The Fellow Travellers

...The environmental handicap of being deaf from birth produces very little difference in the average IQ in comparison with the average for the population at large...

...When everyone else is acting calm and passing out the whiskey, Johnny BOy starts a fight...

...A recognition of diversity of talents can lead to programs tailored to special talents or to lack of them, but "success" may be largely predetermined by heredity, in which case we shall still have to reward excellence and not reward incompetence...

...Even though intelligence is something that is heritable, like tallness, and even though it is predominantly influenced by inheritance among whites in white environments, it can be stunted by sufficiently bad conditions, just as growth can be...

...I wish only to show that these two concepts do not explain, as Caute states, the phenomenon of fellow travelling...

...Further, Caute ignores the question of whether any people, no matter how debased or savage, enjoys having a few score millions of its population exterminated...

...But there was, of course, another element within these men which caused them to refrain from adopting Communist societies for themselves...

...You do your penance on the streets," he says...

...He buys what he thinks is a load of stolen German telephoto lenses which turn out to be Japanese lens adapters, virtually valueless...

...In the centralized economic administration of the Soviet Union, and in the totalitarian efforts to remake society, the fellow travellers saw an attempt to bring this dream into being, and they could not fail to support it...

...They are all struggling to make good in a world they never made and over which they basically have no control...

...When the n~id replies, "I only gut two hands," Teresa snaps, ~Then use them...

...Running through the statements of Gide, Steffens, and other American intellectuals quoted in this book, there is a feeling of guilt at possessing so much wealth and so many privileges, and a satisfaction (particularly in Steffens) in the thought of men like themselves being done away with as a class...

...As Herrnstein shows, there is a pattern: radicals label the ideas and their promulgators "fascist" and "racist" and try to prevent their dissemination...

...He makes an #r by Benjamin Stein "The Long Good.bye" effort to be like Saint Francis among the hired killers...

...Artificial barriers to our development should be removed, but some barriers are inborn...

...Arthur Jensen find their ideas first distorted, then attacked...

...Hence, he argues, there was no blatant hypocrisy in the fellow travellers' position...

...Caute understandably focuses most of his attention on the period between the two world wars, when the triumph of Bolshevism and the decay of capitalism were seen with an exaggerated clarity, and the Soviet Union had more admirers than it was ever to have after the Second World War...

...At this point, Caute raises the logical question of how humane, and in some cases, intelligent men could praise so uncritically a clearly despotic regime...

...They cannot function at all outside it...

...Still, the powerful Lysenko clique suppre~d the views of the hereditarians of its day, aided in this by the totalitarian Russian regime, which had a vested interest in the antiheredity position...

...Foster children placed when very young in new homes have IQs more like those of their biological parents than those of their foster parents...

...He will not act out the part everyone else chooses of the up and coming junior Cape...

...He lends money to Johnny Boy, who not only does not pay it back, but taunts Mike for not being man enough to get it from him...

...She, unlike Charlie, knows that she has to get out to live, and she hates herself and the world around her for making her feel guilty about wanting to leave but also forcing her to do it...

...Identical twins raised apart end up with IQs unusually alike...

...This diversity needs freedom in which to flourish...

...Towards Communists one may feel hostility tempered by the respect accorded a clever and intellectually honest enemy...

...She is a real person and she takes out her frustration on others, as real people do...

...We are diverse...

...Had they not wished to torment themselves, these men could have decisively adopted Communism...

...towards liberals, a sort of symbiotic competitiveness...

...Mike wants to be a loan shark...

...He deals at length with the whole sorry business of the denials, made by prominent western intellectuals, of the existence in the soviet Union of purges, concentration camps, or famines, and the concurrent defense of show trials and the execution of Kulaks, Old Bolsheviks, artists, and sundry others...

...We don't know Brooklyn...

...First, it should be clear that fellow travellers were not the only or most important disciples of the Enlightenment: its ideas are inextricably implanted in modern western society...

...He is, throughout the movie, a human bomb, ready to explode at any moment from the force of his unresolved conflicts...

...Four young men run around and around in the maze of Little Italy's small streets on Manhattan's lower East Side...

...De-Kulakization was simply the elimination of irrational and unjust inequality...

...There was also a decided elitism in the fellow travellers who saw and admired Stalin the Planner, administering his country on a perfectly rational basis, without interference from the bourgeoisie or the working class...

...The New Socialist Man allegedly could be created by manipulating his environment...

...Second, the fellow travellers were often most noticeable in defense of the persecution of intellectuals or members of the bourgeoisie, as Caute documents...

...But it is much more than The Alternative January 1974 23...

...they say...

...genetics, applied to agriculture in the West, was a distinct success...

...D.W...

...That is the terrible law imposed upon the characters who people Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, Mean Streets...

...Some of the scholars Herrnstein has talked with admit that he is right, but won't defend his views...

...David Caute's book deals with these men, defined as those whose committment to Communism was made "at a distance," who chose Communism for others, but not for themselves...

...He throws bombs into mailboxes just for the hell of it...

...And what is most self-destructive of all, he mocks everyone who tries to help him, finally mocking himself into a violent death...

...Lysenko and other I.~m~kian charlatans ruled the biosciences roost (and ruined the roosters) for several decades in twentieth-century Russia, the study of genetics was banned...

...Praise or blame may not be as appropriate as we once thought...

...He alone leaves the neighborhood for forays into Greenwich Village to pick up girls...

...Unless there are environmental factors which can be identified and remedied--lxmr diet, for instance--this IQ differential would strongly inhibit black advancement even if racial prejudice were eradicated...

...But they uniformly refused to accept Party discipline, and instead chose to wallow in their guilt...

...liberals do not defend the right of the hereditariaus to be heard, or if they do, it is only after finding something in the hereditarian position to quibble about . . . they couldn't be uncritical of something labeled "fascist," could they...

...He truckles to a self-important petty Mafioso uncle who may reward him with a restaurant...

...Such individuals as Bernard Shaw, Lincoln Steffens, Andr6 Gide, the Webbs, and Henry Ward have their activities chronicled in minute, almost pedantic fashion: what speeches were made to which groups, which fronts were joined, etc...

...Teresa herself must summon all of her strength even to consider moving out of her parents' miserable apartment into an apartment uptown, by herself...

...Clearly blacks have suffered job discrimination, but just as clearly the white subgroup with an IQ distribution similar to the blacks' have also been relegated to the less attractive and lower wage jobs, not because of racial discrimination but because of their limited capabilities...

...He tries to ward off the obvious doom of his deranged friend, Johnny Boy, played mAgnificently by Robert De Niro...

...They knew what liberty was and sorely felt its absence...

...Professor Herrnstein goes into this evidence in detail, showing its strengths and occasional shortcomings...

...Herrnstein handles this facet of the controversy carefully, noting that some of the difference in IQ between blacks and whites is no doubt due to problems specific to the black environment but that the question of a genetic intelligence difference between races has not been answered...

...Modern western states, on the other hand, have achieved liberal democratic rights which are not to be surrendered in the interest of the GNP or social justice...

...This environmentalist dogma when applied to Russian agriculture was a dismal failure...

...Egalitarian policies could prevent success, but cannot eradicate failure...

...There are other good roles in the movie...

...He cannot disobey them even when they make him act cruelly towards his lover, Teresa, calling her dirty names because she sleeps with him, at the same time desperately needing her and hating himself for keeping her in a closet, meeting her for rendezvous at cheap hotels...

...It is a movie which brings alive the whole huron geography of an area and the people who live in it...

...He climbs to the roof of his building and shoots a pistol at random targets...

...Caute does not seem to realize this, and hence, though he has written a thorough enough history, his book lacks the venom his subject demands...

...The Marxist creed was that environment was all, heredity nothing...

...His conclusion: for the wide variety of environments of white Americans and Europearls, there is a "convergence of the overwhelming body of data on measured intelligence to a figure in the vicinity of 80 percent or higher for the genetic contribution to scores on standard IQ tests...

...He lives by a cede which he never questions, and whose utter artificiality and irrelevance he does not even glimpse...

...When T.D...

...We each are unique...

...He, who has supposedly been acting bizarrely since he was hit with a nightstick, cannot even begin to control the rage he feels at being entrapped in a world of rigid and unrealistic laws of behavior...

...And he is always doing his penance...

...Georgie goes to church every week, to Confession, where the priest tells him to say ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers...

...His world is Little Italy and its laws, the hypocritical moral cede of eighteenth-century Sicily, are unbreakable...

...Georgie, still thinking he is Francis of Assisi, apologizes to the maid...

...The revulsion against the anti-Enlightenment regime of Nazi Germany makes this obvious...

...But fellow travellers are, and have been, apologists for two of the most tyrannical regimes in the history of man...

...I would argue instead that a certain masochism is necessary to fellow travelling...

...The fellow travellers who acquiesced in their destruction could not believe it was a painless operation...

...He responds by considering two points which, taken together, explain beth the acceptance of Soviet atrocities and the failure of the fellow travellers to adopt a revolutionary - X _9 stance vis-a-vis their own countries...

...The fault, dear Brutus, may be largely in our genes...

...Mike cannot let Johnny Boy get away with it without fatally damaging his standing as a tough guy, so he invokes a tragic ending for everyone...

...There are clearly many ways in which to criticize the Enlightenment view of society or the principle of ethical relativism...

...The other characters are similarly trapped...

...This would have expiated their bourgeois sins, since their prerogatives would then be serving the movement...

...Stephen Rosen The Talkies qr "Mean Streets" and You can get up, but you cannot get out...

...At one point Harvey Keitel, playing Georgie, a desperately conflicted smalltime hood, tries to drive his girl friend, Teresa, and another friend, the lunatic Johnny Boy, into Brooklyn...

...The cede tears him apart, and he does not understand why...

...Thus while the presence of an Enlightenment ethos shows why fellow travellers of the Left existed while "fellow travellers" of the Right did not, it does not explain why a small group of men went much further than the rest of society in extolling Soviet Russia...

...He takes care to demonstrate that accurate information on what was actually going on inside the Soviet Union was available, and thus that ignorance or a willingness to give the Workers' State the benefit of all reasonable doubts could not be addressed in favor of the fellow travellers...

...Perhaps unfortunately, the same treatment is A Postscript to the Enlightenment by David Caute Macmillan $8.95 given to many lesser figures, such as Corliss Lamont, who appears not to have done anything of interest other than join more Popular Front organizations than any other American of his generation...

...But of all the characters living out a fantasy of collective neurosis, Johnny BOy is the most deranged and split...

...They have rationalized the execution of millions (when they have deigned to notice these deaths at all) as the necessary sacrifice one must make in order to reach Marxist goals, while most egregiously declining to accept either these goals or sacrifices for their own society...

...And a terrible tragedy overcomes them in that borough...

...As played by Amy Robinson, Teresa is a character of almost unparalleled humanity: As she and Charlie leave the hotel, she says to a black maid, "You can make up the room now...

...Radical epithets plus liberal quibbling make the argument that intelligence is heritable seem not only vicious but also ill-founded, when it is neither...

...Those social engineering measures which seek to make environmental factors equal for all may lead to a "meritocracy" with hereditary castes, if such castes do not already exist...

...Since people of similar IQs are more likely to marry each other than those of dissimilar IQs, the effect of homogenizing our environments would be to produce a hereditary elite, if the past and present correlation between IQ and success holds in the future...

...He has some essential sense of humor and humility, but the cede will not allow it...

...As environmental factors are made more nearly equal for all people, genetic differences would play an even greater role than they do now...

...Caute makes the general claim that the fellow travellers were heirs to the Enlightenment vision of Reason ruling society, educating 22 The Alternative January 1974 and remolding men, thereby liberating them from the shackles of ignorance and privilege...

...This is but a sampling of the evidence showing that IQ is inherited and inheritance overrides environment...

...maybe they can't take the flack or don't want to admit the failure of egalitarianism...

...In America today, hereditarians like Herrnstein and Berkeley's Dr...

...First, there was the idea that what was happening in the Soviet Union (and later in China) was justified as a rational attempt to reach rational goals...

...Cooper The Fellow Travellers The natural and proper attitude of conservatives towards fellow travellers is one of contempt...

...They could believe that it was necessary to crush certain classes to bring about a new order, but then logically they would have to insist on their own destruction, which they conspicuously did not do...

...What are you doing...

...Caute makes reference to the by-now trite idea that a primitive people need authoritarian control in order to develop and progress and, in fact, do not mind being deprived of freedoms which they never enjoyed...

...These people were not backward or uneducated...

...But he does not believe in it...

...Collectivization, for instance, was instituted in order to eliminate the idiocy of rural life and was imposed, where necessary, because of the intransigent stupidity of the peasantry...

...The nature/nurture controversy is made more explosive by the accumulated evidence that blacks average 15 points lower in IQ than whites, which puts 80 percent or so of the white population above the black average IQ...