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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
A Race Apart
Marek Kohn
.
The scientific study of race, according to Professor Jean-Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, is proscribed by a "taboo" which has "no parallel ?not the inquisition, not Stalin, not Hitler". Rushton argues that evolution has made people of African descent less intelligent, more violent and more promiscuous than Europeans or East Asians. He has been subjected to denunciation in the media, disruptive protests, police investigation, and calls for his dismissal from Ontario's Premier. But, ten years after he achieved notoriety, he remains in his post and is still publishing papers expounding his racial theories. In the words of Andrew Winston, another Ontario psychology professor, "[g]iven that Rushton continues to hold a tenured professorship, to teach and write about race, and has suffered neither the rack, the Gulag, nor worse, his statement is difficult to interpret."[Andrew S. Winston, The Context of Correctness: A Comment on Rushton, Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 5(2), 1996, 231-50.]
Rushton's mixed fortunes illustrate the situation of overtly racial science in general. Although constrained and subject to harassment, it is securely embedded and viable. While some academic publishers have overridden editorial decisions to publish material dealing with race, others are happy to promote such writing. Scholars like Rushton may be denounced by some scientists, but they enjoy cordial relations with significant numbers of their peers. They are able to take part in normal scientific meetings and discussions, though their racial theories remain marginal.
Race has been a perennial source of discord in science over the past half century, despite the widespread Western belief that it has been conclusively discredited as a theme of scientific knowledge. The start of the current phase of race science controversy can be conveniently dated to the occasion in 1989 when Rushton presented his racial ideas at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His model of race, which has remained substantially unchanged since, is based on a division of humankind into three major races, Mongoloid, Caucasoid and Negroid. It proposes that consistent rank orders for these three races can be seen in all kinds of data, including IQ scores, crime statistics, prevalence of AIDS, head size, penis length and the incidence of non-identical twins. Africans, Rushton concludes, have evolved to invest in producing large numbers of offspring, but not in bringing them up; whereas the colder climates of Asia and Europe favoured careful upbringing over large families. East Asians have therefore ended up with the largest brains and shortest penises; Africans are the least intelligent but most highly sexual race.
Evolutionary biologists have not been impressed with this vision, and a number of the scholars who considered it worth commenting upon have subjected it to withering criticism. Other figures have not been content to let it meet its fate in the marketplace of ideas. The then Premier of Ontario, David Peterson, declared Rushton's arguments to be "offensive to the way Ontario thinks", and called for the university to dismiss him. A group of students lodged a complaint about him with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Rushton was also subjected to a police investigation, for possible breach of a statute directed against "every one who ... willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group". Eventually, in the words of Attorney-General Ian Scott, the police decided that Rushton's theories were "loony, but not criminal".
Within the university, according to Rushton, a "witch-hunt" was mounted against him. He was rated "unsatisfactory" in a performance assessment, and his Dean criticised his views. She made it clear that her remarks were not made in her administrative capacity, however, and Rushton has acknowledged that "[i]n its relations with the outside world the university administration stood firmly for academic freedom". It certainly did not take up the head of government's suggestion that Rushton be sacked in order to affirm how Ontario is supposed to think.
Rushton benefited not only from the university's firm stand for academic freedom, but from its grievance procedures, under which he successfully appealed against his grading, and against a ruling that he teach via videotape. The disruptive protests that had led to this decision were curbed by threats of legal action and suspension. Both academic and state institutions eventually upheld his right to freedom of inquiry and expression - but not before the state had explored the possibility of criminal charges for which the evidence would have been papers published in academic journals.
Chris Brand never had to help the West Lothian constabulary with their inquiries, although he did assist them as an advisor on IQ. He did, however, end up losing his post as a psychology lecturer at Edinburgh University after a controversy that began when he described himself as a "scientific racist" to an Independent on Sunday reporter. His remarks about IQ, race and eugenics were published in April 1996, a few days before John Wiley was due to publish his book The g Factor. Wiley immediately withdrew the book, stating that it "makes assertions that we find repellent". The publisher did not clarify which these assertions were, nor how they had escaped its notice until the week of publication.
Chris Brand does indeed make a lot of assertions that many people would find repellent. In the Independent on Sunday interview, he recommended that "low-IQ girls" be "encouraged to have sex with higher-IQ boys" to avoid genetic deterioration. "There are plenty of intelligent African men for black girls to be having sex with," he added encouragingly. But The g Factor itself adheres to the normal conventions of academic discourse, outlining the body of theory based on the idea that intelligence can be defined in terms of a single factor, which can be measured by IQ tests and is substantially heritable.
His discussion of the gap in average IQ scores between black and white populations clearly favours the view that there is a genetic component to these differences. It is not categorical and it is not knitted into a broader racial argument, apart from a passing mention of Rushton's claims. As such, it is a not especially hard-line statement of a view which commands considerable support among psychologists. Though it also provokes intense opposition, the "IQ hawks" (as some have recently started to call themselves) have a substantial base of data on which to draw. Their arguments may be wrong, but are more than assertions.
Rather than seeing himself as an author with a contractual grievance against his publisher, Brand leapt into the role of martyr to political correctness. He began publishing newsletters on the Internet, treating his audience to the benefit of his opinions upon anything that came into his head, from education and eugenics to colloquial terms for female genitalia and what he did on his holidays. In retrospect, his heavily-capitalised and puerile missives seem to have been professional suicide by bandwidth. Brand had continued his normal academic activities at Edinburgh despite endless bickering with the University authorities, the Principal of which he insists on calling "Dame" Stewart Sutherland. Eventually, the prospects of martyrdom on racial grounds having petered out, he turned his attention to paedophilia. Taking up the cause of an eminent scientist charged with sex offences, he remarked that " non-violent paedophilia with a consenting partner over age 12 does no harm so long as the paedophiles and their partners are of above-average IQ and educational level", and recalled that such activities had been a source of pocket money when he was a choirboy. The University's Provost made a formal complaint that Brand's conduct had brought the University into disrepute. Following disciplinary proceedings, Brand was sacked.
Brand has not resolved his dispute with Wiley, so The g Factor has yet to find a new publisher. Its obvious home would be Praeger's Human Evolution, Behavior and Intelligence series - except that the list already includes a book with the same title. This one was written by Arthur Jensen, the founding father of racial IQ science, and was turned down by Wiley. Other titles in the series include Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, by Richard Lynn, whose views on race and evolution are similar to Rushton's, and several books on the Jews by Kevin MacDonald, of California State University. MacDonald presents his view of Judaism as an evolutionary model, in which Jews have structured their religious beliefs in order to resist genetic and cultural assimilation, while encouraging eugenic practices which favour high intelligence. Anti-Semitism, he argues, is a response to the Jews' pursuit of their own interests.
MacDonald's books have been commended by the influential ultra-rightist William Pierce. Another commentator, John Hartung, welcomed MacDonald's 'A People Who Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy' as a tool to chip away at "irrational" Holocaust guilt among gentiles, which encourages them to help modern Israelis "systematically purloin the land and property of people who were not [Holocaust] victims' persecutors". Hartung quoted extensively from the Bible to characterise Judaism as a genocidal ideology whose moral sanctions applied only within the group, and depicted medieval Jews as mercenary oppressors of Europe's peasantry.
Hartung's notice appeared not on a Web site devoted to Jewish conspiracy theories but in a 1995 issue of Ethology and Sociobiology, the journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Dan Sperber, an anthropologist, raised questions about it on the HBES e-mail discussion list. The journal's editor commissioned an addendum from Hartung, who delivered a note extending the arguments of the original piece, along with an ambiguous denial of anti-Semitism. Elsevier, the journal's publisher, vetoed the addendum.
The only casualty of this episode was the e-mail list, which melted down after one contributor took to posting long tracts denying the Holocaust - a familiar endgame for Internet discussions. Concerns were beginning to be expressed that the media might get hold of the story. There was also indignation about Elsevier's editorial interference. Some commentators did make trenchant criticisms of MacDonald and Hartung, but the most striking thing about the correspondence was the relatively low ranking of anti-Semitism among the causes for concern. One distinguished evolutionary theorist wrote Hartung a letter of support, saying that he couldn't see anything anti-Semitic about the addendum, and probably not the review either. On the other hand, he could grasp the issue of editorial interference clearly. His response seemed to encapsulate the uneven perception of social and ethical issues among many of the scholars who took part in the controversy, whose sensitivity to infringements of academic freedom was not matched by their ability to hear undertones of racism.
___
Among the quarters in which the withdrawal of Chris Brand's book was welcomed was Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties, a spokesman for whom called Wiley's decision "a wise one". Liberty's stance in favour of both civil liberties and censorship was trumped in political fatuity by the Anti-Nazi League, which succeeded in preventing anti-racists from speaking against Chris Brand's arguments on race and intelligence. The event was supposed to have taken place in August 1996, during the Edinburgh Festival, but it was supposed to have been a debate, not the sorry piece of fringe theatre it turned out to be.
Brand was to have discussed 'Race, Intelligence and Censorship' at Edinburgh's Cyberia Café with myself and Kenan Malik, author of The Meaning of Race. Following threats of violence from the Anti-Nazi League, the café's proprietor cancelled the event on police advice. Instead, the ANL staged a pocket rally in which various speakers congratulated themselves on having suppressed the debate. One of them was the comedian and columnist Jeremy Hardy, who dismissed talk of freedom of expression as "liberal rot". I found this particularly nauseating from a man who makes a nice living from saying what he pleases, and in doing so stands on the shoulders of those liberals he despises. But the shriller he and other speakers became, the more they sounded as though they were trying to convince themselves.
This article first appeared in Index on Censorship 28/3, May/June 1999.
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http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/ara.html
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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