All Intensive Purposes

I regret following Andrew Sullivan's recommendation to read John Derbyshire's musings about race and conservatism in the New English Review. In this piece at least, Derbyshire has an impressive knack for making social observations that ring false, and strings together so many false notes that it's hard to even know where to start. In a political vein, Derbyshire laments that conservatives somehow have been tarnished with a bad reputation on race, a view put so naively that I wonder if he was asleep or abroad for the last fifty years of American politics. I would not have thought it possible to write so many words about race and conservatism without using either "Southern" or "strategy," but Derbyshire pulls it off. Nor do things get better when he leaves politics behind. Derbyshire appears convinced that most of society adheres to a dogma positing that there are no "mental and personality" differences between different groups in society, a belief of which he might disabuse himself if he were to engage in conversation with ordinary human beings now and then or, failing that, go to a stand-up night at a comedy club. He also appears to have read Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure Of Man without having grasped the book's central arguments.

The small benefit of having read the piece through to the end is that I caught the unintended joke at the very bottom:

Only conservatives can take the lead here—we conservatives, we who unflinchingly embrace cold fact, we who are unafraid to stare the universe in the face, we who know the difference between ideals and fantasies.