CRITIQUE OF The Bell Curve 383
merit (rather than its annoying confusion) in order to avoid (fairly
enough) the charge of racism while maintaining something quite
close to Gobineau's differences in intelligence and the unlikelihood
of their erasure. (Please understand that I am not trying to besmirch
Herrnstein and Murray by name-calling from the past. I am not
attempting to establish my indirect linkage to the Third Reich—
and neither can we blame Gobineau for Hitler's extreme usages via
Chamberlain. But I am fascinated that structures of ideas can be so
similar across the centuries, while thinkers of basically consonant
mind emphasize different parts of an entity in the climates of vary-
ing times.)
Gobineau, seeking a mathematical basis for group differences
in intelligence and morality, was stuck with the crude and direct
measures of nineteenth-century racist science—mainly shapes and
sizes of skulls and other body parts (for no supposedly "direct" as-
sessment by mental testing had yet been developed). For example,
obineau located black destiny in external anatomy:
he dark races are the lowest on the scale. The shape of the pelvis has
character of animalism, which is imprinted on the individuals of that
ace ere their birth, and seems to portend their destiny.... The negro's
-arrow and receding forehead seems to mark him as inferior in reasoning
parity.Moreover, in a manner so characteristic of this pseudoscience,
Gobineau manages to spin every observation in the light of his pre-
conception about black inferiority. Even ostensibly favorable traits
are redeployed in the service of racist interpretation. On the sup-
posed stoicism of blacks in the face of pain, for example, Gobineau
cites the testimony of a doctor: "They bear surgical operations much
better than white people, and what would be the cause of insupport-
able pain to a white man, a negro would almost disregard. I have
amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part
of the limb themselves." Any white man would be praised for brav-
ery, courage, and nobility, but Gobineau attributes this supposed
toleration of pain by blacks to "a moral cowardice which readily
Seeks refuge in death, or in a sort of monstrous impassivity."
As measurement of bodies formed the crude and only margin-
y successful (even in their own terms) devices of scientific racism
ln tne nineteenth century, so has the more sophisticated technology