The Naked Classroom

Most people, whether they admit it or not, accept the basic premises of what is commonly called Human Bio-Diversity. We tend to live around people who look like us and think like us. It is why after more than half a century of trying, the United States is as segregated as it was before civil rights. Humans naturally self-segregate and that is both natural and based in natural properties.

The term Human Bio-Diversity is credited to Steve Sailer, who years ago hosted an email list using that label to discuss advances in the human sciences. For a time, the HBD subculture functioned as a sort of counterculture, reacting to the dominant blank slate culture, while refuting their claims about the human condition. It has remained a gateway drug for many who end up in the dissident camp.

Thirty years ago when The Bell Curve was released, what would become the HBD world was primarily focused on intelligence. After close to a century of systematically measuring human intelligence and comparing the results to various social outcomes, science seemed to prove what people have always suspected. Intelligence is heritable and genetically determined.

Over the last thirty years, managerial culture has turned against the human sciences in an effort to defend their blank slate presuppositions. If IQ is mostly about genes and most of the rest is about home environment, which is also mostly about genes, then most of what makes up pedagogy is as empirical and tarot card reading. This is the topic of Ed Dutton's new book The Naked Classroom.

The book sets out to do three things within the context of education. One is it explains why schools and schoolteachers tend to be far left. Dutton relies on the human sciences to explain the qualities that are selected for by schools, but also what types of people will be attracted to education. The chapter on the biological basis for homosexuality is both enlightening and disturbing in this context.

The second goal of this book is to function as a breezy summary of what we know about human cognition for the average reader. Simply knowing that intelligence can be measured is not useful without some real-world examples that show how intelligence plays a role in every aspect of life. For example, boys reach puberty later than girls, which is why they seem dumber than girls pre-teen.

The final goal of the book is to explain how intelligence and dimensions of personality, the Big Five, explain the cultural trends. People with slightly above average intelligence tend to be more compliant with social trends because they quickly see the benefit in participating in the latest thing. This explains why the woke always tend to be midwits with impressive credentials but limited practical knowledge.

For those looking for a gentle introduction to the HBD topic, then this is an excellent book to buy and read. Dutton is aiming at the general reader looking for a place to start and he is a very capable teacher. His YouTube channel is popular because he is also a highly entertaining presenter. It is a short book that covers the main topics of intelligence, personality, and human differences.

This brings up the main problem in the book. If you are a fan of the Jolly Heretic YouTube channel, then you have heard Dutton discuss the material in the book many times on his show. In fact, the book is a written summary of the last couple of years of his video work. In other words, it is not a book for those already familiar with Ed Dutton or the general ideas within the human bio-diversity subculture.

Another nit that can be picked is that Dutton hints around at the question of whether people can be trained to be logical, but he never takes it head on. This is the general flaw with the HBD space. They get to the water's edge but never come to the inevitable conclusion that must follow their observations. If who we are is written in our code, then the liberal project is nothing more than superstition.

For example, if what science tells us about male homosexuality is largely correct, then logically we should never permit male homosexuals to be around young males without strict supervision. In fact, we should be aggressively screening out homosexuals from schools, youth groups and so forth. Of course, suggesting this means men with guns are sent to throw you into the void.

In other words, if the people with real power refuse to go where science about human nature must lead, then what is the point of knowing any of this? Further, there must be some material explanation for why people with heads full of oogily-boogily seem to rise to the top of liberal societies. Perhaps evolution does not care about empiricism as much as the fans of evolutionary biology insist.

In fairness, this is not the point of the book, so Dutton cannot be faulted for not diving into this topic. He also has to worry about being hurled into the void. In the end, the evolutionary imperative may simply shrug off liberalism like a case of fleas and it will follow other oogily-boogily into the dustbin of history. In the fullness of time, the HBD people will be proven correct about the reality of the human condition.

In the end, a book is judged by how well it achieves what the author sets out to do, not by what some crank in the critic community thinks it should have done. In his short summary of how IQ and personality shapes education in the West, Dutton ticks all of the boxes he set out to tick. The result is a great gift to the dissident curious who needs a gentle introduction to the topic as they sit by the pool this summer.

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