Viva la Difference. I just finished reading an article by Charles Murray that dares to delve into the fray of “The Inequality Tabooâ€ÂÂ.
Long and detailed, he explores the implications, or rather the reasons behind the Summers spectacle of women fainting at the mere notion that men may be somehow innately more adept at higher levels of math and science and, God forbid, that it is due to biology and not environment [read: oppression of the patriarchy].
The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.
He doesn’t stop there, he goes into the rarified air of black vs. white intelligence. This is exemplified by the recent attack on Bill Bennett for merely mentioning, in derision by the way, of the correlation between the drop in crime with the rise in black abortion. Just to mention a statistical fact is tantamount to racism, doncha know.
All this is done in a desire to open honest discourse on some difficult topics, something that has been stifled in our effort to not hurt anyone’s sensibilities, all at the price of genuine progress of society. We have women who can’t lift a man from a burning building, and a President who has to chose an under qualified woman to the Supreme Court just to make a quota based on some absurd assumption that since we are all created equal we should have equal representation of all groups in every field of human endeavor.
He concludes:
In university education and in the world of work, overall openness of opportunity has been transformed for the better over the past half-century. But the policies we now have in place are impeding, not facilitating, further progress. Creating double standards for physically demanding jobs so that women can qualify ensures that men in those jobs will never see women as their equals. In universities, affirmative action ensures that the black-white difference in IQ in the population at large is brought onto the campus and made visible to every student. The intentions of their designers notwithstanding, today’s policies are perfectly fashioned to create separation, condescension and resentment–and so they have done.
The world need not be that way. Any university or employer that genuinely applied a single set of standards for hiring, firing, admitting and promoting would find that performance really is distributed indistinguishably across different groups. But getting to that point nationwide will require us to jettison an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making. That will not happen until the conversation has opened up. So let us take one step at a time. Let us stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial and start facing reality.
As shown in the Summers and Bennett kerfuffles, this won’t happen anytime soon since our PC culture is not receding in spite of new studies and the compilation of the state of knowledge. To truly speak truth to power in today’s culture, you must speak the right truth to the right power lest you be labeled a bigot, a racist, a sexist or worse.
