  | Book Details Title: Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class |
Book DescriptionReview PRAISE FOR COMING APART:“I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.”― David Brooks, The New York Times “Mr. Murray’s sobering portrait is of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction and happiness.”― Wall Street Journal “[An] incisive, alarming, and hugely frustrating book about the state of American society.”― Bloomberg Businessweek “‘Coming Apart brims with ideas about what ails America.”― Economist “[A] timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.”― Publisher’s Weekly “[Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the U.S. exceptional beyond its wealth and military power…religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.”― Booklist (Starred Review) Read more About the Author Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He came to national attention first in 1984 with Losing Ground and most recently in 2012 with Coming Apart. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland. Read more Customers Review: Charles Murray’s new book is fascinating, challenging, important and very useful. He begins by challenging three dogmas: Gender is a social construct; race is a social construct; and class is a function of privilege. This is the current orthodoxy among humanists and social scientists. It is a shaky orthodoxy, however. As he notes, if you enter a university department and ask people (privately) whether or not they subscribe to the orthodoxy they are likely to respond in a nuanced way. This is more likely to happen (I would add) in a hard social science department such as psychology. If you ask the question in an English department you are more likely to receive scowls than sympathetic, nuanced responses. That is because the English department is more likely to see itself in an advocacy role, one with an ideological underpinning that supports what is ultimately a political platform. Subscribers to the orthodoxy are particularly suspicious of biology, which can undercut their position. Since the psychologists are far closer to the sciences than to the humanities (and are already employing such devices as fMRI instruments to see clear differences in the male and female brain) they are far less invested in the ideology. The humanities, however, have taken conscious steps (steps which ultimately failed) to ‘theorize’ the sciences, see them through a postmodern lens and deflate their truth claims.Murray utilizes biology to challenge the orthodoxy and he does so definitively. He comforts us, however, by acknowledging that the results are not to be feared. “There are no monsters in the closet,” but rather a nuanced understanding of human nature and behavior that preserves our sense of human dignity while eschewing judgmental hierarchies that privilege one group over another.On the one hand, this is easily done. There are, e.g., demonstrable physical differences between the male and female brain. There are demonstrable susceptibilities to certain diseases that affect one group and not another. For scientist-specialists within the pertinent disciplines these are widely accepted and beyond dispute.Hence, the book is fascinating in its ability to challenge orthodoxy with state-of-the-art science and point up how odd and strange it is to see certain academics clinging to passé beliefs. That is not, however, the principal purpose of the book. The purpose is to provide the reader with a sense of what is now transpiring in the fields (particularly genetics and neuroscience) that have moved beyond the orthodoxy. This is challenging for two reasons: the nomenclature is difficult and complex and the scientific content is even more complex.Basically, what CM has done is immerse himself in material beyond his sociology/political science/policy comfort zone and taken vast amounts of work, digested it and presented it to the reader in as clear a manner as possible. This work is proceeding at different rates of speed and it promises, ultimately, to revolutionize social science. Hence, this is a futuristic book, brimming with curiosity and intellectual optimism. It says, in my own words, “No serious individual believes in the orthodoxy any longer, but what biology teaches us is not shattering, dangerous and to be feared. Here is where we are in the use of genetics and neuroscience at the moment . . . . Far from any fear of, e.g., genetic determinism, we will become accustomed to seeing a greater role played by happenstance and random occurrence. We will not speak so much of privilege or oppression, but more often of luck.”The book is very challenging because of the complexity of the subject but CM makes it as clear as one could possibly ask. While this is a massive book (500 pp.+) it reads relatively quickly; the core argument is contained within 300 pp., with subsidiary material (appendices, notes, index) of 200 pp. The appendices are both useful and fascinating (a crash course in statistics, an account of sexual dimorphism in humans and an account of sex differences in such things as brain volume). You want to know the nuances of ‘standard deviations’; you want to know the percentage of trans individuals . . . this is now your go-to source.My favorite chapter was the 15th, “Reflections and Speculations.” Here, CM offers his personal views of our current condition. He speculates; he philosophizes; he takes stands. While I disagree with him on some of his policy proposals (proposals which he himself recognizes as unworkable, in some cases) his overall views are powerful and resonant.Note: the book launch for HUMAN DIVERSITY at the American Enterprise Institute is available on Youtube. CM provides a 12-minute summary of the book which is very helpful. He itemizes the major postulates of the book. The “10 Propositions” can also be accessed via the “Look Inside!” feature of the Amazon.com page. They set out the principal points which he wishes to make in the book.Highly recommended. | |
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