If we look at American cities we see a consistent pattern. If we look at towns or small cities in the Caribbean we see a similar pattern. I have not been to sub-Saharan Africa but I am led to understand the facts on the ground are the same, only more so. Perhaps I am ill informed but I do not see, Thomas Sowell, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver or their estimable reincarnations running these political entities -I resist the formulation, "communities."
So, if we can conclude that there is nothing in the water in Detroit, Camden, the Bronx etc. that affects the politics of those places, we are driven to ask if there is something in the DNA or the culture of African-Americans which creates Detroits? But as we are driven to this question we find ourselves trespassing on political correctness so we cast about for other explanations to dodge that question. We say there is a history of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and slavery in the Caribbean and in parts of the United States. We speak of discrimination, segregation, inequality etc. as reasons for Detroit.
As other posters on this thread have observed, so long as we are ourselves enslaved by political correctness we will never be able to diagnose or cure the cancer which is currently consuming the vital organs of America.
Worse, as long as we were psychically enslaved by guilt driven political correctness we will continue to mouth mindless mantras like, "our strength is our diversity" when it is probable that precisely the opposite is the case, diversity generates weakness. We must ask ourselves whether the culture that produces an Anglo-Saxon democracy comes about because the Anglo-Saxons enjoyed an advantage in guns and germs etc. or for other reasons. Do we believe that a society mixed of Anglo-Saxons, Africans, and Arabs would be more or less corrupt than a relatively concentrated Anglo-Saxon society? This takes us to a portion of the article I quoted in my first post:
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit? This is not angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. People do not invest in firms, industries, cities, or countries they do not trust. Corruption makes people poor.
If we judge either by exercising intuition or by examining political structures across time and geography, we should almost certainly conclude that an advanced society is dependent upon the rule of law and the absence of corruption. The element the author calls "trust." Is it not possible to correlate race and the presence or absence of corruption? Could we not conclude from history that the more diverse a body politic the more likely corruption? Could we not with our sophisticated actuarial techniques rather accurately predict tipping points? Or are we paralyzed by fear that we are now trespassing on really dangerous territory pioneered by Progressives and perfected by the Nazis?
Are we afraid honestly to confront and answer the question, are some races simply more "successful" than others? If we are not willing to explore this question do we have any moral right to consciously endanger our democracy by fiddling, Margaret Sanger like, with demographics by jiggering immigration? Does it make any sense to generate a "great society" by pouring trillions of dollars into our Detroits because we are forced by political correctness to believe against the weight of experience that any given ethnic group will respond the same as Anglo-Saxons?
Consider the plight of Japanese Americans emerging from concentration camps at the end of World War II. We have an example of one race succeeding within our culture despite the most ruthless kind of government discrimination. Instead of being invested with federal money they were in effect thrown into federal concentration camps yet the Japanese emerged from their ordeals to succeed at the highest level of American culture. I submit there is a distinguishable difference among races.
No, I have no empirical evidence which leads me to believe that a leader of the Athenian virtue will rise to the top of Detroit or elsewhere in our troubled cities. My subjective reaction tells me that the culture of Detroit simply will not tolerate Thomas Sowell running the place. I have plenty of empirical evidence which tells me that the nostrums of the Great Society do not work but perversely aggravate the pathologies. When social scientists attempt to accumulate objective evidence such as we might read in The Bell Curve the findings are disparaged. I have subjective evidence that there is a difference among races and those differences account for much of the pathology of Detroit.
I despair that I have to tiptoe around the subject even to address it.
