Then and Now, 1994
We look back to a review by Liam Hudson of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
T his review was first published in the TLS of December 2, 1994.
The Bell Curve is a muddled offering. Disjointed in its argument, uncertain in its voice, ugly in its historical reverberations, it reflects no credit on the discipline of mental measurement from which it springs. It none the less contains new – and contentious – evidence. Unfortunately, by being so dubious a product, it encourages the reader to dismiss this evidence as ideologically tainted, and to shirk the responsibility of reflecting on what it might mean.
Its subtitle and blurb tell us that The Bell Curve – whose senior author, Richard J. Herrnstein, unfortunately died recently – is going to deal with the bearing of measured intelligence on the ossification of American society in social class terms. Herrnstein and Charles Murray seek to answer the question: “How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?” The authors claim that, in place of their country’s celebrated capacity to “churn”, allowing the bright and ambitious to rise from poverty and the dull or dissolute to return towards it, a class structure is emerging in America which is increasingly rigid and impervious to change. This argument, however, acts as a screen: for substantial portions of the text in fact play an altogether more dangerous game – that of intelligence and race.
Herrnstein and Murray align themselves with what they see as the “classical” tradition in mental measurement. In truth no more classical than twin-sets and pearls, this constellation of techniques, assumptions and prejudices stems from Francis Galton, and has been carried forward more recently by men like Cyril Burt and Arthur Jensen. This vein of inquiry places faith in “g”, the general factor in intelligence-test scores; and in heritability – the index of the extent to which individual differences in intelligence can be explained in genetic terms. The IQ test emerges from this endeavour as the measure of man’s true fitness; the scientific instrument that selects the brainy from the common herd.
Close to the heart of such inquiries, as even the most cloistered number-cruncher must by now be aware, there lurks a noxious conjunction. Thoughts of a distinctively human gift that is inherited and scientifically assessable jostle intimately in the mind with those of racial purity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Herrnstein and Murray seem at times to flirt with these horrors, and over some of the sources they cite there hangs the whiff of eugenics. As table follows table, you steel yourself against rational-seeming but unacceptable conclusions: that unemployed blacks, say, should be sterilized in order to qualify for welfare payments, or that white college graduates should be given tax breaks if they breed. But the authors disown such talk, and offer themselves instead as men who can look a challenging fact in the eye, their tactic throughout being to voice an alarming possibility and then veer away. The solution lies, they finally propose, in finding valued places in society for each of us, irrespective of where our IQs locate us on life’s great spectrum of fitness. How, you ask, could they have brought themselves to rehearse so much inflammatory material at such length, yet bow out on so vacuous a note?
Some of the evidence the authors deploy is unsatisfactory: on page 493, for example, newspaper reports are dressed up as a table. And they have allowed their text to be disfigured with boxes purporting to show that, among other things, Cyril Burt was right after all about heritability, that Jews are cleverer than the rest of us, and that blacks are worse than whites, even at plumbing and pipe-fitting. Is this really how Herrnstein, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard, believed you should assemble a scholarly argument and text? If so, heaven help Harvard, and heaven help psychology.
Other evidence the authors present comes from respectable-sounding sources, but is tangential or irrelevant to their declared aim. Some of it will disconcert those who have not seen it before, and it is designed to do so. The diagrams on page 279 which compare the distributions of blacks’ and whites’ IQs and that on page 452 which compares the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of black college students with those of their white and Asian contemporaries linger uncomfortably in the mind. On average, the black students’ scores are not somewhat lower; they are much lower. There is reassurance of sorts in the evidence that, lower down in the educational system, among nine-, thirteen- and seventeen-year olds, the gap between the academic achievements of black and white narrowed somewhat between the early 1970s and 1990, but it remains wide.
There are good and obvious reasons, of course, why whole segments of society should become disaffected with the educational process; and why many individuals should fail to do themselves justice on mental tests. There are also good reasons why the ability to do such tests is related only in complex ways to achievements of greater intrinsic interest, like playing the saxophone or running an army. But irrespective of whether they eventually turn out to be genetically or culturally determined, large differences of measured ability that are tied to skin colour do pose social problems. It is one thing to use quotas based on skin colour as a short-term expedient in admitting students to college; it is quite another to use them on a permanent basis in qualifying students as doctors and dentists, lawyers and engineers.
The real interest of The Bell Curve lies elsewhere, however. Herrnstein and Murray have had access to evidence from a sample of more than 10,000 young men and women, first tested in their mid- teens to early twenties, and followed up for a decade. One of this book’s many curiosities is that while its authors give copious help to the uninitiated over elementary statistics, they are conspicuously unforthcoming about the operational details of this National Longitudinal Study of Youth: about who collected what evidence from whom, about attrition rates, and so on. Such insouciance is puzzling, especially in a field in which ideologically motivated misrepresentation has in the recent past been widespread. The material from this Study none the less deserves investigation; both in its own right, and for the hints it gives about how far, in the effort to be civilized, many of us may have slipped into self-deception.
For seventy years or more, the IQ test has been accepted as useful in sorting a population – raw recruits to the Army, say – roughly in terms of their intellectual capabilities. It has been clear for decades, too, that the question of whether individual differences in IQ are genetically or culturally determined is, for most practical purposes, a red herring. Individuals’ IQs are usually a stable feature of their endowment from early puberty onwards, and it is with this fact that educators and policy-makers must come to terms. The special interest of the new longitudinal evidence is that it allows us to see clearly for the first time how IQ relates to the more personal aspects of individuals’ lives; the comparisons drawn by Herrnstein and Murray being all the more persuasive because restricted in this instance to the individuals who are white.
Consider the relation of measured intelligence to parenthood. The mood of adventure fostered by Kate Millett’s The Sexual Revolution and the Hite Reports led us to assume that, in their droves, highly intelligent women were now choosing to have children out of wedlock; that the single-parent family was not just a visible option, but evidence of a young person at the cutting edge. In fact, the data indicate, IQ is closely tied to parenthood, but in the opposite direction. White women with high IQs and college educations are exceedingly unlikely to have children out of wedlock. It is white women with low IQs and more modest educations who frequently find themselves as single parents; some 20 per cent of American children are now born, Herrnstein and Murray claim, to unmarried mothers whose IQs identify them as “dull” or “very dull”. The data have been heavily massaged in the interests of intelligibility and representativeness; they also contain gaps and leaps. But, as presented here, the resulting linkages are painful to behold. It is the children of these women, it seems, who are more likely than others to be under-weight at birth, to suffer squalid living conditions, to experience social and behavioural problems, and to have low IQs. Similarly, when they grow up, they will be more likely than others to experience difficulties in the job market, and to spend time in prison, and more likely to become the unmarried parents of children with low IQs. The cycle repeats itself, the authors contend, and does so in ways that governments of all complexions have so far been powerless to alter.
It will be interesting to see this evidence reworked by specialists whose sympathies differ from those of Herrnstein and Murray. Meanwhile, the nature of the misgivings their evidence causes depends on your political allegiance. If you belong to the Margaret Thatcher, devil take the hindmost school, you countenance the existence of an underclass in a distinctively modern bind: on the one hand, poverty and helplessness, on the other, the chimera of boundless adventure and material plenty presented by the television set. If your sympathies are more libertarian, you are bound to ask yourself what your fine feelings amount to. The lot of the poor is wretched; and, if Herrnstein and Murray are correct, will tend to become more so. What, then, is the merit of encouraging unmarried young women in such a predicament to discover their own sexuality and get pregnant?
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut relates that, in the years after the Second World War, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. “At that time”, he says, “they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.” Some anthropologists and sociologists are still fostering in the minds of their students the belief that differences of ability between individuals or groups are either illusory or the product of oppression. It is seen as injurious to people’s dignity to compare them with others in any respect and find them wanting. Since Vonnegut left university, this doctrine has acquired a harder edge. Where he was taught that “nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting”, an exception is now made in radical sociological circles for anyone who seeks to measure or compare; the very processes of measurement and comparison being seen as the outward and visible signs of an incipiently fascist mind-set.
An implication of the evidence reported in The Bell Curve is that this sort of piety may have begun to outlive its usefulness. For if viewed through Vonnegutian eyes, from a distant planet, certain things about class and intelligence must by now be plain. It must be evident that no government at present imaginable could raise taxes to the level required to give the children of the underclass a fair start. Distinctly audible in the interplanetary void there may also be echoes of the nasty Marxist argument that the fates of the prosperous and the poor are causally linked. Visions of freedom and essential sameness spring into the minds of the talented and upwardly mobile with the force they do, this argument insists, because they enable the talented and upwardly mobile to ignore the economic injustices on which their own projects of personal discovery depend. They can lever themselves upwards only by treading the poor and gullible down, black and white alike.
The Bell Curve has been published at a delicate moment. The panaceas of both the Thatcherite right and enlightened left are ceasing to convince as they once convinced; and the feeling is abroad that, intellectually speaking, the moment may have come to move on. If this text were, paradoxically, to encourage even a few of us to examine our beliefs about the just and decent society in the light of what is demonstrably happening around us, rather than of pieties that make us glow internally, its many imperfections could prove more forgivable than they now seem.
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
THE BELL CURVE
Intelligence and class structure in American life
845pp. New York: Free Press. £25.
0 02 914673 9
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