OUR intellectual landscape has been disrupted by the equivalent of an earthquake and, as the ground settles, intellectuals are looking around nervously and bracing themselves. At such times, the best policy is to heed the evidence that leads toward truth.
The problem with this policy today is that on at least three matters-IQ, heritability, and human nature—the rules we have lived under for some decades now are evasion, euphemism, and taboo. The earthquake has been caused by the simultaneous violation of all three. The problem is especially acute for liberals who have invested virtually their entire substance in three unusual beliefs: that almost everything important about human beings originates in the environment; that environmental factors may be manipulated at will by an intelligent and highly moral elite (composed of themselves); and that the ideal condition of human life would be a certain uniformity, which they call (equivocally) “equality.” By the latter term, they do not mean equality under the law, or even equality of opportunity, but an administered equality of result.
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