Finally Found What I've Been Looking For: on The Bell Curve

I like to think that I am the only anti-racist liberal in America who has actually read The Bell Curve, and that this gives me a certain cachet. I read it four or five years ago, when I came across yet another dismissal of it as "a racist screed," and became curious to know what it really said.

I found it fascinating. Charles Murray and his co-author were interested in questions of how a modern culture like ours deals with the fact that some people are not as smart as other people; how you measure intelligence; what can be done with the information. (Murray does this again in his book Real Education, in which one of his "four simple truths" is that "half of all children are below average.").

I did not find The Bell Curve to be a racist screed; I found it to be a carefully and thoughtfully written book that attempted to wrestle with hard questions. At the same time, after reading it, I wanted to read intelligent critiques of it to help me better evaluate it.

I couldn't find them. All the responses I found were accusatory, defensive, ad hominem attacks that equated the authors to early 20th-century eugenicists. "Did we read the same book?" I found myself wondering--and also found myself still at a loss to intelligently evaluate the book's claims and evidence.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with my friend Carla about Real Education. We moved on to The Bell Curve, and I lamented my failure to find non-hysterical responses to it. Carla is a social psychologist, and she said, "Oh, you should look up Richard Nisbett, he has done a lot of work on that book."

So I did. And my looking led me to a book called The Bell Curve Wars, which is a series of articles about the book, including one by Nisbett, most of them measured and useful. For instance, Jeffrey Rosen and Charles Lane evaluate the sources used, and find that much of the research on IQ that Murray and Hernnstein drew on was conducted by conservative foundations and think tanks; they point out that M & H do a poor job of tackling the question of rising IQs in the 20th century, which argues for the mutability of IQ, and that they ignore fairly extensive research on, for instance, black children adopted into white families, whose IQs tend to resemble those of their new families more than those of the communities they came from. Helpful!

At the same time, I find myself disagreeing with some commentators. For instance, Howard Gardner says that the authors are trying to "set up an us-vs-them dichotomy that eventually culminates in as us-against-them opposition" (p. 33). He says, "At literally dozens of points in the book, [the authors] seek to stress the extent to which they and the readers resemble one another and differ from those unfortunate souls who cause our society's problems" (p. 33--and the last bit of that sentence, from "unfortunate souls" on, is an good example of a writer attributing an attitude to Hernnstein and Murray that I did not find in the book, and distorting their ideas in the process).

As an example, Gardner cites this:

You--meaning the self-selected person who has read this far into this book--live in a world which probably looks nothing like the figure. In all likelihood, almost all your friends and professional associates belong to that top Class I slice. your friends and associates who you consider to be unusually slow are probably somewhere in Class II.

I cannot argue with the idea that Murray loves this little rhetorical trick. He does it again in Real Education, where he argues that most readers of the book likely have a certain kind of academic smarts which is shared by their family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. In Real Education, he argues that he, his readers, and people like you and me, don't actually have much notion of what a person of "average" intelligence is like, how they think, or what they're capable of--because we probably don't know any. Professionals and college professors who are asked to describe what they think a person of average intelligence can do with literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, logical thinking, and so on, tend to overestimate. (In Real Education, he argues that this leads to a utopian progressive educational notion that all children can succeed at a certain kind of academics which, culturally, we value).

I have a very different take on why Murray does this than Gardner does, though. As I read it, he is trying to remind his readers that they live in a certain slice of the world, and don't know as much about the rest of it as they think they do. That what they know about people and children and what they're capable of and what their strengths and weaknesses are does not necessarily generalize outside their cohort. To my mind, that's not divisive so much as giving affluent highly-educated people a much-needed reality check.

My favorite essay in The Bell Curve Wars is Thomas Sowell's "Ethnicity and IQ." Sowell is respectful of the book, and does a better job saying what I've been trying to say than I have. His essay begins:

The Bell Curve is a very sober, very thorough, and very honest book--on a subject where sobriety, thoroughness, and honesty are only likely to provoke cries of outrage. Its authors...must have known that writing about differences in intelligence would provoke shrill denunciation from some quarters. But they may not have expected quite so many, quite so loudly, and/or quite so venomously, and from such a wide spectrum of people who should know better.

The great danger in this emotional atmosphere is that there will develop a two-tier set of reactions --violent public outcries against the message of The Bell Curve by some and uncritical private acceptance of it by many others, who hear no rational arguments being used against it. Both reactions are unwarranted, but not unprecedented, in the over-heated environment surrounding so many touchy social issues today. (70)

So well said--particularly his understanding of exactly the problem I had finding rational responses to the book to help me think about its ideas.

Sowell goes on to take the authors to task for problems such as failing to adequately deal with the mutability of IQ, and relying on correlations without dealing sufficiently with confounding factors. At the same time, he has no trouble respecting them for their balance: "Even where the authors clearly come down on one side of a given issue, they usually present the case for believing otherwise. In such candor, as well as in the clarity with which technical issues are discussed without needless jargon, this book is a model that others might well emulate" (70).

Sowell--a conservative writer, by the way, whom I have come to respect a great deal after going beyond his newspaper columns and reading some of his books--has pretty much written the essay on The Bell Curve I would like to have written, had I been a bit more able to grapple with this huge book's complexity. He admires The Bell Curve where it is admirable (which it is in many ways, compared to so much writing on social issues), yet is not blind to its flaws, and he takes its critics to task for their own failures and distortions. I'll end with the conclusion of his essay:

In one sense, the issues are too important to ignore. In another sense the differences between what Hernnstein and Murray said and what others believe is much smaller than the latter seem to think. The notion that "genes are destiny" is one found among some of the more shrill critics but not in The Bell Curve itself. Nor do Hernnstein and Murray treat race as some kind of intellectual glass ceiling for individuals. As the authors say on page 278: "It should be no surprise to see (as one does every day) blacks functioning at high levels in every intellectually challenging field."

Critics who insist on arguing as if we are talking about an intellectual glass ceiling should recognize that this is their own straw man, not something from The Bell Curve. And if they refuse to recognize it, then we should recognize these critics as demagogues in the business of scavenging for grievances. The Bell Curve deserved critical attention, not public smearing and uncritical private acceptance. (78-9)

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Side note: I challenge my liberal friends to read one book by a conservative this year (and vice versa, but since I only have one friend who identifies as conservative--at least openly--and she's a big reader, I'm not sure she needs to take the challenge). Let it be someone thoughtful and measured, not a frothing, name-calling lunatic who is easy to dismiss. That is, no Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, but, say, Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, or Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, which helped me understand the lofty ideals that drive conservatism as much as liberalism. I'll add that reading liberal responses to The Bell Curve, which so often seemed dishonest and in bad faith about the content of the book, was one of the points over the last 10 years or so at which I lost faith in liberals and began to distance myself from them--very much the way Andrew Sullivan has lost faith in conservatives. Read his book!