The Know Nothing Mandarin Class

When did the Mandarin Class become the modern Know Nothing movement? As their progressive fads become increasingly unmoored in reality and guided solely by mythological beliefs, it is harder to take them seriously.

Three examples in just the past few days. Several days ago, I am driving and listening to NPR. Terry Gross is on, interviewing a journalist who has written a book, The Guarded Gate by Daniel Okrent, about the history of eugenics, bigotry and immigration policy in the US.

Regrettably, the link takes you to a highly edited version of the interview which was overwhelmed by the dissonance between what Gross and Okrent wanted to believe and what is actually true.

There is nothing in the transcript about the bone headed vocal lead-in to the interview. It was something along the lines of ". . . a book about eugenics, the belief that morality and intelligence are inherited." I cringed each time I heard it repeated, thinking to myself, don't you even listen to yourselves?

They are mixing two claims into one, one of which is proven and the other unproven and then speaking as if both are untrue. The inheritance of IQ is reasonably well understood and is particularly well documented. It is one the most replicated findings in sociology/psychology. Most researchers are in agreement that between 55-85% of a person's intelligence is due to heredity. The disputes are not about IQ being heritable. The disputes are about the mechanisms (which genes among so many) and about the degree of heritability - 55-85%. Regardless, intelligence is not only one of the most researched and proven traits but is also one of the most strongly heritable (compared, for example, to personality traits).

So for NPR to imply that it is foolish to believe that intelligence is heritable is quite a disgrace for NPR. They sound like they don't know science at all. Perhaps they simply misspoke? Nope. It is there in the interview. From Okrent:

You find some very well-established scientists, [Henry] Fairfield Osborn, the head of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, he outright declared that it is not just intelligence, it is also morality that is inherited, and criminality is inherited. It's really stunning to think that people who are very, very well-credentialed in the natural sciences could believe these things. But if you begin your belief by thinking that certain peoples are inferior to other peoples, it's very easy to adapt your science to suit your own prejudice.

Again, he is conflating two issues, heritance of morality and heritance of IQ and then seemingly dismissing both as ridiculous. But heritance of IQ is proven.

And even on the morality side, it is not as clear cut as suggested. The Big Five personality traits (Openness, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extroversion and Conscientiousness) are all heritable. These are not proxies for morality, there is some intersectionality and they are all mildly heritable.

Gross and Okrent seem to be of the Blank Slate crew and either resistant or ignorant of the actual science. It is nowhere in the abbreviated transcript, but there was some awkward discussion of Martha Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. It is an uncomfortable truth that Sanger was also a committed eugenist and her thoughts about improving the race were tightly aligned with her Planned Parenthood movement.

Since the whole transcript is not available, I cannot quote Gross and Okrent, but the word nuance seemed to come up a lot between them in order to mask the totalitarian coercion, racism, and bigotry lurking under the veneer of Planned Parenthood and Eugenics.

A further irritation was Okrent repeatedly alluding to his having stumbled across the Eugenics movement as if it were obscure and unknown. Its history is widely known, well documented and not obscure at all. If you are interested in modern history, you "stumble" across it repeatedly. Planned Parenthood, the progressive movement around the world in the first half of the twentieth century, the Soviets, the Nazis, the Fascists. Eugenists all.

Finally, there was the desperate attempt to see a pattern where there is no pattern. NPR set up with their own interpretation:

Okrent sees echos of the 1924 act in President Trump's hard-line stance regarding immigration: "The [current] rhetoric of criminality, the attribution of criminality — not to individual criminals but to hundreds of thousands of people of various nationalities — that's very similar to the notion of moral deficiency that was hurled by the eugenicists at the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the 1910s and '20s."

What Okrent himself says in the abbreviated transcript is slightly different.

I think that one could say that today's Central Americans and today's Muslims ... are the equivalent of 1924's Jews and Italians, or ... the Jews and Italians then were treated and regarded as these Latin American and Muslim nationalities are today. When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.

But in both cases they are deliberately(?) misrepresenting the argument.

Today's argument is not a eugenic argument that the world is made up of good and bad races. Today's argument is 1) whether nations are allowed to determine who is to become a citizen, and 2) how many and what criteria should be applied. According to polls, virtually everyone agrees that a nation is allowed to determine who is to become a citizen. To a lesser degree, but still overwhelmingly, people agree that only people who can be anticipated to contribute to a greater extent than they cost the taxpayer, should be considered for citizenship.

Which makes economic sense. If you flood the workforce with low-skilled labor, you make society more unequal and you harm those citizens already struggling at the bottom, essentially replacing them with cheaper, more capable, and more eager foreign labor.

Nobody is arguing to restrict immigration based on race. This is a fantasy conjured and indulged in by Gross and Okrent with no basis in reality. The 2020s are not the 1920s.

So NPR denying the science of genetics in its revulsion of the progressive history of eugenics is one Know Nothing moment.

Then there is the maelstrom of the progressive thought, Twitter. From Expert Psychologist Blocked on Twitter for Expressing Clinical Opinion on Transgenderism by Tyler O'Neil.

Blanchard's position showed a true understanding of these issues and clinical support for what he sees as the proper treatment for gender dysphoric people. Activists can disagree with him, but his positions are scientifically based, rational, and based on his professional experience.

It seems transgender activists reported his tweets to Twitter, and the company chose to ban him. Helen Joyce, an editor at The Economist, called this decision "unreal."

"Ray Blanchard served on the gender dysphoria working group and chaired the paraphilia working group for DSM V," Joyce tweeted. "He is a world expert in the field. Twitter has just suspended his account for a thread setting out his findings from A lifetime of research. Unreal."

Others echoed her outrage. Jesse Singal, contributing writer at New York magazine, expressed his fear that "as a journalist who often writes about science," he worries that he will not be able to continue using Twitter's platform.

"Gender dysphoria is in the DSM-5. Despite endless rumor-mongering and misinformation to the contrary, it *is* considered a mental disorder. Maybe it shouldn't be! But it's beyond insane to suspend someone for expressing an opinion which lines up with the DSM," Singal tweeted. "I have less and less faith that, as a journalist who often writes about science, I will be able to continue using Twitter without getting punished for communicating scientifically accurate information (sic)."

Transgenderism is all the rage among the Mandarin Class despite it being a still relatively undeveloped field in terms of scientific understanding. But to the extent that there is any understanding of the numbers and the causes and consequences, it is Dr. Ray Blanchard. He was blocked from Twitter, not because he was scientifically wrong but because the science is counter to the current progressive fad.

Finally, there is the opinion piece in the New York Times this past weekend, What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work. by Darcy Lockman. Lockman is of course pushing a new book she has coming out in which, unsurprisingly, she is disappointed in men for reasons. The NYT is thick with these kind of spoilt-child, self-indulgent, socially embarrassing tirades by rich, privileged, advance degreed women in professions wanting still more from a world which so disappoints them.

Being unaware of revealed preferences, the economic efficiencies of specialization of labor, and the risk mitigation strategies attendant to dual careers, Lockman is simply angry that her spouse and others of whom she is aware are not simply taking a totalitarian, one-size-fits-all, approach such that all married couples spend exactly the same time doing exactly the same chores. She is completely dismissive of everyone else's interests, priorities, and solutions.

She wants more!!!

She asks questions but she isn't interested in any but a tiny sliver of the population. Emphasis added.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

So we are talking about perhaps 1% of the population - people who are progressive, wealthy, both working, college-educated, and where they have already mutually agreed on a workable division of labor which doesn't happen to be 50:50 in time and kind. And in which the woman of the pair feels like she has not been able to reach a happy agreement with her partner and wants to lambast him in public to see if she can fix his miserable recalcitrance. OK, now we are talking about 0.0001% of the population.

And seemingly all of them get an opinion column in the New York Times. It is a strange and unpleasant fetish. The willful incapacity to recognize risk, specialization of labor, trade-off decision-making etc. in their own personal pursuit of self-gratification at the expense of everyone around them seems to be yet another instance of Know Nothing behavior.

What happens when the Mandarin Class and their ideological fads go off the reality rails so comprehensively? Well; I guess we are going to find out.