I closed Chapter 7 in The Mismeasure of Man on the unreality of g and the fallacy of regarding intelligence as a single innate thing-in-the-head (rather than a rough vernacular term for a wondrous panoply of largely independent abilities) with a marvelous quote from John Stuart Mill, well worth repeating to debunk this generation’s recycling of biological determinism for the genetics of intelligence:
The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious.
How strange that we would let a single false number divide us, when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry—thus undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can never stale. E pluribus unum.
Ghosts of Bell Curves Past
I don’t know whether or not most white men can jump (though I can attest, through long observation, that Larry Bird cannot—but, oh, Lord, could he play basketball). And I don’t much care, though I suppose that the subject bears some interest and marginal legitimacy in an alternate framing that avoids such biologically meaningless categories as white and black. Yet I can never give a speech on the subject of human diversity without attracting some variant of this inquiry in the subsequent question period. I hear the “sports version,” I suppose, as an acceptable surrogate for what really troubles people of good will (and bad, though for other reasons).
The old days of overt racism did not engender such squeamishness. When the grandfather of modern academic racism, Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816–1882), asked a similar question about the nature of supposedly inborn and unchangeable differences among racial groups, he laid it right on the line. The title of the concluding chapter to Volume 1 of his most influential work, Essai sur linégalité des races humains (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), reads: “Moral and Intellectual Characteristics of the Three Great Varieties.” Our concerns have always centered upon smarts and decency, not jumping height and susceptibility to cardiovascular arrest.
And Gobineau left no doubt about his position:
The idea of an innate and permanent difference in the moral and mental endowments of the various groups of the human species, is one of the most ancient, as well as universally adopted, opinions. With few exceptions, and these mostly in our own times, it has formed the basis of almost all political theories, and has been the fundamental maxim of government of every nation, great or small. The prejudices of country have no other cause; each nation believes in its own superiority over its neighbors, and very often different parts of the same nation regard each other with contempt.
Gobineau was undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the nineteenth century. His writings strongly affected such intellectuals as Wagner and Nietzsche and inspired a social movement known as Gobinism. Largely through his impact on the English zealot Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau’s ideas served as a foundation for the racial theories espoused by Adolf Hitler. Gobineau, an aristocratic royalist by background, interspersed writing with a successful diplomatic career for the French government. He authored several novels and works of historical nonfiction (a history of the Persian people and of the European Renaissance, for example), but became most famous for his four-volume work on racial inequality, published between 1853 and 1855.
Gobineau’s basic position can be easily summarized: the fate of civilizations is largely determined by racial composition, with decline and fall usually attributable to dilution of pure stocks by interbreeding. (Gobineau feared that the contemporary weakening of France, largely to German advantage, could be “traced to the great variety of incongruous ethnical elements composing the population,” as his translator wrote in introducing the first American edition of 1856). The white races (especially the dominant Aryan subgroups) might remain in command, Gobineau hoped, but only if they could be kept relatively free from miscegenation with intellectually and morally inferior stocks of yellows and blacks (Gobineau used these crude terms of color for his three major groups).
No one would doubt the political potency of such ideas, and no one would credit any claim that Gobineau wrote only in the interest of abstract truth, with no agenda of advocacy in mind. Nonetheless, it does no harm to point out that the American translation, published in Philadelphia in 1856, as Dred Scott’s case came before the Supreme Court near the brink of our Civil War, surely touched a nerve in parlous times—for Gobineau’s distinctive notion of racial purity, and the danger of intermixing, surely struck home in our nation of maximal racial diversity and pervasive inequality, with enslavement of blacks and decimation of Indians. J. C. Nott of Mobile, America’s most active popularizer of anthropology in the racist mode, wrote a long appendix to the translation (his textbook Types of Mankind, written with G. R. Gliddon in 1854, was the contemporary American best seller in the field). Lest anyone miss the point of local relevance for this European treatise, the translator wrote in his preface:
The aim [of studying racial differences] is certainly a noble one, and its pursuit cannot be otherwise than instructive to the statesman and historian, and no less so to the general reader. In this country, it is particularly interesting and important, for not only is our immense territory the abode of the three best defined varieties of the human species—the white, the negro, and the Indian—to which the extensive immigration of the Chinese on our Pacific coast is rapidly adding a fourth, but the fusion of diverse nationalities is nowhere more rapid and complete.
Yet Gobineau needed evidence for his claims. (My previous quotation from Gobineau only asserts that most people believe in innate inequality, and does not present any evidence that this common impression is correct.) Therefore, in the last chapter of his work, Gobineau outlines an approach to securing the necessary data for his racism. He begins by telling us how we should not frame the argument. We should not, he claims, point to the poor accomplishments of individuals belonging to “inferior races,” for such a strategy will backfire as egalitarians search for rare exemplars of high achievement within generally benighted groups. Gobineau begins his final chapter by writing (the quotation is long, and chilling, but well worth the space for its reminder about “certainties” of a not so distant past):
In the preceding pages, I have endeavored to show that … the various branches of the human family are distinguished by permanent and ineradicable differences, both mentally and physically. They are unequal in intellectual capacity, in personal beauty, and in physical strength.… In coming to this conclusion, I have totally eschewed the method which is, unfortunately for the cause of science, too often resorted to by the ethnologists, and which, to say the least of it, is simply ridiculous. The discussion has not rested upon the moral and intellectual worth of isolated individuals.
I shall not even wait for the vindicators of the absolute equality of all races to adduce to me such and such a passage in some missionary’s or navigator’s journal, wherefrom it appears that some Yolof has become a skillful carpenter, that some Hottentot has made an excellent domestic, that some Caffre plays well on the violin, or that some Bambarra has made very respectable progress in arithmetic.
I am prepared to admit—and to admit without proof—anything of that sort, however remarkable, that may be related of the most degraded savages.… Nay, I go farther than my opponents, and am not in the least disposed to doubt that, among the chiefs of the rude negroes of Africa, there could be found a considerable number of active and vigorous minds, greatly surpassing in fertility of ideas and mental resources the average of our peasantry, and even of some of our middle classes.
(Pervasity of prejudice does reside in the unconscious details. Note how Gobineau, writing in his “generous” mode, still cannot imagine, for an African ruler, any higher intellectual status than the European peasantry or perhaps the low
er reaches of the bourgeoisie—but never, heaven forfend, even the worst of the upper classes!)
How, then, shall racial status be affirmed if arguments about individuals have no validity? Gobineau states that we must find a measure, preferably imbued with the prestige of mathematics, for average properties of groups:
Once for all, such arguments [about individuals] seem to me unworthy of real science.…Let us leave such puerilities, and compare, not the individuals, but the masses.… This difficult and delicate task cannot be accomplished until the relative position of the whole mass of each race shall have been nicely, and, so to say, mathematically defined.
I was, I confess, prompted to reread Gobineau by the current brouhaha over The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and my late colleague Richard Herrnstein—for I recognized that they use exactly the same structure of argument about individuals and groups, though for quite a different purpose, and the disparity within the similarity struck me as eerie. Herrnstein and Murray also claim that average differences in intelligence between racial groups are real and salient (also largely innate and effectively immutable), and they also insist that such group disparities carry no implication for the judgment of individuals. In this way, they hope to avoid a charge of racism and secure a judgment as upholders of human rights—for no black individual, in their view, should be devalued because his group is innately less intelligent than whites; after all, this particular individual may be a rarely brilliant member of his averagely dumb race. (I must say that I regard such an argument as either disingenuous or naïve—and I can’t view Mr. Murray as naïve—given the realities of racial attitudes in America vs. our idealized hope for judgment of all individuals on their personal achievements and attributes alone, and not by their group membership.)
Gobineau wished to separate individual and group judgment because he didn’t want the “reality” of group differences to be blurred by the uncharacteristic performance of rare individuals. Herrnstein and Murray make the distinction in a very different political climate; they emphasize the reality of individual achievement (rather than its annoying confusion) in order to avoid (fairly enough) the charge of racism while maintaining something quite close to Gobineau’s differences in intelligence and the unlikelihood of their erasure. (Please understand that I am not trying to besmirch Herrnstein and Murray by name-calling from the past. I am not attempting to establish my indirect linkage to the Third Reich—and neither can we blame Gobineau for Hitler’s extreme usages via Chamberlain. But I am fascinated that structures of ideas can be so similar across the centuries, while thinkers of basically consonant mind emphasize different parts of an entity in the climates of varying times.)
Gobineau, seeking a mathematical basis for group differences in intelligence and morality, was stuck with the crude and direct measures of nineteenth-century racist science—mainly shapes and sizes of skulls and other body parts (for no supposedly “direct” assessment by mental testing had yet been developed). For example, Gobineau located black destiny in external anatomy:
The dark races are the lowest on the scale. The shape of the pelvis has a character of animalism, which is imprinted on the individuals of that race ere their birth, and seems to portend their destiny.… The negro’s narrow and receding forehead seems to mark him as inferior in reasoning capacity.
Moreover, in a manner so characteristic of this pseudoscience, Gobineau manages to spin every observation in the light of his preconception about black inferiority. Even ostensibly favorable traits are redeployed in the service of racist interpretation. On the supposed stoicism of blacks in the face of pain, for example, Gobineau cites the testimony of a doctor: “They bear surgical operations much better than white people, and what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a negro would almost disregard. I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” Any white man would be praised for bravery, courage, and nobility, but Gobineau attributes this supposed toleration of pain by blacks to “a moral cowardice which readily seeks refuge in death, or in a sort of monstrous impassivity.”
As measurement of bodies formed the crude and only marginally successful (even in their own terms) devices of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, so has the more sophisticated technology of mental testing—measuring the subtle inside, as it were, rather than the indirect outside—set the basis for most arguments about human inequality in the twentieth century. (As I explain in much greater detail in the main text, I am not opposed to all forms of mental testing and I certainly do not view the enterprise as inherently racist or devoted to arguing for immutable human differences—for exactly the opposite intention has often been promoted in using tests to measure the improvement that good education can supply.)
However, one particular philosophy of mental testing does undergird most arguments about intellectual differences among human groups made in our century. Moreover, this philosophy does emerge directly from the cruder techniques for measuring bodies that defined the subject in the nineteenth century. In this sense, we may trace continuity from Gobineau to the modern hereditarian theory of IQ. I thought that this philosophy had receded from influence as a joint result of well-exposed fallacies in the general argument and failure of data to validate the essential premises. But Herrnstein and Murray have revived this philosophy in its full and original form in The Bell Curve—and we must therefore return to the historical sources of fallacy.
The “Gobinist” version of mental testing—using the enterprise to argue for innate and ineradicable differences in general intelligence among human groups—relies upon four sequential and interrelated premises; each must be true individually (and all the linkages must hold as well), or else the entire edifice collapses:
1. The wonderfully multifarious and multidimensional set of human attributes that we call “intelligence” in the vernacular must all rest upon a single, overarching (or undergirding) factor of general intellectual capacity, usually called g, or the general factor of intelligence (see my critique of this notion and its mathematical basis in Chapter 7 of the main text).
2. The general “amount” of intelligence in each person must be measurable as a single number (usually called “IQ”); a linear ranking of people by IQ must therefore establish a hierarchy of differential intelligence; and, finally (for the social factor in the argument), people’s achievements in life, and their social ranks in hierarchies of worth and wealth, must be strongly correlated with their IQ scores.
3. This single number must measure an inborn quality of genetic constitution, highly heritable across generations.
4. A person’s IQ score must be stable and permanent—subject to little change (but only minor and temporary tinkering) by any program of social and educational intervention.
In other words, to characterize each of the four arguments in a word or two, human intelligence must be abstractable (as a single number), rankable, highly heritable, and effectively immutable. If any of these assumptions fails, the entire argument and associated political agenda go belly up. For example, if only the fourth premise of immutability is false, then social programs of intense educational remediation may well boost, substantially and permanently, an innate and highly heritable disadvantage in IQ—just as I may purchase a pair of eyeglasses to correct an entirely inborn and fully heritable defect of vision. (The false equation of “heritable” with “permanent” or “unchangeable” has long acted as a cardinal misconception in this debate.)
I cannot, in this essay, present a full critique of The Bell Curve (see the previous essay for more details). I only wish to trace some historical roots and to expose a stunning irony. The Bell Curve’s argument about average intelligence among racial groups is no different from and no more supportable than Gobineau’s founding version. The major addition is a change in methodology and sophistication—from measuring bodies to measuring the content of heads in intelligence testing. But the IQ version relies upon assumptions (the four statements abov
e) as unsupportable as those underpinning the old hierarchies of skull sizes proposed by nineteenth-century participants. In this light, we can gain great insight by revisiting the philosophy and intent of the man who first invented the modern style of mental testing during the first decade of our century—the French psychologist Alfred Binet (who later became the eponym of the test when Stanford professor Lewis M. Terman imported the apparatus to America, developed a local version, and called it the Stanford-Binet IQ test).
I shall show that Binet’s intentions sharply contradicted the innatist version, for he believed strongly in educational remediation and explicitly rejected any hereditarian reading of his results. Ironically, the hereditarian theory of IQ (the imposition of Binet’s apparatus upon Gobineau’s argument) arose in America, land of liberty and justice for all (but during our most jingoistic period during and following World War I). The exposure of Binet’s original intent does not prove him right or the hereditarians wrong (after all, a doctrine of original intent works even less well in science than in constitutional law!). Rather, Binet is right because his arguments continue to have validity, and the distortion of his wise and humane effort must rank as one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century science.
In 1904, Binet was commissioned by the minister of public education in France to devise a way of identifying children in primary school whose difficulties in normal classrooms suggested some need for special education. (In French public schools, classes tended to be quite large and curricula inflexible; teachers had little time to devote to individual students with particular needs.) Binet decided on a purely practical approach. He devised a test based upon a hodgepodge of diverse tasks related to everyday problems of life (counting coins, for example) and supposedly involving basic processes of reasoning (logic, ordering, correction) rather than explicitly learned skills like reading. By mixing together enough tests of different attributes, Binet hoped to abstract a child’s general potential with a single score. Binet emphasized the rough-and-ready, empirical nature of his test with a dictum: “It matters very little what the tests are so long as they are numerous.”
The Mismeasure of Man Page 41