A Wager on a Contingent Fact

Gould makes a claim that sounds deflationary but is actually load-bearing: human equality is not an ethical axiom or a social norm but an empirical outcome — history's dice happened to roll that way. Equal treatment may be an ethical principle, but equality itself is a fact about the world, one that could have been otherwise.

Thayer's account of Chinese strategic thinking shows what it looks like when a great power bets against that fact. In the view he describes, America's multiculturalism is a "sickness," and homogeneity around a single core culture is the source of national strength. This is, in Gould's terms, behaving as if one of those alternative scenarios — the ones with "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude" — actually happened. The Chinese position Thayer sketches presumes a world where the races are not equal and where mixing them dilutes rather than strengthens.

The interesting tension is that Gould's framing cuts both ways. Because equality is empirical rather than axiomatic, it can't simply be asserted against a rival who denies it — it has to be demonstrated, and the demonstration is partly geopolitical. If a multicultural America outperforms a racially essentialist China, the contingent fact Gould describes gets vindicated in the arena that matters to strategists. If it doesn't, the failure won't disprove biological equality, but it will suggest that the ethical principle of equal treatment and the practical work of cohesion are separate achievements — that a true belief about human sameness doesn't automatically produce a society that functions as if it were one.

Put sharply: Gould tells us China's premise is scientifically false. Thayer reminds us that a false premise, held by a rival, is still a strategic hypothesis being tested against you. The American experiment is, in effect, running the empirical trial of Gould's claim at civilizational scale.