In between Christmas celebrations I have been watching the Norwegian show Brainwash, discussed previously. The method of the interviewer was to listen carefully to the Norwegian social scientists – most of whom were pure ideologues – and then he interviewed American and British scientists more imbued with an evolutionary and factual standpoint (Steven Pinker, Robert Nesbitt etc). He then showed each side videos of the other talking. The Americans and British tended to respond to the social theorists with carefully guarded observations that the Norwegian besserwissers [“know betters”] were badly off the mark, and they would be disappointed within their lifetimes as the facts of biological influence became incontrovertible.
The Norwegian ideologues’ reactions, time and again, were that these questions of the possibly biological origin of racial, personal, sexual, and other differences ought not to be asked. They considered interest in the biological origin of differences to be unscientific, a sign of an unpleasant political and personal deviation, and in bad taste. In great majority they said, plainly, that they were not interested in the question, that people interested in the question were too ardent to find a biological reasons, that the whole concern was beyond the range of polite discussion.
And they call themselves scientists!
At one point, in the segment on heredity and environment, the interviewer Harald Eia is talking to an old lady scientist, Judith Rich Harris, in her New Jersey home, who argues the contemporaries of children have more influence on them than parents. Of the social ideologues, she said: “They just go on saying these things year after year, and they never pay attention to the facts”.
He said: “In a way this goes against everything I was taught”
“Tough”, she says. “You’ve been taught a lot of things that were wrong and not just about children and parents” (the Parental Effect at 25:25)
So have we all been systematically misled about sex, race, class, personality by the dominant sociological blather that biology does not matter, or, if it does, it should not be talked about.
As a parent, it means you can relax a lot more about your influence, for better or worse, of the little monsters.
The second implication is that, as wealth increases, educational levels are increasingly linked to intelligence, not social class, since people now do not drop out of school because of poverty, as they used to.