Intelligence and the social scientist

Public Interest, Summer, 1995 by Leon R. Kass

Herrnstein and Murray write with great clarity and unusual care. Immensely difficult and technical subjects are made accessible, often with the aid of marvelously apt examples or analogies. Premises are explicitly stated (for example, about which concept of intelligence they adopt and why), methods are explained, data are thoroughly, yet cautiously, interpreted, and arguments about their significance are presented explicitly and fully, yet with admirable recognition of the limits on what the data allow one to conclude. Evidence on all sides of controverted questions is always presented, and, in this reader's judgment, with remarkable evenhandedness and judiciousness. The tone throughout is sober, measured, concerned; there is nary a note of smugness or condescension. Whether its conclusions prove true or false, whether its interpretations are wrong or right, and, indeed, whether it should or should not have been published, The Bell Curve is an impressive work, written in the best academic (social) scientific spirit - animated entirely by the desire to know the scientific truth about these devilishly tricky and delicate subjects.

Well not quite entirely. The pursuit of the truth here is not simply disinterested. Herrnstein and Murray write also, if not in fact mainly, to address current disruptions of American social life and to rectify what they regard as the failure of social scientists, journalists, and politicians to diagnose or treat our social ills correctly:

They examine changes in the economy, changes in the demographics, changes in the culture. They propose solutions founded on better education, on more and better jobs, on specific social interventions. But they ignore an underlying element that has shaped these changes: human intelligence - the way it varies within the American population and its crucially changing role in our destinies during the last half of the twentieth century. To try to come to grips with the nation's problems without understanding the role of intelligence is to see through a glass darkly indeed, to grope with symptoms instead of causes, to stumble into supposed remedies that have no chance of working.... [T]here can be no real progress in solving America's social problems when they are as misperceived as they are today.

The Bell Curve's science may not be contaminated by its public purpose, but its goal is not truth for its own sake but for the sake of social welfare and public good. Its publication even more than most scientific publication - always an act of making public - is an emphatically political act. This means that it must be judged by more than scientific criteria. Indeed, the authors invite us to judge their publication by the good that it might - in their view, will - bring: "What good can come of understanding the relationship of intelligence to social structure and public policy? Little good can come without it."

The song of the bell curve

What are the main teachings of this book? The big picture is the emerging social stratification of American society largely on the basis of intelligence, rather than inherited wealth or social class of origin. At the top, a cognitive elite, a meritocracy of the smart (not necessarily the wise or the good), is increasingly affluent, powerful, and more than everyone else free to enjoy the privileges and delights of our increasingly complex and technological society. Educated together in our most prestigious colleges and universities, engaged in occupations highly screened for IQ, intermarrying more and more only with one another, and living and working apart from the rest of society, and especially from contact with the people and problems of the growing underclass, this class is comfortably but dangerously isolated from the mainstream of American life.