F
or all its wealth of data, skillful argumentation, and scope, The Bell Curve is a narrow and
deeply flawed book. Murray and Herrnstein have fallen prey to a methodological fetishism that prevents them from adequately considering
alternative, equally plausible inferences that can be drawn from the studies they marshal to buttress their conclusions.
The argument of The Bell Curve is carried out on two distinct, though in the authors' minds interrelated, levels. On the first, they discuss
issues related to the rise of a "cognitive elite," a trend characteristic of all industrial societies, whose knowledge-driven economies offer
fewer and fewer employment opportunities for people unable to operate in the type of occupations such economies require. On the second
level, they argue that a more or less permanent underclass, characterized by the prevalence of low cognitive ability, is becoming a fixture of
American society.
Both observations have been discussed here and abroad for some time. But by adding the dimension of race, a factor peculiar to American
society, The Bell Curve carries the discussion in new directions. Race-determined cognitive ability, they argue, is the underlying reality
driving a grisly sorting process that is dividing the nation. Caught in an epistemological paradigm in which psychological operations are
reduced to genetic ones, they suggest that biology is destiny. No amount of camouflage or public and private efforts to create a level playing
field, they imply, can prevent the inexorable slide of African-Americans into a cognitive caste.
The question is not whether Murray and Herrnstein's argument is "racist"; the question is whether the empirically measured differences
among racial groups reflect "intelligence." The tests do indeed measure something, but it is not "intelligence." Rather, they measure what I
have called "modern consciousness," a set of intellectual skills that are particularly relevant to operating in the highly specialized worlds of
modern technology and rationalistically organized bureaucracies. These core institutions of modern society are produced by, and in turn
produce, peculiarly modern cognitive styles: the ability to operate on high levels of abstraction; to break reality down analytically into
components; to keep multiple relationships in mind simultaneously; and, especially significant for IQ testing, to relate present tasks to
possible future consequences. This last skill, by definition, can be achieved only on the basis of past experiences and habits of thought that
individuals acqire during the earliest period of socialization, when a basic matrix of cognition develops.
Once one is willing to entertain this alternative explanation for the bulk of the data presented in this book, many things fall into place: the
well-documented phenomenon of globally rising test scores as modernization progresses and, similarly, the "leveling off" of rising SAT
scores among the most gifted students in already modernized countries; the much-noted capacity of East Asian students to outscore
non-East Asians on the non-verbal part of IQ tests, which may be understood as attesting to the "cultural capital" of East Asians rather than
their genetic superiority; the measured differences in IQ among siblings, known as the birth-order effect; the shift in scores when an
individual moves from a rural to an urban setting or from one social class to another. The list could be expanded.
Murray and Herrnstein's methodological fixation blinds them to a different way of understanding these phenomena. The deficiency is
especially conspicuous in their interpretation of the relatively low scores of African-Americans as a group. While everyone would agree that
some individuals are smarter than others and that IQ is not as malleable as some have argued in the past, there is good evidence that
socialization practices (particularly in the early years) and factors of family structure and interaction, of neighborhood and religion, help
shape an individual's cognitive structure. If one looks at the data presented in this book from the "modern consciousness" analytical
framework, it becomes clear that African-Americans, as a group, continue to lead lives distant from the centers of modernity. Hence they
have not yet been fully initiated into the habits of thought underpinning the operations of sophisticated technologies and organizational
structures. Yet there is no reason to suppose that this could not be changed through the practices that help form modern consciousness.
When a methodological fetishism of the dimension manifested in this book permeates the interpretation of individuals, groups, and social
life as a whole, the conclusions about what is to be done may indeed look like those reached by Murray and Herrnstein. The authors conjure
up a future strangely at odds with everything I know both of them cherish, a future in which human efforts and virtues become ever more
insignificant. What remains is the triumph of pure intelligence. Looking at the future from the perspective I propose, however, one would
ask whether it is not likely that we, as a society, will come to put a premium on human qualities that have less to do with formal intelligence
than with an individual's capacity for, say, empathy, a sense of humor, or religious commitment. What type of individuals, for example, will
staff the institutions of elder care that demography will increasingly require? To put it succinctly: when I am about to die of Alzheimer's, I
emphatically do not wish to be taken care of by Charles Murray.
The authors appear to believe sincerely that when everyone knows his "place" in society (i.e., when individuals and groups accept their
genetic limitations), everything will be in balance. Yet a reliance upon IQ as the ultimate arbiter in social policy could well make for sloth and
frivolity among all classes, with those at the top smugly certain that they belong there, while the rest assume there is no point in making any
effort at all. If there is one thing more disturbing than a ruling class based on privilege, it is a ruling class that believes it deserves its position
by virtue of its intelligence. The one hopeful element of this scenario is that
the cognitive elite, in its self-satisfied arrogance, would become
so lazy that its regime would not last long.
The implications of this book for American conservatives are, to my mind, quite simple. The worst thing for conservatives
to do would be to
become identified with the Murray--Herrnstein position. The "balkanization from the Left" that
conservatives have so valiantly fought for these
past decades would be overshadowed by a specter of technological
totalitarianism hardly consonant with visions of liberty and
democracy.