Plenty of reality can be denied in public without getting implemented in actual policy, but societies can only do this sustainably if they have a particular cultural toolkit that allows them to get away with this kind of hypocrisy and to tamp down wild swings in attitudes driven by the contest for power*.
My impression is that historically in Europe, Romance-language nations were better at staying near equilibrium levels of "salutary hypocrisy" on paying public lip service to virtue as an ideal while quietly bending to the reality human frailty and tolerating certain (but not scandalous) amounts of vice.
Northern countries, on the other hand, seemed to experience a recurrent cycle of one generation or 'era' reacting against the former one and swing on a pendulum between libertine and puritanical - which seems to be part of the tendency to use new moral attitudes to provide contrast to those espoused by the existing power structure as a tactic in the endless political power game.
To me this seems intimately related with the history and geography of Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, though I would trace it back to the cultural impact of high-status veterans returning from the Crusades (see, e.g., the emergence of the Troubadours and the historical narrative C. S. Lewis explained in "The Allegory of Love"). Compare the Romanticism of the pre-Napoleonic-Wars Regency era with the propriety of the Victorian era or German Enlightenment era with subsequent counter-enlightenment "Sturm und Drang".
Before the 20th Century and in the Latin South of Spain and Italy and to a slightly lesser extent, France, it was possible to extol the virtues of marriage, fidelity, and chastity in public while it being an open secret that most family men with the right combination of status, age, and opportunity would take a 'secret' mistress (nothing as formalized as an explicit concubine) and that this was a tolerable so long as he kept it as quiet, hidden, and discrete as possible, not cause a scandal and especially not get her pregnant, not take too much time, resources, or affection away from his family, and be considerate of the feelings and reputation of his wife.
Part of the toolkit involves some kind of tacit understanding of an Omerta (like one knows that one is supposed to maintain about Santa Claus in the company of little children) which is that everyone is supposed to continue paying lip service and no one is supposed to articulate the state of affairs of a lot of tolerated vice and to openly criticize its toleration. After all, if you are paying lip service to an ideal of virtue without compromise, and someone is able and motivated to call your bluff, then you have no way to argue from your own espoused moral principles why the status quo should be preserved. One immediately recalls the spirit of Martin Luther and his theses and criticism of the practice of indulgences.
Northern country cultures tended to swing from one extreme to another in this and many other regards, and Anglo-derived American culture has manifested this tendency from its earliest days. In periods of ideological tightening this involves a lot of attempts to eliminate Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions", which is a species of salutary hypocrisy that is mostly inertial and politically expedient and so unstable and liable to have its benefits wiped out in a fit of ideological passion.
*One way to do this is to make it extremely costly and difficult for anyone to contest or criticize established power at all. This seems to be how, across the world, the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate created the most stable and conservative (or stagnant, depending on your perspective) national-scale culture in existence after the Age of Exploration. When the Shogunate collapsed 15 years after Perry's arrival, almost immediately Japanese intelligence, diligence, energy and wild political passions for conflicts were unleashed. The Japanese, like Nordics and Germans, have a reserve capacity for discipline, cooperation on mass scale, and "shigurui" berserker mentality, "Simply become insane and desperate. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man." Interestingly, Japan and Germany were both uniquely famous for centuries for being masters of (very dirty and dangerous) steel-making,
I think what Kling means is not that government data by race is scientifically useless but that the government should not classify any data by race. Like the French that do not provide any data by religion.
An individualistic republic has no business to classify people by race. It isn't good for social cohesion.
North Indian Hindus don't marry cousins but South Indian Hindus do. There must be some effect on social cohesion but it is not obvious-- not even in direction.
Cousin marriage figures a lot in novels of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. In Jane Eyre, an Anglican parson seeks to marry his first cousin. Also in Pride and Prejudice, another parson proposes to marry Elizabeth Bennett.
Perhaps, the Church of England relaxed Catholic restrictions against cousin marriage. Still, the weirdest of the weird people had some cousin marriage. So, the idea that restriction on cousin marriage led to weird people doesn't hold.
O/T
Willie Mays died today at 93. This means the oldest-living member of the baseball hall of fame is Luis Aparicio, who turned 90 in April.
The denial of biological reality is getting people killed
Plenty of reality can be denied in public without getting implemented in actual policy, but societies can only do this sustainably if they have a particular cultural toolkit that allows them to get away with this kind of hypocrisy and to tamp down wild swings in attitudes driven by the contest for power*.
My impression is that historically in Europe, Romance-language nations were better at staying near equilibrium levels of "salutary hypocrisy" on paying public lip service to virtue as an ideal while quietly bending to the reality human frailty and tolerating certain (but not scandalous) amounts of vice.
Northern countries, on the other hand, seemed to experience a recurrent cycle of one generation or 'era' reacting against the former one and swing on a pendulum between libertine and puritanical - which seems to be part of the tendency to use new moral attitudes to provide contrast to those espoused by the existing power structure as a tactic in the endless political power game.
To me this seems intimately related with the history and geography of Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, though I would trace it back to the cultural impact of high-status veterans returning from the Crusades (see, e.g., the emergence of the Troubadours and the historical narrative C. S. Lewis explained in "The Allegory of Love"). Compare the Romanticism of the pre-Napoleonic-Wars Regency era with the propriety of the Victorian era or German Enlightenment era with subsequent counter-enlightenment "Sturm und Drang".
Before the 20th Century and in the Latin South of Spain and Italy and to a slightly lesser extent, France, it was possible to extol the virtues of marriage, fidelity, and chastity in public while it being an open secret that most family men with the right combination of status, age, and opportunity would take a 'secret' mistress (nothing as formalized as an explicit concubine) and that this was a tolerable so long as he kept it as quiet, hidden, and discrete as possible, not cause a scandal and especially not get her pregnant, not take too much time, resources, or affection away from his family, and be considerate of the feelings and reputation of his wife.
Part of the toolkit involves some kind of tacit understanding of an Omerta (like one knows that one is supposed to maintain about Santa Claus in the company of little children) which is that everyone is supposed to continue paying lip service and no one is supposed to articulate the state of affairs of a lot of tolerated vice and to openly criticize its toleration. After all, if you are paying lip service to an ideal of virtue without compromise, and someone is able and motivated to call your bluff, then you have no way to argue from your own espoused moral principles why the status quo should be preserved. One immediately recalls the spirit of Martin Luther and his theses and criticism of the practice of indulgences.
Northern country cultures tended to swing from one extreme to another in this and many other regards, and Anglo-derived American culture has manifested this tendency from its earliest days. In periods of ideological tightening this involves a lot of attempts to eliminate Auster's "Unprincipled Exceptions", which is a species of salutary hypocrisy that is mostly inertial and politically expedient and so unstable and liable to have its benefits wiped out in a fit of ideological passion.
*One way to do this is to make it extremely costly and difficult for anyone to contest or criticize established power at all. This seems to be how, across the world, the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate created the most stable and conservative (or stagnant, depending on your perspective) national-scale culture in existence after the Age of Exploration. When the Shogunate collapsed 15 years after Perry's arrival, almost immediately Japanese intelligence, diligence, energy and wild political passions for conflicts were unleashed. The Japanese, like Nordics and Germans, have a reserve capacity for discipline, cooperation on mass scale, and "shigurui" berserker mentality, "Simply become insane and desperate. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man." Interestingly, Japan and Germany were both uniquely famous for centuries for being masters of (very dirty and dangerous) steel-making,
I think what Kling means is not that government data by race is scientifically useless but that the government should not classify any data by race. Like the French that do not provide any data by religion.
An individualistic republic has no business to classify people by race. It isn't good for social cohesion.
North Indian Hindus don't marry cousins but South Indian Hindus do. There must be some effect on social cohesion but it is not obvious-- not even in direction.
Cousin marriage figures a lot in novels of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. In Jane Eyre, an Anglican parson seeks to marry his first cousin. Also in Pride and Prejudice, another parson proposes to marry Elizabeth Bennett.
Perhaps, the Church of England relaxed Catholic restrictions against cousin marriage. Still, the weirdest of the weird people had some cousin marriage. So, the idea that restriction on cousin marriage led to weird people doesn't hold.
Reviews of Glenn Loury's recent "shockingly frank memoir":
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/books/review/glenn-loury-late-admissions.html
https://archive.ph/4rbQW
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/05/10/glenn-loury-late-admissions-confessions-black-conservative-review/
https://archive.ph/BS1cL