BENNETT AND ETHNIC DETERMINISM [Andy McCarthy]
I’m getting a number of complaints about buying into ethnic determinism, which I don’t. Typical is this, from a thoughtful reader, who agrees that Bill Bennett is no racist, but says:
Forget about your claim that there's some statistical accuracy to what Bennett said. There's something morally reprehensible in saying about any newborn, "You have been born to a member of a particular class or ethnic group, so you are statistically more likely than others to grow up to be a criminal." You should be appalled by the determinism -- which is so anti-American -- inherent in such a statement.
My correspondent adds that because Bennett is both a public spokesman and a moralist, his comments are especially egregious, asking: “Where is the morality underlying the social science here? Where is the preacher of morality when it comes time to say, ‘We reject any studies that show such technical correlations because they are morally useless to us, that is to say, to utilize such correlations in discourse offends our moral belief in the dignity of every person’?”
ME: I could not disagree more. It is not a matter of determinism in any individual case to deal honestly with statistically-based group facts. There are a higher percentage of alcoholics in the Irish population than in many other ethnic groups. Acknowledging that fact honestly -- which is always the first step to dealing with a problem, and thereby improving the situation, which is precisely why doing so is not "morally useless" -- is not the functional equivalent of saying that my sons are more likely to become alcoholics than they would be had I not been of Irish descent. A whole lot more goes into it than that.
Bennett's whole point, which I emphatically agee with, is that it is dangerously misguided to leap from sweeping premises, however valid they may be, to lavish conclusions. I think that holds whether the conclusions are about complicated societal matters like crime and social security, or about complicated individual matters like what a child will grow up to become.
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