Even as we relish the celluloid triumphs of Forrest Gump, IQ 75, along come a couple of social scientists with a cruel prediction: In the new America, intelligence rules - inherited intelligence.
"Success and failure in the American economy," argue Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, "are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit."Their new book is "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," and rarely has social science - three pounds and 852 pages worth, including 44 tables, 93 graphs, seven appendices and 108 pages of footnotes - created such a ruckus.
The book contends that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is largely inherited, that it largely (and increasingly) determines the winners and losers in our information-based economy, that it is virtually immutable after early childhood, and that it is possessed in differing degrees by different races.
Blacks as a group, for instance, lag behind whites by 15 points in IQ scores, a difference that Murray and Herrnstein insist cannot be explained by test bias or environmental factors such as poor education or nutrition.
They foresee a society split into a wealthy, high-IQ "cognitive elite" and an impoverished low-IQ underclass. The former will be largely white, they say, the latter largely minority.
But Murray, a conservative policy analyst, and Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist who died recent-ly, caution readers that "it is possible to face all the facts on ethnic and race differences in intelligence and not run screaming from the room."
Possible but not likely, to judge from the clamor the book has provoked. The Times of London says Murray and Herrnstein have written "the year's most reviled publication" and "touched a match to America's most explosive issue." The Washington Times says they've driven "a rhetorical car bomb into the middle of the public square."
President Clinton himself - who has praised Murray's previous work - was said to be outraged by "The Bell Curve."
He's not alone.
Salim Muwakkil, senior editor of In These Times magazine, summarized its message this way: "Black Americans have failure in their genes."
Writing in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, Elijah Gosier recalled his own self-doubts as a fourth-grader, and warned that the book "has the potential to make people stop believing in themselves."
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution compared Murray to what the Greeks called a "parasito," a professional flatterer who was welcomed to the dining rooms of the rich in return for lavishing praise on his hosts.
It all recalled a Victorian dirty book scandal. And while "The Bell Curve" wasn't banned in Boston, it was panned there in a Globe editorial - a full two months before publication.
None of which has hurt sales.
At Shakespeare & Co., a book-shop on Manhattan's traditionally liberal upper West Side, "The Bell Curve" was No. 4 in nonfiction sales and featured in a window display. Ruth Liebmann, a manager, described sales as "brisk times five."
"We're in a neighborhood with a lot of psychologists and educators, so this is the kind of book people feel they have to read, whether their reaction to it is positive or negative," she said.
The book made the covers of Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, with the latter describing Murray as "THE MOST DANGEROUS CONSERVATIVE." When The New Republic scheduled an essay by Murray and Herrnstein on race and intelligence, the staff revolted. So the editors printed 19 rebuttals, creating a debate that took up 29 of the 54 pages in the Oct. 31 issue.
But "The Bell Curve" wasn't making such an impression on talk radio, possibly because the cognitive elite weren't tuned in.
"There's been surprisingly little reaction from listeners," said G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate figure who hosts a syndicated program. "Murray's only saying that intelligence rules. So what's the big deal?"
For all the hype surrounding his book, Murray himself was in no danger of overexposure. There was no book tour, and reporters were asked not to name the Maryland town where he lives for fear of death threats. His publicist said he did not want to talk anymore about "the media frenzy."
"It's damn near hysteria," Murray told the London Times last week. He professed himself depressed by the reaction to "what we think was a responsible, sensitive, humane discussion of a difficult issue."
In the book, he and Herrnstein make these points, many of them well-established by social science research:
-IQ test scores are relatively accurate predictors of how well large groups of people do in life. IQ, or intelligence quotient, will become even more important as the economy demands more and more brainpower, and as high-IQ people keep marrying each other and having high-IQ children.
-A large part of IQ - maybe 60 percent - is inherited.
-Blacks as a group score about 15 points lower than whites on IQ tests, while Asians score slightly higher.
-IQ usually doesn't vary much over life, even when strenuous attempts are made to change it. And even if it can be significantly changed, we don't know how to do it very well.
The last point is crucial, because it allows Murray to downplay the explosive (and fairly fuzzy) issues of genetics and race as peripheral to his conclusion: Most of the welfare state's efforts, such as job training and remedial education, are doomed to fail because most of its intended beneficiaries are too dumb to pull themselves out of poverty.