Topic category: Other/General
Charles Murray: I am a Brahmin, Yet Harvard is Treating Me Like an Outcast!
There’s a big misunderstanding about Charles Murray that depicts him as a fearless fighter for truth. He’s anything but.
Murray is a fierce believer in caste privilege. According to him, if one is high caste, it is one’s prerogative to tell the truth, or lie, but one must be taken very seriously in either case. However, if one is low caste, nothing one says about anything must ever be taken seriously.
This is the way academia has been for at least 1,000 years.
Zachary Karabell, a socialist, former Harvard history instructor, is the only established academic I know of, who has written with any degree of honesty on the caste system which rules this most peculiar institution. In What’s College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education, Karabell observes,
“The sensitivity of academics to hierarchy manifests itself in many ways, but if you want to observe one of the most unpleasant demonstrations of academic snobbery, go to a major academic conference and watch how people react to one another. Let’s say a panel delivers three papers to an audience of seventy-five. At the end of the formal presentation, the audience will ask questions. People stand and identify themselves. Those who have ‘respectable’ qualifications will elicit nods of agreement or sighs of disagreement, and others might approach them afterwards to continue the conversation. But if you stand up and say that you are from No-Name Community College, and even worse, if you say you are an adjunct, eyes glaze over. The sensation is palpable and familiar to anyone who’s attended these events.”
The problem for Murray is not that today’s antiversity no longer respects the truth, but that it has canceled his caste card.
Murray’s masterpiece was The Bell Curve (1994), which he co-authored with Richard Herrnstein. In IQ in the Meritocracy (1968), Herrnstein concluded that I.Q. was 81% genetically determined. In The Bell Curve, however, Herrnstein and Murray maintained that IQ was 40-60% genetically determined.
Had researchers come to a radically different conclusion since 1968? Not at all. In a 2014 American Enterprise Institute (the organization which funded the book, and for whose wonderful, since-defunct magazine I used to write book reviews) presentation—see the link to the video below—not only did Murray confess to having lied about the heritability of IQ in The Bell Curve, he downright bragged about it!
A lot of good it did him! The racial socialist media/antiversity world responded to The Bell Curve by turning Murray into a pariah (Herrnstein had unfortunately died of cancer on the eve of the book’s publication).
But Murray desperately wanted back into that world’s good graces. And so he screwed White, working-class men in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (see “Charles Murray, RIP,” below).
It worked like a charm. Doesn’t it always?
I criticized Murray at the time, and thereafter, before I had experienced the pleasure of his company (see links to October 7, 2016 and March 31, 2018) shortly before the 2016 election.
I was having a conversation with a lovely, polite lady named Amy Wax, when a boor sitting a few feet away forced his way into it, with a lie.
I was talking about how urban police departments had been lying about crime stats since the early 1990s. Wax was not expecting my arguments at all, because she’d never heard them. I argued that “broken windows policing” had been an abject failure, and the fakestats were necessary to hide that fact. I referred to contradictions in James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s program for broken windows policing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982. At one point, Wilson argued that such policing policies would reduce crime; much later, he switched to claiming that the policies would make people safer, without ever explaining the contradiction between the two positions.
Murray interrupted, denying that there was any contradiction.
(I have for several years considered myself the successor to James Q. Wilson as a student of crime and policing. However, to a Brahmin like Murray and his fans, such a notion would be laughable.
Years later, I would learn that Murray and Wilson, in addition to being caste equals, were also friends.)
During the mini-conference, which began momentarily, Murray declared that he agreed with candidate Donald Trump’s position on low-skilled immigration but then, in a complete non sequitur, announced that he would never vote for Trump, due to the candidate’s inferior “temperament.” I pointed out his contradictions in the Q&A which followed, and which you can see in “Outer Boroughs Affect” (see link below).
Given what I know about Charles Murray, I don’t see that he has any basis for his complaints about academia.
If, conversely, he believed in meritocracy and truth, that would be another matter altogether.
“Charles Murray, RIP” (April 3, 2015).
“Amy Wax KOs Penn Law” (March 31, 2018).
Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored
Biography - Nicholas Stix
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.