for Jim Watson, Anarchist
-It is the part of the scientist [...] to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is to finally reject them. Norbert Weiner
What is a bigot? Contrary to what almost everybody seems to think nowadays, a bigot is not a person who harbors hateful prejudices. The dictionary defines bigotry as “close-mindedness and intolerance arising from an inflexible attachment to a system of belief”.
Deferring to this (original, and still correct) definition, we find that academia and
American public life at large are becoming increasingly infested with bigots, but JimWatson is not one of them.
He will be remembered in the history of science for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, but his public legacy risks being a taint of racism. He has now effectively been ostracized by everyone and lately expunged as an undesirable from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an institution that he almost single-handedly turned from a near-bankrupt backwater into a world-class research center. Why? He has ventured an imaginative range of controversial opinions over the years (picture him, if you will, as a blend of Charles Murray and James Damore, aged nine decades in an oak barrel, for a brew of powerful trouble), but the final downfall came after a PBS interview in which he stated:
Deferring to this (original, and still correct) definition, we find that academia and
American public life at large are becoming increasingly infested with bigots, but JimWatson is not one of them.
He will be remembered in the history of science for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, but his public legacy risks being a taint of racism. He has now effectively been ostracized by everyone and lately expunged as an undesirable from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an institution that he almost single-handedly turned from a near-bankrupt backwater into a world-class research center. Why? He has ventured an imaginative range of controversial opinions over the years (picture him, if you will, as a blend of Charles Murray and James Damore, aged nine decades in an oak barrel, for a brew of powerful trouble), but the final downfall came after a PBS interview in which he stated:
"There is a difference, on the average, between blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is... genetic."
The sin here isn’t the allegation that “blacks are less intelligent than whites”. A statistical, group-level difference in the average IQ scores of racially-defined populations (not just in the United States) is an empirical fact. Watson did not fabricate it. His outrageous conceit, the source of all infamy and proximate cause of his firing, is that the gap is due to “genetics”, i.e. to differences in the allelic
distributions of IQ-linked genes, as opposed to environmental causes such as differences in access to education, disparities in health, affluence, family life. What one is not likely to hear in discussions of this topic is that both the genetic and the environmental hypotheses are speculative. We do not have scientific evidence to back up either of them, because we cannot experiment on humans, and it is hard (though probably not impossible) to design observational studies to settle
this question. So the claim “it’s all down to the genes” is as unscientific as the claim “it’s all down to systemic racism”. Why the fury then? On its face, this is a dispute about arcana that in a rational, ideal world would be of no practical interest since, 1. IQ itself is a questionable proxy for intelligence, and (more importantly) 2. this is a question about group-level differences, but groups do not have independent existence; only individuals do, and they ought to be judged according to their individual merits, with basic respect vouchsafed to all. This, not the dogma that groups (or individuals) are fungible, is the essence of anti-racism.
But this isn’t an ideal world. The Watsonian kerfuffle stems, in part, from this
near-universal misunderstanding: Nature and Nurture are the neat dichotomy of causes shaping human beings, with genes determining what is innate-and-immutable, and society weaving its distorsive influences on top. The scrummage in popular culture being about how overwhelming or underwhelming the social effects are when it comes to human behavior.
The only problem with this picture is that it bears little resemblance to reality. Genes and environment interact in complex ways to determine most biological traits, and genetic causes, insofar as they can even be defined in isolation, are no more “determinative” of human biology than environmental ones. In other words, even if Watson were right and the inter-racial IQ gap were “genetic”, this would not imply that it is fixed and immutable, the lot dealt a subset of humanity consigned to perpetual inferiority. Blacks could have, as a group and on average, lower statistical IQ than whites owing to genetics, and the gap could still, in principle, be closed (or even reversed) by environmental interventions. Watson himself alludes to this at the end of his fateful PBS interview. He states:
distributions of IQ-linked genes, as opposed to environmental causes such as differences in access to education, disparities in health, affluence, family life. What one is not likely to hear in discussions of this topic is that both the genetic and the environmental hypotheses are speculative. We do not have scientific evidence to back up either of them, because we cannot experiment on humans, and it is hard (though probably not impossible) to design observational studies to settle
this question. So the claim “it’s all down to the genes” is as unscientific as the claim “it’s all down to systemic racism”. Why the fury then? On its face, this is a dispute about arcana that in a rational, ideal world would be of no practical interest since, 1. IQ itself is a questionable proxy for intelligence, and (more importantly) 2. this is a question about group-level differences, but groups do not have independent existence; only individuals do, and they ought to be judged according to their individual merits, with basic respect vouchsafed to all. This, not the dogma that groups (or individuals) are fungible, is the essence of anti-racism.
But this isn’t an ideal world. The Watsonian kerfuffle stems, in part, from this
near-universal misunderstanding: Nature and Nurture are the neat dichotomy of causes shaping human beings, with genes determining what is innate-and-immutable, and society weaving its distorsive influences on top. The scrummage in popular culture being about how overwhelming or underwhelming the social effects are when it comes to human behavior.
The only problem with this picture is that it bears little resemblance to reality. Genes and environment interact in complex ways to determine most biological traits, and genetic causes, insofar as they can even be defined in isolation, are no more “determinative” of human biology than environmental ones. In other words, even if Watson were right and the inter-racial IQ gap were “genetic”, this would not imply that it is fixed and immutable, the lot dealt a subset of humanity consigned to perpetual inferiority. Blacks could have, as a group and on average, lower statistical IQ than whites owing to genetics, and the gap could still, in principle, be closed (or even reversed) by environmental interventions. Watson himself alludes to this at the end of his fateful PBS interview. He states:
“I don’t know anyone who takes any pleasure out of the difference between blacks and whites. I wish it didn’t exist! [...] But if the difference exists, then you have to ask yourself, How can we try and make it better?”
Properly understood, then, this is an ordinary scientific question. Addressing it in an empirical rather than moralistic way, if we must focus on groups instead of individuals, could even provide a new rationale for affirmative action, or lead to the development of novel educational approaches. It would also pass a verdict on the “diversity” industry that has proliferated in academia over the past decade on the anti-scientific foundations of critical theory.
We come lightly, thus, to the second and more fundamental reason for Watson’s
immolation. At this point I must make something in the way of a confession: I’m
personally acquainted with the reprobate, having had long conversations with him in the course of my visits to Cold Spring Harbor. The man himself used to foil the laboratory-appointed minder that garrisoned his office to keep visitors at bay, by doggedly retrieving promising intruders from the glass-partitioned antechamber. Very few people talk to Jim Watson nowadays, and one suspects even fewer
do with a genuine willingness to understand him—a courtesy which he repaid, in my case, with calypsoan globs of his society. On this basis, to the extent that it endued me with any special insight, I have formed the following impression: the most provocative of Watson’s public utterances in re women and minorities are, at heart, nothing but a doomed pushback against an ideological consensus emerging
in academia. The usage of the term “white” as a racial slur, and of “whiteness” as a sort of byword for metaphysical evil, the fragmentation of society into victim groups cheered for their identitarian pride— all these phenomena, now hegemonic on college campuses, are familiar to the American reader, but close to shocking for someone like me, fresh immigrant from officially “color-blind” Europe, on my
first encounter with them.
It is often said that the past is another country, and from this standpoint Jim Watson could be my compatriot. He is irked by, in his words, “those who hate white men” and exasperated by the multiplication of double standards, ideological fervors, and taboos enforced by petty authoritarians.
Many have commented patiently that the identitarianism of the American left is divisive and counterproductive, and tried to nudge its votaries back to reason. Jim Watson took what may be termed a non-constructive approach: he started trolling everyone, missing no chance to convey his honest opinion on the most sensitive issues of the day in the most provocative and misinterpretation-prone way possible, taking what appears to be active pleasure in pissing off all the right
people. This is an exercise in anarchism, not bigotry.
I hear the demarche: “This is a man in a high-profile position, with commensurate
responsibilities. Whatever his motivations, he seems to have made it his mission to
make life harder for women and minorities”.
But has he? When we look into the record of his life, what do we find? A misogynist, a racist?
Not so. The opposite is true. In the 1960s and -70s, when prejudice against women and minorities was indeed systemic and the cultural hegemony set against them, when it was the norm for lab heads to dismiss female candidates, believing their scientific education to be wasted money on people destined to be wives and mothers, when—in short—it took real moral courage to reject bigotry, Jim Watson launched and nurtured the scientific careers of a cadre of spectacularly successful women. It is with deeds like these, in an era hard to imagine nowadays when the most coveted posts in academic departments are on the Diversity Committee, that this man showed his true colors. And is it really believable, after all, that such a rebellious individualist would judge people based on their group
affiliations?
Yet it is true that words count as well as deeds. The accusation that by merely broaching the subject of statistical differences between human groups he committed an act of sabotage against the careers of female and black scientists is paternalistic and cannot be accepted. It is paternalistic because if is predicated on a vision of women and blacks as delicate flowers wilted by the first harsh breeze. And it is paternalistic because it fails to recognize women and blacks as individuals as opposed to amorphous elements of their respective victim classes (in this, one is irresistibly reminded of Scheler's diagnosis apropos the compassionate humanitarians of his days: That they loved humanity because of their inability, or unwillingness, to love real, individual people).
No, a fair observer would be tempted to convict Watson only on the following ground: Given the evidence-free nature of his group-IQ speculations, why wade into the topic at all? The irresponsibility of it appears, indeed damning.
However, one is reminded the affair blew up originally (in 2007) thanks to a British journalist, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, who chose to publish remarks Watson had made to her privately without realizing what she was. She got her scoop. Ever since, heavy-handed attempts to deter him from speaking up on this topic have backfired spectacularly, prodding him into petulant provocations, as he clearly cannot and will not curb himself in obeisance to social pressure. It is rather in his clumsy efforts to signal his good intentions — e.g. by making it a point in our conversations to emphasize how much he despises Republicans — that a certain human pathos transpires through Watson’s pugnacious facade.
This man’s whole life has been marked by a failure to conform to social norms. One feels this is inextricably intertwined with his scientific accomplishments. Jim Watson will follow the truth “as he sees it”, pereat mundus. Are we wise to condemn him for this quality?
There is a short Platonic dialog by the name Euthyphro. In it Socrates can be found examining the nature of the pious with a man who has come to court to bring religious charges of murder against his own father. After much wriggling and an evasive answer from “marvelous” Euthyphro, Socrates roguishly laments: “As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved, wherever it may lead”.
It is in throwaway quips like this that Plato’s brilliance as Author shines through. This is an epigrammatic encapsulation of the Socratic mission at the threshold of the trial, and it portends the sacrifice this mission would require of Socrates. More, it is the essence of the Greek spirit of free inquiry: seeking out the truth wherever the journey may lead. We may end up in wrong places, at times, getting lost; but in the end, if we stay faithful to the maxim the process will correct itself and the truth will be a less remote ideal than when we started. We can think of this as the seed which, after the “long, mystical slumber” of the middle ages, blossomed into science itself.
Do we really believe we are building a more just and decent society by setting up smelly little orthodoxies and making people fear for their jobs and livelihood if they dare touch them? By going back to dealing with deviations in matters of opinion with hysteria and heresy trials?
The CSHL trustees’ decision to sever all remaining links with Watson is on one hand understandable; on the other hand it evinces a curious mix of cowardice
and recklessness in breaching long-standing norms of academic freedom, and it is an awful symptom of America's current state. It empowers the bigots on the far right, who misunderstand the issue and fancy they have a new martyr; and it emboldens the bigots on the far left, who gloat (as I have personally witnessed) at the humiliation visited on a 90-year-old man as he lies possibly dying in a hospital bed after a car accident--almost cartoonish cruelty from people wont in the same breath to denounce “hate” in others, while never failing to flaunt their compassion.
In the end, Watson’s unredeemable fault is to be an anarchist in an age of rival authoritarianisms. His nonconformity itself is a threat to the new cultural hegemony in elite circles, academia foremost, hence the detractors’ hatred, and his immolation will be an example to everybody else, hence their gloating. Are we not justified in thinking that a less troubled nation would have celebrated Jim
Watson's reverence for truth-seeking and turned that into the very tool to make short work of his many dotty opinions?
As it is, his story arc confirms that American public life, right and left, is slipping into the clutches of bigots so certain that they are right, so certain that their ends are just, that no means is out of bounds. The only plangent note Watson ever struck with me was in connection with the smears he suffered after his decision to auction off his Nobel medal: leftist bigots spread the rumor he craved riches to buy a painting; the proceeds were actually donated to expand the CSHL Genome Center library.
There are many who have come to believe in politics as a struggle between good people and morally degenerate enemies; who feel that if they could encompass the latter’s defeat, crush and unperson them, they would usher in utopia.
The convulsions we are seeing in academia, of which the Watson affair is but a tremor, are thus a reflection of the pathology eroding the foundations of the Republic, the developments in Long Island mirroring those in Washington. Mocking and despising Trump is easy. Recognizing the same disturbing trends at work in one’s own camp is harder.
The United States was founded as a haven in which the human spirit could finally be unfettered. Its history abounds with examples of dark times overcome by the afflatus of its founding ideal. In this we can perhaps find the source of optimism for the future.
We come lightly, thus, to the second and more fundamental reason for Watson’s
immolation. At this point I must make something in the way of a confession: I’m
personally acquainted with the reprobate, having had long conversations with him in the course of my visits to Cold Spring Harbor. The man himself used to foil the laboratory-appointed minder that garrisoned his office to keep visitors at bay, by doggedly retrieving promising intruders from the glass-partitioned antechamber. Very few people talk to Jim Watson nowadays, and one suspects even fewer
do with a genuine willingness to understand him—a courtesy which he repaid, in my case, with calypsoan globs of his society. On this basis, to the extent that it endued me with any special insight, I have formed the following impression: the most provocative of Watson’s public utterances in re women and minorities are, at heart, nothing but a doomed pushback against an ideological consensus emerging
in academia. The usage of the term “white” as a racial slur, and of “whiteness” as a sort of byword for metaphysical evil, the fragmentation of society into victim groups cheered for their identitarian pride— all these phenomena, now hegemonic on college campuses, are familiar to the American reader, but close to shocking for someone like me, fresh immigrant from officially “color-blind” Europe, on my
first encounter with them.
It is often said that the past is another country, and from this standpoint Jim Watson could be my compatriot. He is irked by, in his words, “those who hate white men” and exasperated by the multiplication of double standards, ideological fervors, and taboos enforced by petty authoritarians.
Many have commented patiently that the identitarianism of the American left is divisive and counterproductive, and tried to nudge its votaries back to reason. Jim Watson took what may be termed a non-constructive approach: he started trolling everyone, missing no chance to convey his honest opinion on the most sensitive issues of the day in the most provocative and misinterpretation-prone way possible, taking what appears to be active pleasure in pissing off all the right
people. This is an exercise in anarchism, not bigotry.
I hear the demarche: “This is a man in a high-profile position, with commensurate
responsibilities. Whatever his motivations, he seems to have made it his mission to
make life harder for women and minorities”.
But has he? When we look into the record of his life, what do we find? A misogynist, a racist?
Not so. The opposite is true. In the 1960s and -70s, when prejudice against women and minorities was indeed systemic and the cultural hegemony set against them, when it was the norm for lab heads to dismiss female candidates, believing their scientific education to be wasted money on people destined to be wives and mothers, when—in short—it took real moral courage to reject bigotry, Jim Watson launched and nurtured the scientific careers of a cadre of spectacularly successful women. It is with deeds like these, in an era hard to imagine nowadays when the most coveted posts in academic departments are on the Diversity Committee, that this man showed his true colors. And is it really believable, after all, that such a rebellious individualist would judge people based on their group
affiliations?
Yet it is true that words count as well as deeds. The accusation that by merely broaching the subject of statistical differences between human groups he committed an act of sabotage against the careers of female and black scientists is paternalistic and cannot be accepted. It is paternalistic because if is predicated on a vision of women and blacks as delicate flowers wilted by the first harsh breeze. And it is paternalistic because it fails to recognize women and blacks as individuals as opposed to amorphous elements of their respective victim classes (in this, one is irresistibly reminded of Scheler's diagnosis apropos the compassionate humanitarians of his days: That they loved humanity because of their inability, or unwillingness, to love real, individual people).
No, a fair observer would be tempted to convict Watson only on the following ground: Given the evidence-free nature of his group-IQ speculations, why wade into the topic at all? The irresponsibility of it appears, indeed damning.
However, one is reminded the affair blew up originally (in 2007) thanks to a British journalist, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, who chose to publish remarks Watson had made to her privately without realizing what she was. She got her scoop. Ever since, heavy-handed attempts to deter him from speaking up on this topic have backfired spectacularly, prodding him into petulant provocations, as he clearly cannot and will not curb himself in obeisance to social pressure. It is rather in his clumsy efforts to signal his good intentions — e.g. by making it a point in our conversations to emphasize how much he despises Republicans — that a certain human pathos transpires through Watson’s pugnacious facade.
This man’s whole life has been marked by a failure to conform to social norms. One feels this is inextricably intertwined with his scientific accomplishments. Jim Watson will follow the truth “as he sees it”, pereat mundus. Are we wise to condemn him for this quality?
There is a short Platonic dialog by the name Euthyphro. In it Socrates can be found examining the nature of the pious with a man who has come to court to bring religious charges of murder against his own father. After much wriggling and an evasive answer from “marvelous” Euthyphro, Socrates roguishly laments: “As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved, wherever it may lead”.
It is in throwaway quips like this that Plato’s brilliance as Author shines through. This is an epigrammatic encapsulation of the Socratic mission at the threshold of the trial, and it portends the sacrifice this mission would require of Socrates. More, it is the essence of the Greek spirit of free inquiry: seeking out the truth wherever the journey may lead. We may end up in wrong places, at times, getting lost; but in the end, if we stay faithful to the maxim the process will correct itself and the truth will be a less remote ideal than when we started. We can think of this as the seed which, after the “long, mystical slumber” of the middle ages, blossomed into science itself.
Do we really believe we are building a more just and decent society by setting up smelly little orthodoxies and making people fear for their jobs and livelihood if they dare touch them? By going back to dealing with deviations in matters of opinion with hysteria and heresy trials?
The CSHL trustees’ decision to sever all remaining links with Watson is on one hand understandable; on the other hand it evinces a curious mix of cowardice
and recklessness in breaching long-standing norms of academic freedom, and it is an awful symptom of America's current state. It empowers the bigots on the far right, who misunderstand the issue and fancy they have a new martyr; and it emboldens the bigots on the far left, who gloat (as I have personally witnessed) at the humiliation visited on a 90-year-old man as he lies possibly dying in a hospital bed after a car accident--almost cartoonish cruelty from people wont in the same breath to denounce “hate” in others, while never failing to flaunt their compassion.
In the end, Watson’s unredeemable fault is to be an anarchist in an age of rival authoritarianisms. His nonconformity itself is a threat to the new cultural hegemony in elite circles, academia foremost, hence the detractors’ hatred, and his immolation will be an example to everybody else, hence their gloating. Are we not justified in thinking that a less troubled nation would have celebrated Jim
Watson's reverence for truth-seeking and turned that into the very tool to make short work of his many dotty opinions?
As it is, his story arc confirms that American public life, right and left, is slipping into the clutches of bigots so certain that they are right, so certain that their ends are just, that no means is out of bounds. The only plangent note Watson ever struck with me was in connection with the smears he suffered after his decision to auction off his Nobel medal: leftist bigots spread the rumor he craved riches to buy a painting; the proceeds were actually donated to expand the CSHL Genome Center library.
There are many who have come to believe in politics as a struggle between good people and morally degenerate enemies; who feel that if they could encompass the latter’s defeat, crush and unperson them, they would usher in utopia.
The convulsions we are seeing in academia, of which the Watson affair is but a tremor, are thus a reflection of the pathology eroding the foundations of the Republic, the developments in Long Island mirroring those in Washington. Mocking and despising Trump is easy. Recognizing the same disturbing trends at work in one’s own camp is harder.
The United States was founded as a haven in which the human spirit could finally be unfettered. Its history abounds with examples of dark times overcome by the afflatus of its founding ideal. In this we can perhaps find the source of optimism for the future.