Brooks, apparently feeling he has not discredited himself enough, tries again

When the New York Times took its op-ed page off the free Web a couple of years ago, the consensus among conservatives was that the Times had done this in order to avoid the repeated embarrassment created by the wide exposure of its columnists’ lame-brained ideas to ever-alert conservatives bloggers.

Whether or not that was the Times’ motive, the premise has been proved correct. The Times’ op-ed columns have just been made available on the Web again, and its star “conservative” columnist David Brooks has just made a royal ass of himself, in a column devoted to the subject of IQ. Denying in the usual liberal manner that IQ means much of anything, he describes IQ as “a black box. It measures something, but it’s not clear what it is or whether it’s good at predicting how people will do in life.” Evidently Brooks has not read the main and most impressive portion of The Bell Curve, in which, using the data compiled in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein established the numerous ways that IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes ranging from income to accident proneness.

In Brooks’s precious treatment, IQ is some vague, poetical thing, with no clear definition possible:

[J]udging intelligence is less like measuring horsepower in an engine and more like watching ballet. Speed and strength are part of intelligence, and these things can be measured numerically, but the essence of the activity is found in the rhythm and grace and personality—traits that are the products of an idiosyncratic blend of emotions, experiences, motivations and inheritances.

What nonsense. Of course there are innumerable subjective, subtle, and non-scientifically measurable differences in the way different people’s minds work. But that’s not what IQ is about. IQ is about the ability to perform certain tasks, specifically, the ability to process information. This ability can be measured, it is largely consistent in an individual over the course of his life time, and it has measurable consequences in, for example, the kinds of work people can do. Persons with an IQ of 115 or less do not have the intellectual ability to be mathematicians, surgeons, or academic historians, no matter how much rhythm and grace and personality they may exhibit; and of a population with an average IQ of 85 with a standard deviation of 15, only 2.3 percent will have an IQ over 115, compared to 16 percent of a population with an average IQ of 100. The example I’ve just given was not chosen at random. Let us recognize that all Brook’s verbal dancing, his turning IQ into a banquet of indefinable essences, is motivated by one thing and one thing only: his need to deny the black-white IQ gap.

This may be the worst column Brooks has written since his endorsement of homosexual marriage a few years ago, where he adopted a blatantly fake, “spiritual” mood never before seen in his writing. He’s doing something similar here. What an insufferable intellectual prostitute.

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There are so many false statements in the Brooks column you’d have to go through the piece one sentence at a time exposing them. But one that stands out is his laughable notion that up to this point, IQ has been the accepted, established explanation for human differences (!), but now new research is throwing that established view into question. Thus the article’s audaciously Orwellian title, “The waning of IQ.” Steve Sailer, laying the irony on thick, agrees with Brooks’s fictional assertion that we’ve been living under an unquestioned, intellectually sterile IQ establishment until Brooks came along. After all, Sailer asks, “how many dozens of articles about IQ and the Wealth of Nations can The Economist run in one decade?”

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Ben W. writes:

I just finished reading the thread “Brooks, apparently feeling he has not discredited himself enough, tries again” at VFR. Yesterday I sent you an article about the “software gap” between males and females and my exasperation with those who feel the need to “close the gap.”

I’ve come to a point in my life at which I no longer care to see gaps “closed” and problem behavior “solved.” The Jena 6 and the Michael Vick case in Atlanta point out to me that blacks will be what it is that they are (no need to detail how they behave in general). No amount of social engineering will change their being and their ethics (segregation, integration, whatever environment is current and whatever continent they are on).

Similarly, males will always excel and be better at certain things than females, no amount of social tinkering will change that fact.

Brooks may kid himself about what IQ represents and the liberal media will try its hardest to represent blacks and women in a false (glorifying) light. But empirical reality and statistics speak for themselves.

Fact of the matter is that Caucasian (or is it white?), Graeco-Roman/Christian, male-driven civilization is the apex of the historical hierarchy (and there is a hierarchy—this intellectual space is not flat)—from Beethoven to Handel, Newton to Einstein, Homer and Plato to Shakespeare, etc. Them’s the facts and those who attempt to “close the gap” or “solve the problem of inequality” are wasting our time and resources—they are lying to us.

LA replies:

Would it were the case that they were only wasting our time and resources. In reality, they are denigrating, delegitimizing, and dragging down the society in order to overcome an inequality that they falsely blame on society.

Dennis Mangan writes:

IQ is a scientific field with robust findings to its credit, one in which reputable scientists have done reputable research. Yet non-scientists like Brooks seem to feel the need to display their ignorance, as well as to deny the science of IQ when it suits their political/social needs. No one would ever think of doing this with, say, physics. The study of intelligence is the scientific field which has perhaps the greatest disconnect between what the scientists believe and what the general public, including the media, believe. The “reality-based community” likes to deny reality when it suits them. [LA notes: “Reality-based community”is liberals’ description of themselves as rational people compared to conservatives who supposedly believe things based on faith, authority, and prejudice.]

Sebastian writes:

I read your comments on David Brook’s inane column, as I do most of what you post, with interest, and agree with the gist of your critique. But I have never placed too much weight on IQs in evaluating a society comprehensively for the simple reason that studies show Asians have higher IQs that European whites.

This tells me that whatever IQ exams measure, they leave out something fundamental to the human experience. Unlike Jared Taylor, I have never been impressed with Asian society nor, dare I say, the one-dimensionality of the Asians I have known or worked with. There is some spark, some sense of originality, some, to borrow from Kant’s aesthetics, spontaneity of the mind through judgment that separates Western man from the supposedly brighter Asians.

History and personal experience have taught me that Asians are all but immune to the call of philosophy, aesthetics or political science that have defined the Western experience. The examples of Japanese ship and auto production are legendary. The higher collective IQs found in Japan have produced wonderful replicas of Western innovations (including constitutional government), but little by way of original and independent thought. I have seen what were supposedly brilliant Asian financiers freeze in panic when their models are proved wrong while Italian descendant traders, who would score lower on an IQ exam, improvise their way to impressive gains. My examples could fill a few pages. Where are the great Asian thinkers and artists? You may teach a young Asian to play Beethoven, but God is in the composition, not the it’s memorization. How many Asian readers concern themselves with the subjects discussed on your site?

Since you are on the subject, you may want to read a short column at the back of this month’s The American Conservative (the issue with the Pinkerton essay) on just this very subject of the West’s spontaneous mind. Clearly IQs matter, and Brooks is engaged in the same unscientific apologetics you mention. But there is more to the story than a simple one-to-one correlation between IQs and the collective worth of a society.

I do enjoy your site, whatever my IQ.

LA replies:

I agree with what you’re saying about Western man’s spark, originality, individuality, and innovative qualities as compared with Asians. That is also one of the reasons I oppose Asian mass immigration along with Hispanic, black and Muslim immigration, even though Asians do not present the same sorts of social problems that the other groups do. Despite the fact that they are well-functioning human beings, Asians are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually different from us, and their massive presence and increasing influence among us can only have the effect of suppressing and changing our qualities and “Asianizing” our society. This has nothing to do with disliking anyone or looking down on anyone, but of wanting to preserve the basic characteristics of our society, which continued mass immigration must destroy.

But that does not disprove the reality and importance of IQ. I am surprised that you are not aware of the fact that while Asians—and here we’re mainly talking about northern Asians, though there seem to be plenty of Indians with high IQ—have a higher visual-spatial-mathematical IQ than whites, the white verbal IQ is higher than or at least equal to the verbal IQ of Asians. Moreover, Asian IQ has a smaller standard deviation, meaning that they are more bunched around the mean, while whites extend further toward high intelligence at one hand, and idiocy at the other. Thus, even though the mean IQ of whites and Asians is pretty close, there are more very bright whites than Asians.

Beyond those factors, IQ is not a measure of creativity and no one says it is. No one says that IQ is a complete picture of our mental qualities. IQ measures the ability to process information. This is something real and objective. A person with a low IQ cannot do certain tasks that a person with a higher IQ can. A society with an average IQ of 100 will have a very different level of development from a society with an average IQ of 90. So IQ is real and of fundamental importance in human affairs. But the fact that IQ is real and important does not mean that there are not other mental qualities, not measured by IQ, that are also real and important.

Does this make sense?

A reader writes:

Ben W. writes: “I’ve come to a point in my life at which I no longer care to see gaps “closed” and problem behavior “solved.” The Jena 6 and the Michael Vick case in Atlanta point out to me that blacks will be what it is that they are (no need to detail how they behave in general). No amount of social engineering will change their being and their ethics (segregation, integration, whatever environment is current and whatever continent they are on).”

Actually, before the sexual revolution destroyed the black family, blacks were assimilating towards white norms. Marriage among blacks used to be more common and violence less common. Blacks on average may have less intelligence and may have certain tendencies towards bad behaviour, but its not like the level of disfunction we see now in the black community was inevitable. I too doubt we will ever see the IQ gap closed, but blacks_could_do better in at least some areas, if the rest of society set a better example. Social norms do matter.

LA replies:

I agree and I’ve said the same almost every time I discuss race and intelligence.

N. writes:

Your point about “the kinds of work people can do” is very well taken. One of the crimes liberals have committed against black people is via affirmative action in education, where black students who would earn “A” and “B” grades in a second or third tier institution are pushed into highly competitive places such as Stanford, MIT, etc. where they fail. This is, however, merely a specific instance of the larger blunder that began in the late ’60s (when else?), the idea that “everyone should go to college.” We can see the results as SAT scores continue to decline, despite the fact that analogies were removed some years ago as part of the general dumbing-down of the test. The results are all around us, unhappily; contrast Bakke with the Affirmative Action individual who took his place, way back in the 1970s.

However, the damage has spread far beyond just the black subculture. Some states have even adopted scholarships based on state-run lottery money, ostensibly to help poor-but-bright students in a manner similar to the GI Bill. But what is happening is this: people who would excel in a technical school or community college, becoming good welders or refrigeration techs, or nurses, etc. are sent to State-run colleges where they flunk out in a year or so. Then, at the age of 20 or 21, they get to start their life over again! What fun!

All of this stems from the fundamental error that “IQ doesn’t measure anything,” when in reality the SAT, the ACT and other tests have a clear correlation to success at various levels of schooling. We are creating a generation of frustrated people who aren’t going to be very good at what they do, because we don’t want to tell anyone, “You aren’t up to that task, here are some others you could excel at.”

LA replies:

What is NCLB but the policy incarnation of the belief that all of America is Lake Woebegone, “where all the children are above average”?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 25, 2007 09:02 AM | Send