs with a hammer and a sickle.

So let me be more precise: the picture we have built up of ourselves from the human sciences does not, by itself, mean end-state equality is undesirable. But it sure as hell gives the lie to the claim that it can be achieved without a massive escalation in state power, that after a period of re-adjustment the state can just “whither away”. It is precisely because the hard left wants to gloss over this cost that it has no choice but to reject the findings of socio-biologists, Darwinian anthropologists, differential psychologists, et al.

There is nothing new about this. We all know that social determinism was one of the shibboleths of Soviet Science and Russian geneticists like Dmitry Belyaev – the Siberian fox guy – had to practice their dark arts away from the prying eyes of the Communist Party priesthood, like alchemists in Medieval Europe. But it was one thing to ignore this body of knowledge in Soviet Russia in the middle of the 20th Century. Imagine how much harder the neo-Marxists in the humanities departments of America’s elite universities have to try in the face of all the evidence that has accumulated.

To point out the role that genes play in people’s behaviour, even if you stress the contribution of the environment as well, is to run afoul of campus blasphemy laws. The fact that the scientific evidence in support of your point of view is overwhelming just strengthens their resolve. That is how cognitive dissonance works: the greater the distance between a person’s beliefs and reality, the more aggressively they react to anyone pointing out the truth. As the student protestors chanted at Middlebury – they literally recited this from a piece of paper, like a liturgical incantation: Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact’. The choice you face,then, is whether to stand your ground and fight –or retreat,whether that means applying for a position at aWashington think tank, switching to a less contentious field of scholarship, or keeping your head down and hoping for the best, periodically abasing yourselves at the feet of the cult’s High Sparrows. ..

If everything is reducible to power dynamics, the only possible motive you can have for challenging Post-Modernist dogma is because you have a self-interested reason for preserving the status quo, i.e. maintaining injustice and oppression. Either you are on the side of the oppressed or you are a shill for “the patriarchy” and “white privilege” and if that is the case then they are morally justified in bringing you down by any means necessary. It goes without saying that college administrators will not come to your aid. …

⁎Toby Young is the co-author of What Every Parent Needs to Know and the co-founder of several free schools. In addition to being an associate editor of the Spectator, he edits Spectator Life and is Director of the New Schools Network. Follow him on Twitter@toadmeister and see www.nosacredcows.co.uk