Thoughts on Charles Murray from Metafilter

I have, for reasons of insatiable curiosity, read several of Murray's books. One thing I appreciate about him is that e asks hard questions that my fellow progressives consider anathema: Are there people who, even in a hypothetical healthy and functioning society, will still be unable to function in that society in a way that brings them out of poverty? If so, how does a society deal with that?

In his book on education, he takes on the naively utopian idea that all children can achieve in the narrow academic way we have come to value, if they're given the right supports early enough. How, he asks, do we educate for the variety of aptitudes and interests that people have?

These strike me as good questions, and, coming off a period of painful disillusionment with progressive communities I'm a part of, I welcomed the questions.

The trouble is, Murray's answers are terrible. He ignores social forces of racism and classism, instead treating the cultural status quo as a universal truth. This is obvious in The Bell Curve, where he writes as if the forces of racism that have created the problems of urban black communities don't exist, so that the questionable IQ research that seems to show that black people, on the whole, are less intelligent (by a certain very questionable measure of intelligence) reflects innate racial characteristics rather than entrenched social, economic, and cultural forces.

In his book on education, he advocates for a model of education that allows for a variety of options besides the academic track we think every kid can and should be on, so that young people can pursue their areas of strength rather than being forced into a model they can never succeed in. He actually has a pretty good analogy for this, where he asks his non-athletic readers to remember the hell of gym class, where they were constantly being asked to do things they weren't good at or interested in, and then were graded on how well or poorly they did them. For some young people, he said, college-prep academic classes are like this. The difference is that they can't escape those classes, and they are given the added pressure of being told that success in these classes is essential to their future success and well-being, as well as being a measure of their current worth. This analogy made sense to me, since I suffered through PE in exactly the way he described.

But! What he's advocating is basically a form of tracking, where students can enter an academic track or be encouraged to follow another track more suited to their abilities and interests. The infuriating problem here is that he acts like he's never heard of "tracking," or of any of the biases that shunt poor and working-class children and children of color into the non-academic tracks. That's his unforgivable blindness and bias, because without that awareness, the only thing ideas like his can really do is perpetuate systems of inequality and injustice. You can see this in the people who take up his banner, as we see happening here.

I met Murray's wife a few years ago, at a Quaker conference I attend. A friend of mine who is a Republican Quaker (rarer than hen's teeth) hosted an interest group for politically conservative Quakers, and I attended. I had no idea Murray's wife was a Quaker, and was very surprised by it. Quakers in my vein of Quakerism are generally both theologically and politically liberal. Murray's wife was less interested in talking about her own conservative politics and values (if she even had any). She seemed, rather, to want and need to talk about the difficulties it caused her to be married to a notorious and reviled conservative writer. She was very hesitant to name him, fearing the judgment of those in the room. I see by the discussion of her on his wikipedia page that she is still married to him, however, and that Murray attends her Quaker meeting. That must be a very interesting experience.
posted by Orlop at 8:49 AM on May 18, 2017 [41 favorites]