Wokism, rethinking priorities and the Bostrom case

1.-Wokism

The fall of the Socialist Bloc began a long period of peace, democratization and economic growth, but unfortunately in complex systems there is a homeostatic tendency and all good things carry within themselves the seeds of their own negation. The over-stabilized economy of the 1990s accumulated imbalances that led to the Great Recession. The democracies abandoned their Cold War militant position and accepted the Hegelian inevitability of universal democratization as their geopolitical stance reaching all kinds of pacts with the dictatorships under the hypothesis (structurally correct, conjuncturally wrong) that economic growth leads to democratization.

However, the main characteristic of the period are not these objective processes, but the degradation of expectations and the lack of social ambition. In technology the period 1991-2022 was a time of automation stagnation (in an environment of general cheapening of the labor factor) and the oligopolization of the Internet.

In the field of social emancipation an entire generation embarked into the repetition as a farce of the previous generation historical struggles. In the 1960s, African-Americans achieved full legal equality and they become politically enfranchized, and in the 1970s, women accessed reproductive control and labour market participation, and homosexuality ceased to be penalized. All these processes happened in parallel to the liquidation of the remains of the European colonial empires and the establishment of the Welfare State.

The beginning of the XXI century gave us a purely virtual but quite aggressive version of those same historical struggles, centered around a Maoist Cultural Revolution on the United States elite campuses: extravagant proposals like eliminating prison or defund the police and a strange grammatical etiquette on the use of pronouns are only the surface of an agenda focused on: i) the political mobilization of all identity (racial, religious or sexual) cracks, and ii) the imposition of a medieval epistemology, where the defense of faith and the religious- identity feeling is considered a higher value than the search for objective truth (the strict denial of the kantian “Sapere Aude”).

2.-Rethinking priorities

However, this microscopic and hysterical activism cannot change the reality that the amount of current suffering (human and animal) is still huge and Humanity faces existential risks.

Faced with the politicization of identity, a progressive and universalist ideological proposal had to appear. Social science and ethical theory have been clarified and developed in the last forty years, to the point where we have knowledge to seriously affect social governance, and to the point where animal suffering can no longer be ignored.

Although I sympathize with the anti-identity resistance (vg . Quillette) and the movement to defend academic freedom of expression, their political defeat is as inevitable as that of any other defensive and partialist political movement that has to face an aggressive worldview. Culture wars cannot be “won” (the fight itself fuels the tumor process), but rather they have to be superseded.

Right now the only thing that can save the open societies of the West (and prevent a future of nuclear war and/or widespread tyranny) is a surge of institutional and moral progress and a worldview to backs it up. Although no concrete community can be the sole agent of these transformations, the Rationalist+ Effective Altruist community is the true political vanguard of our age.

3.-The Bostrom case and Human Biodiversity

The radical opposition between the woke culture and the EA and Rationalist communities cannot escape any observer with the least bit of political sophistication. The clash is inevitable, and like all conflicts between socially adjacent ideologies (this is a war for the hearts and minds of the Professional Managerial Class) it’s going to be violent.

The recent weaponization of Nick Bostrom ’s youth emails where he used the supreme taboo of the time (racial differences) in a rhetorical example seems the first shot of this existential struggle.

Bostrom ’s apology is, for his part, an example of political wisdom and long-term vision. The original post is hardly defensible, but in epistemological matters, he does not choose the easy route of the kowtow: “Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise, and I don’t have any particular interest in the question. I would leave to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role”.

Bolstrom ’s position refusing to take sides on a factual scientific issue for political convenience, is exemplary not only in the realm of morality and personal example. It is a matter of political survival. The separation between value and fact, between “will” and “representation” is one of the most essential epistemological facts. Reality is what it is, and our assessment of it does not alter it. Statements of fact have truth value, not moral value. No descriptive belief can ever be “good” or “bad.” The black-white IQ gap is precisely the canonical example of this principle: its existence and its causes (whatever they may be) are objective facts, and no one can be morally judged for their sincere opinions about this part of reality. Or rather, of course one must morally judge and roundly condemn anyone who alters their descriptive beliefs about reality for political convenience. This is exactly what is called “motivated thought”.

Bostrom is not very sincere when he says that the subject “does not interest him.” From the precision with which he talks about the subject it is clear that he knows the subject in some depth. Cognitive analysis of human biodiversity (and anthropological sociobiology) are the most fiercely politicized fields of fundamental research. Cancellation culture in these realms dates back to the Chagnon ’s affaire and to the first edition of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology.

Behavioral genetics has found several results of enormous social importance: we can confirm that IQ is strongly heritable, that has increased steadily in recent decades, and that among relatively small and isolated ethnic groups IQ differences can be substantial relative to surrounding populations (the canonical case is the Cochrane paper on Askhenazi IQ, but there are probably other cases in countries with multiple endogamous groups such as India and others in Africa).

Across large racial groups, however, the observed differences are statistically significant but modest (as they are for other anthropometric characters), and given the social and cultural disparities across racial groups and the social plasticity of IQ the share of biological causality on the observed racial IQ gap is a difficult and controversial research problem. Bostrom has not scientific legitimacy to give an opinion in such a technical and disputed issue.

Regarding feelings and human sympathy, the big question is: whose feelings? How can a modest difference in the mean of the IQ distribution offend a black man with an IQ of 130? And if you are a white person with an IQ of 85, how useful is for you the white black IQ gap for which you make a negative contribution? IQ is a personal characteristic, and means are completely irrelevant for every single person.

If we believe that IQ is important for some application, we can measure it directly at the individual level instead of looking at skin color. Anti-racist arguments do not depend on the distribution of psychometric variables. They depend on treating each person as an individual, ignoring skin color, and exclusively considering the abilities and limitations relevant to the case considered of the person under scrutiny. Any “anti-racism” in excess of this, is, in fact, racism