Well, this is awkward.
-I _liked_ [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). That book did a _little_ bit of political positioning in opposition to the blank slate orthodoxy, but for the _most_ part, it was just a fun, clean Science book for Science nerds. Effect sizes! GWAS! Selection on standing variation! Additive genetic variance! No one can get (or stay) angry about these technical minutiæ. "[E]veryone should calm down," Murray wrote, and as your eyes glaze over the two-page table of "Differences in Target Allele Frequencies for Traits Related to Cognitive Repertoires", you can almost start to believe that they should.
+I _liked_ [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). That book did a _little_ bit of defensive political positioning, but for the _most_ part, it was just a fun, clean Science book for Science nerds. Effect sizes! GWAS! Selection on standing variation! Additive genetic variance! No one can get (or stay) angry about these technical minutiæ. "[E]veryone should calm down," Murray wrote, and as your eyes glaze over [the two-page table of "Differences in Target Allele Frequencies for Traits Related to Cognitive Repertoires"](/images/target_allele_frequencies_table.jpg), you can almost start to believe that they should.
This book ... well. This is the Charles Murray book that's _actually_ about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about.
-You really have to feel sorry for the man. In previous works such as 1994's _The Bell Curve_ (with Richard J. Hernstein) and 2012's _Coming Apart_, Murray argues that American Society has developed an increasingly stratified class structure based on cognitive ability. All else being equal, smarter individuals attain higher-paying professions, perform better within a given profession, form stabler families, and commit fewer crimes. But sorting by cognitive ability has a dark side in the dissolution of community and undermining of the American way of life, as the richest and most educated increasingly live in their own bubbles and [...]
+You really have to feel sorry for the man. In previous works such as 1994's _The Bell Curve_ (with Richard J. Hernstein) and 2012's _Coming Apart_, Murray argues that American Society in the 20th and early 21st centuries has developed an increasingly stratified class structure based on cognitive ability. All else being equal, smarter individuals attain higher-paying professions, perform better within a given profession, form stabler families, and commit fewer crimes. But sorting by cognitive ability has a dark side in the dissolution of social capital and undermining of the American way of life, as the richest and most educated increasingly live in their own bubbles with no connection to how their fellow Americans live.
-None of that has _anything to do with race_.
+This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history where humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and where the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present.
+
+In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_, not that this would endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the rationale and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
+
+I mean, yes, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_; the visibility of the two pages of discussion on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ is reduced by discreetly tucking it away into footnote 4 of the "class" section.
+
+In contrast, this little book is more—focused. (I don't want to say "more direct" and undermine my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!).
+
+Murray acknowledges the irony: if the _goal_ is colorblind individualism, why write about group differences!? The problem is strategic: if we can't _talk_ about group differences, but group differences actually exist and are actually pretty stable, then well-meaning people who are distressed by group differences in socioeconomic outcomes end up conducting an increasingly paranoid witchhunt for systemic racism, eventually casting aside the American creed. Murray quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan—I feel like I've [mentioned him on the blog at some point?](/2020/Nov/nixon-on-forbidden-hypotheses/)—"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts."
+
+After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense when you consider that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California).
+
+Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound more racialist or essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as! (The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied.)
+
+
+
+going to school might not do it if you went to a good school,
-[alternate universe no natives no slaves, you could write the same book]
-[Bell Curve had two chapters about race (oh, and a couple more about affirmative action), Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section]
-[push bad memes onto their lessers]
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-... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write.
+... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_.
+
+
[What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
