But Why Would You Study That?

I began trying to refute The Bell Curve. I ended a hereditarian.

Written by Bo Winegard.

From obscure poems to bizarre birds, I take an interest in many odd things. But only one is routinely met with the morally perplexed and often accusatory question: “But why do you care about that?” The “that” is race differences, especially race differences in intelligence. Indeed, interest in the subject is often treated as evidence of some underlying pathology or fetish. Why would anyone care about such an unsavory topic?

Perhaps the proper response is simply that I care about truth. But that answer is too dismissive. Do we not all care about truth? The real question is why devote time to studying race, rather than to, say, whale mating habits, electromagnetic radiation, or any of the other innumerable subjects that do not provoke hostile reactions or cause contentious debates? Time is finite. And every hour spent reading about race or cognitive ability is an hour not spent reading Shakespeare or Newton.

It started with The Bell Curve. In my first psychology classes, I was taught what many undergraduates have since been taught about that book. It is seriously flawed and has been thoroughly debunked by Stephen J. Gould and others. Perhaps the authors are racist, perhaps not, but whatever their motives, the book is full of elementary errors and other logical embarrassments. Being ignorant about psychometrics and caring little about the topic at the time, I assumed my professor was right and gave the matter little further thought.

A few years later, however, I met someone who spoke favorably about The Bell Curve. “Isn’t that book severely flawed?” I naively asked. He replied that it was a careful, judicious work that had been unfairly maligned by its critics. I was surprised. I had never before met anyone willing to defend The Bell Curve. It seemed to me, then, that I ought to read it for myself before forming an opinion one way or the other. The subject was obviously important, and I wanted to know whether my professors had misled me. Was it a reasonable book after all?

I should note that, at that time, I was still a Chomsky-reading, revolution-preaching, cigarette-smoking opponent of the status quo. A free radical, as I pretentiously called myself. Someone who criticized “the system.”

But my leftism was decidedly a pro-science, pro-speech leftism. I thought my political views were correct, after all, and wanted to debate others as much as possible. And if my views were wrong, well, then I also wanted to know. I’m not sure how this affected my understanding of race and IQ, but I do know that I was a racial equalitarian who assumed, without much reflection, that racism was the cause of all racial disparities. I certainly did not approach the topic hoping to defend some racial hierarchy or capitalist status quo. Quite the contrary. I hoped I would find that The Bell Curve was indeed a shoddy book and that racial equalitarianism was true.