November 13, 1994

Letter From America

By V.S. Maniam

 

CAN YOU imagine a serious book – an often dense so­ciological study whose authors seem to recommend that lay readers confine themselves to the opening summary of each chapter – touching off a bitter controversy, with virtually every newspaper and magazine joining in, figuring in tele­vision talk shows, and becoming a bestseller? The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which reached booksellers just a month ago, has achieved that somewhat unprecedented feat, even amidst the sound and fury of elections.

The reason? You get an inkling n the book’s subtitle: In­telligence and Class Structure in American Life. In the preface (which is about all many will get to read) the au­thors explain that their book is about differences in intellec­tual capacity among people and groups and what those dif­ferences mean for America's future.

Their thesis, which they develop in their 845‑page book, seems to be threefold. Intellectual ability, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) and other tests, is distributed un­equally among different ethnic groups. In consequence, a new kind of class structure has developed in American so­ciety, with a “cognitive elite” well endowed with testable cognitive abilities at the top and with the ethnic groups de­ficient in these abilities at the bottom. And there is a corre­lation between the low intelligence of some groups and the high incidence of intractable social problems among them.

In other words, groups with a high IQ are destined for success, while those with a low IQ are headed in a different direction, and little can be done about it. And since intelli­gence is “endowed” – that is to say, inherited – some groups are genetically superior.

That thesis, The New York Times said in an editorial, sounds "an economic death knell for much of America’s black population.” And the book is “a flame‑throwing treatise.” One syndicated columnist, Carl T. Rowan, described the book as “useless, damaging and dangerous in these times of deep racial troubles.” That is an oft‑stated view. As for the claim that IQ is inherited, many contend that it has long remained unproved.

With co‑author Herrnstein (a psychologist who held that intelligence is largely in the genes) dead, Murray faces the mounting criticism of their joint thesis alone. Murray, whose first book was a critique of social welfare policy called Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950‑1980, is considered a political ideologue opposed to welfare policies. This has led to the indignant suspicion that he now uses social science data to attack welfare and that the con­clusions he draws from his data are bogus.

The continuing controversy has, however, yielded some useful information about the reliability of IQ tests. It is now known that the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who de­vised the first IQ test in 1905, had cautioned against mis­taking it as a measure of fixed, unchangeable intelligence. His test did little more than predict success or failure in the then existing French school system and was based on what was being taught in that system. This leads one professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University to argue that IQ tests ought really to be called Tests That Predict Success or Failure in the School System from Which the Questions Have Been Derived! Others aver that cognitive abilities are too broad to be accurately measured by a simple IQ test.

A more interesting point that has emerged is that nobody really knows what “intelligence” means. Certainly not the sci­entists who are struggling to find what goes in the brain and how it records and creates ideas.