Steve Sailer’s ‘Noticing,’ collects decades of the politically incorrect journalist’s columns, conclusively demonstrating that he is one of our most astute and farseeing pundits.
Casey Chalk
One public intellectual is known for his celebration of sexual torture, frequenting bathhouses in San Francisco, and criticizing age-of-consent laws, having publicly asserted: “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even had made the first moves.” Another public intellectual — whose professional background is market research and hobbies include golf and lawn care — is known for his dispassionate, if controversial, analysis of sociological data (much of it published by academics from respected universities) on such topics as race and sex.
One of these intellectuals is, according to Google Scholar, the most cited academic of all time, his ideas beloved and appropriated across a host of disciplines, including critical race theorists; the other is reviled, his ideas and even person maligned by the leading American institutions as bigoted and racist.
Can you guess which is which? If you’re a cynical conservative, you’d probably presume that the sadomasochistic pedophile (who is none other than French philosopher Michel Foucault) is beloved by the left, while the quirky market researcher-turned-journalist is one of liberals’ bugaboos par excellence. The latter’s name, for the uninitiated, is Steve Sailer, whose Noticing: An Essential Reader offers an excellent introduction into one of the most interesting opinion journalists of the last fifty years. Indeed, though I’ve perused the anthologies of many famous writers, never have I read one so curious and entertaining, with articles that have remained relevant (if controversial) decades after publishing. There’s something to be said for noticing.
To Notice Is To Be Human
Why “noticing?” It is, simply put, the methodology behind half a century of Sailer’s sociological and political analysis. He observes something, a thing most of us have probably observed too, and then asks if there might be some explanation — particularly, a data-rich explanation — for that phenomenon. “My basic insight is that noticing isn’t all that hard to do if only you let yourself: the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath though we may be to admit it.”
In that sense, Sailer’s thought bears much more in common with the ancients (and particularly one ancient), than it does with the esoteric, self-celebratory meanderings of contemporary philosophers. For it was Aristotle who employed what he called pepeiramenoi, the act of observing the natural world around him (including humans), and developed theses based on those observations. “The proper procedure,” writes Aristotle in Book VII of his Nicomachean Ethics, “will be the one we have followed in our treatment of other subjects: we must present phenomena … and, after first stating the problems inherent in these, we must, if possible, demonstrate the validity of all the beliefs about these matters, and, if not, the validity of most of them or of the most authoritative.” That, more or less, is noticing. And it has gotten Sailer in quite a bit of trouble over the years, as he readily acknowledges in his foreword.
The reason, which is apparent from a brief perusal of the fifty-plus articles in this collection, is that Sailer makes uncomfortable, provocative arguments that antagonize the most sacred pieities of the left, many of which have even been embraced for generations among many conservatives. Perhaps most repugnant to Sailer’s critics is his role in investigating what he calls “human biodiversity,” which is more or less the various biological differences between people groups, be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. And yet, as our contemporary political distemper makes clear, America seems incapable of shaking off Sailer.
When Noticing Turns Prophesying
Before getting into the most controversial elements of Sailer’s writings — which have gone from prominent conservative outlets such as National Review and The American Conservative to more peripheral and fringe sites like Taki’s and VDARE — it’s worth studying how often Sailer’s predictions have proved accurate.
You can buy the paperback from Passage Press for $29.95, with free shipping within the U.S. by using the promo code WILSON or STANCIL (inside jokes). A few copies of the very expensive leatherbound hardcover are still available for $395.
For delivery overseas, I recommend Amazon as cheaper for shipping the paperback. And Amazon will sell you the Kindle instant digital down load for $9.95.
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Yeah, I still think Foucault is a pretty good writer. We’ll never have done with the panopticon!
Congrats, Steve. About time one of these rolled in. You were long overdue!