My 2020 review of Edward Dutton's "Why Islam Makes You Stupid . . . But Also Means You’ll Conquer The World.
20231013
This is the review that was originally rejected by Amazon - the reason that I posted the very short one to which I recently linked. By the way, they just rejected my review of The Global Currency Plot. This time they not only did not tell me why, but they did not even say what review they were rejecting!
An unemotional look at a religion that provokes strong emotional responses both ways
Albert Einstein spent the last half of his life looking for a Unified Field Theory to explain the fundamental forces governing elementary particles. He came up with quite a bit, but nobody understood it.
Dutton is different. He is looking for a Unified Social Theory to explain elementary human nature. Most of his insights, once you read them, seem obvious. Dutton's problem is not that people cannot understand, but rather that they don't want to.
Dutton has been publishing on these themes throughout his career. The Genius Famine is a treatise on intelligence and how the outlier intelligence of a few members of society goes a long ways toward determining the success of the entire society. The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers is an analysis of the politically correct establishment's unwillingness to confront the reality of Muslim behavior. At Our Wits End - Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future addresses the increasing rapidity with which human intelligence is dropping. Race Differences in Ethnocentrism is a book length dissertation supporting the second half of this current title "… and Means You Will Conquer the World." Dutton draws a number of ideas from the subject of his biographical book Philippe Rushton – A Life History Perspective Lastly, and curiously, although he has written in Churchill's Headmaster: The 'Sadist' Who Nearly Saved the British Empire that Churchill was a dangerous man, that dangerous man is eminently quotable and played an outsized role in twentieth century history. Dutton makes good use of Churchill's quotes on Islam.
As John Derbyshire writes in the introduction "Good quantitative knowledge about human nature—good enough for the kind of robust speculation that energizes scientific discovery, sometimes good enough to have immediate predictive value—is accumulating very fast. Yet even as our understanding advances, public discussion of topics in the human sciences is fiercely constrained by obscurantist political taboos."
With this introduction out of the way – all the important reasons why people would tell you not to read this book – we can get to the substance you are not supposed to notice. First, Does Islam makes you stupid? If so, how?
Dutton devotes a chapter to the discussion of what is intelligence. There is nothing new here – he simply recounts information most of which has been known for half a century and well described by researchers such as Arthur Jensen in The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, Earl Hunt in Human Intelligence, and myriad others including Linda Gottfredson, James Flynn and too many others to name.
Dutton cites the expert, Richard Lynn, who has compiled intelligence research from all over the world in two masterful books, IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality . He goes right to the point in the third book Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. Charles Murray presents the same conclusions and what he hopes is a palatable form in his recent Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. This is surely a vain hope from the guy who wrote "The Bell Curve." Suffice it to say – the science all points the same way.
Dutton pegs several practices that reduce intelligence to the five pillars of Islam: faith, prayer, fasting, charity and the hajj to Mecca.
Intellectual curiosity is stultified when the holy book provides the answers to all of life's questions.
Prayer is mandatory five times a day. There is no way that cannot impact productivity. It also is a strong incentive to conformity.
Devout Muslims must fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan. There is a measurable correlation between lack of nutrition during pregnancy and intellectual deficiency.
Charity and the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Mecca are mostly financial concerns. If you don't have enough money the kids may not get proper nutrition, and probably won't get educated to the extent of their abilities.
Dutton has an interesting and welcome new take on the topic of education. Whereas most of the authors named above would say that intelligence is mostly a matter of genetics, Dutton cites studies showing that being around intelligent people in early life raises a child's measured intelligence – we already knew that – but furthermore, some of the gain may persist into adulthood. He also cites studies showing that people who don't use their brains, such as retired engineers and doctors, lose a bit of intelligence.
Dutton writes extensively about the process of female circumcision. You will not often read about how widespread it is in certain Islamic countries. For a first-hand account, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel." While FGM deals with body parts other than the brain, the traditions of purdah, female seclusion, are consistent with women not being educated up to their potential and with no premium being placed on intelligence in the selection of a wife.
Other aspects of purdah certainly don't help intelligence. Covering the whole body can result in a vitamin D deficiency, heat exhaustion and other problems.
All that said, why is Islam going to conquer the world? The answer to that question lies more with us in the West than with them. They are as they have always been, and they have always been at our door, from Córdoba and Tours to Lepanto and the gates of Vienna. Dutton observes that Islam has always displayed mutual support through positive ethnocentrism and antipathy toward others - negative ethnocentrism. Whereas the West has never been terribly ethnocentric, a century ago we were enough so that our technology was enough to protect us.
We are now too effete to defend ourselves against anybody. Few of us are convinced we have anything worth defending. We are not raising children in the Christian faith – indeed, we are not having many children at all. Islam is simply following the 3 billion year old dictate of evolutionary success – be fruitful and multiply. It is we who have changed.
Though Dutton doesn't go into it in depth, it is not just the Christian West that is not having children. Northeast Asia has an even worse fertility problem than white people. Among Jews, like Christians, it is only the fundamentalist minority who are having children. As Dutton describes in another chapter, religion correlates somewhat negatively with intelligence. Most notably, the highly intelligent fraction of all societies seems to be very reluctant to put their energies into raising children.
The dictionary defines consilience thus: "In science and history, consilience refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions." Dutton marshals evidence from a large number of intellectual disciplines to support his two conclusions, first about Muslim intelligence and second about Islam's impending domination of the Christian world. It offers a different view of Islam itself, insight into recent work in evolutionary psychology and related fields, and some trenchant observations about those of us in what is left of the Christian West. Five stars.
Amazing how Amazon has changed. They censor and remove from sale countless numbers of books and now they censor the heck out of reviews. They removed commenting on reviews a long time ago and removed massive amounts of intelligent and quality reviews. Of course because that is how the powerful people in control want it.
"The miracle of technology is here to save and bury me, corporation code of sin is the only thing programmed to win". Bridge lyrics from Brett Walker's great "Give me Back Tomorrow" song.
Interesting stuff. Has anyone noticed that Amazon won't let you follow this author and get news about new books? Odd, that.