Once we recognize that large differences in achievement among
races, nations, and civilizations have been the rule, not the
exception, throughout recorded history, there is at least some hope
of rational thought — and perhaps even some constructive efforts
to help everyone advance.
Even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, “We owe
London to Rome” — an acknowledgement that Roman conquerors created
Britain’s most famous city, at a time when the ancient Britons were
incapable of doing so themselves.
No one who saw the illiterate and backward tribal Britons of
that era was likely to imagine that someday the British would
create an empire vastly larger than the Roman Empire — one
encompassing one fourth of the land area of the earth and one
fourth of the human beings on the planet.
History has many dramatic examples of the rise and fall of
peoples and nations, for a wide range of known and unknown reasons.
What history does not have is what is so often assumed as a norm
today, equality of group achievements at a given point in time.
Roman conquests had historic repercussions for centuries after
the Roman Empire had fallen. Among the legacies of Roman
civilization were Roman letters, which produced written versions of
Western European languages, centuries before Eastern European
languages became literate. This was one of many reasons why Western
Europe became more advanced than Eastern Europe, economically,
educationally, and technologically.
Meanwhile, the achievements in other civilizations — whether in
China or in the Middle East — surged ahead of achievements in the
West, though China and the Middle East later lost their leads.
There are too many zig-zags in history to believe that some
single over-riding factor explains all, or even most, of what
happened, either then or now. But what seldom, if ever, happened
were equal achievements by different peoples at the same time.
Yet today we have bean counters in Washington turning out
statistics that are solemnly presented in courts of law to claim
that, if the numbers are not more or less the same for everybody,
that proves that somebody did somebody else wrong.
If blacks have different occupational patterns or different
other patterns than whites, that arouses great suspicions among the
bean counters — even though different groups of whites have long
had different patterns from each other.
When American soldiers were given mental tests during the First
World War, those men of German ancestry scored higher than those of
Irish ancestry, who scored higher than those who were Jewish.
Mental test pioneer Carl Brigham said that the army mental test
results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is
highly intelligent.”
An alternative explanation is that most German immigrants came
to the United States decades before most Irish immigrants, who came
here decades before most Jewish immigrants. Years later, Brigham
admitted that many of the more recent immigrants grew up in homes
where English was not the spoken language and that his earlier
conclusions were, in his own words, “without foundation.”
By this time, Jews were scoring above the national average on
mental tests, instead of below. Disparities among groups are not
set in stone, in this or in many other things. But blanket equality
of outcomes is seldom seen at any given time either, whether in
work skills or rates of alcoholism or other differences among the
various groups lumped together as “whites.”
Why then do statistical differences between blacks and whites
set off such dogmatic assertions — and “disparate impact” lawsuits
— when it is common for different groups to meet employment or
other standards to different degrees?
One reason is that “disparate impact” lawsuits require nothing
more than statistical differences to lead to verdicts, or out of
court settlements, in the millions of dollars. And the reason that
is so is that so many people have bought the unsubstantiated
assumption that there is something strange and sinister when
different peoples have different achievements.
Centuries of recorded history say otherwise. But who cares about
history anymore? Certainly not as much as they care about the
millions of dollars available from “disparate impact” lawsuits.
