Before 2017, Sam Harris had a reputation as an intrepid atheist campaigner and author, a penetrating podcast interviewer and an all-round man of ideas. He was thought to be more on the liberal side of the American political divide, if anywhere, and on some issues that is still where he would place himself. But something happened that year that turned Harris into a vociferous advocate of race science. It was all about one man.
Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve, was making a speech at Middlebury College, Vermont. He was shouted down, and his chaperone was assaulted. Murray’s star had faded from his heyday in the mid-1990s, when he had given expert evidence on welfare reform to a Senate committee. Since then, he had been branded a scientific racist and faced boycotts and protests. Although he earned a whack from various think tanks and had pressed on with books and papers on his pet subjects of libertarian welfare reform, race and IQ (including a very odd one on Jewish intelligence that we’ll peruse in the next chapter), his public reach was curtailed. The Bell Curve continued to influence right-wing politicians – the Republican congressman and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, cited Murray as an expert on poverty – but his high profile seemed largely confined to alt-right forums such as Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel.
The Vermont incident changed all that. Murray became an alt-right hero and martyr to the cause of free speech. It goes without saying that the alt-right and free speech are not the same, or even similar, things. Most advocates of free speech hate racism but some found their way to the alt-right’s Web-based forums through Murray, whose public career was given a boost; Molyneux’s half an hour massage of Murray, originally made in 2015, received a flood of new viewers, passing the 300,000 mark. Suddenly everyone wanted Murray.
One of them was Harris. He read Murray and Herrnstein’s book and swallowed it whole. Having once declined to participate in a symposium alongside Murray, he invited the seventy-five-year-old political scientist on to his popular ‘Waking up’ podcast, calling the episode ‘Forbidden Knowledge’. He portrayed Murray as a valiant truth-seeker and his critics as cowardly, dishonest, hypocritical witch-burners. In his introduction he parroted some of The Bell Curve’s key propositions on race and intelligence: that IQ tests genuinely measured intelligence, that ‘average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups’, that ‘genes appear to be 50 to 80 per cent of the story’ and that ‘there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person’s intelligence, even in childhood.’ These, Harris insisted, were facts. There was ‘almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence’, he said, adding that there was ‘virtually no scientific controversy’ over Murray’s claims.1 Not only was this spectacularly wrong – they are not facts and there is much controversy over each of these points – considering the weight, detail and authority of the many scientific critiques of Murray’s work and these claims in particular, it was extraordinary. It seemed that while Harris had absorbed The Bell Curve, he hadn’t read much further.
For 138 minutes Harris gave the race science libertarian a more-than-respectful belly-rub that attracted 400,000 listeners. Murray used the opportunity to repeat his claim that genetics played a role in racial IQ averages before launching a vituperative attack on his many academic critics, claiming they ‘lied without any apparent shadow of guilt because, I guess, in their own minds, they thought they were doing the Lord’s work’. Harris listened, affirmed but did not challenge. Only once, tentatively, did he pose what might be classed as a penetrating question when he noted that The Bell Curve was much-loved by white supremacists and asked about the purpose of exploring race-based differences in intelligence. Murray didn’t miss a beat, using the moment to plug his political views. Its use, he said, came in countering policies such as affirmative action in education and employment, which he found ‘morally repugnant’ because it was based on the false premise that ‘everybody is equal above the neck … whether it’s men or women or whether it’s ethnicities. When you have that embedded into law, you have a variety of bad things happen.’2
This interview transformed Harris’s reputation from being the ‘fourth horseman of the atheist apocalypse’3 into what the uncharitable might call a useful idiot of the alt-right. Clearly, at a personal level he is no racist but in defending and advocating this viewpoint he put himself in the same boat as Murray, even finding himself blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a ‘propagator of hate’, alongside Murray. He didn’t help by getting into a year-long skirmish with Ezra Klein, the then editor-in-chief of Vox, who had criticised the ‘soft-soap’ conduct of Murray’s interview. The spat began with an email exchange that Harris unilaterally published, although he later admitted ‘it backfired on me.’
One of the reasons it backfired was that Harris, the advocate of free speech, was refusing to debate with Klein, having initially invited him on to the podcast. Eventually, Harris changed his mind. Their debate covered much relating to their motivations, and those of various other players, but not so much to The Bell Curve’s claims. However, Harris did reiterate the point that ethnic differences in IQ are partly genetic and that at an individual level IQ is virtually immutable. As he put it: ‘The problem is, yes, it’s hard to change your IQ. We don’t know of an environmental intervention that reliably changes people’s IQ. Murray is right about that.’4 Klein disputed this, pointing out that adoption can raise IQ by twelve to eighteen points, and he explained IQ differences between black and white Americans in terms of the history of slavery and racism, and current disparities in wealth and experience. And that is, in essence, the core of the dispute over race and IQ that has waxed and waned for fifty years.
The discovery of the full horror of the Holocaust, which was in part inspired by eugenic theory, forced race science into retreat. It was kept alive – barely – by the openly racist journal Mankind Quarterly, whose board had once included Josef Mengele’s mentor, and by the white supremacist Pioneer Fund, whose stated raison d’être is ‘racial betterment’. This changed in 1969, when the Harvard Educational Review published a paper by the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, entitled ‘How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?’,5 which sparked the furious and concerted debate on race and intelligence that led to the publication of The Bell Curve twenty-five years later.
Jensen’s case was not much different from that of the racist IQ advocates of the first quarter of the twentieth century but because such views had been kept quiet, his intervention looked like something new. He claimed IQ was 80 per cent heritable and suggested differences between black and white IQs were genetic in origin. He argued that remedial schemes, such as the Head Start programme, had failed to boost the IQs of black Americans and that further interventions of this kind were also likely to fail, because black Americans had lower genetic intelligence than white or Asian Americans. In fact, he began the article with a statement of political intent: ‘Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.’6
Jensen’s paper met an overwhelmingly negative reaction – ‘an international firestorm’, as the New York Times called it forty-three years later, in an obituary.7 It prompted twenty-nine rebuttals and critiques in academic journals and a wave of student protest, much of it at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was based. Students burned him in effigy, and he received death threats and had to be accompanied by bodyguards. His publishers refused to permit reprints or to allow Jensen to respond to letters of criticism. But the paper had what many considered to be its intended impact; it allowed other racist psychologists to crawl out of the woodwork, while Jensen continued to publish papers with increasingly overt racist content. He dipped his toes in political waters, questioning the point of programmes giving support to poor black people, and was heavily backed by the Pioneer Fund (to the tune of at least US$1.1 million by 1994).8 But, unlike his collaborators, he steered clear of extreme right groups or writing for Mankind Quarterly.
Among the new wave was the UK-based German psychologist, Hans Eysenck. In 1971, his book Race, Intelligence and Education argued that the selection of slaves for the plantations made black Americans a less intelligent African sample, and implied that Italian, Spanish, Greek and Portuguese immigrants to the USA were not up to scratch in the IQ stakes. He said his research pointed to the ‘overwhelming importance of genetic factors in producing the great variety of intellectual difference which we observe in our culture and much of the difference observed between certain racial groups’.9 Eysenck, who studied under Cyril Burt, had enjoyed a lofty reputation until his zeal in backing extreme rightist causes embarrassed his colleagues. He contributed several pieces to neo-Nazi publications such as National-Zeitung and Nation und Europa, including an anti-Semitic one about Freud, and wrote racist prefaces for books by the French fascist Pierre Krebs and British fascist Roger Pearson. An interview with Eysenck was published in the British National Front’s mouthpiece, Beacon, and he was a member of the advisory council for Mankind Quarterly. Eysenck’s journal, Personality and Individual Differences, offered a launch pad for fellow travellers such as Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton. He played the role of Jensen’s wing-man but the American did the heavy lifting, pumping out books and papers on his beliefs in racially based intelligence differences.
A flood of academic critique focused on the details of their underlying theory. Stephen Jay Gould criticised Jensen for not understanding heritability; Jensen used it as a measure of difference between populations, rather than within a population, as intended.10 Richard Nisbett summed up the research methods of Jensen and his collaborator, J. Philippe Rushton: [they] ‘ride roughshod over the evidence …’.11 Yet, despite the flaws and caveats, Jensen was taken seriously in the esoteric realm of IQ psychology. Even beyond it, his reputation was less flaky than that of his most ardent supporters.
One supporter was the physicist William Shockley (inventor of the transistor and joint winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956), who later turned his mind to intelligence and population growth. Shockley, who featured as a source of inspiration for the Ku Klux Klan in Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, said higher rates of reproduction among unintelligent people – blacks in particular – were leading to a decline in civilisation. (To offset this calamity, he generously donated some of his sperm to a Nobel Prize-winner sperm bank.) Among his odd outbursts on race was: ‘Nature has colour-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man in the street.’12
The oddest supporter of the lot was Rushton, a British-born, South African-raised Canadian, who went from collaborating with Jensen to producing some weird outpourings of his own. He showed none of Jensen’s caution, writing for the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance and addressing its conferences. He praised the ‘scholarly’ work of the segregationist Henry Garrett, and in 2009 was a keynote speaker at a conference on ‘Preserving Western Civilization’, held in Baltimore. In his speech, he argued that Islam was a genetic problem; not just a belief system but a reflection of an innately aggressive Muslim personality that involved a simple, closed mind not amenable to reason.13
Rushton indulged his obsession with racial difference in sexual behaviour at the University of Western Ontario. He surveyed his male students, asking about penis length, sex partners and ejaculation distance (not something most men would measure, presumably). His dubious methods – such as bullying first years into participating – caused the university to ban him from using students as research subjects. Instead, he trotted off to a Toronto shopping mall, where he recruited fifty white, fifty black and fifty Asian men to answer the same questions. He was reprimanded again for a ‘serious breach of scholarly procedure’, partly because he paid his recruits.14 His secondary research was also idiosyncratic; he used Penthouse as a source of data, and repeatedly dipped into an 1896 anthro-porn book, Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, which includes advice for sexual tourists such as ‘black women smell like crocodiles’.15 Rushton’s theory was that Mongoloids, the smartest humans, were socially disciplined, emotionally inexpressive, relatively sexually inactive and had smaller penises and testicles but bigger brains. Negroids, the least smart, were emotionally expressive, socially undisciplined, hypersexual and had the biggest penises and testicles but the smallest brains. Caucasians were in the middle.16
This related to another of Rushton’s ideas, borrowed from E. O. Wilson: r/K selection theory. Organisms with an ‘r’ strategy reach sexual maturity quickly, have short gestation and produce many offspring who are left to survive on their own. Those pursuing a ‘K’ strategy reach sexual maturity slowly, have longer gestation and invest heavily in the survival of a few offspring. Sociobiologists such as Wilson, who believe all male and female behavioural differences are evolved, characterised male mammals as r-type and female as K-type. The theory was popular in the 1970s but was critiqued for its faulty premises and lack of predictive power. Rushton embraced it, and applied it to humans, arguing that some branches of humanity were more evolved. K-people, such as Mongoloids, became more intelligent as a result of living in cold climates, reached sexual maturity later, had fewer children and invested more heavily in them. R-people, such as Negroids, reached sexual maturity early, started reproducing early and did not invest heavily in their offspring.17 Higher crime rates and lower marriage rates were a result of Negroids being r-people. Rushton looked for physiological evidence: he felt the high correlation between molar-tooth eruption and brain size (the later the tooth eruption, the bigger the brain) was significant. The problem was that there were several Mongoloid groups whose molars erupted earlier than those of Africans.18
Astonishingly, E. O. Wilson gave Rushton’s research a sympathetic pat on the back, noting that ‘Phil’ was an ‘honest and capable researcher’. Wilson commended Rushton for his ‘solid evolutionary reasoning’ but issued a curious warning: ‘If he had seen some apparent geographic variation for non-human species … no one would have batted an eye,’ he began, before getting to the nub of the matter. ‘[W]hen it comes to [human] racial differences, especially in this country, special safeguards and conventions need to be developed.’19 It seemed Wilson, who had also faced accusations of racism, backed Rushton’s conclusions but cautioned against spelling them out quite so brazenly. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who quoted Rushton liberally in The Bell Curve, also defended him, claiming in a footnote that his views, which coincided with their own, were ‘not that of a crackpot or a bigot as many of his critics are given to charging’.20 Others were less sympathetic, including those using r/K theory. The biologist Joseph Graves, who applied r/K to fruit flies, said the theory was of little use in explaining human evolution and that Rushton didn’t apply it correctly and showed scant understanding of evolution.21 The evolutionary psychologist David Barash, who had some sympathy with the application of the r/K theory to humans, said Rushton merely tried to fit the theory to his racist agenda. ‘Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book,’ he wrote in a review of Race, Evolution and Behavior.22
Rushton was able to continue to pump out papers until his death in 2012 at the age of sixty-eight, partly because of generous grants from the Pioneer Fund. By 1994, he had received at least $770,738;23 in 2000 he received a grant of $473,835, 73 per cent of the fund’s total grants for that year. In 2002 he became president of the fund, a post he held for ten years.
Overall, in the quarter-century between Jensen’s 1969 paper and the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994, race science had captured considerable ground in the esoteric milieu of IQ studies but made scant progress among the public. Jensen had softened the American psychological soil but Eysenck, Rushton, Lynn and Shockley were too far to the extreme right, and simply too flaky, to survive in the mainstream for very long. In the scientific community, excoriating critiques of the biology and methodology of race science from big hitters such as Gould and Lewontin seemed to have settled the issue. The Bell Curve changed all that.
The title of this bestseller (which refers to the bell-shaped curve of the distribution of IQ in a population) was certainly snappy but the arguments set out in its 845 pages were nothing new. They were essentially those of Jensen, Eysenck, Lynn and Rushton, with a bit of right-wing libertarian politics thrown in. The difference lay in presentation: the impression of objectivity, the tight chapter summaries, the graphs and tables, the chirpy and authoritative tone.
Herrnstein and Murray argue that America is being stratified according to intelligence, drawing high-IQ people to the top and pulling low-IQ people to the bottom. Because IQ is primarily genetic, they suggest, high-IQ couples have high-IQ babies (and vice versa), with this new elite ‘taking on some characteristics of a caste’.24 They worry that America will morph into Latin America, with high-IQ whites and Asians enclosed in fenced enclaves, protected from the ‘menace of the slums’ by armed guards. Meanwhile, the low-IQ masses, living in high-tech versions of Native American reservations, will be kept going by welfare handouts. This represents ‘something new under the sun’.25
The appendix-filled pages of part two of the book argue that IQ determines how we live, not the other way around; a point Herrnstein and Murray claim is original, although it is not. They say they are ‘clearing away some of the mystery that has surrounded the nation’s most serious problems’26 using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth conducted in the 1980s by the US Department of Labor. The authors say these test scores are a better indicator than parental class status of where children will end up on the economic ladder, as well as whether they’ll go to jail or be divorced. The correlation between poverty and low IQ is seen as proof.
Part three concentrates on race and IQ. The authors immediately state their premise: ‘Given cognitive differences among ethnic and racial groups, the cognitive elite cannot represent all groups equally.’ They add that a ‘substantial difference in cognitive ability’ between blacks and whites is reflected in public and private life.27 They review selected literature on race and IQ, drawing from Lynn (24 times), Jensen (23), Rushton, Gottfredson and Mankind Quarterly. They say Asians have IQs slightly above those of white people, with black people fifteen points below white, and dismiss the idea that the reasons for this might be entirely environmental. In a circular argument, they refute the view that the lower economic status of black Americans is the reason for the lower average IQ by repeating their own view that low IQ causes poverty. They acknowledge the black-white IQ gap is shrinking but doubt it could ever close. Drawing from Jensen, they insist there must be a genetic dimension, although they are ‘resolutely agnostic’ on the precise nature-nurture mix.28 But this doesn’t matter because ‘realised intelligence, no matter whether realised through genes or the environment, is not very malleable.’29
Next, they present their case from a different angle, claiming that black people with the same IQ as white people earn as much, or more, than they do: ‘Racial and ethnic differences in this country are seen in a new light when cognitive ability is added to the picture.’30 In fact, because of affirmative action, blacks ‘overachieve’ on the job market. But blacks with the same scores as whites are still more likely to be unmarried parents, unemployed, and on welfare. (This claim prompted a New York Times reviewer to declare that the book ‘is just a genteel way of calling somebody a Nigger’.31) They go on to discuss their belief that Americans’ IQs are falling because poor, stupid people are having more children than rich, bright ones (which they call dysgenesis). This contradicts the ‘Flynn Effect’; their way around this conundrum is to make the obvious point that the ‘Flynn Effect’ does not reflect a real rise in intelligence but rather the growing sophistication of those taking IQ tests, which is at odds with their faith in the immutable g. They speculate on a genetic explanation (bright Baby Boomers had more babies) and toy with some unexplained environmental factor but in the end, stick to their guns: dysgenesis is thriving because low IQ people are breeding more quickly than high IQ people. They add another argument, used by Yerkes in 1917: less-intelligent immigrants are making their homes in the USA, lowering IQ averages. Flynn notes that the average American IQ has risen by around 9 per cent per generation; Herrnstein and Murray say the average IQ has fallen by one or two points per generation.
In part four, they indulge Murray’s right-wing libertarianism, posing the question: can people become smarter if given the right kind of help? They answer with a big fat ‘no’ but contradict themselves by noting that improving infant nutrition and going to school can raise IQs. They insist compensatory education makes little difference but again contradict themselves, acknowledging a Venezuelan study in which extra tuition did indeed raise children’s IQs. They also note that coaching can improve test results and reference adoption studies in which children who moved from deprived to well-to-do backgrounds added twelve points to their IQ scores. (In other words, their big fat ‘no’ would seem more like quite a big ‘yes’.) Perhaps it would be possible to raise the IQs of those at the bottom, they concede, but it is ‘tough to alter the environment for the development of general intellectual ability’.32 They go with their instincts, opposing affirmative action because it unfairly promotes people with lower IQs, giving black people better positions than their intelligence merits. Instead, they say, it would be more productive to spend money on gifted children.
After warning of the social consequences of the growing divide between the high-IQ elite and the expanding low-IQ underclass, they end with some rather quirky policy proposals, including one that the state should abandon attempts to create equality of outcomes and instead recognise genetic inequality, allowing people to find their ‘valued places in society’ according to their innate intelligence. ‘It is time for America once again to try living with inequality,’ they say, as part of their attack on affirmative action. They plump for a small-is-beautiful solution, arguing there is too much state centralisation. Simplification – less red tape for small businesses, punishments that fit crimes, marriage as a requirement for parental rights, careful screening of immigrants, cheap birth control and replacing welfare with cash supplements – should be ‘a top priority in reforming policy’,33 so that everyone can find their IQ-determined place.
The Bell Curve was an instant bestseller, boosted by the controversy generated by its race science section. Reviews in the mass media focused more on its conclusions than its premises, perhaps because the reviewers felt ill-equipped to critique the use of data. But once the academic reviews started coming in, the premises were picked to pieces.
Stephen Jay Gould argued that the book’s entire edifice would collapse if any of these four premises were false: (i) intelligence must be reducible to a single number, (ii) it must be capable of ranking people in linear order, (iii) it must be mainly genetically based and (iv) it must be effectively immutable.34 He showed why all these premises were wrong, noting that the book ‘contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism’.35 Gould noted that even if one accepted the raw data, they ‘permit no conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average to equal or surpass the white mean’.36 He accused Herrnstein and Murray of ‘spinning’ their cause, by exaggerating the genetic case and playing down the strong evidence that IQ is malleable. He also refuted their view that IQ, as a number, can measure a real quality in the brain. ‘How strange’, he wrote, ‘that we would let a single false number divide us when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry…’37
Another wave of criticism looked at the authors’ reliance on the work of a tiny coterie of race psychologists.38 Leon Kamin, professor of psychology at Princeton, reviewed IQ data relating to Southern Africa, borrowed from Richard Lynn (whom Herrnstein and Murray called ‘a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences’, saying they ‘benefited especially’ from his advice). Kamin showed that some data did not even involve IQ tests, that Lynn had drawn unwarranted conclusions from other data and had ignored tests in which black people outperformed white people. He concluded that the calibre of data in The Bell Curve was ‘pathetic’ and that its authors ‘frequently fail to distinguish between correlation and causation and therefore draw many inappropriate conclusions’.39 Likewise, the biologist Joseph Graves placed The Bell Curve in the tradition of unscientific racism, arguing that its claims were not supported by its data, that calculation errors had reinforced its bias and that the authors had ignored data that contradicted their core beliefs.40
Other critics noted that the authors ‘corrected’ data to achieve the results they favoured, allowing them to overstate their case that IQ is better than socio-economic standing as a predictor of poverty.41 Some focused on Herrnstein and Murray’s reliance on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery tests for their suggestion that IQ was a better predictor of social outcome than family background, when this battery of tests does not measure IQ.42 A team from the University of California found the Armed Services tests were a ‘poor measure of innate intelligence and instead reflected the social environment that shaped people’s academic performance, largely their schooling’.43 Backing this view, the economist Sanders Korenman and the sociologist Christopher Winship cited data that indicate family background was, in fact, ‘more important than IQ in determining socioeconomic success in adulthood’.44
Several critiques drew on data from studies that contradicted the authors’ faith in the predictive power of IQ, including one subtest that turned out to be the best predictor of future earnings, left out by Herrnstein and Murray because it did not back their conclusions.45 Robert Hauser, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, and his colleague Min-Hsiung Huang analysed the results of 12,500 adults in a verbal ability test, taken from the General Social Survey, to show that the Bell Curve’s assertion of a predictive relation between IQ and the professions was not borne out. All that the results showed was that selected highly educated occupation groups had grown rapidly since 1940.46 A correlation between aptitude examinations and economic status was hardly surprising when so many employers subjected applicants to IQ tests.47
In his review of Flynn’s book What Is Intelligence?, Murray said it was a ‘gold mine of pointers to interesting work, much of which is new to me’; a surprising comment, given that Flynn had been developing his argument for more than a quarter of a century. But perhaps it means no more than the fact that Murray was less au fait with intelligence theory than his IQ-obsessed partner, Herrnstein. Murray added that all those wrestling with questions about intelligence ‘are in Flynn’s debt’.48 This is generous, given that Flynn explicitly attacked The Bell Curve’s theories, offering a critique of their notion of race while noting that their meritocracy thesis is ‘incoherent’.49
What is clear is that if you accept Flynn’s theory, something has to give in Herrnstein’s and Murray’s. If IQs have been steadily rising, and this is not a temporary aberration, then ‘real intelligence’ is unlikely to be falling. And if intelligence isn’t falling, despite the poor having more babies than the rich, then the Bell Curve must either have overstated the genetic component of IQ, or its authors’ assumption that the poor are poor because of their lower intelligence must be wrong. Or both. Which brings us back to Gould’s point that if any of the work’s key premises are shown to be invalid, its entire case collapses.
If you’re under the age of forty-five or were not part of the American cultural zeitgeist of the mid-1990s, you might be perplexed by the publishing phenomenon that was The Bell Curve. Read it cover to cover, particularly the chapters dealing with race, poverty and IQ, and if you’ve read anything else on this subject, you can’t avoid concluding that, despite its claims to novelty, there is nothing new under this particular sun. In essence, it combines the anti-welfare political perspective of one of its co-authors with the racist IQ perspective of the other. That is all.
Murray, who was fifty-one at the time, had a track record of working for right-wing think tanks. One of his previous books, Losing Ground,50 was much admired by the Reagan administration. The sixty-four-year-old Herrnstein, a controversial psychology professor from Harvard, had a track record in race-based IQ studies going back to the early 1970s, although he had not achieved the same infamy as Jensen, Rushton and Lynn, but it was these men’s data he embraced. He showed no qualms about drawing uncritically from psychologists who were heavily financed by the Pioneer Fund and had contributed to Mankind Quarterly. In fact, Herrnstein and Murray cited seventeen authors who had written for this expressly racist journal, ten of whom served on its advisory board. They also directly cited five articles from Mankind Quarterly, including one by Nathaniel Weyl, an erstwhile communist who had turned to the far right and, on the basis of their IQ scores, had decided that white Rhodesians were an intellectually ‘elite element within the English-speaking world in terms of psychometric intelligence’.51
Herrnstein died shortly before The Bell Curve was published; Murray, with no background in IQ studies, was left to mount the defence. ‘Here was a case of stumbling onto a subject that had all the allure of the forbidden,’ he admitted, in the tone of one who had chanced upon a secret stash of porn. ‘Some of the things we read to do this work we literally hide when we’re on planes and trains. We’re furtively peering at this stuff.’52 Perhaps, for Murray, the furtive thrills were real; for Herrnstein, most of it was old hat. What this pair skilfully did was to package ‘this stuff’ as something fresh and daring.
Now and then they referred to evidence that contradicted their case, burying most of it in footnotes and appendixes but doing enough to ensure their tone appeared more measured than that of Rushton and his ilk. For instance, at the beginning of Chapter 13 they make this point about IQ: ‘It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.’ If you had read nothing else on this subject, this might seem a reasonable acknowledgement of both sides of the story. In fact, it is the opposite. No one, not even Lynn, denies that environment has something to do with racial differences. But most mainstream academics in the field agree there is no evidence of a genetic role in this gap.
The American Psychological Association set up a task force to investigate the book’s claims, publishing a document entitled ‘Intelligence: knowns and unknowns’. On the American white-black IQ gap, this text noted that the evidence ‘fails to support the genetic hypothesis’. It added that the gap may be diminishing, and the reasons for the remaining gap may relate to caste and culture. ‘There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation,’ it concluded.53
The Bell Curve was an audacious bid to break that consensus. It was a meticulously planned guerrilla campaign, from its carefully edited presentation, complete with short chapter summaries and impressive-seeming graphs and tables, to its publicity, the fanfare of its publication and Murray’s energetic television appearances, articles and interviews.
Linda Gottfredson, who was developing her own track record for race-based IQ studies, got busy with ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’, which she sent to 131 hereditarian academic psychologists: 52 signed and 31 ignored it. Of the 48 who declined to sign, 11 went public with their view that it did not represent a mainstream perspective. The text’s publication in the Wall Street Journal gave The Bell Curve a significant boost; two months after its publication 400,000 copies had been printed.
Gould said that behind the ‘catchy title’ and ‘brilliant publicity campaign’, the book’s argument was no different to those he had critiqued in the first edition of The Mismeasure of Man fourteen years before.54 He said the main reason for its success was the political milieu of its suggestions to slash social services and cut taxes for the rich. A biologically based argument that the poor were poor because they were unintelligent, and that money diverted to improve their lot was money wasted, had strong appeal to a Republican constituency. An additional reason for Gould’s criticism related to the enthusiasm for finding single-gene solutions to all sorts of issues, including intelligence; an enthusiasm, Gould said, that was founded on an ignorance of genetics.55
One detail was missing in Gould’s assessment of the reasons for The Bell Curve’s success: the extraordinary role played by one man. Andrew Sullivan has taken on several journalistic roles over the years: editor, columnist, super-blogger. In each, he has gone out of his way to promote The Bell Curve. Whatever else he’s achieved, he’ll be remembered as the man who put himself at the service of race science. Without Sullivan’s help, the book would not have been the publishing sensation it was. And his subsequent efforts to promote it – even twenty-five years later – have helped maintain its presence.
Sullivan grew up in a Catholic family in Surrey, UK. As a result of an IQ test, he won a place at a top grammar school, going on to Oxford University, where he became president of the Oxford Union and a confirmed Tory. He later shared a flat with a future Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and a future Minister of State, Alan Duncan. He interned at a Thatcherite think tank, before moving to the USA, coming out as gay and HIV-positive, studying for a PhD at Harvard and launching his journalistic career at New Republic magazine. At twenty-six, he was appointed its editor, a position he held for five years. After that, he wrote for the New York Times Magazine (until he was fired four years later) and was a columnist for the Sunday Times. In 2000 he launched his blog, The Daily Dish, hosted by Time.com from 2006 and later by TheAtlantic.com and Daily Beast, which he claimed had eight million page views a month. Sullivan, who currently contributes to New York magazine, has written or edited seven books and regularly appears on American and British television. To say that he is one of the most influential journalists in the world would be an understatement. I’ve long admired the quality of his prose and his willingness to change his mind. In 2000, he was a cheerleader for George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq but recognised the failings of the adventure and came out in support of John Kerry and Barack Obama. Yet he remains resolute in his backing for The Bell Curve: ‘I had no interest in this subject until I saw the data in Murray’s and Herrnstein’s book,’ he said. ‘I was, frankly, astounded by it. … And yet, it turned out it was undisputed. Merely the interpretation of it was open to real and important debate.’56
Sullivan agreed to publish an extract of The Bell Curve’s most contentious chapter in the New Republic, making it the cover story, under the banner ‘Race and IQ’, together with an on-message editorial. He did this, he has since boasted, ‘before anyone else dared touch it’.57 That edition was the biggest seller in New Republic’s history. His staff threatened to resign, so he published nineteen rebuttals before resigning himself, admitting he was a ‘lousy manager of people’.58 The nineteen writers criticised the book’s premises, methodology and conclusions. Some went for the jugular, declaring it an out-and-out racist venture; Alan Wolfe began by asking: ‘What’s the difference between thinking that the black male next to me is dumb and thinking there’s a 25 per cent chance he’s dumb?’59 Sullivan’s decision to publish brought racist psychology out from its academic purdah, restoring it to the realms of respectable debate. You might have expected that once the peer reviews, almost all deeply negative, came in, and the book’s academic credibility was shredded, Sullivan would have retreated, but after a spell of silence he bounced back, not only defending his decision but also endorsing The Bell Curve’s race-based argument, without reservation.
Sullivan said in 2005 that his decision to publish that extract was ‘one of my proudest moments in journalism’, adding that ‘the book held up and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade’ and he was ‘proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did’. He endorsed the book’s race-based premises, telling his readers that ‘human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human – gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian – is a subject worth exploring, period,’ adding that liberalism ‘should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality’.60
In 2011 he dipped in again: ‘No one is arguing “that black people are dumber than white,”’ he said, ‘just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups.’61 Actually Herrnstein, and those he quoted most often, such as Lynn, Rushton, Gottfredson and Jensen, have argued that black people are dumber than white. And Sullivan’s ‘different distribution’ argument is regularly invoked by race science enthusiasts: it is not racist to say white and Asian IQs are higher than black IQs because you get people at all IQ levels in these groups. This is another way of saying ‘I can’t be a racist even though I think that most white people are smarter than most black people because I accept that at an individual level there are smart black people and dumb white people.’ To put it differently, when meeting a black person for the first time the perception would be: ‘It is possible that you’re more intelligent than average but likely that you are, in fact, less intelligent.’ Not racist?
Sullivan complained that ‘political correctness and racial squeamishness have hindered the study of intelligence,’62 mentioning in particular Jensen’s standing among ‘many traditional intelligence researchers’ while claiming that Jensen’s studies on race and IQ had been ‘strangled by PC egalitarianism’.63 It is worth recalling that Jensen’s view was not just that black Americans’ IQs were fifteen points below white Americans’ but also that the main reason for this gap was genetic. In other words, black people were inherently dumber than white people. Sullivan, like Jensen, was quick to add the usual rider that his own views on racial distribution of IQ didn’t only apply to black people.64
Returning to the fray in 2013, Sullivan admitted he should ‘know better than to bring this up again’ before bringing it up again. He announced he’d come to doubt the existence of g and to recognise that IQ should not be conflated with intelligence. This was a breakthrough and a clear departure from The Bell Curve’s view. But just when it looked like he might be siding with the angels, Sullivan slid back, with this curious analogy: ‘We remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species. But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles and beagles have a much better sense of smell.’65 Sullivan was savvy enough to acknowledge that breeding and natural selection were different but then ignored this huge distinction by applying his dog analogy to humans, noting that humans evolved for skin colour because of exposure to different environments. He prefers to talk of poodles and beagles, but we don’t need to guess who are the beagles and who the poodles.
Sullivan’s next big epistle on race and IQ was a 2018 comment piece for New York magazine. He began by caricaturing the ‘blank slate’ and ‘Utopian’ ideas that environment and culture play a major role in human affairs. He then leapt from endorsing the geneticist David Reich’s uncontested view that there are genetic differences between human populations to claiming, without evidence, that there will therefore be group ‘differences in intelligence tests’,66 which Reich neither said nor implied. And from there to once again defending his decision to publish the excerpt from The Bell Curve: ‘My own brilliant conclusion: group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yet know what the balance is.’67 ‘Balance’ implies it is a bit of both, which he suggests, appropriately, is the same as Murray’s view but, inappropriately, also Reich’s and Flynn’s. (Reich never mentions IQ in his book; Flynn believes the US white-black IQ gap is ‘probably environmental’.) Sullivan then gives vent to his conservative ideals, saying that an assumption that genetics plays no role in racial IQ differences could lead us to ‘over-shoot and over-promise in social policy’ and may lead to affirmative action, which he says is ‘racial discrimination’.68
The Bell Curve argues that IQ is primarily genetically based, that black IQs are lower than white, that low IQ is the reason why there are more poor blacks than whites and that the way to deal with this is to endorse inequality, abolish affirmative action, cut red tape for business and reduce the role of the state. This is the cause that Andrew Sullivan has chosen to endorse, over and over and over again, for a quarter of a century.
Twenty-five years after its publication, The Bell Curve’s key pillars have fallen, so why bother with it? The answer is that it continues to exert influence, as seen in Charles Murray’s resurrection. In the UK, such sentiments tend to be more muted. It may no longer be a tome to display on the coffee table but right-wingers are still drawn to its premises. Unlike Andrew Sullivan, most are savvy enough to keep its racist component safely tucked away but the rest is allowed to roam free.
Dominic Cummings, senior advisor to Michael Gove during his time as Secretary of State for Education, and later campaign director of the ‘Vote Leave’ Brexit drive, wrote a 250-page tome attacking the government’s Sure Start programme, which aimed to improve poor children’s prospects; the programme was subsequently abandoned. Using arguments that sound as if they had been extracted live from The Bell Curve, Cummings said there was little scientific evidence that this kind of thing worked and that children’s performance in school was based more on IQ and genetics than teaching, giving a figure of 70 per cent, which is at the extreme end of the genetic-determinist spectrum. ‘There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics,’ he wrote. ‘Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless.’69 Given the fervour of his view that school performance is mainly genetic, it would be intriguing to hear his perspective on why poor British African, Caribbean, mixed-race and Asian children consistently outperform poor white children. From his perspective, we might expect a sad declaration that white children are lacking in IQ genes but, oddly enough, this is not an issue that has exercised his typing fingers.
This was followed by a speech by Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London. He mocked the ‘16 per cent of society’ with IQs below 85 and implied the poor had lower IQs, suggesting the state should put more effort into the 2 per cent with IQs over 130, another Bell Curve proposition. Johnson concluded: ‘The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top’70 – cornflakes such as the Eton-schooled Johnson, presumably.
Then there’s Rod Liddle, a former BBC producer, controversialist and columnist, who defended remarks he made about race and IQ, writing under a pseudonym on the website of Millwall FC. ‘It’s true that 97 per cent of intelligence tests put whites 7 per cent ahead of black Africans and that we’re behind Asians and particularly east Asians,’ he was quoted as saying. He added the usual note of qualification: ‘there’s a greater division in races than between races’ and then qualified the entire sentiment, saying, ‘you can’t trust any of them because they’re culturally determined.’ To justify why he nevertheless chose to make the race-and-IQ point, he added: ‘I’m merely being accurate.’71
The pseudonymous Liddle aside, open venting of scientific racism remains the love that dare not speak its name, at least in the house-trained corner of the British right, which is why the action is mostly subterranean. In 2018, the London Student newspaper exposed the clandestine ‘London Conference on Intelligence’, bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund and held for three years at University College London, without the university’s knowledge.72 Its organiser, James Thompson, an ‘honorary’ psychology lecturer and prolific far-right tweeter on race and gender, declared the conference’s focus was on eugenics and how IQ was inherited between different races,73 with topics including whether ‘racial admixture’ reduced population quality. There were also three papers (all by men) which argued that women were innately stupider than men.74 Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg, editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, were among the conference’s notable speakers. Another was the right-wing gadfly Toby Young, who supports eugenics, arguing that poor people with low IQs should be helped to ‘choose which embryos were allowed to develop, based on intelligence’.75 His proposal relies on the Bell Curve’s assertion that poor people are poor because they’re stupid and that ‘IQ genes’ will eventually be identifiable. He described the elaborate measures of the conference’s organisers to prevent leaks but said these were reasonable ‘considering the reaction that any references to between-group differences in IQ generally provoke’.76 Young said he attended to ‘gather material’ for a speech he was to make at an event in Canada, hosted by the International Society for Intelligence Research, on ‘the history of controversies provoked by intelligence researchers’. Soon after, a public petition protesting against Young’s tweets on eugenics, gays and women gathered 220,000 signatures, forcing him to resign from both his post on the Fulbright Commission and a new position leading the government’s Office for Students.77
A postdoctoral researcher, Noah Carl, was another whose presence at the conference caused him problems. He spoke there at the 2015 and 2016 gatherings. Carl, a fervent supporter of race science, whose work is published on the website OpenPsych, which promotes race science, was awarded a research fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. An open letter protesting against this appointment, which was quickly signed by more than two thousand academics, accused Carl of, among other things, focusing on ‘ethically suspect and methodologically flawed’ research involving race and genetics and noted his participation in the London Conference on Intelligence.78 This nudged Toby Young into action; he launched a pro-Carl campaign, which included a comment piece in The Spectator,79 an editorial in Quillette and a counter-petition, and the college withdrew the fellowship.
I use these examples to illustrate that although Bell Curve-flavoured ideas have less of a public airing in the UK than in the USA they are, nevertheless, bubbling away and looking for outlets. These sometimes come in muted form, as with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, sometimes in provocative form as with Rod Liddle and occasionally in clandestine form, as with the London Conference on Intelligence, in which the racist content was so overt and extreme that it could only be sold from under the counter.