Charles Murray (@charlesmurray on Twitter) co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein one of the most controversial books of the 20th century, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). When it was first published, the harsh criticism from liberals — who claimed the book was practically neo-Nazi propaganda — led me to believe that it really was a bad book.
Liberal propaganda works this way. If enough people tell you they see smoke (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) you tend to assume that there must actually be some kind of hateful fire. So in 1994-95, after reading numerous reviews, articles and op-ed columns condemning The Bell Curve as crypto-racist pseudo-science, I just assumed the critics were correct. It wasn’t until 1996, when I made a dismissive remark about The Bell Curve in an Internet argument, that I found myself challenged: Had I actually read the book? So . . .
Charles Murray’s critics were not merely wrong, they were dishonest (because SJWs Always Lie, as Vox Day has recently explained). The recognition that I had been scammed, hoodwinked and bamboozled by liberal smears of The Bell Curve angered me. The first 125 pages of the book, which have nothing to do with the subject of race, are perhaps the most valuable part of The Bell Curve. Standardized testing and nationwide recruiting by elite universities have resulted in cognitive segregation, the creation of something very much like a caste system. The educational apparatus by which high-IQ children are tracked into “gifted” programs in elementary school and “honors” programs in high school, with the goal of sending every smart kid in the country to an elite university, has the effect of dissolving the social and cultural affinities between the elite caste and the vast majority of Americans. (At age 11, I was placed in an experimental “gifted” program, the first of its kind in our community. I hated it — a ridiculous waste of time, a burdensome “honor” conferring no actual benefit — and rebelled against the system, becoming a teenage hoodlum in middle school.) Once you get past page 125 of The Bell Curve, really, it is an attempt to explain why liberal policies have failed to eliminate socioeconomic disparities between racial and ethnic groups. If you keep in mind that the argument is about the efficacy of public policy — what the government is doing in our name, with our tax dollars — the accusations of “racism” directed at The Bell Curve must be recognized as an attempt to silence a cogent criticism of five decades of blundering, misguided wastefulness. “The Ivy League is decadent and depraved.” But I digress . . .
On Saturday, the Harvard-educated liberal snob Matthew Yglesias smeared Charles Murray by way of attacking Donald Trump, with the unintended consequence that a quote by Murray was called to my attention and, considering my own interest in radical feminism, I asked Murray via Twitter, “Did you ever tackle the ‘innate differences’ controversy that got Larry Summers fired at Harvard?” He replied with a link to an AEI paper he published in 2005, “The Inequality Taboo”:
The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected. . . .
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. . . . Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong. . . .
Here we may interrupt to point out that the phrase “innate differences” refers to average differences between groups. Anyone who watches the NBA cannot help but notice that most of the players are black. This doesn’t mean, however, that there are no good white, Asian or Hispanic basketball players. Nor does it mean that all black people are good at basketball. Also, it does not mean that the NBA is engaging in discrimination. Whenever we see any disproportionate outcome that might be explained by average group differences, we must keep in mind that such differences do not tell us anything about any individual‘s potential, abilities or tendencies, and it is generally a mistake, in a free society, to leap to the conclusion that discrimination causes disparities in outcomes. (The Bell Curve carries many such disclaimers, by the way.) Now, we return to Charles Murray’s 2005 article:
The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By the 1990’s, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary’s pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages. Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker’s chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002). . . .
Regarding women, men, and babies, the technical literature is as unambiguous as everyday experience would lead one to suppose. As a rule, the experience of parenthood is more profoundly life-altering for women than for men. . . . Among humans, extensive empirical study has demonstrated that women are more attracted to children than are men, respond to them more intensely on an emotional level, and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from nurturing them. Many of these behavioral differences have been linked with biochemical differences between men and women.
Thus, for reasons embedded in the biochemistry and neurophysiology of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement at the highest level also have something else they want to do in life: have a baby. In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question. These are precisely the years during which most women must bear children if they are to bear them at all.
Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for high-level accomplishment in the arts and sciences shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.
You can read the whole thing, to which I wish to add this: It does not matter whether male-female differences, as they relate to parenting, are “innate” or “socially constructed.” Biological realities of pregnancy and nursing mean that women have a greater personal investment in parenthood. Without any resort to Darwinian explanations, there are numerous practical reasons why we should expect mothers to be more nurturing than men.
