Are Multicultural Societies Doomed?

MATTHEW ARCHER [Aporia Magazine editor-in-chief]: ... do you think that a multiracial society is a doomed project, like beyond a certain threshold, there's a path determinacy built into it?...

24:32: MURRAY: Yeah. The short answer to the question is, can society survive... America proved that you can integrate other European cultures and mix them up, so that within a few generations you no longer had these kinds of ethnic communities in New York and the other big cities that you had before. And you really did have an amalgam...

But these are all European nationalities. And so we have proved that we can integrate that.

We were remarkably successful in integrating the great tragic flaw of slavery and then African-Americans after slavery...

I think America has now tested the limits of what you can do. And sort of the rule is this: a multiracial society - not just multicultural, but multiracial society - which approaches equal proportions of the different groups is not workable...

I don't think we can make it work when Europeans are now down to 60% of the American population... It just looks to me like a lot of the consequences of that kind of integration of different populations may be too much to overcome. (27:28)

HELMUTH NYBORG: ... President Kennedy... said once, this is a country of immigrant.s^** But what he forgot to tell people was that was predominantly European people.

And now we come to this question of if you have multicultural societies, and you mentioned Phil Rushton. He had a genetic similarity theory. And basically it says that the more genetically you are similar to your children and to your surroundings, the better you get along with them. And there are some other studies showing that the more genetically inhomogeneous a population is, the more critical it becomes in terms of social unrule, or what do you call that, social disturbance, criminality, and so on.

... the more genetically differentiated the population is, the more difficulties it will have living together and being productive together....

So that will actually be a sort of a quantitative argument for keeping up the population as genetically homogeneous as you can. But that goes against what EU is doing, what United States is doing and what people from the extreme left are doing. They will introduce genetically different people living together and I know this is very controversial. (30:28)..

MURRAY: ... But the deal is, Teddy Roosevelt said it explicitly, you come here, you become an American. You buy into the whole package...

HELMUTH NYBORG: ... Today, it is absolutely going in the wrong direction. And the proportions of the immigrant groups who are more fertile and have lower IQ compared to the average in Denmark. If that goes on, you don't need to be a mathematician to say at some time, and that might be around 2070 or 2080, then the power [political power structure] will change... (40:25)

MURRAY: ... The white majority on the left is saying, and the far right, are both much more inclined now toward accepting a totalitarian state than they were before ...

And - I'm just very pessimistic. I think the polarization is such at this point that the survival of America in a recognizable form for another 30 or 40 years is very problematic. (41:39)

NYBORG: ... People are actually from the extreme right side talking about traitors in the government. That's language that I haven't heard that ever before.

And now people are distrusting the political, some political parties to an extent that it is worrying because the whole social contract that you will protect us if we have our rights and so on is in jeopardy. (44:50)

Paraphrasing Nyborg who agrees: the nature & science magazine examples: the media, the professional journals, are turning against data. They're turning against data they don't like.

MURRAY: Let's see if we can play out a slightly more optimistic interpretation of this... Isn't it possible that, are the disciplines so corrupt now that there is no longer a core of social scientists who will not eventually say, guys, we just got to deal with it. Here are the data: replicated, strong. We got to incorporate them. Is that not possible? (50:47)...