Crossing the Line

This is not the sort of review one expects to find in a leftist magazine like The New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/what-hope Nevertheless, even if enlightenment is achieved by the socialist component of our polity--I think a change of policy likely to lag very far behind, for political, psychological, and cognitive reasons. This is a key insight: Wax [author of the book under review] is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.          The Johnsonian "Great Society" interventions in black America are as flagrant a public policy failure as the Nixonian "War on Drugs" that followed. In each case, the government stepped in, all money and arrogance, spent profligately to ensure black men no longer faced any financial responsibilities, ruined millions of American lives by process of moral hazard, and made the original problems much worse. The black family was ruthlessly destroyed as an institution, and black culture went with it. Further, as I've mentioned at other times, the black-white IQ gap is not irrelevant to the problem. It has persisted at the same level for the 100 years that IQ testing has been administered. But, to reiterate a basic consequence of this fact, if the top third of whites pull bachelors degrees, their average IQ would be about 114 and the minimum would be 106. Only 8% of blacks meet this minimum and 2.5% meet the average--a fourfold difference between college-capable whites and blacks. With ever more sophisticated demands faced by professionals, the fact that only 8% of blacks can hope to meet those demands constitutes a serious problem requiring such redress as we can muster. Wax does mention this, but only in a single paragraph that fails to grapple with its implications. I do credit her, however, with the courage to admit that the possibility of genetic differences in IQ between races yet remains, "the science on this question is inconclusive." (69) In the next quote, I disagree with the reviewer, who hasn't learned the limits of governmental competence. Throwing more handouts at black America will exacerbate the problem, which stems in the first instance from a lack of self-reliance reinforced over decades by the nanny state. Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I [the reviewer] would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. The welfare state imposes a system of incentives on blacks that encourages irresponsibility. Black men who walk on their families are at the center of the problem. But, why do they walk? They did not do this in 1960. What has fundamentally changed except the vast and comprehensive governmental provision of all necessities to black mothers and children? And the less involved the father is, the greater the government's largesse. The incentives are clearly perverse, and they have achieved the effect one might have expected. Incentives work. I do not mean to claim that this monstrous bureaucratic affliction impacts only blacks--attenuated versions may be seen among other groups as well. The welfare state has entirely remade lower and working class American society. It has not only robbed these orders of all dignity, but even of the sense that human dignity has value. So have the economic incentives crafted by our left-wing experts corrupted the character of much of America. The author, seeing the psychological results without fully understanding the causes which lie embedded in the system, then moves on to her summation: Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right. This is dead on. The whole of our handling of black America since Johnson has been a cynical game of elites (especially gentile and Jewish elites) engaged in social status competition. The most "generous" on the face of it, at the superficial level, won the competition, as demonstrated by the ever leftward tendency of our politics. Assuming that the poor are angels who will not humanly respond to incentives in the way that the contemptible "bourgeois" would counted as a sound basis for policy design. It turns out the poor are human, and the incentives came into play, and the poor were ruined--just as the middle classes would have suffered ruination had the incentives been generous enough to tempt them. This is what comes of officially sanctioned lies. To adapt Henry James, these are the black and merciless things that are behind the great socializations.