John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?

The flourish of HBD books and talk in the years around 2000 was, to switch metaphors, early growth from seeds too soon planted.Had the shoots been nourished by a healthy stream of scientific results, they might have grown strong enough to crack and split the asphalt of intellectual orthodoxy.But as things turned out, the maintenance crew has had no difficulty smothering the growth.

Even the few small triumphs of HBD—triumphs, I mean, of general acceptance by cognitive elites—have had an ambiguous quality about them.

For example, Freudian psychoanalysis (defined by Nabokov [33] as people’s belief“that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths [34] to their private parts”), which was radically nurturist in its “explanations” of human personality development, is now defunct, thanks to developments in pharmacology.

But, while this anti-nurturist victory has diminished the quantity of nonsense in the world, like one of Robert E. Lee’s [35] battles it has not been followed by any significant occupation of enemy territory. In the applied human sciences pure “blank slate [36]” nurturism is still entrenched. Educationists, for example, insist that given the right environment, any child can do anything [37]. In criminology, even the boldest of conservative writers tell us that illegitimacy and fatherlessness are the root causes, as if those factors themselves were uncaused.