COVER -> DAY ONE
 |
At the height of tension between Washington and Beijing, Hong Kong University published a fascinating piece of research on the rates of propensity to addiction based on race. Top of the league came the Chinese at over 30%, with the Caucasians at around 10% and blacks at 2%. My first thought was to wonder what the conversion rate was from propensity to actuality and then to wonder how many addicts there were on the Chinese side in the negotiations over the spy plane and the captive American military personnel. As the leading addiction in China is to gambling that was far from an idle thought. I recalled the famous story of Spassky losing at chess to a nine-year-old novice simply because the child was utterly beyond prediction. Of course the child only won once but a gambler never is thinking of the next game, nor even the next move, but one. Would any of the Beijing negotiators gamble quixotically, throwing all the careful calculations of the US State Department?
I was reassured, however, by the thought that gambling has a poor record in oligarchies; the luck is simply in surviving, in not being politically or physically purged. Every last leader in Beijing and Moscow from the Finland Station to the Hunan tussle has been cautious unto paranoia. It has never been the enemy that has threatened but the opposition; more deadly the knife in the back than the gun across the battlefield.
This line of speculation having run out, I naturally turned to less immediate ramifications. How open are we to any research based on ethnic characteristics?
It is not, after all, fashionable to make generalisations about ethnicity but this does not mean they are not useful. This brought my first girlfriend to mind. She and her family all brushed their teeth meticulously after every meal and once for luck before retiring and yet their teeth fell out with the regularity of failing light bulbs, yet a later love of mine and her clan knew as little about false teeth as they did about tooth brushes.
Later, in one of my interminable wrangles with the World Health Organisation, I could not convince officials that genetic propensity was an important factor, bearing my teeth stories in mind, in understanding epidemiology. For roughly two decades from 1970 to 1990, good health could be engineered, it was all nurture and no nature at all.
I can feel myself getting onto dangerous ground but there is nothing for it. Is it simply a matter of opportunity which makes certain races good at some physical pursuits and others hopeless or are there some sound structural reasons why certain races swim well and others hardly swim at all? The question is pertinent because the Hong Kong research is based on genetic analysis and genetics is as physically hard wired as arms and legs. You may develop what you have or leave your potential in abeyance but you cannot escape the propensity.
If the Hong Kong research is confirmed, and there is nothing in our contemporary understanding of genetic science which calls its broad conclusions into question, what does that tell us about our attitude to equality?
It seems to me that the first and most fundamental conclusion must be that it is futile to conflate equality of concern and respect with aiming for a society where everyone is identical. Marxists and feminists have notably got themselves into this impossible cul-de-sac and it would be sad if less ideologically driven groups made the same, culturally osmotic, mistake.
The second point to arise is whether propensities can reinforce or cancel in the course of breeding. My distaste in raising the point is visceral but it is better that liberal columnists should ask the question now rather than leaving it to the genetic engineers. Just set the extreme case of Hitler aside and remember that there was a whole generation of genetic engineers in Scandinavia between the two World Wars who thought that what they were doing was enlightened.
The third point which follows on from the first two is whether propensity can or should be engineered out of a population. This is a very complex argument which has already been discussed in a direct way by the disability movement as it confronts abortion following genetic screening.
While it is not good to be blind, deaf or lacking in limbs, how would society be if we were all engineered like corn? It is easy to quote the Beethoven example, to say that suffering generates great art, but the issue is much more important than the optimal conditions for creating a fine string quartet. You might express it in the somewhat trite lines of W.S. Gilbert: "When everybody's somebody, then no-one's anybody".
As I have said before in the context of abortion, even the most sophisticated, open, liberal, democratic societies have found rational discussion of such issues to be almost impossible. Viewed in the context of three centuries of racism in the United States, considered in the light of recent events on the streets of Cincinnati, the prospects are grim.
And yet, political leaders of persecuted, repressed or merely despised minorities will have to undertake some fundamental thinking about the future of those they represent. Classically, the poor have out-bred the rich, wealth being the best contraceptive ever devised, but the incentives offered by the powerful and the comfortable to use genetic engineering for the curtailment of minority populations will be great. Societies that will not pay higher taxes for gasoline to preserve the planet for their grandchildren will hardly be the stuff of heroic resistance if they are offered a bundle of cash in exchange for a modification to their breeding habits or the genetic make up of their offspring.
At first glance this analysis looks dystopian beyond reason, a piece of scare-mongering merely worthy of reproach before being trashed -- but there is a possibility, which we must now face, that genetic analysis of ethnic propensities will establish a new analytical paradigm; and, more to the point, it might produce data profoundly inimical to Caucasian notions of racial superiority.
Then what will we do?
