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327 Around the same time that an insurgent right-wing Congress was taking charge of American politics, a parallel cultural event occurred: the publication of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. This massive work was really two books. One was a media event designed to fill a conspicuous gap in public discourse—while the figures on crime and “illegitimacy” had long served to release sensitive white people from their pesky inhibitions about calling blacks violent and hypersexual, in recent years there had been no comparable statistical outlet for the sentiment that blacks are dumb. The other, which lurked obscurely in the shadow of the public conversation, was a polemic about the intelligentsia or, as authors called it, the “cognitive elite.” The first book presented IQ as the preeminent criterion of social worth; the second attacked intelligence as a means of allocating social power. Contradictory as they sounded, these arguments nonetheless converged in a paradoxical vision: invoking the authority of science. The Bell Curve rejected the whole enterprise of modernity. Conservatives are perennially tempted by the illusion that vexing social con- flicts can be settled by exposing radical aspirations to the dry air of “the facts.” Twenty-five years ago, Steven Goldberg thought he could prove “the inevitability of patriarchy” by citing studies that linked aggression with testosterone and concluded that men were innately more aggressive than women. (As far as I can tell, this line of argument has had no effect on sexual politics except to inspire mock diagnoses of “testosterone poisoning.”) Fifteen years ago, rightto -life activists imagined that the expansion of scientific knowledge about fetal development would have to change people’s minds about abortion. Now The Bell Curve’s revival of decades-old claims about IQ—that there is such a thing as a What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about The Bell Curve 328 THE NINETIES quantifiable general intelligence; that IQ tests measure it accurately and objectively ; that it is largely genetic, highly resistant to change, and unevenly distributed among races; that high IQ correlates with economic and social success, low IQ with the abject condition and aberrant behavior of the poor—is supposed to tell us what to do about social equality, namely abandon the idea as quixotic. Yet to argue about the meaning of IQ—as about the humanity of fetuses or the nature of sexual difference—is really a way of defusing anxiety by displacing onto impersonal “factual” dispute a profound clash of interests and worldviews, with all the yearning, hatred, and fear that clash entails. If I bought the authors’ thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don’t advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes’ bed. In fact, the authors tacitly recognize that science is not the key issue here. Recounting the history of the IQ debate, they focus less on the substance of the argument than on the struggle to prevail as the conventional wisdom. As they tell it, their view of intelligence and IQ testing was taken for granted until it ran into the dogmatic egalitarianism of the ’60s and ’70s, when Herrnstein, Arthur Jensen, and others who correlated race and class differences with IQ scores were driven out of the public arena by intimidating demonstrations and intellectual antagonists like Stephen Jay Gould; but although the latter “won the invisible battle,” discussion of the significance of IQ continued to take place offstage. The clear implication of this tale of exile is that, with the rightward shift in the narration’s politics, it’s time for the return. In short, The Bell Curve is not about breaking new intellectual ground, but about coming up from underground. Murray and Herrnstein are convinced “that the topic of genes, intelligence, and race in the late twentieth century is like the topic of sex in Victorian England. Publicly, there seems to be nothing to talk about. Privately, people are fascinated by it.” I can’t quarrel with this point. The idea that black brains are genetically inferior to white brains did not fade from the public view simply because white people were convinced by Stephen Jay Gould’s eloquent arguments. Rather, the gap between Americans’ conscious moral consensus for racial equality and the tenacious social and psychic structures of racism was papered over...

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