Charles Murray

[Magda Hassan]

Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'?: Charles Murray

By Jason DeParle
Published: October 09, 1994
THE MAN WHO WOULD ABOLISH welfare was flying to Aspen, Colo., sipping Champagne in the first-class cabin and spinning theories about the society unraveling 30,000 feet below. In the past, he says, people were poor because of bad luck or social barriers. "Now," he says, "what's holding them back is that they're not bright enough to be a physician."
It is precisely the kind of statement that makes Charles Murray so infuriating to so many people: sweeping, callous, seemingly smug. The words are harsh, but the voice is genial and oddly reassuring, suffused with regret. He switches to a Bordeaux and recalls his last approach to Aspen, on a private jet sent by Rupert Murdoch.
"Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground," he says, contesting the suggestion that the South Bronx is less nurturing than Scarsdale. "Now I know that's an odd thing to say about the inner city, but at least they're going to school and they have the television on all day. You couldn't say that about blacks 50 years ago."


A white wine follows, and Murray is bursting with anticipation about the corks that will pop later that evening at the home of wealthy Aspen friends. He is 51 and balding, but boyish in blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he leavens his sociological theories with personal asides. The stewardesses in Japan offered him "everything short of a body massage"; he boasts that his friends look at his wife with longing, "and think of what might have been." He is smart enough to know that he is inviting caricature, and bold enough not to care.
Outrageousness, after all, has been good to Charles Murray. He was an unemployed Ph.D. stuck in a midlife crisis a decade ago when he produced "Losing Ground," the book that eroded the assumptions guiding American social policy. With 236 pages of charts and tables, it lent an aura of scientific support to an old suspicion -- that welfare and other social programs cause more problems than they solve. Taking the thought a step further, Murray spoke the unspeakable: why not just abolish them all?
Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling -- that Murray would imagine before publication that the book might be "to the 1980's what 'The Other America' was to the 1960's," or that it was. Even his most bitter enemies concede his formidable intelligence, and in the wake of his antigovernment theories, it sometimes seems downright utopian for others to argue that Federal support can help the disadvantaged.
Though much of official Washington regards him as a menace, Murray's influence is still on the rise, both as the enemy of social programs and the champion of the two-parent family. His prophecy last year of a coming white underclass touched a national nerve, and it brought a flurry of proposals to deny welfare to young mothers. It also brought a surprisingly respectful comment from President Clinton. While he did not agree with Murray's solutions, the President said, the warning about out-of-wedlock births "did the country a great service."
With his new book, "The Bell Curve" (The Free Press), Murray has something even more dangerous and inflammatory on his mind: the relationship between race, class, genes and intelligence. Written with Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, who died last month at the age of 64, the book argues that I.Q. scores -- and their large genetic component -- are the key to understanding who gets ahead in America and who languishes in crime, poverty and dependency.
The authors say the country is witnessing the rise of a cognitive elite, people who are intermarrying and passing on to their children their genetic advantages. They see an underclass operating in reverse, with unemployed men and welfare mothers passing on genetic disadvantages in communities rife with disorder. As the gap widens between the mental haves and have-nots, the authors predict the rise of a new conservatism, "along Latin American lines," with the cognitive elite employing repressive, police-state tactics to protect themselves from the growing danger.
"Like other apocalyptic visions, this one is pessimistic, perhaps too much so," they write. "On the other hand, there is much to be pessimistic about."Unsurprisingly, Murray sees the low intelligence of the poor as a reason to abandon remedial education and similar programs designed to help them, since "for many people, there is nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching."
For years, colleagues have been arching skeptical eyebrows at the work in progress, and the chapters on race show why. Although "The Bell Curve" is not primarily about race, it argues that differences in intelligence are an important reason that blacks are disproportionately poor, imprisoned and dependent on Government aid. And it suggests that at least some of those differences have genetic roots. "That's wild stuff," Murray says with pursed lips and a frown of concern. Like many others, he wonders whether the work will bring an end to his remarkable influence, or extend it into new, more outrageous realms.
HALFWAY TO ASPEN, MURRAY GRABS his laptop computer and demonstrates his research technique. How much can 15 I.Q. points be expected to raise a person's earnings? The machine, packed with data on 12,000 Americans, whirrs and makes a tongue-clucking sound, before spitting out its answer -- $6,654 a year. "See how fun this is!" he says.
Which white kids drop out of high school? More buttons, more whirring -- only those with low I.Q. scores and lower-class parents. "White trash," Murray says. While "that's obviously a generalization," he explains whom he has in mind -- people "sitting at home in their undershirts drinking, and they really don't care anyway." Murray's persona in print is that of the burdened researcher coming to his disturbing conclusions with the utmost regret; but at the moment, he seems to be having the time of his life. "It really is social science pornography," he says.
Social science pornography. The phrase may explain more about Murray's influence than he intended, and possibly more than he fully understands. Much of that influence has stemmed from his ability to express, through seemingly dispassionate analysis, many people's hidden suspicions about race, class and sex. His writings comprise a kind of Michelin guide to the American underpsyche.
The phenomenon is one that he himself has at least inadvertently acknowledged. "Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked in the proposal for "Losing Ground." "Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."
Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich may have more power than Murray, and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan may have more direct influence. But no other conservative has his ability to make a radical thought seem so reasonable. Where others rant, Murray seduces with mountains of data and assurances of his own fine intentions. He will never be the country's most famous conservative, but he may well be the most dangerous.
Seventy-nine academic researchers signed a statement this spring condemning Murray's proposal to abolish welfare; they say it would "increase the incidence of homelessness and hunger among children." And in speeches in June and September, Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, called Murray's welfare solution "un-American" and "almost surreal." She likened it to Jonathan Swift's "modest proposal" that society eat poor children -- minus Swift's satirical intent.
The question now is whether, in his zeal to shatter taboos, Murray has finally gone too far. Murray was dropped from the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that had underwritten "Losing Ground," as soon as he began the new book. In an interview at the time, William Hammett, the institute's president, alternately praised Murray's integrity and worried that the book would broach "the genetic inferiority stuff." Murray quickly affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. The Boston Globe began denouncing "The Bell Curve" this summer, months before it was publicly available. An article quoted scholars speculating that the book was based on pseudoscience, while the editorial page attacked the book's "high ignorance quotient."
The reason for the unease is no mystery: theories of genetic differences have a long and ugly history, especially when it comes to race. Herrnstein and Murray acknowledge as much, and worry that their book, "wrongly construed, might do harm." They hedge their bet slightly, saying the evidence "suggests, without quite proving, genetic roots" for part of the black-white difference. They even call the debate over genes a distraction from more important issues. But once again Murray may be saying with scientific references and assurances of his own good will what others murmur darkly in barrooms and taxis. And his disclaimers are unlikely to mute critics.
"We don't know anything relevant about how the physical processes of the brain differ by race," says Christopher Jencks, a sociologist at Northwestern University, after hearing a lengthy description of the Murray thesis. "There's a striking dearth of evidence.
"This seems to me a case where you ought to have really airtight evidence before you make claims," he continues. "Promulgating the view that, for some physical reason, blacks are unable to do certain intellectual work, reinforces every harmful stereotype we've inherited over 300 years."
Denunciations, firing -- no matter. For Murray, the prospect of trouble was always part of the project's appeal. "Here was a case of stumbling onto a subject that had all the allure of the forbidden," he says. "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."
Who is speaking here, an ideologue or a provocateur? Murray sees elements of both in himself but says at bottom he is neither. "The real answer is that I'm a social scientist, damn it, and a good one," he says. But the story is more complicated than that.
PEERING FROM HIS WINDOW SEAT, Murray watches the buckled Eastern continent gentle into a Midwestern plain, and he searches for the Iowa town of Newton. He describes his childhood there as if gazing upon a faded photograph of a 1950's Lake Wobegon. The streets are shady, the fences are white and the parents are moral and married.
It is impossible to understand Murray without understanding Newton, or at least his interpretation of Newton, which drives his pronouncements on family and community. "My family was pretty much the way a family was supposed to be," he says, "a Norman Rockwell kind of family, I'm afraid. I say 'I'm afraid' because it will just confirm my critics' view that my views about family are unrealistic."
The story patched together from ground level in Newton is more nuanced. Murray was raised in a Midwestern household that stressed moral responsibility, the value that forms the core of his ideology. But his brainy, somewhat alienated youth also kindled his distinctive impulse toward rebellion.
Newton, now a town of 14,789, happens to be where F. L. Maytag manufactured his first appliance, and remains the headquarters of the Maytag Corporation. Murray's father, Alan, spent most of his career as a Maytag executive, rising quickly from working-class roots. The Murrays lived a half-mile from the country club in a neighborhood of managers who worked, golfed and voted Republican together.
If streets can embody a corporate ethic, these do -- one that dubs its employees "the dependability people." The homes are solid and proud, comfortable but not lavish. Alan Murray says a similar creed prevailed inside his family's home: "You were supposed to do what's right, and that was it."
But ask how Charles Murray became the person he is, and the answer usually comes compressed into two words: his mother. At 88, she retains the stage presence cultivated in a lifetime of amateur drama, and she is happy to take credit for sculpturing an ideology. "In his writings I see many things we talked about at our dinner table," she says. "Home background just comes out, that's all." Murray tells a vivid story of her bursting into "furious tears" when she learned that that he had accepted a stolen sweater from a friend.
He describes his youth as "a pretty typical story of the bright, quirky kid who doesn't quite fit in." In a community that stressed athletics, he played chess by mail and starred on the debate team. "I had friends, but I was always a bit weird," he says, recalling the time as a 9-year-old when he told a playmate he looked "rigid" when diving into the pool. "One of the kids said, 'rigid?' and started teasing me unmercifully for using a big word. I remember thinking to myself: 'Rigid? It's a little word. It's only five letters.' "
By his teens, Murray was moving from smart to smart aleck, a transformation he may never have reversed. It began at home, where the disputatious debate star began espousing labor unionism, a pose that so annoyed his parents it is the first thing they mention upon a visitor's arrival many decades later. "He was pro-labor, living on his father's management money," his mother says.
During his senior year of high school, Murray found a more satisfying form of rebellion -- decamping to the Newton pool hall, "where all the juvenile delinquents hung out." He discovered he was actually good at the game, and says that after years of semi-exile, "it was very gratifying to be accepted at that point by the hoods."
The hoods were struck by the change, especially after Murray returned home from college and announced his theory of love. "He was saying, 'To be more successful with women, you really have to have a background as a bit of an outlaw,' " says Denny Rutledge, who was still hanging around the pool hall.
While the basic facts of Murray's youth are not in dispute, his interpretation of them is. In Murray's memory, Newton becomes a kind of Jeffersonian village, where neighbors help neighbors and class distinctions are minor and "not invidious." It is a vision that shapes his hope of what society might look like if the misguided state would just get out of the way.
But Rutledge, who was arrested for theft in high school, says this is an airbrushed view. "That's incredibly myopic, totally inaccurate," he says. "There was a very big dividing line in Newton." Rutledge, who graduated from juvenile delinquency to social work (and, later, real estate) says his own, pained understanding of Newton's class structure was formed during his family's annual pilgrimage to look at the Christmas lights in the Murrays' neighborhood. He remembers thinking, "those people are the haves, and we're the have-nots, and we're not going to get there."
While there is much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray's teen-age years, there is at least one adventure that he understandably deletes from the story -- the night he helped his friends burn a cross. They had formed a kind of good guys' gang, "the Mallows," whose very name, from marshmallows, was a play on their own softness. In the fall of 1960, during their senior year, they nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scattered as a calling card.
Rutledge recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. "There wouldn't have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds," he says. "That's how unaware we were."
A long pause follows when Murray is reminded of the event. "Incredibly, incredibly dumb," he says. "But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, 'How on earth could we be so oblivious?' I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn't cross our minds."
MURRAY LANDED AT HARVARD IN THE fall of 1961, where by his own account he spent four mostly uneventful years, studying Russian history and working at a classical music station. Taking a "pride in perversity," he went out of his way to advertise his oddness, wearing his ties, for instance, with the fat end short. "I really had very few close friends," he says. Graduating in 1965, Murray left for the Peace Corps and stayed abroad for six years. "Thailand was the transforming experience in my life," he says. "Thailand is where I grew up."
Murray claims he joined less out of idealism than a desire for adventure, and he found some in the romance he kindled that summer in Hawaii with his language instructor, Suchart Dej-Udom. The daughter of a wealthy Thai businessman, she was born with one hand and a mind sharp enough to outscore the rest of the country on the college entrance exam. He proposed by mail in the fall of 1965 and their 14-year marriage began the following summer, a move that Murray now views as another youthful rebellion. "I'm getting married to a one-handed Thai Buddhist," he said. "This was not the daughter-in-law that would have normally presented itself to an Iowa couple."
If Newton is where Murray's antistate politics were planted, Thailand is where they began to sprout -- in part as the unintended consequence of the nation's privy program. The Peace Corps sent him from village to village, urging skeptical Thais to build and use modern sanitation, but Murray says his importunings had little effect. His father recalls him writing home to say, "It's hard to get a guy to build a well when he likes the taste of dead rats."
Murray's suspicions of Government initiative deepened after his tour ended. He found work with research firms doing counterinsurgency studies on behalf of the United States Government. The job sent him back into Thai villages, to assess the impact of programs designed to stave off rebellion with the provision of things like fish ponds, health clinics and roads.
But Murray concluded that the services had virtually no impact on the villagers' attitudes. They were much more interested in whether local chiefs could catch water buffalo thieves. "It became clear to me how utterly irrelevant Bangkok was to the life of the village," he says, adding that in some cases the Government intrusion even destroyed a delicate civic fabric.
The theory blossomed into a doctoral thesis in political science at M.I.T. It is a classic Murray work, filled with complex statistical considerations from which he drew a stark conclusion: "Thai villages show a remarkable latent ability to take care of their own affairs." It is a message that, in one form or another, Murray has been repeating ever since.
Murray retained enough residual liberalism in 1972 to contribute $5 to the McGovern campaign. But when he finally returned home a year later he was a married man with a child, and the country no longer looked the way it did when he left in 1965. Radical chic, Woodstock, the Black Panthers -- all had washed across the continent while he'd been pondering modernity in places called Pong and Khao Soi. "I read about the 60's in Time magazine," he says. Driving to work one day, he had a minor epiphany. "Gee," he told himself, "you really are a conservative."
Murray cemented the belief with a seven-year stay at the American Institutes for Research, a Washington organization that evaluates social programs -- none of which, he says, worked.
Murray's disillusionment had deepened on more than one level. His marriage had been unhappy for years, but his childhood lessons on the importance of responsibility brought him slowly to the idea that divorce was an honorable alternative, especially with young children involved. Then one day in 1980 he told his wife, "Life cannot go on like this." "He found he dreaded coming home," she recalls. When he could not bring himself to tell his parents, she made the call.
A year later, Murray made his second break, leaving the research firm. Though he had risen to the position of chief scientist, he sensed a futility in the work. He had written what he considered "gems of reports," but he knew they were mostly unread. His plans (and his means of support) were unclear, but a book began to take shape in his mind.
MURRAY BOUNDS FOR THE DOOR AS THE ASPEN runway halts the jet. By sundown his car is climbing toward the gated community of Starwood (home to John Denver and the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar) and the wine cellar that has tantalized him for much of the day. His host, Irwin Stelzer, is gone on business, but he has left his wife, Cita, a wine list and decanting instructions -- a half-bottle of 1983 Chateau Margaux will be followed by the main event, a 1979 Petrus (retailing at $375 a bottle).
A business consultant whose clients include Rupert Murdoch, Stelzer once arranged for Murray to spend a month in England writing about the British underclass for The Sunday Times. The paper paid for Murray's family to accompany him, an arrangement Murray considered his payment for the work. But as a bonus, Stelzer had the paper drop Murray a $10,000 check. "He's the godfather," Murray says.
The Stelzer home happens to be the one where in 1976 Claudine Longet shot the skier Spider Sabich, and there is a requisite tour of the bathroom crime scene. Hummingbirds flit around the patio grill and the small talk eventually turns to Murray's work on I.Q. and race.
An Israeli cellist asks if Murray draws any conclusions about Africa's shortage of ancient literature. Murray says he does, and as the veal chops sizzle, he offers the Israeli a national compliment: "In terms of I.Q, you guys are off the charts." As the meal ends, a call is placed to the absent Irwin, and it falls upon Murray to deliver the bad news; the Margaux was somewhat tannic. "But the Petrus!" he says. "It's just been blossoming!"
The next morning brings a tougher audience. Murray is in town to address a retreat of foundation executives, sponsored by the Aspen Institute, and he will warn that welfare is driving illegitimacy and bringing society to the brink of collapse. The message is one he has perfected in the decade since "Losing Ground." It is a beguiling book, thick with statistics yet accessible, even lively, and steeped in a tone of good intentions. Scrapping the welfare system will not mean that stingy people have won, he wrote, but that "generous people have stopped kidding themselves." His calm marshalling of evidence, and would-that-it-weren't-so tone, made it a work that liberals could not simply dismiss.
By now, an army of critics has challenged some of the book's statistical underpinnings. Murray tied the soaring rate of out-of-wedlock births to the growth of the welfare system that supports single mothers. Critics say the relationship is, at most, indirect. Births to single mothers continued to rise, they say, even when benefits were holding steady or (depending how one calculates) in retreat. And they rose for middle-class women who never collected welfare. After a decade of esoteric statistical debate, Murray claims (plausibly, even to some detractors) to have shown at least a small link between benefit levels and out-of-wedlock births, though only among whites.
But it is another thing then to leap, as Murray does, to the assertion that abolishing welfare will immediately halve the number of out-of-wedlock births -- or that the resulting pain would be worth it. "There'd be a lot more homelessness, a lot more hunger and a lot more despair," says Robert Greenstein, until recently the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington advocacy group.
But as out-of-wedlock births have continued to grow (more than 30 percent of Americans are now born to single mothers) so has Murray's influence. When "Losing Ground" first appeared in 1984, Murray's views were too radical even for Murray -- the book couches them as "a thought experiment," and not even Ronald Reagan would actually propose such a thing. But this spring a dozen Representatives stood in front of the Capitol and called for an end to benefits for mothers under 21. They would send the children of those who could not manage to state-run orphanages.
Similar proposals are backed by such glamorous Republican names as Jack Kemp and William Bennett. Murray may even be the first welfare analyst to see his work on the multiplex screen. When the makers of the Joe Pesci film "With Honors" wanted to depict the tough-minded undergraduate of the 90's, they showed a Harvard student with "Losing Ground" tucked under his arm.
Without undue armchair psychology, it is possible to see in this outcome the satisfaction of two of Murray's deepest, if contradictory, yearnings. With his speaking schedule, book sales and Congressional appearances, he has captured the respectability so valued in his childhood home. At the same time, he manages to remain the pool-hall outlaw with shocking views, luxuriating in the clucking disapproval of polite society.
His presence in Aspen is a bit of an event. His two co-panelists, Judith Jones of Columbia University and Frances Fox Piven of CUNY, berate him as a demagogue fueling the forces of reaction, but Murray has heard it all before. He genially professes "a lot of common ground" with his liberal antagonists, only to tick off his agenda: abolish welfare, abolish food stamps, abolish subsidized housing. Murray even wants to end child support payments to unwed mothers, arguing that physical unions acquire their legitimacy only through marriage. What would he tell a young, unwed mother? "I don't want society to say to her, 'You made a mistake,' " he says. "I want society to say, 'You did wrong.' "
Piven, looking aghast, accuses him of being "preoccupied with sin."
It is a provocative thought -- is Charles Murray, deep down, on an antisex crusade? The notion makes him laugh. As a policy analyst, he cares only that children are raised by two parents. Besides, he adds, "No young man who spent as many years in Bangkok as I did can be against sex."
It is a flamboyant comment, but Murray has been advertising his hormones throughout the trip. He let out a manly groan when a woman in a tube top passed him on the plane. He noted the shapely blond assistants staffing the seminar and gave thanks, as a married man who values monogamy, that he did not dwell permanently among them, shuddering at "the tension."
In fact, Murray has been raising the subject of his own sexuality throughout months of discussion. Speaking of his high-school girlfriend, he volunteered that "in those innocent days, we never had the experience," adding later that he feared "the worst would happen, the condom would break" and he would be forced into a teen-age marriage. He added sarcastically, "It probably accounts for the twisted views I have today."
What then, took place in Bangkok? Quite a lot, it seems, since his friends from those days still tell tales of Murray's barroom antics, ones that he nostalgically repeats. Murray explains that he and a Peace Corps friend once sat for 12 hours at a place called the Patpong Terrace, interviewing bar girls as they returned from their liaisons, taking "all sorts of intimate notes about who did what, that I don't care to repeat." The resulting document became an underground thriller among his friends.
Murray also makes clear that he did more than take notes, though he theatrically objects to hearing the women described as prostitutes. "Don't use that word," he says. "They were women of the evening. Courtesans. We liked them, and they liked us.
"In a lot of the places you had to woo the ladies," he continues. "It involves money on the man's part, yes, but it also involves consensual relations."
He understands that he is describing a pastime not usually associated with a defense of the two-parent family. "I'm trying to tell you I'm not against sex," he says, characteristically blunt.
"You," Murray concludes, "should have been so lucky."
THE CRITICS WHO SAY MURRAY IS living in the 1950's are, in at least one respect, off by more than a century. His home in rural Maryland, a half-hour outside Frederick, originally served as a tannery in the 1830's. Worried that the new book may bring threats of physical harm, he asks that the village's name be withheld. He lives there with his second wife, Catherine Cox, and their two young children.
The romance started a year after his divorce, when Cox, then teaching English literature at Rutgers, dropped him a letter. Their parents were close friends, but Murray, who is six years older, had never known her well. He invited her sailing, and they were married two years later. He wrote a chapter of "Losing Ground" on the honeymoon. "Catherine is just the person," he says. "We just fit like this utterly perfect fit."
There was one hitch -- his politics repelled her. Cox says she knew the relationship would never work as soon as she saw him reading the conservative author George Gilder, and she spent long hours trying to reconcile his Continued on page 62 shocking views with what she saw as his deep decency. "It took a long time for that to sink in," she says. "He really cares about people," she says.
By all accounts, Murray has managed the merger of his old family and his new one with unusual grace. Guilt-ridden over the divorce, he spent virtually every weekend with his daughters, Narisara and Sarawan, and friends say he sometimes turned down lucrative out-of-town engagements to do so. His ex-wife remarried first, and she says when Catherine was pregnant she told her, "Don't worry, Charlie's a good father." When Murray threw a 60th anniverary party for his parents, Suchart Dej-Udom Murray Milsted was on hand. "Everyone's healed nicely now," she says.
At least until the new book arrives. In Richard Herrnstein, Murray found his equal in two vital categories -- intelligence and shock value. Superficially, their backgrounds could not be more dissimilar. Herrnstein's parents were left-wing, Jewish immigrants from Hungary who raised him in a working-class neighborhood of the Bronx.
But as he told the story of his youth, in a long conversation last summer, it echoed with Murray-like themes of alienation and rebellion. He was packed off in Hungarian short pants and stockings to endure the taunts of grade-school classmates, and he acted up so much that his teachers used to lock him in the coat room. "I was raising hell most of the time," he said.
Though he was an acclaimed psychologist who held B. F. Skinner's former chair at Harvard, Herrnstein's notoriety stems from his nonacademic work. In 1971, he published an article in The Atlantic Monthly about the heritability of intelligence, famously predicting a future in which the "the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth do now." Though Herrnstein dealt only peripherally with race, militant students branded him a racist, interrupted his lectures and, he said, threatened him with physical violence.
But he continued to write about intelligence, not only out of interest but also out of a sense of obligation. Scholars, like priests, he said, have a "calling to find the truth and disclose it." Meeting Murray at a conference, he told him "you ought to get into the I.Q. business," and the two quickly agreed to collaborate. Their paired sensibilities reminded one colleague of two kamikazes on a test flight.
The book begins by asserting a paradox: America, by its commitment to equal opportunity, is reordering society into increasingly unequal classes, with a prospering, intellectual elite at one end of the bell curve and a miserable, menacing underclass at the other. This inequality, it says, is the inevitable result of a modern economy that needs and rewards smart people. A true meritocracy is an astonishingly unequal place, since the abilities of individuals vary widely.
The argument goes like this:
The country has always had class divisions, but the criteria for them have changed. In the past, racial and class barriers kept smart people down, and privileged births lifted dim people up. In a world of bright farmers and dull senators, the rich weren't necessarily smart and the smart weren't necessarily rich.
But in midcentury, the economy vastly expanded its need for smart people, like engineers and computer programmers. And the educational system got increasingly efficient at finding them and channeling them into elite universities and prosperous careers. At the same time, there was little room for those with stong backs but dull minds, and a cognitive underclass settled like sediment. The result, they write, was a world "in which it became much more consistently and universally advantageous to be smart." The authors stress that they are merely describing this development, not celebrating it.
While lots of critics have worried about rising inequality, "The Bell Curve" veers away from more familiar discussions by its emphasis on genes. While others use words like "education" or "test scores" to describe the sorting mechanism at work, Herrnstein and Murray use the word "intelligence" and stress its genetic roots. Citing studies that estimate that from 40 to 80 percent of an individual's intelligence stems from genes, the authors take a midpoint of 60 percent. (The studies refer to how much an average individual's I.Q. is affected by genes, not to the cause of interracial differences in intelligence.)
While that would seem to leave a large role for environment, the authors insist that the differences separating one household from another are diminishing. (Unlike a century ago, for instance, virtually all children go to school.) As environmental differences narrow, heritability rises. Suddenly, they write, "success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit."
Herrnstein and Murray chase this vision to its apocalyptic conclusion. Smart people, intermarrying, will produce smart children; the disadvantaged will pass down their intractable handicaps; and the gap between the classes will grow. Skeptics may pin their hopes on "regression to the mean," the statistical phenomenon that predicts that two high-I.Q. parents will have children whose scores are lower, closer to the national average (just as two low-I.Q. parents are likely to have children whose scores are higher). But the authors say this force is overpowered by other factors, like the increasing tendency of the very smart to intermarry.
The book includes eight chapters of original research designed to correlate low I.Q. with a variety of social problems, including crime, poverty, out-of-wedlock births -- even bad child-rearing and poor citizenship. They are careful to stress that for any given individual, I.Q. scores may mean little; character, drive and luck may do much more to influence success. But they insist that the scores establish powerful patterns for people in the same cognitive range, meaning that inequality will increase.
Their prescriptions are, in many ways, a continuation of Murray's attacks on social programs. The authors want to abandon affirmative action, which they think poisons race relations by promoting unqualified blacks. They want to drop remedial education programs, which they think can never work, and spend the money on the talented students they say the economy really needs. They would alter immigration practices that they think are admitting people of less-than-average intelligence. And they would eliminate welfare and other Government benefits that, they believe, encourage women with low I.Q.'s to reproduce.
How all this would avert the apocalypse is unclear. If some people are really too dim to make it on their own, for instance, maybe welfare (or Government jobs programs) should be expanded. In the end, the Herrnstein-Murray solutions reside less in a specific set of policies than in a new set of expectations. Rather than trying to erase individual differences, they say, society should find ways for people of differing abilities to live with dignity.
They conjure a romantic vision of a world that strips power from the central Government and returns it to the neighborhood, where all people can engage "in the stuff of life -- birth, death, raising children, making a living, helping friends, singing in the local choir or playing on the softball team." The goal is to offer the less gifted something more precious than economic equality, "a place as a valued fellow citizen." While it's hard to see how this will shore up a collapsing society, the neighborhood does sound familiar. It seems a lot like the world Murray saw in Newton, one that perhaps even then did not exist.
EVEN SKEPTICAL READERS will find the book's central message disturbing. A country founded on the principle that people are created equal does not like to be reminded that people can have innate, limiting, differences.
But bleak as "The Bell Curve" 's vision may be, it is not entirely new. Herrnstein has been saying similar things for two decades. And the fear that a meritocratic society will prove a dystopian one is at least a half-century old. In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young, a member of the Labor Party, sketched a similar scenario in his novel "The Rise of the Meritocracy." He saw the trend leading to an armed rebellion by the year 2034.
One group of skeptics will question whether intelligence is as newly influential, or as dominant, a force in American life as Herrnstein and Murray believe. They are almost certainly right that the intelligent person can rise more easily today than a century ago. But brains have always helped, even before such gifts could be measured at the end of a No. 2 pencil. Witness Huck Finn.
Others will question whether I.Q. really is, as Herrnstein and Murray assert, the all-encompassing measure of mental aptitude. One leading skeptic is Robert Sternberg, a Yale psychologist, who has pioneered the study of what he calls practical intelligence. He cites experiments among housewives who are failures at pad-and-pencil math but competent comparison shoppers when they hit the supermarket aisle. "That's not to say I.Q. counts zero," he says. "It's to say that there are other kinds of intelligence that are equally or maybe more important."
A third, and perhaps more powerful, criticism of the book will most likely involve its stress on genes, and the short shrift Murray gives to environmental factors. There is, at the heart of the book, a fundamental conflict between cause and effect. While it may be true that cognitive differences produce inequality, inequality also produces cognitive differences. Environment, especially the unspeakably bad environment of the black ghetto, must count for something.
Murray sounds surprised and alarmed that anyone would think "that we're hung up on genes," a puzzling protest given the book's clearly provocative assertion (to repeat) that "success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit" (emphasis added). Of course environment matters, Murray goes on to say, but no one knows how to change bad environments in ways that bring long-term cognitive gains. The book makes a case that Head Start and other programs have tried, only to leave behind "high hopes, flamboyant claims and disappointing results." Murray concludes that "the heritability of I.Q. is not a big deal in this book," but "the intractability of I.Q. is a very big deal."
It is true that the public often assumes that environmental differences can be easily remedied, while genetic differences are forever fixed. Theoretically, the opposite could someday be true: biological differences may be easier to rectify than social differences. But his late-hour protests aside, Murray has spent months arguing that cognitive differences are highly heritable and highly intractable.
He has repeatedly waved aside the suggestion that rotten homes and neighborhoods suffocate the intellectual development of the disadvantaged. When I asked him in August if his own children would test as well if they had been raised in the Robert Taylor Homes, the vast public housing wasteland in Chicago, he said, "It doesn't make a damn bit of difference -- their I.Q.'s are going to be the same, one way or another." Later, when I remind him of his words, Murray says he had given "the wrong answer," and speculates that his children would have done worse in school and possibly have become criminals or teen-age parents. Nonetheless, he adds, "they still would have tested pretty high on I.Q. tests."
Whichever shading represents Murray's deepest belief, it's clear that most Americans think that environment matters quite a lot -- especially those with the supposed genetic edge. The upper middle class is obsessive about getting its children in the right schools and test-prep courses. The Murray family seems no exception: before moving on to Harvard, Murray's older two daughters attended Washington's tony National Cathedral School (a decision he attributes to his ex-wife).
The emphasis on innate differences would be explosive enough, even if the subject of race never arose. But it does, and Murray knows an assault is coming. "Let's be sensible about this stuff," he says. "Let's not ignore it. Let's not run screaming from the room, either. That's not justified."
THIS MUCH IS KNOWN: blacks, on average, score about 15 points lower than whites on intelligence tests. Why that is, and what it means, are questions with a long and troubled past, marred by pseudoscience and racial animosity.
The most obvious explanation is that black children are more likely to grow up under handicapping circumstances like worse schools, poorer homes, inferior nutrition and violent neighborhoods. Indeed, as the overall gap in living conditions has narrowed, so, too, have the racial differences on test performance (although not as much as many people have hoped).
Other explanations for the differences involve test bias or differential motivation on the part of black children convinced of their own limited prospects. Herrnstein and Murray consider these theories but say they cannot explain the entire 15-point difference. They conclude that the evidence "suggests" that a portion of the gap -- they are agnostic about how much -- stems from "genetic roots."
What evidence? They cite studies showing the test differences persist even when class is held constant. They cite a survey in which a plurality of psychologists indicated that genetic factors helped explain racial differences. The authors also offer a Minnesota study of transracial adoption by the psychologists Richard Weinberg and Sandra Scarr. The study involved about 100 children born in the late 1960's, including black children adopted into upper-middle-class white homes.
At first, the new environments seemed to boost cognitive performance. At age 7, the adopted black children had I.Q.'s of about 97, above the racial average of 85. But a follow-up study 10 years later showed a fall-off to 89, only slightly above the national black average. White adoptees also declined, but had higher scores at both testings, falling from 117 to 106. Herrnstein and Murray conclude that "whatever the environmental impact may have been, it cannot have been large."
But that is not what Weinberg and Scarr emphasize. Their most recent paper, written with Irwin D. Waldman, claims to find "little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying a racial difference." Instead, they note that the black adoptees fared worse than white adoptees even before the adoption took place, thanks to longer stays in foster care and worse foster-care homes. They speculate that the blacks may also have encountered increased discrimination as they reached adolescence. They were, after all, still black children in a mostly white world.
Moreover, the psychologists found that although their I.Q. scores dropped, the black adoptees did better in school than other black children, suggesting their privileged home environments helped. Thus, "the balance of evidence, while not conclusive, favors a predominantly environmental etiology."
At this point, the debate gets both nuanced and nasty. Murray notes that if an explanation is "predominantly" environmental, then it is at least partly genetic. Weinberg says, "the genetic component may be skin color," which triggers a discriminatory social response. Weinberg calls Murray "acontextual." Murray attacks Weinberg for trying to "dance around the point."
Other scientists, meanwhile, say the whole inquiry is plagued by insurmountable methodological difficulties, that no one knows how to disentangle genes from the social impact of being raised black in America. Jonathan Beckwith, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School, argues that scientists cannot measure genetic differences between the races "until we can identify a gene that's involved." He adds: "I don't think there is any evidence that would point toward a genetically based black-white difference in intelligence."
"The Bell Curve" devotes only 2 of its 22 chapters to race, and less than that to the subtopic of genes. It even asserts "that it matters little whether the genes are involved at all." There are manyoutstanding black minds, Murray says, just as there are many dull white ones; individuals should always be treated as such. Genetic differences between the races, he says, "are utterly irrelevant to the arguments of 'The Bell Curve.' "
But in a country where white people have claimed innate superiority for 300 years, the talk of genetic differences matters quite a lot. It could be put to any number of demagogic uses, at a time when many blacks are already willing to suspect the worst of whites. "The Bell Curve" acknowledges that I.Q. tests have been used to support "outrageous racial policies." And it notes that by 1917, the spread of the tests had led 16 states to pass forced sterilization laws (primarily for the mentally retarded). But the authors remain uninhibited by this history.
In the last chapter they say they will be pleased if the book brings a discussion of how to "manipulate the fertility of people with high and low I.Q.'s." Murray says he is talking about the elimination of welfare, not coercion, but given the history of eugenics it is a disturbing phrase nonetheless. It recalls the high-school prankster who burned a cross, only to learn later what the fuss was all about.
"I really don't think I'm a racist," he says, explaining he uses the word "think" only because he distrusts blithe assertions. "Deep down inside, I don't think I am. So if people say, 'You have a racial agenda,' I just say, 'No, I don't.' "
THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO people in America who hold Charles Murray in special esteem, even as they judge his ideas skeptically against their own difficult lives. They live in a weatherbeaten farmhouse, down five miles of gravel road, just past a junkyard, outside of Baxter, Iowa. Kaye and Jerry Postma are two of Murray's oldest friends.
A visitor is deluged with engaging stories about the man Kaye theatrically calls "Mr. Murray." Kaye adopts an arch voice and remembers Murray sauntering in from Harvard to declare, "you remind me of a Rubens." Jerry recalls a visit to Washington, when a neighborhood kid volunteered that Murray had odd views about race. "The kid said, 'Just say something to him bad about blacks, and he'll just get up and leave,' " he recalls.
It is clear that Murray sees the Postmas as something special as well -- the ideal denizens of the Jeffersonian village he wants this country to become. He regards Jerry, who works at the Maytag factory, as "kind of a saint figure." He notes the dozens of championship baking ribbons that line Kaye's kitchen wall -- betraying a depth of talent that her day job, as a nursing aide, disguises. When he talks about a place for the "valued fellow citizen," the Postmas are who he has in mind.
But ask the Postmas about abolishing welfare and they reply that one of their daughters has relied on it. 'It's just more complicated than Mr. Murray has any idea," Kaye says. "The girl falls in love with this total, freakin' bum. She thinks she can change him.
"The last thing on these people's minds is whether or not they'll have welfare," she continues.
When the topic turns to "The Bell Curve," the emotions rise another notch. Kaye is white, but one of her daughters has married a black man, and her living room boasts a portrait of three black grandchildren. Her response to a "Bell Curve" paragraph about race, genes and I.Q. recalls Murray's admonition not to "run screaming from the room," since that is precisely what she does.
"I get so emotional," she says, stomping around the house. "As a mother, I get a lump in my throat. I just don't think humankind needs to hear how much smarter this one is than that one. I just don't have that much faith in statistics. I don't think that can ever be proven."
In her view, Murray is still playing the precocious tricks he perfected in seventh grade, when his antics tied their teacher into knots. "He'll take off on one little piece of lint in an argument and make a furball out of it," she says.
But when the evening ends, she sends her visitor packing with a gift for her contrarian friend -- a slice of blueberry pie, freshly baked in her championship kitchen. "No matter what," she says, "I adore him."

Jason DeParle is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/magazi...int&src=pm