I’m writing this short piece for a few people on Twitter, genetics researchers or aficionados who are concerned with the possibility of a hereditarian left – that is, with whether one can plausibly and pragmatically be both a leftist and a believer in modern science on genetic influences on individual behavior and capacities. I personally am only a nonstandard leftist at best, and not aware enough of modern research to call myself a hereditarian in any robust sense; but I am keenly interested in the struggle between biology and the social sciences for explanatory “space” when it comes to human activity, and I take seemingly heterodox ideas like genetic confounding, stereotype accuracy, and female intrasexual competition very seriously.

Here I’m centrally concerned with Paige Harden’s essay on genes and merit, especially now that she has co-written a somewhat controversial Vox piece (and readers will know how I feel about Vox) about a recent Sam Harris podcast with Charles Murray (a good friend of mine has responded at length, too). Freddie deBoer also used the term in a positive response to the Vox piece – he doesn’t mean by it what Harden means, but the difference is actually productive, since it shows how she is possibly too optimistic about the left. Personally I find myself amenable to Harden’s view, but pessimistic about the possibility of its widespread adoption.

The earliest use of the term “hereditarian left” I can find is from Steven Pinker’s 2003 book The Blank Slate, which in fact cites Murray and his The Bell Curve coauthor Richard Hernstein as saying that “a hereditarian left is a niche waiting to be filled.” Under different political circumstances, Murray – who has advocated for a universal basic income, has asserted that intelligence does not carry with it any sort of moral desert, and has decried the formation of coastal “cognitive elite” enclaves that he thinks contribute to the decay of middle America – would probably himself be on such a left. If wishes were fishes and so on.

Harden makes five “proposals”; I’ll be discussing just three of them here (the fourth is a historical point, and the fifth is more or less equivalent to the third). Here’s my gloss on those three:

  1. One person cannot be morally inferior to another; that is, all people are equal in terms of utilitarian priority, dignitarian moral worth, or something similar.
  2. There do seem to be genetic differences between persons, and these differences seem to have predictive value for important outcomes (including intelligence).
  3. You don’t need to ignore (2) in order to believe (1).

For simplicity, let’s call a “hereditarian leftist” someone who believes these three points. To what extent would such a person be a hereditarian, and to what extent would such a person be a leftist? On the first point, it’s worth noting that the central disagreement between Harden (et al.) and Murray noted in the Vox piece has to do with the extent to which we can infer that measurable differences between groups are caused by the same mechanisms that cause differences between individuals making up those groups. (Well, sort of; as usual, it’s not clear that Murray holds the position attributed to him, and in fact The Bell Curve itself noted the same difficulties the Vox authors did. See Neven Sesadric’s 2000 article on a similar point, “Philosophy of Science that Ignores Science: Race, IQ and Heritability,” Philosophy of Science 67 [Dec. 2000]: 580-602.) It turns out that we can’t strictly infer that the mechanisms behind individual differences cause group differences, but they do seem to be a natural explanatory starting point; the debate should revolve around the plausibility of alternate explanations (nutrition, discrimination, and so forth). If an a priori rejection of genetic explanations of group differences is required in addition to the three points above, then a hereditarian leftist can’t really be hereditarian.

Well, put that aside for a moment. Can a hereditarian leftist really be a leftist? Let’s first consider the question, related to the above, whether (2) fits plausibly with leftist empirical practices, then the question whether (1) fits plausibly with leftist ethical practices.

Empirical considerations. Though leftists don’t precisely believe the opposite of (2), there is an element of leftism that very much favors a certain kind of “alternate” explanation: an explanation that involves a “big bad”. These final bosses of leftism – white supremacy, patriarchy, neoliberalism, global capitalism – are usually ill-defined constructs that, despite their explanatory (and thus metaphysically derivative) nature, are still “felt” with some sort of immediacy in the experiences of the leftist activist. On the other hand, leftists despise “naturalizing” the things they don’t like. In the tradition of Foucault, they find it important to constantly emphasize how social arrangements and conditions are “constructed” and “historically contingent”. There is a one-upping process that goes on: for instance, one leftist might say that gender is a better explanation for certain facts than sex, and the other might reply that sex itself is socially constructed, as is all biology, no less than gender. (Joan Wallach Scott said the first and then repudiated it with the second, in fact.) Genetic explanations are exactly the sort of “natural”, seemingly “ahistorical” explanations that leftists despise, and they carry with them dangers like “determinism”, “essentialism”, and other leftist bugbears.

Ethical considerations. More importantly, though, it’s not clear to me that many leftists believe (1). The crucial paper here, and a very famous one, is Elizabeth Anderson’s “What is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics 109.2 (Jan. 1999): 287-337. Anderson contrasts “luck egalitarians” with “virtue egalitarians”. For the former, the point of egalitarianism is much like the second half of Marx’s dictum: “to each according to need.” Anything that is plausibly the result of bad luck – which includes bad genetic luck, whether its result is a propensity for illness, low intelligence, laziness, psychopathy, or what have you – anything that’s bad luck should affect our treatment of someone only pragmatically, not in terms of our assessments of their inherent worth or dignity, or of how much they matter in a utilitarian calculus, or whatever. But for the latter, the point of egalitarianism is only to remove certain kinds of barriers to the expressions of virtue – and virtues, including some which may be genetically determined, do render a person more worthwhile.

Harden seems to me to be a luck egalitarian. But a great many leftists – or at least progressives, liberals, whatever – are not luck egalitarians but virtue egalitarians. Consider the impetus behind Laurie Penny’s statement that “Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.” Adolph Reed Jr. has said similar things about anti-racism as a middle-class ideology. The credo of virtue egalitarianism, which informs the upwardly-mobile, corporate-friendly identity politics that dominate the current left, is “to each as they deserve”. This is why it’s possible, for instance, for “leftists” to express hopes that poor rural voters, “deplorable” as they are, suffer from the loss of healthcare that their Trump support helped cause. Similarly, deBoer has spoken critically about the surprising fervor among leftists for harsh criminal punishments against certain kinds of defendants – those, that is, who truly deserve it. And this isn’t a “leftist versus liberal” thing, either. Think of far-left attitudes toward shutting down expression, toward mob violence, etc. Some people deserve free speech; some people deserve safety. And others – the unvirtuous – don’t.

The problem with virtue signaling, I’ve started to say, is not the signaling but the virtue. Anyone whose ethical or political preconceptions are based in aretaic intuitions will find it intractably difficult, I think, to make universal statements about human dignity, what treatments are genuinely beyond the pale, and so on. If virtue is what confers worth, then you will end up with worthless people. Harden, I believe, overestimates the antipathy of the left toward calling people worthless. By action if not by word, it is actually a fond pastime of many leftist adherents. And don’t forget for a second that leftists thrive in university settings. People who have excelled at standardized testing their entire lives, who have prized themselves on their intelligence and used it to gain comfortable sinecures in colleges or in media, will not as a class fail to treat intelligence as a morally important virtue. What’s the most forceful Democratic critique of Republicans? That they’re dumb, uneducated, illiterate, innumerate. That they don’t know what words mean. And that, because of this, they have “retreated” into their pathetic, windswept dustbowls – or as Barack Obama said in 2008, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.” The What’s the Matter with Kansas analysis: they’re too stupid to even know their own interests. So they deserve to suffer.

In closing I should note that there is probably a large degree to which the question of genetics is a non sequitur for certain kinds of leftist politics, too. For instance, the Vox authors – with the support of Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and so on – seem to say all of the following: (A) Intelligence (maybe g) is a coherent and robust scientific notion; (B) IQ tests measure it accurately and with predictive value. Add in the fact (C), which the Vox piece doesn’t deny, that (e.g.) Asians score higher on IQ tests than whites, whites higher than Hispanics, and Hispanics higher than blacks, and you can deduce the following: (D) Asians are more intelligent than whites, whites more intelligent than Hispanics, and Hispanics more intelligent than blacks.

It should go without saying that this is a bridge too far for many leftists. The question of whether there is a leftist explanation for (D) won’t matter to many. They will be busy trying to rebut (A), (B), and (C). And you know what they’ll say, the really committed leftists. Intelligence isn’t real, or maybe there are multiple intelligences. Perhaps you’ve forgotten about emotional intelligence, about “lived experience”, about female “ways of knowing”, about the special knowledge that comes from the “standpoint” of being oppressed, etc. IQ tests are culturally biased. All they measure is how well you take an IQ test. Their results are simply fabricated by a supremacist conspiracy. Asians score highest because white people are trying to set minorities against each other and inhibit solidarity. And so forth. Do you really think what people minded about The Bell Curve was its brief and inexpert discussion of genetics? Do you think avoiding the topic entirely would have saved it from being called “race science”?

These are the real leftist positions on the issue, not some middle-ground choice of a more comfortable explanation for uncomfortable facts, for now, come what may. Leftism may be logically consistent with the facts on intelligence, or the facts on genetics, but politics is not about logic. What we care about in the logical choice of a contentious proposition P is finding something where there is a clear line between it and not-P and some hope of deciding the issue. But this is the opposite of what politics wants. Politics wants a lot of empty conceptual space between “leftism” and “not-leftism”, for instance. It wants a ton of lonely, plausible positions out there that someone might hold, because the more of them there are, the more you must reject to prove your loyalty – and your worth. Don’t think for a second you’ll get credit simply for not being in the enemy camp. They’ll come down on you with all the more force for not having an army around you.

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