An amusing article from long ago, on Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve".
New York Times Magazine. `The Most Dangerous Conservative.' by
Jason Deparle. October 9, 1994. pp.48-78. Cover Story.
[the following version may be somewhat abridged, it's a reprint from the San Francisco Chronicle Oct 16 . The thing that sticks in my mind from "The Bell Curve" is that none of the Murray/Herrnstein "research" was published in normal academic peer-reviewed channels. They just wrote a book, which only coincidentally ended up being widely promoted by people with no axe to grind whatsoever. Served Murray well, anyway, it seems, though Herrnstein didn't survive to enjoy the fruits of his labor.]
The man who would abolish welfare was flying to Aspen, Colorado, sipping champagne in the first-class cabin and spinning theories about the society unraveling 30,000 feet below.
In the past, he says, people were poor because of bad luck or social barriers.
"Now," he says, "what's holding them back is that they're not bright enough to be a physician."
It is precisely the kind of statement that makes Charles Murray so infuriating to so many people: sweeping, callous, seemingly smug. The words are harsh, but the voice is genial and oddly reassuring, suffused with regret.
"Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground," he says, contesting the suggestion that the South Bronx is less nurturing than Scarsdale. "Now I know that's an odd thing to say about the inner city, but at least they're going to school and they have the television on all day. You couldn't say that about blacks 50 years ago."
Murray is bursting with anticipation about the corks that will pop later that evening at the home of wealthy Aspen friends. He is 51 and balding, but boyish in blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he leavens his sociological theories with personal asides.
He is smart enough to know that he is inviting caricature, and bold enough not to care.
Outrageousness, after all, has been good to Murray.
He was an unemployed Ph.D. stuck in a midlife crisis a decade ago when he produced "Losing Ground," the book that eroded the assumptions guiding American social policy.
With 236 pages of charts and tables, it lent an aura of scientific support to an old suspicion -- that welfare and other social programs cause more problems than they solve. Taking the thought a step further, Murray spoke the unspeakable: Why not just abolish them all?
Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get.
Even his most bitter enemies concede his formidable intelligence, and in the wake of his anti-government theories, it sometimes seems downright utopian for others to argue that federal support can help the disadvantaged.
Although much of official Washington regards him as a menace, Murray's influence is still on the rise, both as the enemy of social programs and the champion of the two-parent family. His prophecy last year of a coming white underclass touched a national nerve, and it brought a flurry of proposals to deny welfare to young mothers.
It also brought a surprisingly respectful comment from President Clinton. While he did not agree with Murray's solutions, the president said, the warning about out-of-wedlock births "did the country a great service."
With his new book, "The Bell Curve" (The Free Press), Murray has something more dangerous and inflammatory on his mind: the relationship between race, class, genes and intelligence.
Written with Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, who died last month at age 64, the book argues that IQ scores -- and their large genetic component -- are the key to understanding who gets ahead in America and who languishes in crime, poverty and dependency.
The authors say the country is witnessing the rise of a cognitive elite, people who are intermarrying and passing on to their children their genetic advantages. They see an underclass operating in reverse, with unemployed men and welfare mothers passing on genetic disadvantages in communities rife with disorder.
As the gap widens between the mental haves and have-nots, the authors predict the rise of a new conservatism, "along Latin-American lines," with the cognitive elite employing repressive, police-state tactics to protect themselves from the growing danger.
Unsurprisingly, Murray sees the low intelligence of the poor as a reason to abandon remedial education and similar programs designed to help them, since "for many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching."
For years, colleagues have been arching skeptical eyebrows at the work in progress, and the chapters on race show why.
Although "The Bell Curve" is not primarily about race, it argues that differences in intelligence are an important reason why blacks are disproportionately poor, imprisoned and dependent on government aid. And it suggests that some of those differences have genetic roots.
How much can 15 IQ points be expected to raise a person's earnings? He punches a few keys on his laptop computer, with its database on 12,000 Americans: $6,654 a year.
"See how fun this is!" he says.
Which white kids drop out of high school? More buttons -- only those with low IQ scores and lower-class parents.
"White trash," Murray says.
Murray's persona in print is that of the burdened researcher coming to his disturbing conclusions with the utmost regret. But at the moment, he seems to be having the time of his life.
"It really is social science pornography," he says.
Much of Murray's influence has stemmed from his ability to express, through seemingly dispassionate analysis, many people's hidden suspicions about race, class and sex.
The phenomenon is one that he himself has at least inadvertently acknowledged.
"Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked in the proposal for "Losing Ground."
"Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."
Where others rant, Murray seduces with mountains of data and assurances of his fine intentions. He will never be the country's most famous conservative, but he may well be the most dangerous.
Seventy-nine academic researchers signed a statement this spring condemning Murray's proposal to abolish welfare. They say it would "increase the incidence of homelessness and hunger among children."
And in speeches in June and September, Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, called Murray's welfare solution "un-American" and "almost surreal."
By now, the question is whether, in his zeal to shatter taboos, Murray has finally gone too far.
Murray was dropped from the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that had underwritten "Losing Ground," as soon as he began the new book.
Murray quickly affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
The Boston Globe began denouncing "The Bell Curve" this summer, months before it was publicly available.
The reason for the unease is no mystery. Theories of genetic differences have a long and ugly history, especially when it comes to race.
Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge as much, and worry that their book, "wrongly construed, might do harm."
In 1984, when "Losing Ground" first appeared, not even a politician such as Ronald Reagan would have espoused such ideas.
But this spring a dozen Representatives stood in front of the Capitol and called for an end to benefits for mothers under 21. They would send the children of those who could not manage to state-run orphanages.
Similar proposals are backed by such Republicans as Jack Kemp and William Bennett.
Murray's agenda enrages his liberal antagonists: Abolish welfare, abolish food stamps, abolish subsidized housing. He also wants to end child-support payments to unwed mothers, arguing that physical unions acquire their legitimacy only through marriage.
What would he tell a young, unwed mother?
"I don't want society to say to her, `You made a mistake,' " he says. "I want society to say, `You did wrong.' "
"The Bell Curve" begins by asserting a paradox: America, by its commitment to equal opportunity, is reordering society into increasingly unequal classes, with a prospering, intellectual elite at one end of the bell curve and a miserable, menacing underclass at the other.
This inequality, it says, is the inevitable result of a modern economy that needs and rewards smart people. A true meritocracy is an astonishingly unequal place, since the abilities of individuals vary widely.
While others use words like "education" or "test scores" to describe the sorting mechanism at work, Herrnstein and Murray use the word "intelligence" and stress its genetic roots.
Suddenly, they write, "success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit."
Herrnstein and Murray chase this vision to its apocalyptic conclusion. Smart people, intermarrying, will produce smart children. The disadvantaged will pass down their intractable handicaps. And the gap between the classes will grow.
The book includes eight chapters of original research designed to correlate low IQ with a variety of social problems, including crime, poverty, out-of-wedlock births -- even bad child-rearing and poor citizenship.
They are careful to stress that for any given individual, IQ scores may mean little. Character, drive and luck may do much more to influence success. But they insist that the scores establish powerful patterns for people in the same cognitive range, meaning that inequality will increase.
Their prescriptions are, in many ways, a continuation of Murray's attacks on social programs. The authors want to abandon affirmative action, which they think poisons race relations by promoting unqualified blacks.
They want to drop remedial education programs and spend the money on the talented students they say the economy really needs. They would alter immigration practices that they think are admitting people of less-than-average intelligence.
And they would eliminate welfare and other government benefits that, they believe, encourage women with low IQs to reproduce.
Rather than trying to erase individual differences, they say, society should find ways for people of differing abilities to live with dignity.
They conjure a romantic vision of a world that strips power from the central government and returns it to the neighborhood, where all people can engage "in the stuff of life -- birth, death, raising children, making a living, helping friends, singing in the local choir or playing on the softball team."
The goal is to offer the less gifted something more precious than economic equality, "a place as a valued fellow citizen."
"The Bell Curve" devotes only two chapters to race, and less to the subtopic of genes. It even asserts "that it matters little whether the genes are involved at all."
There are many outstanding black minds, Murray says, just as there are many dull white ones. Individuals should always be treated as such. Genetic differences between the races, he says, "are utterly irrelevant to the arguments of `The Bell Curve.' "
But in a country where white people have claimed innate superiority for 300 years, the talk of genetic differences matters quite a lot. It could be put to any number of demagogic uses, at a time when many blacks are already willing to suspect the worst of whites.
"The Bell Curve" acknowledges IQ tests have been used to support "outrageous racial policies."
And it notes that by 1917, the spread of the tests had led 16 states to pass forced sterilization laws -- primarily for the mentally retarded. But the authors remain uninhibited by this history.
In the last chapter they say they will be pleased if the book brings a discussion of how to "manipulate the fertility of people with high and low IQs."
Murray says he is talking about the elimination of welfare, not coercion, but given the history of eugenics it is a disturbing phrase nonetheless.
"I really don't think I'm a racist," he says, explaining he uses the word "think" only because he distrusts blithe assertions.
"Deep down inside, I don't think I am. So if people say, `You have a racial agenda,' I just say, `No, I don't.' " |
