Ideology Beats Reality in Reich’s WHO WE ARE and HOW WE GOT HERE
20th April 2018
John Derbyshire does some fisking.
As we all know, a peculiar orthodoxy about human nature has come up among the Liberal Arts and Grievance Studies (LAGS) types who staff academic administrations, media, and government bureaucracies, including those that approve money grants to research scientists. A key tenet of this orthodoxy: There Is No Such Thing As Race. According to this tenet, race is a “social construct,” a sort of collective optical illusion.
(As weird as this is, it is not the weirdest thing LAGS folk profess to believe. You can, as I pointed out when addressing AMERICAN RENAISSANCE conference last year, find credentialed academics who will assure you that there is no such thing as sex: that men and women are biologically indistinguishable. We live in an extraordinary time: a good portion of our intelligentsia is clinically insane.)
For some reason, Prof. Reich feels the need to touch his forelock to this race denialism. That is not easy for him to do, as the science he’s been describing in the first three-quarters of his book makes plain what nonsense the LAGS orthodoxy is.
Prof. Reich spends the last three of his twelve chapters trying to square this circle, with results that are painful to read.