Intelligence and the social scientist

But life as lived is based not on "legitimate arguments" but on opinions and prejudices; and "need not be" rarely translates into "will not be." Precisely because most people do not - and probably cannot and will not - refrain from stereotypical thinking, and precisely because intelligence is so central to our humanity, it cannot be good for living together to go around broadcasting the low group IQ of blacks or Hispanics, or of Poles or Slovaks, for that matter. Few individuals (smart or dumb) belonging to such a group, "known" or "thought" to be intellectually inferior - even if through no fault of its own - are likely to live unencumbered by such opinions, once it becomes noised about and taken as truth.

Virtue and justice banished

Herrnstein and Murray are not responsible for our increasingly racialized political thought. On the contrary, it is much more their opponents - partisans of affirmative action; teachers of the ruling importance of race, class, and gender; preachers of the divisive sorts of multiculturalism and ethnic tribalism - who have betrayed the American ideal of the dignity of the individual, and, alas, so tragically close to the time at which that ideal was finally being made available to all people, regardless of race, creed, or color. But in Herrnstein and Murray's attempts to restore the focus on the individual, to replace the utopian drive for equality of outcomes with the dignified equality of opportunity, and to overcome tribalist thinking with a public-spirited concern for all our fellow citizens in the accepted presence of manifest inequality, they instead contribute - to be sure, unintentionally - to the very sort of poisonous racial thinking they oppose.

The excesses of affirmative action can and must be opposed on moral and political grounds - as unjust, harmful, and un-American - without trying to show that it can never work because of the intellectual inferiority of blacks. The authors of The Bell Curve seek to overcome racialistic thinking in the long run by requiring it in the short run. In this respect, they do exactly as their misguided opponents have done in demanding minority set-asides and quotas - and they should be willing to accept the blame for the consequences that follow.

As these are not cowardly men, I rather think they (now, only Murray) will be willing to take the brickbats - if they are in fact deserved. They have been scandalously and unfairly vilified and falsely accused of saying things they have not said. But it is part of wisdom to understand that one is partly responsible for how one is misunderstood. And no true student and friend of the American republic ought to be surprised at the uproar.

Murray, in a Wall Street Journal article responding to his critics, defends the decision to publish against the charge of irresponsibility:

We said to ourselves that the question of irresponsibility must finally be determined by truth. As Mr. Herrnstein said shortly before his death: If what we say in The Bell Curve is not true, then there would be no responsible time to publish it. If what we say is true, there is no irresponsible time to publish it.