The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

There’s a great debate going on over at the American Scene over Jim Manzi’s National Review cover article that cautions conservatives about embracing genetic research and evolutionary explanations of behavior.

Thoughts by an anonymous contributor: How are we to explain that educated opinion is farther removed from the scientific consensus on this question than are the opinions of high school dropouts?

I think that we can best understand this phenomenon by viewed the doctrine of biological equality as a sort of secular religion. This doctrine was conceived by Thomas Hobbes in a British political context in the 17th century, and was promoted during the 18th century “Enlightenment” by Rousseau, Locke, and others; but close contact with alien races led to doubts, and Hobbesian equality appeared to be “on the ropes” following the growing acceptance first of Darwinian theories of natural and sexual selection in the late 19th century, and then of Mendel’s rediscovered genetic theory in the early 20th. Yet the bio-egalitarian creed, down but not out, surged back to popularity following WW2, and achieved a great political triumph during the 1960’s, when it became the new legitimating ideology of European-derived cultures and political establishments. This course of development can reasonably be compared to the displacement of official paganism by Christianity as the legitimating ideology of the European political and cultural elite during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, or the displacement of Christianity by Islam in Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and North Africa–Christianit y survived as a minority faith in many of those lands, but the new legitimating ideology was Islam.

Now, one interesting but not well known thing that has been discovered about sociological “cults”–new or unfamiliar religious movements, such as Hare Krishna in a Western context, the Moonies, Mormonism when it was new, and even today outside its geographical stronghold in Utah, or Christianity in the early Roman Empire–is that most of their converts are not drawn from the lowest orders of their societies, but from people with above average literacy, social class, and, presumably intelligence. The reason for this is that the need to assimilate significant amounts of new doctrine and worldview poses an obstacle to the conversion of the less educated members of society.

In contrast, sociological “sects” offer more zealous applications of the “old time religion,” and the familiarity of their core tenets presents minimal intellectual barriers to the recruitment of the less educated.

So the egalitarian creed is very similar to a new religious creed–that is, it is a political “cult,” as sociologists use that word.. From the beginning, it drew its adherents mainly from educated elites, who progandized for their faith with increasing vigor. During the 20th century, and with an accelerating boost from the propaganda that accompanied WW2, this ideology of intellectuals increasingly filtered down to the hoi polloi. For example, even in the 1950’s, a majority of Americans had already become persuaded of the genetic equality of Whites and Blacks, and the majority’s new belief made possible widespread public support for, or at least acquiesence to, the radical social legislation passed in the 1960’s. With the passage of time, more and more the public has come to accept the new, fashionable creed, but, not surprisingly, the number of holdouts is larger as one moves down the educational ladder.

This is just one part of a larger pattern in which older, traditional beliefs–often summed up as “social conservatism” or “cultural conservatism, ” and which traditionally included a biological interpretation of the racial hierarchy that characterized the now unfashionable colonial age–a pattern in which a set of old, “Victorian” beliefs decline in popularity among the better educated, the better read, and the more intelligent; indeed, decline among most people who are well enough informed to be aware of, and interested in, the prevailing intellectual trends, fashions, and prejudices; and have their greatest number of remaining adherents among the more “backward” parts of the socio-economic pyramid. This is very much analogous to the pattern of conversion that occurred in northern Europe to Christianity, and in the Middle East to Islam. First the ruling classes adopted the new religion in Europe, or a new ruling class adhering to a new religion imposed itself through military superiority in the Middle East; the new religion with its distinctive moral code became the new legitimating ideology. Anyone with ambition was likely to adopt it, further raising its social status and finally leading to most of the population adhering to the new faith, some with more zeal than others. Eventually, the old religions of Europe died out, just as Christianity died out in North Africa and was reduced to a minority faith in the Middle East, where its numbers are still diminishing. And that is also what we saw happen in European-derived cultures during the 20th century: elites adopted a belief in biological equality, lending it prestige; it filtered down to the masses until a critical mass of adherents was reached; next it became unequivocally the new legitimating ideology from which no ambitious person dare publicly deviate; and then the rest of the population rapidly signed on to the new secular religion, except for a minority of “backward” holdouts who are assumed to be either stupid or evil, and possibly both.

But the weakness of the egalitarian dogma is that it is not a real religion. Instead, it claims to be a truth not about the spiritual world, but about the material world that is perceived empirically through the five senses. Because the egalitarians make claims not of divine revelation but claims of a scientific or pseudo-scientific nature, their claims can be shown, if not absolutely, at the very least beyond any plausible doubt, to be false. What saves their house of cards from collapse is their near-total control over the instruments of mass communication and over the schools. Thus, most people can be kept permanently ignorant of all or most of the information that would expose the absurdity of the egalitarian dogma. In the sixties, the new faith triumphed over a half century of scientific research in human heredity and related fields, and it has continued to consolidate its gains even as further research continues to confirm earlier findings. Although the new religion has much in common with primitive faiths, such as the belief that an assortment of gods dwell atop Mt. Olympus, and Apollo’s horses pull the sun like a chariot across the sky each day, I see no reason why the new myths, however counterfactual, cannot rule the minds of the majority and the elite alike indefinitely. Telling people today, especially in European-derived cultures, that the Victorians and the Nazis [National Socialists, please] were basically right about human differences and that most people today, and especially the best educated people, are wrong is much like telling the Muslims in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey that they should abandon Islam and return to the Christianity of their ancestors.