What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

And how easy it is to recognize the revenant shapes that the old unchanging enemies—racism, leader worship, superstition—assume when they reappear amongst us (often bodyguarded by their new apologists).

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

All societies that have tried to keep themselves ‘pure,’ from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

Incidentally, by what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing bigots and tribalists of the sin of ‘discrimination’? They are the ones who judge severely by category, and yet can’t tell anyone apart. ‘Discrimination’ is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable to perform.