By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
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.
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