[This is a book review of Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America. Contains spoilers for The Bell Curve, Facing Reality, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Fountainhead, and The Unholy Consult.]
I.
For those of you who are coming to this book fresh from reading The Bell Curve, I have some sorry, sorry news. I know just how much you were looking forward to all the new regression graphs you were sure Murray would include. After all, for what other reason did any of us read The Bell Curve in the first place? Our expectations were high. But – brace yourselves for this, friends – in Murray’s new book, there are none! Alas! No regression graphs! Oh the horror! The disappointment! The despair! Charles Murray, how can you let us down like this?
But wipe your tears, friends. We will just have to take consolation and make do with that lesser substitute – charts and tables. Luckily, the table-density in Facing Reality approaches the regression-density in The Bell Curve, so readers will not be starved of those sweet, sweet numbers they all so crave. If Murray’s editor had balked at the subtitle Two Truths About Race In America, he might just as accurately have gone with the title Facing Reality: Charts, and How I Made Them. (Honestly, I always thought a better title to Murray and Herrnstein’s 1994 book would have been: The Bell Curve: Did We Put In Enough Regression Graphs For You? It would have been a rhetorical question, because everyone knows there can be no such thing as “enough” regression graphs.)
II.
But let us set aside talk of tables now and descend to the discussion of mere words, which unfortunately much of the book is still made of, despite our dear author’s best efforts to increase the chart concentration.
Murray has made a rather unusual choice in his nomenclature. For most of the book, he has set aside the words commonly used in the US to refer to racial categories: “black”, “white”, etc. Instead, he has chosen to use words that he says refer to the geographic origin of each racial population’s genetics. (Interestingly, this is one of the only times he falls back on genetics, as I’ll get to later.) This choice leaves a few of the racial categorizations unchanged or mostly unchanged, and a few looking very bizarre indeed. His mappings are these: whites -> Europeans, latinos and latinas -> Latins, blacks -> Africans, and asians -> Asians.
His argument for doing this is that the original words “get in the way of dispassion.” Certainly, discussions involving the words “black”, “white”, and “IQ” in the same sentence generally involve as much passion as anyone could ever want. But one wonders whether it’s the nomenclature that’s the problem, or just the concepts themselves that invariably ignite passionate ire. In fact, even just talking about any of these concepts alone, IQ or race of any sort, is generally not a dispassionate exercise.
But the terms Murray chooses are not just unusual. They are bizarre and confusing – perhaps strategically so. After all, I image Murray sitting in his office tapping his pen and thinking, confused people are generally too busy frowning in confusion to develop any real momentum along the righteous anger axis. In fact, the poor suckers might even read the whole book before they figure out what I’m talking about. Now that’s what I would call victory!
In fact, Murray admits his word-choice sounds unnatural even to himself:
While writing those four chapters, I was often tempted to revert to the usual labels entirely. I suspect that many of you will often (or always) wish I had done so.
But he exhorts the reader to understand, explaining:
But every time I wished I could write simply Whites or Blacks, and then asked myself what would happen if I did, the answer was that Whites or Blacks would let the semantic baggage associated with those labels affect the interpretation of the sentence.
I would suggest that a slightly alternate, unspoken explanation might be closer to the truth:
But every time I wished I could write simply Whites or Blacks, and then asked myself what would happen if I did, the answer was that someone would quote me out of context on Twitter.
It would not surprise me at all to learn that he sat there in front of his computer doing find-replace in Word, until he came up with alternate nomenclature that made it impossible to select out any damning excerpt under 280 characters.
To be fair, though, Murray’s geographical-origin race-terms don’t sound nearly as bizarre as, say, Ann Leckie’s using the pronoun “she” to refer to people of either gender.
No, what I have a problem with isn’t the nomenclature he makes up himself. It’s what he borrows from other writers – and worse, other ideologies. This is the same trap so many other conservative writers fall into. They think they can use the language of the enemy as their own, to their own benefit.
Now, there is a school of thought that goes: “Well, my enemy may use this phrase to refer to their ideas, but if I start using it to refer to my ideas, then I can steal their terminology and prove my ideas dominant over theirs!” Unfortunately, this is a doomed strategy. Unless your group is substantially larger than your enemy’s group, you’re not going to manage to snatch away coinages they’ve already claimed. What will happen, though, is that their ideas will corrupt your own thoughts and ideology through your usage of them. If you wash your clothes in their water, then don’t be surprised when your clothes start to reek of the same stench.
Now, I don’t mean to say there are no cases when you can safely and reasonably use your enemy’s terminology. You can use it in quotes. You can use it when you’re explaining the enemy’s ideas from the enemy’s perspective. You can use it in order to mock it. And obviously, I don’t mean that every word an enemy uses must go on the do-not-use list. Hitler used both the words “kittens” and “eugenics” (well, in German with a thick Austrian accent, but you get the point), but only one of those has become verboten in modern usage.
But don’t copy the enemy’s way of talking when you’re describing your own ideas! First of all, you’ll just reinforce the perception that their modes of thought are universal and correct. But more importantly, you’ll introduce elements of their thinking into your own, corrupting your own thought process.
Consider how unseemly it would be if fundamentalist Christians started adopting Dawkin’s original version of the word “meme”. That is, if they started using “meme” to refer to an idea that competes against other ideas in a culture, so that the selection pressures over time cause it to “evolve”. (Of course, this is not to say they can’t use “meme” to mean a funny comic on the internet, which is perfectly acceptable usage for anyone who hates Dawkins, and which I endorse fully.) If you’re going to oppose an ideology’s ideas, oppose its coinages as well. Otherwise, it will seem like you are personally accepting parts of the enemy argument, and the enemy ideology will become all the more powerful for it.
And so we come upon the unwitting Charles Murray using the word “toxic” in a way he really ought to know better than to do:
My view is that this position has proved to be toxic.
Murray is using “toxic” here in a metaphorical sense, to describe affirmative action as something that tends to have negative effects on whatever it touches, as if it “poisons” them. Is this correct as far as the meaning Murray is trying to get across to the reader? Yes. But there are deeper aspects of language to consider. Such as, that he’s using this metaphor the same way feminists popularized it for discussing “toxic masculinity”. And this aspect of feminism is just another form of identity politics, an ideology which Murray wrote much of this very book to argue against. So yes, while the metaphor conveys his intended meaning, no, he still should not be using it. His enemy’s redefinition of the word “toxic” is itself “toxic”, and by using it he has made himself an unwitting carrier for some portion of their ideas.
The more you start to talk like someone, the more you start to think like them, as speech and thought come from the same root. And the more you think like someone, the more you will begin to agree with them. Language is like a virus – once you catch it from someone else, the same symptoms will start to develop, and devolve into the same terminal outcomes.
I’m not saying you can’t use any word or metaphor already claimed by someone else. But there is such a thing as taste! If you must copy, copy someone who you already think like, or someone you wish you could think like, or at least someone you tend to agree with. Leaving your formal patterns of thought and speech to fall where social pressures take them is a mistake. Without some degree of conscious effort to exorcise enemy modes of speech and thought, the zeitgeist will just osmosis its way across your blood-brain barrier and take up residence in your grey, and with the eviction moratorium in place right now, who knows when you’ll ever get it out again.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think half of the conservatives aping the liberals’ terminology were CIA agents who had infiltrated the right wing to slowly and subtly turn it liberal, like something out of Fountainhead. But I suppose intellectual carelessness is just as parsimonious an explanation.
But I digress – and I shouldn’t, not when there still remains rhetorical bizarreness in Murray that still needs to be pointed out!
Such as this lovely simile:
The new ideologues of the far left are akin to the Red Guards of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and they are coming for all of us.
Ah, yes. The old “they are coming for all of us” appeal to logic and reason. Not sinister and alarmist at all, that. (Though that’s not to say it’s not understandable, considering some of Murray’s recent experiences getting “cancelled”.)
His editor apparently had the same reservations about the sentence as I did, since you can just hear Murray’s rebuttal to the editorial comments in the next sentence:
The comparison is not overblown – not when students demand that an art professor at Skidmore be fired…
(“It’s not overblown! Really, it’s not! And no, I’m not taking the sentence out! You’re not my mom, and you can’t make me!”)
Friend, when the executions start, then I’ll grant you it’s not overblown. Though I suppose by then it’ll be far too late for it to matter what I grant you or not. But I’m not too concerned. Americans are not in general an execute-y sort of people. Even during the Revolution, I believe there were only a few people tarred-and-feathered, not the outright cutting-off-of-heads business most communist revolutions had. Either starting a democracy takes a smaller blood sacrifice, or our founding fathers managed to collect enough red juice from the war with the British to satisfy the Elder Gods’ thirst for platelets without resorting to additional measures.
III.
That everyone has an equal right to not have their head cut off (at least not without due process) is just one of the many great aspects of America that Murray catalogues:
Europeans who looked with hope to America in the nineteenth century grasped a simpler meaning: In America, they would be the equals of anyone else – equal before the law and possessing the same inherent human dignity as anyone else. In America, they would be judged on who they were as individuals, not by what social class they came from or how they worshipped God.
This, according to Murray, is at the core of the “American Creed”, and what he believes makes the US unique:
The creed was what made America America.
Does the creed include compulsively quoting the Declaration of Independence? This seems to have become the universal “Made in America” stamp of books and films, perfect for anything from a Nicolas Cage movie to a brief description of some charts relating race and IQ. Murray’s obligatory homage is right on the first page of chapter one:
The creed’s origin is the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights….”
His claims of the US’s uniqueness and greatness are perhaps the least data-supported section of the book. No charts needed to prove that, no sir. His adoring praise of the American founding ideals will be familiar to anyone who attended a US public grade school (at least anyone reading this in 2021 for whom that statement is true in the past tense – I can’t speak to the experiences of future generations considering the recent push for more CRT teaching in schools). I suppose Murray trusts his readers’ own indoctrination to speak for itself – a trust that he of all people ought to know is becoming more and more misplaced with the advance of identity politics and their concomitant anti-American themes.
To be honest, taking for granted his readers’ belief in traditional American values doesn’t seem like a good strategy for Murray to convince modern liberals or progressives to his side, as he claims to be attempting. But maybe all that is just posturing. Perhaps at this point Murray has given up even pretending that anyone liberal might read his book, and decided to write straight to the center right while framing himself as a moderate.
But will even this easier audience buy what he is selling? After all, is the US truly so unique as he claims?
The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct. America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible – a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy.
I’ll grant him that historically speaking democracy is unusual, when by “historically” you mean “taking into consideration the last two-thousand years”. I’ll even allow that relatively speaking, the US has an unusually good democracy. Consider, though, that the other democracies the US is being compared to here include countries mainly controlled by cartels and gangs, countries where rule of law is superseded by a set of oligarchs-by-any-other-name, and Sweden.
In Murray’s account, humans everywhere ran their politics based on preferences for their own group over others, until the US and the US alone up and decided to break with world tradition and treat everyone as individuals with equal rights under the law. To be honest, friends, I have my doubts about this. One of these doubts is that Murray’s argument is based on an evolutionary just-so story:
Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart. The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status, or power.
Is this story plausible? Sure. But proven? No more than any other amongst a whole academic field of similar semi-plausible accounts of the evolution of human social characteristics.
And his claim that the US alone broke with evolution’s strictures is just as unlikely:
That view of power is the defining characteristic of the natural form of government that humankind endured until the miracle at Philadelphia in 1787.
He does know some of the Greek city-states were democracies, right? And a “miracle”? Really? Who again does he think is reading this? Has he given up on the moderate right altogether and aimed straight for Christian fundamentalists?
If there’s anything we can call the US truly unique in, it can only be military buildup. But the US’s historical supremacy here is mostly due to advances in technology, and even that hasn’t made the US uniquely peaceful, as Murray openly admits.
Which brings me to Murray’s next bit of alarmism, which puts even the Cultural Revolution comparison from before to shame. Consider friends: 2021 is the new 1860. We are on the brink of…Civil War II. That is, if you trust Murray:
When I first encountered arguments that we might be living through the last half of the 1850s all over again, I dismissed them as farfetched. But… we don’t know how the present crisis is going to turn out. I am now slower to assume that we will avoid catastrophe. I’m gloomier about just how awful things might get very quickly.
But does even Murray believe his own dire warnings here? I mean, he lives in the US, right? How many people does he know just itching to go out and fight another war on US soil? I just don’t think Americans have the stomach these days for killing each other en masse over politics. After all, what are Americans bothering to arm terrorists for, if they could just as comfortably go shoot each other themselves?
I think most of Murray’s readership also realizes the unlikelihood of this outcome. However, in order to make his work appear important, Murray has to argue that there are real and severe consequences that would result if the problems his book discusses aren’t solved. But sometimes there just aren’t such consequences. Sometimes a problem unsolved just keeps on being a problem in perpetuity. I mean, look at Carlyle’s Shooting Niagara, where he predicts imminent disaster if England doesn’t immediately engage in wide-scale political reform. It’s been 150 years since then, and what is England’s status? Problems still unsolved, country still running.
So no, I don’t think even Murray is truly expecting Civil War II. Though I am open to changing my mind about Murray’s personal beliefs if someone can find me evidence of the number of firearms he owns.
IV.
Does Murray actually believe all the fluff he wrote about American greatness and exceptionalism? Normally, I would expect someone who’s been around as long as he has to be a bit more cynical about these things. I suppose the rah-rah-America bits could be an attempt to appeal to a moderate right audience. And yet, I think if I had written a book including such blatant propaganda, left-wing or right, I would have died before publication of the sheer embarrassment.
His alarmism, on the other hand, I am reasonably sure is more a pretense to convince readers that his book actually matters and is important, than something he actually believes seriously. If he were truly afraid CRT-minions would execute him tomorrow, he would already have fled the country.
But what does he believe about his primary topic – not race, but g itself?
A lot of the book talks about g, which Murray mostly calls IQ here, presumably since he’s writing to a lay audience. (After all, people new to the field might find the practice of calling intelligence “g” confusing, very unlike the completely unconfusing practice of calling races by their geographic origins.) IQ, or g, according to Murray, is the key at the heart of all the racial heartache troubling the US. But before diving headlong into agreement, perhaps consider for a moment and recall what Murray’s research specialty is. After all, when all you have is a socket-wrench, everything’s shaped like a hexagon.
But what g precisely does he believe in? Friends, I have to admit I may have made a mistake in one of my former posts. I assumed that just because Murray had measured correlations between g and all sorts of life outcomes and general competence, that meant he believed in an holistic g. But then in Facing Reality he goes and makes comments like this:
If you have reasonable interpersonal skills to go with your cognitive ability, you will be avidly courted by employers.
Unless he is just playing to his audience here, this implies he doesn’t group social abilities in with g. Or conscientiousness, as he explains in other parts of the chapter. Really, his g isn’t particularly holistic at all. (So “cognitive ability” just happens to be correlated with all these other things? Hmmm.)
This brings up another question I feel is inadequately addressed, which is – does g exist?
The place called Charles Murray takes this as an unspoken assumption. But again, a researcher generally has a bit of bias when it comes to judging the existence of his primary topic of research, the central aspect of his livelihood. It takes nothing short of Dûnyain-level persuasion to convince a person of the falseness of an assumption so central to their entire belief system, and even for Kellhus it’s a challenge.
But we ourselves, or at least those among us who aren’t IQ researchers, can still stand outside the circle and ask: is g real in any true sense? Or is it just the presence of a correlation between certain other measurable traits? Or else just an extra label that people assign out of convenience but conveys no actual additional information? Or could what people think they are measuring as g just result from some other underlying factor, and this factor is what is actually influencing all the other traits g allegedly explains?
I admit that all through reading The Bell Curve I thought the authors were talking about g as something genetic and inborn. In fact though, when I look back, I believe they never actually say that outright. Murray only claims in both his books that g is something hard to change, and demonstrates this through evidence such as that about schooling. But there are other things than genetics that are hard to change – for example, culture. None of the evidence Murray gives disproves Thomas Sowell’s hypothesis in Black Rednecks and White Liberals that the disparities between blacks and whites that are observed in the US are all just due to historically-propagated cultural differences.
According to this theory, g isn’t innate. It’s the consequence of a learned culture. This could explain certain other anomalies, like why it can change for young children. IQ measurements won’t work until a person is older, as Murray mentions tangentially while talking about his methods of data selection for one or the other of his innumerable tables. But why? Could it be because it takes that long for a person to learn the culture that actually determines their “IQ”? This topic, however, Murray declines to go into:
Race differences in cognitive ability increase significantly from infancy to childhood to adulthood for reasons that are disputed but aren’t relevant to this book.
The reasons “aren’t relevant”? Are you sure?
But if g is just some conceptual correlation, or a result of a separate underlying factor, where does that leave Murray’s argument?
Our dear author clearly seems to believe it leaves it right where we left it, judging from his confidence in his conclusions despite his admitted uncertainty as to g’s true cause. But perhaps this is reasonable, considering the answer doesn’t really affect the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the two “partial solutions” he gives to the problem.
These are, to eliminate racial preferences and identity politics. He says he thinks the latter is realistic to expect of people, and the former not. I imagine he thinks if people make a start on the latter, they’ll come around to the former eventually.
If he’s correct, perhaps waiting-it-out really would fix the problem eventually. If g isn’t genetic, people need simply wait for the cultures to merge, and the racial IQ gap just disappears. Alternatively, if it is genetic, then people must wait for the genetics to converge, which could take a few more generations than for culture. But in the end, once the population becomes homogeneous, the result is the same.
Nevertheless, his solution is unworkable. The dominant culture of maintaining distinct racial identities cannot be changed by a bunch of people reading a book by a cancelled researcher and deciding to stop believing in identity politics. It cannot, because people do not choose their politics – not based on books, not based on logic, and not based on anything else either. No – people’s politics are chosen for them, if mostly invisibly.
People get their politics either from their parents if they’re lucky, or else from the zeitgeist, which like a dispersed Dûnyain spirit pervades everything people read and watch. They absorb the culture through the assumptions of the media they view, and their own assumptions morph to match. Choosing to believe in the zeitgeist is like choosing to worship the circumfix – i.e., for most, not a choice at all.
This is inevitable in a society ruled by demons that control their human populations through the media. There is no such thing as a grass-roots movement, only other demons attempting desperately to carve out their own ground before the more powerful ones come along to stomp them back down. Since one book, no matter how persuasive, does not make up all or even a significant fraction of the modern media, Murray’s strategy is doomed to fail unless he can build enough of a following to overcome the momentum of the dominant culture. His try isn’t bad, but at the end of the day, he’s just not demonic enough to gather the sort of following he would need to change the entire cultural direction of the US.
Now I’m starting to hope he has those guns. In a world that has firearms, a sword’s just not going to cut it if he hopes to earn himself enough swazond in Civil War II to make himself a real demon.
V.
At the very least, Murray is clearly never going to be a Dûnyain. Does he really think he’s going to convince anyone to his side with a book expounding facts and data? Even Achamian knew enough to try to turn the masses against Kellhus by writing a book describing juicy adultery scandals, not listing the population statistics of the New Empire. Yet Murray seems so optimistic. Is this just pretense, like his alarmism? Or does some deeper aspect of his perspective predispose him toward this faith?
At the beginning, he quotes a famous line by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
Murray’s argument being, of course, that he has data, the data proves his facts, the facts support his hypothesis, and that therefore people must believe him.
But Moynihan’s quote, while clever, is also misleading and self-contradictory. Why? But what is a “fact”, friend? How can you ever be sure of the truth of something? You can’t. So what you mean by “fact” isn’t an “unchangeable, utterly certain truth” but something closer to “a very good guess I think it is unlikely I will change anytime soon”. But how did you decide that the guess was good? How did you determine your criteria for what constitutes a “fact” and what doesn’t?
Here, I think the rationalists have the right of it. People intuitively use Bayes’, guessing based on probability and priors what is more likely and what is less. You need more evidence before you consider more unlikely-seeming claims to be “fact”, and less evidence for claims your prior beliefs already suggest are likely to be true. How much evidence you need, or how likely any given thing is to be true, depends on your priors – that is, what you already believe the world looks like. Your priors in turn depend on your worldview. And what is that, but the ground you stand on?
Now friends, I don’t believe anyone is entitled to anything, not even the “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence. But if there ever were something a person could truly call their own, it would be their ground. Every human soul is inherently capable of standing on its own ground, until it chooses or is tricked into stepping off.
And what your ground is determines what your worldview is, which determines what your priors are, which determines what your facts are. So contrary to Moynihan’s claim, there is actually nothing anyone is more entitled to than “their own facts”.
Thus, Murray is entitled to believe the premise of his book – but he believes it based off his own worldview, whether he realizes it or not. He has made assumptions invisible to himself – about the reliability of science, the nature of g, the character of the US government, and so forth. There is a head on a pole behind him. (But is it an African, European, Latin, or Asian head? Now there’s the real question.)
Is his position a reasonable one to take? Sure. Was it fair for him to have been cancelled? No. Is his work valuable? As much as anything that comes out of the social sciences, I suppose.
But is it necessary to face his reality? Only if you seek to live in his world. Only if you seek to stand on his ground.
Literal Explanation Required 