Noli Irritare Leones

Andrew Sullivan shows a strange propensity to believe in genetic racial differences in character as he comments on a New York Times article on the Industrial Revolution. The Times is discussing the work of one Gregory Clark.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

So far, so good. But then it gets weirder. Sullivan notes Clark’s willingness to consider a genetic explanation for this shift in values.

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

What was being inherited, in his view, was not greater intelligence — being a hunter in a foraging society requires considerably greater skill than the repetitive actions of an agricultural laborer. Rather, it was “a repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world.”

and then Sullivan follows up with

I guess it’s obvious what worms crawl out of that can.

Conservatism has long posited that human nature has no history. But what if it does? What if genetic adapation occurs more swiftly among humans than we once believed? This implies that human nature is actually more plastic than we have long thought – but generationally, not individually. It suggests that different populations may have not just different cultural but different genetic inclinations. It means that some populations may therefore have different skill-sets than others, and even different aptitudes with respect to complex systems like, er, liberal democracy, that require specific habits of mind and custom. It means that these facts about human societies across the globe may be somewhat stubborn things in the short term, if not in the long.

Spoken like someone who’s never been the child of an immigrant. And I mean here, not the part about human nature being plastic, but the part about cultural differences being tied to genetics. There’s a whole lot of evidence (sharp rises in IQ of particular immigrant populations over the 20th century, assimilation of children of immigrants, etc.) that it doesn’t work that way. Take that science Times article, where it discusses Clark’s attempt to explain why the Industrial Revolution originated in England rather than East Asia.

It is puzzling that the Industrial Revolution did not occur first in the much larger populations of China or Japan. Dr. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile and so would have failed to generate the downward social mobility that spread production-oriented values in England.

There you have it. The English are mostly descended from the upper classes, who are willing to work long hours and save, while the Japanese are descended from peasants, and are simply genetically less disposed to work long hours and save. And Japan is now doing fine in capitalist terms why, exactly? Did its rich people suddenly start reproducing more? Do Japanese-Americans do well academically and professionally because we got only the Japanese upper classes, and because rich Japanese-Americans then began to dramatically out reproduce poor ones, converting a genetically shiftless population into one genetically predisposed to middle class values? Color me dubious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 6:41 am and is filed under News and Commentary, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.