In a very sympathetic review of Herrstein and Murray in Forbes (10/24/94), Peter Brimelow reads their book as a four-pronged critique of social policy: 1. a critique of the welfare system as it subsidizes birth among low IQ women 2. a critique of federal educational programs in that they overinvest in the poor (without sufficient return) and underspend on the gifted. They propose a national scholarship program, based solely on merit. And they are obviously against headstart programmes. 3. adoption--to make adoption across racial lines easier, though this is not an admission of the power of environment--the adopted children still underperform their adoptive families, Herrnstein and Murray remind us 4. destroy affirmative action especially at elite universities. I suppose, we don't want the future Paretian elites miscegenating with lesser-breeds. By the way, this is how critics are treated in the business press: "Scientific popularizers (!) like Leon Kamin and Stephen Jay Gould were able to proclaim not merely that intelligence was 100% determined by environment and a meaningless concept anyway but that any argument to the contrary was racist." It seems that, as ever, "to work for reasonableness to prevail is to work for the victory of that class interest which is served by reasonableness." (Maurice Cornforth in his critique of Popper's Open Society, p. 386) Along with Gould's work, I have found the following works helpful: James Lawler's IQ, Heritablity, and Racism;Alan Gilbert's chapter "Democracy and Status" in his Democratic Individuality; Richard Lewontin's Not In Our Genes; Allan Chase's The Legacy of Malthus, Bernard Semmel's Imperialism and Social Reform; Wolfgang Wippermann's The Racial State: Germany, 1939-1945 and Troy Duster's Backdoor to Eugenics. In his fantastic chapter on Comte, Irving Zeitlin's Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory revealed to me that Murray and Herrstein are as old as counter-revolution itself. In the early 70's Herrstein critiqued the idea of equality that was implicit in both Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Marx's Communist Manifesto. From critical praise in footnotes, it seems that Greta Jones' book on the imbrication of biological thought with social darwinism may be quite good. Another massive work which I have been skimming is John Soloway's Demography and Degeneration--which is a critical study of (in part)the fears of race suicide in Victorian England. Of course all this scholarship, all of which includes substantial bibiographical references, may just be crass popularization. All in all, Murray's vicious pesimissism about the human condition recalls what Dante saw written over the gateway to hell: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." jb
