Race and IQ

There was a bit of a fracas a couple of weeks ago when a scholar for the Heritage Foundation, a Harvard PhD named Jason Richwine, was fired resigned from his post when the subject of his doctoral dissertation—the effect of low-IQ immigration on the U.S. economy—became the target of a PC witch hunt. Richwine had just published a related report with the Heritage imprimatur about the high cost of lax immigration policy. Unable to refute the numbers he projected, Richwine’s opponents went into his past and found that he said some very non-diversity supporting things and therefore the sociological data he had amassed must be false. Because we all know that people who believe things counter to the progressive agenda are not just bad people but probably terrible at their jobs as well.

As can be easily gleaned from the opening paragraph, I am sympathetic to the plight of Richwine. I think he got a pretty unfair shake and it is lamentable that people do not really care whether or not what he wrote was true or false, only that it denied a modern shibboleth: the facemelting awesomeness of diversity. As someone who often gleefully denies modern shibboleths, I find myself inclined to agree with Richwine and his supporters.

But as I was running this morning and thinking about what Richwine had researched and the way studies of race and IQ are handled, I realized that my support for such studies ought not to exist. In fact, it probably emanates from a pretty nasty place in my heart. Here is what I mean:

Let’s grant for a moment that the people who publish reports about the intellectual inferiority of certain minority groups are correct in their data-gathering and analysis (and this is granting a lot, see here, here, and here). Say that IQ is innate and not culturally conditioned. Say that we can definitively prove that one race is intellectually superior to another. What then? What have we proven? What do we hope to do with this information? In other words, for whom other than a racist is this good news? How do we enact policy based on this? Do we want to enact policy based on this if it were true? What kind of policies would those be? As I confronted these questions, I realized that implicitly my support for and defense of these studies was colored by racism, by my desire to view my own self as dominant. How incredibly ugly.

As a Christian, this is the question I face: if each of us, individually, is made in the image of God, what does IQ matter? Since Darwin and the rise of capitalist economics (funny how intertwined those things are) we have been obsessed with determining the fittest so that we may be sure they, usually we, survive. Whether our methods are sociological, like eugenics and abortion, or economic, like cutthroat business practices and outsourcing, we seem hellbent on breeding out the weaker from amongst the thronging masses. (As I wrote this I was reminded of Chesterton’s great quip which I only paraphrase: “When we say survival of the fittest all that we really mean are those that survived.”) And nothing could be further from Christian truth and practice, which tells us that we all have the same Father and are therefore all brothers.

Another issue this raises for me is that of the limit of knowledge. I wonder if in our desire to know all things we tread on ground best left undisturbed. There is a recurring scene in the conversation between Adam and Raphael in Paradise Lost where Raphael warns Adam of overstepping the boundaries God has erected in his zeal for knowledge.

Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain [ 120 ]

To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope

Things not reveal'd, which th' invisible King,

Onely Omniscient hath supprest in Night,

To none communicable in Earth or Heaven.  (7.120-124)

be lowlie wise:

Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;

Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there [ 175 ]

Live, in what state, condition or degree,

Contented that thus farr hath been reveal'd

Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav'n. (8.173-178)

Raphael is warning Adam, because it is a very human tendency to want to know more than we really ought to know. Knowledge of some things is best left untouched. In our current zeal to explain everything by a combination of chemical imbalance, societal conditioning, and evolutionary prerogative I think we can overreach the proper bounds of human knowledge. And that knowledge can lead to dehumanization.

On questions like that of race and IQ, a question burdened with no upside, I defer not to truth or falsehood but to decorum, trusting that in some matters the truth will not set us free.