The Bell Curve: Trashing The Bell Curve

IN ONE of the numerous asides that made his lectures so memorable, Herman Kahn observed that the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor’s clothes was psychologically flawed. It was impossible to believe, Herman said, that people committed to the wonderfulness of the clothes would instantly reverse course and accept that the emperor was naked, just because somebody pointed out this obvious truth. People truly committed to beliefs don’t get turned around that easily. At a minimum, they would have furiously denounced the little boy who blurted out the nakedness news, just as they are now reviling Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein for putting forward the data that give The Bell Curve its enormous explanatory power.

A howling mob of liberal commentators not knowing what in hell they are talking about is a dispiriting spectacle, and media reaction to the Herrnstein-Murray book has been infinitely depressing. I cannot remember any other work of scholarship, in any field at all, that has been assailed so cavalierly by writers ignorant of the material and manifestly unconcerned about accurately representing its ideas. I used to think that Mickey Kaus was a smart and serious guy. But there he was in The New Republic, attacking the authors for resisting “a near-avalanche of evidence that the black—white difference inIQisa function of environment rather than heredity.”

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Daniel Seligman

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IN ONE of the numerous asides that made his lectures so memorable, Herman Kahn observed that the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor’s clothes was psychologically flawed. It was impossible to believe, Herman said, that people committed to the wonderfulness of the clothes would instantly reverse course and accept that the emperor was naked, just because somebody pointed out this obvious truth. People truly committed to beliefs don’t get turned around that easily. At a minimum, they would have furiously denounced the little boy who blurted out the nakedness news, just as they are now reviling Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein for putting forward the data that give The Bell Curve its enormous explanatory power.

A howling mob of liberal commentators not knowing what in hell they are talking about is a dispiriting spectacle, and media reaction to the Herrnstein-Murray book has been infinitely depressing. I cannot remember any other work of scholarship, in any field at all, that has been assailed so cavalierly by writers ignorant of the material and manifestly unconcerned about accurately representing its ideas. I used to think that Mickey Kaus was a smart and serious guy. But there he was in The New Republic, attacking the authors for resisting “a near-avalanche of evidence that the black—white difference inIQisa function of environment rather than heredity.”