Charles Murray Is Still A Racist Hack.

We're going retro-style OP for this entry.

A friend of mine posted a link to this editorial in the Washington Post, which thanks God that America is not yet like Europe.  About halfway through, I realized the op-ed was full of generalizations, skewed analogies and half-truths, so I decided to look at the byline.  I was shocked to see that the article was written by my 'old friend' Charles Murray.  You know -- the co-author of The Bell Curve.   Yeah, THAT Charles Murray.  The former Harvard professor sporting a far-right worldview with a heavy dose of eugenics and social Darwinism. 

Suddenly the op-ed made perfect sense.  Only Charles Murray and his ilk could write sections like this and be serious:

"I want to focus on another problem with the European model: namely, that it drains too much of the life from life.  The stuff of life -- the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships -- occurs within just four institutions: family, community, vocation and faith. Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. The European model doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them."

Would you like to know more?  You got it:

"The nations of Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. They are countries where jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And with only a few exceptions, they are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.  Call it the Europe Syndrome."

Here's another Murray fastball special:

"The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians."

In spite of all the crap that came before, it is the following excerpt that inspired the title of this entry:

"Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise." The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people -- men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays -- will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life -- the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and who become CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that this is true.  I'm confident that within a decade, the weight of the new scientific findings will force the left to abandon the equality premise [emphasis added]."

You just knew Chuck wouldn't be able to resist falling back on the largely-debunked racist implications of his previous work, didn't you?  The Bell Curve was based on quantitative social science with some kernels of supported evidence (such as the fact that IQ is directly related to income level).  But the analysis was skewed to both draw and imply certain socially-conservative conclusions.  These conclusions in turn could not be reached without some initial flawed premises: that IQ is equivalent to 'intelligence,' that IQ is immutable, and that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic -- and as such, ethnic groups cannot be expected to see their average IQ levels rise.

Officially, they say they cannot be sure how much of IQ is heritable.  This is how he and co-author Herrnstein leaves it to the reader to actually connect the aforementioned IQ and genetics dots to the notion that blacks are as a group intellectually genetically inferior to whites, and always will be.  Keep in mind that Murray is a political scientist, with no educational background in either general psychometrics or intelligence testing.     

We haven't even reached the best part yet!  Check this out:

"The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise -- which says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions -- is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible."

You might find it difficult to believe that Murray's above statement is serious.  After all, he managed to completely ignore a whole bunch of easily discernible evidence countering his claim: the dramatic, measurable and tangible effects of the American 1960s Civil Rights Movement; Brown vs. Board of Education; the executive orders handed down by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the wake of Brown; and the rather sudden and subsequent ascension of "coloreds" into the highest-achieving facets of political, academic and social life in the United States -- a transformation punctuated by, among many other events, former Alabama governor George Wallace morphing from a staunch segregationist to a supporter of integration.

But I suppose government initiatives had no direct link to those radical socioeconomic changes.

If you've gotten this far and are a bit shocked at the quotes, I'd guess your disbelief is due to the fact that you haven't read The Bell Curve.  I have.  Believe me, this kind of drivel is par for the course when it comes to Charles Murray.

It's the same mindset that leads him to talk about "Europe" as if it was one (or possibly two) monolithic sociocultural structures, instead of a continent containing hundreds of religious, ethnic, political and social groups all holding different beliefs and interacting with the world in different ways.  Frankly, it doesn't appear that Mr. Murray has spent any significant amount of time there outside of hotels, conferences and cars.

This gross stereotyping of Europe is so stale that even Murray should be ashamed to resort to it.  And this "European model" he refers to is a right-wing boogeyman being used in the press right now in a limp attempt to discourage government-driven political and social initiatives in this country.  Never mind that America's birth rate is driven primarily by Latino immigration, not by 'traditional American values', whatever that means.  Never mind that Sweden's churches are not 'subsidized' by the government, as Murray describes -- only declared Lutherans pay the 'church tax'. 

This article is no less stupid than an article by a French person declaring that France must not become like the culturally- and socially-inferior United States.  The only somewhat insightful point Murray makes is this one:

"The trouble is that American elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities -- literally or figuratively -- where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class..."

I was actually a bit surprised to reach such a cogent observation after all that came before it.  If only this section had been the main thrust of his argument. 

The chief seductive power of Murray has always been the ability to write such fluid prose that he distracts readers from the simple-headed absurdity of the point(s) he is actually making.  Apparently, the more things change the more they stay the same.  I'm still praying for Murray to have a Wallace-like conversion.  But in the meantime, he is still a racist hack.  

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