I hope my profile established over several years in the forum will be enough to persuade readers I am not writing from a racist standpoint. I just htink this is an interesting philosophical problem.
Dr. Frank Ellis, a lecturer at Leeds University has made the headlines for contending that white people are more intelligent than black people. He has immediately been attacked by “all right thinking people”.
The implication is that it is an absolute taboo to even discuss this possibility.
But it isn’t that simple.
In fact, this is a case where Cathwood’s “Social Constructionism” comes into play.
We are used to seeing humanity as separate from the rest of the animal world. The equality of all people is a value we all claim to cherish (I hope).
However, humanity is a species, and within the species, there are races, just as within the species “domestic dog”, there are breeds.
It is obvious that a Bantu will typically be much taller than an ethnic Chinese; a Zulu will have much darker skin than a Nordic person; northern Europeans tend to have blue/green/grey eyes, whereas Africans and Asians tend to have brown eyes. All these physical (morphological) differences are taken for granted, in exactly the same way that we expect a mastiff to be larger than a terrier, and we expect a dalmation to have black spots on a white background.
What is less well-known but equally true is that there are physiological differences too. A native Australian (aborigine) has a low tolerance to salt in the diet. Exposure to a European diet could cause severe medical problems. An Innuit (eskimo) has a naturaly high body fat ratio, and is able to cope with a diet which is primarily protein and oils. A black person’s darker skin affords some protection from damage from the sun’s rays. And so on. There is nothing controversial about the principle, although scientist may legitimately argue about the details and the reasons. In much the same way, certain breeds of dog need different diets, or are more prone to certain illnesses.
Now we get onto intelligence, and suddenly it is a taboo. It is perfectly fair to say that Rotweillers are naturally intelligent dogs, that collies have specific intelligence that relates to herding situations, that labradors and german shepherds have the right intelligence and temperament to become guide dogs, and so on.
But it is an absolute taboo to even make the inquiry as to whether blacks are either more or less intelligent than whites, or asians, or orientals, etc.
Conceptually, it is at least possible (maybe likely) that a properly conducted study would detect differences in the type of intelligence of the different races. It is at least acknowledged that there are gender differences in intelligence types. Men are typically less able to multi-task than women, for example.
But our intelligence is of such fundamental importance to our view of ourselves as a species that we dare not risk conducting research which might be interpreted as “proving” that one race is more intelligent than another. Inferior intelligence would soon be translated into simply “inferior”.
But here’s another thing, and where Social Constructionism comes in, because any scientist conducting research into intelligence would first have to decide on a definition of intelligence. It is inevitable that his or her definition of intelligence would be based on his or her own social preconceptions. White westerners, and western science as a whole, have a particular view of intelligence. We might not be able to define it very clearly, but we know it when we see it.
An Australian aborigine (from a traditional cultural background) asked to define intelligence would not attach the same importance to IQ tests, geometrical problems and the like. The intelligence that allowed his race to thrive for millennia (without intelligently inventing the gun or the bomb) was based on memory, navigation skills, bushcraft, emotional intelligence, coping with adversity in a hostile and sparse environment.
Similarly, someone from a traditional Chinese background, or Indian, Tibetan, or central African, or indeed, Native American, would produce a very different list if asked to define “intelligence”. The native Americans were too intelligent to slaughter all the bison at once.
So the western society who sets out to find whether one race is more intelligent than another is - perhaps innocently, perhaps not - really setting out to find which race’s “intelligence” is most like his own. Unsurprisingly, he will usually “prove” his own race to be the most intelligent.
And maybe, just maybe, the other races are too intelligent to even ask the question!
It is strange, though, that people who reach a “supremacist” viewpoint, whether through philosophy, mythology, religion, or science, always conclude that their own race is the supreme one. As an example, no Frenchman would ever say, “Sacre bleu! I have done le research and proved that les Anglais are the most intelligent.”
Perhaps the only widely known inception is a short, dark-haired, brown-eyed Austrian guy who drove the world to war on behalf of a supposed master race of tall blonds with blue eyes.
