Last November, William Saletan wrote a series for Slate on "Liberal Creationism," purporting to show that, according to the best evidence we have, there is good reason to think that observable racial disparities in scores on intelligence tests are irreducible to non-genetic explanations. Or, de-jargoned, that it's time to confront the uncomfortable truth that black people aren't as smart as white people (on average, of course).
Saletan was widely panned, at Jewcy among many other venues, for drawing conclusions based on statistical innumeracy, flagrant misunderstanding of the literature on race, genes, and intelligence, and the "research" of J. Philippe Rushton, a discredited racist crank who years ago took to sending out unsolicited mass-mailings of his pamphlets to every member of the American Sociological Association.
Having brushed his shoulders off, Saletan is back on the race-and-intelligence beat today, and this time he's more circumspect. Much more circumspect. He's having an extended, self-serving dialogue with himself, in an effort to ensure his intended audience (William Saletan) that what motivated the original series wasn't racism, but the admirable conviction that the truth isn't any worse off for our discomfort with it; rather, we're worse off for not facing up to uncomfortable truths.
But of course, no persuasive critic of the "Liberal Creationism" pieces thought that Saletan was motivated by racism. The criticism was that knee-jerk contrarianism led him to present as "the truth" a case based on wafer-thin evidence and shoddy reasoning. Rather than confront the methodological lacunae that prevented him from giving a cogent public presentation of the state of the literature on race and intelligence — some uncomfortable truths, you might say — Saletan instead digs in, offering a general justification of his project of exploring "how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic differences," by means of some unintentionally hilarious epistemological musings on truth and semantic musings on 'truth':
In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn't truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it's less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. "The truth," as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can't ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.
Can you feel Saletan's pain yet? All he wanted to do was set right racial injustice, a noble goal if there ever was one, and might have succeeded if a pesky definite article hadn't tripped him up. But here's the thing. (And also, a thing.) As the Saletan of November might have put it, truths aren't any less true for being unjust or pernicious, nor does truth come in degrees. A proposition is true, in which case it's a truth, or it isn't, in which case it's a falsehood. Nor is it very difficult to distinguish the truth from a truth. The former is a complete, actual state of affairs, the latter is a proper part of an actual state of affairs. And the truth won't ever contradict a truth or vice versa, because any statement of the truth states all the truths. If you think you've found an intractable conflict between the two, check your work: something's gone wrong somewhere.
For example, the proposition that the best available evidence points strongly towards a genetic explanation of racial disparities in intelligence tests isn't true, hence is neither a truth nor a part of the truth. In other words, it's false. It's false despite being so counterintuitive in these politically correct days (which goes to show that counterintuition isn't foolproof — aspiring contrarian journalists, take note!). Moreover, it's so clearly false that a brief conversation with credible expert in the field ought to suffice to convince you that it's false. And the cause of ameliorating racial inequalities, in which everyone should in principle be willing to join with Saletan, isn't served by promoting falsehoods, since a false theory of racial inequality is no more useful in reforming education and social policy, than a false physical theory is useful in building bridges and tunnels.
What's more, taking the time to do adequate background research in the first place relieves you of the effort involved in months of back-pedaling and TMI-laden internal dialogues about the nobility of your intentions — effort that could be put to better use bringing whites and blacks together at the table of brotherhood.
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