Race, Iq and Jensen

WEST LOS ANGELES COLLEGE LIBRARY RACE, IQ AND JENSEN JAMES R. FLYNN Professor of Political Studies University of Otago Routledge & Kegan Paul London, Boston and Henley TO NATALIE t First published in 1980 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd 39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD, 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA and Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN Printed and bound in Great Britain by Thomson Litho Ltd, East Kilbride Copyright © James R. Flynn 1980 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Flynn, James Robert Race, IQ and Jensen. 1. Intellect 2. Ethnopsychology I . T i t l e 153.9'2 BF432.A1 80-49972 ISBN 0 7100 0651 9 CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v i 1 THE RACIST AND HIS NEED FOR EVIDENCE 1 2 JENSEN AND HIS CRITICS 25 3 DIRECT EVIDENCE AND INDIRECT 72 4 A PROBLEM FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 115 5 A PROBLEM FOR BLACKS 159 6 CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY 213 APPENDIX A BLACK SOLDIERS AND WHITE SOLDIERS 219 APPENDIX B JENSEN VERSUS SANDRA SCARR 262 NOTES 271 AUTHOR INDEX 303 SUBJECT INDEX 307 v PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book deals with areas in which research and publica tions accumulate swiftly. The reader has a right to know the cut-off date of the author's research: the author stopped reading books on race and IQ, with some pleasure, on 1 January 1980 and published research, with a few ex ceptions, on about the same date. No doubt I have missed something of significance and of course I have not used everything read. As for thanking others for their help, I owe much to many but w ill lim it myself to expressing my gratitude to those whom I bothered the most: Prof. John C. Loehlin, Department of Psychology, University of Texas; Dr G.F. Liddell, Mr J.A. Harraway, and Mr B.F.J. Manly, Department of Mathematics, University of Otago; and Mr F.W. Pernell of the National Archives and Records Service, Suitland, Maryland. Prof. Loehlin read a complete draft of the manuscript and I owe him a particular debt for saving me from a number of mistakes and omissions. Arthur R. Jensen was generous enough to grant me access to material from his own most recent book, 'Bias in Mental Testing', prior to its publication. Both Sandra Scarr and Jensen extended the same courtesy by sending me drafts of material to be included in her forthcoming book, 'IQ: Race, Social Class, and Individual D ifferences'. v i C h a p te r 1 THE RACIST AND HIS NEED FOR EVIDENCE Before we get to Jensen and race and IQ, some philosophy and some history. The racist must choose between two options: that people of a certain colour (say black) or appearance ('looks' Jewish) are to be despised or feared or exploited or reJected simply because o f their colour or appearance; that they merit such treatment because their colour or appearance is correlated with certain personal traits. Philosophical analysis shows that the first option is non-viable; history shows that every racist ideologue of any sophistication has seen this and chosen the second. The second option forces him to assert pro positions which can be falsified by evidence - and th u s engenders a powerful need for evidence he can use in his own d e fe n c e . Philosophers have argued that whenever a man claims to hold a principle or ideal, we can ask him to universalize it. This sounds very profound, but for our purposes we can treat it as meaning no more than that whenever people use words or make Judgments they must do so with logical consistency. This is true not Just when we talk ethics but also of everyday life. If someone picks up a copy of the London 'Times' and says 'the newspaper has come' and then, the next day says 'the cat is on the mat', he had 1 2 Chapter 1 better explain himself. Unless he does, says something like 'the "Times" is so catty in its editorials that I have a special name for i t 1, he pays the price of confus ing whoever hears him. If a man tells his fiancé that he loves steak and then turns up his nose when she cooks it for him, he too had better have an explanation, perhaps that he is feeling ill or is too upset to eat. Then we understand: to like steak one day and not like it the next seemed inconsistent, but now his criteria for liking steak have been elaborated - 'I like it when I am in good health, have not already had it for lunch, it is cooked to my taste, and so forth.' Now that his criteria have been spelled out, his Judgments are at least logically consis tent and we can understand him, which is a prerequisite for deciding whether or not we agree with him. IWhen a racist makes Judgments, we can use logic as a powerful weapon to force him to make his ideals clear. When he says black men deserve to be excluded or kept in their place or exterminated, we can ask him whether this is true simply because they are black. For example, if it were a Nazi talking we might say this: assume that through industrial pollution a chemical got in the water supply which turned the skins of a ll Germans permanently black; would they then deserve to be exploited or exter minated? He can of course answer in the affirmative with complete logical consistency but this merely shows that while logic is important, it is not everything. The reason a Nazi could not answer as above has nothing to do with logic but with the fact that such an answer carries with it an unacceptable price. It is important to be clear about that price. It is not that only a 'fanatic' could bear to imagine the people he admires dying. Our Nazi might well be proud to see 3 Chapter 1 every last German die in the service of his ideals, let us say to avoid being dominated by an 'inferior' race. The real price he would pay i s that of denying the universal experience of mankind, including himself and his fellow Germans, about what is important in relations between human beings, namely, such things as intelligence, charac ter and personal traits. When we interact with people, we do so in terms of whether they are honest or dishonest, generous or miserly, courageous or cowardly, witty o r boring. Our Nazi admires his fellow Germans not simply because they are white but because they are the 'master race', they are (he thinks) more creative, courageous, regal, etc., than the rest of us. In this he is like everyone else: everyone reacts to people in terms of per sonal traits; and to deny that these are relevant to our Judgments about the merits of men, to say that colour un correlated with personal traits is our criterion, is to treat as unimportant what everyone finds to be important in his everyday experience. There is of course no such thing as an absolute price and there are no logical lim its on human psychology. We may someday find a racist who says that colour uncorrela ted with personal traits is his criterion of merit. Let him: his 'ideology' is logically flawless but he has ren dered it completely non-viable. A man who tries to build an ideology on a distaste for colour has put himself in the same position as a book reviewer who tells us that his criterion for Judging books is the colour of the binding. You cannot build an ideology on a brute psychological fact. Booth Tarkington speaks of a Frenchman who went beserk every time he heard the word 'camel'. Interesting psychologically but it does not have much ideological potential. I hope no one thinks I am denying any of the 4 Chapter 1 facts of racist psychology. The racist may well hate people simply because they are black and want to see them go u n d er simply because they a r e black; that i s n o t un usual but quite common among racists. However, this com plex of emotions adds to my thesis rather than the re verse: they virtually impel the racist to claim that blackness is correlated with unlovely personal traits. The more he hates black men the more he finds it impos sible to say, ' I hate them with all my soul, but they are wiser, stronger, more courageous, more generous than we are.' Hatred of colour for its own sake tends to liqui date itself as a criterion of human worth. As a matter of historical record, there has never been a racist ideologue who merely asserted that he hated a particular colour or race. Whether we read Drumont, Gobineau and Treitschke in the nineteenth century, o r Chamberlain, Rosenberg and H itler in the twentieth, their books are full of the connection between race and personal traits. To take H itler as an example, we find that Jews are selfish, filthy, dishonest, cowardly (1) - a l s o greedy, heartless, and unscrupulous. (2) They tend to be bow-legged and have a distinctive body odour repugnant to Gentiles, although they often conceal this with per fumes. (3) They take a special delight in raping Gentile girls so as to defile the race.

Load more