Malgenics

(busted out of draft, incomplete)

I used to think about the way of struggle in three distinct classes {human rights, civil rights, social power}. But since digging Russell Kirk I am mostly convinced that there is no such thing as human rights - that outside the charter of a nation, there is nothing that you 'get' automatically from being born. In other words, rights are the gift of the strong - they are either in the social contract or they don't exist, and social contracts bind the accumulated powers of men. Rights don't exist sui generis.

From that old way of looking at things, certain implications about the legitimacy of powers to take upon oneself to guarantee human rights, civil rights of social power could be calculated. Denial of human rights deserves revolution and war. Denial of civil rights deserves civil unrest and riot. Denial of social power, maybe a good political arm twisting or big fat lawsuits but not violence. That seems all reasonable, but I'm not quite sure how reasonable our society is. People are apt to riot over a baseball game on one hand, but on the other hand consider sleeping in the street an action appropriate to counteract the bankruptcy of the government. 

It is with that slipperyness I consider the latest rehash of the race and IQ debates with Sullivan, Dreher, Coates and Razib Khan. Surely Steve Sailer is just around the corner.

In my own anti-racist activism I've always tried to maintain some proportionality between offense and recourse. The last time I weighed in, I proposed the term 'six pounds of racism' because few people seem to care about the condequences of racism. Instead all their outrage is at the very existence of it, and its permanece speaks volumes more than any reasonable recourse. And so we get off into the tangents of whether or not America is any good.

A lot of people like to pretend that America wants and needs an actual meritocracy. The problem with the idea is that as soon as you start taking scientific measurements of anything, you inevitably can subject that thing to markets - and the extent to which those markets must be regulated to make society actually is oppressive because more often than not the dead frank meritocracy becomes odious. 

In short, you really don't want a strict meritocracy with one even playing field in society. You want many staged level playing fields, leagues for competion. At least I am convinced that civil society requires them. I think that these leagues arise spontaneously - that we have an innate understanding of when 'bully boundaries' have been breached. But to assign something a quantifyable number has a great number of outsized implications for a society trying to perfect meritocracy.

Consider my categories of stupid.

It seems to me that anyone who can understand the logic of keeping away from the temptation of harvesting stem cells, or of allowing Nazi medical research should understand the reticence of using population studies for meritocratic engineering. In other words, unless it can be shown that can be no social engineering possible from the results of this scientific research then you cannot justify it on the basis of it's possible social benefits. 

So the premise that a greater understanding of human capacity is at the root of any study of intelligence. Embeded in that premise is a long history of rebellion against hereditary class.