Charles Murray is a political scientist and an author. He is most famous for having co-authored the controversial book, The Bell Curve, along with the late Richard Hernstein. This book looks at the growing role that intelligence plays in modern societies, and the authors worry about a kind of cognitive partitioning of our society into separate classes. It's a theme that he has returned to in his other work, and in a more recent book, Coming Apart, which we also discuss. And yet, just last month, Murray was shouted down by a mob at Middlebury College, a mob that actually turned violent and sent the faculty member who was chaperoning him to the hospital. What happened? And why is this happening on college campuses? In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast by Sam Harris, we take a deep dive into what happened, and what happened to him, in response to the recent attacks on his speech at the University of California-Berkeley, and why he deserves to be taken to task for being a fascist, white supremacist, eugenicist, Nazi, and egotistical ideologue, and a homophobe, no matter what you think of his views on race and intelligence. Sam explains why this is a problem, and how it s a symptom of an anti-free speech hysteria that s spreading across American universities and colleges across the country, and on social media, and across the political spectrum. And why we should all pay attention to it, because it s not just about IQ, it s about race and wealth, but about race, and its role in modernity and culture. and culture and its relation to race and identity in modern society it s role in the 21st century the role of race and culture, and as a form of identity in our society in the modern world in a world that s history, and the role in shaping our society, in order to be a better world a better, better, smarter, better and better, and better better, more more . not just better, but more, more, and more, , and more, better , better, better and , less, more , more . in etc, less so much, , more and so on and so much more , etc
00:09:28.800Honestly, it felt like the intellectual equivalent of going into Fukushima with a Geiger counter to see just how hot things are.
00:09:37.980Not something I was ever planning to do.
00:09:40.380And I do remain skeptical about the wisdom of looking for cross-cultural or interracial differences in things like intelligence.
00:09:48.100I'm not sure what it gets you, apart from a lot of pain.
00:09:51.000So, many of the topics I discussed in the podcast with Murray are not topics I would ordinarily think about or recommend that you think about.
00:09:59.160But the purpose of the podcast was to set the record straight.
00:10:03.160Because I find the dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice of Murray's critics shocking.
00:10:11.240And the fact that I was taken in by this defamation of him and effectively became part of a silent mob that was just watching what amounted to a modern witch-burning, that was intolerable to me.
00:10:26.520So, it is with real pleasure and some trepidation that I bring you a very controversial conversation on points about which there is virtually no scientific controversy.
00:10:41.240And it's with a man who could not have been a more genial and well-spoken guest.
00:10:59.160So, I first heard of you, as many people did, when you published your book, The Bell Curve, in 1994, I believe.
00:11:06.980And this is along with your co-author, Richard Hernstein.
00:11:10.060And this was, without question, one of the most controversial books in living memory.
00:11:16.760It focused on IQ and the differences in mean IQ between groups of people.
00:11:22.060And it was just treated like, let's say, radioactive communication.
00:11:26.460And like most people who first heard of you at that point, I didn't actually read the book.
00:11:32.120And I just assumed that where there was smoke, certainly that much smoke, there had to be at least some fire.
00:11:39.860And I just assumed that you had said something in those pages that was so intellectually or morally indefensible that that explained the backlash against you.
00:11:51.760And this is a backlash that continues to this day.
00:11:55.220But I've since, in the intervening years, ventured into my own controversial areas as a speaker and writer and experienced many hysterical attacks against me and my work.
00:12:07.600And so I started thinking about your case a little, again, without ever having read you.
00:12:12.560And I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine that I never recognized as such.
00:12:18.940And seeing your recent treatment at Middlebury, which many of our listeners will have heard about, where you were prevented from speaking and your host was physically attacked.
00:12:28.860I now believe that you are perhaps the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.
00:12:37.580And it's just an amazing thing to be so slow to realize that.
00:12:43.720And at first, I'd just like to apologize to you for having been so lazy and having been taken in to the degree that I was by the rumors and lies that have surrounded your work for the last 20 years.
00:12:55.940And so I just want to thank you doubly for coming on the podcast to talk about these things.
00:13:00.680Well, that's very kind of you to say, but I'm curious.
00:14:07.540It's—of all the charges about the book that drive me nuts the most, I think perhaps it was Stephen Jay Gould, who probably a lot of your listeners are too young to remember, but who wrote the review of it in The New Yorker.
00:14:21.600And Gould himself was the author of a book called The Mismeasure of Man, which many people see as the canonical refutation of IQ as being an important concept.
00:14:31.960But anyway, in the review, Gould was referring to the regression equations.
00:14:36.580Well, as it happened with the division of work, I did all the regression analyses.
00:14:40.620And I was reading the review, and Gould made a little parenthetical remark, I bet they only did them once.
00:14:48.900And I threw the book against the wall.
00:14:50.260I literally—my wife was in the room, and I took it, and I just threw it.
00:14:55.140Because thinking of the hundreds of hours that I spent on that, and not only that, when we had all of the analyses done—
00:15:02.380I'm afraid, Sam, a lot of this podcast is going to sound very self-referential and pompous.
00:15:11.260When we got done with all of those analyses, I went back, and I recreated them from scratch.
00:15:17.760I mean, recreating the variables again, doing the whole thing, and so that I could just get rid of any dangers of a screw-up.
00:15:29.380I had to make the identical screw-up twice, in other words, for there still to be a mistake.
00:15:33.160Anyway, the book, I would argue, all you need to do is read in it for a while, and you will realize the things you have heard about are simply wrong.
00:15:42.560Yeah, well, I want to get to the most controversial points you make in the book, and what you actually say about them,
00:15:48.740and what kind of public policy recommendations you make on their basis,
00:15:52.120is because it is the opposite of a white supremacist, neo-Nazi book, and you have been called both of those things.
00:16:03.280What was your basic thesis in The Bell Curve?
00:16:06.480The thesis of The Bell Curve actually is very similar to the thesis of Coming Apart, which hardly anybody noticed.
00:16:13.120And that is, at the time we did it, we were saying we are looking at a future which is being shaped by the radically increased value of IQ in the marketplace over the last century,
00:16:28.440and has also been affected by the increasing effectiveness of the higher educational system in getting intellectual talent wherever it resides and pulling it into elite universities.
00:16:39.900And the combination of these two things is creating a cognitive elite that is increasingly powerful, increasingly affluent, has its own culture,
00:16:49.380and is increasingly isolated from and ignorant of the rest of society.
00:16:54.760That essentially was the, well, that's the thesis of that book.
00:16:59.300That's the reason the subtitle is Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
00:17:03.660And as I said, Coming Apart, the first few chapters have large chunks of The Bell Curve imported into it,
00:17:12.340because in Coming Apart, I was essentially saying it's no longer something that we're in danger of.
00:17:21.700And we spend the first eight chapters, well, no, first we spend three or four chapters talking about the nature of the cognitive elite and how it came about.
00:17:33.920Then we take eight chapters, and we have the relationship of IQ to a variety of social outcomes, unemployment, poverty, educational attainments, crime.
00:17:47.840And the relative roles of IQ and the basic socioeconomic variables in explaining the dependent variable.
00:17:58.340And for doing that, Dick, Herrnstein, and I restricted ourselves to a sample of non-Latino whites.
00:18:05.900And the reason we did that was we said, we know that the whole issue of IQ and race is very heated, and we're going to simplify things.
00:18:19.780We are saying this relationship of IQ to important social and economic outcomes exists in a population of non-Latino whites.
00:18:28.100And then after that, we can go to the issue of, well, does it apply to the nation as a whole?
00:18:35.800And that's the point at which we got into race.
00:18:39.440Right. So the most controversial area of the book is in your discussion around the mean difference across races in population IQ.