Sure; I could have been clearer. Why did the minority regimes in Rhodesia or South Africa attract more international attention and censure than other, arguably more repressive governments? One reason is that they were examples of a white herrenvolk ruling over a non-white Other. By contrast, Latin American whites, at least in the U.S., are subsumed into a category that’s perceived as being less white than the majority. (About half of all Hispanics self-identified as white in the last census.) As a result, it’s the majority’s conduct toward them that’s under the microscope, and programs that gauge diversity in terms of their presence (like the UT affirmative action program upheld by the Fifth Circuit) are at least potentially justifiable. Obviously I’m painting in broad, impressionistic strokes here.

The same goes for the Israelis (perceived as white-on-brown) in comparison to the Quebeckers (white-on-white). I’m just saying that when Razib notes that “some of this is clearly just a matter of race,” it’s not just the race of the group in question that’s determinative.

My point of view is that all human beings of this era are contemptibly ignorant because your intelligence is not enough for you to perceive the world as it is, your views are limited to what your mind is capable of and the amount of time you have to read and self-reflect which is extremely limited (~27,000 days). Most of you make more in one year then the days you will live your entire life, not exactly a recipe for human wisdom. Your mind is not the rational machine the enlightenment thought it was, and you all need to friggin learn it. That means there are people out there that can speak true statements that you can never interpret because the enlightenment was wrong about human reasoning. Just because you read something does not mean you’re understanding it as intended.

http://bit.ly/dYaWUc

Your model and perspective on the world is fundamentally limited. Given human history it’s safe to say all human beings in the 21st century have the intelligence of homer simpson, and that goes for their leaders as well as their intellectuals. Human beings are not a race of genius’s. Any race of beings that has had millions of years of time to solve the most basic ethical problems isn’t very bright on the whole. There mountains of scientific evidence that all of us are at a subhuman level of existence given our wanton waste of resources and our unsophisticated views on a whole plethora of things.

A human beings perspective is only as good as their ‘model of the world’ and what’s been discovered about human reason in sciences means all of you are wrong about a lot of things. Those who fail to understand this will forever remain trapped in their false model of the world.

All human beings of the 21st century are incredibly simple minded, especially those of the academic and professional kind. In fact they are some of the most easy to deceive.

I was discussing this just a couple of days ago with my own biracial/bicultural daughter, who knows quite a few people her age group from mixed families, and she agreed with me – it could demonstrate something, but it often doesn’t.

She and I also agree that there are some practices which are utterly repugnant and should qualify as indefensible in absolute terms, like genital mutilation of female children, and yet conservative people from my own culture have told me I should be tolerant towards it because “it’s just their culture”.

My daughter is pretty far conservative on most fiscal and quite a few social issues, BTW, often more conservative than I am. Whether she agrees that multiculturalists are idiots depends on what level it’s applied – she would assert that there are some human universals that should override, and so would I.

One a personal note, this conservative managed to travel the world, live for nearly two decades in various foreign climes, marry a (gasp) brown person, and have a few mixed-race kids. Sorry Razib, this is your place. Delete this as irrelevant if you please, but blind, ignorant prejudice and, apparently, hatred, trip my trigger.

interesting point. i’m a not a big fan of the tea party because because i believe in less spending AND higher taxes, and they more symbolic anti-gov. types (core demo are older folks who use medicare and SS). i guess i need to think about this in detail. frankly, i think romney is a more competent manager than obama. but i also believe that institutions matter.

p.s. yeah, i figured who you were when you cited the social science literature! too bad more readers don’t do that….

being “religious” gives practices only marginal buffer or latitude. i think “freedom of religion” as analogous to “freedom of speech” is fake. to a great extent it is an artifact of defining religion qua religion as confessional protestantism. you are free to believe whatever you want to believe, but when religious practice bumps up against broader social norms, then you are likely to be screwed. the mormons in the 19th century found that out, and somali muslims in seattle who justify very cursory female circumcision (a cut into the clitoris i believe) on religious grounds also found this out. religion can give one moderate license to engage in behaviors, but they have to be relatively innocuous (e.g., sikhs getting out of helmet requirements).

I don’t agree with the definition of savegry as that which is so terrible we have to intervene there is always a cost benefits analysis. I consider the treatment of women in saudi arabia savage I do not think we should try to impose our moral code not because it is in some way accetable but because the chances of our succeeding in changing it through activing intervention is to small and the cost in human lives is to high.

It amazes me how little real discussion there is around issues like this as we hurdle towards an every more multi-cultural world.

On another note, the vociferousness of the censoring responses of a number of responders is very enlightening. I do not see this when Ed Yong dismisses the bell curve or opines on the policy implications of global warming. I don’t see this on PZ meyers very poltical science blog, I don’t see this when Scottie Westfall dismisses intelligence testing.

As far as I can see multiculturalism is an Orthodoxy of thought every bit as powerful in our society as any religion and just as irrational. The emotional rhetoric of the liberal responders here only confirms that impression for me. I experience this same response myself regularly when I try to explain my views to liberal friends.

Both conservatives and liberals reject science that does not align with their views the question to me is which is more damaging.

To give two simple examples, Conservatives reject the evidence of global warming. The left rejects the evidence that races differ in cognitive capacities(so does much of the right actually unfortunately). My impression is that these positions are both driven primarily by orthodoxy and tribal alignments not rational examination of the evidence. I am inclined to believe that the later has far more profound policy implications then the former.

If you attempt to reject tribal orthodoxy you will become heterdox to any large groups ideology at that point it is cost benefit analysis as whether your alignments with any particular group are more important then your disagreements. That analysis leads me to support the republicans however tepidly.

no. again, be careful about imputing all tendencies to western influence! i think the key is that smell and taste have strong resonances with memory, especially childhood memory. i’ve seen this in non-western contexts, where at our multicultural mosque as a child south asians and arabs would always talk about issues with the food (south asians like it spicy, arabs less so).

Do they not enforce norms through violence, creating a world in which the only differences are the safe ones that involve cumin, complexion, and vowels at the ends of surnames?

i think there’s a lot of schizophrenia here. you can see it in the same person. i do think we need to frankly talk about a “thin set” of “human universals” which are enforced through force (e.g., no slavery). but to get to that point we need to clear out all the bullshit, whether from the left (“we respect all cultures” and “all bad stuff that colored people do is due to white men who colonized them with demonic thoughts”) or right (“USA #1, USA #1, USA #1, greatest country in the history of the mother-fucking world”).

That’s what I was trying to imply with the challenge of comparing past elite opinion (in my example a faculty of an Ivy League uni) and “weak & oppressed” opinion to modern opinions.

I’ve been to communities in the Southwest, advertised as “diverse.” The population is usually 80-90% Hispanic, earning the “diverse” label. I’d argue that when a population is more than 2/3rds of a single ethnicity it ain’t diverse, but what do I know? I don’t have a degree in ethnic studies.

Razib’s point about the celebration of diversity beginning and ending with the relative safe otherness of spices and melanin is spot on. When diversity starts extending into different areas, such as attitudes towards gender relations things get tense. We either get bellicose feminists allying themselves with Dubya or the sort of tittering unease that many liberals have with 3rd world machismo. They usually ignore it or make excuses for it. For what it’s worth, in my limited experience,these are often the same folks who insist on puritanical rigidity in gender relations, domestically. Mild form of racism? Lowered expectations for foreign, masculine peasants? You betcha.

But to defend the middle-brows on the food point; many wannabe middle-brows (not your average guy on the street, who American middle-brows invariably never interact with) from other countries usually begin with an extended discourse on the motherland with their food and love of family. Nobody else, it would seem, takes food and family as seriously as they do. Is this an indigenous response or have they taken their cues from us, having watched one too many episodes of A. Bourdain, and are telling us what they expect us to hear?

On the point about a hegemonic culture in Rome or the Ottoman multicultural empires and how modern multikulti advocates might regard it with unease, perhaps, but aren’t they often proponents of enforced cultural conformity? Do they not enforce norms through violence, creating a world in which the only differences are the safe ones that involve cumin, complexion, and vowels at the ends of surnames?

i don’t even think this is whig history. the enlightenment whigs were quite suspicious of democratic ‘enthusiasms.’ i would argue that anti-elitism implicit in this model is the fruit of 19th century romanticism hybridized with the more radical elements of the enlightenment (e.g., marxism). rosseau and robespierre’s bastard.

as an empirical matter i think it’s wrong. populist movements always need an elite “head.”

Whig history is so neat, tidy and comforting. Isn’t it funny how a fundamentally uncaring universe basically conforms to what a Christian god would try and do? Could it be we where wrong and … oh no wait, could it just perhaps be that we’ve grandfathered in some silly notions connected to that particular flying spaghetti monster unexamined and we are seeing what we want to see? American Liberalism is basically Quakerism minus God.

For example let us take the intelligent bit, would you say that modern sensibilities are closer to the sensibilities of 1950′s Harvard faculty or the sensibilities of the 1950′s “oppressed” and “weak”. Now let me ask you which of these two groups was on average more misanthropic?

In any case please define civilizing, I have no idea what you mean by that vague applause light ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ ), except “more like our current value set”.

“I doubt many today who are conservative would want to live anywhere near previous generations of conservatives in human history.”

I wouldn’t mind living in the 1880′s, 1910′s or 1930′s or 1970′s or 1990′s, as long as modern technology was available and my relative socio-economic status wasn’t changed too much.

*But overall you are right. Real conservatism is fundamentally in a way much more morally relativist than progressivism.*

I like this society and set of values *because* and *only because* it is mine. If arguments, a bacterial infection or drug have changed me, this obviously translates into the target of what I’m conserving.This does not change the fundamental soundness of the position. For indeed a rational agent trying to maximise his utility has no reason to change his value set (except perhaps purge some contradictions, deciding ties by chance).

“If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to kill people, he would refuse to take it, because he knows that then he would kill people, and the current Gandhi doesn’t want to kill people. This, roughly speaking, is an argument that minds sufficiently advanced to precisely modify and improve themselves, will tend to preserve the motivational framework they started in. ”

Human minds are not sufficiently advanced (yet). But there are workable approximations of this.

One angle (not the most important one, but I think its there) could be that while many casual adherents and self-satisfied groupthink nurtured “thinkers” are just mindlessly repeating the party line there ARE a number of people who are seriously committed to what they imagine is a worldwide organized movement to overthrow the existing system (including the system in which they work and draw a salary or get grants). i.e. they may know that a lot of their bullshit is bullshit, but its useful bullshit in a higher cause. It undermines the dominant civilization and its armies and bankers (or so they think..I think the actual contribution of Tariq Ali or even the far more scholarly Vijay Prashad to bringing down Western civ is negligible compared to the contribution of wall street bankers). but there IS a hardcore of calculation and conscious propaganda mixed into the postcolonial bullshit…

All great civilizing forces of modern society have come from the weak and the oppressed not from the intelligent and misanthropic.

The truth is the human mind does not live in reality, if superstition and religion wasn’t evidence that the human mind does not fundamentally work correctly and this applies to all human beings and their bankrupt ideologies.

The world is much more complex simple minded politics of 21st century. Most intellectuals unfortunately live in isolated worlds and take anecdotes as truth. You can’t look at the bank bailouts (corporate socialism) and still take conservatism seriously – the conservatives bailed themselves out with public money to protect the capitalist system and gave the middle finger to everyone else.

http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html

Conservatism’s only valid viewpoints are – people don’t get along (culture conflict) and genetic inequality (the inferior human beings they so detest).

If the nazi’s hadn’t done “human improvement” in the wrong way we could have intelligent discussions about improving the human race through science. But simple minded ideology generally speaking is a result of not understanding how limited your own mind really is. Not all conservatives are stupid people, but most stupid people are conservative.

http://bit.ly/dYaWUc

A better view of mankind is that ALL human beings presently alive on earth don’t have what it takes to be civilized just yet, no real civilization yet exists because they are too busy trapped by their biology to move on from the animal kingdom and they find themselves much too impressed by their ability to speak and do little minuscule bits of science of which there is much yet undone.