"I will happily join an old-school united front against the barbarians: Skull-measurers, IQ-worshippers — it’s really the most terrifying politics there is.”
Ahmari is part of the virtue-signaling right. The whole National Review crowd is part of that. John J. Miller, who tried to destroy Sam Francis. The Wall Street Journal crowd as well. Peggy Noonan. Max Boot. David Brooks, who isn't really a conservative but plays one on TV.
You know what sort of conservative I despise. The tear-down-the-statue bunch. The South-haters. Mark Levin. Chris Plante. Larry "Sissy" O'Connor.
What are on here, Sohrab's 6th major transformation? Beginning as a Marxist before performing an about-face to write for Commentary and then becoming an ultramontaine Catholic he's now doing... Whatever this is.
If at some point you've undercut everything you previously believed enough to build a one man debate society people should start to ask not if you're bright but whether the medication needs to be adjusted.
“The story of Sohrab Ahmari is one of extremes. By turns, he was a rebel Iranian expat, an atheist, a bohemian dissident, an anti-Mormon provocateur, a communist, a lawyer, a teacher, a libertine, and finally, a Christian.”
“A pretty common phenomenon of high IQ but somewhat unbalanced right wing thinkers like Ahmari who are attempting to remake their careers in the more lucrative Center is they they decide to denounce strawman versions of myself and Charles Murray as the real wild-eyed extremists to prove their bona fides and nice liberals.”
Classic grifter movie. He is part of a cottage industry. Soros funds sohrab and many like him.
Why would someone mention Soros in a comment under an article about a shill who launched his publication with Soros funding? I guess it's a mystery and we'll never know.
I am Catholic but realize Catholicism was obscure and remote the first three centuries of American white history. Until 1950, Catholicism was pretty much limited to the Northeast. The higher birth rates of Catholics strengthened its influence for a couple decades after that and even elected a president. But Catholicism lost out to general affluence and the youth culture in the 60s and has little political or cultural influence today. Do nominal Catholics in Massachusetts fear the Archbishop of Boston? They laugh at him as an oddity. Do nominal Catholics in New York even care what the Archbishop of New York thinks? Lady Gaga, Jay Z, Diddy Combs and Kanye West have more influence in modern America than does any Catholic prelate, including the Pope. No wonder we are such a sick society.
The high point of American Catholicism was maybe 1955 when it seemed Catholics had earned full equality by fighting in the Big One but the need to be respectable and high birth rates kept the pews full (does religiosity make babies or do babies drive the need to take them to church?). But once JFK died and joined the American pantheon it seemed the battle had been won. To the integralist movement with which Ahmari associated himself it seemed like the decline was caused by Vatican II, which began to be implemented from around 1965 but it looks more like that just accelerated already present trends. Suburbanization, the car and the Baby Boom generation simply growing up killed the hold traditional Catholic parishes once had.
(PS: Lady Gaga and P. Diddy are both products of Catholic schools.)
To be fair, all the money and vitalism in global Catholicism are in the US now, which the College of Cardinals finally recognized. But yes, the Sacramental Churches are just completely alien to highly individualistic, egalitarian Anglo-America. Want a Church? Just gather two or more together in His name. A Patriarchate? Try reviving the Holy Roman Empire while you're at it.
This is why the curia elected an. American pope oh and American generosity. The Vatican is heading towards a financial cliff and rather then reform, they need donors to pony up the cash so they don’t have to cut expenditures. A tragedy really. The modern Catholic Church has done a lot of good in the world. Now becoming a beggar.
I'm confused because Beauchamp's Vox article, presumably an interview with Ahmari, is behind a paywall. There is no mention at all of you--or Charles Murray--in the excerpt you posted, nor are either of you mentioned in Ahmari's "Skull worshippers" tweet of today.
Furthermore, the only mention of you that I can see in your linked excerpt from Ahmari's New Statesman article of 2024 (also behind a paywall) is this:
"I’m referring to L0m3z, the founder of the edgy imprint Passage Publishing, home to, among others, the racial-hereditarian guru Steve Sailer."
Is that actually a "denunciation" of you? The word "guru" is certainly an overstatement with slightly negative connotations, but you do write frequently about race and heredity, so Ahmari's sentence isn't entirely inaccurate.
In short, I don't think Ahmari is particularly focused on you (or Murray), or even particularly interested in you.
But then again, I don't subscribe to either Vox or Liberties, so I don't have the whole context.
I assume Ahmari objects to observations such as those found in Richard Haier's work. From the learning and the brain book review of Haier's "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Rebecca Gotlieb:
"For example, the thickness of the corpus callosum (which connects the two brain hemispheres) is related to IQ, and the density and organization of white matter tracts in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain differ as a function of IQ. Haier and his colleague developed the parieto-frontal integration theory of intelligence, which suggests that the integration of and communication between certain frontal and parietal areas is especially important for intelligence."
So no, given what we know about Steve, he does not go out and measure skulls. But for Ahmari, what neuroscience has discovered is equivalent to and probably worse than skull measuring, because it has not been, and does not appear likely to be, shown to be false.
That is not an acceptable explanation for the differences in outcomes. The correct answer has already been determined, and it is environmental differences attributable to socio-economic status. To be accepted, you must agree.
I have always found skull size a dubious corrollary of intelligence (even though I have a big skull). James Madison, the most brilliant of the Founding Fathers, was a tiny man with a proportionally sized skull. Crows are really smart, and although they're big birds, their heads are tiny compared to the rest of them.
Thanks for the free links. The New Statesman article looks especially intriguing. The "post-liberalism" currently espoused by a number of Catholic thinkers is actually a rejection of the value-neutrality that has been central to liberalism since the 19th century. It's why we can't have bans on obscenity, gambling, prostitution, marijuana smoking, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other "victimless crimes" that degrade the quality of life for the majority of people. It's a serious and highly pertinent American argument, not a quaint fixation of Continental Papists nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire. Ahmari used to be part of this group, but I think all that ayahuasca has gotten into his brain.
I finally got around to reading both pieces in full. Beauchamp's piece in Vox has nothing to do with Steve. It is a dull and long-winded essay trumpeting Beauchamp's claim that post-liberals, including and especially Ahmari, the only post-liberal he actually interviewed, have become disillusioned with post-liberalism because of its association with the supposedly anti-democratic Trump administration. Chief among the culprits, in Beauchamp's view, is J.D. Vance--who, in my own opinion, can be called a "post-liberal" only in the sense that he's a Catholic and he can't stand liberals (who can?). Furthermore, it's not even clear that Ahmari has abandoned post-liberalism. "He still believes, as a philosophical matter, that secular liberalism’s preoccupation with the individual inhibited its ability to address collective problems," Beauchamp writes.
Now for Ahmari's own piece (much better-written) in the New Statesman: I now can understand why Steve considers this a "denunciation." It's not so much what Ahmari says, which isn't much ("racial-hereditarian guru"), but the fact that it appears in the very first paragraph of Ahmari's essay--and Steve is the only Passage Press (Lomez's publishing house) author whom Ahmari mentions by name. I think, however, that that's because Steve is the only Passage Press writer to date who has much name-recognition. So the fact that Ahmari mentions Steve is actually a kind of back-handed compliment. And, of course, the words "racial-hereditarian" fit right in with Ahmari's complaints about about the white-superiority theories of some of the alt-right.
As Lomez rightly complains, Ahmari completely confuses him with the Bronze Age Pervert, who indeed is a modern-day Nietzsche with all of Nietzsche's "natural aristocracy" hoo-hah. I would say, however, that Lomez contributed to the confusion himself with his 2023 musings in First Things about the "Longhouse" and its "Den Mothers" that could be interpreted as having Nietzschean overtones. (I'm always suspicious of efforts to overlay Neolithic prehistory with feminist theory, and I suspect that the real-life Neolithic farmers were the usual patriarchs, since they knew how to build things.)
The hilarious thing about this essay--which no one but me seems to have noticed--is that neither Ahmari nor his editors managed to get the orthography of Lomez's pen name and Twitter handle right. It's "L0m3z." Note the zero as the second letter. Ahmari persists in spelling it "Lom3z" instead. This says something about Ahmari's inattention to detail and also the thin copy-editing bench at the New Statesman.
So many, right and left, are absolutely obsessed with taboo enforcement. It is sad, really. "Think freely and objectively, but not too freely or too objectively. We must vigorously maintain the taboo."
It's a good point that the various figures whose politics are built around obviously false beliefs (IQ/race isn't real, gender is malleable, etc.) are in fact the real extremists as opposed to those who say we ought to make rational decisions informed by real and measurable facts, even if they are unpleasant.
Also, to give a bit of understanding or grace to the Ahmaris of the world, accepting that the assumptions you have internalized for much of your life are in fact either false or no longer tenable is very difficult. I am in my 40s so I remember a very different America than the one we inhabit today, would love to return to that, but recognize time only moves in one direction and whatever comes next is going to be very different. All I can do is support people or organizations that will push things in the direction I feel is best. A lot of the things conservatives hold dear are gone forever as the people and culture needed to sustain them are gone (or replaced) now. The future holds a lot of potential but it cannot be a return to the 50s or whatever.
This inability to recognize permanent change has arrived and abandon old nostrums is what led the GOP's chronic good loser posture in the 21st century. Fortunately the right now has people in it that are "unburdened by what has been" to quote the political philosopher Kamala Harris.
As I enter middle age I’m starting to think of my peers as refugees from another planet.
Youngsters don’t even reject shibboleths of the past, they don’t even know they ever existed!
I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers (born 1913 and 1928) and talked to them a lot about their youth. I don’t know how their experiences will sound to my own grandchildren in the 2040s and 50s if I’m lucky enough to be around and to have any.
What is the terrifying politics of skull measurers and IQ worshipers? I know it's unfashionable these days but ultimately politics has to be about policy. What are the terrifying policy proposals?
Stopping the funding for endless attempts to achieve racial proportionality through various forms of social engineering, the bean counting that goes along with monitoring them, and the political agitation necessary to keep up the funding, would break a lot of people's rice bowls.
sure, but isn't the common argument for those policies (or rolling back the existing policies) equal protection? You don't have to bring an IQ argument into it and an IQ argument could just as easily argue for preferential policies, as in-- no one chose to be born dull witted. It could have happened to any of us. Therefore as a society we have a moral oblation to help these less fortunate people.
If you want a sustainable welfare state you better encourage eugenics and discourage dysgenics. But that gets us in terrifying #literallyHitler territory. We start discussing how many kids welfare recipients are allowed to have, if any, and which racial groups we should let in. Next thing you know it's #Auschwitz, so the reasoning goes.
A more benign example would be education. We maintain the standards and concentrate on getting a few more IQ points out of everyone: neonatal vitamins and adequate calories for poor kids; math tables and phonics, in recognition that at least half the population will never comprehend algebra or make it through Shakespeare and just need basic literacy and numeracy. But that's terrifying for a lot of people too. A trillion dollar education establishment exists off the blank slate theory of human development.
In my own life, I've been punching above my weight in several metrics. The bills came due, and the past ten years have been a severe lesson in humility; I'm a straight, white guy so I just had to learn it. A lot of people stand to lose a terrifying amount of wealth and status in the high-trust meritocracy that Sailer and Murray promote.
I dunno. With increases in productivity the intelligent, competent, and hard working can support an awful lot of dull witted layabouts.
The stronger argument is that if you have a diverse society, people will vote against the social safety net. In such a society it changes the perception from an insurance policy that we all have, to a transfer payment to a bunch of "others"
Your middle paragraph doesn't strike me as something people would consider horrifying if you presented it properly. Aside from ego, most people would like to train to their approximate level. I don't see the shop kids resenting that they aren't allowed to study physics. All you have to do is offer the different tracks, and not be rigid about it. Treat the test results as recommendations and offer both kinds of classes as electives to the students in the different tracks.
Isn't that how it used to be? Isn't it still like that in e.g. Germany?
To smart technocrats this is obvious stuff. To universalist Catholics and liberal democrats (not necessarily exclusive), you're respectively denying the transformative power of the Holy Spirit and/or violating the basic human right of equality under the law (or God). Those are compelling priors that give people hope and a dignity they might otherwise not enjoy.
Speaking (or writing) as an officially super smart guy, I can't see a hope and especially dignity scale that slides up as you get a smarter person job. I used to joke ten and twenty years ago that the official position of a liberal is that if a white man anywhere in the US can be found earning his living with his hands, then something has gone horribly wrong. I think the overwhelming majority of white collar desk jobs are soul crushing. I see no reason that society should place those poor blighters higher up than a skilled tradesman.
Well, I think we have two problem populations that we're actually talking about: women, and blacks. Women don't want to hear that their cube farm bureaucrat jobs are soulless make-work, and most blacks don't like the trades either.
Your comment gets me back to the Unzian position that we really may be doing all right with mestizo and castizo immigration; they're incredibly stoic and seem fine with social hierarchies.
As an officially midwit guy who's had some success at law, I dearly wish I had gotten some Ag/Bio degree and gone into livestock farming after it turned out I didn't have the chemistry and math chops for veterinary medicine. So your marketing strategy might help a great deal for my demographic.
I'm guessing you are around my age (Gen X). When I was of career deciding age, agriculture had the worst possible public image. Going into agricultural appeared positively suicidal.
> I dunno. With increases in productivity the intelligent, competent, and hard working can support an awful lot of dull witted layabouts. <
Disagree with this. In theory, sure. AI endowed robots can do all the work and we can all take Soma and be happy.
In reality, what sort of nation you have, not just how prosperous, but how functional, how orderly, how safe the streets, how clean the streets, how decent the people all depend on what sort of population you have. Latin America with robots is still Latin America. Africa with robots is still Africa.
"A trillion dollar education establishment exists off the blank slate theory of human development."
One of the most truest -- and most arresting -- sentences I've read here in a while.
I'm looking not too far down the road at the end of my career in higher education. My daughter is just getting started. I have a lot of worries on her behalf.
> If you want a sustainable welfare state you better encourage eugenics and discourage dysgenics. But that gets us in terrifying #literallyHitler territory. We start discussing how many kids welfare recipients are allowed to have, if any, and which racial groups we should let in. Next thing you know it's #Auschwitz, so the reasoning goes. <
Your "reasoning" there needs to be in scare quotes. The whole eugenics is "literally Hitler" thing was a massive propaganda effort of a bunch of mostly Jewish minoritarians. (Some of them commie adjacent.) But otherwise, great paragraph.
Once you--heck even without--understand the basic idea of evolutionary biology, it's obvious that once you disrupt the "nature red in tooth and claw" bit--and worse constrain the fertility of normal healthy productive people--then you have do some sort of eugenics just to maintain the quality of your people, your nation. It's just math.
And no constraining the fertility of people who can not take care of themselves is not in fact "literally Hitler" it is common sense. Heck it is common sense decency to the taxpayers even if the eugenic concerns did not exist.
I'm not interested in measuring skulls. And some IQ testing gets esoteric. But it seems to be helpful to know that countries with low IQs like Equatorial Guinea, Mali and New Guinea are poor while high IQ countries like Finland, Norway and Israel are rich.
High IQ people with rigorous ethics are particularly susceptible to ideology. It's a pleasant Gnostic vision, these pure untainted ideas floating above it all just waiting to be implemented by the wise and good. So when the troglodytes come along and say, "Nah it's all just downstream from people," it's not a matter on which reasonable minds can differ; it's a religious war.
That's why Trump blows so many cerebrums on the ideological Right. He had the audacity to realize that democracy is about, well, votes. You don't lecture your base about high-minded Principle; you throw them red meat. And if you can find a way to evict the people who won't vote for you, you do that too. To quote Lee Kuan Yew, "This is not a game of cards; this is your life and mine." Who gets to live where and run things is THE issue.
The good news, we can tell them, is that culture is the feedback loop for genetics. But actually that's not good news, because it means the culture wars really are terribly important, and when Carnival Cruise Line frantically rolls out a code of conduct to avoid becoming the Section 8 of cruise lines (and the white employees run for the exits), it really is racist. How dare you think anything other than that the vuvuzela produces the sweetest, most dulcet tones imaginable.
With Ahmari's conversion to Catholicism, there are two problems rolled into one:
Original "ur"-christians were kind of communists, both race and money-wise, and this comes up in catholic history more than once. If in doubt, look at the reverence the Catholics hold for Thomas More - the founder of utopian socialism. It's not an one time aberration - Jesuit patres in Uruguay managed native socialist communes there in the 16th/17th century.
Even non-Catholic pilgrims were not immune and first tried socialism as a guiding principle in Plymouth, before they gave up and reverted to the good old, Hebrew Scripture-based, private ownership concept.
On the racial side, Catholics were also "anti-national", as long as all the different races were Catholic. Hence, the Crypto-Catholic Shakespear gave a very favorable treatment of Black Othelo , while hating with all his heart the Jewish Shylock.
So yes, there is a lot of wokism in the traditional Catholic Catechism.
Yep, very true. It's interesting JD Vance avoided this globalist wokism while converting to Catholicism, while Ahmari fell for it hook, line and sinker.
At the moment, Catholicism comes in 3 flavors:
There is a traditional, old style Catholicism (with strong nationalist, Carl Schmitt-ian overtones - you know what I mean)
There is an evangelical variety relying on Hebrew Scripture
and there is a new-testamenty/Marcionitic, woke globalist one (with or without LGBT+)
The fundamental problem anti-globalists have is that to effectively fight globalism you practically need your own globalism. Otherwise the various "localist" movements get crushed one at a time.
It seems like the debate has evolved. We have gone from "it's not true" to "maybe it's true but we shouldn't tell people." The scuffling now (on the right at least) is about public acknowledgement.
Please like Chris Rufo want to stay in the closet:
I think this is a huge mistake. You can't predict what will happen politically, but if you can change the "elites" understanding of an issue, you can guess where public opinion will end up going.
This whole Catholic right thing is not for me, I guess they're part of the right wing coalition's "big tent" so I might as well be more tolerant of it. Part of it is that I grew up going to Catholic church, and found it to be incredibly boring. No interest in returning, or joining any other church. Converts for some reason are kind of cringe, they "assimilate weird" into it.
I gave Orthodoxy the old college try but started realizing how completely alien it was to the American experience and how its existence in America wrecked its ecclesiology. And from there, it's a short step to realizing religion is actually downstream of people. I suppose my outlook is more Buddhist now, but I'm not sure Buddhism stripped of its folk spirituality and outside of its Garden Nations is still Buddhism. In other words, I don't think I could be Buddhist even if I wanted to be.
Maybe I could reform current religions or start a new religion on the idea that the universe is God and life is the Universe dreaming of itself but I'd need to be in my 30s and have way more charisma than I have to do that sort of thing.
The name Beauchamp dredged up a minor New Republic scandal of the Aughts: Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Iraq soldier and liar, was dating and married his TNR editor. My brain connects him with the Don't Tase me, Bro! guy of 2007. Any relation to Zack?
Ahmari is part of the virtue-signaling right. The whole National Review crowd is part of that. John J. Miller, who tried to destroy Sam Francis. The Wall Street Journal crowd as well. Peggy Noonan. Max Boot. David Brooks, who isn't really a conservative but plays one on TV.
You know what sort of conservative I despise. The tear-down-the-statue bunch. The South-haters. Mark Levin. Chris Plante. Larry "Sissy" O'Connor.
What are on here, Sohrab's 6th major transformation? Beginning as a Marxist before performing an about-face to write for Commentary and then becoming an ultramontaine Catholic he's now doing... Whatever this is.
If at some point you've undercut everything you previously believed enough to build a one man debate society people should start to ask not if you're bright but whether the medication needs to be adjusted.
“The story of Sohrab Ahmari is one of extremes. By turns, he was a rebel Iranian expat, an atheist, a bohemian dissident, an anti-Mormon provocateur, a communist, a lawyer, a teacher, a libertine, and finally, a Christian.”
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/02/49480/
> "...and finally, a Christian.”
How do they know it's final?
He was a Muslim too but that’s always left out if it.
Newt Gingrich has some of the same grifter, transformation traits. He became a Catholic fifteen years ago and declared himself an expert.
Sohrab was always an old school New Deal-style leftist. His problem is his position doesn't map nicely onto modern factions.
“A pretty common phenomenon of high IQ but somewhat unbalanced right wing thinkers like Ahmari who are attempting to remake their careers in the more lucrative Center is they they decide to denounce strawman versions of myself and Charles Murray as the real wild-eyed extremists to prove their bona fides and nice liberals.”
Classic grifter movie. He is part of a cottage industry. Soros funds sohrab and many like him.
Is it possible for a right wing comments section to not mention Soros or Epstein constantly?
No. That would be like a progressive not mentioning Trump and Hitler.
If Soros funding were less widespread, it might be.
Why would someone mention Soros in a comment under an article about a shill who launched his publication with Soros funding? I guess it's a mystery and we'll never know.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/progressive-mega-donor-funding-right-wing-ideas
I am Catholic but realize Catholicism was obscure and remote the first three centuries of American white history. Until 1950, Catholicism was pretty much limited to the Northeast. The higher birth rates of Catholics strengthened its influence for a couple decades after that and even elected a president. But Catholicism lost out to general affluence and the youth culture in the 60s and has little political or cultural influence today. Do nominal Catholics in Massachusetts fear the Archbishop of Boston? They laugh at him as an oddity. Do nominal Catholics in New York even care what the Archbishop of New York thinks? Lady Gaga, Jay Z, Diddy Combs and Kanye West have more influence in modern America than does any Catholic prelate, including the Pope. No wonder we are such a sick society.
The high point of American Catholicism was maybe 1955 when it seemed Catholics had earned full equality by fighting in the Big One but the need to be respectable and high birth rates kept the pews full (does religiosity make babies or do babies drive the need to take them to church?). But once JFK died and joined the American pantheon it seemed the battle had been won. To the integralist movement with which Ahmari associated himself it seemed like the decline was caused by Vatican II, which began to be implemented from around 1965 but it looks more like that just accelerated already present trends. Suburbanization, the car and the Baby Boom generation simply growing up killed the hold traditional Catholic parishes once had.
(PS: Lady Gaga and P. Diddy are both products of Catholic schools.)
Well-written. Good analysis.
To be fair, all the money and vitalism in global Catholicism are in the US now, which the College of Cardinals finally recognized. But yes, the Sacramental Churches are just completely alien to highly individualistic, egalitarian Anglo-America. Want a Church? Just gather two or more together in His name. A Patriarchate? Try reviving the Holy Roman Empire while you're at it.
This is why the curia elected an. American pope oh and American generosity. The Vatican is heading towards a financial cliff and rather then reform, they need donors to pony up the cash so they don’t have to cut expenditures. A tragedy really. The modern Catholic Church has done a lot of good in the world. Now becoming a beggar.
Hi Steve:
I'm confused because Beauchamp's Vox article, presumably an interview with Ahmari, is behind a paywall. There is no mention at all of you--or Charles Murray--in the excerpt you posted, nor are either of you mentioned in Ahmari's "Skull worshippers" tweet of today.
Furthermore, the only mention of you that I can see in your linked excerpt from Ahmari's New Statesman article of 2024 (also behind a paywall) is this:
"I’m referring to L0m3z, the founder of the edgy imprint Passage Publishing, home to, among others, the racial-hereditarian guru Steve Sailer."
Is that actually a "denunciation" of you? The word "guru" is certainly an overstatement with slightly negative connotations, but you do write frequently about race and heredity, so Ahmari's sentence isn't entirely inaccurate.
In short, I don't think Ahmari is particularly focused on you (or Murray), or even particularly interested in you.
But then again, I don't subscribe to either Vox or Liberties, so I don't have the whole context.
Sorry, I meant "skull measurers," not "skull worshippers." Does anyone really think Steve goes out and measures people's skulls?
I assume Ahmari objects to observations such as those found in Richard Haier's work. From the learning and the brain book review of Haier's "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Rebecca Gotlieb:
"For example, the thickness of the corpus callosum (which connects the two brain hemispheres) is related to IQ, and the density and organization of white matter tracts in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain differ as a function of IQ. Haier and his colleague developed the parieto-frontal integration theory of intelligence, which suggests that the integration of and communication between certain frontal and parietal areas is especially important for intelligence."
So no, given what we know about Steve, he does not go out and measure skulls. But for Ahmari, what neuroscience has discovered is equivalent to and probably worse than skull measuring, because it has not been, and does not appear likely to be, shown to be false.
That is not an acceptable explanation for the differences in outcomes. The correct answer has already been determined, and it is environmental differences attributable to socio-economic status. To be accepted, you must agree.
I have always found skull size a dubious corrollary of intelligence (even though I have a big skull). James Madison, the most brilliant of the Founding Fathers, was a tiny man with a proportionally sized skull. Crows are really smart, and although they're big birds, their heads are tiny compared to the rest of them.
Some of us were convinced at an impressionable age by the Sherlock Holmes story about a stolen goose & gem. Holmes wouldn't lie to us.
I love Sherlock Holmes, but I don't know that story.
The Blue Carbuncle. A missed client leaves his hat at Baker St, and Holmes correctly deduces from its large size that he must be intelligent.
Amazon Indians worship and shrink skulls. Steve only measures them.
The movie "28 Years Later" has a certain amount of skull-worship, too.
https://www.vox.com/politics/418116/anti-liberal-moment-end-trump-ahmari-moyn
Archived link: https://archive.is/xVZSe
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/05/americas-dime-store-nietzscheans
Archived link: https://archive.is/bqrRw
Thanks for the free links. The New Statesman article looks especially intriguing. The "post-liberalism" currently espoused by a number of Catholic thinkers is actually a rejection of the value-neutrality that has been central to liberalism since the 19th century. It's why we can't have bans on obscenity, gambling, prostitution, marijuana smoking, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other "victimless crimes" that degrade the quality of life for the majority of people. It's a serious and highly pertinent American argument, not a quaint fixation of Continental Papists nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire. Ahmari used to be part of this group, but I think all that ayahuasca has gotten into his brain.
I finally got around to reading both pieces in full. Beauchamp's piece in Vox has nothing to do with Steve. It is a dull and long-winded essay trumpeting Beauchamp's claim that post-liberals, including and especially Ahmari, the only post-liberal he actually interviewed, have become disillusioned with post-liberalism because of its association with the supposedly anti-democratic Trump administration. Chief among the culprits, in Beauchamp's view, is J.D. Vance--who, in my own opinion, can be called a "post-liberal" only in the sense that he's a Catholic and he can't stand liberals (who can?). Furthermore, it's not even clear that Ahmari has abandoned post-liberalism. "He still believes, as a philosophical matter, that secular liberalism’s preoccupation with the individual inhibited its ability to address collective problems," Beauchamp writes.
Now for Ahmari's own piece (much better-written) in the New Statesman: I now can understand why Steve considers this a "denunciation." It's not so much what Ahmari says, which isn't much ("racial-hereditarian guru"), but the fact that it appears in the very first paragraph of Ahmari's essay--and Steve is the only Passage Press (Lomez's publishing house) author whom Ahmari mentions by name. I think, however, that that's because Steve is the only Passage Press writer to date who has much name-recognition. So the fact that Ahmari mentions Steve is actually a kind of back-handed compliment. And, of course, the words "racial-hereditarian" fit right in with Ahmari's complaints about about the white-superiority theories of some of the alt-right.
As Lomez rightly complains, Ahmari completely confuses him with the Bronze Age Pervert, who indeed is a modern-day Nietzsche with all of Nietzsche's "natural aristocracy" hoo-hah. I would say, however, that Lomez contributed to the confusion himself with his 2023 musings in First Things about the "Longhouse" and its "Den Mothers" that could be interpreted as having Nietzschean overtones. (I'm always suspicious of efforts to overlay Neolithic prehistory with feminist theory, and I suspect that the real-life Neolithic farmers were the usual patriarchs, since they knew how to build things.)
The hilarious thing about this essay--which no one but me seems to have noticed--is that neither Ahmari nor his editors managed to get the orthography of Lomez's pen name and Twitter handle right. It's "L0m3z." Note the zero as the second letter. Ahmari persists in spelling it "Lom3z" instead. This says something about Ahmari's inattention to detail and also the thin copy-editing bench at the New Statesman.
So many, right and left, are absolutely obsessed with taboo enforcement. It is sad, really. "Think freely and objectively, but not too freely or too objectively. We must vigorously maintain the taboo."
It's a good point that the various figures whose politics are built around obviously false beliefs (IQ/race isn't real, gender is malleable, etc.) are in fact the real extremists as opposed to those who say we ought to make rational decisions informed by real and measurable facts, even if they are unpleasant.
Also, to give a bit of understanding or grace to the Ahmaris of the world, accepting that the assumptions you have internalized for much of your life are in fact either false or no longer tenable is very difficult. I am in my 40s so I remember a very different America than the one we inhabit today, would love to return to that, but recognize time only moves in one direction and whatever comes next is going to be very different. All I can do is support people or organizations that will push things in the direction I feel is best. A lot of the things conservatives hold dear are gone forever as the people and culture needed to sustain them are gone (or replaced) now. The future holds a lot of potential but it cannot be a return to the 50s or whatever.
This inability to recognize permanent change has arrived and abandon old nostrums is what led the GOP's chronic good loser posture in the 21st century. Fortunately the right now has people in it that are "unburdened by what has been" to quote the political philosopher Kamala Harris.
As I enter middle age I’m starting to think of my peers as refugees from another planet.
Youngsters don’t even reject shibboleths of the past, they don’t even know they ever existed!
I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers (born 1913 and 1928) and talked to them a lot about their youth. I don’t know how their experiences will sound to my own grandchildren in the 2040s and 50s if I’m lucky enough to be around and to have any.
What is the terrifying politics of skull measurers and IQ worshipers? I know it's unfashionable these days but ultimately politics has to be about policy. What are the terrifying policy proposals?
Stopping the funding for endless attempts to achieve racial proportionality through various forms of social engineering, the bean counting that goes along with monitoring them, and the political agitation necessary to keep up the funding, would break a lot of people's rice bowls.
sure, but isn't the common argument for those policies (or rolling back the existing policies) equal protection? You don't have to bring an IQ argument into it and an IQ argument could just as easily argue for preferential policies, as in-- no one chose to be born dull witted. It could have happened to any of us. Therefore as a society we have a moral oblation to help these less fortunate people.
If you want a sustainable welfare state you better encourage eugenics and discourage dysgenics. But that gets us in terrifying #literallyHitler territory. We start discussing how many kids welfare recipients are allowed to have, if any, and which racial groups we should let in. Next thing you know it's #Auschwitz, so the reasoning goes.
A more benign example would be education. We maintain the standards and concentrate on getting a few more IQ points out of everyone: neonatal vitamins and adequate calories for poor kids; math tables and phonics, in recognition that at least half the population will never comprehend algebra or make it through Shakespeare and just need basic literacy and numeracy. But that's terrifying for a lot of people too. A trillion dollar education establishment exists off the blank slate theory of human development.
In my own life, I've been punching above my weight in several metrics. The bills came due, and the past ten years have been a severe lesson in humility; I'm a straight, white guy so I just had to learn it. A lot of people stand to lose a terrifying amount of wealth and status in the high-trust meritocracy that Sailer and Murray promote.
I dunno. With increases in productivity the intelligent, competent, and hard working can support an awful lot of dull witted layabouts.
The stronger argument is that if you have a diverse society, people will vote against the social safety net. In such a society it changes the perception from an insurance policy that we all have, to a transfer payment to a bunch of "others"
Your middle paragraph doesn't strike me as something people would consider horrifying if you presented it properly. Aside from ego, most people would like to train to their approximate level. I don't see the shop kids resenting that they aren't allowed to study physics. All you have to do is offer the different tracks, and not be rigid about it. Treat the test results as recommendations and offer both kinds of classes as electives to the students in the different tracks.
Isn't that how it used to be? Isn't it still like that in e.g. Germany?
To smart technocrats this is obvious stuff. To universalist Catholics and liberal democrats (not necessarily exclusive), you're respectively denying the transformative power of the Holy Spirit and/or violating the basic human right of equality under the law (or God). Those are compelling priors that give people hope and a dignity they might otherwise not enjoy.
Speaking (or writing) as an officially super smart guy, I can't see a hope and especially dignity scale that slides up as you get a smarter person job. I used to joke ten and twenty years ago that the official position of a liberal is that if a white man anywhere in the US can be found earning his living with his hands, then something has gone horribly wrong. I think the overwhelming majority of white collar desk jobs are soul crushing. I see no reason that society should place those poor blighters higher up than a skilled tradesman.
This could all be solved with marketing.
Well, I think we have two problem populations that we're actually talking about: women, and blacks. Women don't want to hear that their cube farm bureaucrat jobs are soulless make-work, and most blacks don't like the trades either.
Your comment gets me back to the Unzian position that we really may be doing all right with mestizo and castizo immigration; they're incredibly stoic and seem fine with social hierarchies.
As an officially midwit guy who's had some success at law, I dearly wish I had gotten some Ag/Bio degree and gone into livestock farming after it turned out I didn't have the chemistry and math chops for veterinary medicine. So your marketing strategy might help a great deal for my demographic.
I'm guessing you are around my age (Gen X). When I was of career deciding age, agriculture had the worst possible public image. Going into agricultural appeared positively suicidal.
> I dunno. With increases in productivity the intelligent, competent, and hard working can support an awful lot of dull witted layabouts. <
Disagree with this. In theory, sure. AI endowed robots can do all the work and we can all take Soma and be happy.
In reality, what sort of nation you have, not just how prosperous, but how functional, how orderly, how safe the streets, how clean the streets, how decent the people all depend on what sort of population you have. Latin America with robots is still Latin America. Africa with robots is still Africa.
I completely agree. I do not want to live in such a state. I was only arguing that it might be sustainable from a money point of view.
"A trillion dollar education establishment exists off the blank slate theory of human development."
One of the most truest -- and most arresting -- sentences I've read here in a while.
I'm looking not too far down the road at the end of my career in higher education. My daughter is just getting started. I have a lot of worries on her behalf.
> If you want a sustainable welfare state you better encourage eugenics and discourage dysgenics. But that gets us in terrifying #literallyHitler territory. We start discussing how many kids welfare recipients are allowed to have, if any, and which racial groups we should let in. Next thing you know it's #Auschwitz, so the reasoning goes. <
Your "reasoning" there needs to be in scare quotes. The whole eugenics is "literally Hitler" thing was a massive propaganda effort of a bunch of mostly Jewish minoritarians. (Some of them commie adjacent.) But otherwise, great paragraph.
Once you--heck even without--understand the basic idea of evolutionary biology, it's obvious that once you disrupt the "nature red in tooth and claw" bit--and worse constrain the fertility of normal healthy productive people--then you have do some sort of eugenics just to maintain the quality of your people, your nation. It's just math.
And no constraining the fertility of people who can not take care of themselves is not in fact "literally Hitler" it is common sense. Heck it is common sense decency to the taxpayers even if the eugenic concerns did not exist.
I'm not interested in measuring skulls. And some IQ testing gets esoteric. But it seems to be helpful to know that countries with low IQs like Equatorial Guinea, Mali and New Guinea are poor while high IQ countries like Finland, Norway and Israel are rich.
High IQ people with rigorous ethics are particularly susceptible to ideology. It's a pleasant Gnostic vision, these pure untainted ideas floating above it all just waiting to be implemented by the wise and good. So when the troglodytes come along and say, "Nah it's all just downstream from people," it's not a matter on which reasonable minds can differ; it's a religious war.
That's why Trump blows so many cerebrums on the ideological Right. He had the audacity to realize that democracy is about, well, votes. You don't lecture your base about high-minded Principle; you throw them red meat. And if you can find a way to evict the people who won't vote for you, you do that too. To quote Lee Kuan Yew, "This is not a game of cards; this is your life and mine." Who gets to live where and run things is THE issue.
The good news, we can tell them, is that culture is the feedback loop for genetics. But actually that's not good news, because it means the culture wars really are terribly important, and when Carnival Cruise Line frantically rolls out a code of conduct to avoid becoming the Section 8 of cruise lines (and the white employees run for the exits), it really is racist. How dare you think anything other than that the vuvuzela produces the sweetest, most dulcet tones imaginable.
With Ahmari's conversion to Catholicism, there are two problems rolled into one:
Original "ur"-christians were kind of communists, both race and money-wise, and this comes up in catholic history more than once. If in doubt, look at the reverence the Catholics hold for Thomas More - the founder of utopian socialism. It's not an one time aberration - Jesuit patres in Uruguay managed native socialist communes there in the 16th/17th century.
Even non-Catholic pilgrims were not immune and first tried socialism as a guiding principle in Plymouth, before they gave up and reverted to the good old, Hebrew Scripture-based, private ownership concept.
On the racial side, Catholics were also "anti-national", as long as all the different races were Catholic. Hence, the Crypto-Catholic Shakespear gave a very favorable treatment of Black Othelo , while hating with all his heart the Jewish Shylock.
So yes, there is a lot of wokism in the traditional Catholic Catechism.
Catholics are the OG globalists. The slightly African heritage of his holiness Pope Leo is testament to this.
A Catholic church in London or Paris is probably as close as you’ll get to a group of humans drawn from every ethnic group.
Yep, very true. It's interesting JD Vance avoided this globalist wokism while converting to Catholicism, while Ahmari fell for it hook, line and sinker.
At the moment, Catholicism comes in 3 flavors:
There is a traditional, old style Catholicism (with strong nationalist, Carl Schmitt-ian overtones - you know what I mean)
There is an evangelical variety relying on Hebrew Scripture
and there is a new-testamenty/Marcionitic, woke globalist one (with or without LGBT+)
The fundamental problem anti-globalists have is that to effectively fight globalism you practically need your own globalism. Otherwise the various "localist" movements get crushed one at a time.
Yeah the Naomi-Klein era anti-globalisation movement was in fact quite-transnational.
It seems like the debate has evolved. We have gone from "it's not true" to "maybe it's true but we shouldn't tell people." The scuffling now (on the right at least) is about public acknowledgement.
Please like Chris Rufo want to stay in the closet:
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1940446709206933975
I think this is a huge mistake. You can't predict what will happen politically, but if you can change the "elites" understanding of an issue, you can guess where public opinion will end up going.
This whole Catholic right thing is not for me, I guess they're part of the right wing coalition's "big tent" so I might as well be more tolerant of it. Part of it is that I grew up going to Catholic church, and found it to be incredibly boring. No interest in returning, or joining any other church. Converts for some reason are kind of cringe, they "assimilate weird" into it.
I gave Orthodoxy the old college try but started realizing how completely alien it was to the American experience and how its existence in America wrecked its ecclesiology. And from there, it's a short step to realizing religion is actually downstream of people. I suppose my outlook is more Buddhist now, but I'm not sure Buddhism stripped of its folk spirituality and outside of its Garden Nations is still Buddhism. In other words, I don't think I could be Buddhist even if I wanted to be.
Maybe I could reform current religions or start a new religion on the idea that the universe is God and life is the Universe dreaming of itself but I'd need to be in my 30s and have way more charisma than I have to do that sort of thing.
> I suppose my outlook is more Buddhist now,
For someone calling himself "The Anti-Gnostic" that's rather stranger, considering Buddhism is basically Gnosticism-lite.
Maybe Taoist then. I suppose I'll have to read up on them.
I was raised Catholic and have a fluctuating adherence to it as an adult.
I cannot imagine any circumstances where I would consider any another religion.
What is the joke? I want to learn.
I believe it's that they're denouncing "extremists" in order to join extremists. Steve's sentence needs some editing.
The name Beauchamp dredged up a minor New Republic scandal of the Aughts: Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Iraq soldier and liar, was dating and married his TNR editor. My brain connects him with the Don't Tase me, Bro! guy of 2007. Any relation to Zack?
The English pronounce it Beechum, btw.
There are two millennia of a Catholic intellectual tradition.
One can (and in fact some people do) spend an entire lifetime pondering it.
It barely interests me but I’m wise enough to know that there is something there.
Of all strains of intellectual thought to dismiss it seems an absurd one to pick.