The Greatest Contradiction in Contemporary Liberal Thought
(Blacks, Gays and Schizophrenics and the antithetical ways in which we view the causes of mental attributes)
By
David Gottfried
People believe what they want to believe and conveniently bury any evidence to the contrary.
The proto feminist writer and leftist luminary, Lillian Hellman, said, before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, that she would not “cut her conscience to fit this year’s fashion.” I subscribe to her adamantine refusal to follow popular trends, and I will not conform to the prevailing, shabby pseudo leftism of identity politics, intellectual shoddiness and knee-jerk anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism.
People very often are certain, absolutely certain, that some mental attributes must be caused by the environment. These people are just as certain that other mental attributes are a function of genetics.
Liberals are certain that black intellectual deficits, reflected in persistently lower scores on IQ tests (The average black IQ in the United States is 89, and about 80 percent of the U.S. population has scores over 89), SATS and reading and math tests given to students in grades K through 12, are caused by the environment.
Liberals are also certain that gay people are gay because of genetic factors. This is in deference to the gay rights lobby which believes that people would be more sympathetic to homosexuality if it were genetically preordained. It would be nice if gay people had the gumption to say that they are entitled to their sex lives no matter what the cause of their orientation.
Meanwhile most people are convinced that severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, is caused by genetic aberrations. Of course, if the problem is genetic in origin, we can make liberals happy by absolving mothers of culpability. Since the onset of modern feminism, women have been deemed sacrosanct. no matter how many babies they abort, and the apostles of the feminist order tell us there are no pathogenic mothers, only pathogenic genes.
Also, the notion that genes are the cause of severe mental illness makes conservatives happy because it buries the liberating insights of R.D. Laing who explained that schizophrenics were the scapegoats of their communities. Finally, the theory that anger and alienation are simply the consequence of ornery genes allows both liberals and conservatives to disregard any protest leveled by a disturbed person as his nasty ideation is simply the manifestation of unclean and dirty neuronal quirks.
I submit to you that these beliefs are simply figments of ideological bigotry.
A) First, let us consider black people.
At the outset, I must readily concede that plenty of black people are brilliant, creative and have produced ideas that blazed like Roman candles. My contention is that on average black intellectual ability is persistently mediocre and that their depressed intellectual development cannot be attributed to the environment and only the environment.
i) We know that genes can make one tall, short, blue eyed, someone suffering from Down’s syndrome, and one with an inborn propensity to suffer breast cancer. Why are liberals so certain that genes cannot make one intellectually dull. Why are liberals so certain that certain genetic traits cannot be positively correlated, why are they so certain that people with genes that make them dark cannot often possess genes that dull their intellect.
ii) In 1984, the New York Times reported that a study showed that blacks who came from homes averaging incomes of $40,000.00 a year had SAT scores that, on average, equaled the SAT scores of whites who came from homes that made $ 4,000.00 a year. This demolishes the argument that blacks score poorly because they are so much poorer than whites. This study showed that blacks whose families made $30,000.00 a year scored lower on SATS than whites whose families made $4,000.00. Does this study have policy implications. It sure does. Let’s have a little less help for the home boys and thugs of Harlem and a little more help for poor whites in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
iii) Black girls in Harlem are now reaching Menarche, or the onset of menstruation, before they are 10. This is because they never stop eating. (In the 18th Century Austrian girls reached menarche, on average, when they were 14). My Mother was raised in the Great Depression and did not get sufficient milk, had meat only on Fridays and Sundays, and she got the highest score in New York State on the History Regents. Please stop telling me that black intellectual deficits are caused by poverty and inadequate nutrition.
iv) In the New York City Public Schools, class sizes in black neighborhoods are usually lower than what they are in white neighborhoods, for at least the past five decades liberal educators have brought in more and more resources to boost intellectual performance in black schools, “language arts” teachers have descended on the students to give them extra help in learning to read, but the torpor of black intelligence is unremitting.
v) In Europe, people learned how to produce and use electrical power, learned how to create vaccines (In England, people were vaccinated against small pox in the late 18th century; in Byzantium, they were vaccinating people against small pox in the middle ages), produced engines and motors, gave us Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Bach and the Beatles, produced penicillin, and performed c sections as far back as the time of Julius Ceasar (the term caesarean section was derived from his name because he war born via a c section.). Africa gave us drums, witch doctors and voodoo.
(To be fair, I should note that a book came out about 10 years ago – I don’t recall the title; it was something like “Guns, Germs and Steel” -- which posited that Africa’s developmental retardation was a product of geography. The writer said that Europe, the middle East and East Asia were constantly trading with one another. In the course of trading, they conveyed new ideas and manufactured products to other areas. India passed on a system of numeration to the Arabs who passed it on to Europeans. The production of spaghetti was passed on from China to Europe. The constant cross pollination of ideas along the world’s trade routes stimulated cognitive growth. Africa, with the exception of Northern, Arab Africa, was largely out of the loop)
vi) Black people appear to laud spectacle and easily tire of intellectual concentration. When the movie Malcolm X came out, I viewed it in an all-black theatre. It was almost impossible to hear what the characters in the film were saying as the audience continually pumped their fists and screamed and shouted all sorts of things throughout the movie. The words and the ideas offered by Malcolm X did not matter. The audience was more interested in the raucous spectacle they created.
(Actually, I read Malcolm X. I will never forget that in arguing against black assimilation he noted that German Jews tried very hard to assimilate and suffered more than all the other Jews of Europe. He knew, as educated Jews know, that the Jews of Germany were like a tribe of Uncle Toms forever trying to charm and befriend Germans and that all their endeavors at fellowship led to poison gas. Some people think that he had to have been an anti-Semite because he was a black Muslim. However, it is the uneducated black American rabble, who purport to follow him, and think they know something about him because they sport a T shirt which bears an image of his face, who tend to be the bigger anti-Semites.)
Similarly, several years ago Nelson Mandell spoke at a massive rally in New York. One black girl said his speech was wonderful and that she did not hear what he was saying. The words did not matter because the ideas behind the words did not matter because she did not care about ideas – or logic, or knowledge or anything other than cathartic spectacles where everyone gets to scream and shout, and scream Amen and work themselves up into a semi psychotic lather of unrestrained emotion.
vii) I once witnessed a conversation, among black people, regarding problems in loosing weight. One garish, gaudy, gauche black woman said that she couldn’t stop eating because, “They ain’t be nothing left to do but eat.” Needless to say, reading or playing chess were not the sort of pastimes she ever considered. In any event, I will have to stop this section of my essay here, before I sound as racist as Lester Madox.
B) Male Homosexuality
Now, let me turn my disparaging, dyspeptic gaze to the liberal notion that homosexuality is always caused by genes. I suppose I was always allergic to this notion because it seemed to imply that we gay men were genetically, or inherently, more like women than other men. How do I hate the stunted reasoning of the la di da liberals and ladies of castrato-dominated Cambridge. Let me count the ways:
i) They claim that homosexuality is inborn, but which homosexuality are they talking about.
Are they dumb enough to believe that homosexuality is a singular or unitary phenomenon. Since there are many different types of homosexual relationships, there are many different types of homosexuals, and how can one assume that every type of homosexuality is caused by genes.
For example, I have known homosexuals whose idea of sex, while chock-filled with feral fucking, is not an inherently sadomasochistic ritual and is something tempered with fondling, kissing and generous expressions of affection.
I have known other homosexuals whose idea of sex does not seem to be within the realm of sex. I have known gay men whose “sex” consists of the following: a) both men give themselves injections of speed, b) one man shoves his fist into the other man’s butt, and c) neither man has an erection, let alone an ejaculation. In what way is this sex?
I suggested that homosexuality had to be thought of as existing in the pleural in this old poem of mine:
INSPIRED BY LORD BYRON
By David Gottfried
Bonded beauty in the night
Or bound and bandaged blistered blight
Heavenward heads in starry nights
Or smoggy gloom and occluded lights
Beach house dreams of brisk salt air
Or urban sewers, the pusher's lair
Champers in the sweet-smelling Pines
Or West Fourteenth and clinic lines
In any event, aren’t we putting the cart before the horse when we assume that homosexuality is always a function of genes when there are so many different types of homosexual behaviors.
(The formatting is awry in the immediately preceding sentence. I did not intend to use such a large font.)
ii) If one grows up in an environment of orthodox Jews, one may grow up to be an Orthodox Jew. If one were raised by three unmarried Aunts, and one had no males influences in one’s childhood, as was the case in Truman Capote’s childhood, isn’t it possible that one’s hen house of a childhood can make one become a catty, bitchy queen. Of course, the reigning liberal liars at MSNBC and CNN simply buries this sort of thinking and tells us that the environment, while clearly explaining black academic lags, is of no consequence insofar as homosexuality is concerned. Conservative commentators believe what they want to believe, liberal commentators believe what they want to believe, and if you are not feeling well, and are consigned to the television set, your hours will be more profitably spent viewing a horror movie, or a Jerry Lewis comedy or practically anything other than the brain dead dingbats of cable news networks who have a patina of erudition and scholarship covering a swamphole of ideational imbecility.
iii) WHEN ONE’S OBJECT CATHEXIS IS ONESELF, ONE MAY BECOME A FUCKED UP AND LONELY BASTARD. If a man feels effeminate, wants to be effeminate and is effeminate, it is his business. Indeed, I can think of many other attributes, such as the desire to wage war and kill innocent civilians, which are much more toxic that male effeminacy. Yes, the common fools of middle America may deplore homosexuality for its effeminacy, but there are much more important things which make male homosexuality problematic.
The object cathexis is the object which arouses a person’s libido. For a heterosexual man, the object cathexis is a woman.
I submit to you that for most homosexual bottoms the object cathexis is himself, i.e., the bottom is turned on by the idea of getting fucked or being a used and victimized spectacle; he is, in a sense, fucking himself as his male energies are directed against himself.
The straight man is of course interested in fucking just as much as the gay bottom is interested in getting fucked, but the straight man seeks to plant his phallus into another person. This takes the straight man out of himself, and his narcissism, and into a woman.
Consider the behaviors of gay men and straight men. There are gay men who post videos of themselves shoving dildoes up their butts or anally masturbating. Obviously, this is a form of “sex” that needs no partner. The bottom is getting off on the “fabulously” warped spectacle of his butt getting fucked and his sexual excitation has no need of another man, unless of course 40 men were assaulting him as this would do more to kindle the masochistic inferno of his mind. Although gay men are now posting videos of themselves shoving dildos up their butts, how many straight men are posting videos of themselves masturbating their penises.
Of course, one should be allowed to do whatever one wants. However, it would be nice if instead of counseling young people to do whatever they want and to let it all hang out, we would remind them that various behaviors may result in certain dismal outcomes. Very simply, a homosexual bottom, while capable of falling in love, will have a marked propensity toward being single because his sexual tastes do not draw him to other people.
I think that when homosexuals become strong couples, very often they are doing it because they are working very, very hard at it. While the effort may be noble, valiant and very, very fine, there is something to be said for love and passion that is not contrived and that drives up through your loins like lava spurting into a heavenly, starry night .
iv) Some people, whose psyches merge the perversity of Cher with the stupidity of a garden variety Trump supporter, have told me that Homosexuality is genetic and that they know this because they have witnessed drag shows. Brimming with excitement, they told me that they figured it all out: Gay men dress up like women because they want to be like women and they want to be like women because they have queer genes.
Have they ever really looked at a drag show? Have they ever studied a man who is, supposedly, behaving like a woman? Of course not. Drag acts are all variations on a theme, of what French dramatists called “Grande Dame.” They are all imitating the image, etched in their minds since early childhood, of a powerful, imperious, Blood-sucking bitch. Do you really think that Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ethel Mermen et al are representative of womenhood or are they stand-ins for the mangling mommas of the youths of gay men. (Actually, many homosexuals do not have the sort of background described by Freud, Rado, Bieber and Socarides, but to make this document readable, and short enough to accommodate the puny attention spans of the common hordes, I have to abridge, abbreviate and remove all qualifications from my essays.)
v) If you skinned your knee, did this happen because you had genes that made you skin your knee or were you a nine-year-old boy who was playing outside and fell on the ground. Although any half assed college student should know by the middle of his sophomore year that a positive correlation does not establish causation, try telling this to any of the air heads and pseudo intellectual monstrosities who often write for the New York Times. That paper has designed a form of yellow journalism, which affects intellectual sobriety and profundity, that goes like this: An article says that very often A goes together with B. Therefore A probably causes B. During Gulf War One, the first war in which the American people learned that computers were among our major weapons, we heard that some Iraqi children went hungry. I was waiting for the New York Times to say that computers cause hunger.
Of course, they never were that inane, but several years ago the NY Times gave us a steady drumbeat of articles which reported that various physical deviations and quirks were positively correlated with homosexuality. The NY Times never failed to make the unscientific inference that this proved that physical phenomena, which may very well have been caused by genetics, created one’s homosexuality. Of course, it never occurred to them that the physical or genetic deviations could have been caused by behavior or the environment. Instead, the Times told us that since the hypothalamus was smaller in gay men than in straight men, a gay guy was probably gay because his hypothalamus was tiny. It never occurred to the Times that behavior can change the size of organs.
However, we know that doing bench presses can increase the volume of your pectoral muscles, that smoking cigarettes can change the genetic structure of cells in the alveoli of the lungs and studies showed that rat sexual behavior can alter the anatomy of rats’ brains. I discussed some of these issues, and others, in a prior article on substack
C) The Mentally Ill .
Finally, a few words about the mentally ill. Just as we exonerate black people for their intellectual deficits by saying that they had environments which stifled cognition, and just as we implicitly claim that homosexual males are a lesser sort of man, or half men, by claiming that their homosexuality is genetic, we have composed just the right theories to banish and blame the mentally ill.
People on both the left and the right will tell you that mental illness is genetic. Having claimed that it is genetic, they can haughtily demean the mentally ill as worthless carriers of bad genes. Of course, since many schizophrenics did not suffer the sort of pulverizing, cataclysmic abuses that one might have endured in Darfur or Dachau, and became schizophrenic after a relatively tranquil childhood in suburban America, the argument that schizophrenia is genetically rooted has, at first blush, a patina of merit.
However, the idea that schizophrenia must be genetic in origin has developed because we focus too much on a Quantitative analysis of harm as opposed to a Qualitative analysis of harm. People assume that if the child’s bones are not broken by the parent, and the child is not starved, the environmental harms are not potent enough to induce severe emotional pathology. However, what matters is not the level of harm that one has experienced; it is the type of harm that one has experienced. One might have suffered intense harm, but if those harms make you want to resurrect your life, you may thrive. However, if those harms make you hate yourself, they will be truly debilitating. In other words, it’s not how hard you were punched that matters. What matter is if the punch you received made you want to punch yourself. See the second half of this article I wrote on substack,