Really good essay. I think part of the problem that Murray - in common with all of us recusants from the Social Justice religion - is up against is that we have never really managed to quite pin down a comprehensive overview of the hugely seductive psychological complex that underpins the religion. Because, of course, race unrealism is just one part of the mix that makes up the whole fairytale of it. TS Eliot's weary observation about the unbearableness of reality for much of humankind is part of the answer. And I keep trying to get to the heart of it in my essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but I never feel like I've quite got to the core of it either.
I think it's the idea of "mind over matter", which is extremely appealing to people without a religious background. I remember I believed in this idea as a kid that anyone could achieve anything, for example you could become an athlete with a world record despite having a debilitating disease, and would deny all evidence to the contrary. In retrospect that seems to be no different than religious fervor, which secular people feel the need to simulate in some way. For an intelligent person feeling like they don't have agency over their life and the outcomes they achieve is a bleak nihilism-inducing mentality.
We don’t judge people according to their “traits and talents” but their performance. To be sure, the former enable the latter to some degree. But lots of smart intellectuals have done appalling things, and nowadays few are admirable. Lots of less intelligent people have done better. Of course, less intelligent people are at higher risk for doing some bad things like committing violent crime and family disintegration. But they're not destined to do so. Judge behavior not ability.
"Unleash tribal hatreds and animosties "..what exactly have blacks been doing to whites for the last 60 years with criminal behaviour?And now the biggest problem is that whites might start to act as a collective group too....
"More adventurous versions of race realism contend that many of the racial disparities that the orthodoxy blames on widespread racism are actually caused by intrinsic or at least recalcitrant average differences in psychological traits and tendencies among races. (I will refer to this position as hereditarianism.)".
That would be where I stand.
"Needless to say, hereditarianism is not popular among educated elites."
You have a habit of conflating 'educated' with a college degree; to me, this is erroneous. The vast preponderance of college degrees are given (not earned) in indoctrination courses.
"With limpid, unembellished prose and promises that it is not full of “bombshells” or fatal threats to progressive moral concerns, Human Diversity attempts to forward a trenchant attack on the orthodoxy that is also palatable to the average educated reader."
Is Murray putting forward the truth or making more money?
"Murray makes the case that there are almost certainly socially consequential race differences “in cognitive repertoires” that “could be at least partially genetic”..."
Are we still using that old sop to those who can not accept reality; 'could it be at least partially genetic'?
I will have to decline the purchase of either book. It sounds like a warmed-over pablum.
A well done review and appreciation of Murray's work. I'm often amused how frequently critics of The Bell Curve ignore the fact that the book's first author, Richard Herrnstein, was literally an operant psychologist. He was a colleague of B.F. Skinner, and ran his pigeon lab at Harvard. Herrnstein's main scientific contribution was the study of choice behavior using concurrent schedules of reinforcement. In other words, his major empirical work attested to the environmental malleability of behavior.
After all the articles on nature vs nurture the one upshot to me, surprising to myself by the way, is that as a society we must do a better job of helping everyone find their productive place. We should, for example, help family farms succeed with a wide range of agricultural projects and be willing to protect their markets; we should start testing in the 3rd grade and every two years after to move students into study that inspires and elevates them, which could be vastly different for many groups of children; we need to create spaces in our economy for artisans again, craftsmen. And we need corporate compensation based on a rational schedule. We currently have a society that's built for the few, and they do very well, for a few generations. But there is simply too much loss of value below the top 5%. And if, as this article points out, 50% or more of the results of individual lives is based on genetics, then no fault of their own, we have a duty, don't we, to make sure that we don't throw every child into the same rough waters and expect them all to learn to freestyle to success?
I am very interested in how all this plays out in a future with significant bi-racial marriages and children especially in the USA. We see a dramatic increase in these marriages over the last 5-6 years (now at 20%). While Asians are more likely to marry someone from another race and whites least likely, think that is more a function of percentage of population each of these groups are and therefore the amount of other races that are available to marry. Will this not, over time, eradicate the race differences outlined by Murray's book? And what will that mean to identity politics?
Racial frictions will be with us until measurable differences in such abilities as athleticism, cooperative communalism, and mathematics, e.g., have evolved away to minor variations.
This is simply because each functional human being, at the sub-lingual, animal level, *wants* to believe that the group s/he identifies with is demonstrably superior to all other groups in *all* categories, which by extension makes that individual likely better than other individuals of other groups *in all categories*.
A comforting thought often held by 4 year olds. It is very immature but it's hard-wired into humanity. It'c commonly called "a competitive nature" and almost everyone has some of it.
Now, a cosmopolitan and thoughtful individual will grudgingly and tacitly accept 2nd place in some categories, so long as he's first in some others, and will choose to believe that those categories are somehow less important than the ones s/he excels at, but the fact remains that any perceived superior talents in other groups over your own will be resented at some emotional level.
So far as I can see, that's the way it has been, still is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
I would love to hear the PR strategy for presenting incontrovertible evidence that blacks are stupider and more violent than whites (and latins and asians) _because they're born that way_. As much as I despise the anti-truthness of the orthodoxy, there is accidental alignment with them, Murray, yourself as you note and many other peace loving hereditarians. There is no positive outcome I can envisage from this.
Murray's work is founded on obsolete estimates of the heritability of human traits, including intelligence. He is working with estimates derived from the twin studies of the 70s-90s. Mainstream behavior geneticists do not take these estimates literally anymore, as it has been recognized that they hugely overestimate genetic influence on our traits. His work would not survive peer review. It has become clear that the ability measured by IQ tests is primarily determined by environment rather than genes. I go into detail on this subject here: https://eclecticinquiries.substack.com/p/on-race-racism-iq-and-heritability?r=4952v2
I read your article, but I didn't find it convincing. You criticised Arthur Jensen, but you didn't point out the fundamental flaws in his books. It would be worthwhile for you to formalise a critique of Emil Kirkegaard or Seb Jensen, who have high replicability in their articles, if you want to be taken seriously.
Really good essay. I think part of the problem that Murray - in common with all of us recusants from the Social Justice religion - is up against is that we have never really managed to quite pin down a comprehensive overview of the hugely seductive psychological complex that underpins the religion. Because, of course, race unrealism is just one part of the mix that makes up the whole fairytale of it. TS Eliot's weary observation about the unbearableness of reality for much of humankind is part of the answer. And I keep trying to get to the heart of it in my essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but I never feel like I've quite got to the core of it either.
I think it's the idea of "mind over matter", which is extremely appealing to people without a religious background. I remember I believed in this idea as a kid that anyone could achieve anything, for example you could become an athlete with a world record despite having a debilitating disease, and would deny all evidence to the contrary. In retrospect that seems to be no different than religious fervor, which secular people feel the need to simulate in some way. For an intelligent person feeling like they don't have agency over their life and the outcomes they achieve is a bleak nihilism-inducing mentality.
Bo, congratulations on the creation of a most clear and stimulating review of the books and the subject.
We don’t judge people according to their “traits and talents” but their performance. To be sure, the former enable the latter to some degree. But lots of smart intellectuals have done appalling things, and nowadays few are admirable. Lots of less intelligent people have done better. Of course, less intelligent people are at higher risk for doing some bad things like committing violent crime and family disintegration. But they're not destined to do so. Judge behavior not ability.
"Unleash tribal hatreds and animosties "..what exactly have blacks been doing to whites for the last 60 years with criminal behaviour?And now the biggest problem is that whites might start to act as a collective group too....
"More adventurous versions of race realism contend that many of the racial disparities that the orthodoxy blames on widespread racism are actually caused by intrinsic or at least recalcitrant average differences in psychological traits and tendencies among races. (I will refer to this position as hereditarianism.)".
That would be where I stand.
"Needless to say, hereditarianism is not popular among educated elites."
You have a habit of conflating 'educated' with a college degree; to me, this is erroneous. The vast preponderance of college degrees are given (not earned) in indoctrination courses.
"With limpid, unembellished prose and promises that it is not full of “bombshells” or fatal threats to progressive moral concerns, Human Diversity attempts to forward a trenchant attack on the orthodoxy that is also palatable to the average educated reader."
Is Murray putting forward the truth or making more money?
"Murray makes the case that there are almost certainly socially consequential race differences “in cognitive repertoires” that “could be at least partially genetic”..."
Are we still using that old sop to those who can not accept reality; 'could it be at least partially genetic'?
I will have to decline the purchase of either book. It sounds like a warmed-over pablum.
A well done review and appreciation of Murray's work. I'm often amused how frequently critics of The Bell Curve ignore the fact that the book's first author, Richard Herrnstein, was literally an operant psychologist. He was a colleague of B.F. Skinner, and ran his pigeon lab at Harvard. Herrnstein's main scientific contribution was the study of choice behavior using concurrent schedules of reinforcement. In other words, his major empirical work attested to the environmental malleability of behavior.
After all the articles on nature vs nurture the one upshot to me, surprising to myself by the way, is that as a society we must do a better job of helping everyone find their productive place. We should, for example, help family farms succeed with a wide range of agricultural projects and be willing to protect their markets; we should start testing in the 3rd grade and every two years after to move students into study that inspires and elevates them, which could be vastly different for many groups of children; we need to create spaces in our economy for artisans again, craftsmen. And we need corporate compensation based on a rational schedule. We currently have a society that's built for the few, and they do very well, for a few generations. But there is simply too much loss of value below the top 5%. And if, as this article points out, 50% or more of the results of individual lives is based on genetics, then no fault of their own, we have a duty, don't we, to make sure that we don't throw every child into the same rough waters and expect them all to learn to freestyle to success?
I am very interested in how all this plays out in a future with significant bi-racial marriages and children especially in the USA. We see a dramatic increase in these marriages over the last 5-6 years (now at 20%). While Asians are more likely to marry someone from another race and whites least likely, think that is more a function of percentage of population each of these groups are and therefore the amount of other races that are available to marry. Will this not, over time, eradicate the race differences outlined by Murray's book? And what will that mean to identity politics?
Racial frictions will be with us until measurable differences in such abilities as athleticism, cooperative communalism, and mathematics, e.g., have evolved away to minor variations.
This is simply because each functional human being, at the sub-lingual, animal level, *wants* to believe that the group s/he identifies with is demonstrably superior to all other groups in *all* categories, which by extension makes that individual likely better than other individuals of other groups *in all categories*.
A comforting thought often held by 4 year olds. It is very immature but it's hard-wired into humanity. It'c commonly called "a competitive nature" and almost everyone has some of it.
Now, a cosmopolitan and thoughtful individual will grudgingly and tacitly accept 2nd place in some categories, so long as he's first in some others, and will choose to believe that those categories are somehow less important than the ones s/he excels at, but the fact remains that any perceived superior talents in other groups over your own will be resented at some emotional level.
So far as I can see, that's the way it has been, still is, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
I would love to hear the PR strategy for presenting incontrovertible evidence that blacks are stupider and more violent than whites (and latins and asians) _because they're born that way_. As much as I despise the anti-truthness of the orthodoxy, there is accidental alignment with them, Murray, yourself as you note and many other peace loving hereditarians. There is no positive outcome I can envisage from this.
'Demure' is the adjective; 'demur' is the verb (and nount).
Murray's work is founded on obsolete estimates of the heritability of human traits, including intelligence. He is working with estimates derived from the twin studies of the 70s-90s. Mainstream behavior geneticists do not take these estimates literally anymore, as it has been recognized that they hugely overestimate genetic influence on our traits. His work would not survive peer review. It has become clear that the ability measured by IQ tests is primarily determined by environment rather than genes. I go into detail on this subject here: https://eclecticinquiries.substack.com/p/on-race-racism-iq-and-heritability?r=4952v2
I read your article, but I didn't find it convincing. You criticised Arthur Jensen, but you didn't point out the fundamental flaws in his books. It would be worthwhile for you to formalise a critique of Emil Kirkegaard or Seb Jensen, who have high replicability in their articles, if you want to be taken seriously.