Imagine if science stumbled upon a set of genes that are almost always present in the criminal population. After testing thousands of prisoners, they find a set of genes in more than 90% of them. In the rest of the population, the genes appear almost only in those who have a criminal record. In other words, the correlation between the presence of these genes and criminality is so high, there has to be a causal relationship. That would be an enormous breakthrough and lead to a rethinking of criminal justice in the West.

Now, we know the racial makeup of the prison population in the US. We know blacks commit an enormous amount of crime relative to other races. The likely result of that genetic breakthrough would be the end of nonsense like this. The debate over black crime would quickly move from magic spells and evil spirits to biology. Inevitably, the presence of the crime genes would be vastly more common among blacks than other races. The question facing public policy makers would be how to use this information to reduce crime.

Now, this is unlikely to happen, but it is a useful way to think about how reality can be useful in forming public policy. In the fanciful example above, the result would be changes in how we view crime. Just as people have to accepted the fact homosexuals cannot help themselves, that they are driven by biology, people would come to accept that some people are born bad. The difference would be that efforts to address this genetic “defect” would seem completely moral. Compassion would dictate finding a cure for black crime.

It is important to remember that compassion does not have a universal and timeless definition. A century ago, the compassionate response to poverty was discipline from the upper classes, along with highly conditional charity. Even New Dealers thought paying people to loaf around was monstrously immoral. Yet today, asking a man to work for his gourmet coffee and XBox subscription is considered heartless. The point being, public morality changes and it usually changes in response to new generations.

The reason America has urban reservations full of useless black people is the rich people in charge of us ran out of ways to fix things like black crime and poverty. They simply got tired of shoveling the sand of egalitarianism and the blank slate , against the tide of biological and racial reality. The great cultural revolution that started in the middle of the last century was not the liberation of blacks and women, as is always claimed. It was the liberation of rich people from their duties to the lower classes and society as a whole.

Slowly but surely, science is creating an alternative toolkit for addressing the problems that vex modern society. There’s a reason that columns like this one are written by people with no math or science. Gavin Evans is an aging cleric for a church with empty pews. No serious person embraces the blank slate, even though it remains taboo to discuss in public the realities of biology. In fact, the shrillness of the vinegar drinking scolds is entirely due to the fact they are on the wane. They have to shriek in order to get attention.

Stories like this are becoming more common and as such people are increasingly comfortable with biological explanations to social phenomenon. Progressives still recoil in horror at the mention of science, but that’s mostly true of the older Progressives. The actuarial tables are not on the side of biology deniers. The younger generations are increasingly comfortable with genetic and statistical reality and that means the ruling class will become increasingly comfortable talking about public policy based on reality.

None of this means the ruling class is going to suddenly swing in the direction of race realism. That’s not how culture changes. Instead, morality moves like an infectious disease. A new challenge to an old moral code spreads slowly at first and then reaches critical mass. Similarly, the antibodies react in a defensive effort to ward off the new challenge. Right now, science is viewed as a mortal threat by the Progressive host, so their reaction is extreme. That means ruining careers as a way to scare dissenters.

In time though, the new generation takes up their positions and they have adapted to the new morality. All the boys are girls following sportsball through statistics and figuring out how to sell more stuff to left-handed cross-dressers on-line will have no problem thinking about crime as a biology problem. Using mouth swabs to determine that little Jamaal has less than 2% chance of going to college will sound smart. Designing an education system for little Jamaal so he can be a warehouse worker will be compassionate.

Ultimately, it will be compassionate, relative to the benign neglect we see today. Take a ghetto tour through a place like Baltimore and you see a world that should never exist in a Western country. Less than a long lifetime ago, it did not exist. It was not allowed to exist by the people in charge. The black ghetto is loud, chaotic and sadder than anything you will see in modern America. It should never have been allowed to get this way and it should not be allowed to persist. It will never be fixed, but it can be better.

The only way it gets better is to start where this post started – biology. Poor people of all races are poor because they make bad decisions, they have poor impulse control and they have lower IQ’s than the rest of the population. You can’t fix nature, but you can put structure around it to mitigate it. Poor people, especially poor black people, need rules, not choices. Allowing people to suffer at their own hands is no more compassionate than allowing a depressed person to jump off a bridge. It’s indifference, not compassion.

Once you accept the fact that biology is real, things like mandatory birth control for poor people on government assistance makes a lot more sense. Shaniqua can’t figure out that she should not have ten babies. She lacks the intelligence to think through these things. She can figure out that getting her EBT card charged up means not getting pregnant, so she will willingly sign off on Norplant. By the morality of the legacy generation, that seems monstrous. To the morality of the next generation, that will be the height of compassion.

Similarly, “fixing the schools” will always be an easy racket for grifters, but in a world of biological realism, it will be impossible to pretend that Jonquarius will one day be a computer programmer. The education reform of tomorrow will be about training 85-IQ blacks how to do something useful and avoid the obvious pitfalls of life. More important, no one is going to be deluded into thinking the black underclass will join the middle class. It’s that compassionate racism will set different objectives for the moral reformer.