On IQ Determinism and Conservative Intellectualism
By this point, you may have heard that a report arguing against immigration offered by the Heritage Foundation was co-authored by someone (Jason Richwine) who wrote his Harvard doctoral thesis on the idea that Latin@ immigrants to the United States were destined to form an educational and professional underclass because they were genetically disposed towards having lower IQs. This, he argued, was reason for the US to tighten its border control on the US-Mexico border and to greatly restrict the number of Latin@ immigrants granted citizenship. Beyond the obvious racism and disturbing parallels one could draw to racially and gender-motivated IQ-and-intelligence-based attacks on Americans throughout history, this betrays something deeper that I feel is important to understand about conservative intellectualism in general.
Conservatives often position themselves as having a solid understanding of economics and history. They maintain that by looking to our past we can see a way forward for society. This is not to disparage the work done by conservative historians. Many have written well-reasoned and well-researched accounts of their subjects. However, it seems to me that the scope of understanding of conservative intellectuals with regard to history is bounded by the Rio Grande, the Ural Mountains, and Pearl Harbor. To argue that white people are genetically predisposed to be smarter and more successful than other races is laughable both from a scientific and historic perspective, but since I haven't cracked a science book for a good while now, I'm just going to talk about the history.
I wonder what Richwine thinks about the Maya, whose Classical period (around CE 250-900) was a golden age of technology, urbanism, science, and the arts. I wonder what he thinks about the contemporary Muslim empires whose cultural and scientific output almost singlehandedly saved the concept of Western civilization. I wonder how he squares his view of, let's face it, white intellectual superiority with the fact that while these civilizations were in a golden age and the intellectual capitals of their respective worlds, European civilization was a shell of its past glory, fighting feudal wars in the crumbling ruins of Rome.
I guess you could call that a fluke, though. After all, Richwine might say, by the time Europeans arrived in the Americas, they had proven their intellectual superiority. Here again, he would be wrong. Keeping our focus only in Mesoamerica and the Andean region, there were two civilizations that rivaled or surpassed any others on earth in terms of complexity, accomplishment, and cultural output. Both the Aztec and Inca empires (for lack of a better word that occurs to me right now) were prosperous, multiethnic, and culturally diverse. The Aztec trade networks stretched through the Americas and their capital, Tenochtitlan, was almost indisputably the largest and richest city in the world at the time. The Inca, meanwhile, had created a post-scarcity planned economy whose innovations in agriculture and construction have not been replicated to date. This is not to whitewash the problems these states had or to overly romanticize them: rather, it is an acknowledgement that the very people that Richwine denigrates have historically proven him wrong by creating civilizations that equalled and surpassed contemporary European civilizations.
I will be fair to Richwine and assume that he drew his racist conclusions from some sort of statistical analysis. However, his conclusions are laughable and speak to a severe lack of analysis. IQ scores, like pretty much all intelligence measures, have been shown to be racially skewed against people of color. Also, assuming that Richwine really did show a significantly lower IQ score among Latin@ immigrants, I would ask him to consider the colonial and postcolonial legacies that European and American states have visited upon the rest of the world and Latin America in particular, rather than twisting his findings to fit his previously held racist beliefs. History shows that there is not one race of intellectually superior people, but rather that social, cultural, economic, and governmental forces combine to produce what I'll call "mental output": advances in science, governance, philosophy, the arts, etc.
In conclusion, my problem with Richwine and other conservative intellectuals is not that they aren't intelligent. I'm sure a great number of them are. But just like how conservatives who profess economic expertise are currently ignoring basic demand-side economics any college freshman in introductory macroeconomics can explain to you, so too do conservative intellectuals on issues of race tend to ignore millennia of history that contradict their conclusions. I think Richwine and his fellow intellectual conservatives are very smart people: I just wish they'd pay more attention in class.