The Spectator ‘s cover story this week is an excellent piece by Adrian Wooldridge on ‘The new elite: the rise of the progressive aristocracy‘. Taking as his theme the demolition of the meritocratic idea by woke activists, he sets out the worldview behind it and the huge amount of trouble it is causing. Here’s an excerpt.
Meritocracy is “racist” and “the antithesis of fair”, pronounced Alison Collins, a former Commissioner of Education in San Francisco. And the old idea of judging people as individuals? That’s the white man’s game of divide and rule. “Colour blindness” – what we used to regard as the absence of discrimination – is dismissed as a con, designed to draw a veil over millennia of exploitation. The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism. Or, perhaps, the ‘white’ way of looking at the world. “The use of standardised tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade black minds and legally exclude black bodies,” writes Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby.
The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. “The only remedy to racist discrimination,” writes Kendi, “is antiracist discrimination”. The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. “Abolish whiteness!” says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. “White lives don’t matter. As white lives.”
These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.
Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.
Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged. Whatever you think of Prince Harry, he is clearly ‘doing the work’.
This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.
The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. This phenomenon is at its most advanced in the U.S., particularly at its universities. University students are selected for their WQ as revealed by their personal statements and extracurricular activities (“I spent my vacations fighting racism in Guatemala”), as well as by their academic grades. Indeed, a growing number of universities are reducing the weight placed on standardised test scores while increasing their emphasis on more subjective criteria. Aspiring professors are required to submit diversity statements when they apply for jobs as well as conventional academic resumes.
Yale now has as many academic administrators as it does tenured staff. Many of them have titles which include the word ‘diversity’, as in ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ and ‘Deputy Chief Diversity Officer’. Chief diversity officers have become such a familiar part of the university scene that one executive recruitment firm, Hunt Scanlon, gushes they occupy “one of the most important positions for shaping the vision, culture and very face of institutions of higher learning from coast to coast”.
It’s a golden rule of academia that what U.S. universities do today British universities will do tomorrow, but in a secretive and cut-price manner. A commitment to diversity is increasingly used as a tiebreaker in making academic appointments. When making applications for grants – the bane of the British academic’s life – candidates know that they have a much better chance of success if they explore woke themes. Some subjects – all those ‘studies’ – are predicated on the assumptions of the inverted pyramid of virtue. Others, such as history, have replaced the old history of progress and promise with a new one of oppression and guilt.
British universities may not have access to the same gargantuan bureaucracies as their U.S. cousins, though the bureaucrats they have are cut from the same ideological cloth. But they have got into the habit of relying on pressure groups to do some of the work for them. Stonewall stands ready (for a fee) to certify whether our seats of learning are LGBT+ friendly by measuring them against a diversity index and then enrolling them in its Diversity Champions scheme. Universities cannot receive research grants, the lifeblood of academia, unless they employ Athena Swan accredited ‘leads’ who use Athena Swan accredited measures to show they are inclusive employers. The organisation’s definition of diversity and inclusion involves hitting goals to increase the hiring of minorities, even if minorities constitute a majority of employees, and submitting employees to unconscious bias training.
Worth reading in full.
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“Meritocracy is “racist””
The most astonishingly racist comment. She’s saying that some races have less merit than others. You wonder how people can’t see this. The level of doublethink required beggars belief.
What she really says is Evil white people have cunningly defined merit as equivalent to white and we must be wary of this trap! That the overwhelming majority of white peoples get disqualified by this system as well must somehow have escaped her.
Stefan Molyneaux was completely cancelled and labelled a far right extremist for pointing out that standardised tests use different races’ average IQs as part of how they’re set. For that, he was called a ‘white supremacist’ even though he never said which races were average higher or lower. As I recall, Ashkenazy Jews have the highest average IQ of all races.
Stefan Molyneaux was completely cancelled and labelled a far right extremist for pointing out that standardised tests use different races’ average IQs as part of how they’re set.
A profoundly stupid statement: IQ is an ill-defined concept to begin with. Grouping people by race (however defined) and calculating average race IQs is no more sensible than calculating global temperatures (or any other averaging of different quantities) and there’s no way ever to at least get the correct value as the overwhelming majority of people considered to belong to such a race won’t have had any influence whatsoever on this average. And even assuming this could be rectified (which it cannot), in the next minute, two people die and five are born and all the averages of the past are outdated.
Whoever Stefan Molyneaux is, he is, to quote Andi Tanenbaum, Certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I don’t know much about Stefan Molyneaux but the point about calculating average race IQs is to disprove race hustlers who claim that disparate outcomes must be because of “racism”. If race hustlers stopped talking about “racism” and evil loonies stopped pushing us towards equality of outcomes, we wouldn’t need to point out the obvious. I am not interested in “race” and I treat each person as I find them, as an individual, but I am not able to forget about “race” because the racism industry is using “racism” as an excuse to try and screw up my life and my country and what is left of Western civilisation.
The calculation is theoretically nonsense and practically impossible.
I don’t know much about Stefan Molyneaux but the point about calculating average race IQs is to disprove race hustlers who claim that disparate outcomes must be because of “racism”.
This can probably do with a more detailed rebuttal than the quick one from yesterday.
1) Race. This is an entirely artifical construct and one that’s solely applicable to the USA. The USA is (simplifying this somewhat) populated by a hodgepodge of descendants of all kinds of African tribes/ peoples and all kinds of European tribes/ peoples. In this form, this doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world (yet). A concept based race is defined on top of that, by putting all people with negroid characteristics in one group and all with caucasian characteristics in the other, the former being called black and the other white. In Europe, whether someone is French, English, Italian, German, Spanish or Polish is something which makes quite of a difference. They’re not all all faceless Whities devoid of other distinctive characteristics. The same goes for Africa which is – to this date – intensly tribal, with so-called black people going after other, equally black people because they stem from a different tribe. This oversimplification may be appropriate for the USA. It’s completely inappropriate for the rest of the world. The cultural imperialism seeking to force it onto it nevertheless is to be rejected.
2) Race IQ. This is an inherently racist concept because it’s based on the presumption that the race assigned at birth (see above) must be a defining characteristic for the people who get races assigned at birth. One could as well define a black-haired IQ based on the presumption that the hair-colour assigned at birth (what precisely constitutes black hair cannot really be defined) must be this defining characteristic (Or handedness, more traditional and at least a real characteristic).
3) Average IQ. Averaging is a mathematical algorithm for reducing the amount of random error in a series of measurements of the same quantity. So-called IQs aren’t measured. So-called IQs of different people aren’t measurements of the same quantitiy plus an unavoidable amount of random error due to mechanical imperfections of the measurement device and chaotic environmental circumstances at the time a measurment was taken.
4) Average race IQ. Even this nonsense-quotient could only be calculated if it was possible to stop the world and generate an IQ value for every member of some race assigned at birth. The nonsense-quotient would then accurately represent the population it’s supposed to apply to while still being completely meaningless for each particular individual. As the world cannot be stopped and an IQ value for every member of a race assigned at birth cannot be generated in no time, this calculation cannot be made.
While some or all of this may well be true, that’s not really the point. Race industry hustlers will point to inferior outcomes for certain races and blame racism. What is your answer to them?
Nothing. This is a scam from start to finish and it’s pointless to argue with scammer about their scam. They’re not going to be honest about it.
Insofar this is really an answer for an audience and not an attempt to convince a political ideologue of the misguidedness of his ideology, it depends. A good start would be to point out that this is – as usual – circular reasoning. They start with the presumption that what they refer to as race matters for some event X. They then compile some random set of incomplete statistics about X based on this presumption, ie, by grouping people into so-called races. Should a statistical difference they like happen to manifest itself, they then claim that this would show that the presumption must be true. But it’s trueness was already assumed when compiling the statistic, as evident by the grouping.
And then, I would hope that there are maybe a few people in the audience who are intelligent enough to understand this and sufficiently unpredjudiced to accept it as well. I wouldn’t want to bet on that, though. Especially considering that I’m total shit at making up words people intuitively want to agree with.
The scammers say race is a social construct then they quote statistics based on race to prove that racism exists and is responsible for “problem” X or Y. That’s as obvious as the nose on my face, yet most people don’t grasp this, or don’t want to, or are afraid to say so, or they believe that the differences in outcomes between races, which certainly do exist, are because of racism. So the way you defeat that argument (and I am talking about the “audience” here, as you put it – agree that convincing the ideologues is pointless) is by showing that differences in outcome are due to average differences. I believe that there are ways of measuring intelligence and averaging this across groups that are useful in so far as they confirm that differences in outcome are explained by things other than racism. As I said, I would rather avoid the whole sorry business but I cannot, because everyone keeps talking about race – the hustlers and ordinary people who want to be seen as “nice”. If ordinary people simple said we don’t care about any of this, the whole problem would go away, but it doesn’t and it won’t because people in rich world countries feel guilty about their success. I don’t see any good ending to this – it’s already bad and it will get worse and worse until one side or the other is defeated and subjugated.
The scammers say race is a social construct then they quote statistics based on race to prove that racism exists and is responsible for “problem” X or Y.
Yes. And that’s circular reasoning because the statistic was created on the presumption that what it’s supposed to demonstrate is true. The moment you (or anyone else) accepts this nonsense, the game is lost and no amount of calculating nonsensical averages of immeasurable quantities from random (and typically very small) subsets of a population is going to help here. Assuming your correlation looks like you’d want it to look like, they’re going to claim that this difference in outcome just proves that your method is structually racist. These is no way out of this conundrum. These people are bullshit merchants because they’ve intentionally chosen to be this.
Indeed I do not accept this nonsense, but their audience does. Lots of highly educated, “intelligent” people I know at least claim to believe this stuff.
The heritability of intelligence is non-zero. Some people find that uncomfortable, but that’s their problem.
Indeed, it surely is. The people saying it really can’t see the irony in their own beliefs!
The problem is that the subject of race has become impossible to discuss rationally.
The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism.
Can someone please politely inform this dumbbell that China has been governed by public officials appointed based on a strictly meritocratic system (at least in theory) for longer than descendants of Europeans had a chance to spout nonsense about anything on the American continent? The Prussian (and later, German) military also worked in this way since the reforms enacted in response to Napeoleon’s subjugation of German, well before an eugenic movement or imperialism existed. And by that time, there weren’t even loads black people in Germany, let alone black slaves.
I continue being amazed that people pay so much attention to other people who are hell-bent to avoid anything but navelgazing as their navels must surely be the focal point of the universe. To me, that’s just a sign of someone who’s as narrow-minded as pompous and very affectionately in love with himself.
These convoluted thinkers are out in force now one Duchess of Sussex is not coming to the coronation. One US Professor I saw called it a white ceremony devoid of diversity’. Well, lady when our dear late Queen took the throne in 1953, estimates suggest that there were fewer than 10,000 black people in the UK. And as the predominance of peoples here are white skinned, and have been since the stone age, its hardly surprising now is it..?
That’s going to be very surprising to a lot of people in the USA (apparently) who seem to assume that because there has always been a large group of black people in the USA, this must have been the same everywhere else, too. They’re probably going to think that those evil Brits are so absolutely horribly racist that they weren’t even willing to tolerate black people as slaves.
The Anti-slavery Act chased the last vestiges of it out of our society (It was only Dukes and Earls with the odd black servant, the rest were mostly merchant seamen who decided to stay on these shores…) in 1833. Something else the Yanks can’t get their head round is that I believe that there has never been a law passed in the UK in which skin colour or race has been a defining fact in how the law was applied. No Jim Crowe here…
I would tend to avoid the word ‘merit’ in circumstances outside of a tightly controlled group or cult with very highly developed precepts of morality. Look at the state we are in, what would merit consist of? I see it more as a cascade of consciousness that is about to appear in the next two months with numbers never before seen. The result of such an elevation is a complete reconfiguration of the human realm. In a period of such great flux you have to find a firm anchor.
Essentially, these psychos want to destroy the West. ‘Freedom is slavery. Slavery can be monetised. Knowledge is racist. Ignorance is bliss.’
It really is like the Dark Ages: a millennium of civilisational development goes down the gutter! Christianity, Renaissance and Romanticism out the window; in comes narcissism, postmodernism and moral relativism.
The only option seems to be to gather all the books and statues and works of art you can find and hide on an island like Skellig Michael. Kenneth Clark talked a lot about how civilisation survived the Dark Ages by the skin of its teeth. This era is far worse. With satellites, where the hell does anyone hide?
Graham Hancock is derided for his view that there might have been an earlier human civilisation, in part because there aren’t direct artifacts of that civilisation to be found: merely fingerprints found in relics of other more recent civilisations. But look at our civilisation: we’ve turned our backs on supersonic transport and are on the way to banning travel beyond 15 minutes for the majority of eight billion people. Everything is moving online and physical media are going the way of the dodo. All it will take is a cyber calamity in 30-40 years’ time to wipe out all trace of our civilisation, leaving a few buildings and an ignorant population unable to fend for itself.
When one looks back at one’s ancestors’ lives, there are old portrait photos, often letters and postcards, ornaments collected from around the world. It’s possible to build a sense of who a person was. Now we have email that gets deleted and thousands of mostly worthless photos from our phones on a cloud server that could get deleted or virused anytime.
I don’t have children, to my regret, but in another way I’m glad, because I’d be battling an education system that sets out to corrupt children intellectually and sexually. If my football-mad son came home from school one day wearing make up and saying he wants to be a girl called Sarah, I think I’d be wanting to re-educate some teachers with some considerable force!
I feel bad for parents right now. They want to do what’s best for their children, but how the hell can they afford to do home schooling?
I think you’re interpreting this massively too negative: These people don’t believe in their own drivel. They have the very limited aim of winning elections in the USA. And in order to do so, they’re literally trying to bribe voters: If you’re black, vote Democrat. We’ll make sure your children can even become doctors when their abilities are lacking. That’s all this really means. Semi-permanent tribal electioneering in a society viewed as inherently tribal and inherently restricted to zero-sum games: What one group wins, another group must lose. In reality, these are pretty stupid people and their actual influence, even in the USA, is certainly much more limited than their influence on click-baity headlines might suggest.
I agree that these people don’t believe their own drivel, but is it credible that winning elections is a limited aim? What happens when they win? Do they slap their hands on their knees and say “okay then, back to sane objectivity”?
The Communists, many also pretty stupid people, gained power in Russia with a bucketful of magical thinking, a knack for disruption and appealing to a demoralised society’s baser instincts, and a promise they’d put an end to political executions (apart from the few they deemed strictly necessary). Two decades later they were murdering 650,000 innocent people a year. As Joe Rogan would put it, they are only ‘three people’ away.
You can create a positive environment out of whole cloth. The point is that we establish a system of value. How does one start from scratch? Unless you have a real anwser then you can’t say anything. We are going to move forward into the future and we need to take a real grip of it. Forget the surrenders of the last thirty years either we take a grip of it or we disappear and count for nothing. In terms of spiritual science it is a matter of comprehending Ahriman and dealing with him. This is the very meaning of my life.
Jack Teixieria ! What has he disclosed ??
They (the people peddling this bullshit and profiting from it) don’t really believe a word of it. Or more accurately, they don’t care enough to give the nonsense they spout more than a second’s thought. Truth and lies are all the same – just there to serve a purpose.
It’s an old-fashioned shakedown of the capable by the mediocre, weak, sociopathic and lazy. When they’ve had everything they can take and the well of goodwill, genuine tolerance and resourcefulness has run dry; when aeroplanes fall out of the sky because pilots are hired on the basis of lip service paid to gods of these overgrown toddlers rather than skill or experience; when everything original and good in culture has crumbled into a mush of homogenised simulacra, they’ll creep back into the shadows along with the crooks pulling their strings, and a previously apathetic society will plead with the capable – regardless of melatonin, biological sex or obstacles of birth – to return and rebuild. There won’t be many left who can. Having so easily let go of what was hard won through centuries of struggle against actual rather than imagined tyranny, we won’t deserve it anyway.
We are living in the world of complete stupidity. The stupid will believe any nonsense they are fed.
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Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
In the interests of “diversity” I would like to see a film about the life of Nelson Mandela with Mandela played by George Clooney. ——–Now wouldn’t that have the flames spitting out of the eyes of the woke?
Wow, they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore!
The only significant flaw to the idea of meritocracy is twofold: 1) we have never really lived in a genuine one in recent memory, if at all, and 2) an unrestricted meritocracy can very easily degenerate into oligarchy or aristocracy if we are not careful, as powerful people can rig the game. Otherwise, meritocracy is actually far more egalitarian than any other alternative. But these self-styled “antiracist” (read: reverse racist) armchair-philosophizing pseudo-intellectuals never make such arguments.
At the risk of being struck off this is all B****CKS isn’t it?
There is a ‘victimization’ industry that is receiving a lot of money and power.
To keep supporting this industry there must be more and more ‘victims’, and more and more ‘oppressors’, otherwise there would be no need for those in this industry.