Merry Christmas! This Christmas Day, Daniel and Jack chat about Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous pseudo-scientific racist hoax The Bell Curve. Content Warning. TRANSCRIPT: https://idtg.net/38 Full Transript List: https://idtg.net/ Notes/Links: Shaun, "The Bell Curve." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo ForeverJameses, "Reading the Right - Volume One: The Bell Curve": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZFGgJlAsk The Bell Curve PDF: https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf P 37-38 "The Creation of a Cognitive Elite Within The College System." John Ogbu p. 307 Ogbu and Simons, "Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance With Some Implications for Eductation." https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/OgbuSimonsvoluntaryinvoluntary.pdf "From his comparative research Ogbu has concluded that (1) no minority group does better in school because it is genetically superior than others; (2) no minority culture is better at educating its children; and (3) no minority language is better suited for learning in school (Simons et al. n.d.). He has argued that from a comparative perspective, one cannot attribute the differences in minority school performance to cultural, linguistic, or genetic differences. This is not to deny genetic differences or to deny that cultural and language differences may have an adverse or positive effect on minority school performance; but culture and language do not entirely determine the differences among minorities. Consider that some minority groups, like the Buraku outcast in Japan, do poorly in school in their country of origin but do quite well in the United States, or that Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan. Comparative research suggests that we might discover at least a part of the explanation by closely looking at the histories and sociocultural adaptations of these minorities (Simons et al. n.d.). More specifically, to understand why minority groups differ among themselves in school performance we have to know two things: the first is their own responses to their history of incorporation into U.S. society and their subsequent treatment or mistreatment by white Americans. The second is how their responses to that history and treatment affect their perceptions of and responses to schooling." Erik Siegel, Scientific American "The Real Problem With Charles Murray and 'The Bell Curve.' https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/ "“The Bell Curve” endorses prejudice by virtue of what it does not say. Nowhere does the book address why it investigates racial differences in IQ. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race." "Daring Research or 'Social Science Pornography'?" ""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." "The White Man, Unburdened." Quinn Slobodian and Stuart Schrader. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-white-man-unburdened-slobodian-schrader "Despite the reputation he cultivates as a teller of uncomfortable truths based on rigorous empirical social-scientific research, Murray misrepresents what the United States was trying to achieve in Thailand, and what his role there was. In Murray’s monograph, the word “insurgency” appeared twice and “war” never. He made no reference to opium, perhaps the commodity most worth fighting over in northeast Thailand. He did not mention martial law. And he certainly did not analyze how ethnic persecution shaped village life. Murray’s later writings have effaced these particulars even further. Most important, Murray diminishes the U.S. war in Vietnam as the decisive context that shaped much of Thailand’s political and economic fortunes. The nearby American war transformed Thailand’s urban economy, while heightening worries both within the Thai regime and in the diplomatic community at large that Thailand might become another falling domino. Rural community development was designed to thwart Communist organizing and subversion. Additionally, from the 1950s through the 1970s, there were challenges to the Thai national government’s legitimacy—which meant, in turn, a protracted initiative to suppress any dissent that struck Thai leaders as carrying a remote echo of left-wing subversion. Meanwhile, a host of factions within the government were themselves skirmishing, with coups and counter-coups. CIA involvement was one way for Washington to play favorites. Reading Murray’s Thai writings, you’d never know that his employer, AIR, was linked to security agencies or that the actual counterpart Thai development agency was a paramilitary force created by the CIA, the Border Patrol Police, which played a key role in a massacre of students and the installation of dictatorial right-wing rule in October 1976. Obscuring this context has important consequences for Murray’s analysis of the failures of U.S. nation-building in Thailand, which would go on to serve as the conceptual seedbed for his critique of the American welfare state. The research he conducted in the late 1960s assessed villagers’ attitudes toward the government and the assistance it provided. He found that many villagers claimed to have little positive interaction, or any at all, with representatives from the national government. They preferred to deal with local officials. Local officials, Murray argued, were more sensitive to their needs than outside administrators." Making Sense Episode 73, "Forbidden Knowledge" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6Rmbfi6YrE Sam Harris/Ezra Klein debate: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast Eric Turkheimer blog: https://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/category/eric-turkheimer-gloomy-prospect-blog/ Turkheimer, "The Origin of Race Differences in Intelligence is Not a Scientific Question." https://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/origin-of-race-differences-in-intelligence-is-not-a-scientific-question/ "I should be clear that I am not making a “both sides do it” argument. It is the hereditarians who are trying to reach a strong and potentially destructive conclusion, and the burden is absolutely on them to demonstrate that they have a well-grounded empirical and quantitative theory to work with. So, if you are out there and think that group differences t are at least partially genetic, please explain exactly what you mean, in empirical terms. Do you mean that some portion of the IQ gap will never go away, no matter what we do environmentally? Do you mean we will discover genes with hard-wired biological consequences for IQ, and their frequencies will differ across groups? Are polygenic risk scores going to do it somehow? But don’t let me mischaracterize your position: explain it yourself. My concern is that anti-hereditarians play into race scientist’s hands when we agree to engage with them as though there existed a legitimate research paradigm proceeding toward a rational conclusion. At least in the social sciences, legitimate empirical research paradigms rarely come to all or none conclusions, so it becomes natural for people to conclude, with Murray and Harris, that the whole long argument is bound to settle eventually on the idea that group differences are a little environmental, a little genetic. But in fact, that is not where we are headed. I predict that in a relatively short period of time, contemporary race science will seem just as transparently unscientific and empirically untrue as the race science of the early 20th Century now appears from our modern perspective. Declaring something to be a science doesn’t make it so. The hereditarians want all the good things that come from being thought of as scientists. They want academic respect, they want protection from charges of racism, they want clear separation from the very recent history of “race science” that led directly to the Holocaust and Jim Crow. They have to earn it, by doing the hard work of developing the quantitative and empirical theories that transform intuitions about stereotypes into real science." Pioneer Fund at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund Science Versus Propaganda on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC6Y2M1v03NONm9o5NhkgGA "How Nazis Infiltrated Academia (and why they're obsessed with penis size)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hojHGXi1qew PZ Myers "The Problems With Evolutionary Psychology." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osEiblC7Itw "Is the Bell Curve Accurate, True, Statistically Sound, Racist? IQ & Class in America (1994)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01b7UCm1p5c (Gould comes on at approximately 9:45) "Curveball," The New Yorker, November 28 1994, by Stephen Jay Gould. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html JFK's Very Revealing Harvard Application Essay: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-very-revealing-harvard-application-essay/281699/ "The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain." Jack's response to Rothbard's ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Human Nature’: http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/rothbards-conflationary-universe/
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Daniel tells me what he learned from years of going where few of us can bear to go and listening to what today's far-right, the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis, etc.
Talk about and say to each other, in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, their live streams, etc.
The Waffle SS, I call them, and do they waffle.
Daniel listened, so we don't have to.
Needless to say, these are terrible people, and they say terrible things, so every episode comes with a big content warning.
Daniel and I talk freely about despicable opinions and acts, and sometimes we have to repeat the despicable things that are said, including bigoted slurs.
So be warned.
Hooray!
Merry Christmas!
It's episode 38, special Christmas edition.
Happy Hanukkah, Jack.
Happy Christmas and Hanukkah and all the other things.
Kwanzaa, that's the other one.
It is actually the second day of Hanukkah today, as we're recording this.
It is, isn't it?
Yes, and I meant no disrespect.
But happy holidays.
To our Jewish overlords.
Yes, that's right.
Please don't stop sending the checks, Mr Soros.
Yeah.
Happy holidays, because we are both foot soldiers in the war on Christmas, so we shouldn't be saying Merry Christmas.
Episode 38, it's a Christmas edition, exactly like a normal edition, but with some snow on the top.
And we're gonna be talking about mr charles murray this uh month week we can't really say this week because we don't have a regular schedule this episode this episode we're going to be talking about mr charles murray of bell curve co-author fame but first uh i i'm told we have a bit of news Yeah, this is just breaking sort of just a little bit ago.
Eli Mosley, who is one of the sort of organizers of Unite the Right, he is the quote-unquote lieutenant of the alt-right during the 2017 era.
He was sort of Richard Spencer's, one of Richard Spencer's right-hand men.
He is subject to this Synes v. Kessler lawsuit, the civil suit that's going up against all these organizers that is kind of slowly working its way through the courts.
And he has consistently refused to provide the discovery that the lawyers have asked for for over a year now, to the point to where he has finally been concited in contempt of court, and it does look like he is actually going to go to jail for failing to provide evidence that has been asked of him many, many, many, many times, and he has been intransigent in his illegal filings.
Seemingly doesn't care.
He's like, I can't attend court that day because my mother needs to see me and that sort of thing.
It's been... It takes a lot to go to jail in a civil case.
I mean, you have to be a real asshole.
And he's managed it.
He's managed it.
There you go.
He took a leaf out of Belle Gibson's approach to legal proceedings and just decided to ignore it and hope it would go away.
Yeah.
He's doing even worse than Cantwell, which says that's right.
Yeah.
I'm not not a fan of the carceral system or the prison industrial complex or capitalist society's tendency to put people in cages and gulags and stuff like that.
But I don't know.
I'm I'm not heartbroken about this one, I have to admit.
Well, this is also like this was completely avoidable.
From the get-go.
You haven't given us the documents we've been asking you for very politely.
Yeah, he's literally got no one to blame but himself.
So yeah, no, that's happening.
I don't know, maybe we'll announce it.
He might wriggle his way out of it, but apparently he has been ordered to show up on January 6th.
That's where we are!
Yay!
What a silly man.
just to give everybody what they want and pays his fines or whatever like before then he will most certainly spend at least some time in jail so that's where we are yay what a silly man um
so um charles murray is the author of many books including the bell curve which is the one that um we'll be discussing most um relevantly here i've been fighting doing this episode um in part because it's a shitload of work it's It's just a lot of fucking work.
And there are kind of continuing debates around all of the topics regarding this sort of like race and IQ concept which is fits at the well sort of IQ in general and it's kind of role in terms of understanding how people fit into society into you know capitalist societies and Um, versus, uh, and then with, um, kind of racial divisions and that sort of thing kind of layered on top of that.
Um, this kind of race and IQ concept gets debated anywhere and everywhere.
It is a very, very complicated topic and there's a whole lot of bullshit that's just kind of buried into the whole thing.
And, uh, I'm not an expert on the literature.
I'm not up on every single one.
So, uh, you know, it's kind of hard to do a full episode just on that.
Um, at the same time, uh, I've made myself something of a, at least, at least I sort of understand the general outlines of these debates and sort of kind of where...
These things are happening, and so I was planning on doing a full sort of takedown of the bell curve.
But then I didn't have to, because as we mentioned in the last episode, Sean already did that for us, and it is excellent.
And I think it speaks to the difficulty of this topic and to kind of discussing it that I know enough to know that Sean, while that video is amazing and 2 hours and 40 minutes long or something similar to that, it takes him that long to just scratch the surface of where this argument was in 1994 when The Bell Curve was published.
And there's now 25 years worth of people arguing back and forth after The Bell Curve that you'd have to get through to really Do this topic justice.
It is a massive, massive bit of intellectual and academic and pseudo-scientific and pseudo-academic shit-fighting, where people compare papers and then like, no, this paper doesn't mean that, or no, you're misinterpreting this, or you're willfully misinterpreting this, or you're taking money from an actual eugenics organization, etc., etc.
You know, as you do, of course, oh yeah, you know.
So this is and a podcast is not the place to do Those kind that kind of like scholarly kind of kind of citing sources kind of work And that's why it's difficult in this format to really kind of talk about like debunking it in detail Which is why I'm glad I don't have to so I do consider this video or this sorry this video um this podcast a Sort of sort of something that goes alongside
Sean's video, so please go kind of watch that first.
It is, I believe, the first or second link in the show notes, so go check that out.
It is absolutely worth your time.
I have watched it three times.
It's glorious.
It's very good.
There is actually another long video on YouTube about the bell curve and Hernstein and Murray, which I would recommend, and I can't remember what it's called or who made it, but I have watched it and it was good, and I will find the link to that as well.
But yeah, Sean's video is excellent.
Yeah, there's another channel that I'm going to recommend called Science and Propaganda, which has a couple of videos about this topic.
And this is this guy Simon Witton, who is fairly new, but he also has a really good Twitter feed to follow if you're interested in this topic, and he has made like three or four really good videos.
But we're going to take it as read that this stuff is fallacious, I assume.
science gets picked up by uh right-wing shitheads to um push a certain um social agenda uh which we're going to get to very shortly but we're going to take it as read that this stuff is uh fallacious i assume right and refer people to other people's work essentially right i mean you know ultimately again
i'm the the point of this podcast episode is more to discuss charles murray and his background and sort of like the the sort of ancillary issues around the bell curve as opposed to like kind of refute the bell curve itself Yeah.
Which, honestly, the bell curve self-refutes.
So, let's dig into a little bit of what the bell curve actually says.
Again, I hope that you're aware that the bell curve is a book that was published in 1994.
It's written by a guy named Charles Murray.
In Richard Herrnstein.
Richard Herrnstein died shortly before the eventual publication of the book, and so Charles Murray is sort of the sole author listed whenever these debates come up.
But Herrnstein is absolutely a big part of how this book came to be written.
This episode is really about Murray himself.
I think we might...
I've been kind of looking into Herrnstein a little bit.
I think we might do another episode on Herrnstein down the line because he's kind of an equally fascinating figure.
His work goes into talking about criminology.
In fact, we're going to talk a little bit about him here in a minute because he wrote another book, which I have in front of me, which is Yeah, we'll get there.
We'll get there in a minute.
But I'm not quite prepared to do a kind of full conversation about Herrnstein at this moment.
But we are going to talk about Charles Moran, sort of his place within sort of public discourse, kind of the thing that he does, the things that, like, why he writes this book.
There is this sort of perception among people who haven't read The Bell Curve, and even among people who have, that it's primarily a book of science.
It's primarily a book about numbers and this kind of idea of what is genetic determinism of IQ and how does that affect social positioning.
It's primarily this book of genetics and social science.
It's not really that at all.
It's a very kind of straightforward argument where what they do is they take IQ scores alongside socioeconomic status indicators, which basically come through parental income of people.
And then so they have this kind of big mess of data, and they track that along with this labor study board study and determine that if you kind of hold IQ constant and then vary socioeconomic status, you get a certain kind of linear relationship between and they track that along with this labor study board study and determine that if you kind of hold IQ constant and then vary socioeconomic And so you get a linear relationship, the better off your parents were, the better off you are.
And then they do the same thing where they hold a socioeconomic status constant and then compare IQ, and it turns out that IQ has another linear relationship, but it is a stronger linear relationship than the one through parents' socioeconomic status.
This is an incredibly simplistic and nonsensical... No, it's not nonsensical.
It's just you're taking the crudest possible data set and using that to make these incredibly broad policy proposals because this isn't just a book about About you know kind of kind of rarefied but you know social science book about IQ and genetics and like how much of who we are is Actually, you know built into our genes etc.
Etc.
This is a book with specific policy proposals.
This is a book that is about pushing an agenda the The world welfare of the mid 90s the cutting back of you know Bill Clinton stands in the stands and says the Arabic government is over basically cuts welfare and For millions of Americans, the poor, starving children, majority African American in this country since the mid 90s, you can lay a huge proportion of that on Charles Murray and Richard Harnstein and this fucking book.
And so it's an important book.
But to think of it as primarily a book of science, which is how a lot of people tend to think of it It's it's completely fucking wrong And that's the thing that I think we really have to kind of get across here And it's also the fact that like we've known this since the book was published because I'm gonna read some stuff from the book that are from from Reviewed articles about the book that indicate this even back in 1994 so we're gonna get there Yeah, indeed.
It's extremely tempting to read long sections from Stephen Jay Gould's response to it that he put in at the end of the second edition, or whatever it was, of The Mismeasure of Man, a book that already refutes the bell curve before the bell curve was even published.
But he does add a refutation of the bell curve, a very short, actually, refutation of the bell curve in the second edition.
I think it was the second edition.
And it's very tempting to just read long passages from that.
I was reviewing it earlier and I had to sort of fight the impulse to just post it all on Twitter because it's so brilliant.
I also want to focus in on one thing.
You said it's self-refuting.
One of the things I love about the Sean video is the way he zeroes in on something that is so important, which is that Hernstein and Murray's political conclusions, which are the point of the book, they write the pseudoscience in order to cushion and justify the The political conclusions that they want to draw and the political program they want to advocate, the political conclusions don't flow from the arguments.
You know, just on a very crude level, they say you shouldn't give welfare to people who are single mothers.
They don't say this exactly, but this is what it amounts to.
Don't give welfare to single mothers, you know, because they're doing it because they're low intelligent people, low intelligence people.
Well, You're not going to deter them from having more children by not giving them benefits if they're low-intelligence people, are you?
If they're low-intelligence people, then they're not going to draw the conclusion from that I shouldn't have more children because they're low-intelligence people.
I'm not saying any of this is real.
What I'm saying is that their own presentation of the argument is inherently self-contradictory, and I love that Sean zeroes in on that.
No, absolutely.
And I completely agree.
And in that particular case, what they're actually doing is they're not even, you know, they're softening their own argument because they won't say just like, well, those children are just going to die.
That's it's ultimately a matter of eugenics.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They phrase it as, you know, well, then the poor mothers will just like realize they can't have more children because they can't afford them.
But in reality, it's like, We're not going to give people access to birth control.
We know that people who have more access to more resources are better at using birth control, for instance, and better at planning their families.
And that's not because they have higher IQs.
It's because condoms cost money, and health care costs money, at least in this country, and hopefully not in yours.
But we'll see what happens.
Anyway, I feel really bad.
I feel really bad for the state of your country right now.
I'd say come here, but we're even worse.
I've just realized that this is actually the perfect subject to be doing for the Christmas episode, because it's basically just the kind of Malthusianism that Dickens was satirizing in A Christmas Carol.
I just literally heard Scrooge saying, well, if they'd rather die, they'd better do it and reduce the surplus population.
That's exactly right.
So I would like to Kind of highlight a little bit like how the rhetoric of this book works and and I think that people think of it as a race and IQ book which it is in part really the magazine article in the Atlantic which was the very first piece that Andrew Sullivan edited it's kind of the thing that he was named to fame and the thing that brought Andrew Sullivan to a place of prominence in American public life and
was the Atlantic cover story about the bell curve, so anything you ever thought badly about Andrew Sullivan, and there are lots of things to think badly about Andrew Sullivan, he got to start peddling race and IQ bullshit, which was the highlight of the magazine piece, but it's only a tiny part of the overall, of the actual book.
They sort of wrote, like, Murray kind of says this, like, oh, the book isn't really about race and IQ, that's only a little bit of the book, You are correct, although you were the one that did the magazine piece that made this the big thing.
And if I were more of a more conspiratorial bent, I would think that...
The reason they highlighted that in the magazine piece, and in all the publicity around it, was specifically to distract people from the terrible nature of the rest of the book, which is less overtly racist, obviously, but if anything, even more ideologically suspect, and even more incoherent on any kind of logical basis.
I have, in front of me here, an actual paperback copy of The Bell Curve.
Believe it or not, I bought this.
I bought it used.
Charles Murray's not getting any money for this.
But, I have this.
It is 800-something pages.
It is a massive book.
I have put a link to a PDF of this book.
I have checked the pagination.
I've spot-checked it.
The pages should be accurate in both the PDF version and the version in front of me.
So, we're going to read a little bit from The Bell Curve.
Hooray!
This is the central argument in the bell curve.
This is from page 37.
And it is entitled, The Creation of a Cognitive Elite Within the College System.
The experience of Harvard, with which we began this discussion, is a parable for the experience of the nation's university system.
Insofar as many more people now go to college, the college degree has become more democratic during the 20th century.
But as it has become more democratic, a new elite was developing even more rapidly within the system.
From the early 1950s into the mid-1960s, the nation's university system not only became more efficient in bringing in the bright youngsters to college, it became radically more efficient at sorting the brightest of the bright into a handful of elite colleges.
So, this is the central message of the book.
What's happening since the kind of decline of the old aristocratic systems at major elite universities in the United States is that instead of basically a mix of IQs of people who are just kind of the children of aristocracy getting into elite schools, now that these schools use SAT scores and other kinds of metrics, like basically proxies for IQ as metrics, that these schools become much more top-heavy with really brilliant people.
And what that means is that essentially all the bright people are leaving the middle of the country and going to elite schools, and that these elite schools are literally taking the brightest of the brightest of the bright.
And there's just so much wrong with this.
Where do you even start?
I mean, where do you even start with this?
But I would like to use this moment to kind of illustrate this slightly.
And that is John F. Kennedy's Harvard application essay is five sentences long.
I'm going to read it to you now, and I put this in the links.
In its entirety?
In its entirety.
We're going to read this.
Um, the reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several.
I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university.
I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer.
Then, too, I would like to go to the same college as my father, to be a quote-unquote Harvard man is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.
Now... That's it, yeah.
This... Should I paraphrase that for you?
My name's Kennedy.
Will that do?
This gets bandied about as a demonstration of how dumb John F. Kennedy was, which completely misunderstands the entire context for this.
missing the point yeah it misses the point because like a uh it misses you know this isn't just this wasn't like a paper he wrote which is sort of implied by some of the conversation about it This is handwritten in the, like there's a version of this in his handwriting where you can like read this.
It's part of the form.
It's basically a why do you want to come here thing.
It's not meant to be a You know, a scholarly essay or anything like that, you know?
No.
But it indicates, like, around this time, when this was in 1935, I think, was when he was... yeah, April 23rd, 1935 is the date that it's dated.
At this point, Harvard accepted about 90% of its applicants, because unless you were a rich douchebag from an aristocratic family, nobody bothered to... you wouldn't apply to Harvard otherwise.
It just didn't happen.
And, uh, Murray and Herrnstein absolutely agree with this.
They're like, well, yeah, no, and like, that system was bad, we agree, aristocracy is bad, but an aristocracy at least, you know, allows that, um, you know, smart people get left in the middle of the country, whereas now they're all going to the biggest and best schools.
I'd be fascinated to know if social position is determined by IQ, I'd be fascinated to know how aristocracy became aristocracy in the first place without all aristocrats being of high IQ.
Well, Murray's whole thing is that since, like, the 1950s, that this is kind of a new phenomenon.
And in fact, in his previous book, Losing Ground, is all about how, like, these aristocracies are being kind of, like, shut down by this kind of coming meritocracy, and that, you know, kind of creating this cognitive elite, and that this is bad because of, you know, kind of mismatches, and it creates an aftereffects on our politics and all that sort of thing.
I want to be clear that, like, this is nonsense.
This is, like, and I have two things that I'm going to use.
First of all is the, um, college admissions cheating scandal, um, where, uh, wealthy people were, you know, paying to get, um, to, they were essentially kind of scamming the testing agencies to get their kids extra time on tests by, largely by faking disabilities, which is his own awful problem where, you know, anybody faking disabilities to do that just implies that everyone is faking disabilities to get benefits on.
And like that's I mean, that's horrible.
That's even more horrible than anything else in the story as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah.
But that those students end up doing like perfectly fine in Harvard.
They I mean, you know, they you know.
From what I understand, they don't fail out at any higher rate than the other kids do.
Or at least not significantly higher.
I mean, they do fine.
Once you're in Harvard, you're just in Harvard.
Yeah, exactly.
incredibly difficult school it's incredibly difficult to get into not to get out of yeah and some of the others like mit seems to be a school that's like ridiculously hard to get out to get out of um you know it's also hard to get into but you know there are like some of the some of the like top end engineering schools there does seem to be a a bit of a a gradient there um but also like people talk about like these sort of these these sort of great inflation
and this sort of like this idea of um you know sort of sort of college admissions at top universities as being a fundamental problem like how do you select who gets into these schools and you know there are all kinds of things and a lot of people will say like oh well you just pick you just kind of make it you just set a criteria and you you know take the top So many thousand.
I think 6,000 is a usual school year at a major at Harvard or Neal.
6,000 students.
Well, they get more than 6,000 applications from people that get straight 4.0 GPAs.
And that goes for like every single elite school in the country.
This is not.
And so what if you get like somebody really good who has a 3.9?
And that's why this sort of like it's not just sort of great inflation.
It's not just sort of like GPA inflation It's suddenly you have to get these sort of like crazy extracurriculars and you do all this stuff and ultimately a lot of these like you know sports scholarships for things like rowing and You know equestrian and that sort of thing like that's ultimately built around allowing the children of aristocracy their sort of like extra way in because like you know who does that except for those kids so This is just fundamentally false.
This is built right there into the book.
You spend 10 seconds thinking about it.
It's wrong.
The whole thing is wrong.
It's just wrong.
It's wrong.
I do not have to debunk this book any further.
It is over.
The argument is just wrong.
It's just wrong!
That's right.
Yeah, that is a central prop of the book, and it's It's not that it's not real so the whole thing everything everything else is sort of using this sort of like you know very flimsy mathematical kind of rigmarole to then demonstrate that this is true along kind of all walks of life.
And it's a little bit more solid when you start kind of looking at it and saying, like, well, people who are good at standardized tests tend to kind of do better in getting into non-elite schools.
They tend to, you know, but all of this just kind of comes along with sort of socioeconomic status.
And, you know, you talked about Gould.
There's also a video from 1994, from November 1994, soon after the book was published, in which Gould explains the problems with the mathematics in this video.
And I have linked it in the show notes.
It is kind of towards the bottom.
And Gould actually starts talking about 9 minutes and 45 seconds, and it's about sort of – it's worth watching the full two-hour thing because you get a lot of different perspectives on the book, all of whom are saying this is complete horseshit for – various reasons within my field.
Gould is definitely the most entertaining, and he's the one that I like the best.
I mean, honestly, I just watch him in that, and I'm like, what a podcaster this man would have been.
He would have been an amazing podcaster.
I can only imagine had he lived a few more years.
I also linked to another article that Gould wrote in 1994 called Curveball, which is his sort of the text summary of the basic idea that he says in that video.
Again, there's a lot of...
I didn't really want to talk too much about Gould personally in this video, but all of that is straightforward.
This is the way that we need to take a look at this.
Again, this was debunked immediately upon publication, and Gould was right on the top of understanding this.
But this claim that there's a cognitive elite forming, that is absolutely their rationale for their policy proposals.
because basically what they claim to be afraid of is idiocracy, isn't it?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, the sort of marching moron stuff It's sort of like and and like it ends up being again They sort of go into a slightly more sophisticated kind of angle where they start saying well if all the bright people are
are in major cities and there aren't any kind of like bright people in Dubuque, Iowa or whatever, then you start to see this sort of disconnect between a sort of intellectual political elite and the hoi polloi, whereas if like you were really bright and you couldn't get into like a major school, you'd go to your local state school and be like a genius and you'd be like kind of building and innovating and everything There.
But again, the whole thing is, like, there are more bright people who can possibly go to any of these schools, and to the degree that we're seeing, like, Rust Belt collapse, it's not because all the geniuses are in New England and Southern California, it's because of neoliberal policy that's extracting resources from them.
I was going to say, I think, you know, Occam's razor allows us to find other explanations for why there's a disconnect between ordinary people and the political elite.
Personally, I think there are better, simpler explanations.
It turns out that people that went to the schools that I went to were just better.
And, you know, I hate to say that because, you know, Yeah, I feel bad about it, but like ultimately they just take the best of the best and the only way that we can know that is through clearly through this test.
I mean this test which has no cultural things built into it.
I'm gonna explain in much detail why no, these tests are completely fair and they are not biased in any way and just don't ask me to take one in Japanese because I would totally fail that.
Certainly.
Sorry, that's a gag on Sean who uses that example.
So, I did want to read one more portion of the bell curve, if you don't mind.
Another very quick portion.
I put the page references here, but I didn't quote the text in the show notes.
This is on page 307.
I'd like to introduce you to an educational researcher, a Nigerian-American named John Ogbu.
John Ogbu died in 2003.
There is some controversy around him and I don't necessarily I'm not a not qualified to comment on like the nature of his career which was about a 50-year career and In education and kind of research and kind of sociology and the socio-political nature of education around the world He visited many many countries and did a lot of like really high-level research in the stuff and but
He is cited in the index of the bell curve, and I'm going to read the entirety of what Ernst and Murray have to say about John Ogbu.
This is the point, this is the moment in which, you know, I say on Twitter, I make fun of the bell curve a lot on Twitter, and I did say at one time, you know, there are bits in the bell curve that refute the bell curve, and then some like dipshit goes like, yeah, show one, and then I literally screenshotted this page.
and posted it and then it's like yeah well yeah but what about all the other stuff they said so i want you to i want you to read i want you i want you to listen gee it's almost as if they're not arguing in good faith and whatever you say they'll always say yeah but what about this and then you answer that and then they say well what about that and yeah and so this is um about sort of black white differences in test scores
This is about, you know, sort of all the different ways to explain how large black-white differences in test scores could coexist with equal predictability for the test for such things as academic and job performance, and yet still not be based on differences in intelligence broadly defined, let alone genetic differences.
Here's the section about OGBU.
John Ogbu, a Berkeley anthropologist, has proposed a more specific version of this argument.
He suggests that we look at the history of various minority groups to understand the sources of differing levels of intellectual attainment in America.
He distinguishes three types of minorities.
Autonomous minorities, such as the Amish, Jews, and Mormons, who, while they may be victims of discrimination, are still within the cultural mainstream.
Immigrant minorities, such as the Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans within the United States, who move voluntarily to their new societies and, while they may begin in menial jobs, compare themselves favorably with their peers back in the home country.
And finally, caste-like minorities, such as black Americans, who are involuntary immigrants or otherwise are consigned from birth to a distinctively lower place on the social ladder.
Ogbu argues that the differences in test scores are an outcome of this historical distinction, pointing to a number of castes around the world, the Untouchables in India, the Buraku in Japan, and Oriental Jews in Israel, that have exhibited comparable problems in educational achievement despite being of the same racial group as the majority.
In other words, Ogbu does a ton of research around the world.
He goes to many, many countries and looks at educational systems of attainment across like ethnic, cultural, religious groups.
And he starts to summarize these things and he comes up with this kind of idea of the caste-like minority.
And that is, if you are born into a minority within a nation-state or within a region, within a country, And you are discriminated against by, you know, various kinds of complicated sociological definitions that he uses.
You end up having about a standard deviation lower IQ, lower test scores, lower achievement in terms of general life.
Um, then the people who are not subject to those kinds of, um, uh, political, kind of sociological, uh, detriments, right?
And he finds this across all societies.
He finds this, like, in places where there are groups that are, like, genetically, you know, quote-unquote genetically, very similar to the host population, who do not do well because of this kind of caste-like minority status.
Yeah.
I'm now going to quote from a piece co-authored by John Ogbu.
Now, I'm going to give Murray and Herrnstein a little bit of credit here, because this particular one was published in 1998, which is four years after The Bell Curve was published.
But it is also really more of a summary of Ogbu's historical research, as opposed to a discussion.
It's more of a review article about Ogbu's work, essentially.
And so, and this is again in the show notes, this is a free PDF.
Charles Murray has had 21 years to read this, and as far as I know, he has not ever responded to it.
From his comparative research, Ogbu has concluded that one, no minority group does better in school because it is genetically superior to others.
Two, no minority culture is better at educating its children.
And three, no minority language is better suited for learning in school.
He has argued that from a comparative perspective, one cannot attribute the differences in minority school performance to cultural, linguistic, or genetic differences.
This is not to deny genetic differences or to deny that cultural and language differences may have an adverse or positive effect on minority school performance, but culture and language do not entirely determine the differences among minorities.
Consider that some minority groups, like the Buraku outcasts in Japan, do poorly in school in their country of origin, but do quite well in the United States.
Or that Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States, but do poorly in Japan.
Comparative research suggests that we might discover at least a part of this explanation by closely looking at the histories and sociocultural adaptations of these minorities.
More specifically, to understand why minority groups differ among themselves in school performance, we have to know two things.
The first is their own responses to their history of incorporation into the U.S.
society and their subsequent treatment or mistreatment by white Americans.
The second is how their responses to that history and treatment affect their perceptions and resources to schooling.
Again, this completely refutes, even if the bell curve was just about racial differences in terms of IQ, etc, etc, and the earlier thing where I said you can refute the bell curve with reading three sentences and thinking about it, even if it was just about the race and IQ question, Yeah.
Murray and Hearnstein, well, Hearnstein's been dead for decades, but Murray has no answer to this and no hereditarian answer to IQ.
They never respond to this kind of argument.
It's just completely beyond the pale for them.
They'd rather look at the data itself than look at the sociological patterns that create the data.
And that's it.
Period.
Yeah, yeah.
They just declare by fiat that it's not relevant.
It's not worth talking about.
In much the same way that they declare by fiat that, you know, the science about IQ is settled.
Right.
And again, I feel like there is this sort of thing to where we end up having the same kind of argument over and over again with this stuff, where we end up kind of wanting to...
To, I mean, and I think in good faith, like, have the argument about IQ and about sort of like cultural bias on IQ.
And these guys have answers, quote-unquote answers, to that.
There are kind of responses, and this is why this sort of debate ends up being so intransigent on all sides.
Well, we should just read a little bit of Eric Turkheim right now.
Sorry to read so much right here in this portion, but I can't say it better than this.
Sorry, go ahead.
Before you go on, I want to nuance what I just said.
Herrnsten and Murray put lots of what you could call alibi statements into the book.
I mean, I said they declare by fear that the science about IQ is settled.
You can quote loads of bits in the book where they say, oh, well, we don't know, you know, about the relationship of IQ to genetics or socioeconomic status.
And we're not saying that it's definitely all heritable.
You can find loads of stuff like that in the book.
That's not what I meant.
You know, I agree.
Definitely.
And, you know, they do this.
I mean, sorry, Murray does this and sort of the people of his ilk do this all the time.
Murray is very avuncular.
He seems like such a nice, reasonable guy in these things.
He's very much sort of like, well, look, I mean, I understand that people kind of have this problem, but here's all the reasons that I think our research is valid.
It was valid at the time.
I've just gotten more data since then and you know there's a lot of stuff you know we kind of made some mistakes but ultimately you know things have kind of come this way and all we're really saying is that there are pretty good reasons to think that the difference between kind of black and white IQ data is at least partly genetic and like how can you possibly disagree with that?
And we've got all these scientists that stand behind us that agree with this.
So, you know, ultimately, we stand in the mainstream on this.
And it's the silly people who think that like sociological factors, the environmental factors, the environmental factors are the things that are doing this and not.
Yeah, well… Yeah, exactly.
It's a wonderfully vague term.
It's the environmental factors.
That's like everything other than genes, isn't it?
status as opposed to yeah well as it's a one like a history of oppression like something you know yeah exactly it's a wonderfully vague term is the environmental factors that's like everything other than genes isn't it and they can define that as narrowly or as widely as they like and of course when you look at the science of this and i and i have been in talks with i think i'm going to get an actual geneticist to come on and talk about some of these issues um
So I'm gonna try not to put I'm gonna try not to put my foot in my mouth on this one to show my whole ass Talking about this stuff by by avoiding it But I want to be clear that there are like within people like doing this science.
There are very good You know, there is research that kind of goes a lot of different ways on this, right?
I mean there is but but it's it but it's a conversation and so I This is why I wanted to read this thing from Eric Torkheimer.
Now, Torkheimer has a really nice blog.
He works for the Genetics Human Agency, and he's an academic.
He's been studying IQ and intelligence testing and this sort of stuff for about 30 years.
He is on Twitter.
I don't think he follows me.
Eric Turkheimer, if you want to come, I would love to have you on the show, honestly.
I really love your blog.
And he has a really clear kind of perspective on this.
And he makes the point that, you know, I, Eric Turkheimer, and Charles Murray have both been sort of arguing this topic for our entire careers.
And neither one of us has made any difference.
Nobody ever changes their mind on this topic.
Um, and his point on this is, like, basically, uh, this is because the questions that we're arguing are not those that can be solved scientifically.
Like, there's not, like, some research program that's going to be able to, like, definitively solve these questions.
And the people who do want to say this is, like, wholly based on heredity don't even have any idea about what that kind of research program would look like.
Like, what kind of results do you expect to get?
So...
Here I'm gonna I'm gonna read a bit from his blog.
I put a link to This in the show notes and to his full blog and it's definitely worth kind of digging into his archives If you have an interest in this topic, I find him a really great kind of clear thinker on this stuff But I'm reading from one called the original race differences in intelligence.
It's not a scientific question and he says I should be clear that I am not making a both-sides-do-it argument.
It is the hereditarians who are trying to reach a strong and potentially destructive conclusion, and the burden is absolutely on them to demonstrate that they have a well-grounded empirical and quantitative theory to work with.
So, if you are out there and think that group differences are at least partially genetic, please explain exactly what you mean in empirical terms.
Do you mean that some portion of the IQ gap will never go away no matter what we do environmentally?
Do you mean that we will discover genes with hardwired biological consequences for IQ, and their frequencies will differ across groups?
Are polygenic risk scores going to do it somehow?
But don't let me mischaracterize your position.
Explain it yourself.
My concern is that anti-hereditarians play into race scientists' hands when we agree to engage with them as though there existed a legitimate research paradigm proceeding towards a rational conclusion.
At least in the social sciences, legitimate empirical research paradigms rarely come to all-or-none conclusions.
So it becomes natural for people to conclude, with Murray and Harris, that the whole long argument is bound to settle eventually on the idea that group differences are a little environmental, a little genetic.
But in fact, that is not where we are headed.
I predict that in a relatively short period of time, contemporary race science will seem just as transparently unscientific and empirically untrue as the race science of the early 20th century now appears from our modern perspective.
Declaring something to be a science doesn't make it so.
The hereditarians want all the good things that come from being thought of as scientists.
They want academic respect.
They want protection from charges of racism.
They want clear separation from the very recent history of quote-unquote race science that led directly to the Holocaust and Jim Crow.
They have to earn it by doing the hard work of developing the quantitative and empirical theories that transform intuitions about stereotypes into real science.
Yeah, that's really good.
I yeah, that's really good, because that's that's exactly right.
I mean, they claim the status of disinterested, apolitical, objective observers, you know, science, science and all that.
And Stephen Jay Gould calls it scientism.
And They want all these advantages of appearing neutral and disassociation from what they're actually doing, which is perpetuating this very old... Again, Gould points out how old it is.
The bell curve is just sort of, for him, the latest iteration of this thing that goes back a very long time.
Same arguments.
And what they're doing is claiming the status of science for something that, you know, I mean, this is a point Sean makes in the video.
He makes a point about how Hernstein and Murray constantly make this assumption that the evidence is eventually going to pop up that proves them right.
They sort of kick it down the road, you know.
In time, more evidence will come in, and it's bound to support our side of it.
And Murray's pose is, yes, it's a bit of both, and we're just trying to be reasonable about it, while strongly implying it's mainly genetic.
Whereas, of course, I think what... What's that guy called?
Turkheimer?
Turkheimer, yeah.
What he's pointing out there is incredibly valuable, which is that there is just...
There is no scientific consistency about what they actually mean a lot of the time when they say, um, that these things are hereditary and that's in the bell.
It's not just sort of your Twitter Nazis that do that.
It's in the bell curve as well.
It's in the bell curve and it's in all the, I mean, I've read, I've read, I mean, again, I'm not, I'm not, I don't, I don't claim to be 100% affiliated with all this literature.
I am not, someone who does this for a living um this is not my area of expertise at all but i have read like these papers and and it's thrown throughout this this problem it's just kind of built in you know this idea of like well what are you actually saying like what is the actual thing you're trying to do and you know they will always fall back on well you know it's the you know it's the sjw's it's the you know it's the egalitarians
just will not let us ask these questions that like we really need to ask and they will not give us the research funding for and it's like you've had you've been in this career for 30 years like yeah Charles Murray has been touted by the AEI for decades.
Who's stopping you?
He's an incredibly, incredibly powerful person within the fields of public policy.
He forces legitimate scientists to consider him as a peer based on this book that you can refute by looking at it.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
That a layman can refute by just taking one of the props of the argument seriously and thinking about it for two seconds.
Yeah and this is why they love to pose as sort of you know heretical speakers of forbidden ideas whose free speech is being curtailed because what's actually happening is that people are protesting the fact that they're still peddling this stuff despite the fact that it's been shown time and time and time again for a very long time to have no scientific validity.
Nobody's actually stopping them from saying it.
What's happening is that people are saying you shouldn't be allowed to go around touting this stuff Without being challenged because it's bullshit and the poses being you know i'm free speech martyrs obviously always.
Is a lovely distraction from what the conversation which should be happening which is forcing them to define terms and actually tell us what they're actually saying because i don't want to do that.
Right, exactly.
And another thing that kind of comes up, again, I'm sorry to keep reading stuff, but there's so much great writing about this that I'm just going to, just demonstrating that all this was known in 1994.
This is from the New York Times Magazine.
This is a profile of Charles Murray.
It is available online.
It is from 1994, and it is entitled, Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?
Which is a great title.
Yes.
This is a quote from Murray.
Why can a publisher sell it?
He asked in the proposal for Losing Ground.
Losing Ground is Murray's prior work to The Bell Curve, which argued many of the same policy proposals that are in The Bell Curve, but without the patina of pseudoscience.
Yeah, I encountered pre-Bell Curve Murray and Herrnstein being cited by Rothbard, actually, when I was studying the Austrians.
Oh yeah, definitely, definitely.
We'll come back to this in a second, but he asked in the proposal for Losing Ground.
Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear 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 a more direct influence, but no other conservative has his ability to make a radical thought seem so reasonable.
While 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.
Yeah, yeah.
And that I mean, you made the point earlier, the book has played an enormous ideological role in justifying savage policies.
And that that was very much the the intention.
I mean, Murray went into it in order to pursue a very eccentric and extreme form of reactionary libertarianism.
That was his politics.
Absolutely.
Also, just from this same piece, which does go a little bit into Murray's childhood, and again, worth looking at, while there's much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray's teenage years, there's 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 dishonesty 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 said.
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.
You know, even if it's true that it didn't cross their minds, that is itself proof of institutionalized racism, that a bunch of white kids could burn a cross and it not even occurred to them that they were being racist.
I don't believe that for a moment, by the way, but even if you take that at face value, I just love the moment of, like, he pauses for a second before he answers.
Yeah, no, this is definitely a piece worth reading, but- You're mentioning something that I omitted!
You're not supposed to- well, anybody who's read The Bell Curve knows that you mustn't mention things that they omit, because, you know, omission is a huge part of their technique.
And also by acknowledging it.
See, he acknowledges.
Oh no, no, you're right.
I'm sorry.
I completely kind of forgot that incident.
I don't have any desire to rebut that or to consider what my own, like, kind of lack of willingness to tell this to you.
Or my lack of remembering it, even if we take him at his word.
I didn't really, I wasn't really thinking that I forgot the incident.
God, what stupid kids we were.
That doesn't make me, like, think about the possible other things I might be omitting in this story, and it doesn't make the people who agree with him kind of think about, like, what else might be missing from this.
I mean, I've got the data right here, and the data, it just comes, it's magic.
The numbers, they just happen.
Yeah, it doesn't mean anything, and now that I've acknowledged it, we can just move on, because that's another key technique in the bell curve.
You acknowledge the counter-argument, or the evidence that proves you wrong, and then you just skip over it gracefully and assert that you're right anyway, and move on.
Which is how you quote, you cite John Ogbu in your book.
You make sure you put it in there, so that whenever some asshole like me comes up and says, like, hey, you didn't really deal with it.
No, no, it's right there, it's in the book.
You're lying, clearly.
Yeah.
It's also how if you're Charles Murray you propagandize yourself against those who criticize you because you know people say with perfect justice you're a biological determinist and you say no no look here in the bell curve it's there's a bit here so it says that you know environmental factors play a huge role and I'm not a biological determinist despite the fact that there's a manifestly biological determinist book.
You're strawmanning me.
I didn't say this was biological.
I'm saying it's got to be partly genetic, partly environmental, and that we should just act like it's mostly biological.
Because the evidence will come in eventually that proves that it is.
It's no wonder he gets on so well with Sam Harris, really, is it?
Oh yeah, no, no, no.
I mean, particularly on this topic, and you hear this over and over and over again, one of these guys showed up to Molyneux's, and I think I mentioned this in the Molyneux episode, it wasn't Murray, I forget exactly which guy it was, there's a lot of these guys that do this.
I want to say it's David Reich, but I don't want to be wrong on that.
So one of these guys did an interview about race and IQ on Molly New Show.
And was kind of talking about, well, we've come leaps and bounds, and it turns out maybe we know 2% of the information about the genome and how that affects intelligence.
And just imagine when we know 50%.
Then we'll be able to make all kinds of predictions.
So yeah, come back when you know 50%.
Because you've been saying the same shit for 50 years.
Yeah.
You know, yeah, you're always like, yeah, we've got, we've got some evidence right here, and it's all, it's, it's, it's in the pipeline, you know, we're doing research, we are doing, we are real scientists, we are going to get this one of these days.
Yeah, come back, you know, when you have 50% of intelligence is due to, like, identifiable genetic structure that we can identify, and when, when you have that, then we can have a real conversation about what that means.
But until then, Fuck off!
Yeah.
Like, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not here to do that.
So, I feel like one of the things that also gets missed is, and we've touched on this a little bit about, like, Murray is a social scientist.
He's not a geneticist.
He's not someone who does this.
He's someone, he's a policy agenda.
He's a policy wonk.
He has a policy agenda and he comes at this as someone who wants to cut welfare programs.
Who thinks that government programs don't actually do anything to assist the people they're supposed to help and they just end up kind of creating cultural dependency or they end up getting And this is obvious if you kind of look at Murray's career, but there's a very good piece that I recommend over at the Baffler.
This is by Quinn Slobedian and Stuart Schrader.
I apologize if I butchered that name.
And it's called The White Man Unburdened.
And if there's one thing I have recommended on this in this episode that should be read it is this piece I almost led with this piece because I think it's really but it talks about Who Charles Murray is it actually I believe it links to that original that New York Times piece that I was called a New York Times Magazine piece that I was quoting earlier or at least it references it but this is a piece that goes into Who is Charles Murray?
Where does he come from?
What's his background?
And, uh, well, let's just quote from this.
Yeah.
Don't apologize.
I promise this is the last time I'm going to do a long quote, but like this is, this is definitely kind of worth it.
All right.
Don't apologize for reading.
Despite the reputation he cultivates as a teller of uncomfortable truths based on rigorous empirical social scientific research, Murray misrepresents what the United States was trying to achieve in Thailand.
So Murray kind of gets his start as a social scientist.
He's hanging out in Thailand and he's doing like social surveys of the local like peasantry, the local population to determine what kinds of aid they might need from the organization he was working with, which is essentially a Murray misrepresents what the United States were trying to achieve in Thailand, and what his role there was.
60s um which should tell you a lot about like it's essentially like papering over the effects of the vietnam war um that's that's what he was doing at this time again it's an excellent piece i didn't want to quote the whole thing um anyway murray misrepresents what the united states were trying to achieve in thailand and what his role there was in murray's monograph the word insurgency appeared twice and war never he made no reference to opium perhaps the commodity most worth fighting ever in Northeast Thailand.
He did not mention martial law, and he certainly did not analyze how ethnic persecution shaped village life.
Murray's later writings have effaced these particulars even further.
Most important, Murray diminishes the U.S.
war in Vietnam as the decisive context that shaped most of Thailand's political and economic fortunes.
The nearby American War transformed Thailand's urban economy, while heightening worries both within the Thai regime and in the diplomatic community at large that Thailand might become another falling domino.
Rural community development was designed to thwart communist organizing and subversion.
Additionally, from the 1950s to the 1970s, there were challenges to the Thai national government's legitimacy which meant, in turn, a protracted initiative to suppress any dissent that struck Thai leaders as carrying a remote echo of left-wing subversion.
Meanwhile, a host of factions within the government were themselves skirmishing, with coups and counter-coups.
CIA involvement was one way for Washington to play favorites.
Reading Murray's TIE writings, you'd never know that his employer, AIR, was linked to security agencies, or that the actual counterpart TIE development agency was a paramilitary force created by the CIA, the Border Patrol Police, which played a key role in the massacre of students and the installation of dictatorial right-wing rule in October 1976.
Obscure in this context has important consequences for Murray's analysis of the failures of U.S.
nation-building in Thailand, which would go on to serve as the conceptual seedbed for his critique of the American welfare state.
The research he conducted in the late 1960s assessed villagers' attitudes towards the government and the assistance it provided.
He found that many villagers claimed to have little positive interaction, or any at all, with representatives from their national government.
They preferred to deal with local officials.
Local officials, Murray argued, were more sensitive to their needs than outside administrators.
This becomes his central- this is his central ideological focus.
Yeah.
Giving power to lo- and, like, I'm not saying- I'm not making the argument against local control here because that's a complicated political thing, you know, that, you know, whether- on what scale we need to manage these things, but ultimately Murray isn't saying, well, local people kind of know their needs best and we should allow them to sort of make the decision.
He's saying, like, we shouldn't be giving aid to these people because ultimately it just- it makes their lives worse and all you have to do is ask them.
You know, I work for an organization that's funded by the CIA and it's the Stalin right-wing puppet governments.
And they don't want anything to do with me.
And so clearly, that's just saying that all welfare is just bad.
It's amazing, isn't it, how every single time you pull on any thread and you get taken to the same bloody places over and over again.
The method, amputation of context, tactical amnesia about the crimes of imperialism, and the point of the exercise is, you know, firstly to conduct imperialism in the first place, based on, of course, you know, as it turned out historically, white supremacy.
And ultimately it's about protection of capital.
It's just amazing how it always flows back to the same thing via the same channels. - We've talked a lot about Charles Murray here because that's the nature of the episode we're talking about Charles Murray, but he did have a co-author, Richard Hernstein.
And Richard Herrnstein had been kind of involved in the IQ stuff back in the 60s and 70s.
This guy Arthur Jensen writes the original sort of paper that starts off this whole debate.
In 1969, which was certainly not...
Certainly didn't come out of opposition to the Civil Rights era at all.
No.
That's not what was going on.
But I have another book in front of me.
This is called Crime and Human Nature.
I don't know if there's a PDF available of this one.
I have not read this whole book.
But it's by Richard Herrnstein.
Published 1985.
And he has a co-author, James Q. Wilson.
James Q. Wilson, in case that name might ring a bell to you, is the guy who created the thing called Broken Windows Policing, which is where you go after Minor property crimes because it's something-something, you know, put more black people in prison for low-level offenses and then that makes crime go away.
Sort of begins that whole process.
Broken windows ends up being sort of the ideological justification.
For that, we're on, you know, poor people and African Americans in the Reagan White House.
Again, funny how all this ends up connected.
Probably was buddies with our buddy Bob Whitaker from the last episode, or at least, you know, who knows?
I don't know.
I'd have to look into that, actually.
I'm not sure about that, but I'm not even going to read from this book.
I'm just going to read from The Flapjacket.
And I know I said I wasn't going to read anymore, but fuck that.
I'm going to do it here.
Good.
That's more like it.
No apologies.
In a study that will forever change the way we think about both crime and human nature, we'll see...
Wilson and Herrnstein explore the effects of constitutional factors, gender, age, race, intelligence, personality, the family, school, and community, the labor market, television, alcohol and drugs, and punishment and reward.
Crime and Human Nature also charts historical trends, compares different cultures, and offers a startlingly original perspective on the age-old debate over punishment as deterrence, rehabilitation, or retribution.
Essentially, it's trying to look at human nature through the lens of crime, and making an argument that criminal behavior is something that is, they don't seem to quite go 100% on the, this is sort of genetically created.
They're not quite doing the full-on phrenology thing.
They're saying, oh, there are cultural factors.
People just have bad cultures and sometimes bad genetics.
They don't pull their pants up.
Right.
That's sort of the thing.
And again, we talked about American Renaissance, the color of crime, which is essentially the same argument.
They just file off the highfalutin language and just start quoting black crime statistics.
Yeah, this is just the genteel version of that.
Yeah, right.
And so this is and so I've talked about Murray a lot I've talked about Hurnstein here.
I'm probably gonna do a little bit more on Hurnstein in the future.
Um But yeah, like what else do you have to say?
Well, Charles Murray, you know, he's being rehabilitated, or certain people are trying to rehabilitate him, aren't they?
Absolutely.
To the extent that he needs it.
Sorry, I was moving my book off my desk so I had a place to sit.
Um, no, I think that, like, A, he was never really that far out in the hinterlands.
I think that, like, his, like, Sam Harris talks a lot about, like, you have been unfairly maligned for your entire career.
And it's like, yes, by, like, respectable people who, um, understand how words and numbers work.
Yeah, you were maligned by people who were unkind enough and ungentlemanly enough to point out that your books are full of shit.
Yes.
Your book is full of shit.
Therefore, you are unfairly maligning me because you're saying I said things I didn't say.
You're just, you know... And this is kind of the thing that's really important.
I mean, the Sean video, we referenced it earlier.
Please go check it out.
It's really... The reason I'm not doing the more in-depth discussion about race and IQ is because Sean did that work for me, basically.
I really i really want to stress that's not only very good on the on the arguments in the facts and stuff very very very good indeed it's also very accessible and enjoyable.
I mean if you know it's not like enjoyable like you know watching a.
Watching a watching a movie, but it's enjoyable to if you're someone like us, you know, it's you're not gonna you're not gonna be bored if you like this podcast.
I think you will really appreciate that video.
Honestly, I think you'll get a lot out of it.
Oh, yeah, and Sean does something really like clever structurally and we'll end on that but one of the one of the arguments that he makes and one of the things that he says is that People want to argue about the bell curve as if we're kind of arguing about science, and this is kind of the point that Turkheimer's making, but Shine goes in a different direction than this.
And that is, you know, Murray and Herrnstein in the book, and then Murray and all of his future appearances, is very, like, almost jovial in the sort of, like, No, I'm not really arguing like this.
I'm not really, like, there's a lot of hectoring languages.
Like, we're really trying to be precise about this and really try to indicate and include words from all of our critics so that we're, you know, we can't be accused of kind of writing a polemic or whatever.
But then I go on to argue as if all of that sort of hectoring and all that back and forth and all that nuance didn't exist.
Because they argue for absolutely draconian, awful, As part of their contention that a cognitive elite is forming, they start to argue for stuff like reservations for the cognitively impoverished.
They get close to arguing for, like, concentration camps for the stupid.
And, you know, we know what they mean by the stupid.
Well, and, you know, even beyond that, I mean, like, cutting of welfare... I mean, again, I hate to keep harping on this, but, like, we talk a lot about, like, terrorists and stuff on this show, and about, like, sort of this overt kind of white supremacist stuff, and, like, people trying to create Rahoah and stuff, and the violence that they commit.
And all of that is absolutely terrible.
And I'm not, like, I'm not gonna sit here and, like, say we shouldn't talk about mass shooters, because that's absolutely something we need to talk about.
I think it's an essential part of what this show does.
But Charles Murray has had more negative effect on the world than any of these dipshits could ever pretend to.
Yeah, not just directly via providing ideological cover for neoliberal politicians who've wanted to attack social welfare and social programs and so on and so forth, but also in the ammunition that he's given to people like that, to the people who
Go and commit the mass shootings, or encourage the people that commit the mass shootings, because every one of these fuckers argues, you know, IQ is immutable, and it's heritable, and it's fixed, and it's linked to race, and they will refer to the bell curve.
I don't know if they've read it or not, probably loads of them haven't, but it's a totemic piece of aesthetics for them.
Well, and the heft of the book, the size of it, and look at all the numbers, look at how long it is.
It looks impressive with its big scholarly apparatus, and yeah, that's what it is, it's aesthetic.
The cultural critique kind of does the same thing.
The cultural critique is a better sourced academic book than the Bill Clinton one, for as terrible as it is.
By not making a real argument, you fail to make a bad one from Kevin MacDonald.
But at least there are more references.
The references are better sometimes.
I don't know.
I keep meaning to do a little segment where we dig into some of Kevin MacDonald's footnotes because that's a horrifying and wild ride.
I meant to do it today, but then I got stuck finding all these quotes and really enjoying digging back into this for an afternoon.
Yeah, that's good.
We delayed this one for a week because I had some personal life stuff to deal with.
And because I knew I did not want to... I wanted to have all this.
I didn't want to half-ass this one.
But I think Sean does something really interesting in his video, and something that I really appreciated as someone who has sort of read fairly deeply in this literature and someone who has done a lot of that sort of groundwork that Sean does, is that he starts, like, quoting bits of The Bell Curve and then, like, citing it to Murray's sources.
And if you know this world at all, you know, like, you know, you just start dinging Pioneer Fund.
Pioneer Fund.
Yep, Pioneer Fund.
These are all people funded by an openly eugenicist organization that was founded in 1937, and that has never not been an openly eugenicist organization, that is running one of the major journals in this field, that is running one of the major journals in this field, Mankind Quarterly, is just a publication of this group,
There are some layers of people who sit on the board of these major academic, like real academic sources that are looking at this stuff are funded by this eugenicist organization.
And there's a level of secrecy only because people don't look at it.
But then these people have to be taken seriously within academia because they're on the boards of the major publishers.
They're on the boards of the major journals and so you have to consider their arguments in terms of like talking about this stuff publicly.
Absolutely yeah and it's not unreminiscent of the vast network of Um crackball right wing libertarian economics groups and think tanks and professors that infest the american university system funded by various billionaires you know again i mean it's not as it's you know it's not the same as uh the pioneer fund which has got links to nazis and all sorts of people because as you say it's a eugenicist organization But it works in the same way.
These people don't get scrutinised and they get taken as respectable despite the fact that their ideas are absolutely fucking insane.
And because they have this patina of academic respectability, and it just gets omitted.
You know, this stuff will get talked about in the media, and you'll just go, well, this think tank says, and this professor says that.
It's the same with Charles Murray.
When he goes and talks to people like Sam Harris, Sam Harris doesn't cite, doesn't talk about the fact that loads of your sources in your main book about this, they can be linked back to an openly eugenicist organization.
Well, I'd like to push back slightly on the on what you were saying about like sort of these economics and business schools being, you know, sort of funded by by right wing billionaires and sort of that and that they're not like directly connected to this eugenicist stuff.
But I mean, I know what you're saying and I agree with you, but the connection is closer than I think.
You know, you mentioned earlier Murray Rothbard, who's one of the intellectual progenitors of libertarianism.
Well, Murray himself, his ideology is extreme right wing libertarianism.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, and these guys are not, like, sort of strict racialists.
But, like, Murray Rothbard gets, like, quoted.
I mean, he has a, you know, a famous paper, you know, egalitarianism is a revolt against human nature.
Maybe we'll do a Rothbard episode one day.
That'll be fun.
I should pimp my... I did an essay responding to one of Rothbard's essays.
It might have been that, actually.
Was it?
It's one of those famous ones.
I mean, it's absolutely something that we could do a full episode just going through that essay.
Yeah, I did.
I wrote an entire response to Rothbard's egalitarianism revolt against human nature.
So maybe I'll be vain and link to that as well.
Please do.
That paper gets quoted.
I mean, you know.
Not so much now in 2019, I think.
I think people kind of, A, Murray Rothbard was Jewish and they don't like quoting their Nazi propaganda, Paris the Thought.
But it definitely gets, like, sort of those ideas become part of, sort of, the source of the neo-reactionaries, certainly, kind of borrow heavily from that.
And then the sort of general tenor of that, then just, you know, it provides intellectual justification for this more kind of folk version, this more kind of like populist kind of ground level up where they're not intellectualizing in the same way, but they're sort of like borrowing from the same ideas.
And the fact that there is this patina image justification is what allows it to look legitimate to people kind of looking into this for the first time.
And that's why it's so pernicious.
Yes.
And that's why, I mean, frankly, that's why I do this.
It's just to connect it, to show you where it comes from.
So, you know, to immunize people against it.
I feel like that's so much what this is, is to just, like, point the links.
Point the links out.
This is where it's coming from.
Some of the context that they very determinedly omit.
Right.
Yeah, provide some of it.
It also occurs to me that there's something kindred in Murray's method, which is to play this very avuncular, genial, reasonable guy, and then to disavow all the claims that are made about him.
Maybe not all of them, but the claims made about him and the book by people who are You know outrage that it's still taken seriously and don't think you should be taken seriously etc that you know these people are on the right track and he will.
He will disavow those claims you will say no that's not true look there's this quote from the book etc etc and that strikes me as an approach is very kindred to the the central you know mode of today's far right which is this sort of ironic.
Oh, I mean it, but I also don't mean it But I also kind of do maneuver and actually of course it is because that goes right the way back through Through all this stuff right the way back to from from day one.
They've been doing this.
They've been doing this around Yeah, you can find this in in in my cough, you know, you can find those same kind of general.
Yeah kinds of ideas and I mean, hell, I'm sure you could find it in, like, pro-slavery literature in 1840 in Missouri if we went looking for it.
I'm not a scholar of that, like, era, but...
Yeah, no.
This is part and parcel.
This idea of, like, we're not going to say what we really believe.
We're going to say the thing that is a little bit nicer than the thing that we actually believe.
And use that as our cudgel.
And then they think that we do that.
Then they think that, like, I must support, like, coming up and killing every white person.
Because...
Because I must be doing the equally insidious thing of like hiding my real beliefs, and I'm very open about the things I actually believe.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I'm, you know, what you see is what you get.
I tell you what I think.
I'm not hiding the fact that I, you know... It turns out that when you when you don't actually believe that millions of people should be killed, it's very easy to not pretend not to believe that.
Yeah, that's right.
I can just say it.
I don't have to hide it because what I think, you know, you might not agree with me and I'm very much in the minority, but what I think fundamentally isn't absolutely insane and obscene, so I don't have to dance around it.
So that's Charles Murray, at least the version we're going to do right now.
I don't know, let me know if you actually want to do the full Sam Harris-Charles Murray discussion and talk about all that.
Legitimately, I say this to the audience or to Jack if Jack wants to do it.
But it's legitimately fascinating, but I don't know that a general podcast audience is going to want to listen to me geek out about particular exchanges within another podcast, you know?
And just all the bullshit that got kind of buried, but it is fascinating in terms of how the language works, which is something that I can sit and relisten to that any day.
I will just kind of put it on and just go like, God, this is such a train wreck.
But that tells you more about me than anything.
We'll do a series of them.
We'll do Sam Harris and Cline as well.
It'll be great.
No, I mean, I'm up for it.
We'll see what the listeners think.
I'm hoping in the new year we can get back to sort of the old and kind of hit a bunch of these kind of figures, like kind of doing Richard Spencer and David Duke and Mike Enoch and stuff and kind of hit some kind of get back to basics a little bit in the new year.
But I do want to keep doing these kind of bigger picture episodes as well.
But I mean, there are a lot of figures that we just haven't covered because news happens or because like there's something else kind of going on.
But there are a lot of people that we could definitely spend, you know, an hour talking about that we just haven't gotten around to yet.
And I feel slightly embarrassed not to have done an Identity Europa episode yet because we really should.
So we'll get there.
But that's not what we're doing.
I think we're going to try to do one more episode before the end of the year.
And we're going to do another movie review.
Should we reveal what movie we're doing?
Yeah, go ahead.
No, hang on a minute.
You're not supposed to talk about it.
Oh, we're not supposed to talk about it.
But then again, that's the whole problem.
People talk about it.
Yeah.
No, we're going to talk about Fight Club and sort of toxic masculinity and how it sort of fed into the Manosphere and how the Manosphere, like kind of what it says about this movement and about like sort of how it becomes the progenitor of a lot of this stuff because I think it is legitimately fascinating, but I think it's legitimately fascinating 20 years later, maybe more so than it was in 1989, but we'll also use that to kind of talk about
that year of 1989 in cinema and because there are a lot of other films that are kind of playing with sort of similar ideas and sort of like where this has gone so i have lots of thoughts on this um but we'll do that and we'll talk about the movie a little bit as well yeah the first rule of the next episode of i don't speak german is we do talk about fight club we do talk about german that that would we do talk german yeah what if we both actually spoke german and then did a whole episode in german talking about fight club that would be Yeah, I want to learn German just to do that joke.
It would be totally worth spending years of my life learning a language just to do a troll on our audience.
And also, I could read Marx in the original German.
That would probably be handy.
That was episode 38 this week we are planning to do another one before the end of the year so i won't say thanks for the year that you've given us listeners it's been an amazing year we started in january this year.
And here we are in december nearly at the end and it's a huge from our standards anyway a huge audience it's it's a pretty big audience it's i'm i'm i'm kind of amazed.
We never thought it was going to do this.
We should do this in the next episode.
But I think even if we don't get that last one out before the end of the year, 38 episodes in 52 weeks is not half bad.
That's pretty good.
Given the nature of this content and kind of what we're doing here.
So I'm proud of us.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I'm proud of you.
I'm just tagging along.
Happy Christmas!
No, we're not doing that, are we?
Happy Holidays!
That's right, sorry.
If you celebrate holidays.
But of course, Happy Hanukkah, because we're just required to.
Just have a pleasant end of December.
It's such a terrible joke, given what's actually happening in the world.
Yeah.
You know, I hope that people understand that I don't mean that in the slightest and it's not like, you know, it's fine.
Anyway, please, if you celebrate a holiday, please celebrate it with kindness and love in your heart.
Unless you're a Nazi, in which case, you should absolutely stop being a Nazi.
Stop being a Nazi and, you know, yeah.
Well, that's it.
Stop being a Nazi.
Yeah, just stop being a Nazi.
Or if you want to be racist, take the microphone away, then I don't have to pay attention to you anymore.
Exactly.
Yeah, either stop being a Nazi or stop talking about it.
One or the other will do, you know, for a start.
But otherwise, if you don't fit into that category, have a pleasant end of December and beginning of January.
We might see you before the New Year, but yeah, great.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
Cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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