REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 31
over the first fifteen years because I had focused on the foundation
documents of biological determinism, and not on "current" usages
so quickly superannuated. I had stressed the deep philosophical
errors that do not change rather than the immediate (and superfi-
cial) manifestations that become obsolete year by year.
The third major episode then kicked off in 1994, with publica-
tion of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
Again, their long book contained nothing new, though the authors
spun out the old arguments over eight hundred pages filled with
copious charts and graphs that bamboozle people into confusing
both novelty and profundity with their fear of incomprehension.
(In fact, The Bell Curve is eminently understandable. The argument
is old, uncomplicated, and familiar; the mathematics, though la-
bored through several hundred pages by iterating example after
example, represents one study, appropriately simple in concept,
and easy enough to comprehend. Moreover, for all my severe criti-
cism of the authors' content, I will happily grant that they write well
and clearly.) When I met Charles Murray in debate at Harvard's
Institute of Politics, I could only think to begin with a favorite line
from Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost: "He draweth out the thread
of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."
The remarkable impact of The Bell Curve must therefore, and
once again as always, be recording a swing of the political pendulum
to a sad position that requires a rationale for affirming social in-
equalities as dictates of biology. (If I may make a somewhat lurid, but
I think a propos, biological analogy, the theory of unitary, rankable,
innate, unalterable intelligence acts like a fungal spore, a dinoflag-
ellate cyst, or a tardigrade tun—always present in abundance, but in
an inactive, dormant, or resting stage, waiting to sprout, engorge,
or awake when fluctuating external conditions terminate slumber.)
Some reasons for The Bell Curve's impact must be idiosyncratic—
a catchy title, a fine job of editing by a legendary figure on the New
York scene, a brilliant publicity campaign (I will confess to jealousy,
and a desire to find the people responsible so that I can hire them
away for my own books). But these particular factors must count for
little in comparison with the overarching generality: newly fertile
political soil. Should anyone be surprised that publication of The
Bell Curve coincided exactly with the election of Newt Gingrich's
Congress, and with a new age of social meanness unprecedented in