Bell Curve Apologists

Atrios is doing great work on the subject, but let me add a quick point about Murray to my earlier post. First, Sullivan’s remarkable claim that putting the New Republic‘s weight behind Murray and Herrnstein’s racist pseudo-science was one of his “proudest moments” in journalism contains the same sophomoric distortion of the “classical liberal” tradition he claims to represent as David Adesnik’s defense of teaching ID. It might be relevant if someone was talking about suppressing publication of The Bell Curve, but that wasn’t the issue. Again, the liberal commitment to free speech is not a commitment to the idea that all ideas are of equal worth. Sullivan, as editor of the New Republic, is a gatekeeper; the issue is whether a shoddy scientific argument that African Americans are genetically inferior should be treated as credible, and given the imprimatur of what was once a respected liberal magazine. To follow Sullivan’s logic, he wouldn’t be permitted to publish an article criticizing William Bennett’s crackpot claims about the life expectancy of gay people without also giving Bennett a cover story in order to promote them. In other words, it’s a self-evidently ridiculous argument. Promoting Murray’s (grossly illberal) arguments has nothing to do with promoting “debate” or adding to the “marketplace of ideas.” Sullivan gave Murray a soapbox to propagate his reprehensible ideas because he agreed with them, and despite their having been utterly discredited he still does. Trying to hide this behind a commitment to “classical liberalism” is a sick joke.

And in this, he follows Murray’s lead. To expand a bit on Digby’s argument, Murray throughout his career has managed to synthesize the worst elements of American right-wing thought, advancing an (often contradictory) combination of obsessive racial and gender essentialism with an alleged commitment to social-Darwinist rugged individualism, and he switches between the two in order to advance the most reactionary political outcome. As Louis Menand pointed out in a terrific essay reprinted in American Studies, what gives away the show is that Murray sees a liberal individualist utopia in…the United States prior to 1960. Yes, the half-apartheid United States of Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Emmett Till is, in Murray’s mind, when American society was truly an individualist meritocracy. Randall Kennedy explained this very well in the New Republic symposium:

First, there are notable outcroppings of disingenuousness in the Murray-Herrnstein essay, the most blatant of which is its claim that “our limited objective is to warn readers who come to the discussion [black-white differences in I.Q.] with firmly held opinions on either side.” Surely the authors and their backers are seeking to do more than this. One of the things they are seeking to do is to keep alive the long-standing claim that, on average, whites are intellectually superior to blacks not only in terms of educational attainment but in terms of cognitive capacity.

Second, Murray and Herrnstein create straw men. They write, for instance, that “many people have a fuzzy impression that if cognitive ability has been depressed by a disadvantaged environment, it is easily remedied.” Who says this? The people to whom Murray and Herrnstein refer do not typically claim the baleful consequences of a disadvantaged environment can be easily repaired. To the contrary, they usually acknowledge the tremendous difficulty of countering the bad effects of poor living conditions. That is why they plead for more funding to transform the disadvantaged environments that generate problems that are hard to undo.

Third, Murray and Herrnstein display a nostalgia for good old days that never existed. “We argue,” they write, “that the best and indeed the only answer to the problem of group differences is an energetic and uncompromising recommitment to individualism. To judge someone except on his or her own merits was historically thought to be un-American, and we urge that it become so again.” Although I am sympathetic to one of the impulses behind this comment — an impulse prompted by the cages of racial and gender differences being created by some ideologues of “diversity” — the reference to a lost golden age of meritocracy is laughable. American history has been characterized by invidious racial oppression far more than it has been characterized by race-neutral equal opportunity.

Fourth, I hope that African Americans and others will eschew Murray and Herrnstein’s invitation to indulge in what they describe as “wise ethnocentrism.” The suggestion appears to me to be merely another marketing device, a way to make more palatable the Murray-Herrnstein claim that blacks, on average, are inferior intellectually to whites. Being part of a group that is collectively inferior in intellectual capacity is not so bad, the authors appear to contend, so long as the group recognizes its own accomplishments. Indeed, the authors later maintain with a gush of apparent enthusiasm that “it is possible to look ahead to a world in which the glorious hodgepodge of inequalities of ethnic groups genetic and environmental, permanent and temporary, can be not only accepted but celebrated.” This ridiculous appeal to non-judgmental relativism is one part reactionary racialism and one part 1990s political correctness — a strange brew indeed. Furthermore, apart from the matter of motive, the substance of the advice is dubious. We have enough ethnocentrisms in our nation without adding a new variety or creating a fresh justification for those already in existence.

As Brad DeLong explains, even in his less “controversial” mode Murray is a sloppy, second-rate thinker, whose non-trivial empirical claims have a distinct tendency to be false. The core of The Bell Curve is something much worse than that. Sullivan’s decision to promote this book was, an is, an indefensible disgrace.