Underclass:Brighter than the liberals
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Jeremy Clarke
IN 1994 Charles Murray, an American social scientist, co-authored
a book called The Bell Curve: Intelligence
and Class Structure in American Life. It was more than 800 pages long,
so not many people read it. But then somebody discovered that it was one
of the most politically incorrect books of the decade and it became a bestseller
overnight.
The main thrust of the book's argument is that low intelligence lies at the
root of America's social problems. Of course, the rest of the world has known
about and been entertained by the low intelligence of Americans for years.
Nothing new there. Any country populated from scratch by the poor, the fugitive
and the illegitimate is bound to take a long time to get up to speed. America
lags behind even Australia in this respect. And look at the Boers. They made
virtually no progress at all in the brain department in almost 400 years
and may even have gone backwards. More contentious than this, however, was
the theme by Murray and Richard Herrnstein, his co-author, that inherited
intelligence is more important for getting on in life than "environment".
Better to be born smart and poor, they claimed, than rich and stupid. They
got people's backs up, too, by their suggestion that the more stupid an American
woman is, the more illegitimate children she is likely to have. (Having slept
with few, if any, stupid American women, I wouldn't like to comment on that
one.) Most shocking of all, however, was their contention that America's
black people might be endowed with even less intelligence than the whites,
which must be saying something.
Once our Left-liberals got to hear about this over dinner, of course, they
started doing star jumps. One is permitted to assert that black people make
better athletes or singers than white people. One may suggest, as Herrnstein
and Murray do, that on the whole Asians have higher IQs than the whites.
But even to put the phrases "black people" and "IQ test" in the same sentence
is strictly verboten. For the amount of opprobrium they brought on themselves
for this, Murray and Herrnstein might just as well have claimed that the
Holocaust never happened and that at least Mussolini made the trains run
on time.
Six years on, Left-liberals still remember Murray's malignant audacity.
(Herrnstein died, so he's out of the firing line.) This is why the decision
by Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, to share a platform with Murray last week
at a debate entitled The Growing Threat of the Underclass, was greeted
with a chorus of disapproval, along the lines that Straw should have been
making out a warrant for Murray's immediate arrest, not sharing a jug of
water with him in a lecture hall. "I deplore many of the views Mr Murray
has espoused; but I also believe in argument," said Straw, obviously a raving
fascist. They are so sweet, Left - liberals, when they get really, really
angry, aren't they? I couldn't get down to the news agents fast enough to
see what The Guardian would say about Murray's visit. "What debate
can one have about such manifest and malign claptrap?" wondered Francis Wheen,
the big gun wheeled out by the newspaper.
As he warmed to his theme, Wheen became so apoplectic with moral indignation
about Straw's attendance at the lecture, he drew his sword and threw away
the scabbard. Charles Murray was a man with a "lamentably inadequate brain,"
he sneered. The Sunday Times (which sponsored the debate) was an "absurd
and half-witted newspaper". And Wheen, a recent biographer of Karl Marx,
went on to quote Orwell's remark: "There are certain things one has to be
an intellectual to believe, since no ordinary man could be so stupid." And
so on. It was splendid stuff.
As a former dustman, I only had one small quibble with Wheen's polemic. If
the worst thing he can think of to say about other people is that they are
thick, he really ought to get out more. He might, then realise that there
are millions of perfectly happy people out here, myself included, by the
way, who are far more motivated by their genitals than by their brains and
that not everybody is necessarily crushed by stinging rebukes such as these.
That's the trouble with intellectuals: they think the rest of us think like
they do, when we don't. Which, in fact is the main point The Bell Curve tries
to make. It is a warning against the polarisation of society into an increasingly
powerful and therefore arrogant "cognitive elite" of which Wheen is clearly
one - and the rest of us "half-wits". A timely warning too, I'd say.
Jeremy Clarke The Sunday Telegraph May 14 2000
If Jeremy is correct,then Auberon Waugh is on unsafe
ground claiming intellectual superiority is enough to treat animals with
contempt.No doubt all animals in the main are "driven by their genitals",and
perhaps we inflate our capacity to do something more than being driven by
our own. Jeremy suggests putting "black people" and IQ tests in the same
sentence is verboten.How odd then that Mr Waugh chooses to use intellect
as a means to showing man's superiority,when, race or species,making intellect
the issue is verboten in the former case but allowable when it is only an
animal one is subjugating. As John Allen Paulos
shows,it is possible for there to be actual differences in a population,
and thus on average for any set of people to be lower or higher is some respect
judged by some standard or other.The question is who sets the standards?
IQ tests it is suggested can be culturally biased,so that some race fairs
better than another by default. In the case of animals,this is most certainly
the case when they are required to accord with our standards of behaviour
or intellectual capability.If we tried to create some standard which was
not biased in our favour we perhaps would come put winning so easily. I doubt
many people have the capacities of a Cephalopod for passing through small
spaces,or the vocal capacities of whales to communicate across vast distances
without the use of satellites and cell phones. If we use a value system biased
in favour of intellectual ability,like the Bell Curve suggests,with animals
there will be a noticeable difference between us and other organisms,because
we are setting the standard of what "intelligence" means. The book has caused
a rumpus because the fact is it may be true,but this is no reason to justify
discrimination or create unfair standards.Much less so in the case of animals.
Mr Waugh may limit his compassion to those things that have a brain size
of comparative size to his own, if he did perhaps he would have more compassion
for a cockroach. PC silliness has led to a situation where everything is
seen as being the same or having the same value.Mr Waugh is living proof
that not all of us have the same capacities,his humble friend of insect
extraction,who curiously he would crush underfoot,is much more likely to
survive than Mr Waugh and his anachronistic ideas.Mr Waugh is already in
the throes of being deselected by Natural Selection,and the sheer fact that
his paltry sour grapes bleating over those who measure their compassion on
a less absurd scale than mere brain size is easily dealt with here demonstrates
admirably how large a difference two bell curves can have even when comparing
two human beings.