The real problem with the technocratic Charles Murray is his zeal for the pernicious “American creed” of radical individualism.
Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America, by Charles Murray (168 pages, Encounter Books, 2021)
Viewed from the right, Charles Murray is an almost tragic figure. A libertarian-leaning proponent of America as the first “proposition nation,” Murray may be too committed to Enlightenment ideology to properly appreciate man’s social dimension, much less the importance of roots, identity, and religious faith. Limited though Murray’s perspective may be, however, we can still hope that Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America will provoke some worthwhile discussion, as Murray is at least one of the few scholars willing to confront “the disconnect between the rhetoric about ‘systemic racism’ and the facts.”
Murray’s thesis aims not merely at Critical Race Theory, but at its underlying assumptions, along with affirmative-action mechanisms which have been in place for fifty years now. He argues that such mechanisms are “based upon the premise that all groups are equal in the ways that shape economic, social, and political outcomes for groups and that therefore all differences in group outcomes are artificial and indefensible,” and then goes on to make his case that “that premise is factually wrong.” In Murray’s analysis, inflammatory rhetoric about systemic racism runs up against incontrovertible obstacles, such as the fact “that American Whites Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.”
For Murray, disturbing footage of police brutality must be be juxtaposed with the fact that “police use of force, including excessive use of force, will always and inevitably be higher in high-crime areas than in low-crime areas, and high-crime areas in the United States are overwhelmingly urban and African and Latin.” That police caught harassing or physically abusing black citizens “should be kicked off the force and shunned by other police departments” goes without saying, continues Murray. At the same time it is viciously unjust to equate such calculated abuses of power with “errors in decisions that had to be made in seconds in the face of lethal threats,” under “mental stress associated with combat—stress unlike anything that most of us (including me) have ever experienced.”
As for systemic racism in the academy and workplace, Murray cites numerous sources ranging from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to the American Psychological Association, before drawing his ironic conclusion:
Africans and Latins get through the educational pipeline with preferential treatment in admissions to colleges and to professional programs. Their mean IQs in occupations across the range from unskilled to those requiring advanced degrees are substantially lower than the mean IQs for Europeans in the same occupations […] I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of intellectuals of every stripe is the temptation to give a grand unified explanation for multidimensional phenomena. So it should be noted to his credit that—unlike “woke” activists who pretend to know for certain that the culpability for every last racial problem can be tidily and solely pinned upon white people—Murray makes no rash claims about the reason (or reasons) for the disparities he observes. Instead he rightly emphasizes that averages are not ironclad rules, and urges his readers to remember that any given person may defy statistical predictions, graphs, and charts.
So the real problem with the technocratic Murray is not that he is a flaming racialist. He isn’t. The real problem is instead his zeal for the pernicious “American creed” of radical individualism. “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one,” the reader is informed at the outset of the book, and this unfortunate statement highlights Murray’s underlying assumption that “America” is neither more nor less than a postnational space where a random melange of people can make as much money as possible off one another without government meddling—devil take the hindmost. In considering Murray’s work, then, conservatives would do well to keep in mind that there is no individual without community.
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People would be better off if they come to understand that equality doesn’t exist and never will.
Equality does exist, Mr. Johnson. Equality exists in the value of each human being, without regard to their intellect, talent or capabilities. Our society places value on the measures of potential that individuals are judged to have. At the root of that measuring is a fundamental flaw, that those of particular status or intellect or talent are the rightful judges of such value. Yet, the true value we bring to this world is in the lives we touch directly, and occasionally what we learn from those experiences can transform the world – not though our own planning nor machinations, but though fate, destiny, or a higher guiding hand. (Call it what you will.)
A simple carpenter transformed the fate of the entire world. A simple man rose to the papacy, and helped set free a nation and caused a wall to fall. A fragile child dying in a hospital bed transforms lives of everyone around them with their courage and faith.
We are all equal in our ability to transform our world, and it sometimes shocks us the person who accomplishes that kind of greatness.
Jesus was not, “a simple carpenter.” He was divine and therefore quite unequal.
I read Murray’s book and altho he did not use the term I think the thrust of his work is that the current racial policies and practices seems to fly in the face or meritocracy. And one of the things we know from history about social success (be it individual or collective) is that the further a society departs from a meritocratic model the worse it gets… in almost every way of measuring success..