Ethics and the Future

April 18, 2006

Steve Sailer takes a lot of flak for arguing that genetics/heritability/family/ethnicity matters, profoundly, in the impact on society, history, civilization. His arguments are often worth considering. Here he discusses Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity, responding to the review in Albion's Seedlings of Moisés Naim's Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

How did Rembrandt get in there? Well, 174 of his paintings have been stolen and are on the black market. The fastest way to move one billion dollars without touching the banking system is to send a few such Rembrandts by air cargo.

The problem is driven by "transitory unsavory appetites" of the prospering world.

If we continue to indulge our worst appetites, without the capacity to distinguish what strengthens civic society from what profoundly degrades it, our Anglosphere discussions about historical roots, or the deftness of our adaptation to the Singularity will be moot. We'll have moved on to William Gibson's world of cyberpunks, splintering markets and anomie.

We're just a bore, we know. Virtue will make us happy. Vice will, in the long run, make us miserable or worse. Wishing doesn't make it false.