Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411080072
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK HAMPSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Success and failure in the American economy,'' argue Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, ``are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit.''
Their new book is ``The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,'' and rarely has social science - three pounds and 852 pages worth, including 44 tables, 93 graphs, seven appendices and 108 pages of footnotes - created such a ruckus.
The book contends that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is largely inherited, that it largely (and increasingly) determines the winners and losers in our information-based economy, that it is virtually immutable after early childhood, and that it is possessed in differing degrees by different races.
Blacks as a group, for instance, lag whites by 15 points in IQ scores, a difference that Murray and Herrnstein insist cannot be explained by test bias or environmental factors such as poor education or nutrition.
They foresee a society split into a wealthy, high-IQ ``cognitive elite'' and an impoverished low-IQ underclass. The former will be largely white, they say, the latter largely minority.
But Murray, a conservative policy analyst, and Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist who died recently, caution readers that ``it is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences in intelligence and not run screaming from the room.''
Possible but not likely, to judge from the clamor the book has provoked. The Times of London says Murray and Herrnstein have written ``the year's most reviled publication'' and ``touched a match to America's most explosive issue.'' The Washington Times says they've driven ``a rhetorical car bomb into the middle of the public square.''
President Clinton himself - who has praised Murray's previous work - was said to be outraged by ``The Bell Curve.''
He's not alone.
Salim Muwakkil, senior editor of In These Times magazine, summarized its message this way: ``Black Americans have failure in their genes.''
Writing in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, Elijah Gosier recalled his own self-doubts as a fourth-grader, and warned that the book ``has the potential to make people stop believing in themselves.''
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution compared Murray to what the Greeks called a ``parasito,'' a professional flatterer who was welcomed to the dining rooms of the rich in return for lavishing praise on his hosts.
It all recalled a Victorian dirty book scandal. And while ``The Bell Curve'' wasn't banned in Boston, it was panned there in a Globe editorial - a full two months before publication.
None of which has hurt sales.
At Shakespeare & Co., a bookshop on Manhattan's traditionally liberal upper West Side, ``The Bell Curve'' was No. 4 in nonfiction sales and featured in a window display. Ruth Liebmann, a manager, described sales as ``brisk times five.''
``We're in a neighborhood with a lot of psychologists and educators, so this is the kind of book people feel they have to read, whether their reaction to it is positive or negative,'' she said.
The book made the covers of Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, with the latter describing Murray as ``THE MOST DANGEROUS CONSERVATIVE.'' When The New Republic scheduled an essay by Murray and Herrnstein on race and intelligence, the staff revolted. So the editors printed 19 rebuttals, creating a debate that took up 29 of the 54 pages in the Oct. 31 issue.
But ``The Bell Curve'' wasn't making such an impression on talk radio, possibly because the cognitive elite weren't tuned in.
``There's been surprisingly little reaction from listeners,'' said G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate figure who hosts a syndicated program. ``Murray's only saying that intelligence rules. So what's the big deal?''
For all the hype surrounding his book, Murray himself was in no danger of overexposure. There was no book tour, and reporters were asked not to name the Maryland town where he lives for fear of death threats. His publicist said he did not want to talk anymore about ``the media frenzy.''
``It's damn near hysteria,'' Murray told the London Times last week. He professed himself depressed by the reaction to ``what we think was a responsible, sensitive, humane discussion of a difficult issue.''
In the book, he and Herrnstein make these points, many of them well-established by social science research:
IQ test scores are relatively accurate predictors of how well large groups of people do in life. IQ, or intelligence quotient, will become even more important as the economy demands more and more brainpower, and as high IQ people keep marrying each other and having high IQ children.
A large part of IQ - maybe 60 percent - is inherited.
Blacks as a group score about 15 points lower than whites on IQ tests, while Asians score slightly higher.
IQ usually doesn't vary much over life, even when strenuous attempts are made to change it. And even if it can be significantly changed, we don't know how to do it very well.
The last point is crucial, because it allows Murray to downplay the explosive (and fairly fuzzy) issues of genetics and race as peripheral to his conclusion: Most of the welfare state's efforts, such as job training and remedial education, are doomed to fail because most of its intended beneficiaries are too dumb to pull themselves out of poverty.
Must IQ be destiny? Here's how Murray put it recently in a television interview: ``Is environment important [to IQ]? Yes. Do we know how to manipulate the environment? No.''
The book proceeds to this prediction: American society will become highly stratified, with the cognitive elite lording over an impoverished, unruly and expensive underclass. Democracy withers, the United States becomes a giant, repressive banana republic and Jefferson spins in his grave.
Although academic opinion will take a while to form, several criticisms of ``The Bell Curve'' surfaced quickly: that intelligence is broader than whatever an IQ test measures; that IQ tests, despite efforts to fine-tune them, remain inherently biased against cultural minorities; and that even if genes play a large role in intelligence, that doesn't mean the environment does not, or that society should stop trying to do what it can to boost IQ.
Murray and Herrnstein deal with such objections in great detail. They argue, for example, that research shows the black-white IQ gap is actually wider on tests that appear ``culturally neutral'' than on those that seem ``culturally loaded.''
Conservative support for ``The Bell Curve'' has been less than ringing.
Some on the right, such as William F. Buckley and William Bennett, have mostly stuck to the they-have-a-right-to-be-heard line of argument. Others, like columnists John Leo of U.S. News & World Report and William Safire of The New York Times, have been flatly dismissive.
Other readers wondered why Murray and Herrnstein brought up race at all, especially since the authors emphasize how IQ is splitting the nation by class.
``The only justification for making this case is that it is true,'' neoconservative Nathan Glazer wrote in The New Republic. But it's not enough: ``This truth throws into question most public efforts to overcome black-white differences. ... I ask myself whether the untruth is not better for American society than the truth.''
Murray says the authors HAD to talk about race and intelligence, because otherwise readers would suspect them of dodging an issue ``which lots of people have been whispering about behind their hands.''
Murray has been liberals' bete noir since the publication a decade ago of ``Losing Ground,'' his influential attack on the welfare state. Now, as then, he claims to be searching for the truth, and to be troubled by some of his own findings.
But some suspect Murray of a reckless bad faith. A New York Times Magazine article described him sipping champagne in first class on a flight to Aspen, Colo., cackling about the ``pornographic'' aspect of his research one minute and drooling the next over the exquisite vintages he would taste upon arrival at the home of a wealthy patron.
The article also revealed that when Murray was a high school senior, he and some buddies burned a cross in his hometown of Newton, Iowa - a stunt he describes today as stupid but without racial intent.
All the attention was a publicist's dream. The man pinching himself was John Ekizian of The Free Press, which doubled the $30 tome's first press run of 100,000.
``Unbelievable,'' Ekizian said. ``We expected editorial page attention, but it's spun out into something much bigger.''
But much of the reaction was beyond negative, he was reminded. Headlines for the New Republic rebuttals included ``Neo-Nazis!'' and ``The Lying Game.''
``It's not for me to object to publicity,'' Ekizian explained. ``I mean, this is America.''
by CNB