“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”
I realize that there's nothing so shocking in this rather tame swipe at the comforts of European life (other than the sheer audacity of a "fellow" at a think tank criticizing others for being disconnected from life). But let's look at the tape again, folks:
“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”
Does the name ring a Bell?
If not, it should, because Charles Murray is an odious and deranged fruitcake whose only claim to fame is having co-written The Bell Curve, the foremost work of "scientific" racism of the last two decades. (He's still at it, incidentally, publishing his worthless "findings" about race and IQ tests all over the less salubrious organs of the U.S. media).
Murray wrote a book, based on "research" that was later demonstrated to be totally fraudulent, stating in bald terms that blacks and Hispanics were inferior by nature and that this was responsible for their lagging social and economic achievement. Its primary practical suggestion was that persons of disadvantaged social backgrounds be discouraged from having children. It was, as Steven Fraser memorably put it, "a chilly synthesis of the work of disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists".
The work has been thoroughly and entirely debunked by a vast group of researchers, thinkers and academics from Steven Jay Gould to Thomas Sowell.
Steyn, of course, with his many friends on the racist right, would doubtlessly have no problem with this sort of work, but I'm sure most of us would feel differently.
There are many, from the Wall Street Journal to his scattershot employer the American Enterprise Institute, who have been counting on the public forgetting Murray's eternal shame, so he could be rehabilitated as a seller of political misdirection. Let's have none of it. I don't know who edits Steyn at Macleans - (s)he'd need to have a strong stomach to digest his egregious taste in show tunes alone - but overlooking the approving quotation of one of racism's best and truest academic friends is an oversight that sullies the whole publication.
For shame.
(LATE UPDATE : Received some comments to the effect that I'm unfairly crying racism and that Murray has not been debunked. I encourage readers to weigh the evidence and make up their own minds. Neither, in my considered view, is correct.)
