Conformity is pure stupidity, that's elementary, Dr Watson
It really doesn't take much to discover the current limits of western tolerance: the Nobel Prize winner, James Watson, certainly has.
During a recent interview to publicise a lecture tour of Britain, he said of Africans, "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says, not really".
And, then bang went his lecture tour. The London Museum of Science was the first to cancel a scheduled talk, followed shortly afterwards by -- wait for it -- the Bristol Festival of Ideas: which should perhaps be better named the Bristol Festival of Politically Correct Ideas. The icing on the ideological cake is that he has now been indefinitely suspended by the research institution which employs him in the US.
Now, I'd better make my own position clear on this, before a mob of professional anti-racists do a Watson on me. That intelligence is an inherited quality, is quite clear. However, the actual development of intelligence is so closely related to environmental factors, that the apparent absence of "intelligence" in an individual is not necessarily proof that the person concerned lacks, what we might call, the "cleverness" gene. If Shakespeare had lived in a pre-literate world, or Mozart had been born into one without musical notation, and if the mark of intelligence in such societies had been the ability to trap animals or to follow a spoor, they would probably have been perceived as very cretinous dullards indeed.
So, how much genius is stifled in Africa by the absence of opportunity? We cannot know. Intelligence prospers when a culture recognises and cherishes it. In the warrior culture of, say, the Zulus, how does the little lad or lass, owners of the "cleverness gene", acquire the intellectual wherewithal that will cause him or her to achieve their scholarly potential? The only way to judge intellect equally would be to implement some utterly immoral experiments, in which, say, 500 Zulus would be seized at birth and raised within, say, a Japanese environment, while 500 Japanese are raised as Zulus: and even then, the physical differences would ensure that neither group could authentically experience life as it was lived within their host communities.
What is intelligence, anyway? I'm sure I don't know. The academically "stupid" black boy in Harlem might manage miracles of instant triangulation with a basketball: the Aborigine who cannot read or write might, through intuition, eyesight and psychological calculation, follow a human trail that is entirely invisible to rest of us. And, very possibly, if some Nazi-like experiments were to find that one racial group was more "intelligent" than another, the differences between the groups would still be tiny.
All human societies are sophisticated in structure, even when innumerate, and the more "undeveloped" a people, like the Eskimo of the Arctic or the San people of the Kalahari, the more complex their language, with labyrinths of case endings, inflections, moods, tenses and irregular verbs, requiring massive brain power to master. The intellectual tool which governs most social behaviour is emotional intelligence, and this, very definitely, is a culturally and environmentally acquired quality. And, above all other expressions of emotional intelligence, a tolerance of a contrary opinion has been one of the defining qualities of the western intellectual tradition. It is what enables us to hear arguments we profoundly dislike, without smashing up the furniture, or, in James Watson's case, cancelling his lecture tour and wrecking his career.
As his fate testifies, left-wing intolerance has in recent years been a steadily growing feature of western political culture. It is why the British historian, David Irving, was actually imprisoned in Austria for "denying" the Holocaust. The anti-Irving censoriousness reached comic proportions when he last came here to speak; for one of the groups which succeeded in preventing him giving his talk was Sinn Fein. But, hold on. The Shinners were actually in alliance with the Nazis, and -- until some kind person cut it down a couple of years ago -- they annually had reverential shindigs at the statue, in Dublin, of the arch Nazi-collaborator, Sean Russell. For, as the Shinners repeatedly reveal, in the absence of emotional intelligence, what you usually get is emotional imbecility.
Yes, Watson might well be wrong in his notions about race and intelligence. So what? Let him ventilate them anyway. The western intellectual tradition is based on tolerating mistakes, encouraging doubt and accepting scepticism. Trial and error were why Europe conquered the world and the absence of either was why Confucian China stayed at home. It is not coincidental that almost all major technical and social inventions in the past 500 years, from the keeled, three-masted sailing vessel to the bicycle, the fountain pen to the silicon chip, the free market to the co-op, and parliamentary democracy to the welfare-state, have been invented by the west.
For heresy has been the oxygen of western intellect, whereas enforced conformity has invariably suffocated it. And, whenever societies insist on silencing their ideologically troublesome James Watsons, solely in order to ensure a peaceful night's slumber, what they usually get is the perfect tranquillity that follows upon the application of a pillow to a sleeping face.
