I'll requote his Steyn review here because I think it's important:
Please don't get me wrong. I am sure Mark Steyn is sincere here. I am sure he believes this stuff about "culture." Most educated people do. Most will continue to do so for a few more years, while the neuroscientists, geneticists, genomicists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and statistical sociologists sap away beneath them — until the ground gives way. (A professional academic biologist friend of mine is in the habit of snapping out, any time anyone takes refuge in this "culture" stuff: "Culture? Culture? What does that mean? Where does it come from? What are the upstream variables?") [Emphasis added.]Dear K.C. Burke, the Taki-published piece does strike one as rather Swiftian in wit and tone, akin to his immortal essay A Modest Proposal. At least on first pass.
But I suspect the resemblance is only surface deep. A trait that Jonathan Swift does not share with John Derbyshire is: Well, Swift is not a Darwinist. Nor did Swift believe that the explanation of the empirical universe reduces to the answers provided by physics and chemistry exclusively.
Frankly, I do not know where Derbyshire is coming from. It appears he rejects not only race, but culture as well, as "forces" shaping human destiny, personal or sociopolitical. Race as a category is meaningless, because "races" interbreed [note the question-begging there]. Culture as a category is meaningless, too: It is simply something that "Nature" does spontaneously (given enough time), via the blind processes of Darwinian evolution....
Dear KC, you're probably wondering by now where I'm trying to take this.
So I just refer us back to Derbyshire's "Swiftian piece" on the relations of race and culture.
I cannot imagine anything more skeptically cynical in import and tone than what Derbyshire has written in this piece.
On that ground alone, I have no sympathy for his case.
On the other hand, he has "First Amendment rights" that the federal Constitution protects.
National Review magazine, however, is not a federal agency in any way, shape or form. As a private institution, they can dismiss anyone from employment in their organization "for cause" as they see it.
National Review magazine has a heritage inculcated on it by its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr. — a devout Roman Catholic.
To the extent that Buckley still lives in his "creation," atheists are really not all that welcome there....
And Derbyshire, no matter where he started, surely looks like a man who has fallen into atheism. And finally, into despair....