Stefan Molyneux has a soothingly authoritative presence for those who yearn for soothing authority. Those without this urge might reach for a different adjective: smug. This balding, bearded fifty-two-year-old Irish-born Canadian is a failed actor with a measured tenor voice. He discovered his calling, and a source of income, when he founded a cult-like online ‘community’ he calls ‘Freedomain Radio’. Freedomain has alt-right Web forums, psycho-babble, leave your family advice and Molyneux’s YouTube channel, which he uses to promote his once-libertarian but now pro-Trump, anti-feminist and virulently pro-race science views. This is Molyneux on European and African brains: ‘My ancestors were driven out of Africa and struggled to survive winter and hunger. Over thousands of years they became smarter and wiser through suffering. They made the modern world. Now the Africans say we are “privileged” and thieves. No – suffering made us. No more guilt.’1
Molyneux finds like-minded authors and academics (if you’re a race science author you can expect a call), and butters them up with ingratiating questions: we’re-in-this-together: you, me and my 100,000 young white male viewers. He displays just enough knowledge of their topics to give his followers the impression of a learned truth-teller going into battle against a devious, deluded, politically correct liberal-left conspiracy. Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson and Jordan Peterson have all played along nicely, most more than once.
One of his favourites is Nicholas Wade, a seventy-six-year-old English journalist who, I imagine, still makes New York Times editors blush; he went from being the newspaper’s science correspondent to penning the most discredited book on race science (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History) of the last twenty-five years. When it was published, in 2014, 139 of the world’s leading geneticists and evolutionary theorists signed a letter to the New York Times refuting its case. This led to an all-too-brief spell of relative silence, until the alt-right surge in the wake of Trump’s election campaign gave Wade another innings, which he used to lambast his ‘left-wing’ academic critics: ‘That attack on my book was purely political. It had no scientific basis whatever and it showed the more ridiculous side of this herd belief,’ he said, later adding: ‘There aren’t any mistakes in my book.’ He later acknowledged much of it was ‘speculative’.2
In one sense, A Troublesome Inheritance is old hat; Wade repeats the usual race science shibboleths. But he adds some new, particularly incendiary, material: the Industrial Revolution began in England because natural selection blessed the English with genes for working hard and respecting the law; Africans are genetically inclined towards tribalism, the Chinese towards authoritarianism, and the super-smart Jews evolved for capitalism.
Wade, who insists he’s not a racist, does not explore alternative explanations of why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, why tribalism is more prevalent in Africa and the Arab world or why Jews developed a strong intellectual tradition. He argues instead that environmental changes prompted rapid genetic changes: ‘The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also in human evolution,’ he writes,3 adding that if the differences between tribal society and modern states were purely cultural, ‘it should be easy to modernize a tribal society by importing Western institutions. American experience in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan generally suggests otherwise.’4
Like Lynn, Wade believes people continued to evolve through natural selection after leaving Africa, and this included evolution for racial variations in personality and intellect. ‘[I]t is reasonable to assume that if traits like skin colour have evolved in a population, the same may be true of its social behaviour,’ he says.5 This, he claims, is the key to understanding modern humanity because ‘the broad general theme of human history is that each race has developed the institutions appropriate to secure survival in its particular environment.’6 The English ‘evolved’ from being the violent peasants of 1200 to the law-abiding citizens of 1800 who launched the Industrial Revolution. How? Wade says it was because the rich had more surviving children than the poor. ‘Since the size of the English population remained fairly constant, many children of the rich must have dropped in social status, diffusing the genes and values that had made their parents wealthy into the wider population.’7
No one disputes that human populations evolved for skin colour, lactose tolerance, altitude tolerance, defences against malaria and the rest, but no scientist has provided evidence of population-specific evolution for wealth-making, authoritarianism, tribal loyalty or, indeed, intelligence. Wade simply assumes that if the one happened, then so must the other, even though he’s forced to admit that the ‘genetic basis of human social behaviour is still largely opaque’.8 He conflates physical adaptations with national stereotypes that have no demonstrable genetic connection, telling us that Africans live in poverty because they have the genes for trusting tribalism too much. ‘Tribal behaviour is more deeply ingrained than mere cultural prescriptions. Its longevity and stability point strongly to a genetic basis,’9 he says, drawing no distinction between, for example, genetic adaptions for dry earwax and supposed adaptions for trust.10
Now and then, Wade throws in research-based nuggets, which on closer inspection fail to provide the desired ballast. For instance, he cites an academic paper identifying genes that might have been affected by natural selection over the last few thousand years.11 However, it barely supports his thesis. The authors note that with these genes ‘it is likely that we tend to underestimate the degree of sharing across populations’ and conclude that ‘there was not an overall enrichment for neurological genes,’12 which counters Wade’s view on, for example, advanced Ashkenazi intelligence.
Wade’s slant on genetics is out of kilter with contemporary biology. In defining three main races (East Asian, African, Caucasian), he overstates the variance between them, understates the overlap, plays down genetic drift and attributes it all to natural selection. As Agustin Fuentes, a biological anthropologist from the University of Notre Dame put it, when lambasting Wade in a public debate, humans share 99.9 per cent of their genes, limiting variation to 0.1 per cent, and ‘most variation in human genetics is due to gene flow and genetic drift.’ Fuentes added that while Wade chose to highlight genetic differences between people from Nigeria, Beijing, Tokyo and Western Europe, we’d find similar differences between Liberians, Somalians and South Africans, because nearly all human genetic variation is found in Africa.13 Likewise, the 139 population geneticists and other scientists, later joined by more, who wrote to the New York Times to refute the scientific basis of A Troublesome Inheritance said:
Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate explanation of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.14
Wade claimed their objections were politically motivated and there was no scientific case against his claims but the geneticists have hit back. One of the signatories, Jerry Coyne, from the University of Chicago, described Wade’s book as a ‘speculative house of cards’ and ‘simply bad science’.15 Another signatory, David Reich, devoted five pages of his 2018 book, Who We Are and How We Got Here, to Wade’s approach, accusing Wade of making racist claims with no scientific evidence, claims that are ‘essentially guaranteed to be wrong’. Reich sums it up by referring to Wade’s idea about genes that influence behaviour: ‘In a written version of a nod and a wink, Wade is suggesting that popular racist ideas about the differences that exist among populations have something to them.’16 Kevin Mitchell, from Trinity College, Dublin, added to this argument in his 2018 book, Innate: ‘It is a complete non-sequitur to claim that any cultural differences between populations must be caused by genetic differences,’ he wrote. ‘There is in fact no evidence at all that observed or supposed differences in behavioural patterns between populations reflect anything but cultural history.’17
There’s little purpose in going through the rest of Wade’s argument again. Enough to say that his approach amounts to naming a cultural generalisation and assuming it’s valid throughout that population, race, ethnic group or country (he blurs these), then deciding, without evidence, that the explanation lies in natural selection. Along the way he parrots the full range of fallacies discussed in previous chapters, including a misreading of twin studies. All this, and more, left Stefan Molyneux immensely impressed.
Wade is a journalist and Molyneux is a YouTube star but most of the advocates of race science over the past fifty years have been psychologists. Some, such as Linda Gottfredson and Jordan Peterson, are academic psychologists who do not attach the adjective ‘evolutionary’ to their work, but several do call themselves evolutionary psychologists. This applies not only to extremists such as Richard Lynn and Satoshi Kanazawa but also to those more firmly ensconced in the evolutionary psychology mainstream, such as Randy Thornhill, Corey Fincher and Steven Pinker. Those in the mainstream frequently draw on the data pumped out by fringe players such as Lynn.
As we saw in Chapter 9, the twentieth-century link between psychology and race science emerged from IQ testing but it soon enveloped most branches of psychology. I’ve already mentioned Jung’s views on the animal-like primitiveness of Africans; he made similar observations of the ‘American Negro’, writing about their ‘childlikeness’ which, he felt, had an impact on white American naivety, although he concluded this was not too dangerous because blacks were in the minority.18 Jung’s racism was forged in nineteenth-century Europe, where few alternatives were available, but echoes of notions of animal-like primitiveness could be heard long after the exposure of the Holocaust had muted them in scientific circles. The leading American psychologist Henry Edward Garrett (past president of the American Psychological Association and head of psychology at Columbia University) opposed desegregation of schools, which he blamed on Jews, and argued that blacks were innately stupider than whites. In 1963, he explained that ‘the Negro’ had less ‘abstract intelligence … He functions at a lower level.’ However, he noted that ‘[t]hose black Africans are fine muscular animals when they are not diseased.’19
The student and academic reaction to Arthur Jensen’s claims meant mainstream public expression of race science was muted until the 1990s but private racist perspectives lingered among a substantial proportion of American psychologists. A questionnaire sent to 1,020 American psychologists in the mid-1980s (completed by 661), showed most were open to racist concepts of intelligence. A mere 15 per cent felt that the differences between white and black IQs were entirely due to environmental factors.20 Twenty-five years ago, when researching his book The Race Gallery, the science writer Marek Kohn interviewed the biologist Steve Jones, who told him that race would not return to science. Kohn replied that it was still thriving in psychology. ‘Yes’, said Jones, ‘but not in science’. Kohn reflected that he had a good deal of sympathy for this view when he began working on his book. ‘Now that it is finished, I have a good deal more.’21
Why do journalists routinely describe psychologists who pontificate on race, gender and intelligence as scientists when ‘hard scientists’, such as Jones, draw a stark distinction? I blame Isaac Newton. Not a very nice fellow and certainly one who barked up some strange trees, diverted by theological debate, his quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, by occult studies and his urge to hang counterfeiters. But none of this is counted today, because Newton was so smart at the stuff he got right: physics, astronomy and the mathematics underpinning it, calculus, gravity, motion, optics, colour, sound. He failed to turn lead into gold but set the gold standard for scientific methodology. Whether seen as the first scientist or the last of the magicians, as Keynes put it, Newton locked down the idea of scientific proof: make observations, form an hypothesis to explain them, make predictions, look for confirmation of the predictions. And if empirical observation contradicts the hypothesis, form a fresh one. As one of his better biographers, James Gleick, put it: ‘A worry nags at his descendants: that Newton may have been too successful; that the power of his methods gave them too much authority’22 – so much authority that in the centuries since Newton, his scientific methodology has pushed other areas of learning to the fringes. It’s hardly surprising that anyone delving into the world of research would seek the certainty of science even when what they study belongs outside the scientific realm.
Here, I’m referring to the ‘social sciences’. I’m not suggesting these non-scientific areas of study are worthless. My academic training was in economic history, law and politics, with smatterings of psychology, sociology, economics and media theory along the way – all worthwhile but none of them sciences. The ways people communicate, individually or collectively, how they survive, the stories they tell of themselves, of each other and of their pasts, their emotions, dreams and thoughts; these are not reducible to scientific laws. There is no reason why the motion of particles of carbon, of atoms, quarks or strands of DNA, should be replicated in how people behave. Yet the only humanities that seem to have embraced this truth are history and philosophy – perhaps because they alone are secure in their status.
Psychology has the most severe case of ‘hard science’-envy and has therefore been the most eager of the ‘soft sciences’ to shelter under its umbrella. Its pioneers were medical doctors who wanted their theories to be accepted as scientifically valid. Freud was particularly eager and yet the id, ego, Oedipus complex and penis envy have no connection with science. These descriptions are not subject to scientific methodology, they are not measurable, they cannot usefully be correlated with neurobiology. Theories of the workings of the human mind may or may not be valid but are not the same thing as neurobiology, because minds don’t exist without environments. Yet this urge to couple psychology with science has persisted in the assumption that observations about the working of particular minds must be universally applicable. From the psychoanalyst Freud’s accounts of Viennese female patients to pot-luck surveys of first-year university students, we find the conclusions drawn from tiny samples being offered as proof of an assertion, and picked up by newspapers around the world. And we find psychologists striving to promote their theories according to an – often limited – understanding of scientific principle, by framing the ephemeral in terms of simplified laws and statistics.
This desire was expressed particularly cravenly by Robert M. Yerkes, who we met in Chapter 9. He yearned for psychology to be accepted, and well funded, as a ‘hard science’ rather than being relegated to the humanities. This Harvard psychologist saw IQ testing as the route to hard science nirvana. ‘We must … strive increasingly for the improvement of our methods of mental measurement,’23 he wrote in 1917. He later declared that IQ testing ‘helped to win the war’. It also helped win his own war for recognition. ‘[I]t has … established itself among the other sciences and demonstrated its right to serious consideration in human engineering,’ he declared.24 Charles Spearman, the English psychologist who introduced factor analysis to IQ theory and invented g, expressed the same urge in 1923: ‘We must venture to hope that the so long missing genuinely scientific foundation for psychology has at last been supplied, so that it can henceforward take its due place along with the other solidly founded sciences.’25 Henceforward had arrived by 1937, prompting his delight that ‘this Cinderella among sciences has made a bold bid for the level of triumphant physics itself.’26
This is not to say that psychology cannot validly use scientific methodologies, or that there can’t be overlaps with other sciences. Cognitive psychologists would get nowhere without neuroscience, just as economists use statistical tools and mathematical models. The problem arises when scientific methods give a faux-scientific gloss to unscientific assumptions, which is where IQ theory comes in. By applying factor analysis to find g, IQ proselytisers felt they’d achieved their bid for respectability. But it was lipstick on the pig. Applying valid mathematical methods to an invalid precept does not magically validate the original fallacy. Yet, despite the devastating critiques levelled at its assumptions, American psychology clings to IQ. This is Jordan Peterson on its status: ‘If any social science claims whatsoever are correct then the IQ claims are correct because the IQ claims are more psychometrically rigorous than any other phenomenon that has been discovered by social scientists by a factor of about three.’27 A whole industry would go up in smoke if IQ were dropped. In particular, the entire edifice of scientific racism would collapse.
Evolutionary psychologists are the latest to drink from the race science stream, so it’s worth devoting them a few extra lines. Evolutionary psychology explains behaviour in terms of biology. Its founder-theorists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, describe it as ‘the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble, out of the disjointed, fragmentary and mutually contradictory human disciplines, a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social and behavioural sciences’.28 Like sociobiologists, Cosmides and Tooby subsume the humanities under the evolutionary umbrella, downgrading culture, which is seen as a by-product of natural selection. The specifics of behaviour are as a result of gene-prompted adaptations that evolved in the Pleistocene. But evolutionary psychology has an additional element: the idea of the instinct-packed modular mind. Because there are no lengths of DNA for universal behaviours, evolutionary psychologists use the notion of ‘mechanisms’ encoded in the genes, leading to a Swiss army knife model of a mind equipped with a collection of discrete behaviour modules, each evolved to allow us to face Stone Age challenges.29 Men and women evolved different modular minds because of sexual selection, leading to adaptations that prompt men to compete for women and spread their genes as far and wide as possible, and for women to pickily choose high-status or high-earning men.
Evolutionary psychologists talk of hundreds of thousands of independently evolved modules, requiring hundreds of thousands of genetic mutations, although the human genome is thought to have only around twenty thousand genes, many of which have nothing to do with cognition or emotions. Instead, the brain’s development is constantly mediated by the world it encounters, not via evolved ‘triggers’ that activate modules that don’t exist. Neurologically, human brains are plastic: highly flexible, full of non-adaptive capacity, forever sensitive to environmental input, and our ‘domain general’ minds are moulded into specialisation by experience.30
How could evolutionary psychology be so wrong? The Stanford evolutionary biologist Paul Ehrlich suggests an answer: evolutionary psychology’s ‘knowledge of genetics and evolution tends to trail far behind the knowledge of psychology’.31 Instead of embarking on quixotic quests to find genes implicated in specific behaviour, evolutionary psychology works backwards, starting with the assumption that the behaviour is innate. They devise questionnaires to test whether most respondents (often their own students) think this way. When a majority confirms the hypothesis, they claim this proves the behaviour is ‘hardwired’, though it is invariably easy to think of independent variables, unrelated to genetics, that could have prompted their results.32 They then embark on ‘Just-So Story’ trawls to find the prehistoric behaviours behind these mental modules. In this way, today’s habits are put under the timeless seal of Human Nature. The biological anthropologist Ian Tattersall notes that evolutionary psychology’s monolithic ancestral environment ‘is little more than a figment of their nostalgia for an idealised past that never existed’33 and adds that its reductionist notion of the relation between genes and ancestral behaviour ‘betrays a misunderstanding of the fundamental realities of the evolutionary process’.34
We know little of our ancestors’ behaviour in the Pleistocene, let alone whether this had any connection to the random genetic mutations that supposedly prompted these traits. We presume they lived in small, hunter-gatherer groups but know next to nothing about their kinship relations, social structures and relations and belief systems. The British neurobiologist Steven Rose despairs at the variety of human attitudes and habits evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker attribute to natural selection in the African savannah. ‘The grander such assertions, the flimsier and more anecdotal becomes the evidence on which they are based. Has Pinker ever seen savannah, one wonders?’ he asks. You get the picture. Evolutionary psychology’s fundamentalists might attract attention in the media, where they are portrayed as scientists, but their status in the scientific world is less secure. This is summed up well by David Buller, professor of philosophy of science at North Illinois University. Starting as a fan, he spent several years investigating evolutionary psychology’s claims, but ended his 550-page book with the conclusion: ‘evolutionary psychology is wrong in almost every detail.’35
You might assume that evolutionary psychology’s belief in discrete mental modules flies in the face of the general intelligence idea of IQ testing. But evolutionary psychologists don’t question the notion of intelligence as a single thing, captured through factor analysis as g. You might also assume that evolutionary psychology would be antithetical to racism, because of its belief that the human mind was moulded in the Pleistocene, hundreds of thousands of years ago. And, for a while, this was so. Sociobiologists muddied their boots but early evolutionary psychology seemed immune to its attractions. As Cosmides and Tooby put it: ‘Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.’36
However, there were forces pulling in the opposite direction. Evolutionary psychology big-hitters such as Pinker and Thornhill, like the bad boys such as Lynn and Kanazawa, were attracted by the scent. And they have gone further than entertaining the idea that some human populations continued to evolve (or de-evolve) in terms of IQ. It is as though the mental machinery for preferring pink, wearing lipstick, relishing shopping trips, being chatty and empathetic and marrying richer, older suitors (women), or for being mean to step-children, good at parallel parking, reading maps upside down, preferring blue and wanting to get their leg over everything that moves (men) all evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago and remain unchanged, but intelligence is something else; a different category of mental machinery that has continued to evolve not just over the last 200,000 years but over the last thousand. Their core genetic determinism binds them to the belief that nature trumps nurture; that genes explain far more about how we think and act than upbringing, class or culture. They have drawn on genetic determinism to argue that men and women have evolved substantially different mental machinery, so when they saw the same evolutionary arguments used to serve claims about different mental machinery for racial population groups, they were tempted.
All psychologists, all over the world, learn about IQ testing, but it is ubiquitous in North America, penetrating all levels of education and many professions. Evolutionary psychologists particularly relish the ‘scientific’ label, liking to claim that their calling belongs among the biological sciences. It is hardly surprising they embrace the certainty of IQ theory, methodology and practice, which they imbibed with the mother’s milk of their training. Confronted with arguments in favour of a genetic view of IQ, their inclination is to be sympathetic, even when the arguments take on a racial slant.
Race science likes to present itself as pure science but the politics behind its claims are seldom far from the surface. Interviewing Nicholas Wade, Stefan Molyneux dangled a lure, saying that different social outcomes are the result of different innate IQs among the races: ‘high IQ Ashkenazi Jews and low IQ black people’. Wade took the bait, saying that the ‘role played by prejudice’ in shaping black people’s social outcomes ‘is small and diminishing’, before slipping in an overtly political point of his own, condemning ‘wasted foreign aid’ for African countries.37 This is a common theme of many race science advocates: that race confines the potential of groups as well as individual people, and therefore trying to improve their lot is a waste. Arthur Jensen made the same point about the Head Start early intervention scheme; Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan said the same about affirmative action; Murray added it was based on the false idea that ‘everybody is equal above the neck’. Sullivan warned that denying race differences in cognition could prompt us to ‘overshoot and over-promise’ on social policy. There is a common theme: smaller state, less taxation, less social intervention, less foreign aid.
In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould’s book on genetic determinism and racism, The Mismeasure of Man, which focused on the founding fathers of race science, was published.38 But as Gould noted when he revised his book fifteen years later, ‘the same bad arguments recur every few years with a predictable and depressing regularity.’39 Why? One answer is that each outbreak relates to recurring political imperatives. Gould noted that The Bell Curve coincided with the Republican Party’s focus on slashing social services for people in need and giving tax relief to the rich: ‘Can we doubt the consonance of this new mean-spiritedness with an argument that social spending can’t work because, contra Darwin, the misery of the poor does result from the laws of nature and from the innate ineptitude of the disadvantaged?’40
The academic publishing industry, like the rest of the media, is sensitive to the zeitgeist. The spate of ‘Mars and Venus’-type books, both self-help and faux-scientific, which emerged in the 1990s, dovetailed with a wider backlash against feminism. The periodic revival of race science can be seen in a similar light. If, like Murray, Sullivan, Wade and the rest, you oppose big government, welfare spending and the ‘nanny state’, then it must be reassuring to hear scientific-sounding claims that suggest your ideas are in lock-step with nature. If the poor are poor because they’re stupid, what’s the point of trying to uplift them? It’s only a small step to saying that black people are poor because they’re inherently stupid and that Asian Americans, or Ashkenazi Jews, or white people generally, do well because they’re inherently smart.
Gould pointed to the political leanings of those behind race science, specifically referring to Murray’s employment in right-wing think tanks and political conservatism.41 But he missed another step: Murray’s data were drawn from the work of an even more virulent group, some of whom were activists, with links to the radical far-right. Lynn and Rushton led the white supremacist Pioneer Fund, which provided money to the racist psychologists mentioned in these pages. Several wrote for the Pioneer-funded Mankind Quarterly and for another race science journal, Personal and Individual Differences (founded by Eysenck, with Lynn as an editorial board member), and these writers were backed by Washington Summit Publishers, led by Louis Andrews, who wrote from a similar perspective on race and intelligence. More recently, they have also published in the online ‘journals’ of the OpenPsych website, co-founded by the white nationalist and paedophile defender Emil Kirkegaard and the alt-right enthusiast David Piffer, which has editorial links to Mankind Quarterly. They provide positive reviews, endorsements and public support for each other’s views. Murray embraced the data of Lynn, Jensen and Rushton. Sullivan, in turn, embraced Murray and defended Jensen. Pinker aired the views of Murray, Cochran, Hardy and Harpending, who cite Lynn, Jensen, Gottfredson and Eysenck. Thornhill used Lynn’s research for his paper on disease and African intelligence. Many of them came together – far right and near right – in Gottfredson’s document ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’.
Where Gould missed the mark was in his suggestion of a direct relation between political climate and fresh waves of racist science. The hardcore far-right IQ psychologists pump out perpetual streams of data, which are published by their house journals and publishers. This is a given, a constant. They are immune to the criticism that occasionally comes their way when independent academics lower themselves to review one of their books or papers. They reinforce each other, using the Web as an echo chamber in which they can be sure of aggressive backing from racist trolls the world over.
Now and then an hereditarian from outside this tight circle will decide it’s time to pitch in. Their paper or book will take off, be picked up by the media and reverberate on the Web. Why the media might be interested cannot be read from immediate political imperatives. Editors like stories with bite, with controversial angles. Stories on race provide just this, particularly if combined with data that sound scientific. If the data have a genetic tint, so much the better; the editors know a significant proportion of readers believes that genes explain everything. Claims of innate differences between race groups ring editorial bells. At worst, they make good fillers for inside news pages. At best, they generate splash headlines and become running stories, with feature and comment spin-offs. The process goes like this: a race science academic or journalist writes a paper or book that is fed to their university’s press office or their publisher’s publicity team. A press release containing the most newsworthy bits is e-mailed to news and science editors. The press release is worked up into a news report. This prompts fervent debate on the newspaper’s website and Twitter feed. The alt-right trolls get to work and a feature or a comment piece might follow. With enough momentum and enough clicks, likes and retweets, the rest of the news media will follow: radio, television, YouTube. By the time the more critical academics put together their ripostes, the story is dead.
The process is influenced by the political climate, as illustrated by the proliferation of race science on social media in the wake of Trump’s election campaign and since. The rise of the alt-right in the USA, and the success of far-right and authoritarian-nationalist political parties and leaders in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines and elsewhere has been linked to the combination of the economic fallout from the 2008 banking crash, the decline of manufacturing and mining jobs in the West, the recalibration of the world economy as information technology changes the world, and to the wars in Syria and elsewhere that have prompted the refugee crisis. Those who feel they have no stake in this rapidly changing, uncertain, Web-comment-driven, post-industrial world, and fear their positions are threatened by foreigners, darker-skinned people, urban ‘elites’ or women are more likely to join online hate forums and follow assertive, self-assured, vituperative media figures such as Jordan Peterson or Stefan Molyneux. It helps that there are media owners and editors who share an hereditarian agenda, although the process doesn’t have to rely on that.
Therefore, we can expect more of the same in years to come. The building blocks are always in place: a group of dedicated far-right IQ missionaries pumping out race-tinged stories, a wider group of psychologists and other writers deeply committed to an hereditarian intellectual agenda and willing to draw on data from the racist core, an even-wider network of politicians, editors, academics, authors and publishers with anti-welfare agendas, leaning in a libertarian direction, and media decision-makers who know that any story combining race, genetics and intelligence is likely to fly. This, combined with a social media milieu in which people with racist inclinations find each other so easily, guarantees its survival.
It must be said that not all the backers of race science have right-wing agendas. Sam Harris and Steven Pinker are notable exceptions. However, what they all have in common – the true believers and the facilitators – is a fervent belief that the liberal-left media and academia are suppressing science, due to a politically correct queasiness about the truth. Wade told Molyneux he was pilloried because the academic community was in a ‘very leftist mode’. When debating with Ezra Klein, Harris said:
What I am noticing here, and what I’ve called a moral panic, is that there are people who think that if we don’t make certain ideas, certain facts, taboo to discuss, if we don’t impose a massive reputational cost in discussing these things, then terrible things will happen at the level of social policy; that the only way to protect our politics is to be – again, this is a loaded term but this is what is happening from my view scientifically – is to be intellectually dishonest.42
Their martyr complex – the sense that they are the intrepid truth-tellers, following the scientific breadcrumbs wherever they might lead, without fear or favour – is a strong motivating force that draws people like Harris to those with a harder race science agenda. It reverberates on the Web, playing into conspiracy theories about truth-suppression and drowning the calmer voices of science who explain that there is no evidence that IQ differences between populations are genetically rooted. Reporting an absence of evidence is never as thrilling as transforming speculation into fact and, carrying the sword of justice and the shield of truth, riding a white horse against devious, fact-denying conspirators.
One element makes the current wave of race science different: the Web-based ‘alt-right’ (although the ‘alt’ part of it is hardly apposite when the President of the United States echoes all its themes and his former campaign chief, Steve Bannon, is its most public face). The alt-right particularly flourishes in the United States and Canada but its tentacles reach to several parts of the world. Since the early 2000s, it has emerged as a kind of movement, in the loosest sense of the word, with several overlapping zones of passion, anger and interest. Its home is on the World Wide Web, although it is not averse to street action, non-Web political campaigning and terrorism.
Race is certainly the major part of the alt-right’s identity and sense of mission; its core component. Its expression ranges from the visceral white supremacist racism of Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance magazine to the faux-scientific racism that is the focus of this book. There’s a fair amount of overlap, since race science is swallowed whole by white supremacists, giving ballast to their flakiest views. Gender also features prominently; a hatred of feminism and the #MeToo campaign, a conviction that white males experience discrimination, an angry belief in traditional roles and a conviction, often drawing on the perspectives of evolutionary psychologists and others from the ‘Mars and Venus’ solar system, that differences between the brains and minds of men and women are huge and unbridgeable. Some marry this denigration of feminism with a hatred of Islam, which prompts them to write and tweet in defence of oppressed Islamic women; the only group of women they seem to support.
A third theme involves a conspiratorial view of the world. Conspiracy theories are by no means the exclusive preserve of the right, but its members are particularly attracted to the idea that powerful, shadowy forces are shaping the world. Bannon is not alone in finding the hand of the Jewish philanthropist investor George Soros behind every disruptive event. One expression of the conspiratorial view comes from the ‘white genocide’ notion, the fear of a conspiracy (often said to involve Soros) to make white Americans the minority. This ‘replacement theory’ has versions in other countries, including South Africa where it focuses on white farmers, whose cause has been adopted by several on the American right, including Trump. It also inspired the Australian terrorist behind the 2019 Mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand. Other proponents also include the FoxTV talk show host Sean Hannity, and his conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and the murder of the Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich, is a particular favourite, and many dip into Alex Jones’s ultra-right conspiracy site Infowars.
Most members of the American alt-right combine are fervently anti-federal state, despite their nationalism, or at least, opposed to its welfare and foreign aid components. They fear and despise the United Nations and other world bodies, which are often seen in terms of international conspiracy. In American politics they tend to be pro-gun, anti-migrant, climate change sceptics, who either welcome the idea of human-driven global warming as a good thing or, more commonly, view it as a fact-suppressing left-wing conspiracy. A further binding theme is one that used to settle on the hatred of ‘political correctness’ and is now more likely to be framed by free speech: the idea that legitimate views on race, sex, politics and identity are suppressed by a liberal-left elite which dominates the universities and the mainstream media and ‘no platforms’ those who disagree with them. University-based ‘snowflakes’, with their safe spaces, and also their lecturers, who are invariably dubbed ‘cultural Marxists’ (even though most of those accused have no truck with Marxism), are a particular source of agitation.
These issues draw the alt-right together but there is no single, coherent agenda or programme, or formal leadership structure. And there are contradictory elements: anti-tax, small-state libertarians rub shoulders with migrant-bashing, flag-waving nativists, evangelical Christians with evangelical atheists, anti-Semites with Netanyahu-backing Zionists and pro-science empiricists with anti-science and anti-vaccination conspiracists. There is no focal point, although they tend to congregate pseudonymously on Reddit, finding communities of like-minded people in sub-reddit forums,43 and on the imageboard websites 4chan and 8chan and the right-wing social media site, Gab. They dip into news-related sites such as Breitbart News, get their daily news and views from FoxTV and follow the same YouTube stars, such as Molyneux and Peterson. It is notable that the right has far more big-hitting YouTubers than the left, partly because they were early adopters who saw the potential of the platform.
Some are drawn to the alt-right discourse through particular interests, often explored through sub-reddit communities such as the ‘Manosphere’ – an informal Web network of misogynistic white men who are obsessed with male identity, and advocate anything from men’s rights to ‘pick-up artistry’. One branch is the ‘Incel’ sub-culture – a collective of bitter white men who define themselves as ‘involuntary celibates’, unblessed with the genetic make-up for pulling power. Much of their output relates to their belief that men are owed sex and to a biologically determinist view of sex and gender drawn from evolutionary psychology which suggests that women are only interested in men (called ‘Chads’), who have power and certain physical assets. Some advocate that women should be treated as sexual objects, with few rights. Their favourite Web-based star is Jordan Peterson, who says the solution to the problems faced by the Incels is enforced monogamy of everyone else.44
The ‘carnivorists’ are perhaps the most bizarre new identity group of the alt-right. Their conviction is that a diet of red meat will beef up masculinity, and irritate vegetarian liberals and environmentalists. Again, Peterson is its reigning guru, after boasting, in one of his many appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, that he was on a carnivorous diet. This has prompted Peterson followers, among many others, into following an all-meat diet.45
The ‘#GamerGate’ community emerged in 2014, when a game developer, Zoe Quinn, released Depression Quest, which drew from her own experience of depression. It received positive reviews, prompting a vicious backlash from male gamers, who hated its departure from the usual fare of skill-based violence and saw a conspiracy behind the positive reviews. Quinn was forced to flee her home, after a Twitter campaign of harassment, which included rape and murder threats. Her family was threatened, as were her supporters in the media, and other female game developers. The harassment was coordinated through anonymous message boards on Reddit, 4chan and 8chan.46
People in these online communities follow others with links to different parts of the alt-right and navigate their way to its racist component. They find common enemies – leftists, anti-racists, feminists or women seen as rising above their station (as with #GamerGate) – and swarm on them, bombarding their Twitter feeds with ad hominem attacks, insults and site-clogging ‘shitposts’, hacking into their computers, going for their families; all in the cause of silencing them and discouraging others. The right complains bitterly about no-platform actions against its luminaries but it could be argued that the campaigns against people such as Charles Murray and Nicholas Wade have boosted their profiles and given them new media openings. In contrast, the trolling harassment meted out to those campaigning against the alt-right or for feminism offers no positive outcomes and makes people think twice before going public. Trolling is not confined to the right, but left-wing trolls tend to target centrists, liberals, the soft-left and feminists who are viewed as transphobic, rather than the big hitters of the alt-right.
Right-wing trolls know their enemy, as I have discovered. When I wrote a comment feature on Richard Lynn for the Guardian in 2003,47 his pal, J. Philippe Rushton, leapt to his defence but only Christopher Brand and a handful of others took the bait.48 In 2010, I wrote a comment piece in the same newspaper about Randy Thornhill’s research.49 By the next morning, there were a couple of hundred responses, many from men writing under pseudonyms, trolling their way through the night in support of race science. Between 2015 and 2018 I wrote several magazine and newspaper features and gave television interviews on the revival of race science.50 The answering deluge of pseudonymous comments and personal abuse came not only via the publications’ websites but also on social media, particularly Twitter and YouTube.51 It was clear that a community of hereditarians was finding each other on the Web, magnifying the impact of race science and raising the cost of opposing it.