Future social historians will no doubt puzzle over a curious contradiction in contemporary liberalism: its furious ideological rejection of the moral relevance to society of biological factors such as race and sex on one hand, and its equally tenacious insistence upon group rights, based upon those same biological factors, on the other. Those who deny the scientific validity of racial categorizations are inclined to sift social sub-groups such as doctors, military officers, and chief executives for their racial composition with a punctilio that makes the former apartheid South Africa look like a model of racial tolerance and relaxed good sense.
The insistence upon group rights is rapidly leading to a Balkanization of our sympathies, and is a form of deep irrationalism. A trial by our peers now in effect means by our racial peers, as well as by a jury balanced to resemble us in certain sociological respects, as if men were not capable of taking thought and examining evidence on its own merits. We have taken Marx’s false philosophical dictum that it is not men’s consciousness that determines their being but their being that determines their consciousness, and turned it into a principle of jurisprudence. This undermines not only the entire jury system, but even the very possibility of a justice that is not class or racial justice. We are on the road that the Soviet Andrei Vishinsky and the Nazi Roland Freisler trod with such baleful distinction.
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