Climate, IQ and other racist nonsense – 7/1/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

There are things that are obvious, right? For example, it is logical that the climate influences the behavior of people in different regions of the planet. Everyone knows that, damn it. There are climates that hurt the subject and, therefore, produce lazy and ignorant people, right? Here is how a philosopher portrays people born in a certain climate zone:

“Their moods are coarse and their bellies impudent. Thus they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence, and they are overwhelmed by ignorance, obtuseness, lack of discernment and stupidity.”

I wonder who our philosopher is talking about, huh? Why, the inhabitants… of northern Europe, of course. I removed the mention of the “pale complexion” of the supposedly imbecile people from the text above, just to create some suspense. The statements are authored by Said al-Andalusi (1029-1070), a magistrate who, as the name suggests, lived in Al-Andalus, Muslim Spain in the Middle Ages.

Al-Andalusi is simply repeating what seemed obvious to many other Islamic thinkers at the time. His “racism” reasoning, incidentally, was applied to European blondes as well as many black Africans. For this line of thought, the “brown” peoples of the Mediterranean and surroundings clearly represented the ideal midpoint between the extreme cold of the North and the uncontrolled heat of the tropics. It therefore stood to reason that they, and they alone, should have developed civilization, the arts and sciences, while other peoples were “naturally” barbarians.

I’m telling you all this because, in recent days, the social networks (or sociopaths) of this manly Brazil have been invaded again by famous people who defend arguments very similar to those of Al-Andalusi —only inverting the sign, of course, putting the Europeans at the top. People in tropical countries are said to want to enjoy life rather than “get ahead”; that people of African descent have “lower” IQs. One of the guys hitting that bass drum is federal deputy Gustavo Gayer (PL-GO) —predictably, a purple Bolsonarist.

There are many reasons to be discouraged by this little talk of jerico, but the one that irritates me the most at the moment is the complete inability, on the part of these people, to distinguish between common sense and facts, and to see clearly the implications of the historical trajectories of each continent .

It was obvious to Al-Andalusi that the “peak of civilization” can only exist on the shores of the Mediterranean, just as it is obvious to today’s racists that only northern European countries and their colonial heirs in North America and Oceania are ” fully developed”. But to say that is to ignore some inconvenient facts:

1) Warm regions developed several advanced civilizations (many of them predating any European state), from Mesopotamia and Egypt to subtropical China, passing through the Mayan cities of Guatemala, the ancient and medieval Ethiopian Empire and the splendor of India;

2) The apparent supremacy of Europeans and their descendants is a very recent and contingent phenomenon. Until the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire, with its headquarters in Constantinople/Istanbul, faced the Europeans on an equal footing; Chinese and Indians were perfectly capable of stopping the colonialist advance until this same time;

3) As neither the European racial composition nor that of the countries under colonialist advance changed after this period, there is no reason to think that an intrinsic superiority of Europeans —of the “naturally higher IQ” type– explains their advance. Much more complex and contingent factors are likely behind it;

4) Significant changes in IQ within a generation or two are more than documented worldwide (the so-called “Flynn effect”). Decent food, good sanitation and education would almost certainly be able to transform IQ measurements in African countries or Brazil.

The guy who listens to these arguments and still continues to behave like an Al-Andalusi 2.0 can only be qualified in one way: as a real racist.

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