University of California Berkeley

Whether the United States can be saved is another matter. In a mobile world, there will be many people from different races living in each other’s countries. That does not make a case for mass immigration, though. As the late great Enoch Powell was wont to remind us, numbers are of the essence, and a thousand is not equal to a million.

Rodney King famously asked: “Can we all get along?” Where big minorities of Tropicals are settled among Arctics, the answer is plainly “No.” Incarceration rates, patterns of residential and educational segregation, and a score of other social indicators tell the tale very clearly. We dutifully mouth platitudes about equality and racial tolerance (often protesting too obviously much), but our deeds betray our lying tongues.

With fellow Arctics, though, there may be some hope. The USA has been here before. From 1880 to 1920 we permitted settlement of several million Ashkenazim, whose mean IQ advantage over white gentiles is two or three times that of East Asians.

This caused considerable stresses and strains in academia. In my book Unknown Quantity I noted the case of G. D. Birkhoff, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, 1919-44, described by Albert Einstein as “one of the world’s great anti-Semites” for giving preference in teaching appointments to Depression-era Americans over European-Jewish immigrants.  (Reuben Hersh has an informative, though anti-Birkhoff, essay on Jewish people in American math in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011.)

On my aforementioned visit to Arctopolis I was in company with five other invited lecturers from the USA: David Remnick of the New Yorker, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Project, science writer Jonah Lehrer, and physicists Brian Greene and David Gross. I was the only Gentile in the group. What are the odds? On the assumption that ability is randomly distributed race-wise, and taking Jewish people to be four percent of the US population, I make it 0.000000589824, or about one in 1.7 million.

Yet I am accustomed to being the Shabbat goy at events like that. Five to one is quite normal. Everyone, including me, takes it for granted. The complete Jewish intellectual dominance in US society has not caused riots in the streets, only some low-level grumbling.  Will East Asians get the same pass?

Possibly not. The Ashkenazim’s intellectual superiority extends into the persuasive arts: writing, acting, lawyering. East Asian superiority, as well as being lesser overall, is more narrowly focused on spatial-manipulation and deductive abilities—math and the hard sciences. It does not seem likely that they will be able to “control the discourse” to the extent the Ashkenazim have. Further, the Ashkenazim have centuries of experience living among unfriendly host populations and have developed keen skills to manage the situation. East Asians, by contrast, have always been dominant in their own areas. Even the overseas Chinese, as market-dominant minorities in southeast Asia, have been protected to some degree by the nearby presence of an ancestral superpower.

So will this domestic version of the Arctic Alliance work? I suppose we shall find out, though I wish we had spared ourselves the trouble of having to find out.