The Value of Motherhood

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Charles Murray (@charlesmurray on Twitter) co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein one of the most controversial books of the 20th century, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). When it was first published, the harsh criticism from liberals — who claimed the book was practically neo-Nazi propaganda — led me to believe that it really was a bad book.

Liberal propaganda works this way. If enough people tell you they see smoke (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) you tend to assume that there must actually be some kind of hateful fire. So in 1994-95, after reading numerous reviews, articles and op-ed columns condemning The Bell Curve as crypto-racist pseudo-science, I just assumed the critics were correct. It wasn’t until 1996, when I made a dismissive remark about The Bell Curve in an Internet argument, that I found myself challenged: Had I actually read the book? So . . .

Charles Murray’s critics were not merely wrong, they were dishonest (because SJWs Always Lie, as Vox Day has recently explained). The recognition that I had been scammed, hoodwinked and bamboozled by liberal smears of The Bell Curve angered me. The first 125 pages of the book, which have nothing to do with the subject of race, are perhaps the most valuable part of The Bell Curve. Standardized testing and nationwide recruiting by elite universities have resulted in cognitive segregation, the creation of something very much like a caste system. The educational apparatus by which high-IQ children are tracked into “gifted” programs in elementary school and “honors” programs in high school, with the goal of sending every smart kid in the country to an elite university, has the effect of dissolving the social and cultural affinities between the elite caste and the vast majority of Americans. (At age 11, I was placed in an experimental “gifted” program, the first of its kind in our community. I hated it — a ridiculous waste of time, a burdensome “honor” conferring no actual benefit — and rebelled against the system, becoming a teenage hoodlum in middle school.) Once you get past page 125 of The Bell Curve, really, it is an attempt to explain why liberal policies have failed to eliminate socioeconomic disparities between racial and ethnic groups. If you keep in mind that the argument is about the efficacy of public policy — what the government is doing in our name, with our tax dollars — the accusations of “racism” directed at The Bell Curve must be recognized as an attempt to silence a cogent criticism of five decades of blundering, misguided wastefulness. “The Ivy League is decadent and depraved.” But I digress . . .

On Saturday, the Harvard-educated liberal snob Matthew Yglesias smeared Charles Murray by way of attacking Donald Trump, with the unintended consequence that a quote by Murray was called to my attention and, considering my own interest in radical feminism, I asked Murray via Twitter, “Did you ever tackle the ‘innate differences’ controversy that got Larry Summers fired at Harvard?” He replied with a link to an AEI paper he published in 2005, “The Inequality Taboo”:

The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected. . . .
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. . . . Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong. . . .

Here we may interrupt to point out that the phrase “innate differences” refers to average differences between groups. Anyone who watches the NBA cannot help but notice that most of the players are black. This doesn’t mean, however, that there are no good white, Asian or Hispanic basketball players. Nor does it mean that all black people are good at basketball. Also, it does not mean that the NBA is engaging in discrimination. Whenever we see any disproportionate outcome that might be explained by average group differences, we must keep in mind that such differences do not tell us anything about any individual‘s potential, abilities or tendencies, and it is generally a mistake, in a free society, to leap to the conclusion that discrimination causes disparities in outcomes. (The Bell Curve carries many such disclaimers, by the way.) Now, we return to Charles Murray’s 2005 article:

The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By the 1990’s, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary’s pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages. Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker’s chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002). . . .
Regarding women, men, and babies, the technical literature is as unambiguous as everyday experience would lead one to suppose. As a rule, the experience of parenthood is more profoundly life-altering for women than for men. . . . Among humans, extensive empirical study has demonstrated that women are more attracted to children than are men, respond to them more intensely on an emotional level, and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from nurturing them. Many of these behavioral differences have been linked with biochemical differences between men and women.
Thus, for reasons embedded in the biochemistry and neurophysiology of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement at the highest level also have something else they want to do in life: have a baby. In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question. These are precisely the years during which most women must bear children if they are to bear them at all.
Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for high-level accomplishment in the arts and sciences shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.

You can read the whole thing, to which I wish to add this: It does not matter whether male-female differences, as they relate to parenting, are “innate” or “socially constructed.” Biological realities of pregnancy and nursing mean that women have a greater personal investment in parenthood. Without any resort to Darwinian explanations, there are numerous practical reasons why we should expect mothers to be more nurturing than men. Furthermore, we would also expect mothers to be more nurturing than women who avoid motherhood. Radical feminists scoff at any suggestion that women’s greater tendency toward nurturing is a matter of hard-wired neurological differences. Radical feminists deny that there is any such thing as “human nature” which could explain women’s behavior in terms of a “maternal instinct.” Radical feminists generally eschew motherhood and many of them abhor heterosexuality, per se. Women’s Studies textbooks assert that only social and cultural influences (e.g., “compulsory heterosexuality”) explain why most women desire husbands and babies. Because they have no “maternal instinct” nor any romantic or sexual interest in males, radical feminists seem to assume that other women are under the spell of some sort of patriarchal brainwashing: “Most Women Have to Be Coerced into Heterosexuality.”

Why is this abhorrence of men, marriage and motherhood so common among radical feminists? Because they are intellectuals — academics, authors and journalists — and their chosen careers force them into a competition against males that makes it impossible for them to view men as anything other than hostile antagonists. In the ruthless competition for tenure-track professorships, the ambitious female academic has every incentive to avoid the “distractions” of marriage and motherhood.

There is a reason why “lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous,” as Professor Bonnie Zimmerman said, and the disproportionate overrepresentation of lesbians on university faculties is surely not a coincidence. One of the most outspoken critics of Larry Summers in the 2005 “innate differences” controversy was a lesbian professor named Denice Denton, who committed suicide not long after she became chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz. The anti-male/anti heterosexual ideology of feminism (“Fear and Loathing of the Penis”) is pervasive in academia. One consequence is that college-educated women are encouraged to believe that motherhood is a task for which only stupid women are suited. No intelligent woman could possibly find pleasure in caring for small children, according to the anti-natalist fanatics who insist that motherhood is nothing but patriarchal oppression.

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

Feminism is not only man-hating, but also baby-hating, and insofar as feminism is the official philosophy of women in academia, a major function of our higher education system is to discourage intelligent women from having children. This means that each subsequent generation of American children will have less intelligent mothers, and yet feminists seem unconcerned about the potential consequences of this dysgenic trend. The Census Bureau issued a report in April that demonstrated the scope of this problem:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

As I summarized this data, “High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts.” What does this mean? The future will be an increasingly stupid place.

An electorate with more stupid voters is good for the Democrat Party, I guess, which may explain why feminists don’t give a damn about the emerging Idiocracy. Anything that helps Democrats is OK with Amanda Marcotte, but this trend that feminists have done so much to encourage should concern all Americans who have children and grandchildren.

Feminism stigmatizes motherhood. Feminists deny that the mother caring for her own children is doing valuable work. Feminism teaches that husband is a synonym for oppressor, and feminists proclaim that not only are fathers unnecessary to the well-being of children, but that fathers — like all other males — are a violent and terrifying menace.

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, August 2013

These are the ideas taught by Women’s Studies professors in our universities. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver observed, and we cannot safely ignore the consequences of feminist ideas.

My stake in America’s future is not merely a matter of rhetoric and ideology, but flesh and blood. “The personal is political,” after all.




 

63 comments

  1. Congratulations on your beautiful family. Having a family like that is a huge achievement and a revolutionary act in today’s Western world. (And Charles Murray and his and Herrnstein’s “Bell. Curve” are national treasures.)

  3. The debate over the Bell Curve along with debates about vouchers for school choices opened my mind to conservatism. The left wing responses to these issues are painfully obtuse.

  4. I was born and raised a Democrat. I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984. In 1992, I had a Clinton-Gore bumper sticker on my car. The first two years of the Clinton administration cured me of my partisan illusions, and by 1996, I was so far right, I refused to vote for that sold-out RINO Bob Dole and instead voted for Harry Browne on the Libertarian Party ticket.

    When our oldest daughter was born, it was my idea to name her Kennedy, and my wife made me promise that our next daughter would be named Reagan. Four sons later . . .

  6. My wife wanted to name our second son Henry Jackson Lee but I thought that sounded a little too much like a confederate general. He’s becoming such a charismatic little southerner, I’m starting to regret my veto.

  7. I read the Bell Curve. Many mistook it as a racial intelligence predictor (granted in probabilities). But what it really about is the impact of social influences on intelligence and outcomes. Why the high success of Jews, Asians, and Middle and Upper Class Caucasians? Is it nature or nurture? I would argue nurture matters more. And that is somewhat proven by Murray’s next book.

  8. The same things were said (or yelled, rather) about Coon’s “The Origin Of Races.” “It’s awful, it’s racist, it’s what the KKK uses to oppress people, etc. etc. ” OK. But is the book factually incorrect?
    Well, no…

  9. Had a conversation with an atheist that went something like this:

    Atheist: We should live our lives by reason and science, not mythology!

    Me: What do you do when science tells you something you don’t want to hear? Like what if science tells you that blacks are not as smart as whites and neither is as smart as Asians?

    Atheist: Well, that’s not true!

    Me: What if science tells you that?

    Atheist: It can’t tell me that, because it’s not true!

    Me: But WHAT IF science tells you that?

    Atheist: It’s not true!

    Me: OK, I give up. What will you do if science tells you something that is just as uncomfortable?

    Atheist: I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

    Me: I think we’ve already seen what you’ll do.

  10. Regarding the “gifted” programs: My brother was a holy terror, and no matter what evil he perpetrated in school, my mother would back him and yell at the teacher, because her precious little boy was “too smart”; he was “bored in school because it was too easy and it didn’t challenge him.”

    What I could never figure out was… why couldn’t he see boredom as his challenge, and see what he could do to conquer it without hurting others?

  11. An electorate with more stupid voters is good for the Democrat Party, I
    guess, which may explain why feminists don’t give a damn about the
    emerging Idiocracy.
    Anything that helps Democrats is OK with Amanda Marcotte, but this
    trend that feminists have done so much to encourage should concern all
    Americans who have children and grandchildren.

    I think the evidence suggests that Amanda Marcotte is a mediocrity whose talent, such as it is, is to be able to turn in copy on time. I doubt she’s thinking that many moves ahead. What she has to say would be variations on a theme of upraised middle finger.

    I still think your emphasis on academic feminism is misplaced. What that sort of feminism is is analogous to pus: of the inability of academics to set boundary conditions which delineate the distinction between serious intellectual work and grotesque nonsense. The main problem there is the dysfunctions of academe, no the crazy women. A tiny corps of bad attitude lesbianoids is not much of a threat to the larger society as long as people responsible for institutional life see them for what they are.

    Much more influential would be the feminism incorporated into Ellen Goodman’s columns and Anna Quindlen’s fiction. This is feminism for the bourgeois masses and it is frankly malignant.

  13. I would argue nurture matters more.

    The results of more than 200 twin studies conducted over the last century gainsay your argument.

  15. He was indeed a straight A student, but has been a miserable failure since leaving school. Among other nonsense, he’s now on his 4th wife… who hates his guts.

  20. The author of the first piece you link to thinks that IQ is at least fifty percent inherited, if I remember my Bell Curve correctly, and the second piece points to a 50/50 split for nature vs. nurture. Steve Sailer takes the same view. Others in possession of even more specialized knowledge of the question like Richard Lynn think heritability might count for 75% of our brainpower. So the real argument is whether genetics matters only as much as environment or whether genetics matters more. The political implications are enormous either way, given that the fundamental policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans are based on the assumption that outcomes can be equalized across groups, given enough time and money. As a result the Democrats turn life inside out for normal Americans in the quest to make blacks and women be just like whites and men, and the Republicans invade a country with an average IQ of 85 to remake it into a Northern European-type democracy. There are other examples I can come up with, of course, as I’m sure you can too.

  21. The political implications are enormous but given how intermixed race is and how obviously important culture is, the genetic questions are rather low on my hit list right now.

    Although I have to tell you that my breed, is generally recognized to be the smartest of the bovines. Limousins are friggin morons compared to us. And don’t get me started about Herefords.

  22. Actually, in Europe and America the races are surprisingly unmixed despite decades of propaganda suggesting that this is an undesirable state of affairs, much the way religion has stubbornly refused to disappear despite frequent predictions of its imminent demise by the very same people who speak in rapturous terms of our inevitable brown future. And given that even your own sources show that genetics is at least as important as environment, your attempt to downplay stark biological reality is absurd on its face.

  23. “The first 125 pages of the book, which have nothing to do with the subject of race, are perhaps the most valuable part of The Bell Curve. Standardized testing and nationwide recruiting by elite universities have resulted in cognitive segregation, the creation of something very much like a caste system.”

    Back in about 1976, one of my sociology instructors at a no-name junior collage suggested that such was already happening — and that, given enough time, the associated assortive mating might give rise to sub-races of humans. And I’m pretty sure that *he* didn’t make the connection all on his lonesome.

    My point is: I expect that this general idea of those first 125 was already widely current and accepted within sociological circles a full generation before publication of The Bell Curve; thus, their “liberal” smear of Murray and Herrnstein was *doubly* disingenuous, for the “liberals” condemned them for stating-and-popularizing what they themselves already believed

  24. Davis?
    .
    My father has *3* “middle names, one of which is Jefferson. I suspect it’s for Jefferson Davis, rather than Thomas Jefferson.
    .
    By the way, RSM, we may be (very) distant cousins. Years ago, I ran across some genealogy web pages of some relatives … and included in it all were some McCains of northern Georgia and/or Alabama.

  25. My maternal grandmother’s only son was also a failure (and a wino) in life and in marriage (I think he had four different wives in his youth, plus the fifth one in the last few years of his life) — because she was *always* there to make excuses for him. He only turned his life around — in his fifties — after she died and his sisters (and their husbands) refused to make the excuses for him.

    What’s really wierd to me is that my *mother* explained to me when I was a small kid *why* her brother was a waste of protoplasm … and then, when my younger brother started down the same path, though with drugs rather than alcohol, she started doing the same things her mother had done. Fortunately, my brother came to his senses before destroying himself as my uncle had done.

  26. From a reading of her work, I gather that Marcotte comes from a more or less traditional family, against which she rebelled. Her family lives in Texas and it was during the crucial era of her adolescence that Republicans took over the legislature and governorship in Texas. Marcotte thus identifies the GOP — and particularly “the Religious Right” — as her nemesis. It was during the presidency of George W. Bush that Marcotte gained prominence as a “feminist” blogger. However, her feminism is basically just an expression of her partisan loyalty to Democrats and her hostility to Christianity.

    This kind of “feminism” — “Got a vagina? Vote Democrat!” — is to be distinguished from true radical feminism. Marcotte has no actual theory to justify her attitudes, which are merely the prejudices of a partisan. Marcotte has repeatedly supported adulterous womanizers (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Edwards, Anthony Weiner) merely because they were Democrats, and she seems unwilling to acknowledge that male Democrats are among the most abusive sexists on the planet.

  27. Oh, I was a terror myself, but my parents never made any excuses for me. My failure to achieve high grades was my own fault, and I was repeatedly chastised for it. That damned standardized test in the fifth grade — which identified me in the 99th percentile, already reading at a collegiate level when I was 10 years old — was my ruin. Prior to that test, I had been just a disruptive goof-off who talked too much in class. Once I was identified as “gifted,” however, my extraordinary potential was held against me. I could do so much better, my parents scolded me, if only I would apply myself.

    Damn, I hated school. It is strange how much I love learning, but absolutely despise the institutions where learning is supposed to occur. The coercive conformity of the one-size-fits-all regime, where children are poodles in a carnival act, required to jump through academic hoops — this phony make-believe show of “education” is organized not for the benefit of the student, but rather to justify the employment of teachers. The teacher claims credit for the child’s ability, as an output that the school has produced, and once you see through that illusion, you begin to realize that the basis on which our school systems are organized is false, and must ultimately be harmful. I am not sure what sort of school would have been best for me, personally, but I know that the schools I actually attended always viewed me as a problem. There were a few teachers who liked me, and who in some ways helped and encouraged me, but overall the system was organized in ways that were entirely hostile toward me, and other kids like me. Public education in America is an atrocity, an inhuman and monstrous system of waste and cruelty that should be abolished. Everyone who cooperates with the system — every public school teacher, and every parent who sends their child to public schools — is part of the problem.

  28. The thing is, some people never learn that they are responsible for their own problems. I am conscious of my own flaws and failures, and accept responsibility for my inherent limitations and lapses of judgment. Some people simply cannot accept this truth about their lives. They have built up psychological defense mechanisms –rationalizations and projections — that function to externalize blame and, as with the so-called “social justice warriors,” these ego defenses often take political form, so that they lash out at scapegoats whom they demonize as racists, sexists and homophobes. “Sarah” Nyberg insists that he/”she” is a victim of society, and you are oppressing him/”her” if you question his/”her” victim status.

  30. “My stake in America’s future is not merely a matter of rhetoric and ideology, but flesh and blood.”

    Exactly. This is not a hypothetical theory for me.

  31. Nice use of the word “rapturous.” You are reading more into what I wrote than what I wrote.

    The problem with genetics is there are so many variables to draw any big conclusions. I am not saying genetics don’t play a big roll, I think they do to a point. There is a current theory that those Neanderthal genes that groups outside of sub-Saharan Africa have play a big roll too. Ashkenazi Jews are a relatively small group that was very insular for many generations that have had a huge impact on science and music–so is that genetics or culture? I would say both, and it is probably a feed back loop that amplifies the effect.

    Oh, about genetic mixing, completely untrue for black Americans–who probably have 15% to 35% northern European ancestry (depending on your source). http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/how_mixed_are_african_americans.3.html

    Given that, I am going to go out with the theory culture matters more.

    https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/trading-places-bellamy-ameche.png?w=650&h=366

  33. So-called “gifted programs” are merely camouflage for the continued dilution of standards. By separating those children anointed as “gifted,” it allowed the educational establishment to lower the bar for everyone else. Before these programs, there was a single set of expectations. One either succeeded or failed and the chips fell where they fell.

    Of course, that was troubling to many people, so the high achievers were removed from the cohort, the standards were lowered and more students could be lauded as “successes.”

  36. The level of education of parents does not necessarily lead to a lack of intelligence or achievement on the part of offspring. When I grew up, all of my friends and I had college educated fathers employed in white collar jobs. None of my friends’ mothers had any post-secondary education and none were employed outside the home while we were growing up. This is not to say the mothers were uneducated. Rather, the quality of the secondary education they received was infinitely better than that available today. Our mothers were well-read. They demanded that we speak and write correctly. They insisted upon high standards of behavior.

    The Leftist/Progressive agenda has been about the destruction of Marriage and Family. To accomplish this, women had to enter the work force en masse. The Feminist push for “equality” has led to the “assortive mating” we see today, as more women pursued college educations and jobs to the exclusion of parenting. Throw in the post Baby Boom generations inability to delay gratification for various wants, necessitating mothers working to pay for the cable bill or the zillion square foot McMansion, and you wind up where we are now.

  37. Growing up in Texas in a “traditional family” does not turn you into Amanda Marcotte (although maybe her parents dropped her on her head or something). Then again she did go to college in Austin.

  38. You’ll notice she went to a rank-and-file private college in Austin, i.e. she didn’t get into UT. You’ll notice she did not undertake any graduate study, even though she was on the staff (of UT, as I recall) for 8 years. In New York, college staff can commonly enroll in courses, gratis. Not sure if it works that way in Texas, but if it does, she did not avail herself of the opportunity, even thought she did not have child care responsibilities.

  39. Again, some years ago in a discussion of her moderated by Prof. KC Johnson, a woman who claimed to have been the mother of a young man in Marcotte’s social circle ca. 1994 chimed in with her take. Her assessment: at age 17, Marcotte saw herself as a sophisticate among rubes, and was resentful she received no recognition for that in the society in which she lived. I hesitate to use words which are clinical terms of art, but I think that’s a feature of what’s commonly called narcissism, and she’s been doubling down ever since. Contrast Marcotte with Helen Gurley Brown, a woman who carried with her scarcely a hint of her Appalachian upbringing. Unlike Marcotte, she had actual accomplishments to her credit, and, unlike Marcotte, she wasn’t angry nor was she vitriolic about the people around whom she’d grown up.

  40. My great-grandparents tried to name my grandfather after Robert E. Lee but didn’t know his middle name, and thus guessed “Ernest” rather than “Edward.”

  42. It’s not just that Harvard marries Harvard because that has always happened to some extent — what’s interesting is as women entered traditionally male occupations doctors started to marry doctors rather than nurses and managers marry managers rather than secretaries and so on… This has created enormous class differences that along with the phenomenon of large subdivisions/planned communities self-segregating based upon class as opposed to a neighborhood/town model where blue collar lived within the same school district as white collar. We are starting to have actual classes in America that are harder and harder to move between.

  44. You’re the one who first brought up the question of mixed races, so you provide the links, why don’t you? Maybe this time they won’t undercut your own claims.

  47. I blew out the top of those standardized tests in elementary school as well, but the school still didn’t figure out that I was being bored to tears in school. It wasn’t until I got into a study by a Northwestern grad student who had the idea of having kids in the 11-15 age bracket or so in the Midwest take the SAT and see how they do that they finally admitted that I really was that far ahead of my peers (getting a 780 Math score at age 13 is pretty undeniable).

  50. Nonsense. The way you teach smart kids is entirely different from the way you teach dumb kids. The latter require a great deal of rote memorization that would bore to death the former.

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