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Trashing 'The Bell Curve.' - 'The Bell Curve': A Symposium - Cover Story
National Review, Dec 5, 1994 by David Seligman
Attempting in New York magazine to depict Murray and his supporters as wild and irresponsible ("Who, Me? Prejudiced?" is the heavy-handed title), Jacob Weisberg at one point encourages you to cackle knowingly because Arthur Jensen, "the notorious psychometrician," said at an American Enterprise Institute conference on The Bell Curve that general intelligence "correlates to cranium size." Jacob, you could look it up. The correlation is weak but always positive (around .2 or .3).
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The collection of howlers was substantially augmented by the October 31 issue of The New Republic. The original plan for that issue was simply to run an essay by Murray adapted from The Bell Curve. The plan engendered mass hysteria among editors and contributors, the end result of which was an issue containing not only the essay but 19 other articles, virtually all denouncing the book; many of the contributors had obviously not read it. Typical was the overheated contribution by Leon Wieseltier, who registered particular outrage over the idea that "the fate of individuals is determined by their membership in a group," a thought that appears nowhere in the book.
It is clear enough what The Bell Curve's liberal critics want. They want its ideas suppressed. They want the data to go away. They want the authors depicted as kooks and extremists. The case made by the book is just too threatening to their own egalitarian ideologies, which typically depend on arguments for human malleability. Their arguments were crumbling even before this book came along, but until now it was often possible to ignore the evidence. Now they are reduced to misrepresenting it, and to lashing out at the messengers.
COPYRIGHT 1994 National Review, Inc.
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