400 years ago, the Academy went through a revolution. After Copernicus reminded the world that the Earth rotated around the Sun, and not the other way around, people realised that the truth about the nature of reality had been suppressed by religious forces. This led to a powerful anti-religious sentiment that later developed into The Enlightenment.
When the Christians burned Giordano Bruno to death, thereby destroying one of the finest minds of the Renaissance, freethinkers everywhere realised that they had to keep religious people out of their circles. Every person who desired the truth understood that Christians were willing to kill to prevent that truth from being known. Part of the Renaissance, then, was an anti-Christian revolution.
Ever since this revolution, the Academy has operated on one hard law of exclusion: religious zealots are out. Even if the zealots aren’t actively trying to kill anyone, they will still degrade the quality of the culture, especially the research culture.
It’s impossible to discuss biology with a person who thinks the Will of God, and not evolution, is the cause of the varying physical expressions among the world’s creatures. It’s impossible to discuss anthropology with someone who thinks that God created all the different races of the world at the same time with the same characteristics. It’s impossible to discuss mechnical engineering with someone who thinks that all machines are inventions of Satan.
Excluding the religious worked wonders for the university system. The centuries from 1700 to 2000 saw unparalleled advancement in human knowledge and understanding of the physical world. But this advancement peaked in the latter half of the 20th Century. Since then, the Academy has fallen victim to another form of zealotry: the political kind.
Political zealots are as dangerous to our current understanding of truth as religious zealots were to the ancient understanding. Marxists, in particular, have certain preconceptions about human nature, and will reject any science that conflicts with those preconceptions.
For instance, Marxists insist that the working-class is international. This insistence seems absurd in light of the fact that human population groups vary enormously by almost every measure, as does every species that has adapted to a wide range of environments. The great variation within the human species suggests that it makes more sense to organise on a local level, with smaller political units more closely aligned to local conditions. So the Marxists simply deny that variation.
This denial has severely impeded mainstream psychological research. Any researcher suggesting variation between sexes is howled down as a misogynistic bigot; any researcher suggesting variation between races is howled down as a racist bigot. Because human behaviour is heavily influenced by genes and because genes vary along all measurable dimensions, the Marxists find themselves effectively denying biology, which is itself the basis of psychology.
Psychological research has been forced to accord with Marxist dogma before it can safely be referenced by scientists (a topic covered in detail in the essay Science in Clown World). This neo-Lysenkoism has had the effect of making it impossible to survive as an honest researcher, as the examples of James Watson, Richard Lynn, Hans Eysenck, Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux and a parade of others attest.
The Academy has to keep these political zealots out, and keep them out just as assiduously as it keeps out religious zealots. This means blacklisting anyone political, or with a particular axe to grind, and not just Marxists (who are merely the most egregious current example of political zealots destroying truth).
People with political interests are motivated to deny any biological, psychological or anthropological truth that, if widely accepted, would weaken their political position. As such, they cannot be considered objective and dispassionate observers of the human condition. They cannot be taken any more seriously than people with religious interests are.
For instance, globalists are strongly motivated to deny the truth about race and IQ. If they were to concede that intelligence is mostly genetic in adults, they would be forced to admit that the offspring of immigrants are unlikely to be significantly more intelligent than their parents. As such, low-IQ immigrants will spawn a low-IQ underclass that will inevitably have higher rates of violent and property crime, and therefore should not be let in.
Progressives are strongly motivated to deny the same truth. If they would admit that there’s a limit to how far low-IQ people can be educated, they’d have to admit that taxing the average person into the ground to pay for the education of the uneducable is pointless. They’d have to admit the wisdom in getting rid of much of the teachers’ corps – to which they often belong.
Denying scientific truths isn’t the preserve of left-wing zealots.
Conservatives are strongly motivated to deny other truths. They don’t like to admit how psychological science clearly shows that smacking is bad for a child’s healthy development. They also don’t like to admit how the same science clearly shows that the psychological dangers of cannabis use have been exaggerated. Although conservatives motivated to twist the truth on such issues are comparatively uncommon, the ultimate fact is that having any of these people in the Academy will weaken it.
To fix the Academy, there has to be a widespread agreement to ostracise political zealots the same way that religious zealots have been ostracised. Political zealots have to be removed from every level – not only from the faculty, but from the administration as well. The world’s universities need to become politics-free zones in the same way that they have become religion-free zones. Only then can the truth shine forth.
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In my experience as a teacher most of my colleagues have actually been authoritarian and judgmental of students based on their abilities.
The entire profession and educational system is set up in such a way as to exacerbate existing inequalities.
Most of the teachers won’t admit to openly believing in racial IQ differences having a genetic basis or even state any opinion one way or another about the academic concept of general intelligence.
But their everyday language use and the widespread preference for streaming indicates a practical belief in the concept. They call kids smart or dumb and discuss ability levels, and especially in maths education there’s a widespread belief in innate ability.
I’ve been told “stop trying to open their minds and make them understand,” “just teach them the procedure, the conceptual approach doesn’t work,” etc etc
They also treat the children as subordinates. Many of them may have leftist affectations but they’re middle class, often own property, and have deeply conservative views about getting what you deserve and rewarding hard work, personal responsibility etc, and they have to believe this the way they let kids fail and then go home and sleep comfortably believing those kids deserve it for being lazy.
You’re right, that they have distorted incentives that force them to adopt certain beliefs. But it’s just not necessarily the beliefs you’ve described.
None of this is to say whether any of these beliefs are correct or not. I don’t want to enter into the whole race and IQ debate, but just want to say I’m currently working at a decile one Kura Kaupapa Māori with kids who share a lot of your beliefs.
They think they’re dumb, they think Māori are less academic, they think they can’t do what I make them do. They have poor literacy and they have poor understanding of basic number concepts.
But I can train them to factorize quadratics with nonunitary leading coefficients. I can train them to perform timeseries analysis, bivariate analysis, make statistical inferences using large datasets. I’ve seen them do it. I’ve heard that noise, the “awwww, now I get it,” when they get that conceptual understanding that makes it all click.
I live for that noise. I love that moment, where we high five or fist bump, where I see they’re not too embarrassed to try.
They stopped believing in themselves but I believe in them. I don’t care about my job. Teaching fucking sucks. Schools are fucked up nineteenth century worker factories with pavlovian bells. Even Kura Kaupapa Māori. I’m not interested in a career. I’m ok doing it for a year or two, maybe take this cohort of kids through to graduation, but it’s not my destiny. But I can tell you I’ve seen the people this country thinks are dumb. One girl bleachers her skin because she hates her own race. One boy got stuck trying to do quadratics and I found him crying in the bathrooms saying he was fucking dumb and couldn’t do it. The next week he was back in class solving those same problems, no problem.
I’ve seen the self-hatred, the reflection of the wider country’s beliefs on these children, even in a place where we try to raise them to be proud of their ancestors and surrounded by their own language, those messages still come leaking in.
So maybe you’re right. Maybe IQ is a statistical fact, maybe it’s primarily genetic, maybe we’re all a bunch of socialist idealists ignoring the statistical reality that race is a biological taxon and the non-white races are less intelligent because of population genetic differences.
But I’ve seen different.
> They stopped believing in themselves but I believe in them
Do you believe in the white working class as well? The white working class has all the same problems that Maoris and Islanders do, and most of those problems have the same ultimate cause (shit parenting). The difference is that we don’t get any sympathy.
> the non-white races are less intelligent because of population genetic differences
If you knew anything about race and IQ at all, you’d know that Far-East Asians score higher than white people on IQ tests, and therefore no educated person believes that “non-white races are less intelligent”. If you don’t know this, then you can’t have looked into the topic in any depth.
Every honest person knows there are racial differences in behaviour. You only deny it because you look down your nose at people who believe it. You need to deny race and IQ to feel morally superior to those who do.
Sad!
The smartest person I knew from my time at uni was Maori, he completed his M.Sc in Biology in 18 months. You’d absolutely hate his guts because, like everyone with an education in Biology, he believes in Cold Winters Theory.