John Derbyshire

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This article is about the writer. For the early-twentieth century Olympic swimmer, see John Derbyshire (swimmer).

John Derbyshire (born June 3, 1945) is a British-born author who lives in the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 2002. He is a columnist for the conservative magazines National Review Online and New English Review. Derbyshire writes on a broad range of topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, culture, politics, and race.^[1][2] Derbyshire graduated from University College London, where he studied mathematics. His wife is originally from China and they have two children. While raised an Anglican, he no longer considers himself a Christian but rather a Mysterian.^[3] He currently resides in Huntington, New York.

Despite his oft-voiced opposition to illegal immigration, Derbyshire has admitted that he was an illegal immigrant himself in the U.S. before achieving legal residence and eventual citizenship. He has even joked about his former illegal status, comparing himself to a "reformed drunk at a temperance meeting."^[4] According to Derbyshire, no American ever expressed any concern about his immigration status, supporting his belief that Americans are very reluctant to think seriously about immigration issues.^[5] Before turning to writing full-time, he worked on Wall Street as a computer programmer. As a novelist, Derbyshire's 1996 book, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year". His more recent Prime Obsession was awarded the Mathematical Association of America's inagural Euler Book Prize.^[6]

Contents 1 Important issues 1.1 Disagreements with other NRO writers 1.2 Immigration 1.3 Race and homosexuality 1.4 Iraq and terrorism 1.5 Mathematics 1.6 Intelligent design 1.7 China 1.8 Wikipedia 2 The Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence 2.1 Prior citations of "collective imprudence" 3 Sullivan-Derbyshire dispute 4 Appearance in the Bruce Lee movie Meng long guojiang 5 Notes 6 Published works 7 External links

[edit] Important issues

[edit] Disagreements with other NRO writers

Derbyshire has differed from his fellow writers at National Review on important subjects. For example, Derbyshire supported Michael Schiavo's position in the Terri Schiavo case, showed sympathy for class-warfare themes in movies such as Titanic, argued that Pope John Paul II was totally unable to stop the secularization of the West, ridiculed George W. Bush's "itty-bitty tax cut, paid for by dumping a slew of federal debt on your children and grandchildren",^[7] has derided Bush in general for being too sure of his religious convictions and for his "rich-kid-ness",^[8] dismisses small-government conservatism as unlikely to ever take hold (although is not unsympathetic to it), has called for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (but favored the invasion), opposes market reforms or any other changes in Social Security, defended Michael Jackson as harmless, is pro-choice on abortion, supports euthanasia in a fairly wide range of circumstances, and has suggested that he might (in a time of international crisis) vote for Hillary Clinton as president.^[9] Derbyshire's views on the Schiavo case attracted harsh condemnation from fellow writers at National Review Online. NRO writer and frequent blogger, Ramesh Ponnuru, attacked Derbyshire in language far more forceful than customary in National Review's internal debates.^[10] The Derbyshire-Ponnuru dispute arose again over Ponnuru's recently published book, Party of Death. Derbyshire reviewed the book harshly in the New English Review,^[11] and Ponnuru replied on NRO with another strongly worded attack on Derbyshire as "wrong," "florid," "anti-intellectual," "gaseous" and "preposterous" among other terms.^[12]

[edit] Immigration

Derbyshire has written in heated terms against illegal immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and other Hispanic countries. A typical comment decried the "hordes of Central Americans pouring into our country."^[13] Although this particular comment was ambivalent about a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, more recent remarks from Derbyshire have supported the construction of such a fence in highly charged terms: "Demand a wall...A wall! A wall!"^[14] Though Derbyshire broadly agrees with many other writers at National Review Online on this issue, he has encountered strong opposition from NRO blogger John Podhoretz, who described Derbyshire's comments on restricting immigration to maintain "ethnic balance" in severe terms: "But maintaining 'ethnic balance' is not fine. It is chillingly, horrifyingly not fine."^[15]

[edit] Race and homosexuality

Derbyshire has stated: "I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one."^[16] He has also stated : "The U.S.A. was born with two race problems: the African Americans and the Native Americans. We struggle with those problems still, and must continue to struggle."^[17] Derbyshire's description of himself as "mild and tolerant" has been disputed by a number of other writers. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has called him "Herr Derbyshire"—a slightly veiled Nazi reference^[18]—and suggested that Derbyshire's opinions on immigration are the result of his admitted racism.^[19] For more on the Sullivan-Derbyshire dispute, see below. Derbyshire is also a strong believer in the genetic origin of the racial gap in IQ and posits this as the cause of economic disparity between the races in the United States.^[20]

[edit] Iraq and terrorism

On the War on Terror and the War in Iraq, he has described himself as a "To Hell With Them Hawk," writing in National Review:

We don’t particularly care whether the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds of Iraq put down their arms. We only want them to put down their arms against us. Henry Kissinger (who has been hanging around on the fringe of the THWTH clique--come on in, Henry!) famously said of the Iran-Iraq War that it was a pity both sides couldn’t lose. One doesn’t want to be accused of inhuman callousness; but I am willing to confess, and believe I speak for a lot of THWTHs (and a lot of other Americans, too) that the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure.^[21]

[edit] Mathematics

Derbyshire's book, Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics was first published in hardcover in 2003 and then paperback in 2004. It focuses on the Riemann hypothesis, one of the Millennium Problems. The book is aimed, as Derbyshire puts it in his prologue, "at the intelligent and curious but nonmathematical reader... I think I have pitched my book to the level of a person who finished high school math satisfactorily and perhaps went on to a couple of college courses...."

Prime Obsession explores such topics as complex numbers, field theory, the prime number theorem, the zeta function, the harmonic series, and others. The biographical sections give relevant information about the lives of mathematicians who worked in these areas, including Euler, Gauss, Dirichlet, Lobachevsky, Chebyshev, Poussin, Hadamard, as well as Riemann himself.

In 2006 Derbyshire published another book that attempted to popularize mathematics: Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra. Like his previous book, this survey includes many vignettes of individual mathematicians as well as thorough but accessible discussions of the actual mathematics involved.

[edit] Intelligent design

Derbyshire wrote that Intelligent Design is:

not just lousy science, but lousy religion. I dislike it, in fact, for the same reasons... that I dislike the "Left Behind" books & movies, and unbelievers telling me that natural disasters like the recent tsunami "prove" the non-existence of God.

All that kind of thinking trivializes God... [According to proponents of intelligent design] God is a sort of scientist himself, sticking his finger in to make things work when natural laws — His laws! — can't do the job... I am certain... that we are not the children of some celestial lab technician.^[22]

He described the criticism he received after writing a critical article in National Review magazine as a conflict "worse than the bloody Middle East."^[23]

[edit] China

In August 1986, John Derbyshire married a Chinese woman in Changchun, China. He described the process in an article for The Spectator.^[24] In 2005, he provided his opinion on the possibility of war between the United States and China (presumably over Taiwan):

I have no doubt that Chinese servicemen and U.S. servicemen will be shooting at each other some day soon; but I doubt it will come to a full-blown, city-flattening, carrier-sinking, massed-tank-battles kind of war, because I am unable to imagine any casus belli that would persuade Americans of the necessity for that. The Chinese are another matter; but it takes two to tango, and in the current state of our culture, with self-loathing anti-Americanism a required course at our elite universities, I am sure we would back down in any Sino-American conflict that did not have our own territory at stake. (Yes, including a conflict over Taiwan. Bye-bye, Taiwan.) But this is all guesswork. Of course nobody really knows whether there will be a war... perhaps my opinion is colored by wishful thinking.^[25]

Derbyshire opposes the current government of China: "China needs democracy. China needs democracy. The twentieth century taught us, via an ocean of blood and a mountain of corpses, that nothing else will do. Without democracy, a country — any country — is on a slope to disaster." He wrote in the same article that China in its current state can best be described as the "sick man of Asia", borrowing "the phrase applied by fascist Japan to the chaotic warlord China of the 1920s."^[26]

[edit] Wikipedia

Derbyshire became a fan of Wikipedia in 2006:^[27]

I don’t know about Time magazine’s eccentric Person of the Year choice, but for me this has been the Year of Wikipedia. At the opening of 2006 I was barely aware of Wikipedia. Now I refer to it, oh, three or four dozen times a day. Yes, yes, I know all the caveats, but the thing is so handy [emphasis in the original].

This is a notable change in opinion for Derbyshire, who had earlier commented harshly about Wikipedia in a June 16, 2005 entry on the NRO Corner blog:

Wikipedia is a crock. Anyone can put anything up there. Someone with more time, money and patience (and thinner skin) that I have, should sue the bejasus out of them.^[28]

[edit] The Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence

Coined by Derbyshire in July 2006, the Hypothesis of Collective Imprudence (HCI) stipulates that "no large collectivity of human beings (nation-state or larger) will ever act to avert an obvious calamity until that calamity begins to cause really major, dramatic, unignorable damage."^[29] Often, when humanity is confronted with prospect of a catastrophe, "Nothing will get done until something awful happens. Then something will get done."

HCI seems to be a phenomenon attributable only to large groups of human beings. According to Derbyshire, "Individual human beings can, and often do, act with prudence. Insurance companies would be out of business otherwise. For nations, let alone for humanity at large, acting with prudence is so much the exception rather than the rule..." Examples of HCI cited by Derbyshire include World War II, 9/11, global warming and, potentially, illegal immigration. Derbyshire himself admits that the HCI is hard to falsify, insofar as any collectivity of humanity that does act prudently against potential dangers thereby prevents the "obvious calamity" from occurring.

Derbyshire, along with the help of readers, continued to refine the implications and ramifications of HCI, speculating that it “may have an unhappy corollary: When the human race (or some largish subset of it) really does get its collective act together to avert a foreseen evil, the evil is likely imaginary. This is the Corollary of Misplaced Collective Prudence.” Derbyshire credited “a sapient reader” of his with providing “the most recent illustration”—Y2K.^[30]

[edit] Prior citations of "collective imprudence"

• In a December 1984 review of Secrets of the Tax Revolt by James Ring Adams in Commentary Magazine,^[31] Roger Starr wrote,

Now, perhaps stimulated by the question of how the electorate permitted New York's rulers to mismanage its affairs badly enough to stumble into their 1975 disaster, Adams has surveyed the entire nation, and found that the struggle against collective imprudence is not a New York phenomenon alone. [Emphasis added.]

• In "Biotechnology and the Third World" (published in Ends & Means, No. 1, Autumn, 1996, pp. 26-31),^[32] Dr. Nigel Dower of the University of Aberdeen wrote,

That is, causing poverty might be a case of social injustice, but reducing biodiversity might be morally questionable because it was a case of collective imprudence, was harmful to future generations or was a wrong to nature itself. [Emphasis added.]

[edit] Sullivan-Derbyshire dispute

Andrew Sullivan has vigorously criticized Derbyshire, mostly over social issues involving homosexuality and feminism. Sullivan describes Derbyshire as a "paleo-conservative." Lately Derbyshire has been criticized by Sullivan regarding the use of coercive force on prisoners in Iraq by U.S. troops.^[33] Sullivan, while supportive of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, has been a vocal critic of the use of coercive force and torture on detainees. Sullivan posted the following quotes from John Derbyshire on the subject (along with Sullivan's own commentary):

JUST FOR THE RECORD: "I remain opposed to torture, as I understand the term, and as I believe the common understanding of the term has been in Anglo-Saxon democracies this past 100 years or so." — John Derbyshire, today (08 January 2005).

"My mental state these past few days: 1. The Abu Ghraib 'scandal': Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB." — John Derbyshire, May 9, (2004).^[34]

Sullivan also has a "Derbyshire Award" on his blog: "Nominees are solicited for statements by public figures or writers that amount to right-wing hyperbole, hate-speech or manic paranoia. The award is in honor of one John Derbyshire, a paleo-conservative contributor to National Review Online, and provocative commentator on all things gay, black, female or sexual."^[35]

Sullivan has on occasion praised some of Derbyshire's articles such as one on the legacy of Pope John Paul II. However, in this particular case Sullivan seems to have misread Derbyshire's article. Sullivan seemed to think that Derbyshire was blaming the Pope's leadership for the declining support for the Roman Catholic Church in the West, especially Southern Europe and Ireland.^[36] However, it is clear from Derbyshire's original article that he (Derbyshire) thinks that the decline of the Catholic Church in Europe is due to inevitable economic and demographic trends and not to the Pope's leadership.^[37]

Sullivan and Derbyshire were in agreement over allowing local government to determine when the feeding tube should be removed from Terri Schiavo.

At least one of Sullivan's readers has come to Derbyshire's defense, arguing that, while he finds some of Derbyshire's positions (especially on homosexuality) "appalling,"

he's willing to admit inconvenient facts that don't support his worldview, as in his piece on why he believes that homosexuality is inborn... he's one of the few writers at National Review Online who has no use for talking points.^[38]

As of November, 2006, Sullivan has begun to post articles of praise and respect toward Derbyshire for his integrity and apparent agreement with some of Sullivan's personal philosophy (although clearly not with respect to issues surrounding homosexuality): "Derb really is a conservative of doubt, I think, and, despite his bouts of curmudgeon and prejudice, I've come to admire and respect his intellectual honesty...."^[39]

[edit] Appearance in the Bruce Lee movie Meng long guojiang

Derbyshire had an uncredited role in "Meng long guojiang", a 1972 martial arts film starring Bruce Lee released in Western countries under various titles, such as "Way of the Dragon" and "Return of the Dragon". Of landing the part, Derbyshire says: "[T]he casting director had obviously just trawled around the low-class guesthouses for unemployed foreigners of a sufficiently thuggish appearance." He even took directions from the legendary Lee himself: "'Hey, Slim, let's try that again—and this time look mean. You hate me, remember? I'm a runty obnoxious little chink, just stole your woman, trashed your car and pissed in your beer. Whaddya gonna do to me? Huh? Whaddya gonna do? Come on...' (He spoke perfect idiomatic American English the whole time.)"^[40]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
2. ^ New English Review. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
3. ^ "God & Me", October 30, 2006.
4. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
5. ^ Derbyshire website. Retrieved on 2006-03-09.
6. ^ The Mathematical Association of America's Euler Book Prize. Retrieved on 2007-03-28.
7. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-06-07.
8. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-07-05.
9. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2007-01-03.
10. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
11. ^ New English Review. Retrieved on 2006-06-07.
12. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-06-07.
13. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-30.
14. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-30.
15. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-30.
16. ^ Collected Miscellany. Retrieved on 2006-06-01.
17. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-07-10.
18. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-11-16.
19. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-06-01.
20. ^ New English Review..
21. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-06-15.
22. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
23. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
24. ^ Derbyshire website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
25. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
26. ^ Derbyshire website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
27. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-12-29.
28. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-12-30.
29. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
30. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
31. ^ Commentary. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
32. ^ Ends & Means. Retrieved on 2006-07-08.
33. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
34. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
35. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
36. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
37. ^ Derbyshire website. Retrieved on 2006-07-16.
38. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.
39. ^ Sullivan website. Retrieved on 2006-11-03.
40. ^ NRO. Retrieved on 2006-05-19.

[edit] Published works

• Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream (St. Martin's Griffin, 1997) ISBN 0-312-15649-9
• Fire From the Sun (Xlibris Corporation, 2000) ISBN 0-7388-4721-6
• Prime Obsession : Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (Plume Books, 2003) ISBN 0-452-28525-9
• Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra (Joseph Henry Press, 2006) ISBN 0-309-09657-X

He has also written numerous articles for various publications, including National Review, The New Criterion, and The Washington Times. On the National Review website, he maintains a weekly audio commentary on current events.

[edit] External links

• Derbyshire book review of Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn, March 2005
• John Derbyshire's home page
• Andrew Sullivan's Derbyshire Award nominee awarded to Derbyshire himself regarding his comments on the accidental shooting of an Italian journalist in Iraq
• Andrew Sullivan agreeing with Derbyshire
• Derbyshire stating in an interview that Andrew Sullivan is sexually obsessed with him
• Derbyshire explains his religious beliefs
• Derbyshire explains his fear of offending Jews