VVIf the Nineteenth Century posed the nurture-or-nature question, the Twentieth Century attempted to simultaneously preach the gospel of the former (Marx, Freud, Skinner) and that of the latter (Darwin, Spencer, Galton). The result has been an inherently self-contradictory social narrative. Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Jacques Ellul, among others, were right: the human mind seems infinitely capable of simultaneously clinging to beliefs that are mutually exclusive, i.e. impossible to reconcile. Modern day Karl Roves have overthrown Rousseau.
VVWhile such so-called ‘hard sciences’ as mathematics and physics are free to follow where the evidence leads and encourage broad conceptualizations, this freedom has been lost in the social sciences – particularly when the topic is inter-group variance among humans. Thus, when the entomologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University began writing about ants, it did not take his colleagues long to realize that the implications of his ‘Social Biology’ were in direct confrontation with that age’s stress on egalitarian ideology. Having witnessed up close the route of the eugenics movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Twenty-First Century has learned its lesson, making specific, narrowly technical studies the order of the day, and leaving questions of underlying generalization to lurk in the background.
VVNot last on the list of ideology-forming events was the distorted mirror held up to the eugenics movement by the Holocaust memorial movement. Totally disregarding the prominent role played by Jews in the eugenics movement long after the end of World War II, the media
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the code phrase ‘human capital”), who studiously pretend notto notice the enormous, undeniable role played in economic processes by genetic diversity, or, for that matter, to speculate as to their past and/or future consequences for economic development.