THE "IDEAS" OF ARTHUR JENSEN: A CASE STUDY IN RACISM AND ELITISM

By Grover Furr

Originally published in New Voices: A Magazine of Culture for Working People and Students (Los Angeles, CA), May Day issue 1977, pp. 29-38.

-- Summary –

It's no accident that social elites favor the ideas of genetic, inherited superiority. Such ideas are called "hereditarianism" and are strongly racist.

Cyril Burt (now dead), Arthur Jensen (professor at Berkeley) and Richard Herrnstein (professor at Harvard) promote racist, hereditarian views. They push the lies that I.Q. equals intelligence and intelligence varies by race. Yet even when such ideas are discredited scientifically, they were still pushed in journals, the media and through public policy. The most important recent example of this promotion is an article by P. Medawar. Though it seemingly opposes hereditarianism, it actually defends the Jensenites.

Since we cannot rely on the social elites to oppose racism, and since we know that scientific refutation alone won’t do, we must develop an independent anti-racist strategy.

JENSEN HONORED AND DISHONORED

On February 24, 1977 Arthur R. Jensen was elected to the position of Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This position is one of the highest honors in American science. Since he was nominated and elected by the AAAS council of delegates, Jensen's election shows his prestige among members of the scientific elite.

Yet Jensen's election comes only three months after the discrediting of Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was Jensen's chief intellectual mentor, one time co-worker, and the leader of racist hereditarianism. Burt, it seems, had systematically falsified his "research" over a period of sixty years. Why did he cheat? To "prove" his preconceived notions: that "intelligence," equated with performance on I.Q. tests, is fundamentally inherited, is affected little by schooling, and is closely related to class, race, and income. Jensen relied on Burt's research more than on anyone else's. Ten of Burt's articles are cited in Jensen's infamous essay, "How Much Can We Boost LQ. and Scholastic Achievement?" published in the Harvard Educational Review, 1969.

In fact Jensen's election follows years of scientific refutation of every aspect of his research. It follows the complete rejection of the underlying assumptions of his work by nearly every professional in the field of genetics, testing and psychology. Jensen's statistics have been shown time and again to be grossly in error. His assumption that I. Q. tests measure anything that can be legitimately termed "intelligence" has been proven false. His attempt to use twin-studies (including Burt's fraudulent ones) to separate genetic from environmental components of intelligence has been in vain. There is hardly one article of research in the scholarly press during the past several years which even partially confirms Jensen's findings.

Finally, the coup de grace which had appeared to finish "Jensenism" off in the scientific community was the publication in 1974 of Leon Kamin's book, The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Earlbaum Associates, 1974). Since then, the vast majority of psychologists and geneticists regarded the hereditarian position as a dead letter.

In this context, the action of the AAAS delegates in electing Jensen to a high honorary post is even more significant. It is a sign, to those who can read it, that the admiration of the scientific elite for Jensen is not to be relinquished merely because his studies contain no shred of truth!

A LONG AFFAIR

The AAAS has shown a positive predilection for Jensen and other hereditarians almost from the very beginning. The journal Science of December 17, 1971 devoted its entire book review section to Sandra Scarr-Salapatek, an admirer of Jensen 1s, who has only certain technical and statistical disagreements with him. Professor Scarr-Salapatek assured Science readers that "Jensen’s writing is credible or at least responsible." On October 20, 1972, the entire letters section was devoted to Jensenism, giving Scarr-Salapatek another ten columns. On July 6, 1973, Science published an editorial which praised Richard Herrnstein. Again, in 1975 there appeared what Hirsch called "a new major whitewash review of Jensenism" by Carter Dennison -- "an appalling example of intellectual dishonesty."

ELITES HOLD HANDS

It is clear that elitism and racism are very deeply rooted within the ruling scientific groups, as well as within ruling academic, government and business groups. The implications of Jensen’s work and of other hereditarians like Burt and Herrnstein appears to be profoundly interesting and important to members of the scientific elite -- so much so that the lack of real scientific evidence to back up the hereditarians poses no real barrier to their remaining in high regard.

Of course there is no wall separating the scientific elite from other elites which are more openly political. Virtually every prominent scientist and social scientist in the USA works on programs or contracts funded by the Federal Government. Many government institutes such as the NIH, NIMH, NSF, the Defense Department, the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), etc., provide close connections between governmental policy-makers, advisors, and top scientists. The same men and women who attract government research funds and achieve prestigious research positions at the "best" universities also select what articles will be published in the most prominent journals, and have considerable influence over the direction of future government research projects and funds.

In order, then, to understand the phenomenon of Jensenism, it is essential to understand that the enthusiasm over Jensenism occurred, and continues to occur, mainly among the scientific elite; that Jensenism was, and still is, promoted mainly by this group.

Unless we keep this in mind, we are apt to think that the AAAS has gone crazy. Or -- more seriously -- we are apt to think that Jensen and his ilk may be correct to some degree after all, since they are still flattered in such publications as Science and honored by prestigious groups like the AAAS, despite the virtually unanimous rejection of hereditarian research by practicing research scientists, and despite the fact that one can scarcely find a work of primary research which supports any of Jensen's, Herrnstein’s or Shockley’s results.

It is also important to remember this when reading Medawar's article in the New York Review of Books, December 2, 1976. For Medawar is a member of this same scientific elite. He himself was formerly quite taken with the possibilities of Jensen-type theories. Medawar has been forced to reject the hereditarian viewpoint because he cannot find a single reputable geneticist who thinks it has any merit whatsoever. But Medawar's elitism prevents him from rejecting hereditarianism entirely, although he claims he wishes to do so. In fact, Medawar draws explicitly hereditarian conclusions in at least two instances in his review. This cannot be explained away as a result of ignorance on Medawar’s part. Nor can the uncritical openness to, and even acceptance of, neo-racism among the scientific elite be set down to "ignorance" as Medawar, in his lame attempt to apologize for the hereditarians, tries to do.

Until World War II, the scientific elites of the U.S. and Britain (of which Burt was a key member) were very open in their enthusiasm for hereditarianism, with its racist and anti-egalitarian implications. This enthusiasm continues today. Today, as in the past, the scientific elite stands shoulder to shoulder with the business and political elites -- from which it is indeed often indistinguishable -- in defense of its own privileged status and the status quo. The self-justifying ideology of the scientific elite continues, as before, to be expressed in a strong propensity for racist ideas and, more generally, in anti-egalitarianism of all kinds (often expressed as anti-communism, an attempt to brand as "opponents of science and truth" those who, whether radicals or not, oppose the teaching of theories of racial inferiority and superiority). Medawar's essay stands squarely in this tradition.

MEDAWAR’S MUD

Medawar’s essay on the I. Q. controversy presents a seriously incorrect analysis of both the scientific and political issues at stake. Medawar repeatedly attacks the straw man of "human genetic equality." Without giving any sources, he states that Marxists hold this view. But (1) Leon Kamin's book, not a Marxist analysis in any case, does not argue for "human genetic equality" ; and (2) Medawar admits that the only Marxist he does cite, the late J.B.S. Haldane, rejected the idea of "human genetic equality."

Medawar gives a self-contradictory account of his own opinion of the real question: to what extent intelligence is inherited? Thus he states that "intellectual differences are indeed genetically influenced" unless "intellectual abilities are unlike all others and unless human beings are unlike all other animals in respect to possessing them. "But later he concludes that the 1 atter statement is in fact true. Therefore, "intellectual differences "are not "genetically-influenced"? Wrong again. Medawar tells us "there are likely to be inherited differences of teachability" (without citing any evidence). This is a directly hereditarian conclusion, yet Medawar states it.

Why no evidence? Politics! According to Medawar, the hereditarians and principally Sir Cyril Burt, were not motivated by "malevolent "or "political" concerns. But "Marxists" who assert that the whole issue of the hereditability of intelligence and I.Q. is primarily a political issue, are not only mistaken, but "dogmatic," blinded by foolish "conspiracy theories." In fact, Medawar would have us believe that the anti-racist Marxists are the real malevolent ones since they supposedly oppose those scientists who are "in thrall to such bourgeois superstitions as the desirability of telling the truth."

Medawar constantly tries to absolve the hereditarians of any evil intent. For example a notorious racist against the Irish and other inferior races, Eysenck, is "probably now" embarrassed by a strongly hereditarian statement made earlier (though· Medawar gives no evidence that Eysenck is embarrassed). Again, the Admitted social harm of the hereditarian~ influence on social policy is "not ... the consequence of the malevolence of those who undertake them." Medawar even tries to put Burt's falsification of his statistics in a more sympathetic light, by comparing him with Mendel, who allegedly did the same thing. He assures us that Burt was not guilty of "villainy" but only "probably thought of himself as the evangel of a Great New Truth."

Medawar is at great pains to deny that Burt was politically motivated in any way. He tells us that Burt "designed" the educational tracking system which his phony research justified in order to "promote the interests" of bright students. Put in this light, Burt's falsifications appear almost admirable: who wouldn't want to help bright children? But, according to Medawar, those who have abolished Burt's tracking system did so "for political reasons." He is certainly unwilling to assume they were trying to "promote the interests" of the students. So it is the anti-hereditarians who have intruded politics into the question; and are thus responsible for "handicapping" the bright children that Burt was trying to help! Medawar assumes here that the tracking system designed by Burt, with his fabricated statistics, did in fact identify "bright students." Burt would be pleased at this, no doubt; he devoted a lifetime of fraudulent "scholarship" to convince us precisely of this identification. Burt has evidently succeeded so well -- among the elite at least -- that even the discovery of his fraud cannot shake Medawar's confidence.

If the racists are nice guys then, and if a "conspiracy" is only a "stupidity" of Marxism, how does Medawar account for the persistence of hereditarian theories and their tremendous social influence? In a strange way. Somehow, these men -- and no one would call Burt, Eysenck, Jensen, et al, stupid -- show a ''deep-seated misunderstanding of genetic principles." Moreover, "… the more disputative IQ psychologists give the impression of being incapable of learning anything from anybody." The hereditarians hold "illusions" -- that a single-number valuation can be put upon intelligence, that "culture-free "intelligence tests" can be devised, etc., -- which others do not hold.

But why do such prominent, "intelligent" men insist upon holding on to so much ignorance over such a long period of time? Medawar cannot explain. He repeatedly assures us, however, that they are not "malevolent." By this he appears to mean that they are not trying to use their "science" to justify certain ulterior sociopolitical policies. But this "explanation" simply can’t account for the persistence and influence of the hereditarian viewpoint in the face of literally decades of scientific refutation.

MAKING FRIENDS

The fact is that hereditarians have always shown a great deal of interest in seeing their views put into practice through legislation and social policy. Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes, the pioneers of IQ and intelligence testing in the U.S.A. were involved in setting up the racist immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. C.C. Brigham founded the Educational Testing Service while a convinced hereditarian. Burt helped design the British school examination tracking system. Henry E. Garrett, an influential U.S. hereditarian (Chairman of the Columbia University Psychology Department, and one-time President of the A.P.). spent his retirement years writing pamphlets for the Ku Klux Klan on the inferiority of Blacks. More recently, Jensen has written literally dozens of articles for semi-popular magazines in order to spread his views among the policy-making elite, and has granted dozens of interviews.

There is nothing "subconscious" about this political activity. Medawar derides a "conspiracy theory of heritability," but note the academic genealogy of the most prominent hereditarians. Eysenck was a pupil of Burt’s. Jensen also worked with Burt in the 196O 1s, before he published his Harvard Educational Review article. Henry Garret was thesis director for a certain Audrey Shuey, whose book The Testing of Negro Intelligence (1956) is cited so frequently by Jensen and Eysenck. (In contrast to the hereditarians, a glance at the reviews of Shuey's work in Psychological Abstracts shows that the book was universally panned by the profession.) The contemporary hereditarians favorably review each other’s books and articles; Jensen glowingly eulogized Burt upon the latter’s death. In short, hereditarians have engaged in a concerted effort to promote the acceptability of their own views, not only within the scholarly world, but -- significantly -- in the non-scholarly, political world of policy-making elites.

The hereditarians understand very well an important political fact. Achieving acceptance in the academic world is not at all necessary as a precondition to achieving influence in public policy and among the policy-making elite. Jensen and company simply executed an end-run around the psychology and genetics professions. The hereditarians understand the need to reach and influence the elites in our society much more clearly than do academicians like Medawar or even Kamin, who has decided that, with his disclosures, the issue is settled, and so has returned to animal experimentation. (See the Princeton Alumni Weekly, February 14, 1977, p. 12).

In fact, the issue is far from settled in the real world. Several widely-used college textbooks, including Herrnstein’s own, still set forth hereditarian views as true, as the scientific consensus. Many college professors still teach the racist notion that I.Q. is a measure of innate intelligence, and that Blacks are inferior.

All this has happened despite the fact that most psychologists and geneticists discount the hereditarian views. Again, despite the scientific disrepute of his theories, Jensen has been appointed AAAS Fellow. One is reminded of the appointment of the Fascist, Charles Maurras to the Academie française in 1939. Both Jensen and Maurras impressed and influenced the policy-making elites. They knew it was possible to rise high in academic life simply by vigorously arguing ideas which are pleasing to influential political circles, virtually without regard to intellectual or scientific merit.

PUBLISH OR PERISH?

Any reader who finds it difficult to believe that Jensen has in fact been dishonest (not merely, as Medawar would have it~ mistaken) should see Professor Jerry Hirsch's article entitled "Jensenism: The Bankruptcy of ‘Science’ Without Scholarship" (Education Theory, Winter,1975, Vol. 25, No: 1, 3-28). Hirsch, whose name Jensen fraudulently listed as an editor of his own journal Behavioral Genetics, has compiled a list of some of Jensen’s more probably deliberate lies and has, in addition, chronicled the acceptance of these lies by some remarkably "qualified" psychologists. Yet even Hirsch is weak on explaining Jensen’s popularity. He states: "That so many unscholarly ‘experts’ would accept such a specious product provides stark proof of the intellectual bankruptcy of our present harried academic system, which overvalues speed and quantity of output at the expense of quality: publish ( ever more) or perish!"

No doubt the pressures of "publish or perish" have something to do with this. But they cannot be the major factor in explaining the influence of Jensenism, even within academia. First, many scholarly refutations of Jensen's material began to pour out immediately after Jensen's Harvard Educational Review article was published in 1969. The Review itself devoted the next two special issues to refutations of Jensen I s article. Other organizations, such as the American Anthropological Association issued special publications devoted exclusively to refuting and attacking the genetic inferiority myths.

Second, Jensen and his supporters published very few essays in scholarly journals at all. This fact led many academics to reject his views from the beginning. Thirdly, "publish or perish" pressures might explain a lack of critical attention among junior members of the various professions. But Hirsch's evidence includes principally senior, established, respected academics who endorsed Jensen’s theories or failed to scrutinize his assumptions and methods carefully. Such men and women are not in the "publish or perish" class.

No, what accounts for Jensen's reputation and ideas spreading and becoming respectable was the instantaneous popularity his racist myth. enjoyed among academic and governmental elites. Working researchers in psychology and genetics and rank-and-file faculty in these fields, .never joined the hereditarian march.in any numbers. But many were impressed (a) by the wide and favorable publicity in the media given to Jensen; and (b) by endorsements from prominent figures in psychology and the social sciences generally.

SOCIAL DARWINISM REVISITED

In the highly stratified societies of the U.S.A. and Britain, with great differences in wealth, income, and standard of living, scientific elites tend to be conservative. They have been taught elitism in graduate programs, as faculty members of universities, as admirers of "classical" culture and as members of the "ingroup" clique of a profession. They also receive much lighter teaching loads, more research grants and more sabbaticals than other teachers. Prestige periodicals are open to them. They receive high incomes and are able to maintain a lifestyle resembling the lower echelons of business and governmental elites. ( An American family of four need earn only about $32,000 total to be in the top 5% of all U.S. families.)

Elites, in education, business or government mostly believe they are where they are because they deserve to be. As a corollary, they also believe those classes of people outside the elite -- the poor, uneducated, unemployed -- are where they are because they, too, deserve to be there.

This view boils down to Social Darwinism, a philosophy long used To justify classes in capitalist society. Capitalism is supposedly a "meritocracy, "that is, those who are "fittest" rise to wealth, status and power. Failure to "rise'' is prima facie evidence of lack of ability. Thus Herrnstein’s September, 1971 Atlantic Monthly article "I.Q.," a crude piece of Social Darwinist "reasoning," was actually read aloud in its entirety in two parts over WQXR FM, the Radio Station of the New York Times!

Derek Bok, President of Harvard University, sent Herrnstein a handwritten note of congratulation upon publication of this article. Hence, too, the appeal of Herrnstein's subsequent book, I.Q. In the Meritocracy, so favorably reviewed in Science.

The "genetic inferiority" myth serves to rationalize inequality, exploitation and poverty. But the particular wrinkle served up by Jensen, Herrnstein et al., the myth that I.Q. scores are largely equated with "intelligence" appeals especially to academics. (If you have a high score you deserve to run the show.) But Irving Kristol, a conservative academic and editor of Fortune, noted in a review of Herrnstein’s book (May, 1973, pp. 392-4), that a high I.Q. does not guarantee worldly success. Academics may have the highest I.Q. 's on the whole. But academics do not run the government, or major corporations. Herrnstein is therefore not describing social reality so much as he is telling the academic elite what they want to hear: they are the most intelligent people, and should identify with other such "intelligent" types - such as big businessmen and politicians. Finally, it should be noted that hereditarians like Herrnstein have been quick to point out that the antiegalitarian implications of Jensenism are also explicitly anti-Marxist and anti-socialist. Herrnstein is happy to tell the elite that hereditarianist theories can prove to be a valuable bulwark against "the rejection of aristocracies and privileged classes, "against the vision of a classless society," and against "the specter of Communism" (Atlantic Monthly, September, 1971).

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Scientific criticism and refutation do at suffice to stop the spread of the hereditarians' racist falsehoods. What, then, can be done? Medawar attacks the Marxists who "vilify, shout down, and rebut by calumnies" the traveling hereditarian circus. Even Hirsch, in the article cited above, criticized SDS and the Committee Against Racism for confronting academic racists. (It must be said, that Hirsch's own essay documents very well the uselessness of any other method besides confrontation.)

The hard fact is that it is only because of the militant opposition of students and some faculty to Jensen, Herrnstein and Shockley that the spread of this filth has been reduced somewhat. Scientific refutation alone is not sufficient to stop the spread of pseudo-scientific racist and elitist doctrines in society or in academia when those doctrines are backed by, and support the interests of, the ruling elite in society.

The triumph of racist and anti-Semitic doctrines in German universities before the Nazi seizure of power teaches this lesson. When racist lies serve the interests of those who have political power, the truth does not win out through operation of a "marketplace of ideas."

Medawar is merely red-baiting when he calls Kamin’s discussion of the political history hereditarianism after WWI "essentially Marxist." Marx didn't discover the virtue of history. At best Kamin's book is consistent in some ways with a Marxist class analysis. If Kamin's book had followed a Marxist class analysis he would have emphasized even more the class biases of hereditarianism. For the fact is that American ruling class families have all along given widespread, favorable publicity to hereditarian ideas and their proponents. They do this through control of universities, foundations, research funding, and the mass media. Families like the Rockefellers and Carnegies helped found and fund eugenics associations in the U.S. in order to spread hereditarian and elitist views. Departments of Eugenics were set up in many prominent American universities after WWI expressly to teach pseudo-scientific rationales for racism and class discrimination.

This support paid off. The whole field of genetics in the U.S.A. during the 1930s was extremely racist. Genetics textbooks reflected eugenicist views of the inherited superiority of Nordics, the inferiority of other races and the undesirability of miscegenation. Outside the laboratories, genetics was a racist pseudoscience. Geneticists in all western countries went far beyond their scientific evidence to support racist and elitist conclusions, pawning them off as "science." (W. Provine, Science November 1973). Only popular revulsion against Hitlerism finally forced this "discipline" to retreat in the late 1930s.

CONCLUSIONS

What conclusions should anti-racists, such as active members of the International Committee Against Racism, draw from these facts?

Elitist and racist ideas, and -- Specifically -- the idea of genetic inferiority and the heritability of intelligence, are very strong within the scientific and academic elite. This has nothing to do with the scientific "truth" or "validity" of Jensenism and hereditarianism. These ideas are even deeply rooted among those in the scientific elite who, like Medawar, purport to "reject" them.

There is probably nothing that can be done to eradicate these ideas from the scientific and academic elites, short of eliminating the elites themselves. The most to be done is to so discredit these ideas among everyone else, so the elite will have as little influence as possible.

Defeating these ideas through scientific refutation and publicity has been tried. It's good -- but not enough. And we must not stop it, or give up, or just "declare the battle won," like Kamin, and retreat to the labs.

The most prestigious journals, professional honors, research grants, the popular and semi-popular media -- all these are far more open to the elite than to anti-elitists. This will continue to be the case. We can never achieve "parity" with the academic elite in these areas.

The only way to put the racist hereditarians back on the defensive and keep them there is to combine refutation with confrontation. We must patiently explain why permitting Jensen, Herrnstein, and those who preach their racist and elitist lies to enjoy "free speech" unimpeded, or to teach their views in class, cannot be continued.

We anti-elitists do not have money, prestigious positions {save very few), or access to professional or popular media. Let us use what we do have on our side: (1) the truth; and ( 2) numbers.

We should continue to use the truth -- to refute tirelessly the Jensenist lies, to expose their fraudulent basis. But we must begin to use numbers much more effectively.

Anti-racists can win many faculty and, probably, most students to see the need to declare hereditarianism out of bounds on campus; and outside the permissible limits of academic freedom. It is as dangerous in its way as shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. We must confront those who teach racism with a multi-racial mass movement, and expose them, and -- where people can be convinced to do it -- stop them from hiding under "free speech" or "academic freedom."

Any strongly egalitarian, antiracist position taken anywhere in our society will be "Red-baited," that is, attacked as Communist, Marxist, radical, etc. This is an old trick of the elite. Any group which engages in strong criticism of academic racists will be called "totalitarian." Antiracists, such as those active in or with INCAR, should realize that this is inevitable. As recently disclosed in the press, the FBI red-baited Martin Luther King, and continued to do so even after he proceeded to fire anyone in the NAACP whom he even suspected of socialist affiliations, then or in the past!

If you are active in fighting racists, you will be attacked as "radical." Even those who confine themselves strictly to court action or written opposition to racism will not be able to avoid this. The elites will always try to stop egalitarian and anti-racist movements, like INCAR, through redbaiting. Inevitably, some members fall victim to this attack and evade it in the only way possible -- by dropping away from the anti-racist struggle. Because the only way to avoid being red-baited or called "radical," etc. is not to fight racism.

But when anti-racists do attack racists and racist theories strongly, and mobilize numbers of students and faculty to do likewise, more students and faculty, particularly minorities, those most immediately victimized by racism -- join the anti-racist fight. And "red-baiting" has much less effect when the anti-racist group, such as the INCAR chapter, is strongly multi-racial and, especially if Black and minority students are in the leadership of the anti-racist struggle.

The ways to confront and overcome red-baiting are:

(1) Fight racism actively and militantly, never giving up principle;

(2) Point unashamedly to the history of anti-racist activity by socialists, communists and others from Toussaint L'Ouverture and Gabriel Prosser to John Brown and the Southern Populists, to the Scottsboro defense, the CIO, the Civil Rights Movement and the Committee Against Racism;

(3) Make the fight multi-racial. Only multi-racial unity can make significant inroads upon racism in academia -- or elsewhere.