Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ten years ago, John Derbyshire, a respected veteran conservative writer, was summarily dismissed by National Review in response to a public outcry over an article about race in America. Derbyshire dived directly into the loaded question of how non-blacks ought to view and treat blacks, both as a race and individually, given the available statistics on crime, social behavior, and most controversially, intelligence....
One of the great modern diseases is our obsession with quantifying the intrinsically unquantifiable. The successes of the modern natural sciences have fostered an unjustified faith (and faith is the right word, since this belief is pure dogma) that a superficial approximation of scientific method may be applied to human life itself — to morality, society, education — with similarly salutary results. The...
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