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Race and history
Scott MacEachern (maceache@ACS.UCALGARY.CA)
Sun, 30 Oct 1994 14:16:14 MST
Philipe Rushton wrote:
>Pacific Rim countries like China (People's Republic or Taiwan),
>Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, even Vietnam and Thailand are
>econonmically outperforming African and Caribbean countries by leaps and
>bounds, not just economically and scientifically, but socially and culturally
>as well. Crimes like rape hardly exist nor do teenage pregnancies and
>AIDS. Most places in the African Caribbean, African-Africa, and African
>Amereica are very dangerous places, especially for whites.
How do countries 'outperform' other countries 'socially and
culturally'? Under these measures, thing as varied as the
exploding AIDS rates in Thailand or the institutionalized rape
and exploitation of Asian women by Japanese troops in World War 2
might mean those countries are 'culturally underdeveloped'. The
reference to AIDS is particularly galling; Asian countries have
been even more willing to respond to the AIDS threat with denial
and draconian punishment than have African ones.
After working in Africa on and off for twelve years, I'm
surprised to learn that the whole continent is a 'very dangerous'
place, especially for whities like me. Just unobservant, I guess.
Perhaps I should go to somewhere safe in Asia to work --
Kampuchea, perhaps, or East Timor.
>
>(Proximally, Koreans have less testosterone and
>are less inclined to have disruptive personalities.
>Evolutionarilly, this is due to greater selection against
>fighting and mating in the colder
>arctic environments where Koreans evolved relative to Africans.
One traditional racist explanation of the alleged inferiority of
blacks was that their occupation of tropical environments led to
less selection for intelligence and initiative in such 'milder'
climates. We've now turned this around a bit, but it's still the
same old argument. God knows why cold climates are assummed to be
harsher than hot ones, or what selection against fighting and
mating (!) have to do with present-day economies in Japan and Korea.
>
> It is all discussed more thoroughly in my book. It is a shame
>that so far my opponents, as the opponents of Charles Murray, can do
>no better than pout and rage. Where is the intellectual discussion. If
>not on Eye to Eye and other programs on which I appeared, then at
>least among PH.D. scholars as, I supposed, existed on this net?
I doubt that many of the people on this list will buy your book.
In the first place, you'd probably get some of our money through
royalties. In the second place, buying it would just encourage
you to write more of them. For the moment, we'll have to make do
with the posts that you submit to ANTHRO-L. Fortunately, there's
plenty there to work with.
Too bad you hadn't written it about 700 years ago. At that point,
you could have done so at the court of Mansa Musa, in the state
of Mali in West Africa. Mali at that point was larger, and
considerably richer, than practically any European state. It was
also an important part of an Islamic intellectual and cultural
sphere that stretched to India and beyond. As a citizen of Mali,
you would have been forced -- by the evidence, of course -- to put
'whites' at the bottom of your scale of evolutionary progress.
You would not, of course, have had the bioanthropological
verbiage to play around with, but the cultural data would have
stood pretty well on its own.
Scott MacEachern
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