Some Thoughts on the Genetic Fallacy and the Bell Curve

The title is something of a pun.

There's been a lot of virtual ink spilled of late on Charles Murray's book (with Richard Herrnstein) The Bell Curve, Sam Harris, and Ezra Klein, with contributions along the way by Richard Nisbett, Andrew Sullivan, and others. Of the people contributing points of view, Nisbett and especially Klein (the latter a non-expert, like myself) are closest to my own points of view. However, I don't want to specifically engage the "race-IQ controversy" here so much as comment on Murray's defense of his sources.

As I've commented before, I spent years debating Holocaust deniers, and it's probably unsurprising to most that the concentration of anti-Semites among Holocaust deniers is quite high -- the Venn diagram is essentially a perfect circle. Pointing this fact out to deniers while debating them tended to evoke a few stock responses: "you dirty Jew"; "I am not an anti-Semite, but if I were, here's why I would be"; and "facts can't be anti-Semitic."

I'd like to focus here on this third type of response. On the one hand, there is merit in pointing out that, generally speaking, it is not a fair way to dismiss someone's argument by pointing out that their sources are tainted in some way. Just because someone is an anti-Semite doesn't necessarily mean s/he is lying, with one exception -- when the topic of his/her statement is Jews. When that's the case, the charge of a genetic fallacy falls flat because, as a fallacy of irrelevance, it cannot be deployed when the topic is wholly relevant. I.e., on the topic of Jews, one's feelings about Jews are relevant.

In the same way, one's view of race is relevant when the topic is race; more specifically, if the topic is black people, then one's view of black people and their putative inferiority to whites is also relevant. That said, I don't know what Charles Murray thinks about black people -- I can guess, but it's actually neither here nor there. However, where his sources are concerned, there can be little doubt. Specifically, I want to discuss the Pioneer Fund.

Murray himself responds to concerns about the Pioneer Fund in his Afterword to The Bell Curve (I believe added for the first paperback edition, although I'm not positive), specifically Charles Lane's attack in the New York Review of Books. Murray writes, "Lane also discovered that we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run (he alleged) by men who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority."[1] That Murray felt it necessary to insert the parenthetical comment that he did is suspect at best. It's not really in the realm of debate whether Lane's assessment of the Fund's founders and directors as Nazi sympathizers (some of them), white racial supremacists (many of them), or eugenicists (all of them -- it was the very purpose for the Fund's founding) is true.

He continues on the same page, "Never mind that the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation."[2] This is a strange construction for Murray to use, considering that he's just cast doubt on whether the founders were as bad as Lane characterized them. Obviously, Henry Ford was a gutter anti-Semite -- the point to which Murray makes reference here -- while the Ford Foundation actually pursued civil rights goals in the 1960s and 1970s.

But Murray's comparison ultimately fails for a few reasons. First, the Ford Motor Company, which Ford founded, and the Ford Foundation, which he cofounded with son Edsel, are two separate entities. The Ford Foundation doesn't produce cars. In contrast, the Pioneer Fund is a single entity. More importantly, Murray suggests that there is no comparison between Wickliffe Draper, the Fund's founder, and its directors in 1994. This is a mostly true comparison -- Draper was openly racist and anti-Semitic and a keen admirer of Nazi eugenics; in 1994, the Fund's director was Marion Parrott, a North Carolina lawyer who maintained a low profile (although it's probably worth noting that among his closest political associates was Jesse Helms).

However, Murray's note about the Fund's directors is less important than the work that the Fund supported. Among the recipients of Pioneer Fund money under Draper was Nazi Germany's Office of Racial Policy, specifically for the production of films about Nazi eugenics. Under Parrott, among the Fund's most important beneficiaries was Roger Pearson.

Pearson is important for two reasons. First, he's important because he founded the Northern League in 1958. Have a look at some samples of their work online, such as this piece from their circular lionizing the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. See the ad in the lower left-hand corner? That's an ad for Right magazine, whose publisher was Willis Carto. To say Pearson is a fascist would be a wholly defensible statement.

Second, Pearson is important because he is cited in the Bell Curve. Not only is he cited in the Bell Curve, but in Murray's defense of basing his work on studies published in Mankind Quarterly, he never once mentions that Pearson is the journal's publisher.

The question to ask oneself at this point is not whether Murray is racist. Again, I don't know whether he is or not, although I can hypothesize on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Rather, the question to ask is why he wasn't honest about the Pioneer Fund, Mankind Quarterly, and Roger Pearson when he wrote his Afterword. Someone should ask him.

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[1] Richard J. Hernnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), Ebook, p. A36.

[2] Ibid, pp. A36-A37.