Further thoughts on Sailer

Commenting on my critique of Steve Sailer, a reader says:

The Sailer article you originally referenced, I had ceased to read when he detoured to his college days. You finally explained why I failed to finish this—and almost every other piece by him. The man can’t stay focused.

My reply:

Several readers have thanked me for articulating what they find unsatisfactory in Sailer’s work. It seems that no one (except for various leftists plus John Podhoretz who have mindlessly attacked him as a racist) had bothered criticizing Sailer before. There is no intellectual criticism in our culture. There are just these multicultural niches. The people in each niche automatically approve of the people in their own niche, and ignore or dismiss the people in other niches. To criticize someone in your own approximate niche (in this case, the niche of race realists) is not done, it’s seen as an act of disloyalty. So there’s no real discourse.

But let’s not be unfair to Sailer. Notwithstanding his limitations, including the lack of any moral or spiritual or civilizational framework in his writings and the frequent triviality of his focus (if he lives to ninety he’ll be discussing black athletes, his favorite subject, on his deathbed), he continually provides valuable and illuminating insights in a variety of areas. He’s an original. But I read him very selectively. For example, I never read his movie reviews. A bio-reductionist approach to movies? Give me a break. Sailer has no more feel for discussing movies and other cultural subjects than I have for selling farm equipment. Yet curiously he puts his status as “movie reviewer” at the top of his bio.

And it’s the same when he discusses literature. The first half of his review of Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons consists of a detailed discussion of the various body types of the novel’s characters, including his educated guess as to each character’s body fat percentage.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 17, 2005 08:50 PM | Send