Initial Reaction To Charles Murray’s “Facing Reality” Charles Menton
As you may be aware, Charles Murray is out with a new book, “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America.” I picked up a copy today. It’s not a long book, and I am already much of the way through it.
For those curious about how I got the book, I bought it at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Of course, they did not have it in stock. But they took my order, and after a couple of weeks, the book arrived, and I went over and bought it. (This is in contrast to Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage” which, although I ordered it about two months ago, somehow has still not arrived; and to Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally,” as to which, the clerk informed me, after studying his computer screen intently for several minutes, “we can’t get that.”)
The gist of Murray’s book is not complicated to summarize. The “two truths about race” that Murray refers to are, in the words of the Table of Contents, “race differences in cognitive ability,” and “race differences in violent crime.” Murray’s point is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about race in America without recognizing the truths about the large differences between and among races on these two metrics.
Even as I was making my way through Murray’s book, I came across today, via Maggie’s Farm, a recent review of it at Quillette by a guy named Razib Khan. The guy who posted the link at Maggie’s to Khan’s piece, who goes by the name “The Barrister,” calls it “a thoughtful review.” But then Barrister says, “it seems unfair to expect Murray to offer solutions.” What Barrister refers to is this excerpt, which is the heart of Khan’s review:
Murray’s narrative suffers from a similar failing—it identifies problems, but leaves the vexing elaboration of innovative policy solutions to others. It drops the data at our feet like a ticking time-bomb, but the prescriptions to defuse the device are like an instruction without a manual.
Well, it’s a lot worse than just that it “seems unfair” to expect Murray to offer solutions. Can we just state here what should be obvious to everyone? — THERE DOES NOT EXIST ANY “INNOVATIVE POLICY SOLUTION” THAT IS GOING TO SOMEHOW “SOLVE” OR “FIX” THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AND AMONG RACES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY OR VIOLENT CRIME. Nor does there exist any “policy solution” (“innovative” or otherwise) that is going to solve or fix any time soon the differences in life outcomes between and among racial groups that flow from the two underlying truths that Murray identifies.
It just seems to be nearly universally accepted among our progressive elites that all human problems are subject to being promptly solved or fixed by having the government hire some group of self-proclaimed experts who will devise some “innovative policy solutions” and, with the added magic of infinite government resources, voila!, the problems will be solved. If somehow the first trillion dollars or ten trillion or a hundred trillion hasn’t fixed the problem, it must therefore be an issue of not having tried quite the right solution, or of not having been given enough funding.
As bad as is the progressive failure and refusal to recognize or even allow mention of Murray’s “two truths,” just as bad or worse in my opinion is the failure and refusal to acknowledge the abject failure of essentially all progressive “solutions” to major societal problems in the form of “policies” of government programs and spending. Name any area touched by this delusion — poverty, homelessness, housing, education, health care, “food insecurity” — and you find the exact same thing: more and more spending, bigger and bigger bureaucracies, and the problem as defined never gets better and indeed gets worse. No amount of failure of this model seems able to make the slightest dent in the blind faith that it is going to work next time.
Now we’ve just come off a year and a half where somehow the “experts” sold the politicians (or at least the Democratic ones) on the idea that they could “solve” the problem of a new highly infectious virus. The experts gave us mask mandates and lockdowns and business and school closures and stay-at-home orders, all at enormous cost to the economy and human well-being and with no measurable benefit in terms of reduction in illness or death. The only thing of measurable benefit has been the vaccines, which have been almost entirely an effort of the private sector (except to the extent that the government contributed by expediting regulatory approvals and otherwise getting out of the way).
Our world is so far from perfect, and not remotely perfectible. For life outcomes, the best we can hope for is that the large majority of people, all those who are not severely disabled in some way, can lead independent and fulfilling lives according to their own desires and preferences and willingness to work. Our own country has made far more progress toward this goal than any other society in world history. But that progress has mostly been made through allowing a freedom-based economic order to operate, not through government programs and spending and redistributions. Equality of outcome? Our government programs can’t even make a meaningful dent in “poverty” after many decades and tens of trillions of dollars.
Maybe the lack of any government-directed solutions to such problems should have been Murray’s third truth.
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