Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (44 page)

We are not off the hook either. Like evolution denial, Holocaust denial is not simply going to go away and it is not benign or trivial. It has had and will have ugly and dire consequences, not only for Jews but for all of us and for future generations. We must provide answers to the claims of Holocaust deniers. We have the evidence and we must stand up and be heard.

15

Pigeonholes and Continuums

An African-Greek-German-American Looks at Race

Science books rarely make the best-seller lists, but when they do they usually have something to do either with our cosmological origins and destiny—Stephen Hawking's
A Brief History of Time
—or with the metaphysical side of our existence—Fritjof Capra's
The Tao of Physics.
How, then, did Free Press sell over 500,000 copies of a $30 book (yes, that's $15 million) filled with graphs, charts, curves, and three hundred pages of appendices, notes, and references, all on the obscure topic of psychometrics? Because one of those curves illustrates a fifteen-point difference in IQ scores between white and black Americans. In America, nothing sells like racial controversy.
The Bell Curve
(1994), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, generated a furor among scientists, intellectuals, and activists throughout the country that continues to this day—the
Bell Curve Wars
, as one debunking book is titled.

The arguments in
The Bell Curve
are not novel, in our time or any other. In fact, earlier that same year, the prestigious journal
Intelligence
published an article by another controversial scientist, Philippe Rushton, in which he claimed that not only do blacks and whites differ in intelligence but also in maturation rate (age of first intercourse, age of first pregnancy), personality (aggressiveness, cautiousness, impulsivity, sociability), social organization (marital stability, law abidingness, mental health), and reproductive effort (permissiveness, frequency of sexual intercourse, size of male genitalia). In addition to lower IQs, Rushton believes that blacks have earlier maturation rates, higher impulsivity and aggressiveness, less mental health and law abidingness, more permissive attitudes and greater frequency of intercourse, and larger male genitalia (inversely proportional to IQ, the data for which he collected through condom distributors).

In both
The Bell Curve
and Rushton's article, the Pioneer Fund is acknowledged. This caught my attention because of its connections to Holocaust denial. The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 by textile millionaire Wycliffe Preston Draper to fund research that promotes "race betterment" and that proves blacks are inferior to whites, the repatriation to Africa of blacks, and educational programs for children "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states . . . and/or from related stocks" (in Tucker 1994, p. 173; the Pioneer Fund denies that these are its current goals). William Shockley, a Nobel laureate in physics, for example, received $179,000 over ten years for his research on the heritability of IQ. Shockley believed that white Europeans are "the most competent population in terms of social management and general capacity for organization" and that "the most brutal selective mechanisms" of colonial life made the white race superior (in Tucker 1994, p. 184). Rushton's work was financed by the Pioneer Fund to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.

The Pioneer Fund also supports the journal
Mankind Quarterly.
One of the early editors of the journal, Roger Pearson, when he immigrated to the United States in the 1960s worked with Willis Carto, organizer of the Liberty Lobby and founder of the
Journal of Historical Review,
the leading publication of Holocaust denial. Over the past twenty-three years, Pearson and his organization have received no less than $787,400 from the Pioneer Fund. According to William Tucker, Pearson and Carto "regularly blamed the 'New York money changers' for causing the 'Second Fratricidal War' and the subsequent 'Allied War Crimes' against the Reich out of a desire to impose financial slavery on Germany and the world" (1994, p. 256). Carto's Noontide Press, publisher of racist and eugenics tracts as well as books denying the Holocaust, also featured Pearson's
Race and Civilization,
which describes "how the aristocratic Nordic, the 'symbol... of human dignity,' had been forced by 'taxes against landholders ... to intermarry with Jewish and other non-Nordic elements,' thus securing the wealth necessary to retain their family estates but sacrificing their 'biological heritage' and 'thereby renouncing their real claim to nobility'" (in Tucker 1994, p. 256).
Race and Civilization,
Pearson acknowledges, was based on the work of Hans Gunther, who was a leading German racial theoretician before, during, and after the Third Reich, although Pearson claims he was de-Nazified after the war. Pearson has also been on the advisory committee for Nouvelle Ecole, called by some "a French highbrow neo-Nazi group" but by Pearson merely "right wing" (1995).

I telephoned Roger Pearson. When I interviewed him, Pearson confirmed that he did work with Willis Carto for three months when he first came to America, editing Carto's journal
Western Destiny,
but he explicitly denied having used phrases such as "New York money changers." He also repudiated other charges, including the one that he "once reportedly boasted of helping to hide Josef Mengele" (see Tucker 1994, p. 256). This rumor seems to have spread far and wide, and Pearson is especially perturbed by it since at the time of Mengele's escape in March 1945, Pearson was seventeen-and-a-half and undergoing basic infantry training in the British Army. He has never had any contact whatsoever with Mengele and believes that the charge is like an urban legend, recycling itself through books and articles without anyone being able to cite a primary source for it.

I found Pearson a kind, soft-spoken man who has given considerable thought to the major issues of our time. He presently holds an honorary position as president of the Institute for the Study of Man (he is sixty-eight and semi-retired), and he is the publisher of
Mankind Quarterly,
which the institute took over in 1979. At that time, Pearson broadened the journal to include sociology, psychology, and mythology, adding appropriate new board members such as psychometrician Raymond Cattell and mythologist Joseph Campbell. During his reign, Pearson claims, neither the institute nor the journal has endorsed the repatriation of blacks or white supremacy.

Then where did the idea come from that they do endorse such racialist beliefs? Pearson admits that before his time the journal did endorse such ideas, and that he himself believes that societies ideally should be as homogeneous as possible (i.e., WASP), with the elite running the show. The problem, as he explained, is that this "natural" process is being interfered with by modern war and politics, a belief he developed from personal experiences:

I served in the British Army in World War II. On May 29, 1942, my only sibling, a 21-year-old Battle of Britain fighter pilot, was killed in combat in North Africa against Rommel. This had a great impact on me and until I was about 32—when I got married and started my own family—I had dreams of my brother returning. In that war I also lost four cousins and three close school friends, all young and without children. And lots of people I knew were killed before they had children. What I was seeing was that the more talented individuals were being selected against in modern warfare and it left me with an acute feeling that there is something deeply wrong with the world where you have wholesale over-breeding by people who are not as competent as others, while the more competent are killed off. Today I am very much against war because it disproportionally selects and destroys the more intelligent people. Plus it destroys culture. Look what we did to the great cities of Europe in World War II. A good example of this can be seen in the book
War and the Breed,
written in 1915 by the chancellor of Stanford University, David Starr Jordon. It is a story of young, childless Englishmen who were killed in World War I, and how warfare was destroying the West. I republished this book to show that the Europeans were a warlike bunch of people who didn't know what was good for them. Through centuries they destroyed themselves by fighting each other and consequently, from an evolutionary perspective, they did not deserve to survive.

I was a great nationalist who believed, in those days, in the purity of the gene pool. Nations used to be seen as breeding pools. Not any longer. The nation as a kinship unit is a thing of the past. We are moving into multicultural, multiracial units. I question how desirable this is from an evolutionary point of view. I think it is a reversal of the evolutionary process. (1995)

To help me better understand his views, Pearson sent me copies of some of his books and a selection of back issues of
Mankind Quarterly.
He was convinced I would see that the racialist tone of decades past has subsided in recent years. There are many interesting articles in this journal that have nothing to do with race, but there are also plenty that do, and these exhibit the same old slant now tricked out in more technical and less provocative jargon. Here are a few of the many instances I could cite. The Fall/Winter 1991 issue contains an article by Richard Lynn, titled "The Evolution of Racial Differences in Intelligence," in which he concludes that Caucasoids and Mongoloids living in temperate and cold climates "encountered the cognitively demanding problems of survival" and thus "a selection pressure favoring enhanced intelligence explains why the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the races which have evolved the highest intelligence" (p. 99). I guess Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Jews, Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans—a rather mixed group of races all living in "unchallenging" warm environments—were not particularly smart; and the Neanderthals who inhabited cold northern Europe long ago must have been very intelligent, even though modern humans allegedly outsmarted them. To be fair, the journal did publish critiques of this argument in the same issue.

The Summer 1995 issue features Glayde Whitney's Presidential Address to the Behavior Genetics Association, delivered on June 2, 1995, complete with graphs and charts demonstrating a dramatic ninefold black-white difference in murder rates, about which Whitney concludes, "Like it or not, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that some, perhaps much, of the race difference in murder rate is caused by genetic differences in contributory variables such as low intelligence, lack of empathy, aggressive acting out, and impulsive lack of foresight" (p. 336). What is his evidence for this hypothesis? Nothing whatsoever. Not even a single citation. And this in an address given to a room full of behavior geneticists and printed in a scientific journal read by anthropologists, psychologists, and geneticists. In this same issue, Pearson concludes a twenty-eight-page history titled "The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought" by bewailing the dysgenics of the modern world in which the elite are being selected against and outbred by the hoi polloi: "Heavily dysgenic trends have dominated this century as a result of the selective elimination of air crews and other talented personnel involved in modern warfare in Europe; the genocidal slaughter of the elite in Europe, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; and the general tendency for the more creative members of modernized societies around the world to have fewer children than the less creative" (p. 368).

I am not quoting selectively here. Pearson's latest book,
Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science,
elaborates the same theme, ending with this dramatic prediction about what will happen if we do not do something about this so-called problem: "Any species that adopts patterns of behavior that run counter to the forces that govern the universe is doomed to decline until it either undergoes a painful, harshly enforced and totally involuntary eugenic process of evolutionary reselection and readap-tation, or is subjected to an even more severe penalty—extinction" (1996, p. 143). Just what does "total involuntary eugenic reselection" mean? State-enforced segregation, repatriation, sterilization, or perhaps even extermination? I asked him. "No! I simply mean that nature selects and eliminates and that if we continue on our present course the species will go extinct. Evolution itself is an exercise in eugenics. Natural selection in the long run tends to be eugenic" (1995). But following on the heels of lengthy discussions about racial differences in intelligence, criminality, creativity, aggression, and impulsiveness, the implication seems to be that it is non-whites who are the potential cause of the extinction of the species, and therefore something needs to be done about
them.

The End of Race

Is it possible to prevent interbreeding and preserve genetic integrity? Has any nation ever been or could any nation ever be a "breeding unit," in Pearson's terminology? Perhaps a worldwide Nazi state might be able to legislate such biological walls, but nature certainly has not, as Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, demonstrate in
The History and Geography of Human Genes,
lauded by
Time
magazine as the study that "flattens
The Bell Curve"
(appropriate, since it weighs in at eight pounds and runs 1,032 pages). In this book, the authors present evidence from fifty years of research in population genetics, geography, ecology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics that, "from a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence" (1994, p. 19). In other words, the concept of race is biologically meaningless.

But don't we all know a black person or a white person when we see one? Sure, agree the authors: "It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals." But, they continue, "the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection" (p. 19). Traditional popular racial categories are literally skin deep.