Intelligence and the social scientist

Public Interest, Summer, 1995 by Leon R. Kass

Once upon a time, before science and society got into bed together, serious attention was given to the question of dangerous knowledge. First it was an issue between philosophy and the city (e.g., Athens against Socrates), later between science and biblical religion (e.g., the Church against Galileo). Keenly aware of knowledge's power to harm as well as help, even the great founders of modern science advocated self-censorship and practiced the art of veiled writing, not only to avoid persecution, but also to protect those who might be harmed by their "dangerous" truths.

Rene Descartes, mindful of the trial of Galileo but also eager to ward off unworthy followers, suppressed his radical scientific treatise, Le Monde, anonymously publishing instead a "mere autobiographical fable," The Discourse on Method, which subtly tells only the discerning reader the core of what Le Monde contained. And, in The New Atlantis, the ideal community ruled by his new practical science of nature, Francis Bacon has the scientists deciding among themselves which discoveries to make public (i.e., to publish) and which to keep secret.

Today, in our liberal, open, and "enlightened" society, we may worry about the bad effects of technology, but we believe wholeheartedly in the goodness - or at least the innocence - of knowledge. With us there is virtually no thought or opinion so dreadful or offensive that it cannot be - and is not - shouted from the rooftops. Thus, the issue of dangerous knowledge is now quite limited in scope and contested only by intellectuals. Yet they do so arbitrarily: the very same people who scream freedom of expression for Snoop Doggy Dogg or Robert Mapplethorpe, or who cannot understand why there is a contract out on Salman Rushdie, would be only too happy to silence - or academically lynch - Charles Murray and his late partner, Richard Herrnstein, for publishing their findings about the vexed subject of intelligence, genetics, and race. The vicious attacks on The Bell Curve(*) and its authors have been an ugly spectacle. But their enemies are right at least in this: there are vital matters at stake and the issue of dangerous knowledge is in this case well worth some attention.

Nothing but the truth?

Almost 25 years ago I witnessed up close two acts of censorship practiced by no less than the National Academy of Sciences, the American Olympus of scientific distinction. A report entitled Assessing Biomedical Technologies - I, as executive secretary, had drafted it for the National Research Council's Committee on Life Sciences and Social Policy - was censored by the Academy's Report Review Committee, largely on the grounds that its publication might frighten Congress into cutting off all funds for biomedical research. At the very same time, an ad hoc committee of the Academy, chaired (if I remember rightly) by the eminent geneticist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, decided that the Academy should not commission a study - called for by Nobel laureate and Academy member, William Shockley - into the relation between race and intelligence. Nothing such a study might discover, the ad hoc committee argued, could, if known, possibly do anybody any good.

Though I was appalled at the cowardly censorship of our, in truth, very bland document, and though I was amused to see this double-barreled suppression of thought and inquiry by a collegium that had only scorn for the Church's suppression of Galileo, I remember being very impressed by the prudent and statesmanly report of Dobzhansky's committee, with whose conclusions I then agreed. It seemed to me then that a society founded on the self-evident truth of human equality - the equal dignity of each human being - had no business ranking racial groups, especially on the basis of alleged "scientifically measurable differences" in the powers that most make us human.

Times have changed. Race-consciousness is now rampant, no longer condemned but instead insisted upon by the loudest partisans of equality. For us, equality stands no longer as a founding faith in the rights of individuals, but as a fanatically sought-for sameness of result in the wealth, status, and power of groups. Blocking the march to equality, however, is a new, electronically transformed world that increasingly penalizes those who can't keep pace (and their children), despite the well-meaning, but unsuccessful, programs devised for their advancement by the "best and the brightest," those who have smartly risen to the top. Perhaps a case can now be made that we do indeed need to know the truth about intelligence, its heritability and malleability, and its relation to our social dilemmas, including those connected with race. This, indeed, is the view taken by Herrnstein and Murray. Before judging the wisdom of their effort, one should try to understand what their book says and means, in its own terms.

Science for the public good

Someone who has not read the book, but "knows" it only from the largely irresponsible things written and said about it, will be surprised to discover that The Bell Curve is not primarily about race. Neither does it teach that genes (fully) determine intelligence or that intelligence determines one's destiny. It remains loudly agnostic about whether, and to what extent, observed racial differences in IQ have any genetic basis. Also, its presentation of the scientific evidence is scrupulously separated from - and not driven by - its (limited) public-policy suggestions.