July 06, 2004

Carl Pope and The Virus of Hate

By Louis Andrews

Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, needs to get out more. In the May-June 2004 issue of Sierra, the official publication of the Sierra Club, he penned an editorial entitled “The Virus of Hate.” In it he discusses the tactics of various people “on the losing side” of the recent Sierra Club election, accusing them of having

“entered into an ugly alliance with individuals and groups whose motivations are clearly racist.

“As a result, earlier this year, I sadly opened a new file folder to deal with a virus—not a computer virus, but a very ancient human virus, one that now threatens to infect the Sierra Club: the virus of hate.”

Now that is a serious allegation given the present politically correct climate. So what is an example of such an individual or group “whose motivations are clearly racist?”

One comes from my website, Stalking the Wild Taboo (SWT). The website is named after a book by the late Garrett Hardin, one of the most important environmentalists of all time.

Now, as far as I know, nowhere on SWT does the Sierra Club’s name or that of Carl Pope appear. And I might add, neither does “hate,” except perhaps in the essays and book reviews by various leftist egalitarians mentioned on the website to make a point about political correctness. Much of the website consists of reprints of articles and book reviews from peer-reviewed scholarly scientific journals. In addition, as mentioned above, it also contains published essays and book reviews written by me addressing various issues connected with immigration, human diversity, and political correctness.

In his “Virus of Hate” editorial, Pope chose quotations from three individuals, including me, as examples of the virus. My quotation that Pope used originally appeared in an essay entitled No Technical Solution: a Synopsis of the Race Problem in the United States which came from the now defunct online journal pinc, Vol. 3, No. 1, May, 2000, and is reposted on my SWT website. It reads as follows:

“Intelligence and other natural race differences are such that blacks, whites, and Asians will always differ significantly (as groups) in outcomes, even when provided with identical resources. As cognitive abilities become increasingly more important in our highly technological society blacks, as a self-identified group, will fall further and further behind.”

Few readers of VDARE.COM are likely to find that much of an example of a “virus of hate,” but even so, Pope ignored the context in which the paragraph was placed.

It ended the first section of the essay, which was on race differences. After discussing the origins of the three primary races and the widely noted IQ differences (virtually all of which came from peer-reviewed articles in major scientific journals and is available in the best seller The Bell Curve.) I followed with three paragraphs, then ending with the final one quoted in its entirety by Pope.

These preceding three paragraphs read as follows:

“Despite massive funding over 30+ years, no environmental program has yet been devised that has been shown to have a permanent effect in reducing the IQ/achievement difference. Recent studies show that, for example, the Head Start program actually works to accentuate the long-term achievement differences between the races. It seems unlikely at this stage that a magical X factor will be discovered that will change our understanding of the situation.

“Many other differences besides intelligence impact individual outcomes and society. For example, blacks have better short-term memory than whites and out-compete whites in many sports. Despite being only about 12% of the population, blacks dominate professional basketball and football. Every major running record is held by someone of African descent. Even within the black population, differences in specific athletic abilities are apparent. East Africans excel at long distance running while West Africans dominate the short distance races. In the 100m, the 10-second barrier has been broken 134 times; in every case the runner was a West African or someone of West African ancestry.

“In terms of health and health costs, blacks have much higher incidents of premature and multiple births, and among older blacks, much higher rates of dementia than whites. Older whites tend to have higher rates of depression than older blacks.”

Pope alleges that he sees hate dripping from my words. But is it hate to note that the Head Start program actually increases the differences in black-white achievement? [See Does Head Start Make a Difference? Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas, The American Economic Review. Vol. 85, No. 3. pp. 341-364, 1995.]

Is it hate to note that blacks have better short-term memory and do better in many sports than whites?

Is it hate to note that older whites have higher rates of depression than blacks?

Is it hate to note that as our technological society develops, better cognitive skills will be more valuable?

In the popular parlance, accusations of racism are meant to convey moral condemnation. But can a fact be condemned morally as racist, i.e. that the Head Start program increases the achievement differential between blacks and whites?

Surely it cannot be “racist” to state a truth.

Can it?

Racism as a moral evil can only mean that someone asserts an untruth, known to them to be untrue, because of hatred of others.  

But if someone sincerely believes something to be true, there can be no moral evil—regardless of whether the thing believed is true or not.

In other words, moral wrong depends on how and why something is believed, not what is believed.

But do not expect logic to slow down those who find the labels of racist and racism useful.

The real hate is in the Carl Popes of this world who value political correctness above all else, and who see any honest discussion of racial/ethnic issues as anathema and as racist.

Of course we all know why. If honest discussion of our major issues were to be the rule rather than the exception, their little pipe-dream world would collapse.

Yes, Carl Pope needs to get out more and see the world. And he should take others with him.