One of Wade’s key data points is the rapid economic growth of East Asia in the past half-century: “In the early 1950s Ghana and South Korea had similar economies and levels of gross national product per capita. Some 30 years later, South Korea had become the 14th largest economy in the world, exporting sophisticated manufactures. Ghana had stagnated.” Wade approvingly quotes political scientist Samuel Huntington’s statement, “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values.” And Wade attributes these attitudes toward thrift, investment, etc., to the Koreans’ East Asian genes.
This all fits together and could well be true. But ... what if Wade had been writing his book in 1954 rather than 2014? Would we still be hearing about the Korean values of thrift, organization, and discipline? A more logical position, given the economic history up to that time, would be to consider the poverty of East Asia to be never-changing, perhaps an inevitable result of their genes for conformity and the lack of useful evolution after thousands of years of relative peace. We might also be hearing a lot about Japan’s genetic exclusion from the rest of Asia, along with a patient explanation of why we should not expect China and Korea to attain any rapid economic success.
In any era, racism is typically supported by comparing two groups that are socially unequal and with clear physical differences. But both these sorts of comparisons are moving targets.
Wade offers social and biological facts on his side. The key social fact is the persistence of social inequality, both within and between countries. Whereas a leftist might see such inequality as evidence of unfair social structures within a country and unequal economic arrangements among countries, Wade takes these as evidence for the devastating combination of genetic differences and genetically reinforced cultural differences. The key biological fact is that ethnic groups do differ genetically in many ways, not merely in those genes directly connected to physical appearance.
Racial explanations for inequality are just too easy and too convenient. Differences between Czechs and Slovaks, Hutus and Tutsis, English and Irish, northern and southern Albanians, and so forth—all these have been explained by locals as arising from inherent differences between the competing groups. From the perspective of the United States, though, such comparisons don’t seem so compelling—how different can the Flemish and the Walloons be, really?—and so racism is commonly supported by comparisons between countries.
As Wade puts it, “many countries with no resources, like Japan or Singapore, are very rich, while richly endowed countries like Nigeria tend to be quite poor. Iceland, covered in glaciers and frigid deserts, might seem less favorably situated than Haiti, but Icelanders are wealthy and Haitians beset by persistent poverty and corruption.”
As Mr. Pilkington said in Animal Farm, “If you have your lower animals to contend with, we have our lower classes.”
Wade does not characterize himself as a racist, writing, “no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race.” But I characterize his book as racist based on the dictionary definition: per Merriam-Webster, “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Wade’s repeated comments about creativity, intelligence, tribalism, and so forth seem to me to represent views of superiority and inferiority.
Wade writes, “academics, who are obsessed with intelligence, fear the discovery of a gene that will prove one major race is more intelligent than another. But that is unlikely to happen any time soon.” So far, no problem. Labeling scientific or political disagreement as “obsession” or “fear” is not the most polite debating tactic, but Wade is entitled to his opinion. But later on he writes, “The populations of China, Japan and Korea have consistently higher IQs than those of Europe and the United States,” and he characterizes this as a difference in intelligence.
That said, I can’t say that Wade’s theories are wrong. As noted above, racial explanations of current social and economic inequality are compelling, in part because it is always natural to attribute individuals’ successes and failures to their individual traits, and to attribute the successes and failures of larger societies to group characteristics. And genes provide a mechanism that supplies a particularly flexible set of explanations when linked to culture.
Despite Wade’s occasional use of politically conservative signifiers (dismissive remarks about intellectuals and academic leftists, an offhand remark about “global cooling”), I believe him when he writes that “this book is an attempt to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.” If researchers ever really can identify ethnic groups with genetic markers for short-term preferences, low intelligence, and an increased proclivity to violence, and other ethnic groups with an affinity for authoritarianism, this is something that more peaceful, democratic policymakers should be aware of.
Wade could be right in his conclusions—maybe it’s true that Afghans and Iraqis are genetically distinct, compared with people of Western European descent, as a result of their adaptation to their “tribal societies.” Maybe East Asians really are, on average, intelligent but not creative. Maybe the famous cultures of poverty in the United States and elsewhere are associated with genes involved in impulse control, violence, and short-term thinking. Wade has very little discussion of the implications of his theories for race relations within the United States. I assume that in an attempt to avoid this aspect of controversy, he talks about the poor economic performance of Haiti but not about the lower incomes and social class of blacks and Hispanics within U.S. borders.
Wade’s arguments aren’t necessarily wrong, just because they look like various erroneous arguments from decades past involving drunken Irishmen, crafty Jews, hot-blooded Spaniards, lazy Africans, and the like.
But I think the themes of a book like Wade’s are necessarily contingent both on the era when it is written and the audience to which it is addressed. At the start of his last chapter, Wade speaks to his readers: “Imagine you, as an English speaker of European descent ...” In the spirit of modern ideas in theoretical physics, one might imagine a multiverse of possible Nicholas Wades, writing in all possible epochs and for all possible audiences, dividing up humans into groups at different levels of coarseness and focusing on different economic and social outcomes. The racial explanation tuned to our social group and our time period will look oh so reasonable, while all the others will just look silly, like either historical relics or desperate attempts to shore up the status quo.
I feel awkward giving this conclusion because it seems so relativistic, it makes me feel like such a social scientist. And I certainly don’t want to say that all racial arguments are equally valid. The theories of the book under discussion, for example, seem much more plausible than various crude racisms of the past. But that returns us to the paradox that today’s racism seems plausible in comparison to what came before. At any given time, racial explanations are a convenient and natural way to explain social economic inequality. Then, as relations between and within societies change, the racial explanations change alongside. The terms of race are simply too flexible given the limited information we have regarding the connections between genes and behavior.