If East Asians Are Smarter than Europeans, then Why Didn't THEY Conquer the World?

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever—much cleverer than the discoverers—never originate anything.  —Charles Darwin

The progressive principle…whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to Custom; the argument of Custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependents of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom Custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress.  —J. S. Mill

     Several times, thus far, over the course of this politically incorrect blog, I have discussed variations in empirically measured cognitive skills (a.k.a. “intelligence”) among various human ethnicities. To discuss these variations is heresy and blasphemy to the progressive left, since one of the foundation stones of their entire “philosophy,” if you please, is that “everyone’s the same”; but if so, then simply stating empirical facts is heresy and blasphemy to these folks. It should be borne in mind that most of the tests used to come up with this heretical body of evidence are designed by left-leaning psychologists and other academics who are desperate to prove that, yes indeed, everyone is the same—and continually failing in their attempts. No IQ test has ever been devised which has passed the standards of, say, the American Psychological Association, and which has shown people of African ancestry to be as “cognitively skilled” as East Asians. Different groups of human beings are different, not only physically but mentally. Men and women are different, too.

     A large and growing corpus of evidence, collected and studied for over a century, indicate that different ethnicities have different average IQ test scores. The smartest people, on average, according to the evidence, are Ashkenazi Jews, with an average IQ of around 110, maybe a little higher. Kevin MacDonald in his book The Culture of Critique, certainly not a pro-Jewish document, claims that the average IQ of Jews in the USA is 117, although most researchers are not inclined to rate them so highly. (Not all of Yahweh’s Chosen are this intelligent, only those of central and eastern European ancestry. Sephardic and Asiatic Jews have intelligence test score averages closer to other west Asian people, i.e. down in the 90s.) Next after the Ashkenazim are East Asians, especially the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, with a mean IQ of around 105. Next are Europeans, with the IQ system calibrated so that their average score is 100. After Europeans come various “brown people,” including West Asians, Indians, Southeast Asians, North Africans, American Hispanics, and Native Americans, with a mean IQ score of around 90. (The Eskimos are possibly the highest scorers among this assemblage, scoring in the low 90s, possibly because in the very harsh environment in which their race evolved it was of significant survival value to be able to figure out how to survive.) Next come American blacks, who score around 85, and have done so since IQ tests were first applied, around the time of the First World War. Next are black Africans, with the extremely politically incorrect average of approximately 70. (Those who consider, probably rightly, that genetics is a conditioning factor in intelligence, claim that the higher IQ scores of American blacks is due in part to the fact that American blacks tend to have 20-25% European blood in their veins.) Finally, the lowest scorers among ethnicities are Australian aborigines and African Bushmen, both groups scoring in the low to mid 60s. Across the earth, the mean IQ for the human species is about 90. People might insist that I’m a Nazi white supremacist for pointing out these ugly data, but I could hardly be considered a white supremacist, let alone a Nazi, for allowing that Aryans come in third place, after Jews and “Orientals.” It’s not much of a boast to admit to coming in third place.

     Nevertheless, it is a plain, empirical fact, another ugly one for some people, that the European race has conquered the earth, and really without much difficulty. At first it was through violent conquest and imperialism, and later the conquest became more cultural. European languages are spoken all over the world, and European technologies, and even music and clothing styles, have supplanted traditional ones pretty much everywhere. There is still a kind of globalist colonialism going on, in which European-style science and economics, and also Enlightenment liberal values such as individual rights, democracy, and secular “progress,” are being urged upon the nations of the earth. To find a human society that has not adopted plenty of European culture one would have to seek out some stone age tribe living in the most remote of jungles, and even then one might have to try very hard to find one without European style cloth, flashlights, and butane lighters.

     So the question is, if the European race is only in third place with regard to intelligence, why is it that they (we) are the ones who conquered the earth? As for the Ashkenazi Jews, allegedly the most clever, they have lived in a kind of symbiosis with the European west, and haven’t risen to prominence until relatively recently, after the aforementioned liberal values inspired people to stop “marginalizing” them. Thus far their history has been inextricably mixed with that of the Aryans. Also, as peoples go, there are relatively few of them. But what about the East Asians? Not only are they calculated to be smarter than Europeans, but they enjoyed a civilizational head start of many centuries. The Chinese were reading printed scrolls and wearing silk cloth when the Britons and Germans were still illiterate and wearing animal skins. Also there are a LOT of them. Why didn’t THEY conquer the world?

     The countries of East Asia have become, with the exception of North Korea, relatively prosperous, with even North Korea, its government anyway, having relatively advanced technology. Modern Tokyo or Shanghai is at least as technologically advanced, and almost as westernized, as Paris or Berlin. East Asia, or much of it, has caught up with the west, more or less, with regard to a western standard of living. But even so, even after becoming developed nations in the western economic sense, these countries have failed to make many great contributions to science or technology. There are some exceptions, like the Japanese fellow who first isolated adrenalin, but for the most part East Asians have become developed by copying the west. They have become masters at improving upon other people’s (mainly westerners’) ideas—making improved cars, cameras, electronics—but are not so good at inventing anything new, from scratch. The Chinese especially were innovative in ancient times, being the first, allegedly, to use paper, the printing press, silk cloth, gunpowder, rockets, etc., but for reasons of their own that sort of originality and innovation almost completely disappeared. Evidently, world predominance is not simply a matter of general cognitive skills measured by IQ tests.

     One hypothesis I have considered to explain ancient China’s period of technological innovation is that the civilization was influenced by the Indo-European Tocharian culture of the Tarim Basin, in what is now northwestern China. The Tocharians, being “Aryan” and closely related to modern Europeans, may have inoculated China with enough of a spirit of innovation, or just fresh ideas, that it motivated technological progress, even if the Chinese just adopted Tocharian ideas like they now adopt European ones. At the very least it is likely that the Chinese got the idea of riding horses and using them to pull wheeled vehicles from the Tocharians. But Indo-European influence on ancient China is something about which I know very little, and I’m just making a wild guess.

     It may also be simply a cultural phenomenon that a new civilization will be more flexible, with greater exercise of the imagination, before it settles down more or less comfortably into an established tradition, or as J. S. Mill expressed it, of Custom. Setting aside the imaginative aspect of world conquest and emphasizing merely the physical military aspect, it could be that the Europeans were more suited to it as a result of higher testosterone levels, resultant greater aggressiveness, and a more athletic body type, which certainly would have had some effect on armies in ages when most fighting was hand-to-hand. Then again, even the greater physical aggressiveness may have been a factor in conditioning greater intellectual vitality and a fearless compulsion to explore the unknown.

     Anyhow, the fact remains that East Asians have shown less intellectual creativity than have the Europeans over the past two millennia or so. Even now, Communist China is making moves to become a world superpower, but it is doing so by trying to beat the west at the west’s own game—which includes spying, stealing research data, violating international copyright laws, and a heavy reliance on western-style education to succeed. If required to rely on their own ideas they would still be living in a medieval world—maybe a very neat, clean, civilized one, superior to the west in many ways, but not much advanced over what they had many centuries previously. Even the Communist economic and political system of China is based on the ideas of a German Jew who lived in England in the 19th century.

     Most of my dealings with East Asians have been with the Japanese, for whom I have a great deal of respect (although sexually some of the guys are real perverts—I’ve seen their hentai comic books). But I have had much closer relations with the Burmese, for many years; and although they’re more Southeast than East in their Asianness, and are genetically somewhere intermediate between East Asians and, say, Australoids or maybe Polynesians, they have enough East Asian in them to make a good enough example. I have read that the estimated average national IQ of Burma is 87, although there is a great deal of variability there, with a full spectrum from empty-headed mouth-breathers to phenomenally brilliant scholars. I’m surmising that the more intellectual ones tend to be closer to the Chinese genetically, by ethnicity, and those less so having on average more Australoid ancestry. (Burma was inhabited by Australoids before a later wave of more “modern” humans migrated into the area around 40,000 years ago.) I may as well mention here that the ethnic Chinese living in Burma have taken up an economic position similar to the Jews in the west, tending to be better educated and wealthier than the ethnic Burmese, and occasionally resented for it.

     Setting aside the aforementioned mouth-breathers and also the self-identified ethnic Chinese, and attending to the brilliant Burmese scholars, some of them really are quite phenomenal. Some Burmese Buddhist monks have memorized by heart the entire Pali Tipitaka, which consists of forty rather thick volumes, and know it all backwards and forwards, so to speak. It’s like memorizing an entire encyclopedia in a foreign language; it makes memorizing the Quran or the complete works of Shakespeare look trivial by comparison. The level of knowledge of the Pali texts of even an average Burmese monk is way beyond that of the average western Dhamma teacher, and of most western monks, probably me included.

     The thing is, though, that they are total dogmatists. They dedicate what intelligence they have to memorizing and mastering the thoughts of someone else. Some of them chant the same Pali texts from memory for an hour or two every day, seemingly without ever being bored with it. Their standard of right and wrong is usually the authority of early medieval Sinhalese and South Indian commentators, plus a few of the more famous Burmese Sayadaws. They display almost no creativity, and almost no original ideas whatsoever…and if they do try to come up with something original, like a personal non-dogmatic interpretation of an ancient text, they usually bungle it. Some of the famous Sayadaws whom they slavishly follow also bungled their attempts at theorizing for themselves. The Burmese are good people, and I really have no desire to badmouth them, but their intelligence is of a dogmatic sort, and at that they can really excel. They can be really phenomenal. Also, in their own ways, they are more civilized than most westerners. But creativity or originality they are not so good at.

     Many times I have wondered whether this lack of imagination is purely cultural or partly genetic. I can’t say with certainty. I assume it’s probably a combination of both, which is racist and politically incorrect and all that, but that’s just too damned bad. Be offended by it. I don’t care.

     One consideration is that, reportedly, although East Asians have a higher average IQ than Europeans, they have less statistical diversity in that regard. This is similar to the comparison of intelligence between males and females—women have approximately the same average intelligence as men, but the extremes of the distribution, both at the genius end and the imbecile end, are predominantly male. The bell-shaped curve of IQ distribution for East Asians (though apparently not the Burmese) is narrower than for Europeans. Consequently, if this is true, then despite the fact that they’re a bit smarter on average, the European race nevertheless produces more of the towering geniuses who discover new natural laws and invent new technologies. This narrower statistical distribution apparently does not hold for the Ashkenazi Jews, who have produced plenty of towering geniuses.

     Biologically, Europeans can be said to be intermediate between African blacks and East Asians in certain important respects. Physically, whites are almost as athletic as blacks, being larger, stronger, and faster than East Asians, and also having higher testosterone levels and presumably higher levels of natural aggressiveness. Also, whites may resemble blacks with regard to having greater imagination and spontaneity—consider black proficiency in impromptu rapping, or their creative tendency to give their children names like Trayvon and Shaqisha. On the other hand, Europeans more closely resemble East Asians in such traits as general intelligence, objectivity, and emotional self-control. So, being intermediate in this way, members of the European race may enjoy the best of both worlds, so to speak, and it is this which may explain much of European success in its global predominance, and the claim of the Indo-Europeans to be “the master race.”

     Again, being less imaginative and more inclined to follow a deeply established tradition, right or wrong, is presumably genetic as well as cultural. Either way, it does seem to explain the fact that East Asians were not the ones to overpower and colonize most of the rest of the world. Even if they had come up with the necessary military technology they still probably wouldn’t have done it. On my older blog I wrote an essay hypothesizing that the predominance of the European race was a result of greater extraversion, genetically and/or culturally conditioned. The west seeks knowledge and fulfillment more outwardly, in the material world; whereas the Eastern mind is more introverted and introspective, seeking its knowledge and purpose more inwardly. This could be the key to the scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions occurring in the west and not somewhere else. But since then, in fact very recently, I came up with another hypothesis, or stab in the dark.

     A few days ago in the politically incorrect nightmare of a book The Culture of Critique, I came across the illuminating statement, “real science is individualistic at its core.” The author made the statement with regard to the rather cultish phenomenon of Freudian psychoanalysis being essentially pseudoscience; although it applies just as well to the dogmatic Oriental mind. Individualism appears to be an aberration which developed in Europe, especially in northern, Germanic Europe. The tendency of pre-modern non-western people to identify more with their family or tribe than with their own individual person is something that the great majority of modern westerners really do not grasp (although many in the west are currently increasingly regressing into tribalism). In a conformity-based culture like those that have reigned supreme throughout the East for millennia, the individualism that produces a scientific revolution is seen as a kind of sin, something to be sternly disapproved of and possibly driven away in disgrace. Without that originality one may occasionally find a Genghis Khan conquering much of the world with egotism, cunning, ferocity, and sheer numbers, or an Imperial Japan using military technology copied from the west; but the technological edge required to outclass all competition requires the creativity and imagination produced by western-style individualism.

     Dr. MacDonald also hypothesizes in his book that the peculiar monogamy of western civilization helped to create economic conditions conducive to the Industrial Revolution: it results in a “low pressure demographic profile” in which times of prosperity do not so quickly result in maximum population growth which keeps the majority of a population at a subsistence, hand-to-mouth level of existence. But the European style of monogamy, based on mutual affection and some degree of respect, with women viewed as more or less equal, has begun to backfire on the west even if it originally was one of the west’s most catalyzing cultural traits—now many women in the west have turned against and vilified their own men, the least misogynistic race on the planet, in favor of men they really wouldn’t want to know very well. But I digress.

     Getting back to the idea that individuality is a driving force for innovation and progress, it also helps to explain why Communism inevitably fails. The ideologically uniform hive mind that Communism strives for and insists upon recreates the unimaginative dogmatism that cannot compete with liberty and individualism, and the fruits thereof. Ha! But that’s a different subject, so here I stop.