The Bell Curve: Moral Intelligence

WHEN I coined the word “meritocracy” and its imagined credo, IQ + Effort = Merit, I could never have anticipated that the actual rise of a “cognitive elite” in America and its contrary in the underclass would be chronicled with such meticulous scholarship forty years later. I was talking mostly of what might be; Herrnstein and Murray are talking of what has been, and is. One of the most enduring truths is that man is a verb; but what human beings can do remains astonishing and frightening.

I love America almost as much as my own country. This is perhaps partly because for three years running in the 1930s I was taken each summer by my informal foster parents (one of whom had been Eleanor Roosevelt’s best friend at school) to stay in the White House. My childhood recollections are no doubt unreliable, and even more my judgments. But for what they are worth, I was impressed by Franklin Roosevelt not just as a wily politician but also as a man of moral stature, and I felt a little the same about some of his colleagues when I sat down for dinner with him and Wallace and Hull and Ickes and the other New Dealers. Whatever later revelations have done to tarnish the image of Roosevelt, I don’t think that many people would consider that a comparison between him and Nixon or Reagan would be wholly unfavorable to their predecessor in the Presidency. One of the extraordinary things about moral qualities is that they are so readily recognized by those around the people who possess them. This can make goodness catching.

MY

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Michael Young

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

WHEN I coined the word “meritocracy” and its imagined credo, IQ + Effort = Merit, I could never have anticipated that the actual rise of a “cognitive elite” in America and its contrary in the underclass would be chronicled with such meticulous scholarship forty years later. I was talking mostly of what might be; Herrnstein and Murray are talking of what has been, and is. One of the most enduring truths is that man is a verb; but what human beings can do remains astonishing and frightening.

I love America almost as much as my own country. This is perhaps partly because for three years running in the 1930s I was taken each summer by my informal foster parents (one of whom had been Eleanor Roosevelt’s best friend at school) to stay in the White House. My childhood recollections are no doubt unreliable, and even more my judgments. But for what they are worth, I was impressed by Franklin Roosevelt not just as a wily politician but also as a man of moral stature, and I felt a little the same about some of his colleagues when I sat down for dinner with him and Wallace and Hull and Ickes and the other New Dealers. Whatever later revelations have done to tarnish the image of Roosevelt, I don’t think that many people would consider that a comparison between him and Nixon or Reagan would be wholly unfavorable to their predecessor in the Presidency. One of the extraordinary things about moral qualities is that they are so readily recognized by those around the people who possess them. This can make goodness catching.