In the Name of Wokeness: Institutionalized Racism | Heather Mac Donald | EP 350

Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life. [Music]

And a scientist's comparative advantage is not social work. It is not social justice, even if we're going to bracket that term "social justice," which I am forced to do because I think it's a preposterous phony term. But let's say there is such a thing that is legitimate. It is ridiculous for our academic, our universities now, to be telling scientists that we are going to evaluate you based on whether you are doing enough equity work. The only obligation of a scientist is to use his intellectual capacity to push back the boundaries of ignorance and to continue this stunning evolution out of poverty, penury, disease, want, vulnerability that has given us lives that would have been unimaginable 200 years ago. We live like no God on Olympus ever had a hope of living. [Music]

Hello everyone. Heather Lynn McDonald is an American political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. Her new book, Mid-April release, "When Race Trump's Merit," is now available. Heather, it's a pleasure to be able to talk to you today.

I thought I might open our conversation about your new book "When Race Trump's Merit" with a technical description of what constitutes merit. And so, and you may know some of this, but I doubt very much whether the people who are watching and listening know.

So imagine that you're tasked as a psychologist with ethically proceeding to develop hiring criteria for a given job. So what you have to do is you have to perform what's called a job analysis and what that means is a decomposition of the requirements of the job into a list of skills and functions. And then you have to look for predictors, then on the hiring side, that will increase the probability that the person you hire will be able to carry out that list of skills and functions.

Now, it turns out that as jobs increase in complexity—and so a complex job is one where the demands of the job change quite rapidly. So there are jobs like factory line worker is a good example, where once you've learned the routine, all you do is repeat it. And then there are other jobs where the requirements of the job switch from situation to situation and day to day. And so managerial jobs are complex; sales jobs are complex; jobs in the medical field are complex; scientific jobs are complex.

And then it turns out that if the ability to deal with complexity is one of the hallmarks of merit, then the best predictor of that ability is a test of general cognitive ability. And essentially, an age-corrected test of general cognitive ability is an IQ test. And the reason that IQ tests are good predictors of performance in complex jobs is because IQ tests assess the ability to learn, and they're actually very, very good at that.

And the problem with throwing out the cognitive test literature, let's say because it does produce disparate racial impact, is that there aren't any more well-validated measures of anything at all in the social sciences or in medicine than tests of general cognitive ability. And the people who derive the statistics that made tests of general cognitive ability possible are the same people who derive the statistics upon which all social and medical science is predicated. And also, by the way, a fair bit of physical science as well because physicists use equations that are derived from the statistical literature. Statistics means state.

And you hear that social scientists have physics envy, but much of the approach conceptually that physicists have used, particularly in the last century, were actually derived from the social sciences rather than the reverse. So merit—there's actually a technical definition of merit. And merit is the ranking, ordering of people in relationship to their ability to perform the tasks of a given job. There's a commonality of merit across complex jobs, and the general tests of general cognitive ability are a measure of that central tendency to adapt to complex situations.

And so insofar as there are jobs, and insofar as people differ in their ability to perform those jobs, there is merit, and merit in that sense can be assessed. There's merit in relationship to those jobs. Merit can be assessed most accurately by tests of general cognitive ability. And then that instantly gets us into the equity nightmare.

So anyways, that's the technical definition of merit for those of you who are watching and listening, in case you're interested. Now, Heather has just written a book called "When Race Trump's Merit," and I thought it could have been titled somewhat more broadly "When Group Identity Trumps Merit," because it's not a problem that's only focused on race, although that's definitely a punchier title. So why is it that you decided to focus on this particular topic, and what do you think your book brings to the table?

We'll walk through your book step by step, but we might as well open with that.

Jordan, thank you so much. This was a book written out of a combination of sorrow and rage—sorrow at the fact that the institutions that I love—classical music, art, philosophy, literature—were being torn down by a false narrative saying that if a tradition has a demographic history that is predominantly white, that is the European tradition, it is per se a racist tradition. So classical music, because the great Western composers—Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Beethoven, Smetana—we're all white, therefore we should look upon that tradition with contempt and suspicion.

And rage because the arguments that are being made are so completely false. And yet every single leader of a tradition that brings us beauty, sublimity, wit has turned on its own tradition and joined in the anti-racism crusade. So this book provides the data that explains why there is disparate impact when you apply those colorblind, neutral standards of merit. There's a vast academic skills gap that means that any neutral, completely non-discriminatory standard of academic skills or the cognitive abilities that you described will have a disparate impact, and that is not because of racism.

So Heather, you've noted that the technical definition of merit and the objective definition of merit, which we've just run through, has been subverted or replaced by this insistence that if you take any given domain of inquiry or endeavor and you note that there are any differences in representation of population by group category, that that's a prior evidence for something approximating systemic prejudice. And your concern, which is partly what you're laying out in this book, is that that axiomatic, a priori presumption of prejudice based on the mere observation of differential group representation is not only faulty but faulty enough to threaten the entire enterprise of merit itself.

You know, Adrian Wooldridge wrote a very good book on the history of meritocracy, pointing out that the historical alternatives to something like objective assessment of merit haven't been equity or equality of opportunity, but nepotism and dynasty. And so if we were realistic about this, even on the side of the left, we would note that if we scrapped objective tests of merit, there's no reason to presume that what we would get out of that wouldn't be something far worse, that being nepotism and dynasty.

Now, what has been your response to the replacement of the idea of merit with the idea of equity or equality of outcome, and how do you define equity?

Well, first of all, you know, it's a puzzle. What really does the left believe? There's two options. One option is they think that these objective tests are in fact covertly racist, that despite the history that you described of the development of these occupational analyses that had nothing to do with race. You know, this was not the issue; it was employers seeking help from psychologists in breaking down the cognitive needs of different jobs. If this could have happened in China or in India, where the race issue was not present, there was no reason to think that those tests were devised with some ulterior motive of keeping out blacks. But no, quite the contrary.

Because even by the critical standards of the left, if capitalism is motivated by the greed that the left purports motivates it, there was every reason nonetheless, there was every reason for the people who were developing these tests to concentrate not on nothing but race and sex blind merit, if for no other reason than to maximize their own profit.

And so, because it meant that if you developed a test that could find talent that had been hidden by racial or sex prejudice, you could arbitrage that and make a fortune, which is what you do if you can hire extremely qualified people at a lower than market rate because they've been prejudiced against. So in fact, all the tension that might have pushed the tests in a biased direction was actually extant, even by the leftist's own hypothesis, in exactly the opposite direction.

And that is, in fact, how it turned out in reality. Because the use of cognitive tests did allow us as a society to discover talent that had been hidden from view beforehand, and that was well established by the Socialists, for example, in the UK in the 1930s and then also in the U.S. military. You know, that was certainly the case with the development of the SAT, of trying to break up the hegemony of the New England WASP elites in the transit between Andover and Yale.

But just again, what explains this? What is their hypothesis? And as I say, they would either be arguing that there was covert racism in the development of these tests, leaving aside the economic capitalist interest in finding talented workers, or it's even more nihilistic than that, and they actually do not believe in ideas of merit or of accomplishment or excellence and that any test that purports to find cognitive ability is per se invalid.

And in that case then we should all be going to a lottery. You know, if they really believe that these tests were illegitimate, and you have college presidents themselves preposterously blaming their own institutions for racism. You know, whenever a Yale University president, Peter Salovey, or Princeton's Christopher Eisgruber gets up there and beats his chest and says, "Woe is me! Yale and Princeton are so systemically racist!" which is merely a case of virtue signaling to get attention from The New York Times, he's implicitly accusing his own faculty of racism.

And so, if he really believed that, then they should go to randomized admissions. If it's not possible to distinguish between somebody who is more cognitively suited for a high-stakes, high demands in an academic environment or a workplace environment, and there's really any kind of test like that is per se invalid, let's just admit by lottery! And they will never do that because, in fact, they do know that these tests are valid.

They predict--there's nothing that predicts first-year grades in college better than the SAT. Those grades in themselves predict, by and large, how students behave. So it is an utterly hypocritical narrative that wants to demean these tests because they have racially disparate impacts at the same time that these schools are ruthlessly trying within groups to rank by cognitive ability.

Right, well, you'd also have to scrap the within-school grading structure as well and assign grades on a random basis, because if you open up the admission process randomly—and I think you could make a case for that, I'm not saying you should, but you could make a case for that for early-stage university education—because you could say, "Well, let's let everybody in. Those who can float will float, and those who can sink will sink."

And now, that has the advantage of a kind of radical equality of opportunity. It has the disadvantage of extreme inefficiency in that many, many people will fail, and that will be very expensive for them and for the institution. If you have grading criteria with regard to success within the class, you're going to get a rank ordering of achievement inevitably, if there are any criteria that are being applied at all.

And the probability that those criteria will, if they're valid indicators of competence, the prime probability that they'll be correlated with general cognitive ability is about 0.6. It's very, very high. And then you could even go a step further and you could say, "Well, let's just scrap the idea of merit altogether." And what that would mean is that you would no longer have choice in your selection of service person!

Right, you'd have to accept whatever lawyer came your way. You'd have to accept whatever physician came your way! It would be a lottery of matching between professional and customer as well, and you'd also have to scrap disparate pay. Because in order to remove this so-called systemic bias, you can't only do that on the selection side. Well, actually, because the selection side never quits! You're selected on some basis with regards to your ability to go to university, then when you're in university, you're selected on your basis to do the work, and then when you graduate from university, you're selected on your ability to do the job!

And that might be merely to satisfy your customers. But if, among salesmen, for example, if you look at what predicts how satisfied customers of salesmen are with the salesman, especially if they're selling something complex, one of the things you immediately find is that a very good predictor of sales success happens to be general cognitive ability.

And so the fundamental problem is that general cognitive ability is so pervasive as a merit index that there's no getting rid of it without eradicating the idea of choice and difference at every single level of every interaction in human society. And if you don't think that would be a nightmare, then you've never had a bad plumber.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate, and you're absolutely right, and it would be a very useful test to ask the levelers on the left that are trying to tear down every sublime institution of Western civilization in the name of fighting disparate impact: are they willing to go that far and have randomized, not just college admissions, not just law school and medical school admissions, but randomized choice of professionals and consultants?

Let me just say though, in one sense, if you are a radical egalitarian, that would be in one sense an ideal situation, because what we have now, you and I, Jordan, are people of education and relative prosperity, and we can choose our doctors and our engineers and our architects and our lawyers from pretty much the top of the pool. But if we went, but the pool is the same, so somewhere in that pool of doctors are people who really were at the bottom of their medical school class, squeaked out without the assistance of racial preferences. Same with plumbers, same with lawyers.

Well, somebody's hiring them, and so there is presumably a scale of medical competence, and the wealthy presumably get the best doctors. Now that's complicated by the fact that if you are in an inner city, a large inner city, you're probably using that city's teaching hospital, which may be Columbia or Harvard, in which case when you go to the emergency room, you are getting the top doctors, not the worst. But if you're relying on a clinic in on 126th Street, East 126th Street in East Harlem, you may not be getting the doctors that we assume as our birthright we should be able to contract with. So it's an interesting question.

I mean the demands of equity might in fact say, why should poor people get less good medical care and be able to hire less good medical professionals? But this is getting a little far afield and into sort of, you know, Rawlsian definitions of what you would choose in your provider.

You know, part of the problem—and this is an intractable problem—is that, and it is really a painful thing to encounter. I mean, one of the things that the authors of the "Bell Curve" pointed out, Richard Hernstein, one of the authors, was that in the typical Ivy League environment, the typical Ivy League inhabitant never meets anybody in the lower half of the cognitive ability distribution.

And so if you happen to teach at Harvard, your less able students are people who have an IQ of 115, and that puts them at the 85th percentile in the general population. You never have a student who has an IQ of 100, and you certainly never have a student who has an IQ of 85, which is 10 percent of the population. And one of the things Hernstein pointed out is that what that means is that the typical elite, the atypical inhabitants of an elite institution, has no idea what the full range of human cognitive ability actually constitutes.

Now, I was a clinician for a very long time, and I had many clients who were inhabitants of the lower end of the cognitive distribution. So I had one client, for example, with whom I spent 29 hours teaching; I spent 29 hours teaching him how to fold a piece of paper with sufficient accuracy to put it into an envelope with sufficient precision so that it could be put through an automatic letter-sorting machine. Now, if you bend and mutilate the envelope to any degree, it'll jam the machine. And so you have to be very precise.

And this problem was complicated by the fact that there were photos stapled to this letter in a somewhat random manner, so that with each folding exercise, you had to take into account the position of the photo, which also couldn't be folded over. And it was virtually impossible for this man to learn how to do that. And you actually have no idea how complex a task that is until you watch someone who just can't do it.

And it's part of the reason that the equity problem and the systemic racism problem is so deep and pervasive, is that it's actually extraordinarily painful to apprehend the full range of human and cognitive ability. Because there are people for whom the easiest task mathematically is no more difficult than falling off a bed, and so that might be someone with an IQ of 160 who specialized in physics. And there are others for whom the probability that they will ever learn to make change facilely is zero.

And that's a difference in quantifiable ability so great that it becomes qualitative. And it is one of the most painful facts of human existence that that unbelievably wide range of generic ability makes itself manifest, and it does so in a rather arbitrary fashion as well. It's that, you know, it isn't obvious that the typical extremely bright four-year-old has done anything in particular to deserve being that bright; it just happens to be the case that that's the manner in which they're gifted.

And that brings with it a tremendous advantage. It's far better, by the way, economically to be born at the 95th percentile for general cognitive ability than the 95th percentile mark for familial wealth. So there isn't a form of wealth that's more profound than that natural general cognitive ability, and there's an immense diversity in capacity that's built in there at the beginning.

And it's no wonder people recoil against that. If you run into that as a clinician or a researcher, it's brute force of nature phenomenon like the claws and the teeth of a predator. It's a terrifying reality, and it's very difficult to mediate against. I mean, you know, you know the American military, for example, determined after about a hundred years of general cognitive ability testing that people with an IQ of less than 83 (and so that's about 12 percent of the population) cannot under any circumstances or with any training protocol conceivable be trained to do anything of any utility whatsoever at any level of military organization.

And so it's illegal in the United States to induct someone with an IQ less than 83. And if you know that that's 12 percent of the population, that's an absolutely terrifying statistic because it means that the very enterprise that is most hell-bent on finding personnel—that would be the military—concluded that despite their own necessity for finding personnel, they have to put 12 percent of the population per person permanently out of reach. It's unbelievably sad.

Well, you speak about the complete bubble that surrounds people teaching in Ivy League universities and their cluelessness about the range of cognitive ability and how people live outside of Cambridge or New Haven, and it reminds me when you read the founders' rhetoric and 18th-century political theorists, and it's not an egalitarian viewpoint at all, contrary to our current narrative about that, and a certainty that, of course, the people should not be given too much power.

They don't necessarily shouldn't have the vote, and the concern about the mob—I think back in the 18th century there was much more exposure. You don't have institutions that were completely sealed off to the less cognitive elite, and so there was maybe a little more realism about what the vast range of human experience was. But I would say, Jordan, I know that your instinct is always to de-emphasize a race aspect. I can just tell you from the United States perspective that I think a lot of, practically all of this discourse is driven by race.

I do not think if there were reliable and seemingly continuous, significant gap, standard deviation gaps in the average IQ between blacks and whites that there would be a lot of upset about cognitive testing. I feel the same about our prison population. We have this narrative in the United States about mass incarceration as something that is per se bad. Nobody looks at the actual numbers of who's in prison compared to the number of violent crimes being committed.

It turns out you have, if you commit a crime in the United States, there is a three percent chance that you will end up in prison. So most crime is going unpunished. You have to—you know, prison is still the lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. You have to try very hard to get a district attorney to say, "Okay, I'm actually going to take your case to court. I'm not just going to plea bargain you down, but you belong in prison." You have to have a very long record before he actually says, "Okay, I'm going to pay attention now."

So, but if our prison population was not racially disparate (it is now about a third black, whereas blacks are about 13 percent of the population), if there was not that disparity, nobody would give a damn about mass incarceration. And it's the same thing with the fact that there is a distribution of academic skills, the—way out in the high end. And we also have the gender issue, the sex issue, with males being overwhelmingly represented at both the high and the low end of math skills compared to females. But just to repeat, I think in the United States we would not be as troubled as we are by what you say are tragic cognitive disparities but for the race issue.

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Right, right. Well, I looked into the race issue a lot when I worked at Harvard because we were—I worked with a student there on developing efficient assessment tests, both on the cognitive and the temperamental side. So, for example, in a managerial domain, you want people who have traits that are associated with high intrinsic conscientiousness. And by the way, there's no racial differences in conscientiousness. And conscientious people are diligent and orderly and industrious and task-oriented and detail-oriented.

And fundamentally, a conscientious person is someone who's capable of formulating and keeping verbal contracts. And it's the next best predictor of success in managerial domains, next to general cognitive ability. It's not a great predictor of entrepreneurial ability, by the way. And we looked deeply into the racial literature at that point, and I was trying to account for the fact of these persistent racial differences.

And one of the things I found, for example, that was very strange was that the differences between the general cognitive performance of North American Native Americans and Caucasians was much smaller than the difference between performance between the black population and the Caucasian population. And that's a tough nut to crack because if you had to find a population that was as historically oppressed in the United States as the black population, the Native American population would certainly spring to mind.

I think you could make a strong case for equivalence of outcast status, let's say, and certainly a strong case for multi-generational pervasiveness, and continuing multi-generational pervasiveness. But it doesn't manifest itself in the general cognitive ability difference front.

And so that was disheartening to note that more recently, we might point out that there is plenty of evidence that environmental intermediation can produce improvements in general cognitive ability. The Flynn effect has demonstrated that, and it's quite clear that on average, people in the United States score quite substantively higher on IQ tests than they did a hundred years ago.

And a lot of that is a consequence of improved nutritional status, for example, and the fact that information is at hand for pretty much everyone. And it's also the case that the racial gaps in general cognitive ability performance have been decreasing over about a 30-year period and that they're actually much smaller in childhood than they are in adulthood.

And that's the one point of optimism that someone very hard-headed might still maintain in relationship to the IQ literature looking at it on the racial front is that at the age of five or so, the difference between Caucasians and blacks, for example, is something more approximating five points than the, say, 10 to 12 points that seems more standard by adulthood.

And no one really knows why that is, why that gap expands across time. And it would be very useful to, at least in principle, to focus our sociological and psychological investigations into determining why that is. I suspect phenomena like fatherlessness play a role. I also suspect that early literacy is relevant. You know that in the typical middle-class family, a kid of—forget race for a minute—if you look at the typical middle-class family compared to the typical working-class family, a typical middle-class kid by the age of three or four has been exposed to a veritable plethora of books and semantic information compared to a working-class kid.

All things being equal, and the differences in exposure magnitude is absolutely remarkable even by the age of three. And so there are still some places we might look if we were really interested in remediating the remaining differences in general cognitive ability.

So, well, we've tried that. I mean, this is the whole Perry Preschool experiment, and yeah, absolutely, this has been noted—the difference in the number of words that children hear from poor and middle-class backgrounds. And I would absolutely agree with that. One question is: is the failure to surround lower-class children with rich verbal environments a function of just ignorance about good child-rearing? Or do you get somewhat of a circular loop where it is the lower cognitive level of the parents that results in this type of inadequate— from our perspective, maybe there's other strengths going on there?

I don't know. I've got a kind of an Appalachian, white trash couple living underneath me in my California apartment, and I can tell you it's an amazing contrast. There really are class differences that are hilariously stereotypical. But these guys live up to it to the T. I mean, everybody in their environment has no teeth, either because of meth or they're just beat each other up too much. But there's clearly—I would not want to be the child of those parents. And they're not married. There's both.

I mean, so the best predictor of the IQ of a child is the average IQ of the parents. And so you definitely get a situation where cognitive resources accumulate. And this is particularly true in the modern world because modern high-status women are much more likely to mate—they like women in general—they mate across and up dominance hierarchy. So that as women have become more educated, the proclivity for educated women to only marry educated men, and there's an associated IQ assortative mating phenomenon going on there, that's increased substantially in recent years.

And so it is definitely the case that environments that are set up by people who have lower cognitive function are less likely to be literacy-producing environments. But there may be also additional effects where that could be ameliorated to some degree because if your parents—if the parents of a given child are both lower than average in IQ, their child will on average be slightly smarter than them. There's a phenomenon called regression to the mean.

And so if you have parents who both have IQs of 145, they don't produce a child with an IQ of 60—they produce a child with an IQ of 130. And if you have two parents with IQs of 85, they produce a child with an IQ of, say, 90 or 95 on average. It's something like that.

And so those children could benefit from a richer semantic environment. But the problem with that on the educational front is that, you know, maybe part of the reason the IQ differences are pervasive racially is because there are real differences in literacy culture. But a lot of those might be manifesting themselves as early as two years old.

You know, because in the literate family, kids that two are already sitting and reading. Often they're not; they're just looking through books. But they have a hundred books in the room, and they might spend an hour a day leafing through them. It's proto-literacy behavior. And if you want to instantiate that kind of proto-literate behavior in children that early, you have to adopt a pretty radically invasive, neo-colonial attitude towards the lower-class family.

And that's something that in and of itself is problematic. You know, you want every working-class family to be mother, father, and well-meaning social worker. I mean that's a dismal deal for everyone concerned. But it's very hard. But as I said earlier, we had these early preschool experiments that were extremely intensive, and they did produce a narrowing of the cognitive skills gap. But those differences disappeared by 12 or 16 years later, as you suggest.

I would say possibly it's a misplaced obsession of the elites to be so concerned about pulling everybody up to a higher average level of cognitive capacity. What really is to concern to our society at this point is the breakdown of bourgeois values. And you say there's no differences in conscientiousness among groups. I hope that's the case. But that's really, I think, you know, our race problems would go away if we could extirpate the dysfunctional underclass culture.

And that is something that is tearing down black's potential to succeed by embracing this anti-oppositional culture that says that academic effort and achievement is anti; is acting white. It glorifies criminality; glorifies conspicuous consumption; misogyny; maximal procreation; you know, having as many children as you can by different baby mamas. If we could get, I would say an intervention that was maybe focused less on the cognitive matters and more on simply deferring gratification, self-control—the types of issues that Edward Banfield wrote about in his "The Unheavenly City," that that would be the most important thing to focus on.

Because I’m not sure that efforts to change the cognitive skills gap will be that successful over time, but really all we ask is people to respect the law and to restrain their impulses. And as you pointed out, the data for, let's say, the Head Start enterprise does indicate very clearly that these wide-scale attempts to increase general cognitive ability did not succeed.

What you saw with Head Start was that the children who went through Head Start were more likely to be in the proper grade for their age and they were more likely to graduate from high school, and they were less likely to become pregnant in teenagehood. But that hope for expanding both cognitive ability as a consequence of early childhood intervention did—it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Head Start experience—but was obliterated, as a general rule, by grade six.

All the other kids caught up! And so then there's only two places to go from there. And one is to go even earlier into the intervention, which means you start taking kids away from their family in some real sense at the age of, let's say, two or even earlier. And that's a rat's nest and a nightmare of its own accord. Or to understand that, as you pointed out, that there are other socioeconomic variables that might be focused on.

I think one of the most interesting ones biologically is likely fatherlessness. Like, we do know, for example, that girls who don't have a father will hit puberty on average at least a year earlier, which is substantially earlier. And that indicates a real biological impact of the lack of a masculine figure in the household because that's a walloping physiological difference.

We know that boys who have a lack of father at the age of 12 have telomeres, so this is a genetic difference that are on average something approximating 15 percent shorter, which means that all other things being equal, they're already doomed to a much shorter life.

And so we don't know what the pervasive multi-generational consequences of the breakdown in familial structure in the final analysis are. I mean, it does appear that the black population has fallen behind on the family integration and stability front since the early 1960s rather than making advances, and it doesn't look like that's good for anyone concerned given the absolute wealth of data showing how pervasive a problem at every level fatherlessness happens to be.

We also have no idea what the consequence of fatherlessness is on the development of general cognitive ability across time. There might be a literature on that that I don't have to be familiar with, but it is certainly the case that that's another place we might look if we were trying to bolster social stability and eradicate some of the pervasive differences in, in what would you say, general psychological well-being that seemed to be associated with race.

Well, yeah, I mean, you're—I think you're playing this as how bad it is. You know, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his astoundingly present report in the 1960s warning that the country was about to screech to a dead halt with regards to further civil rights progress, his reason was not a resurgence of white racism or changing economic positions in the country—opportunities in the country. His reason was what he saw at the time as a catastrophic breakdown in the black family.

At that point, when Moynihan wrote this report, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 23 percent. And Moynihan said that with that number of young black males growing up in single-family homes without fathers to socialize them, to civilize them, growing up without the expectation of a marriage culture, this population is doomed. You will not get out of underclass poverty culture, gang culture.

Well, what are we at today? We're at 71 percent! Of what Moynihan was raising an alarm about. So, three times higher. And so it is absolutely at civilization-destroying levels. And what is as bad—and we know you say we don't know the cognitive consequences of that—that's probably true—but we certainly have ample data on the fact that kids growing up in single-parent family homes are four or five times as likely to be poor.

You know, you say you'd be better off being born with a smart parent than a rich parent. I would say you're better being better off being born with two parents than one welfare-supported single mother who happens to have a larger government income than two working-class married parents that are maybe pulling in $25,000 a year.

You still, if you're in a Rawlsian position of choosing where you want to end up, you choose the two-parent family over the wealthy single mother. So things are really bad. But the problem is how do you fix it?

And people like you and I have been going around talking about the problem of single parenting. And I was just going to add, the problem is not just for the individual child and growing up without a father, but when boys are raised in a culture that does not expect them to get married before they have children, they are absolved of the types of expectations that can help them become functioning males.

And I know I'm in your territory here, Jordan, in talking about how do you civilize the savage male libido. But one way you do so is to say if you want to make yourself a plausible mate, you have to learn to defer gratification. You have to learn to have future orientation. And when you're growing up in an inner city, and it is absolutely the norm that you can start having sex with girls at age 12, they may or may not get pregnant, but you will have no further responsibilities, there is no reason to develop those skills of self-control that make you a plausible worker, a plausible husband, a plausible colleague in any kind of voluntary association.

So that's the problem. The solution, though, is extremely difficult because, as I've been reprimanded in the past by Deborah Dickerson, the relationship between the sexes in the black community is very, very troubled.

So Heather, I spent a lot, a lot of time studying motivation for drug and alcohol abuse. And among savvy researchers into the addictive realm, the question is never why do people take drugs. The question is always, given the overwhelmingly reinforcing properties of drugs—cocaine and alcohol perhaps above all—why don't people do nothing but take drugs all the time? And the answer in the typical situation for young men, who are statistically more likely to abuse alcohol, for example, is that most young men abuse alcohol when they're young, say between the ages of 17 and 25 or so.

And the reason they stop is because they take on what we would generally regard as adult responsibilities—they develop a career, they get a permanent girlfriend, maybe they have children, and they realize that their impulsive, hedonic lifestyle is interfering with that and that it isn't sustainable. And so they grow the hell up and wise up and start walking on the straight and narrow path.

If you're never required in your lifetime to adopt the responsibilities, particularly of parenthood, there's no reason that that competitive hedonistic lifestyle won't just continue. Now, you know, it gets pretty stale and ugly by the time you're 40. Even if, who wants—you know, you want to be a juvenile teenage player by the time you're 40? It’s pretty contemptible, but the problem with depriving people of responsibility is that you deprive them of the necessity that matures them.

And the problem with that is that that produces a lifestyle that is self-destructive in actually relatively short order. And so by lifting the responsibility off the shoulders of people and replacing that with, let's say, state support, you're actually demolishing—you’re certainly demolishing the women because they have no men to rely on, but you're demolishing the men too because they have no necessity to require them to mature. And that's actually a catastrophe, not a freedom!

I think yes, there is a misunderstanding in Western countries today that define poverty exclusively by the income of a household or government benefits, and the government believes that just as a government check can substitute for a father and that social workers can substitute for a father, that income is all that we need.

Whereas in fact, what really is the key is whether the household is passing on social capital and those traits that make one able to seize opportunities that still are available in Western societies. There's a critique from the right that is trying to adopt some lefty economic criticism that might say that, well, because of big business or globalization, the economic situation for the working classes is irredeemably grim.

And I'm not going to dispute that. But I still would say there are opportunities for people who are willing to hustle, to discipline themselves, to not be addicted. You know, the problem of drugs in the United States is absolutely horrific. We are a society that seems to be so spiritually bereft that people turn to drugs at much higher rates than elsewhere.

But if you are straight and are reliable and show up every day and do not scream at your boss, but have the ability to restrain your impulses, you will be able to have a decent life. And those are the issues that are most essential, not whether you've got parents with money or what your race is. It really is the bourgeois values, and those are disparaged in society today.

You know, there's the book by the former editor at City Journal, "The Dream and the Nightmare," that pointed out that the '60s counter-cultural revolution of, you know, tuning out, getting high, and disparaging what your parents worked hard for—that that was something that the wealthy could dabble in and then come out ahead.

But when you have that corrosive idea that normalcy is somehow racist or acting white and that you give license to people that are going to thumb their noses at the law, that are going to shoplift, rob turnstiles, jump with impunity and get more involved in drugs, they're not—they don't have the safety nets! And so that was really a catastrophic development in our culture that the elites survived.

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Heather, you open your book with a discussion of the cultural revolution in it. It is in part this revolution of the 1960s that you described, and you also described the values that the radicals in the 1960s—the rich radicals let's say—were rebelling against as bourgeois. And I would say from a psychological perspective, it's actually reversed. Is that what constitutes bourgeois values are actually functional values.

And the reason that they're functional is because they work if you iterate them for a long period of time in a social environment. And so conscientiousness is a good example of that because in many ways, bourgeois values are values that promote conscientiousness. They're pushed very hard in Asian societies, for example, and those would be virtues of discipline and dutifulness and dedication and industriousness and the ability to maintain—to formulate and maintain contracts.

And that is a very good predictor of long-term success. And so those values aren't precisely bourgeois— they just happen to be productive. And the bourgeois tend to be productive, and so they have those values. But the idea—the thing is, by claiming those virtues as bourgeois, you fall prey to the Marxist worldview that claims that those are merely secondary derivations of something that's arbitrary and class-based, when in fact, they're not.

There are preconditions for success! And it also helps us understand how we might better define wealth because, on the one hand, you could say, "Well, if you just provided people with enough of a basic income, they would be wealthy." But on the other hand, you could respond to that and say, "No, if you're not being raised in a familial environment that engenders within you the virtues that will make you successful in a social context over the long run, you're poor no matter how much money you have!"

All that money is going to do for you is pave the highway to hell. And of course, that happens to lots of people who are incoherent on the value front, who have a windfall.

The money is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, because it just speeds their inevitable demise. I saw that happen in my clinical practice all the time when I had incoherent clients, who were badly socialized, let's say, much to their own chagrin, who would receive their unemployment check or their welfare check, and their psychopathic friends would instantly descend.

And they'd be out of commission entirely for the three days it took them to spend every cent they had on alcohol and cocaine, and then they'd be face down in the gutter, and wake back up. Well, then they were back in therapy, but money wasn't going to help that in the least!

We, on the conservative side or even on the classic liberal side, we have to very carefully beware that we don't fall into the trap of assuming the reflexive leftist stance—that the reason people are poor is because they don't have money. Because that isn't the problem! Poverty is a way deeper problem than mere lack of money! Not that lack of money is not important.

Well, I don't think any conservative would ever argue that. I think just the opposite! I think it's the left that defines poverty exclusively in terms of economic levels and ignores cultural factors completely. And if you talk about culture, you're viewed as blaming the victim. And those values are now criticized as white values!

Conscientiousness, you know, with caring about getting things right, accuracy. Those, since the 1990s and the reign of the charlatan corporate diversity consultant, used to go around to a T and Levy Strauss and say that if you focus on promptness and punctuality, well, that's just not—that's not valuing differences, and you need to be retrained so that you don't impose your white structure on your employees. So that's been going on for a long time.

And I don't think it's the right that is deficient in that. But to get back to your question of the way that the term bourgeois sounds, I would welcome alternatives. I certainly am not using it in an economic context necessarily of capitalism. But it may be that it is a counterproductive word to use because to the left it does sound like you are simply wanting to prop up this illegitimate system of private enterprise and profit.

But so when I use bourgeois, simply mean habits of self-control, of conscientiousness, of respect for authority that used to be middle-class values.

Well, you're basically just laying out a case for the pragmatic utility of trait conscientiousness, and it is the second best predictor of long-term lifetime economic success. And as I said, there is no evidence whatsoever that there are intrinsic ethnic differences in conscientiousness, and there's certainly no evidence that—I’d be surprised!

Well, I'm surprised as well, but that is the case. And the idea that those virtues are somehow associated with racial identity is just—there’s not a shred of evidence for that! And in fact, the scholarship that established the idea that these virtues of promptness, for example, and of a hard work-oriented ethic—that scholarship, first of all, was conducted by people who had no academic standing whatsoever. It was one weird opinion paper, unfortunately, I can't remember the derivation at the moment, that was published about 30 years ago that gained cachet because it fit the leftist narrative. But there isn't a single serious researcher into the conscientiousness domain that would ever make a claim like that.

And it's useful to know, just on a technical level, that conscientiousness is the best, second best predictor of long-term life success, and in instilling conscientious virtues, which, by the way, what Asian families seem to really excel at that!

So here’s an example. So, the children of first-generation Asian immigrants are likely to do far better academically in the United States than the children of American of Americans who aren't immigrants. But that advantage disappears in three generations as the children become more and more American in their conscientiousness virtues.

And the Asian advantage in economic success, which is pronounced, not only among the well pronounced throughout the Asian immigrant population, does seem to be a consequence of the inculcation of conscientious, disoriented values. So that does seem to be a very positive field of open possibility in relationship to remediating racial differences in outcome.

Now, we don't know how to do that because it's not all that obvious how you instill conscientious virtues. I mean, the Asians do it in the confines of their own private family, and how to duplicate that, say on the educational front, isn't obvious. So we're stuck on that front to some degree as well.

Now you, yeah, in—oh please, go ahead.

I was just going to say, again I mentioned my former editor's, Myron Magnet. He had a relationship with George W. Bush and was pushing his idea of homes for teen single teen mothers, where you would take a young single teen mother and put her in an environment of others living, small group homes that would just absolutely surround that child with—I'm not going to use bourgeois anymore, you've taught how to say conscientiousness—and people that will absolutely insist on ability to be prompt, to respond to requests politely, doing homework, meeting expectations.

And this group home project was based on the understanding of how deep the lack of those values were in your typical inner-city home, where the mother may be strung out on crack, you know, you've got five different children by five different parents there; the father, the boyfriends are coming in and out; it's a completely chaotic household.

But the problem, maybe this would work, that degree of intensity, but it was clearly economically impossible. It would have been so expensive. So what do we have as a second best solution? The second best solution would be a school that would be unrelenting in its emphasis on self-discipline, its application of discipline for failure to obey rules.

And you had that for a bit with the development of what came to be known as the no excuses charter schools—things like KIPP, the Success Academy in New York. Well, what happened to the no excuses charter schools? They fell prey to the self-immolation of decent, excellent institutions post-George Floyd.

KIPP used to have a motto as, which was "Work hard, be nice." Seems like a perfectly innocuous motto, right? No! It turns out it's racist! Saying to children "Work hard, be nice" is a function of white supremacy!

And so the founders of KIPP, who had begun with a civil rights motivation—they began in Texas, and then these schools spread, and they were very, almost like boot camp—the children have to walk down one side of the corridor on their way to class. Everything that the teacher does is scripted. The students' answers are scripted in order to remove variety or discretion from teachers because they believed that they had the answer to how you inculcate self-discipline and future orientation in children, and it was working!

But now he has had some success with that at the Michaela School in inner-city London, which is a lottery admissions school, and her graduates have a higher chance of being accepted to Russell Group universities, which include Cambridge and Oxford, than any even private school in the UK.

And she adopts that extraordinarily disciplined approach, and that, you know, unfortunate— you know, in some sense, that’s anecdotal, although she has many graduates, but it does look like there’s some possibility on that front. Now you just alluded to a theme that you developed quite intensely in your book, which is post-George Floyd guilt on behalf of every institution that you can possibly name that had a meritocratic basis.

You walk through how these institutions have emulated themselves on the pyre of equity since the George Floyd killing. You start with medicine, for example, and walk through science, classical music, art, museums. Exactly. And so these institutions of higher order learning and culture, and describe in painful detail how they have all allowed themselves in a fit of guilt to be subverted by this idiot equity agenda, which is an extraordinarily dangerous movement.

Do you want to start maybe discussing your book more specifically with a description of why the equity doctrine, which at first glance sounds a fair bit like a variant of equality of opportunity and that second glance seems like only basic fairness? It's very difficult for people to understand why that doctrine is so pernicious and deadly.

And so can you summarize in a relatively comprehensible form why the equity doctrine is so catastrophic? Well, here's the—what the left is doing today: it looks around and it chooses institutions almost at random. And if it finds that there is not a proportional representation of blacks in that institution—whether this is Google's computer science force, or Harvard's Medical Faculty, Medical School faculty, or a classical music orchestra, or the Western art collections of a museum, or the partners at an elite law firm—if there is not 13 percent blacks in that institution, that institution is per se racist, per se!

The only allowable explanation for racial disparities in a medical practice or in a physics department, in an economics department, in a math department, the only allowable explanation is racism. And with that rule, it means that any kind of standard that has a disparate impact on blacks, such as an expectation of mathematical skill or an expectation of a grasp of fundamental medical principles, if that expectation has a disparate impact on blacks, it must be discarded.

And it is all coming down! There is not a single institution in our world that is not vulnerable and that will not be torn down as long as racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial disparities.

Here is the alternative explanation for why Google, in its computer science and engineering workforce, is not 13 percent black: the academic skills gap! It is mathematically impossible to maintain meritocratic standards and to engineer diversity as the diversity mongers define it, which is basically racial proportionality.

If you look at black 12th graders in the United States—and our 12th grade is the last year of high school before you go on to college, so these are 16, 17-year-old students possibly on their way to college—66 percent of black 8th graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic 12th grade math skills. Those skills are defined as being able to do arithmetical calculations or being able to recognize a linear function on a graph.

The number of black 12th graders who are merely competent in those simple 12th grade math skills is six percent, and the number who are advanced is too small in the United States to even show up statistically. The reading picture is not much better. The American College Testing organization, the ACT, says that only six percent of black 12th graders are college ready when you look at their combined math, reading, and science scores.

And again, these are very basic, minimal expectations! So given that, there are simply not enough competitively qualified blacks in the hiring pipeline to say that every physics department in this country, every chemistry department, every IT department, every tech startup in Silicon Valley is going to be 13 percent black. Nevertheless, it is—you've got to guarantee to end up on the front page if you write the usual racial inequity story that says, “Okay, this law firm's partner class just didn't have 13 percent blacks in it!”

This is pernicious because our meritocratic standards are not racist! They are designed, as we began with our discussion, Jordan, to overcome traditional prejudices that had kept out, say, worthy Midwestern high school students from elite Ivy League law schools because the admissions officers were saying, "Well, you're not really of our, you know, you don't fit into Harvard because you came from a farming family."

And so we developed the SATs because they were identity blind. They were color blind; they were class blind. Anyone that has the cognitive skills can get ahead! And the rise of objective color-blind testing gave us the first wave of cognitive elite in our meritocratic institutions, which was Jews. And now the Asians are coming in and they're whooping everybody's ass!

Because they do have those incredible transmission belts of conscientiousness in their homes. But they're getting in not based on race or class privilege, but based on objective meritocratic standards! So if we're going to tear down these standards because they have a disparate impact on blacks, even though they are not racist standards, we are engaged in a nihilist enterprise that will halt progress!

It will halt scientific progress! This is not confined to things that people say, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter if classical music flagellates itself for phantom racism." This is happening at the heart of our scientific enterprise! Medical schools are junking objective tests of merit because they have a disparate impact on blacks.

Our federal science agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, are determining research priorities based not on scientific need but based on disparate impact. So the NIH is shifting precious federal taxpayer research dollars from pure science into research on racism and racial disparities in health for the simple reason that black researchers do less pure science and they do more racism research.

And so the NIH has determined that from now on, as an anti-racist institution, it should be funding more black scientists! And so it has decided we're going to do less basic research into the neurological pathways of Alzheimer's disease or the way that cell signaling happens in nematodes for oncology research.

We're going to do less of that, and we're going to do more looking at environmental and racist determinants of black obesity. And those may be valid research objectives, but we should determine what we research based on our societal needs, not based on the idea that we should have racial proportionality in our research grants!

It's also the case that that proportionality is not only impossible to achieve technically for the reasons that you laid out, but also impossible to achieve metaphysically and purposefully so, because if you add the intersectional doctrine to the racial mix and you presume that the same argument with regards to disparate impact applies not only to race but to gender and then to all the admixture of the various gender identities and their interactions, you're almost instantly, mathematically, in a situation where it's not even hypothetically possible to ensure that there's no disparate impact of selection techniques across all those multitudinous group categories.

And I actually think that's a feature of the metaphysical game rather than a bug because it's perfectly to the advantage of the radical leftists to set up a game that normative society can't win no matter how assiduously it plays it. And so that's a huge problem because the problem of group disparity is never going to go away because you can endlessly multiply the nature of the groups that you're measuring.

And then on the societal side, I mean, one of the real problems with denying the most qualified Asians, for example, access to these privileged positions is that you're also denying society access to their outstanding levels of diligence and general cognitive ability. I mean, part of the reason that we developed the ACTs and so forth, LSATs and the MCATs, was so that society as a whole could identify pools of extreme cognitive talent and exploit them, to put it bluntly, is that it's better for everyone if we can find the smart kids and give them as much opportunity as possible, even if that means rewarding them in a disparate manner because we so desperately need what only they can produce.

And so, you know, we've also bought into this idea that, well, if you're an Ivy League scientist, you're in a privileged position, and forgot entirely that, yeah, but you also work 80 hours a week nonstop on your obsessional concern in a manner that no one else is capable of doing.

And the consequence for the rest of us is that, well, maybe we now have a cure for what would otherwise be an intractable disease. And so by playing this idiot group identity game, we deprive ourselves of the best that our entire society has to offer!

Right, I mean, it's an absolute value that human civilization should strive for excellence! This is our greatness! This is our Divinity—to aspire to be accomplishing things that have never been accomplished before; to create beauty!

But it is also, if you want to be purely pragmatic about it, in a geopolitical vein, it is also essential for a country to be able to compete! And China—I'm not going to be an apologist for China; it clearly has its streaks of unbelievable insanity, as we saw with its COVID policies, and it probably has massive corruption. Nevertheless, when it comes to educating its massive population, it is, as far as I know, ruthlessly meritocratic!

And it wants to find its top math talent and throw everything it's got at them! It has a single exit exam from high school. Students study, possibly pathologically for that. You know, it may destroy childhood, but they are certainly focused on maximizing their talents!

And China takes those students and pushes them, and they are—China is pulling ahead from the United States in many, many fields that are essential to IT competitiveness and frankly to defense, a whole range of nanotechnologies, a whole range of artificial intelligence! What are we doing here?

We are dismantling gifted and talented programs! We are saying you may be talented in math, but that is a fault! That is a problem! We are going to tie you down and not make sure that you accelerate at the rate that maximizes your potential because gifted and talented programs are not racially proportional.

There's not 13 percent blacks in gifted and talented programs, therefore we're dismantling them! We're dismantling the exam schools, whether it's the Lowell High School in San Francisco, that has traditionally been extraordinarily demanding. It has taken students and pushed them into careers where they advance knowledge, human knowledge.

And it has gone to a lottery system! Well, not surprisingly, the first year after the lottery system, the proportion of D's and F's in the 9th-grade class jumped up 300 percent! The Thomas Jefferson School in Virginia also—it is being dismantled because it had a color-blind, utterly fair, non-culturally biased admissions test, but it produced—that test had a disparate impact on blacks, and so we're getting rid of it!

We have these absurd diversity, equity, and inclusion statements that scientists have to sign that are basically doing several things. They're saying, I will never, ever, ever break the taboo and discuss the academic skills gap!

I will conform to the mantra on campus that the only allowable explanation for disparate impact is racism, and I will try to pigeonhole my life's passion of studying how mitosis happens with an eye towards understanding cancer development. I will try to fit that into some kind of racial equity narrative!

But the fact is, as you suggest, Jordan, there is comparative advantage, and a scientist's comparative advantage is not social work. It is not social justice, even if we're going to bracket that term social justice, which I am forced to do because I think it's a preposterous phony term.

But let's say there is such a thing that is legitimate; it is ridiculous for our academic, our universities now, to be telling scientists that we are going to evaluate you based on whether you are doing enough equity work! The only obligation of a scientist is to use his intellectual capacity to push back the boundaries of ignorance and to continue this stunning evolution out of poverty, penury, disease, want, vulnerability that has given us lives that would have been unimaginable 200 years ago.

We live like no God on Olympus ever had a hope of living. Merely electricity itself is a miracle! Every day that we walk into a room and flip that light switch on and we get light—that's all you need! Beyond that, I'm like in awe!

But that is itself incredible, and we take it for granted! We take—and you know why? We're also demeaning that because the history of science for the last 200 years—that took off in the West. There were some early competitors with other civilizations, but the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the anti-poverty revolution, it has been the great conversation predominantly among the Anglo-American-European sphere.

China's getting into that conversation now, but because it is overwhelmingly white, it is now viewed as, again, simply a source of white supremacy! And you have heads of medical organizations, you have the heads of scientific journals like Science that are on a practically monthly basis putting out statements saying that science is racism!

The White House Office of, under Joe Biden, the White House Office of Technology and Science Policy, recently a couple of months ago put out a statement saying that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise! These are atrocious lies by people that do not deserve their power! But they are not innocuous because they are breeding resentment, and they are pulling back our greatest talent to a level of mediocrity.

We'll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series, Exodus! So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don't get away with anything! And so, you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper!

It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished! But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question. Now, in your book, "When Race Trump's Merit," you spend a fair bit of time concentrating on the effect of the equity crusade on the artistic world and so the world of visual art, the world of music.

Why did you choose to exemplify those domains in particular, and can you run us through a description of what you found on the artistic and musical, visual arts and musical front?

Why did I choose those domains? Because I love them! Because they are the source of human joy and transcendence. What else is there besides? I mean, the scientific enterprise, the engineering enterprise, the tinkerers—those people who have figured out how to build things, to create composite materials—all of this is extraordinary.

But ultimately what matters is the unbearable Eros of Brahms's solo piano work, the pathos of a Chopin nocturne or mazurka, the elation that one gets from Ramos' opera overtures or, or Mozart's—the thrill of Mozart's extraordinary energy and passion and sublimity, the driving force of the classical style, the beauty of Vermeer of Dutch Baroque Golden Age still lives.

All of these teach us. And literature that allows us to enter modes of human consciousness that we never would have had access to if we remained mired in our petty, narrow, narcissistic selves. Artists have the capacity to take us along with them into their observation of the human condition, and they've done so in the past with exquisite, gem-like eloquence—a command of language that none of us possess!

A command of melody, of harmony, of being able to paint beauty—the watercolors of John Singer Sargent, his capacity to paint Italian light on Italian stone, and sculpture and lemon trees in full bloom—one is in awe! These traditions that have given us so much beauty, so much ability to leave behind possibly even our sorrows and lose ourselves instead in a novel of somebody else that is filled with wit and irony, whether it's Mark Twain or George Eliot.

We can lose ourselves for hours in those imaginary worlds. They are now, all, every single Western tradition is being torn down on the phony charge of racism. All that the yahoos have to do—all that the rabble has to do is point out that a tradition that was born in Europe, which was demographically historically enough ineluctably white, is therefore racist.

Now, here's what they do not do: this is a completely one-sided game. You could also go to Africa. You could say that the tradition of Yoruba drum language is all black; it is not diverse! Africa was demographically black; we do not expect Africa in its traditions to have white artists.

We don't go to Chinese classical opera, which for centuries was created by Chinese, and we don't say you don't have black people in Chinese opera; you're racist! Or you don't have white people in Chinese opera. We don't go to the Indian tradition of the classical epic, and we don't say, "Gee, why aren't you writing about black people in your classical epic? You must be racist!"

The only tradition that gets the deconstructive, demystifying technique is the white tradition. And museum curators are now turning on their own collections that have been given to them over the centuries by donors of immense generosity. The inevitable wall plaque now—if you go to the 17th century Dutch and Flemish wing of a museum—I’ve noticed this in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; it's true in the Metropolitan Museum.

I'm planning next week to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I was sort of snooping around the website and seeing what they've got. So they've got a new hanging of their 17th century Dutch art collection. It's their permanent collection, but they've re-conceptualized it, of course. They've made the same argument, which is unpleasant: "All these—" which is, if you have a gorgeous Dutch still life of cut crystal, of shining silver, of peeled lemons, of translucent grapes, of oysters, possibly a pheasant—that still life is all about colonialism! You should see it through the lens of racial resentment because the Dutch at the time were engaged in colonial trade and imperial conquest, and therefore any household wealth that was generated in Holland, in Delft, in The Hague, it's all on the backs of colonialized subjects.

This is preposterous! A still life is not about colonialism! But these curators are teaching young people who may be entering their museums for the first and possibly the last time to see beauty through the eyes of racial resentment. Those museum directors should all be fired! They are betraying their duties. They’re betraying their privilege, which is to curate one of the greatest accomplishments and civilizational legacies of all time. And they are tearing it down through the phony lens of racial disparity!

I used to see this in, um, English literature departments, for example, is that, in principle, the people who study English literature are great admirers of the literary tradition. But of course, one of the things that's painful if you happen to be an academic who admires a great author is the realization of your comparative inability to produce such a great work.

And if you love those works and are unable to replicate them yourself, it's quite easy to fall prey to a kind of bitter resentment. And then if you ally that with a Marxist doctrine, which is quite convenient on the moral front, you can claim moral superiority to the progenitors of that tradition on the basis of their hypothetical participation in the oppression landscape.

And so you can falsely elevate yourself above even that which you love. Right? I mean, you destroy your own ideal in doing so! And that's a heavy price to pay! But I can hardly walk into art museums anymore because I see these great works of art, and then beside them, there’s a commentary which basically—I don't think there's any worse writing that's ever been done by anyone ever anywhere than art criticism rewriting.

It's its own universe of pathological enviousness. And there's a great work, and then beside it, there's a commentary which basically says, "I, the person who's writing this commentary on this great work, am ethically superior to the artist who made this work on the following grounds!"

And you can share in this ethical superiority by making a few casual references to a colonial enterprise that you don't possibly have the depth of historical understanding to even begin to comprehend. And it's such a—it's an invitation to an attitude that's so corrosive and pernicious because it's not only denigrates the piece of art, which is bad enough given that it's the whole reason for the enterprise to exist, but it also invites the viewer, instead of being brought to his or her knees in awe and gratitude at the creative ability and to see and feel painfully the gap between themselves and that creator, but to say, "Oh no, fundamentally, as a mere modern person, no matter how ignorant I am, I'm far superior to any of these people on ethical grounds because I don't participate, let's say, in the colonial enterprise!"

Even though, of course, you're participating in the bloody colonial enterprise in 50 different ways with everything you ever purchase! And so it's really is, I think, it's the re-occurrence of the eternal spirit of Cain, essentially, you know, that fratricidally and then genocidally envious spirit that pulls down and destroys.

And to see that manifest itself in art museums and in the domains of higher culture is, well, appalling beyond comprehension and painful to anyone who does love those things. That's the difference. I mean, that’s what—it is the appalling thing about today. It is the heads of these institutions that are turning on their own tradition! That is something new!

This isn't sort of the academic critics in departments of art theory and whatnot in universities off to the side. This is Max Hollein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is Rondo, the head—James Rondo, the head of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are the ones that are putting out this rhetoric of hatred and resentment. And it gives students, who are already just woefully ignorant—I mean, laughably ignorant—a reason, an excuse, a righteous motivation to embrace their ignorance!

You know that all they tell them to do—students now, right—to dismiss an author and say, "I don't need to read Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift or Anthony Trollope or William Wordsworth or Keats; it's a white male. Therefore, I'm not going to read it! I only want to read books that confirm my own identity!"

How absurd! The point of reading is to get out of your identity! But it gives, when we—this we saw this had been long brewing, but the famous chant at Stanford University in the 1980s against their very modest core curriculum, survey course that all students had to take in Western civilization, the chant of those students: "Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western sieve has got to go!"

This was sort of a play on words because Western Civ referred both to the actual course at Stanford. But it turns out that this was actually against the entirety of Western civilization because that is what's going on now. And so it is an excuse for ignorance!

One of the things we might point out too here for everyone who's watching and listening is that you might say, "Well, fair enough, but why bother with the whole cultural mess? Who gives a damn about literature and art and so forth, and why are we making such a big fuss about it in the first place?" And there's actually a psychological answer to that.

Being Jonathan Haidt has recently re-analyzed some data on the relationship between political affiliation and mental illness, showing that, well, first of all, there's pronounced gender gap in that a substantially higher proportion of women—girls and women are suffering from diagnosable mental disorders than men. And that's an exaggeration of a proclivity that has been there for a long time because women have higher levels of negative emotion.

But that's also massively affected by political affiliation. And so the people who have the highest rates of diagnosable mental illness currently are young liberal women. And the reason for that in part is that the identity that they've been offered, which is this fragmented subjective hedonistic identity, is actually so dysfunctional as an identity that it produces anxiety and hopelessness.

And it does that because it doesn't unite them with other people, because to be mentally healthy, you actually have to be united with other people. And it also doesn't give them any goal of value to strive for in the future, much less a unifying identity. And so that produces a kind of hopelessness.

And so part of the reason that it's so cataclysmic for students to be disenchanted with the domain of higher aesthetic inquiry is that if they can't escape the bounds of their limited subjective hedonistic identity, the necessary consequence of that will be social disunion, isolation, discord, anxiety, and hopelessness.

Those are the alternatives! And the reason you go to university to study literature isn't so you can become educated and join the club. It's so that you can have a better life; that your identity fleshes itself out, not least by the necessity of coming into contact with other modes of apprehension that are more sophisticated than your own, but that it actually orients you in the world so that you are more firmly grounded and more hopeful metaphysically in a fundamental manner.

And so, you know, the leftist trope is that all of the different knowledge systems are nothing but claims on power. And so there isn't any qualitative distinction between that which is civilized and that which is impulsive except as a consequence of the self-justification of the hypothetically civilized. But it's simply not true!

Is that there are all sorts of modes of sophisticated being that are much more likely to produce