No black-and-white answers in Murray's The Bell Curve - controversy over Charles Murray's and Richard J. Herrnstein's book about the link between race and intelligence - The Last Word - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 21, 1994 | by Suzanne Fields

If only I could find the right phrase to nail Charles Murray for The Bell Curve, his new book on race and intelligence that every good American must attack to remain high-minded. By puncturing his theories, I could accrue credentials with all the right -- or rather, left -- scholars, and set myself high above the racists and bigots in the United States.

After all, I'm descended from Russian Jews, and this is my big chance to sing on the side of the angels. Didn't the Nazis claim that the Jews were mentally inferior? They measured our craniums to prove we had smaller brains. Aren't Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein trying to do something similar to another racial group, claiming that blacks, as a whole, register some 15 IQ points below whites?

Many reviewers are saying so. Two authors in the New Republic even published their dissent under the banner "Neo-Nazis."

It's easy to find issues and conclusions with which to disagree in much of The Bell Curve. But Neo-Nazi? Most of the IQ statistics have been common knowledge for a long time, and so what? As Murray himself notes, IQ has never told us that much about an individual person's capabilities; it was Thomas Edison who pointed out that genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.

I once attended a party for members of Mensa, the so-called "genius club" (I was a guest). It was one of the dreariest parties I ever attended, for the only common denominator for the Mensas was how well they had performed on a test. There were computer nerds, dropouts, plumbers, engineers, teachers and drifters, each a self-selected snob of a sort, and all insufferable bores. Some were winners and some were losers in the game of life.

So why all the fuss about IQ?

The attackers are concerned that Murray's book will be used against blacks and -- worst of all -- against the perpetuation of the bureaucracy of social programs such as welfare, Head Start and affirmative action.

But emotion seems to have replaced analysis in much of the debate; some of the most vicious attacks have been personal. Since Herrnstein is dead, Murray has to take all the heat. Again, nothing new there: The biologist E.O. Wilson tells how he was pilloried two decades ago when he wrote Sociobiology, a book that addressed the biological roots of behavior. Not only did his students at Harvard demand that he be fired, but one angry protester threw a bucket of water over his head. "I was politically incorrect," he says, "before political correctness."

Much of what happened to Wilson in the 1970s is happening to Charles Murray today. He has inspired fear and loathing across the spectrum of race-conscious America -- and that's too bad. Bringing these statistics out in the open and debating their real significance is what The Bell Curve ought to be about.

Anyone who works with a colleague of a different race rarely speculates about what that person's IQ is, if it's clear that the colleague got where he or she is by merit. But an underground prejudice has grown in America as a result of racial quotas in schools and the workplace. As jobs are won due to race rather than qualification, the most talented minority individuals suffer, since their colleagues don't know if they were hired because of their talent or their race. Quotas often cast a shadow over their accomplishments.

The Bell Curve is most provocative -- and gets Murray into most of his trouble -- when it suggests that a "cognitive elite" will be necessary to run the new technological world and in pure numbers will push blacks further behind whites.

That may be true with or without The Bell Curve. But it's possible that value systems will play a larger role in determining who succeeds in the numbers. We know now, for example, that single motherhood is a strong predictor of poverty. Forget IQ. Just consider the drag on time and energy of a small child; young single mothers have an almost impossible task finishing school, holding a job or ever escaping the welfare trap.

For all the controversy, The Bell Curve is a book with "legs," as the marketers say. It will be argued over for a long time, forcing into the open the intellectual prejudices and racial bigotries that need airing, because these are the undercurrents of common thinking by black and white in modern America.

The governing intellectual theme of The Bell Curve is not about determinants, but determination. "The best and indeed only answer to the problem of group differences," the author writes, "is an energetic and uncompromising recommitment of individualism." Statistics, as Charles Murray could testify, have no power to tell you for whom the bell curve tolls.