Clarence Thomas bestie Harlan Crow has so many friends testifying to his good character. As Law Boy Esq. put it on Twitter, "incredible to watch everyone on the right chime in with 'I am also financially intertwined with the billionaire Nazi guy'."
Among these friends is the notorious Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and other modern classics. Murray declared that Crow's "decency, integrity, and kindness" are recognized by everyone who knows him, "[i]ncluding people of the left." (It would be interesting to know who some of those "people of the left" are, but it's not really important.) Murray even dedicated his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class to Crow.
I have to admit that much of what I'm seeing online about Thomas, Crow, and Murray is basically ragegasms, the opiate of liberals and the left. The people throwing these tantrums don't know how mainstream Murray's views are, by which I mean that they are held not only by the right but by liberals and many leftists.
As I've pointed out before, people who are outraged by scientific rationalizations of race and sex are likely to embrace biological explanations of sexual orientation, gender and other "identity", mental illness, and alcoholism and other addictions. Racial essentialism is making a comeback too, as shown by the popularity of DNA testing to trace people's "roots."
Murray has sometimes tried to minimize his interest in race, and to foreground the application of his methods and arguments to class. It's on that issue that liberals agree with him, even if they're not aware of it. Chris Hayes, the liberal pundit for MSNBC who occupies probably the farthest "left" position in American corporate media, wrote in his 2012 book on meritocracy, "First, kids are not created equal. Some are much smarter than others. And second, the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege. That was the idea, anyway" (35), of Hunter College High School's competitive entrance exams to select superior students. I pointed out in my discussion of his book that Hayes assumes that unequal smartness has something to with how kids are "created," and that the superior kids deserve an elite place in society. Not all liberals would agree with Hayes, but I don't have the impression that many even noticed the problematic position he took here.
It's not true that "the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege." The privileges of wealth, race, and sex have always been justified on the basis of innate virtue. If they weren't just naturally superior (so goes the claim), the rich, the male, the white wouldn't be on top of the heap; but a look at the Bushes, the Trumps, the Kennedys, the Buckleys, and other American elites should be enough to show that money buys the mediocre and even the inferior a lot of influence and power. Charles Murray isn't the first social scientist to try to justify those social hierarchies on the basis of biology, and he won't be the last. Many have toiled in that vineyard, and though their fruits have been discredited many times over the past century, there's never a shortage of money to keep them toiling, nor of sensitive journalists who will promote their claims.
I think that even fewer leftists would agree with Frederik DeBoer, who wrote in 2017 a tortured defense of biological stratification. Soon after posting it, he deleted it and almost all of his online writing up to that point, so I'll draw here on the extensive quotations I used in my discussion.
To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?
I've been trying to find some quotations I remember from Charles Murray that looked very similar to this; no luck. Murray admits that racism and sexism are real and deplorable, but they are receding, so differences in status and wealth will increasingly be due solely to innate and immutable differences in ability. The result will be a 'natural' stratification in society as genetically superior marry and live among their own kind. It's all rather sad, but some are destined to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and presumably to live in squalor. Being enlightened scientists, we don't blame them, but we can't pretend that they are as good as we are.
This is, of course, the traditional defense of racial and other hierarchies. DeBoer was aware that the optics of his position were unfortunate, and he hastily denied that he had any such position in mind, However:
The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,
All this may or may not be true. But first, it's evasive. While DeBoer strenuously distanced himself from racist or sexist or even classist interpretations of his "case," he seemed to be assuming that low-performing students pop up at random in any population. How is society to know which kids should be encouraged, and which kids left to their own devices? He didn't say. Later in this article DeBoer acknowledged that our "metrics" for academic talent are inadequate; he went on hiatus soon after he posted it, but he has returned, and has published a couple of books which apparently (judging from their Amazon listings and reviews) extend his position. Maybe I'll get to them, maybe I won't.
A few years later I began reading the English novelist Miss Read, whose stories are set in a rural English village and narrated by a kindly but conservative English schoolmarm. I think Miss Read would have agreed with DeBoer. She's on the alert for the talented few who can be prepped for advancement to grammar school, but is content to teach most of her pupils no more than the three R's, because they just aren't capable of any more than that. If she were right, England should have remained a rural backwater, populated by barely literate farmers and shopkeepers and the schoolmarms who stuffed the ABCs into their reluctant brains.
But she was wrong. Most of the kids I went to school with in the 1950s and 1960s, in a semi-rural Indiana town, looked to me like Miss Read's pupils looked to her. But many or most of them went on to community college and beyond, learned accounting and computer and other skills, which if not intellectual are certainly academic. What Miss Read and Frederik DeBoer don't seem to realize is that although you can map "achievement" on a graph and individuals may stay much the same relative to each other, the average goes up. The mediocrities of today know a lot more than the mediocrities of a century ago.
Another related example: When the first digital computers were developed, they were programmed by women - women who essentially created the field of programming. What they did was considered easy, albeit drudgework that men shouldn't have to bother themselves by doing. But eventually men moved into the field and women were driven out. At that point programming came to be regarded as a very difficult, advanced intellectual task beyond the ability of women, something only men were capable of, and women fought their way back into the field with great difficulty against that assumption. It wasn't the task that changed, or the academic abilities needed to carry it out. For details, see Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).
There's also the little matter that some more intellectual subjects, like reading, writing, history, and others, are taught systematically so as to bore most students. I say "systematically" because I don't know that anyone sat down and planned it that way, but the results are consistent. When students are taught with better methods, they learn a lot more, and they learn it eagerly and with interest. Whether DeBoer would consider that "plasticity," I don't know. Nor does it matter.
What matters here is that though DeBoer considers himself a leftist, he basically agrees with the educationally conservative (though condescendingly liberal, in a sense) Miss Read and the right-wing Charles Murray. Murray's position, however much liberals may deplore it, is in reality one that they hold themselves in many cases. That's why they react to the mere mention of his name with fury: it's easier than informing themselves and thinking about it.
Individual differences, however "profound," are not a problem. Society needs differences. If everybody were Einstein, there'd be no one to do everything that an Einstein doesn't, won't, or can't do. Schooling should be oriented, not to finding the few who can tolerate boredom enough to learn intellectual skills, but to finding out what each student can do and helping them to learn to do it. I cheerfully concede that there would be a lot of opposition to doing that, but it's not the result of individual differences. I also think that DeBoer, Hayes, Miss Read, and their ilk exaggerate the difficulty of most of what must be learned. The "metrics" we have can't tell us in advance what a child is capable of, though that's the holy grail of certain researchers (and mocked by Michael Young in his satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy). Such people are not the friends of human potential, but its opponents, and they can be found all over the political spectrum.
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