[The eighth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

What's it like to live in a modern, diverse, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive, multicultural society? Everyday experience in early twenty-first century America is enough to sketch the situation in bold strokes.

Growing up absurd

Such a society lacks sustaining stories, symbols, and models of a good life, and indeed intentionally eradicates them. Such things are racist, since they reflect the specifics of a particular culture, and sexist and heteronormative, since they express fundamental patterns of human life. They're also theocratic, since they connect the order of human life to a particular understanding of the order of the world.

Under discussion: Honor: A History by James Bowman (Encounter Books, 2007)

What happened to honor in the West? And without honor -- or at least an honest understanding of it -- are we capable of facing the challenges of the 21^st Century?

In Honor: A History, Bowman places these questions in a political context, as a clash between the old honor culture of the Islamic world and the anti-honor culture of the modern West. In this sense, his question is similar to the one Mark Steyn asks in America Alone. If Islam has all the attributes of what Osama Bin Laden famously called "a strong horse," will the pampered and polite social democracies of the West be able to survive its galloping onslaught?

This horse race bookends a rare and worthwhile exploration of the concept of honor itself, which is a confusing topic in the contemporary West where honorable ideals have been discredited as anti-modern, and the word "honor" has been reduced to a mere synonym for neutered, universal, non-hierarchical values like "goodness" or "honesty" or "integrity." The bumper sticker banality "honor diversity" renders the word honor a substitute for the verbs "value" or "esteem." While you can certainly follow the dilution of honor's meaning here, this is a world apart from a word once closely connected to glory won in battle.

In the journal Intelligence Gerhard Meisenberg contributes another analysis showing that IQ and fertility are negatively correlated.  Here's the abstract:

Although a negative relationship between fertility and education has been described consistently in most countries of the world, less is known about the relationship between intelligence and reproductive outcomes. Also the paths through which intelligence influences reproductive outcomes are uncertain. The present study uses the NLSY79 to analyze the relationship of intelligence measured in 1980 with the number of children reported in 2004, when the respondents were between 39 and 47 years old. Intelligence is negatively related to the number of children, with partial correlations (age controlled) of −.156, −.069, −.235 and −.028 for White females, White males, Black females and Black males, respectively. This effect is related mainly to the g-factor. It is mediated in part by education and income, and to a lesser extent by the more “liberal” gender attitudes of more intelligent people. In the absence of migration and with constant environment, genetic selection would reduce the average IQ of the US population by about .8 points per generation.

All these patterns have been found before, including the more negative correlation among black females.  Here are the results in graph form.  

As you can see, for white women the most fertile range is 70-80, well below the black average of 85.  The second best place to be, from the perspective of a white woman's genes, is legally retarded!  

The smartest black females suffer from there being so few good bruthas out there.  While intelligent black males can either dip into the general population of the community or go white to find a partner, these options tend not to be available for black females who are not attractive to educated whites and don't usually want typical black men.  

0.8 points doesn't seem like a lot, but it means 11.7% fewer people with IQs higher than 130.  In a century there will be a drop of 2.9 points and 37.7% fewer gifted individuals.  Considering that whites and Asians have been genetically separated for tens of thousands of years and only differ by about five points, a change of three within a hundred years should horrify us.  Just imagine, if the "natural" IQ difference between whites and Hispanics is five points, our grandchildren could live to see one of the current gene-based racial gaps all but disappear within their lifetimes (assuming Hispanics don't also suffer dysgenics, etc).  No Child Left Behind will finally be a success! 

And don't count on the Flynn Effect to bail us out, as it's all but ended in the developed world.  Improved environment has done what it could for us and all future genetic deterioration will be noticeable.  Also, as Meisenberg explains, the 0.8 point drop is assuming that the nurture component stays the same, which it won't because a genetically lower IQ population will create a less stimulating environment.  

...if the cognitive returns on environmental improvements are indeed diminishing in the most advanced societies, small genetically caused declines can entail far larger declines of phenotypic intelligence than predicted by genetic selection alone. This is because a less intelligent population is less able to maintain near-optimal environments, thereby reducing its intelligence even more. For example, small reductions in the average intelligence of educational administrators will result in an increased probability that educational reforms will reduce rather than enhance students' intelligence, and thereby lead to even lower intelligence in the next generation of educational administrators and even greater deterioration of the educational system.

On the other hand, a lower societal IQ may cause Americans to reject socialism, thereby making the economy better than it otherwise would've been and increasing resources. Early twentieth century Russia could've certainly done better with fewer high IQ Jews and Georgians.

An interesting observation is that when you look at fertility of whites with IQs of >100 the rules don't apply. The Caucasian birthrate is almost exactly the same whether one is at 100 or 130.  Perhaps 100 is the bare minimum required to use contraception consistently and effectively.  

So what is to be done?  Those who have taken to the sport of burning strawmen say "Leave things as they are or Nazism.  Nothing in between!"   Obviously there are other options.  What would happen, for example, if colleges drilled the educated on the heritability and importance of IQ to one tenth the degree they preached feminism and environmentalism?  Even if childbearing and rearing made women less happy on a daily basis than working 9-5, and I truly doubt it, intelligent people tend to look for higher reasons to live.  That's why they endure physical discomfort to go to Africa with the peace corps or volunteer to teach in an inner-city neighborhood.  Some actual literacy in the human sciences would teach those with high IQs and a sense of social consciousness that the most important thing they could leave behind is their genetic makeup.  If this was widely understood, large families (made up of one's own biological children!) for women who have already demonstrated intellectual ability by say graduating from a top university would become a status symbol the way adopting a black baby is today.  There's some evidence that societies which revere families and traditional values have more eugenic fertility than those where acceptance of a sterile egalitarian humanism is a main marker of status.  In early twentieth century China the wealthier and literate tended to have more children and Richard Lynn has found Muslim Indonesia to have the most eugenic fertility of any contemporary nation studied.  

As for the other end of the spectrum, there doesn't seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn't include coercion.  Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can't even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.  If we say we don't want government making these decisions, then we have to ask why we allow government to institutionalize crazy people who haven't been convicted of a crime, a power that is just as open to abuse.

From The Occidental Observer.

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.

This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.

Given the significance of this, I thought today we’d spend some time delving into numbers for the “median” American’s experience in the US today. Regrettably, much of the data is not up to date so we’ve got to go by 2008 numbers.

In 2008, the median U.S. household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes).  I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the U.S. in 2008.

The BBC reports that Scrabble is now easier:

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

Mattel has failed to account for Americans' creativity in naming their offspring. Indeed, the store of possible names would seem limitless and fluid. There must be three or four different spellings of "Shaniqua." Though granted, few Chaniquas play Scrabble.

From View From The Right

We've entered into a new situation, in which our relationship with our government and society and our fellow Americans, how we feel about them, and even what our own identity is as Americans, has become, to an undetermined extent, undetermined. How that will sort out we don't know yet, and may not know for a long time.

For years I've wrestled with the question, how does a conservative relate to a social order that has already been radicalized? How does an American feel about his country--and about himself as an American--when it has been largely changed into a different country? My answer has been stated in part in my Traditionalist's Credo:

I declare that this government is no longer a constitutional and moral form of government. I will deal with it, and I will obey its laws, and I will support it when it is defending our country from foreign and domestic enemies. I will vote in its elections and participate in its political debates. But I will never accept it. I aim at a restoration of constitutional and moral order.

For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.

In the same way, the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning. It is the steady march of demographics -- which is driving up the ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy that condemns the public finances of the United States to sink deeper into the red. It is the inexorable growth of China's economy, not American stagnation, that will make the gross domestic product of the People's Republic larger than that of the United States by 2027.

As for climate change, the day of reckoning could be as much as a century away. These threats seem very remote compared with the time frame for the deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in which the unit of account is months, not years, much less decades.

But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?