Why bad books like the bell curve can stay alive forever

Here’s a question for academics: Would you like to write a book that is reviewed everywhere, introduces a technical term into popular culture, and is still remembered passionately more than two decades after it comes out? The answer, I suppose, would be “yes”. But this is one of those occasions when, if a genie granted you these three wishes, you had better be on your guard. For all those things are true of The Bell Curve, written in 1994 by two academics and still a subject of heated discussion today.
 
In September 1994, America was a divided country, perhaps as divided as it is today. Having voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election, it was set to give Newt Gingrich’s Republican conservatives a majority in Congress in the fall elections. The phrase “culture war” was beginning to be used to describe the divergence and animosity between the open, liberal, and tolerant atmosphere of America’s coasts and the traditional, conservative milieu of the country’s “heartland”. And into this strained environment two academics — the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray — dropped The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Nor did they do so under the radar. The book was reviewed everywhere, excerpted in The New Republic magazine, and spawned countless academic discussions, critical volumes, and policy papers.

 
Herrnstein died the same month the book was released, so Prof Murray took all the praise and criticism alone. And there was a lot of both. Those on the right who had long assumed that liberals were prone to magical thinking, to idealistic minimisation of racial differences, seized on the book’s argument — buttressed with an inordinate number of graphs — that IQ was correlated closely with important social outcomes like poverty, that some amount of IQ was heritable, that there are persistent differences in average IQ between groups, particularly racial groups, and thus that genetics partly explains racial differences in IQ scores. Others saw it as an attempt to dress up old-fashioned racism in new and statistically significant clothes.

 

In the decades since The Bell Curve was published, considerable work on the heritability of IQ has been carried out. It is worth noting that whatever racial gaps in average IQ have been observed are narrowing over time, and IQ itself has been rising in most areas. The latter is called the Flynn Effect: In America, for example, average IQ has risen 18 points since the end of World War II. There are multiple other ways in which Messrs Herrnstein and Murray were wrong at the time, especially in their use of statistics, and have been demonstrated to be wrong since. This is not surprising, since The Bell Curve was not in fact peer-reviewed before being released.

 
What is extraordinary about The Bell Curve, however, is that it still feels like a live political issue. Prof Murray has moved on to other issues — a few years ago, he decided he would prove that only white men are capable of great art or inventions, by examining how often other white men cited them as great artists or inventors — but American politics and culture has not. In fact, in Donald Trump’s America, reactions to The Bell Curve have become totems of your acceptance of an inclusive as opposed to a “traditional” conception of America. For the freshly empowered alt-right, which imagines itself as a scientific, rational updating of old-style white supremacism and ethno-nationalism, the book is something akin to a foundational document.

 
But the approach of some on the left has helped empower this sentiment. Most visibly, when Prof Murray was invited to famously liberal Middlebury College in Vermont to speak about some of his more recent research, students there turned their backs on him and chanted in protest as he tried to speak. Later, the professor who had invited him to campus was assaulted and seriously hurt.
 
In some ways, this attitude has not just kept a flawed work alive as a current topic, but has helped propagate the notion that Prof Murray and his work are, to quote a recent podcast by “new atheist” Sam Harris on the subject, “forbidden knowledge”. In other words, if people are protesting a work and preventing the author of that work from speaking at a particular platform, then there must be something true in that piece of work. This is, of course, a logically incoherent argument. Nor is Prof Murray, who has a prize perch at the American Enterprise Institute, exactly silenced.

 
The lesson surely is this. If you want to discredit a work, show how it is wrong. This effort was conducted creditably with The Bell Curve a decade ago, when America was in fact more openly racist than it is today. That it is once again considered respectable has much more to do with how the culture of protest has changed.