Solving Problems Requires More Effort Than Just Placing Blame

It's amazing how liberals have perverted our education system, at least when it comes to the liberal arts. Sitting in many classrooms today, you'd think all history is about how the white man has oppressed the rest of the world, stolen resources, abused women, enslaved people and caused havoc everywhere.

Sadly, some of this does have merit -- but not only is this perspective one-sided, it's also naive and incomplete.

The consequence is that white men are taught self-loathing -- because everything's our fault -- and thus we fail to learn about many of the good things white men have done or to discuss seriously why white men happen to be doing so well while others aren't.

For example, we learn all about the slave trade, but we don't always learn that white Westerners were the first to abolish slavery despite being the potential enslavers. Nor do we spend nearly enough time learning about the great achievements in medicine, science and politics that the West has contributed to the world.

Although it's certainly true that the Third World has suffered at the hand of the West, no one ever seems to admit that they'd all be a lot better off if they had embraced technology, democracy and capitalism the way the West did. Liberals have an especially keen problem with this idea because it would mean they'd have to admit that our way is better than other ways.

Liberals love to talk about how evil white men have been to women, but rarely do they mention that a woman in the Western world lives like a goddess compared to the way she lives elsewhere.

We also learn that a woman's ability to succeed in the professional world has been destroyed by sexism and entrenched interests. And of course that's true to an extent.

But here's something to at least think about. Liberals don't talk about the fact that if you look at the IQ distribution of men and women, you'll find that while the means are basically the same, the male bell curve is much flatter and wider. This implies that among men, there are both more geniuses and more idiots than among women.

And that implies that we shouldn't be surprised to see men outnumber women at the highest levels of academic and professional achievement -- or at the lowest. Personally, I don't really like this line of argument, but I bet it's never received serious consideration in any of our women's studies classes.

Liberals also do a great job of explaining how all odds are stacked against blacks and how achievement tests are racist. Of course, there's some level of institutional racism that still exists.

But what's interesting is that if you give just about any test that measures intellectual achievement to a large, randomly selected group of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics, blacks will almost always end up doing the least well.

This isn't because black people are stupid or because everyone else is racist. Empirical evidence suggests that these performance differences result from differences in cultural norms and values. The reason we need to recognize these facts is that we should be working on fixing cultural problems -- something the great American hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized -- and not trying to shift the blame elsewhere.

Why is all of this relevant? Because it's unfair to constantly demonize white men not only because it can be misleading and biased but also because we're unlikely to get very far that way.

What we should do is offer a more balanced perspective and give credit where credit is due. Clearly white men have made some mistakes, and that needs to be recognized. But white men are not the root cause for the majority of the world's problems. It's a lot easier to blame some outside force than to look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What can I do to improve my own destiny?"

Reach Felix Lurye at flurye@email.unc.edu.