Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 2, 1994 TAG: 9411030060
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Whether that's the same thing as intelligence, or what Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein call "cognitive ability," is another question, and one that we'll leave for others to argue. But Murray and Herrnstein - co-authors of the new and much-remarked book, "The Bell Curve" - seem on firm enough ground in arguing that IQ is a generally accurate predictor of educational, economic and social outcomes.
The traits that as a rule enable people to do well on IQ tests are, or are linked to, traits that as a rule enable individuals to do well in the life of economically advanced societies of the late 20th century.
Which makes it all the more bewildering, not to say self-contradictory, when the authors get around to arguing that groups shouldn't be concerned if their average IQ is lower than that of other groups - even when the group difference is as much as the 15 points between white and black Americans.
Such advice may have a patina of political correctness. But it is eerily akin to the old racist notion that black people should be content with their subordinate lot and revel in the glorious opportunity to pick plantation cotton.
That isn't the only p.c.-like but bizarre sop offered up by Murray and Herrnstein. In a New Republic essay based on Parts III and IV of "The Bell Curve," they say that group IQ differences shouldn't be confused with IQ differences among individuals. Though African-Americans on average score lower on IQ tests than Caucasian-Americans (and Caucasian-Americans somewhat lower than Asian-Americans), individual blacks may score far higher than the white average.
True. But the authors' preoccupation with group differences is akin to reflexive liberals' preoccupation with group identity. Some liberals want to measure everything according to group participation and representation. They recoil only, it seems, from group measures of IQ.
The problem, among many, with Murray and Herrnstein is their conclusion that the existence of group differences implies that we should ignore them. To suggest that Americans, armed with insights from their book, will now start judging each other as individuals rather than as members of racial groups is to raise the prospect that "The Bell Curve" was not written on the planet Earth.
Racism must be fought by treating others as individuals, and by correcting a history of discrimination against groups.
Whether IQ is more a consequence of heredity than of environment, as Murray and Herrnstein also argue, is another of those questions best left for others to debate. Clearly, though, the authors are being either naive or cynically sly in suggesting that their belief in the genetic basis of IQ doesn't matter - after delineating sometimes significant differences in group IQs, with groups defined in racial or ethnic terms rather than, say, by geography or religion or income.
By itself, it's a confused argument. In addition, negative reaction to "The Bell Curve" by other students of "intelligence" and learning issues has made it clear that some of the premises of "The Bell Curve" are just plain wrong.
As it turns out, for instance, considerable evidence exists that intervention programs such as Head Start can have a positive effect on IQ - contrary to the assertions of Murray and Herrnstein. And in citing the persistence of the black-white group difference in IQ test scores as evidence of the immutability of group IQs, the authors apparently did not notice how the rise over the decades in the group scores for both undermines their own thesis.
Meanwhile, as it also turns out, other studies suggest that however much IQ variations may be genetically based for individuals, they may be all culturally derived at the level of ethnic groups. A 15-point IQ gap between the majority and a minority ethnic group in Japan, for example, was entirely erased in America, where immigrating Japanese were treated by the white majority as an undifferentiated ethnic group.
All this would be academic, save for the public-policy implications. It is well that this subject should not be considered taboo. Discussion is healthy, taboos unscientific. But the intent of "The Bell Curve," at least in part, seems to be to belittle public initiatives that try to redress legitimate racial grievances. If the IQ gap is meaningful as the authors say, yet not nearly so immutable as they claim, then the implication should be the opposite.
by CNB