There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns along with the dumbing-down of American culture and entertainment might soon render the US incapable of maintaining such systems; we may have already reached the point where we won’t be able to fix our systems if they break as badly as they did during the financial crises of the 19th century or that of 2008 or the Great Depression of the 1930s. One warning sign is that a lot of our immigrants are coming from peoples with lower average IQs than is necessary for complex economic and political systems. Even if a lot of geniuses are present in a country, economists say that it is average IQ that correlates highly with such measures as high per-capita Gross Domestic Product and advanced technology.
Sometimes those writers, like me, believe there to be some important differences between Latin Americans, Southwestern Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, Southern Asians, East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, Northwestern Europeans—including descendants of the colonizers of the US and Canada, and so on. By measured IQs, these peoples I’ve named might be ranked (highest to lowest): Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians (at least Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Han Chinese), Northwestern Europeans, Southern Asians (though there is a great variation by region and religion), Latin Americans and Southwestern Asians (nearly a tie?), sub-Saharan Africans. From all evidence, the IQs of all those peoples are different, as are the ways the mind-personality complex is organized. The cultures are also different, reflecting their environments plus past responses of the local populations to their external environments, their own cultures, and their own mind-personality complexes which reflect the responses of past generations of those peoples.
It’s all very complex and not much like the simple conceptions found (necessarily) in ancient times when abstract reasoning was evolving and was being shaped in particular cultures, when abstract reasoning was not yet applied in a fully disciplined way to the entirety of being and thus was not always shaped properly even when geniuses were producing promising ways of thinking, including tentative ways of understanding that entirety of being. It’s all very complex and not much like the simple, verging on simplistic, conceptions taught (necessarily) in high-school biology and most popular books on biological evolution.
In those earlier ages, abstract reasoning was applied to what might be labeled `metaphysics’ and `theology’ and thus, despite Archimedes and a few other scientific stars, empirical science (physics and mathematics but also history and literary studies and so on) fell well behind, resulting in some serious distortion of those understandings of the entirety of being. In the past few centuries, empirical sciences generally raced ahead—with mathematics and physics even penetrating into the regions of metaphysics and (potentially) theology. By referring to theology, I mean to point to speculative efforts efforts such as mine to understand communal being (including possibly the Holy Trinity, one God in three Persons) by use of modern differential geometry. Understanding means to accept reality, to draw concepts from even the most brutal of facts and of `pure’ understandings of regions of concrete, thing-like being, and to use those concepts for proper discussions of more abstract realms of being. For example, I’ve suggested—following the German philosopher, Kurt Hubner—that quantum mechanics seems more reasonable if we conjecture that relationships are primary rather than stuff. Relationships create and shape stuff rather than stuff existing first and then starting to form relationships.
It’s certainly true that we human animals arose in the midst of messy processes occurring in a complex and complicated world. Multiple family-lines of humans moved into different environments and began to respond to those environments. And then new family-lines were formed in some of those environments—creatures of Africa adapting to life on the steppes of northern Eurasia and so on. We now know this wasn’t quite a one-way process even with the lines of human beings which moved out of Africa—there were some returning and breeding into African family-lines as well as, for example, males of the group named Ancient Northern Eurasians breeding with women taken from the regions of the ancestors of Han Chinese—the mixed lines forming new family-lines which became the bulk of American Indians. There are even signs of large-scale inter-breeding with `archaic’ family-lines of human beings—Neandertal and Denisovan; there is evidence in some of the genes of Southeast Asia and various Pacific islands of smaller-scale inter-breeding with some truly archaic, relatively small-brained human beings.
Even way back in the days of the African Eden, the archaic humans who were adapted to life in great savannahs of Africa were likely different at an early stage from those adapted to life in a forest setting in Africa, both being different from archaic human animals who had adapted to life in Southeast Asia or in the plains and great oak-forests of Europe. It’s quite possible that higher levels of abstract reasoning began to develop in some simple way in some of those very early human populations and not in others, though those differences might have been washed away well before the major Out-of-Africa crew moved into Southwest Asia 50,000 years ago or so. Major differences in abstract reasoning probably developed even among human family-lines with significant capabilities in abstract reasoning during the periods over the previous 10,000 years or so when we can see signs of an acceleration in the development of both technology and social forms of organization—see The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. That first happened in a few regions such as Southwest Asia—modern-day Palestine into the plains of modern-day Iran, parts of east Asia, and on the steppes of modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia. Similar developments occurred in other parts of the world.
The bottom-line in our day is that there are peoples, including those in Latin America, who have the capability of sustaining a part of a modern civilization and that part is distinct enough that they can call it their own; they don’t have the capability of truly adapting to the more advanced parts of a modern civilization, Western or Chinese or Indian, or any other civilizations you might claim to exist.
Even within civilizations, there are differences in IQs and personality characteristics. Accomplishments in science would indicate there are higher IQs in some European peoples than in others. History would indicate that a people, such as the Italians, could be intellectually dominant for centuries (the Renaissance and some centuries before that) and then drop down to lower levels later on—though some studies indicate that Italians have one of the highest average IQs of modern European peoples. Some possible reasons for such historical changes, and ways of possibly thinking about underachieving or overachieving peoples, are explored in three books I’ve recommended before:
- The Genius Famine by Edward Dutton & Bruce G Charlton,
- At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent by Edward Dutton & Michael Woodley of Menie, and
- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.
You can also do a search on my blog, Acts of Being for my discussions of authors such as Jacques Barzun, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, Hermann Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Garry Wills regarding signs of decay in intelligence or literacy or moral character which could be seen in major areas of the West even before the American War Between the States. I claim that deeper understandings of human being, individual and communal, come from consideration of quantitative studies along with these more `literary’ studies.
So…
Are the Venezuelans capable of running a smaller-scale version of the United States or Germany or China? No. Nor are the Argentinians nor are the Iraqis nor are the Greeks for all their ancient accomplishments. Heck, the Indians don’t even seem up to the task of running a same-scale version of their own country/civilization. And the question can barely even be asked about the sub-Saharan African countries without moving into fantasy-regions of advanced African civilizations populated by comic book characters.
We should have good relationships with these countries, respecting what they can and can’t do. We shouldn’t colonize them nor force upon them excessively one-sided deals. Nor should we allow too much immigration into the West of the human beings from these countries who have the intellectual levels and personality characteristics to succeed in the advanced countries; that gives them opportunities but decreases the chances that those countries will advance toward higher capabilities, or even retain their current capabilities. We should trade with them in reasonably fair ways. We should interact with them, allowing them to adopt the parts of our ways and views which they can handle and maybe use to enrich their own countries’ cultures.
We should let them follow their own path, borrowing from us but not being shaped by us. We should be wise enough to realize that they can’t really be `like us’, even in the good sense of developing their own more advanced ways of technology and social organization, unless they choose that sort of a path by, for example, developing cultural and social ways which give reproductive advantages to those with higher levels of abstract reasoning power and with personality characteristics which can drive them, especially their geniuses, to higher accomplishments.
They may not choose this path. I think some peoples have to do so and will do so. The alternatives may be dire, especially if large reservoirs of oil or other natural resources make them attractive to predator nations. Of course, it probably won’t happen that the `undeveloped’ or `underdeveloped’ peoples will be allowed to choose their own paths forward. After all, the human race contains many aggressive and energetic men inclined to conquest or even extermination (sometimes only extermination of the males) when confronting peoples occupying valuable lands. The human race also contains a lot of self-righteous bigots who think to be doing good when they impose their ways upon other peoples—in the name of charity. Maybe that is how things are meant to be or at least how they have to be until we pass into the next world, the world of the Resurrected. But, maybe, we have a chance to advance toward that perfect world by doing a bit better by ourselves and by others in this very imperfect world.