Charles Murray

BA, Harvard University

Charles Murray is the pet sociologist of the regressive-conservative right. He says, and probably believes, that he is “a social scientist, and a damned good one.” But one look at who sponsors his work and his objective scientist bona fides start to seem ultra-iffy.

Murray’s book Losing Ground, published in 1984, focuses on what it claims is the futility of social benefits programs such as welfare and affirmative action, and calls for their abolition. He wrote the book while a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank whose mission is to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.” Yeah—that old right-wing wheeze. The institute’s board features, among others, national empath/loon Peggy Noonan and William Kristol; it advertises praise from DICK CHENEY and Rudolph “Noun Verb 9/11” Giuliani. With such sponsorship, is it any wonder that pretty much the only people to hail the book’s conclusions are the conservatives who agreed with it before it was ever written? For everyone else, the book features misleading statistics, goalpost-moving changes of definitions, and conveniently ignored contexts, all in the service of promoting the elimination of welfare.

But never mind that. Murray became a star with The Bell Curve (1994), which he wrote with the late Richard Herrnstein (of Harvard). It purports to prove that the IQs of African Americans are genetically—fatedly—lower than those of whites. (But don’t get cocky, white people. Your IQs are lower than those of Asians.) To prove its by-definition racist (and implicitly eugenicist) thesis, The Bell Curve cherry-picks IQ tests, manipulates statistics, and proffers research of highly dubious provenance. Why? Why else—to make the case for abolishing government laws, subsidies, and ameliorations regarding black people.

As for its sponsorship and credentials, oh brother. If you thought the Manhattan Institute cast a pall of prejudice over Murray’s first book, getta loada Mankind Quarterly. Born in Edinburgh in 1960, this publication is an anthropological journal founded and funded by what we might call “genetic white supremacists.” Its founder, Robert Gayre, advocated apartheid in South Africa, defended “racialism” from its unfortunate association with the Nazis, and once testified in a trial that, in his opinion, blacks were “worthless.” Mankind Quarterly gets its money from the Pioneer Fund,* which—despite its denial of any connection to white supremacism or, um, Nazis—retains its charter-enshrined mission: “race betterment, with special reference to the people of the United States.”

One of Murray’s and Herrnstein’s key advisors on The Bell Curve was Richard Lynn, a psychology professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland—an associate editor of Mankind Quarterly who has received $325K from the Pioneer Fund.^* Lynn has, in his writing, agreed with the view that “the poor and the ill” are “weak specimens whose proliferation needs to be discouraged in the interests of the improvement of the genetic quality of the group, and ultimately of group survival.” A Newsday article cited him as saying, “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.… Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”

“Race betterment.” Improving “the genetic quality of the group.” “Incompetent cultures.” Yes, and “phasing out” peoples via “the extinction of the less competent.” With intellectual guidance like that, who needs Nazis? Murray denies that his book is a eugenics tract and insists that his focus is not black people, but social class. But considering the fact that one key chapter harps on “dysgenesis” (the genetic deterioration of a population), that denial seems disingenuous at best. A social class is not a genetic phenomenon. But a race—at least to the Murrays of the world—is.

The upshot of all this is that government shouldn’t waste money on trying to improve educational (or any other) opportunities for the poor unfortunates whose genetic inferiority, of course, is not really their fault. What should the genetically blessed do instead? Set a good example. That, in fact, is the theme of Murray’s book Coming Apart (2012), which ascribes the “decline” in American society to the abandonment by the rich white upper class of its traditional obligation to instruct the lower orders by showing them how to behave.

Yes, really.

Murray has won for himself a life of wealth, luxury, and esteem by lending “scientific” support to policies beloved of racists, crackpots, and anti-Semites—and, more important, of conservatives. Because after all: If a government’s efforts to aid its citizens are doomed to fail, why bother? Which means, why pay—why even levy—taxes?

Who does this? One answer: a small-town boy acting out.

Murray grew up in tiny, idyllic Newton, Iowa. His father was stern, his mother insufferable. He enjoyed “taking pride in perversity” at Harvard by wearing his ties with the fat end short. After college, in 1965, Murray joined the Peace Corps. He went to Thailand, where he lived in a village that he came to regard as a model society. “Essentially, most of what you read in my books I learned in Thai villages,” he told Bill Kristol in 2014. “I suddenly was struck first by the enormous discrepancy between what Bangkok thought was important to the villagers and what the villagers wanted out of government. And the second thing I got out of it was that when the government change agent showed up, the village went to hell in terms of its internal governance.”

There’s the right’s favorite sociologist: a nerd who defies The Man by wearing his tie wrong, and who longed for the America of 2014 to be more like a Southeast Asian village in 1965.