You'd think Andrew Sullivan would have learned better than to revisit his decades-long support for race-based theories of the distribution of IQ in human populations. Well, you'd be wrong. Last week he took yet another kick at that putrid can:
The Study Of Intelligence
It's been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism. The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen:...
The right response to unsettling data is to probe, experiment and attempt to disprove them - not to run away in racial panic. But the deeper problem is that the racial aspects of IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence, and how best to encourage, study and understand it.
His former colleague at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, responds with what seems to me great weariness and great restraint:
Andrew asserts that "pc egalitarianism" is strangling research into IQ. To buttress this observation he points to a piece in Alternet that basically asserts the same. The piece contains no numbers to back up the claim, and quotes only one scientist to evidence this scourge of manners....
The contention, for instance, that "research is not about helping people; it's about finding out stuff," may well be true in some limited sense. But it's never been true, in any sense, of race and intelligence. In the 19th century helping out white people (however that is defined) was very much the point of intelligence research. Into the early 20th century, the rise of eugenics was equally linked the field to the advancement of "people." Even the intelligence theorists whom Andrew, himself, has advanced over the years are motivated by a desire to presumably help people, if only in the form of deciding how a society should expend its limited resources.
Advocates of the "p.c. egalitarianism" theory, such as Andrew, evidently believe that the notion that black people are dumber than whites is a cutting edge theory, as opposed to a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists. They present themselves as bold-truth tellers who will not bow to "liberal creationists." In fact they are espousing firmly established views that date back to the very founding of this country. These views did not emerge after decades of failure of social policy. Indeed they picked up right where their old advocates left off; within five years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Arthur Jensen was convinced that black people were intellectually addled.
Sullivan responds that the notion that he has an "obsession" with the topic of IQ and race is "bizarre." It's simply a topic "worth airing" - again and again over his career as writer and editor, from the time his entire editorial staff at The New Republic threatened to quit when he published excerpts of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve in 1994, until the present day. And no matter how many times he gets utterly slapped down for it, he's determined to bring it up over and over and over again.
As Coates says, with utmost civility and understatement, "Andrew's ahistorical approach to race and intelligence has always amazed." Well, that's one way to put it all right, though I can think of a few others.