People who offer to make the size of their I.Q.s a matter for public comment—for instance, by joining Mensa—must be among the most pathetic of self-promoters. If they had any genuine accomplishments to boast of, it seems to me, they would consider it beneath them to boast of skill in taking a test. Thus the remarkably virulent and unenlightening controversy which greeted the publication of The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, has at least been the occasion of some innocent amusement.1 Just a glance through the letters pages of Newsweek, for example, at all those whose denunciations of the book’s “racism” claim the authority of I.Q.s in the 140s is a real hoot.
Are Murray and Herrnstein vindicated? You be the judge.
Interestingly for connoisseurs of Anglo-American differences in rhetorical style, many of the correspondents of the London Times on this subject chose to brag of their low I.Q.s, sometimes allowing their addresses—Head of Surgery, Guy’s Hospital, as it might be—to provide an illogical (no one has ever said that low I.Q. cannot accompany high achievement) but wittily ironic commentary. But the best fun to be had with the issue on this side of the Atlantic was supplied by The New Republic, which apologized for giving Murray and Herrnstein a forum for their views by calling up an extraordinary parade of critics, all of whom attempted either to
