From the Nixon White House Tapes (May 13, 1971): Richard Nixon discussing welfare and racial issues with John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman.NIXON: I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.
EHRLICHMAN: The Mexican American is not as good as the Mexican. You go down to Mexico--they're clean, they're honest, they're moral.
NIXON: Mexico is a much more moral country.
EHRLICHMAN: Monterrey, Cuernavaca. Go into slum areas, and by God they come out with clean shirts on a Sunday morning.
NIXON: The church. You find a helluva lot less marijuana use in Mexico than the United States.
Above: Nixon trying his hand at badminton.
NIXON: The second point is that coming out--coming back and saying that black Americans aren't as good as black Africans--most of them , basically, are just out of the trees. Now, let's face it, they are.
1 comment:
Basically the same views as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi & Albert Schweitzer.
The difficulty is that these views are abhorrent, but on the other hand it is increasingly clear that groups do differ on average in a number of ways due to being separated for thousands of years.
So reconciling this darwinian knowledge with social justice can be difficult. Peter Singer makes some comments on this:
"A Darwinian left would not:
• Deny the existence of a human nature, nor insist that human nature is inherently good, nor that it is infinitely malleable;
• Expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings, whether by political revolution, social change, or better education;
• Assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression or social conditioning. Some will be, but this cannot be assumed in every case;
A Darwinian Left for Today and Beyond
Peter Singer
Excerpted from A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, New Haven, 1999, pp. 60-63.
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This short book has been a sketch of the ways in which a Darwinian left would differ from the traditional left that we have come to know over the past two hundred years. In closing, I shall first draw together, in point form, some of the features that I think would distinguish a Darwinian left from previous versions of the left, both old and new; these are features that I think a Darwinian left should embrace today. Then I will cast a glance at more distant prospects.
A Darwinian left would not:
• Deny the existence of a human nature, nor insist that human nature is inherently good, nor that it is infinitely malleable;
• Expect to end all conflict and strife between human beings, whether by political revolution, social change, or better education;
• Assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice, oppression or social conditioning. Some will be, but this cannot be assumed in every case;
A Darwinian left would:
• Accept that there is such a thing as human nature, and seek to find out more about it, so that policies can be grounded on the best available evidence of what human beings are like;
• Reject any inference from what is 'natural' to what is 'right';
• Expect that, under different social and economic systems, many people will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain a position of power, and/or advance their interests and those of their kin;
• Expect that, regardless of the social and economic system in which they live, most people will respond positively to genuine opportunities to enter into mutually beneficial forms of cooperation;
• Promote structures that foster cooperation rather than competition, and attempt to channel competition into socially desirable ends;
• Recognise that the way in which we exploit nonhuman animals is a legacy of a pre-Darwinian past that exaggerated the gulf between humans and other animals, and therefore work towards a higher moral status for nonhuman animals, and a less anthropocentric view of our dominance over nature;
• Stand by the traditional values of the left by being on the side of the weak, poor and oppressed, but think very carefully about what social and economic changes will really work to benefit them.
In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its Utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved. That is, I think, the best we can do today — and it is still a much more positive view than that which many on the left have assumed to be implied in a Darwinian understanding of human nature."
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1999----02.htm
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