Genetics and Hooey
A reader asks:
“If race and genetics has nothing to do with culture, then where does culture come from?”
I have a friend who believes in astrology. She asks in the same bewildered tone as yours, “If fate and personality traits do not come from the stars, then where do they come from?”
In both cases, the Christian idea that men have free will simply never is brought up. If men have free will, then when they act as a group over generations, passing their lessons along to their children, they freely choose to act as a group, to develop or ignore the habits of life passed on to them. Culture is nothing more than the aggregate name for their habits of life, which their fathers chose to adopt, and they, whether for sound reasons or no, chose to pass along.
The idea of diversity is the idea that men in the aggregate (a culture) cannot be good or wicked, creative or slothful, talented at music, or prone to anarchy, or whatever. Since we would never believe that to be true of an individual man, I do not see why any sane man would even bother to entertain the idea as being true for a group.
On the other hand, the idea that certain men are born with superior qualities that are merely inherited, or that certain cultures are superior not because of the efforts of the men in the culture but due to the magic of their blood, is mere nonsense. With great pain and loss, we of the West expunged this alien and oriental idea from Europe during World War Two.
Anyone so enamored of it, let him move to India, find his place in the caste system, and leave us alone.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
