ECCE SIMIAE

Behold the Ape

One of the things I find difficult to discuss with fellow Liberals is the question of intelligence and its heritability.  That observable differences in cognitive function may be no more than learned behavior, or a the most a product of childhood experience, seems to be one of the credos that today's Liberal must share at the risk of losing the label.  Of course there is evidence to show that childhood deprivation of several kinds does affect the way one performs on IQ tests and perhaps in the experiences of life, but looking at people who are incontrovertibly brilliant it's hard to select parenting skills as the cause without looking silly.  The result is often that  people who have achieved great breakthroughs, often incomprehensible to the rest of us: people with great powers to analyze, calculate and create have their accomplishments explained by diligence or the willingness to work. That is something to which we can all aspire and fits into our cultural ethic

I heard in a movie trailer yesterday, that old and quite untrue saw "we only use 10% of our brains" which is patently untrue but  survives by offering hope that, like J.N. Barrie's Wendy Darling, we too can aspire to great ability if we only try hard and truly believe. No matter how hard I try, I still cannot follow Einstein's math much less develop the ability to have worked it out myself.

But to preserve the ego: to preserve the hope of a possibility that we're not second or third rate, we analogize with other achievements.  After all me can train to run farther or faster, to lift greater weights, to play sports better. We only have to use that latent 90%, to buy the "Baby Einstein" CD's and never mind the lack of evidence for success.  We can decide that specific talents are not part of some greater measure of mental ability, and some remarkable ability to calculate or to write music might just be latent in all of us if we try harder. We might decide to see some physical ability as a compensatory type of intelligence to offset our other intellectual lacks and in fact that's a component or the " intelligence is learned behavior" school of Liberal thought.  How brilliant must a Gibbon be, a squirrel, a bird!

But as I said, one risks ostracism by the trustees of conventional enlightenment by discussing, even in jest, such shibboleths as the genetic basis of intelligence, of racial features or even physical stature. What I'm saying is that by many measures, we Liberals are not the opposite of conservatives but just another variant. We too believe what is comfortable and what makes others comfortable with us and what is very uncomfortable to all good people is racism. I've heard it said many times that we cannot research certain things lest we play into the hands of racists or sexists or eugenicists and other miscreants. It's so much like that refrain from so many 20th century horror films: "there are things men were not meant to know."

And so we will ascribe that bell curve to other things. We will question, and perhaps rightly, the ability to test intelligence accurately, writing off vast differences in number crunching ability or short term memory or pattern recognition to cultural things, even when culture has little to do with those tests.  We talk about 5% differences and ignore the 100% differences that can hardly be written off so easily and  not only because we aspire to undeserved greatness, but because we're afraid others will misuse the data.

So it's interesting to see how we very conservative Liberals will see peer reviewed studies like the one in Current Biology that arrives at these conclusions:

•Individual differences in chimpanzee cognitive performance are heritable

•Cognitive traits found to be heritable show significant genetic correlations

•Sex and rearing history do not significantly influence cognitive performance

Will we decide that a biological basis for intelligence only pertains to modern Humans and not our immediate or more distant ancestors?  Perhaps it will be decided that our ancestors learned to be sapient the way we learned to lose out body hair and gain larger brains.  If not, we're going to have to learn to stop hiding and to address the real problems, the cultural and social and ethical problems of how we treat other people directly. We're gong to have to learn to separate all sorts of human variation from estimations of human worth, rights and dignity.  That's far harder to do than to wear a blindfold and demand that others do as well.

My guess is that the "no scientific basis" will remain a strong political force despite any degree of  sabotage by science because truly, there is no conservative more tenacious than a Liberal.

Where I've Been

I'm now the southeastern correspondent for The H.O.R.N., the Head On Radio Network. Here's a rant last night by host Bob Kincaid:



Bob doesn't make a pretense of being a journalist, but his live streaming of the Families USA conference in Washington, DC caught an incredibly important and little-known fact about the health care bill:



Mind you, ending Medicaid means testing is no wonky arcanum. In states like Alabama, this is literally the holy grail of reform advocates.

Bob also has interesting guests:



The H.O.R.N. is a listener-supported liberal talk media that has already outlasted the Air America experiment, proving that you cannot support liberal opinion with a right-wing revenue model.

Bully for Teddy

It's a funny thing, the conservative American mind. Talk about quotidian things, work, the weather, and they can be charming, witty, companionable and seem intelligent, but stay away from politics if you don't want to have to discard many friendships. Beneath the mask can lie a morass of anger and ignorance as deep and foetid as hell itself.

I've very often had people express nostalgic longing for a president like Teddy Roosevelt - a hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman, soldier, adventurer and writer of books; a man not afraid to conquer and not likely to apologize for it. A conservative's conservative. Someone who stood, square jawed and well armed astride the American horizon in a time of unlimited freedom, opportunity and prosperity when the lower orders knew their place. Thus are the dreams.

Of course Teddy was often denounced as a Communist Agitator. Today his opinions would have the Sarah Palins and Joe who isn't a plumber flapping in a frenzy like decapitated chickens. He espoused a graduated income tax and more government regulation of financial markets. He advocated more government social programs such as housing for immigrants. Of course there were no Nazis then to be falsely associated with American progressivism and no way to compare him to Hitler as today he inevitably would be.

Roosevelt's time had seen the effects of economic booms, panics and busts in rapid and relentless quick step. Economic inequality was growing, monopolies were tightening their grip on free markets and massive accumulations of private wealth were threatening democracy. His vision didn't include doing nothing or faith in the power of doing nothing or blind trust of the altruism of the very, very wealthy.

"Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism "

said Roosevelt in a famous 1910 speech calling for a "New Nationalism" One wonders what bizarre grotesqueries of accusation would emerge had it been given today. Would people be carrying weapons to his speeches, would he be called a tyrant, would there be hysteria over the way he was "dismantling freedom?" Would they question his citizenship, his patriotism; accuse him of murder? It's hard to tell but surely Barack Obama has suffered worse for less radical statements.

Of course Teddy had to remind his audience after he said

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration"

that he was quoting Abraham Lincoln because he was regularly being called a totalitarian himself - as well as a Communist. Perhaps such things never change, but the perception of an America that's sliding irretrievably down a slope toward the antithetical perdition of communism and fascism because sentiments such as those of Lincoln and Roosevelt are essentially "far-left" and "liberal" and we're being assured of it daily by mindless maggots with megaphones.

It seems that the Niebelungs of negativity have been crying wolf for a very long time, but look at how well the average man lives today compared to how he lived a hundred years ago when poverty consumed most of us and faith based laws restricted huge numbers to certain neighborhoods, certain jobs, certain levels of education, certain expectations of justice in an essentially Hobbsian society.

Somehow I cannot believe that a hundred years of progress toward more liberal goals have made us justifiably disgruntled. We live longer, live better, cleaner, healthier and have far more freedom to alter our circumstances for the better. The slope has not been slippery, the slope never existed. Progressive income tax has not stifled entrepreneurship which has thrived even in times of over 80% top brackets and in fact it seems to dampen economic cycles. It seems the only wolves that have shown up were wearing conservative clothing and warning us of wolves.

Isn't a new nationalism what we need today? The old kind and the old attitude and the old maxims and the old and vicious, dishonest and hate-filled rhetoric has never done us any good and have now brought us to the brink.