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Title: The Bell Curve Author: Wayne Price Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: Fascism, antifa, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, anti-racism, racism Source: 1995 Mar/Apr issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160322154653/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/45
There has recently been a lot of publicity around Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life. The authors claim that IQ tests prove that
African-Americans are dumber than whites, lower class whites are dumber
than middle- and upper-class whites, and immigrants are dumber than
native-born whites.
Along with a number of related books, The Bell Curve has been widely
reviewed and discussed in the mass-circulation newsmagazines (Time,
Newsweek, and US News), the political publications of liberalism and
conservatism (New Republic, Nation, Commentary, etc.), and on the
opinion pages and columns of the influential newspapers. The reception
has mostly been critical but respectful.
I have not read the whole book, only excerpts together with descriptions
and commentary. This is not, then, a book review, but a discussion of a
social phenomenon.
Murray and Herrnstein admit that, in the past, inequality was caused by
environmental factors of discrimination and prejudice. But now, they
claim, all this oppression has passed away. Nowadays we have an open
meritocracy, where individuals from all races, classes, genders, and
religions rise freely to the top or fall to the bottom, based only on
their intelligence. This creates a “cognitive elite” on top and an
“underclass” of fools on the bottom.
The view that the USA is an open society has little relation to reality.
Despite certain gains, won with great effort, racism and sexism remain
deeply embedded in the structures of every institution. Class position
permits wealthier parents to pass on wealth, social contracts, and the
social skills and culture needed to advance in this society.
These writers are not making the standard conservative argument. The
non-fascist right usually argues that those on the bottom are lazy,
shiftless, and immoral: they could do better but chose not to. Therefore
society has no responsibility for them; let them starve if they will not
work! But Murray and company state that those on the bottom really
cannot help themselves. They are simply biologically inferior. This view
takes conservatism a giant step toward an openly racist, biological
ideology. Its implications, never spelled out, are fascist, including
forced sterilization, eugenics, and genocide.
Murray and Herrnstein are clear about the political character of their
work. Murray states that he is saying openly the sort of (racist,
undemocratic) comments that wealthier white people say privately.
Herrnstein is dead, but Murray connects his views with attacks on
welfare, Head Start, educational enrichment, and immigration, and with
fear of a growing “white underclass.”
Defenders of The Bell Curve and similar works argue that their opinions
should be respected, even if disagreed with, because they are scientific
and scholarly. Actually there is no new research presented here, just a
rehash of already known material mixed with falsehoods and blatant
misinterpretations.
The Bell Curve confuses two very different concepts of “IQ.” (Actually,
most intelligence or cognitive tests no longer use the term, but I will
use “IQ” to mean “scores on intelligence tests.”) One is that IQ is a
measure of innate intelligence, underlying actual thinking, what people
are born with, unaffected by environment, and unchangeable over a
lifetime. It is a real thing in the head (perhaps the speed of nerve
conduction). This is the implicit view of Murray and other conservative
ideologues.
However, this is nonsense. It is as if someone claimed to have a ruler
that did not measure people’s real height (caused by the interaction of
their genes with the environment) but an innate, underlying Height,
unaffected by their diet, and distinct from how tall they actually are.
The other concept is that IQs and other scores are test scores, created
to estimate a useful theoretical concept, “general intelligence,” that
is not a thing but a summary of a set of thinking skills. These include
the ability to learn from experience in this culture, to use language
(English), to solve problems logically, to think abstractly, and to
concentrate on a task. Such skills are the product of a complex
interaction between genetic heredity and many aspects of the social and
physical environment. This view of intelligence testing is consistent
with that of the big majority of psychologists and researchers.
Obviously this set of cognitive skills does not cover all aspects of
thinking or acting. It does not include thinking creatively or
originally. It does not include artistic or musical or athletic ability.
In fact, children may not be classified as retarded just on the basis of
an intelligence test; they must also have an evaluation of adaptive
behavior: how they take care of themselves and relate to others.
Neuropsychologists, who examine brain/cognitive interaction, will
usually add a memory test, among other instruments, to an intelligence
test. Finally, IQ does not include motivation, so important to how well
people do in life, and something heavily influenced by environment and
experience.
The manual for the most widely used intelligence test states,
“Intellectual ability is only one aspect of intelligence....[We] must
distinguish between test scores or IQs on the one hand and intelligence
on the other” (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Third Edition,
Manual).
The bell-curvers claim that intelligence test scores are important
because they predict several aspects of life. Since they treat IQs as
measuring innate, biological intelligence, they treat such predictions
as proving that intelligence causes these things—instead of as just
happening together with them.
It is true that, in general, IQs predict fairly well how people will do
in school. After all, these tests try to measure just those traits most
important in schools.
IQs predict, but much more weakly, how well people will do in terms of
jobs and income. School-type skills and school learning are only weakly
connected with “getting ahead”; useful but only up to a point. Otherwise
college professors would be the richest people.
More negatively, low IQ scores predict—weakly—the likelihood of going to
jail, using dope, having babies without being married, and generally
doing things that are dangerous and not respectable. This “proves”
little except that it is unpleasant to be undereducated, unemployed, and
poor.
However the conservatives make this exciting by noting that different
population groups have different average IQ scores. Thus
African-Americans consistently test lower—on the average—than
European-Americans. The implication is that Blacks are a biological
group that is innately inferior to whites in intelligence, and that this
causes Black poverty and crime.
This is ridiculous, because “racial” groups are not biological entities.
Black people have quite a lot of white ancestry, as whites have a good
deal of Black. Both African-Americans and European-Americans are mergers
of a wide range of physical types. Nor are “immigrants” a biological
grouping.
From the other view of “intelligence,” as a concept about a set of
mental skills, the meaning of “facts” changes. Different ethnic and
class groups have different social psychologies—each group’s common way
of thinking, valuing, and behaving. Average group IQs go together with
group values and behavior because they are all part of the common way of
thinking, not because intelligence causes all the other more-or-less
common aspects of group life.
Some social groups have been faced with great oppression,
discrimination, forced poverty and degradation, with few avenues for
learning or social rising. Parts—not all—of these groups respond by
rejecting the values of education and by internalizing their oppressors’
view of themselves to an extent. (Malcolm X frequently spoke about
this.) This has been true, not only of a layer of African-Americans but
also of some Italian-Americans and white Appalachians.
Of course this does not prove that these groups are biologically
inferior in intellectual ability. Nor does it show that they are
“culturally deprived.” Along with weaknesses, their cultures also have
great strengths. Every group—ethnic, racial, or class—has strengths and
weaknesses.
Every group’s culture is terribly distorted compared to the truly human
culture that a free society may someday develop.
That The Bell Curve and other such trash could be widely publicized and
discussed means something politically—beyond their insignificance as
science. Far-right ideas have become respectable and can be treated as
part of the public dialogue by the mainstream capitalist press. Fascism
is definitely not on the agenda yet, but the population is being
familiarized with the basic “ideas” of fascism. We have to do our best
to attack these ideas and to familiarize people with the ideas of
freedom.