One public intellectual is known for his celebration of sexual torture, frequenting bathhouses in San Francisco, and criticizing age-of-consent laws, having publicly asserted: “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even had made the first moves.” Another public intellectual — whose professional background is market research and hobbies include golf and lawn care — is known for his dispassionate, if controversial, analysis of sociological data (much of it published by academics from respected universities) on such topics as race and sex.
One of these intellectuals is, according to Google Scholar, the most cited academic of all time, his ideas beloved and appropriated across a host of disciplines, including critical race theorists; the other is reviled, his ideas and even person maligned by the leading American institutions as bigoted and racist.
Can you guess which is which? If you’re a cynical conservative, you’d probably presume that the sadomasochistic pedophile (who is none other than French philosopher Michel Foucault) is beloved by the left, while the quirky market researcher-turned-journalist is one of liberals’ bugaboos par excellence. The latter’s name, for the uninitiated, is Steve Sailer, whose Noticing: An Essential Reader offers an excellent introduction into one of the most interesting opinion journalists of the last fifty years. Indeed, though I’ve perused the anthologies of many famous writers, never have I read one so curious and entertaining, with articles that have remained relevant (if controversial) decades after publishing. There’s something to be said for noticing.
To Notice Is To Be Human
Why “noticing?” It is, simply put, the methodology behind half a century of Sailer’s sociological and political analysis. He observes something, a thing most of us have probably observed too, and then asks if there might be some explanation — particularly, a data-rich explanation — for that phenomenon. “My basic insight is that noticing isn’t all that hard to do if only you let yourself: the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath though we may be to admit it.”
In that sense, Sailer’s thought bears much more in common with the ancients (and particularly one ancient), than it does with the esoteric, self-celebratory meanderings of contemporary philosophers. For it was Aristotle who employed what he called pepeiramenoi, the act of observing the natural world around him (including humans), and developed theses based on those observations. “The proper procedure,” writes Aristotle in Book VII of his Nicomachean Ethics, “will be the one we have followed in our treatment of other subjects: we must present phenomena … and, after first stating the problems inherent in these, we must, if possible, demonstrate the validity of all the beliefs about these matters, and, if not, the validity of most of them or of the most authoritative.” That, more or less, is noticing. And it has gotten Sailer in quite a bit of trouble over the years, as he readily acknowledges in his foreword.
The reason, which is apparent from a brief perusal of the fifty-plus articles in this collection, is that Sailer makes uncomfortable, provocative arguments that antagonize the most sacred pieities of the left, many of which have even been embraced for generations among many conservatives. Perhaps most repugnant to Sailer’s critics is his role in investigating what he calls “human biodiversity,” which is more or less the various biological differences between people groups, be they racial, sexual, or otherwise. And yet, as our contemporary political distemper makes clear, America seems incapable of shaking off Sailer.
When Noticing Turns Prophesying
Before getting into the most controversial elements of Sailer’s writings — which have gone from prominent conservative outlets such as National Review and The American Conservative to more peripheral and fringe sites like Taki’s and VDARE — it’s worth studying how often Sailer’s predictions have proved accurate. His 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum” in The American Conservative, which warned that nation building in Iraq would be hindered by the high degree of consanguinity due to the common practice of cousin marriage in Iraqi culture, was republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004. “The deep social structure of Iraq is the complete opposite of those two true nation-states [Germany and Japan], with their highly patriotic, cooperative, and (not surprisingly) outbred peoples,” he wrote, in an analysis far more insightful than anything conjured up at the Pentagon or Foggy Bottom in those years.
The “Sailer Strategy,” which he originally outlined in a 2000 article at VDARE, was the political argument that the future of the Republican Party resided not in aggressive (if typically futile) appeals to minority voter blocs, but by minimally raising its fraction of the white vote, and thus exploiting the power of the electoral college (see the 2016 election). A 2014 article at Taki’s titled “World War T,” in turn predicted that after the impending victory of gay marriage in the courts and many state legislatures, the “next domestic campaign,” would focus on transgenderism. Whatever your opinion of his politics, Sailer’s auguries are the envy of pundits spanning the spectrum of “expert” public discourse.
Then there’s his aphorisms, such as “invade the world, invite the world.” This is how Sailer succinctly describes American foreign policy in the modern era: reckless military interventionism that destabilizes other regions, coupled with lax immigration policies. The result is that America has welcomed large numbers of Somalis, Afghans, and Iraqis, among a host of other national and ethnic groups, which have in turn tangibly reshaped the American communities in which they land. He has articulated “laws” about female journalism (many female journalists aim to upend certain social values so that they will be decreed more attractive) and mass shootings (if there are more wounded than killed, the shooter was likely black; if the reverse, the shooter was likely white) that evince interesting (and alarming) assessments of our world.
Notice What America Does With our “Sailers”
What makes Sailer so unpalatable, and even offensive, is not primarily the above, but his opinions stemming from the varying average cognitive faculties of human populations, including racial groups. There is, one must admit, quite a bit of data over the decades that substantiates the reality of those differences. But the conclusions Sailer draws from that data (say, on such issues as affirmative action or public education) are not especially welcome. Indeed, many prominent academics have spilled quite a bit of ink seeking to persuade America that racial differences in IQ stem not from anything innate (and thus less fixable), but from exclusively external factors, such as poverty, crime, or unfair tests (which, they believe, are fixable).
For example, notes Sailer, he’s read hundreds of articles asserting that racial disparities in test scores in school districts must be caused by racism. Yet there’s not a single example among thousands of school districts across America in which blacks outscore whites. “That’s not the right kind of noticing,” he writes. “It raises awkward questions about what’s really going on.”
What’s going on, however, is not a narrative of white nationalist bigotry (though Sailer has certainly been accused of that). Indeed, Sailer is quite emphatic in his insistence on the equal dignity of humanity, as well as his appreciation for excellence in all races, exemplified in such pieces as his 1996 National Review discussion of Jackie Robinson. Rather, it is statistical trends between demographic groups, and what implications that might have on public policy.
Of course, such differences can be (and have been) exploited by self-identifying bigots. But that data might be leveraged for evil purposes doesn’t vitiate the reality of the data itself, much as the wicked appropriation of science to create chemical weapons such as chlorine gas doesn’t negate the hard facts of the periodic table (how dare you, manganese dioxide!!!). “The one thing that really scares me is that progressive intellectuals seem to assume that if modern science demonstrates that the races often differ genetically, well, that just proves Hitler was right and therefore genocide is the only alternative,” observes Sailer. “This malevolent insanity on the part of orthodox liberal thinkers alarms me.”
As well it should. For even when Sailer’s is at his most contentious (you can Google him if you’re desperate for examples), is it not a little disturbing that an unpretentious golf-loving, data-crunching immigration hawk from southern California is characterized by the left as the epitome of twenty-first century evil, while a French pseudo-intellectual who wanted to rape little boys is their darling? (Sailer’s 2019 piece “The Whip Hand,” I should add, explores this unsavory history of Foucault). Perhaps, in Sailer fashion, to perceive that bizarre dichotomy is to notice something.
