Early Career & Time at AEI

Doug Monroe:

Charles, it is such an honor to interview you in 2026 the 250th anniversary of the birth of our nation and the Declaration of Independence. The one thing I would call you is a patriot. You have dedicated your career to thinking hard about the problems Americans face and trying to use your political science and social science skills to think about those problems and suggest solutions. You’re one of the leading, to me, the leading political and social scientists during your age. And I think we’ve heard it said, I don’t know who said this, but we all have our opinions and we’re entitled to those opinions, but we’re not entitled to facts. And so what you typically do is you look at the facts believing that facts are real and when you talk about them, it draws controversy and that’s just what happens when you go into the breach. But what I admire most about you is you’re unafraid to speak the truth and defend it if you believe in it. We need so much more of that.

Charles Murray:

Thank you very much, Doug. Appreciate that.

Doug Monroe:

I thought I would start off. I’d love to talk to you about the Civil War and being here in Burkittsville and Rufop. I think that’s in many ways symbolic of you and your career, that you have gone right into the breach and fought it out and the Emancipation Proclamation came from here and really modernity as we know it in America began in many ways. But let’s start just any comments you could give about the last 35 years with AEI. I know that’s a very important organization to you. The name even means I think what you represent.

Charles Murray:

Yeah. I’m glad to have the chance to say something about AEI because I had several good years affiliated with the Manhattan Institute. That’s where I did Losing Ground and In Pursuit. And I liked the people there and all that. But it’s also true that as I started to work on the bell curve, the man who was president at the time got kind of nervous about that. And to say that I was fired is a little ham-handed. It was going to be more convenient for him if I found someplace else. Well, I found AEI. Chris DeMuth was the president and I have put AEI through a lot in terms of having to field controversy and accusations and the rest of that. And nobody at that institution has ever flinched. With the presidents I’ve worked under being exemplary in that regard. I have put out books and I’ve said to myself, they are going to be really unhappy, never. Wonderful organization. And I have more freedom at intellectual freedom at AEI than any professor at Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Doug Monroe:

That’s fantastic.

Charles Murray:

Of usable freedom, not just theoretical freedom, but usable freedom.

Doug Monroe:

Well, I noticed that today, it’s still true. I’m surprised about the Manhattan Institute because today they would support that kind of truth telling. They’re doing it. What happened?

Charles Murray:

No, I think of the Manhattan Institute very fondly, including Bill Hammett, who was the president at the time who made that decision. It was a case of him just getting nervous and me not fighting it. If I had gone to him and said, “Bill, I really need to pay the bills and so forth. Can we figure out something?” I’m sure that he would have been back. And Manhattan Institute now with Heather McDonald and Christopher Rufo and others is doing cutting edge important fearless work.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. We interviewed Heather McDonald and I’m going to see Chris Rufo in a couple of weeks at UVA. 

What shaped your worldview? Good Capitalism and Becoming a Libertarian 

Doug Monroe: 

To get right into the worldview topic, Praxis Circle is about the worldview topic, the worldviews around the globe and praxis means you know what praxis is as an intellectual concept in the circle is the people that experience praxis together theory and facts and where we go with that, from governance to how we live our lives. My impression in what little I know about your biography is your worldview formed from Iowa to something in the mid 80s, let’s say. Can you tell me about what formed your worldview early on up until say the mid 80s when you got married and some of the stuff in taking religion seriously started happening?

Charles Murray:

I will refrain from doing 45 minutes in answering that.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, no question.

Charles Murray:

Right. Just hitting the highlights. My wife, who also comes from Newton, Iowa, is convinced that a great deal in my worldview comes from growing up in Newton, Iowa, home of the Maytag Company, which was a company town, no question about it, except that it was a really good company. So they paid good wages. They had Maytag Park, they had Maytag scholarships. Well, here’s an example. In the 1950s, they put up plant two, a new plant and Fred Maytag II put in smoke scrubbers on the smoke stacks. No government regulations, no EPA, no nothing. He just thought that it was appropriate to be a good neighbor to avoid putting out too much smoke. So my view of capitalism was shaped by growing up with a father who worked for one of the finest companies in America that exemplified high quality integrity, trustworthiness, all that sort of thing. She says that may not be true of all of capitalism.

Doug Monroe:

Well, it’s not.

Charles Murray:

That’s the first important thing. Second important thing was that politically from the time I went to Harvard until the mid 1970s, late 1970s, I didn’t have strong political opinions one way or the other. I voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. I would have voted for John Kennedy in 1960 if I’d been old enough. I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was, however, the process of being in Thailand and having a lot of insights about the relationship of the government in Bangkok versus the reality in the village that translated into the difference between the government in Washington and the reality in American communities and also a decade of evaluating social programs that didn’t work. And both of those led to Losing Ground and the process of writing Losing Ground made me realize that I was a libertarian who didn’t realize he was a libertarian. That was a very formative experience.

Exposure to Buddhism & Gravitation Towards Christianity 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. There’s a lot I could go with a lot there, but we’re going to come back to some of this. What about being in your Asian influence? You expressed some love of Asian culture and perhaps Buddhism or meditation, I’m not sure what. And there’s a whole version of Christianity that is Buddhist. We actually interviewed a friend of mine, Jay Ford, who was head of religion at Wake Forest, he’s a Christian and Mahayana Buddhism. So anything on that? I’m just curious. It doesn’t sound like it.

Charles Murray:

I was in Thailand for a total of six years, 1965 to 70 and 1972, 73. And I was married to a Thai woman for most of that time and continued to be married to her for 13 years. And I love Thailand. There was a period when I thought I would never come home. There was a period when I was trying hard to get into Buddhism, trying hard because I took seriously Buddhist meditators who were having insights that I thought I would like to share, still would like to share. And I tried to meditate and I just frankly am not very good at that stuff, so I continue to be extremely sympathetic to Buddhism as a religion. Great deal to admire in it. I’ve gravitated in a very gradual process toward Christianity instead.

What’s important to the average American? Shift Away from Marriage 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Shifting gears just a little bit, getting back to maybe some of the hometown stuff of Bethlehem Steel or Firestone or company towns, Kohler, Wisconsin, really was a leader in that. So what’s important to the average American? I think how important is family to you in the ordinary American? That’s my question.

Charles Murray:

Well, I would have answered that question somewhat differently 50 years ago than right now. 50 years ago, 60 years ago is probably better to say. The family was at the center of everything. And if you were a fully grown adult in your late 20s and you weren’t married yet, you were already a little bit of an oddball. And if you never got married, you were quite definitely an oddball, which doesn’t mean that you were necessarily disliked or despised or anything. In the contrary, a lot of single people are favorite characters in our lives, but they were ancillary to an absolutely almost universal commitment to the family.

Now you have fewer than half of males adults are married at this point. I can’t give you the exact statistics for recent years, but marriage seems to be optional now and seems to play a very different role. And Doug, I just will say as a general comment, the last 16 years for somebody my age, I’m 83, have been so revolutionary with regard to America that I don’t kid myself that I can understand what’s going on. Old age, there are certain things you get wiser about trying to assimilate the kinds of technological and political upheavals that we’ve had in the last 16 years for someone my age is I think virtually impossible.

Doug Monroe:

Ditto on that, I will agree with you 100% and you’ve got me by 12 or 13 years. 

What is your worldview? Patriot Committed to American Experiment 

Doug Monroe: 

So getting back to worldview, I think you know what worldview is from a technical standpoint. I’m going to generalize and say it’s your metaphysical reality and the narrative that you attach to that. And some people have on, some people have two or three and they go in and out of them to their advantage. There’s research done on this. So my question is, what is your worldview today, which is a combination of politics, philosophy, et cetera. You’re probably the only one I know who can answer that succinctly. So what is your worldview today?

Charles Murray:

I’m trying to think of a succinct answer.

Doug Monroe:

You’ve done it. You’ve done it. Yeah.

Charles Murray:

It’s a combination of a couple of things. One is I remain committed to the American experiment as the noblest political achievement in history. And I really appreciated in your introduction of me that you called me a patriot and I’ve never had an interview where somebody used that as a descriptor, but you said that and I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” So I remain committed to that. The book I’m working on now, which I hope to finish before I die, is basically taking everything I’ve done and trying to go back and understand how the American experiment was dismantled because it was dismantled.

And I think I will make a contribution if I can do that. As for my worldview now, it is just agnostic about so many things. Do I think AI is going to be our salvation or our downfall? I don’t know. Do I think that genetic engineering is going to be the devil or heaven? I don’t know. All sorts of ways in which the society will change radically over the next couple of decades. I do not have a coherent hope for how that turns out. For a long time in my life, I would have continued to say we can bring back a new incarnation of the American experiment. I think it’s fair to say I no longer believe that’s possible.

Doug Monroe:

From what I’ve read recently in what you’ve written the last 10 years, I would agree with your comments that I see two or 300 years out, but that’s if we don’t destroy ourselves first or blow ourselves up. And so I’m with you on a jump ball. My hope is that we can find the new norm that’s closer to what you and I know and it may be happening, that’s what I pray for. 

How has your worldview changed? Shift Away from Standard Academic Liberal 

Doug Monroe:

So would you say, has your worldview changed since you were at Harvard and MIT or has it evolved?

Charles Murray:

Oh, it’s way different. I was secular at Harvard MIT and I continued to be–not an aggressive atheist at all, and I’ve always admired religion–but I was not religious myself. It was not an important part of my life. It very gradually became a more important part of my life, but that’s over the last 20 years, so that’s fairly late in life. Politically, oh yeah, I was a standard academic liberal from the time I got to Cambridge at the age of 18 until sometime during the 1970s. Standard meaning I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about any particular aspects of it, but that’s the way smart people thought. That’s what I learned when I went to Harvard. And I remember thinking in the early 1970s that I did admire Bill Buckley because the guy was really witty and smart and made you think. And then I said-

Doug Monroe:

I was going to ask you about him, whether you had an experience like him at MIT or Harvard?

Charles Murray:

No.

Doug Monroe:

No? Okay.

Charles Murray:

I knew nobody at MIT or Harvard who was conservative and who gave me access to that way of looking at the world. But I remember thinking to myself that, “Gee, I admire Buckley, but he has to hang out with conservatives and who would want to do that?” And so I continued perhaps for social reasons to be a standard academic liberal for several years after that.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. You were not in Mary Eberstadt’s book about those that moved from left to right, were you? I don’t think-

Charles Murray:

I don’t think so, because I was never acting on [inaudible 00:17:10].

Doug Monroe:

She has like eight or nine people she wrote about a lot of it.

Charles Murray:

You just simply will not find anything political that I wrote before the 1980s.

 On Individualism and Being a Madisonian 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. So I want to get you to comment on an observation I have about you. I don’t know necessarily the right word, but I think you’re a believer in individualism or George Weigel might call it personhood, that there’s something important about the person in contrast to statistical analysis and that kind of thing. I see it in human accomplishment. I see it in your writing. Could you comment on that?

Charles Murray:

Yeah. Even before I was religious, I believe that life has transcendental qualities and I’ve always avoided trying to define what I meant by transcendental, but it was in contrast to the view that we’re a collection of chemicals and we are activated at a point in time and we survive for 70 or 80 years and then we are deactivated and that’s all there is.

Doug Monroe:

Turn off the computer.

Charles Murray:

Yeah. The object is to spend the time as pleasantly as possible. What I refer to as the European view of human life and I said, “No, that there is a transcendental element to it that’s very important to live a fulfilling human life.” So that’s always been there. And the best way to summarize my views on all of these things involving human nature and the rest of it is to call myself a Madisonian, which I now do. Madisonian meaning that I buy into the view of human nature and of human life that the founders bought into and it has a lot of elements of libertarianism in it in terms of limited government, but it was more complex and nuanced than that. And I also go along with the complexities and the nuances that I think the founders perceived in an incredibly accurate way.

Doug Monroe:

They were true superstars. I mean, you can get 20 to 30 men together primarily, but not totally with that kind of ability, that’ll never happen again. It may in a different way. 

Losing Ground: The Book that Exposed America’s Welfare System

Doug Monroe:

All right, well let’s move away from the worldview. So we’re doing great. We’re moving right along, but let’s get into your work right here and I would pull them out, but we’re going to focus probably on a little bit on losing ground, coming apart, human diversity by the people and then I want to spend significant amount of time. We can cover those fairly quickly, taking religion seriously.

Charles Murray:

I just have to interject here. Do you realize how weird it is to look at that stack and say, essentially that’s my life for the last 40 odd years?

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. You’re one of those that if you start being a fan, it’s hard to keep up. Okay. It really is. There are a few like Roger Scruton and Os Guinness are prolific like you and there are others we follow, but that’s an amazing record there. And so I congratulate you on that. Moving to Losing Ground, can you explain to the audience that were not even born before 9/11 how Losing Ground influenced the reforms under President Clinton in 1996? You get credit for that to some extent, okay.

Charles Murray:

I like to take it as much as I can, even though I have personal doubts about it. But anyway, here’s what happened. Look, you’ve got the 1960s. In which all at once people who were poor became victims who were kind of incapable of helping themselves and that they should be given generous support because their poverty or their disadvantages were not of their own making. It was the system’s fault. Racism played a big role in this discussion. And in any case, during the 1960s, welfare became a problem because first it was a very different way of looking at charity than had existed previous to that. Previous to that, it had been for emergency purposes and the people who accepted it were very apologetic about accepting it and they felt it was shameful to have to accept that help. And by the end of the 1960s, the welfare package that could be put together with all of the programs that had been installed meant it was much easier for women to have babies without getting married and much easier for men to drop out of the labor force than it had been.

Huge change in attitude toward welfare and the obligation of the individual to take care of himself. And by the 1990s, this had gone too far and what Losing Ground did, I think, was expose all the ways in which this was terrible for poor people. It’s not that welfare queens were living off the money of hardworking Americans. That was my main point. It is these are incredibly destructive incentives on all sorts of fronts. That argument got traction and it became morally acceptable to do things to reform the welfare system and be able to say, honestly, I’m doing this because we have a miserable situation for poor people and we’re going to try to improve it. So I think maybe Losing Ground did play a role in opening up the moral respectability of reforming welfare.

Doug Monroe:

It’s amazing to me that you saw that so early from 1950 to 1980 and you started writing about it so early. I think you’re ahead of the curve kind of person and that’s why you’re a prophet in some ways as a social scientist. 

What has happened to the welfare state today? It’s corrupting us. 

Doug Monroe: What has happened to the welfare state? The other side of this coin is the growth of the federal government. That to me is if you get below the principles and philosophy, it’s really all about that in politics in this country is, do you want limited governor or not? To get back to the welfare state, what has happened to it since? I have a hard time knowing that since 1996. Are you in touch with that to the same extent?

Charles Murray:

I discovered a few years ago how out of touch I was because I had not kept track of the incredible growth in welfare payments that is now accessible. I wrote a book that we’ll probably talk about called In Our Hands, which advocated a guaranteed basic income. And at the time I wrote it in the early 2000s, it was $10,000 a year. It would be more now, of course. But I was in a debate in the late twenty-teens about my proposal and my opponent in the debate was arguing people under the current system are already getting more than your guaranteed income. And he cited chapter and verse for the numbers that are out there and I had not been keeping up. So the degree to which you can live a comfortable living by playing this system is far worse now than it was in 1996. An order of magnitude worse perhaps.

Doug Monroe:

Right, right. Phil Graham has written on that and he’s divided all the income from Bill Gates down to me or somebody around here across the street into quintiles. And so the bottom quintile is, we were talking about this last night somewhere, I think in the 50,000s, but half of that is earned and half of that is unearned. So the unearned part would be the welfare and then the next quintile is only slightly larger, higher. It’s in the 60s, but that’s all earned. So that’s all I know.

Is there a way to incentivize work through the welfare system? Yes.

Doug Monroe:

I want to shift and ask you my wife’s question, okay? I would argue that even conservatives like me and perhaps you have accepted the welfare state to some extent. We don’t want starving people across the street. We want to help those that we can. Here’s the question, could we not design a system that starts out with unearned income, but as you earn it, you make more. In other words, your welfare payments decline, but as you earn more, you make more. So there’s not a disincentive not to work. Would that be possible?

Charles Murray:

Well-

Doug Monroe:

I’m sure you’ve heard that.

Charles Murray:

It has to be done very carefully because if you just do it step by step, so basically you’re working an extra 20 hours a week and your incremental marginal increase in income is a few percent, uh-uh, that’s not going to work. My own solution in my proposal for universal basic income is that everybody gets it up to something I think at the time I first wrote the book 20 odd years ago up to a pretty high number, $30,000 in those dollars. You didn’t have to give back any of the grant and once you hit the $30,000 earned income level, you had a very small beginning of reduction in the grant, but by that time there are very few people that are going to quit their job and get the full grant rather than keep the $30,000 plus most of the grant. So it can be done, but very few welfare systems have done a good job of designing it so that’s the way it actually is done.

Doug Monroe:

I don’t have time to get into that, I would love to. I don’t feel like I know quite enough about UBI. My observation is prior to COVID there was more discussion about it than there is now. I think we’ve been distracted by Trump debates and so on.

Charles Murray:

A UBI would only work if it replaces the entire welfare state. I can’t emphasize this enough. If it is an add-on to the current benefit package, forget it will have all the negative effects that people say it will. If it replaced everything so that you had an electronic check deposited to a known bank account at the beginning of every month and all of your friends and relatives knew you would get another check like that the next month all at once you have agency in a way that you have not had agency before if you’re a poor person. An income stream gives you a kind of agency you didn’t have before and what I want to do is to install that as a way for people who are at the low end of the totem pole to be able to do a couple of extremely important things.

One is you have a lot of people who aren’t going to ever earn a large amount of money no matter how hard they work. They deserve not just an existence, they deserve a comfortable style, lifestyle. Well, working a minimum wage job, both partners plus a UBI would let people, even at very low paying jobs, have a comfortable lifestyle and that’s a good thing. The second thing it would do is it would give somebody with low income a way to accumulate resources and take risks and go out and try things, which they can’t do now. So those are my reasons for thinking a UBI would be a good thing, but my catch is politically utterly unrealistic. We’re never going to get rid of the entire welfare system and replace it with the UBI.

Doug Monroe:

But you think it’s still a political topic of conversation. Is that fair to say?

Charles Murray:

Yeah, it is, but I’m not particularly in favor of the UBI as it is proposed by those people who are still advocating it.

Doug Monroe:

They’re adding to what we have here, and that’ll bankrupt us further. So that’s obvious. 

Is there systemic racism in America today? Yes, against whites. 

Doug Monroe:

I would say by the 1990s, I was a dad and very involved in the investment banking, corporate finance, M&A, private equity business. But as a white Christian male, I was starting to feel uncomfortable in my own nation. And I would say by the summer of 2020, I felt like Satan okay, and I’m not exaggerating. And so here’s my question. Compared to what we remember in the 60s and 70s and I remember segregation vaguely, I was born in 55. Is there systemic racism in America today?

Charles Murray:

Well, yes, there is. There has been for years and years and years. The difference is that starting in the last couple of years, people have started calling affirmative action what it is, which is systemic racism. And for a long time that was justified by arguments that, well, it’ll be temporary. That’s what the Supreme Court said in the Bakke Decision. In 25 years, we’ll be able to get rid of it because we’ll no longer have the systemic anti-black racism. It has was justified on you’ve got to kickstart progress after people were disadvantaged for so long. There are all sorts of arguments, some of which were pretty good justifying affirmative action, but it was always racially, systemically discriminatory.

It was always racially systemically discriminatory. Are there still a fair number of Americans who are irrationally hostile to blacks, white Americans who are irrationally hostile blacks? The answer is yes. Do I think that it is deep and broad? Not really. I am stunned by the degree to which for a long time now white Americans have supported things that were to their own disadvantage and supported them often by large majorities. So, short answer to your question, systemic racism against blacks was once a problem in this country, no question about it. The magnitude of that problem has radically diminished and probably was almost non-important by the 1970s. Whereas systemic racism and the hostility that goes with it of non-whites toward whites has been stunning.

Coming Apart: Why the focus on whites only? To take race out of it.

Doug Monroe:

All right, let’s move. We’ll be commenting on this more as we go forward because all these topics are interrelated. Let’s move to Coming Apart. I think you did a brilliant thing there in only writing about whites.

Charles Murray:

I learned my lesson in The Bell Curve.

Doug Monroe:

Explain why you did that. Was it necessity or was it brilliance? I’m not sure. But it was brilliant.

Charles Murray:

I’ve limited Coming Apart to whites only for a couple of reasons. One was to give a finger to my critics. Okay, you want to go after me unfairly for things that I am imputed to believe about race that I don’t. I’ve got a solution, I’m not going to talk about race. But it was also partly, I am not exaggerating when I say that The Bell Curve was perceived as a book about genetic differences and intelligence between blacks and whites. There are all sorts of people who say that’s the topic of The Bell Curve-

Doug Monroe:

I read it and I didn’t have that impression, I did not have that impression.

Charles Murray:

It’s not remotely the topic, and there were important things that Dick Herrnstein and I was saying in The Bell Curve that deserved to get more attention, and a lot of what went into Coming Apart was the argument of losing… I’m sorry, of The Bell Curve, but presented only in terms of whites, which allowed people to actually read the book and take on board what I was trying to say.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, it’s been a great seller. And I think I sent you a clip of Rusty Reno referring to it. It’s a great metaphor and you’re good at creating metaphors that get your message across. 

Coming Apart: Belmont vs. Fishtown Social Class Divide 

Doug Monroe:

Let’s talk a little bit more about Coming Apart and can you explain, this will be hard, but Belmont and Fishtown and how the split occurred by 2012 even. Okay, and we’re going to focus on the topic of elites, that is a very hot topic now. But just could you explain Belmont and Fishtown to the audience? Here’s the author.

Charles Murray:

Sure. First, the origin of the words themselves. I wanted a word that represented upper income, highly educated population. Belmont, Massachusetts was the home of Richard Hernstein, my co-author in The Bell Curve, and is the classic intellectual upper middle class neighborhood, so that was easy. And then I was looking around for a white working class neighborhood, preferably an urban white, urban class neighborhood, there are very few left. And one of the few that survived until about 20 years ago was Fishtown in the northern part of Philadelphia. So that’s what they represent. But how is it that we got a separation into what I call a new kind of class system, which are symbolized by Belmont and Fishtown? And the answer has to do with the importance that intelligence took on in determining success in life and started basically in the latter two thirds of the 20th century.

For a long time being bright helped in terms of success in life, but it became really, really important as technology advanced during the 20th century. The example I like to use is to compare the options open to a person with extreme mathematical ability but no social skills in 1920 versus 2010. And the answer is in 1920, he could become a math professor or an actuary. In 2010, the guy can juggle offers from quant hedge funds versus Silicon Valley for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because of the increased value of their skillset. Well, the same thing happened across the board in occupations. At the same time that was going on, the increased economic importance of high IQ, you had the colleges become a systematic sorting machine for plucking out the smartest kids in the country, I’m talking about the elite colleges. Harvard in 1950 was not an intellectually elite school. The faculty was, but not the students. The students were mostly affluent Northeastern kids from social-

Doug Monroe:

500 miles circle-

Charles Murray:

Yeah, roughly, exactly.

Doug Monroe:

Right around Harvard.

Charles Murray:

And some of them were smart. Some of them were real smart and some of them weren’t. That all changed in a single decade. By the time I got to Harvard in the fall of ’61, most of the kids were public school kids and the mean SAT scores of the incoming freshman class had gone up by well over a standard deviation, which means the average Harvard student in 1950 would have been in the bottom of 15% of the class by 1961. So, imagine that going on nationwide, that sorting process, well, guess what? It turns out that people flock together and when you get a whole bunch of smart people in a community, it changes the nature of the balance of cultural power in that community. And we started to develop these extremely affluent, highly educated enclaves that we’ve gotten used to now, but it’s quite a new phenomenon. It’s a different way of sorting social classes than existed a century ago.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. Just from my observation, I think the turn really radically turned somewhere between you and me. It might have been right about when I got in college. I would say no one ever gets into Yale, I don’t know who goes there, just no one gets in from the South. People do get into Harvard occasionally and if you’re perfect on your math SATs, you might get in MIT. And also it’s the need for a college degree was just not the case in my dad’s era. He died at age 93 a couple of years ago. You didn’t need it, but that is not the case. 

Coming Apart: Has the social class division increased since 2012?

Doug Monroe:

Has the division between Fishtown and Belmont increased since 2012, would you say?

Charles Murray:

Two answers. If you want to talk about the real Fishtown, what’s happened, it could be symbolic of what’s happened to the nation as a whole. Fishtown is now chic. It has been all these young artistic types and so forth. It was cheap rentals in Fishtown compared to the rest of Philadelphia, they moved in. And so, what used to be bars that sold beer at a bump and pretzels are now little fancy places with all sorts of fancy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and so forth. So the real Fishtown has just disappeared and become gentrified. The fictional Fishtowns, the working class communities, the difference is absolutely… Well, is it worse than in 2010? No. The deterioration has slowed. So, when I wrote Coming Apart, you were down to about 50% of males 30 to 49 who were married, which is an incredible reduction since the 1960s.

And since then it has not gone much further down, but it was already down a lot. Similarly, the white, out-of-wedlock birth rates have not gone up a lot since 2010, but they were already quite high by 2010. So, there has been stagnation in the magnitude of the class division since I wrote Coming Apart, but absolutely no way in which things are better than they used to be.

Doug Monroe:

It kind of stabilized at a low level, maybe something like that, that’s your impression.

Charles Murray:

Yeah, for example, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate, which skyrocketed in the 1960s and ’70s and then slowed and plateaued out at about 70%. And that’s been plateaued out for 20, 30 years now and the same thing has happened on the white side.

Coming Apart: Was the 2016 election the revenge of Fishtown? 

Doug Monroe:

This is just an opinion question, but I think President Trump in 2016 stepped on a wave he didn’t even know was there.

Charles Murray:

Stepped on a what?

Doug Monroe:

A wave. A political wave that he didn’t even know was there and he’s developed it quite well since. He’s very good at that. But could you view the 2016 and maybe even MAGA as the revenge of Fishtown or that kind of thing? Have you ever thought about that?

Charles Murray:

Oh, yeah. And in fact, I saw during the early part of the 2016 presidential campaign, I already, in fact wrote a piece of the Wall Street Journal in which I said basically that what Trump is drawing on are the divisions, the polarization that occurred, and that I was comfortable with. What stunned me was Trump’s success in winning the presidency. I wrote a draft of that Wall Street Journal article, which was going to come out the week after the New Hampshire primary when Trump had already done better than expected in Iowa and so forth. And my draft began, “As Trump fades into the rearview mirror.” And my editor at the Wall Street Journal said, “Maybe we better change that opening to the, because all at once we realized Donald Trump wasn’t going anywhere, which is a huge shock to me.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. I’ll never forget waking up my wife when it was clear. That election was called pretty early and she was asleep. I said, Honey, you ain’t going to believe this one. You ain’t going to believe this one. But it’s crazy, American politics. 

Coming Apart: Is Europe a Warning to the United States? 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. So the last question on Coming Apart, you do talk about alternative futures I think in the end. What do you have to say about that? You do mention the European model and so on. You may have answered that already and you don’t know.

Charles Murray:

No, I haven’t because I saw the European model as being the canary in the coal mine for the Americans that Europe was ahead of us with the word ahead is probably inappropriate in this case in terms of a variety of problems that we were already starting to experience. One of them is just the huge cost. The also of the welfare state as you have as a population ages and a second thing was the need for constant immigration. But the problem is as the immigrants come in, they are not people who share the values that made the Swedish social welfare system work. And so, all of these things America will observe and we will learn from that.

Well, that was not entirely wrong. Now, how well we’re learning is another question, but I think that it’s clear that the United States has started a backlash against wokeness that far exceeds anything that we’ve seen in Europe. We see Europe trying to develop those kinds of movements, but none of it has been as decisive as it’s been in the United States. So, maybe Europe has served as the canary in the coal mine for us.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. I think Rodney Stark certainly and Sam Huntington would say that the Islam problem, the Muslim problem in Europe will drive a lot of it. We don’t have it to the same extent here. You’re starting to see it rise with some in the DP. 

The Bell Curve: Are people determined by genes or environment? Genes. 

Doug Monroe:

We’ve moved beyond Coming Apart now. We’re going to go into eventually Human Diversity. I would love to do a full interview just on that, but we’re just going to hit the very high points there.

Charles Murray:

Okay.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a very thorough book. Let’s put it that way.

Charles Murray:

Pretty dense.

Doug Monroe:

Your research is amazing. As I mentioned, praxis, we’re Praxis Circle and so it’s theory and facts. As it relates to that book, it’s nurture versus nature, what you’re born with, what the environment you experience. Which is more important?

Charles Murray:

Nature or nurture?

Doug Monroe:

Nature and nurture.

Charles Murray:

There’s actually an answer to that question.

Doug Monroe:

Okay.

Charles Murray:

And in terms of a technique that has been used in literally thousands of studies and that is one in which you compare outcomes for siblings and preferably for twins. And the reason this is so valuable is that ordinary siblings or twins who are not monozygotic, are not identical, they share 50% of their genes. Monozygotic, identical twins share 100% of their genes. Those twins are born into a family at the same time in the history of the marriage, history of their parenting skills, the socioeconomic status of the family. All of these things, both of these twins are born into the same environment, but the siblings who are monozygotic and the siblings who are dizygotic, half twins or versus full, they are different. Well, let me rephrase that. If you see a difference between the outcomes, let’s say in the number of arrests among identical twins versus the shared relationship of number of arrests among non-identical twins, the only explanation for that difference in arrest rates is genetic.

So that’s what you want to do with a whole lot of traits. You’re comparing the 50% shared genes versus the 100% shared genes and you can use a series of equations that are called the Falconer equations to disaggregate the results into the component of the variation that can be explained by genes, the component that can be explained by the shared environment that the twins have and the rest, which is a combination of measurement error and the non-shared environment. An example of the non-shared environment is you’ve got two kids, they go to the same school, but in their civics class, one of them gets an absolutely sensational teacher and the other one is sent to the class of a very mediocre teacher and the inspiring teacher makes a big difference. Okay, that would be non-shared environment. Okay, that’s a long preface to the answer, how much is genes, how much is the shared environment?

The answer is very consistent. For virtually all traits, the importance of genes is way bigger than the importance of the shared environment. And the implication of that for public policy is pretty dramatic. What it says is that when you jack up the environment, let’s say for a disadvantaged child to improve their school performance, let’s say, you are not working with a cause that has that much impact relative to their genetic heritage. That is not a basis for saying, oh, it’s all determined by genetics. There’s still a role for the environment to play, but people are not nearly as plastic as liberal public policy has assumed, not nearly as plastic.

The Bell Curve: Can human beings change their cognitive abilities? 

Doug Monroe:

You get extensively into that and we’ll come back to that about human diversity, but I think you talk about a set point that most individuals have or you can detect that relates to that in the end of the book.

Charles Murray:

You can have temporary effects but, I will give you an example of definite experience of my own, of an environmental change radically changing my cognitive ability. I took Evelyn Wood’s speed reading course when I was a graduate student. And in my case, the advertisements were exactly right. By the end of that course, I was reading at the rate of a couple of thousand words a minute with excellent comprehension. It was amazing. And they’ve told me when I finished the course, “You must read everything this way.” You can’t start a novel and say, “But I’m going to mosey through this one just for fun. You’ve got to always use this.” And of course I didn’t do that and of course within six months I was back at my pre-intervention reading speed and the same thing has happened with attempts to jack up IQ can be done a little bit sometimes in the short term but not in the long term.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. I had the same experience with speed reading, by the way. 

The Bell Curve: What is IQ and does it determine human behavior?

Doug Monroe:

Okay This is a question you get a lot, but I’ve got a couple follow up questions. What is IQ and how is it determinative in human relations?

Charles Murray:

IQ is the ability to figure things out. Now what the things are varies and a lot of people are really good at figuring some things out and not other things out, but if you take overall for most people, there is a mental quickness and ability to juggle competing things in your mind which lets you come up with accurate statements that people who have lesser levels of intelligence have a hard time coming up with. This is most obvious in math where anybody who has taken enough math has hit a wall where they simply cannot do it anymore and we know people who say, “That’s easy and they’re just doing things we cannot possibly do.” Well, the same thing happens with non-mathematical intelligence as well and it doesn’t mean that people with high IQs are wise. It doesn’t mean even that they have a lot of common sense necessarily, but that they are mentally very good at figuring things out.

Doug Monroe:

I want to ask that same question again a different way. So it sounds like you would say that high IQ has nothing really or very little to say about your moral persuasion or your character or if you have a high IQ and you’re evil, you’re just evil a lot faster and better.

Charles Murray:

Doug, I think I had a friend, Ed Crane, who was head of the Cato Institute for many years until sadly he died recently. The thing he said when The Bell Curve came out was, “Charles, you’re saying that everyone has a moral compass, but some are more susceptible to magnetic storms than others.” That’s perfect because there is a correlation between high IQ and for example, the ability to make long-term calculations and foresee long-term consequences of behavior. There is a relationship between low IQ and a very short time horizon so you can’t really take into account the secondary effects that are going to be disastrous and you do things that are really stupid.

That doesn’t mean that you are inherently immoral and so forth. In a way, it’s easier to have a lot of the qualities of wisdom and of moral judgment and so forth with a high IQ than without it, but it doesn’t mean that you did not have all sorts of people with quite pedestrian IQs who lived morally exemplary lives in a society which did not create magnetic storms and to pursue this metaphor perhaps farther than I should, I look upon what happened from the 1960s onward in social policy to have been one gigantic magnetic storm for people with not very high IQs.

Human Diversity: What was your motivation in writing the book?

Doug Monroe:

Moving to your motivation to write Human Diversity, were you motivated to respond to postmodernism, cultural Marxism, radical feminism, all these things that created DEI and so on. It seems to support, Human Diversity seems to support counter themes to those great movements. Is that…

Charles Murray:

Here’s where I would say there is-

Doug Monroe:

Do you get my question?

Charles Murray:

The question really is say I didn’t have to go after the things that created DEI. What I wanted to do was to identify the current state of knowledge about differences between males and females, differences between blacks and whites and Asians, differences between poor people and rich people. What do we know and we’re going back to Pat Moynihan’s, “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.” What do we know about these differences? And the answer is, we know quite a bit. And so what we know about the differences between males and females is that a lot of them are inborn. You have major differences in the frequency distributions of let’s say the personality characteristics such as conscientiousness and openness and neuroticism and the rest of it, extroversion. There are for some of these characteristics and not others, very substantial sex differences and these are not manufactured.

They’re not the result of sexist upbringings. They are the result of, wait for it, men and women are different in many important ways. And similarly, races are different in many important ways that are inborn and that is not or should not be a controversial statement. We know a lot about the genetic sources of those differences. They do not rank human beings on an inferior superior continuum at all. Different races are up and down on different outcomes that you want to measure, but are blacks genetically different from whites? Yes. Are there fuzzy edges with people who are part one and part the other? Yes, of course there are. Does this prevent you from drawing scientific conclusions about underlying genetic sources of these differences? No, it doesn’t. So human diversity, I think I can say in its presentation of these data is very non-political. I don’t think that you can come up with a politically biased statement in my description of what the facts are.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. Okay. I think it can be written to refute DEI, but it can also be observed to embrace it. It’s presenting the facts as you see them and as the research was presented to you. 

Human Diversity: Are gender and race social constructs? No, not at all. 

Doug Monroe:

Let’s take each one of these one by one, gender, race, and class. We’re not going to go in depth to each one, but just, there’s a consistent title in the section headings, gender and race are social constructs. Gender and race are social constructs, true or false and why?

Charles Murray:

They have an underlying biological reality with fuzzy edges so that one is not required to say that every single solitary male is a biologically normal male and every single biologically female, biological female is totally typical there. There are peculiarities that happen. The percentages of births that involve these peculiarities is minuscule. I mean, we’re talking fractions of 1% for some of these differences. So things which would allow you to say that sex is not binary, you’re appealing to a very small part of the population that is not entirely biologically typical male or female.

Doug Monroe:

So basically you are saying-

Charles Murray:

I forgot where I started…

Doug Monroe:

No, no. Well, you’re saying that gender and race are not social constructs. They’re actually, there’s reality there. I just was reading last night your really insightful observation that the more women, for example, become successful in the work world, the more freedom they have, the more wealth they have, the more the differences increase among women than lessen. The more they become like what might be their natural self, is that true?

Charles Murray:

Yeah. It’s one of the things which has been replicated with studies from Scandinavia and from a variety of other countries that is counterintuitive. Because, especially the Scandinavian countries have utterly gender equal laws in every conceivable way. And in Sweden, you have women going into much more traditionally female occupations than you do in Pakistan or African countries or many Asian countries. And the easiest explanation for this I’m simplifying obviously is if you are a well-educated young woman in Pakistan in a poor country, your job opportunities are not nearly as broad, nor are you likely to have the household income that you would have if you lived in Scandinavia and so you become an engineer not because you like engineering, but because you have the ability to and so you take on an occupation which you’re not that drawn to.

In Sweden, a woman doesn’t need to become an engineer in order to meet certain economic needs and she is freer to choose from a wider choice of occupations and without anybody trying to push her in that direction, she tends to go with traditionally female oriented occupations. So, that’s been observed so consistently that it’s not really a subject of controversy anymore.

Human Diversity: How has feminization changed America since the 1960s? 

Doug Monroe:

Let’s dwell a little bit more on females, and this is more your opinion than your scientific opinion, but just observing the world around you. When I came along, I was the last all male Morehead Scholar group in 1974. The next year females were also eligible to be Moreheads, kind of like the Rhodes Scholarship thing. And so, women have done amazingly well in the job world and are dominating in universities and in business in some respects. Just as an average American, how has that changed America since the ’60s in politics today? What do you see there?

Charles Murray:

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Helen Andrews that she’s been publishing to a lot of attention recently.

Doug Monroe:

Yes. I hope she writes a book on this.

Charles Murray:

Yeah. She makes the case that the feminization of the law and the feminization of college administrations has been a disaster and that it’s because of characteristics that are to some degree inborn female tendencies. For example, in the law to be more forgiving than males are, to be less inclined to say, “Well, maybe the law is badly written, but this is what the law is, and so this is what the consequences have to be.” That it is females who are more likely than males. And again, we’re talking about tendencies rather than yes, no differences.

But in the case of if you have 60% of attorneys that are women and 60% of judges that are women instead of 10%, that you have a very different legal system than you had before and a worse one. And so point number one, I am not an expert on these characterizations of the direct effects of feminization. It all makes a lot of sense to me.

It all makes a lot of sense to me that there are virtues in terms of institutions functioning for certain kinds of institutions where ones that are dominated by men have an advantage. Among other things, if they’re dominated by men, the women who go into those fields tend to accommodate themselves to the male way of looking at these problems, such as a legal problem. Whereas if they’re dominated by women, males who continue to go onto that are going to be under increasingly pressure to accommodate themselves to women’s ways of looking at these problems.

Doug Monroe:

Exactly. And I know that just being involved in single-sex high school education pretty heavily for about 20 years, every head of school will tell you that if you have an all-male school versus an all-female school that it’s very different in the way you have to run the school and there’s no choice about it. You know what I mean? It’s just you do that or your life becomes miserable. 

Human Diversity: What’s wrong with men in America today? Not being men. 

Doug Monroe:

So here’s a question. I’m going to dedicate this to Nick Eberstadt. What is wrong with men today in your opinion? Loaded question, but…

Charles Murray:

They have become wusses. Toxic masculinity is a very popular phrase that people throw around and it has gotten to the point that I think that people take the word toxic for granted. There are a lot of good things about traditional masculinity. And I’ll tell you the ones that I grew up thinking were the good, that if you are a real male, you protect women. You don’t make fun of them, you certainly don’t abuse them in any way. There is no more unmanly thing you can do than to strike a woman. And that when the ship goes down, your job is to stand at the deck and wave goodbye with a smile as the children and your wife go away in the boats. Those, that’s what masculinity is and it includes a willingness to physically defend the situation.

There are lots of things to be said for masculine men and all of those things were denigrated. All of the qualities of males protecting females and being responsible for caring for them and so forth have been treated with derision now for 30 or 40 years. And you know what? A fair number of females kind of like masculine men. So I think we have been at war with natural human nature for 30 or 40 years and it has been far more destructive than I would have ever predicted. And males have given up their desirable characteristics with much less fight than I would have expected.

Doug Monroe:

In my world, they used to call that being a gentleman, okay?

Charles Murray:

Yes. Being a gentleman.

Doug Monroe:

Being a gentleman. And the second thing is I won’t mention who made this observation where I first noticed it, but it takes men to control men.

Charles Murray:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

Have you heard that before, yes?

Charles Murray:

I have not and it just strikes me intuitively as absolutely true.

Human Diversity: Is class a function of privilege? Not anymore. 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Let’s move to class. We’re almost through human diversity. Class is a function of privilege, okay? I think your writing refutes that to some extent. It’s always complicated, but is that true or false class is a function of privilege, why is true or false important?

Charles Murray:

These days… It used to be much more true than it is now, I suppose. I mean, if you take an aristocratic system, obviously you only become a Duke or an Earl in a hereditary title because you’re born to the right person. Okay, so that’s an extreme example, but it’s obvious. But was it true even at the time that our parents were growing up? And if I say my parents, I’m talking about people who grew up in the World War I era and so forth. And it was already not nearly as true as I think it once was because you had all sorts of talent that was not concentrated in the privileged classes. And even at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was beginning to find avenues. And by the middle of the 20th Century, if you were a talented working-class kid, you had lots of people who wanted to get you into college and help you to get into college.

So I would say since the 1950s, here’s what privilege will still do for you. If your father has contributed a $50 million building to Harvard, you are more likely to get into Harvard than someone whose father has not contributed that, okay? That’s fact.

Doug Monroe:

Check.

Charles Murray:

A check. And you know what graduating from Harvard buys you? What it buys you for the last 20, 30, 40 years, but it may be diminishing, is places are interested in giving you an interview. Goldman Sachs wants to interview you, whereas they may not be interviewing at Iowa State because you got into Harvard.

Doug Monroe:

Or UVA or Carolina.

Charles Murray:

Yeah.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, yeah.

Charles Murray:

You got into a highly competitive school and it’s getting in there that they value because those schools have had really good screens for academic talent. And I say that that’s maybe diminishing because these days it’s no longer enough to know that somebody has a Harvard degree or for that manner, a UVA degree because of affirmative action, you have very different distributions of talent throughout that population. The signal that is sent by having a privileged degree these days I think is a lot weaker than it used to be. Well, the short technical answer to your question is class of function of privilege is that all the statistical ways that you can look to answer that question say no, that the individual’s talent, intellectual talent is much more important than parent socioeconomic status.

Does natural law exist? Yes. 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Well, let’s move a little bit out of with a couple of questions, the identity politics area and I think we’ll be about halfway. Are you doing okay?

Charles Murray:

No, I’m okay.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. All right. This is a hopeful thing. Well, let me ask first, do you think that natural law exists in the sense that say a Robert George would or a Thomas Aquinas would, or, you get my question?

Charles Murray:

Yes. I’m hesitating because I’m not sure how to answer it. It would be presumptuous for me to say I think the same way that Robbie George, let alone Thomas Aquinas thought because I’m not well versed enough on all that.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Charles Murray:

Do I think that the moral law as C.S. Lewis describes it… To summarize it very quickly, C.S. Lewis says, “There is a common standard of decent behavior that has cut across all sorts of cultures. We do not know of any culture in which it is considered virtuous to betray people who have helped you. We don’t know of any culture in which it’s approved of to run away from the enemy in a battle.” And he goes through a lot of examples and says that it is God’s way of revealing himself to us this instinctive sense of an underlying moral law. And I read that argument and I’ve come up with all sorts of reasons to fight against it, none of which quite persuade myself. And so-

Doug Monroe:

There are exceptions, but they’re so small. That’s the problem.

Charles Murray:

Yeah, yeah. So I thought that’s an insight and I also think back to the formation of other great traditions in thinking about the ground of the universe. Think about Taoism, think about Buddhism. I’m not an expert on Hinduism, but I’m told they have similar kinds of things that about 600 BC within a couple of centuries period, you had all the great traditions, the Judaic tradition, which were looking at the universe and all of them saying, “There is something going on here which is beyond human creation that we must adapt ourselves to.” So in that sense, I do believe in natural law.

Is it possible to return to a Madisonian view of meritocracy? Maybe.

Doug Monroe:

Throw a little optimism, a little light on there. Do you see any light in the last three years that we could return to more of a Madisonian view of letting individuals succeed or fail based on their own merit as opposed to class orientation whether sex, race, religion, whatever?

Charles Murray:

I would never have imagined an administration repudiating disparate impact as evidence of discrimination. For those who aren’t familiar with that, disparate impact was established back in the early 1970s and it said, “If you have drastically different proportions of Blacks and whites in an occupation that this is prima facie evidence of discrimination,” which is a terrible definition of discrimination and has led us to attribute all sorts of things to racism when that’s not what was going on. Repudiating that is going to go a long way to heal this country.

Now, the Trump administration repudiated it. How long will that last? I don’t know. We already know all the ways in which the universities and also the federal government are trying to evade that, but the progress that has been made, and that also includes the willingness to talk about affirmative action as racist, which did not used to exist. These are heartening signs of progress. I am somewhat surprised that they have occurred.

Doug Monroe:

Could be fishtown, it could be revenge of the bourgeoisie, who knows? That’s what I call Trump, whether you love him or hate him. He’s impressive in his ability to get things done in his work ethic and no one anticipated he would be as prolific in work ability as a man is at age 78, 80 years old.

Charles Murray:

The thing though that I really need to add to my statement about progress is this has gone along with not surprisingly an increase in outright white racism as reflected in the social media and other indicators. There is a sense in which it has come about because whites in a way have said, Is it okay for Blacks to play the race card? Is it okay for Latinos to play the race card? Okay. How about if we whites play the race card?” I personally think that’s disaster, but I don’t know how to prevent that. I don’t know how one says, “We for the last 40, 50 years have been systemically racist against whites,” and not have go along with that a lot of anger and resentment on the part of whites at finally being free to say that. But it had to be done because if this weren’t done, if we continued on the path that we were on from ’20 to ’24, then I think that all sorts of analogies between the 2020s and the 1850s are brought into play.

I thought they were in play during the campaign of 2024 and I think the election of Trump may have played the same role that pushing the release valve on a pressure cooker does that is getting ready to explode. So have we had progress? Yes. Are we out of the woods yet in terms of mortal dangers to American democracy? No, we are not out of those woods.

Is equity a utopian idea? Yes, completely.

Doug Monroe:

Hasn’t history proven that it’s utopian for government to think they can give everyone an equal starting point and manage equal outcomes?

Charles Murray:

It’s not only utopian, it is proven to be utopian in the literal sense. Look, you are never going to get a better environment for trying the egalitarian experiment than the Jewish kibbutzes in the early years of Israel. You had an environment in which people were in survival mode, but they were also extremely idealistic about making this work because kibbutz were revolutionary egalitarian.

Doug Monroe:

Absolutely.

Charles Murray:

Children brought up by the community, not by the individual parents, everybody absolutely equal in how much the money they got and all that. And this was being done by people who were not idealistically committed to it, but is one of the most intellectually gifted populations in the world. So you had enormous human capital that was available for these kibbutz experiments and within a matter of years, every single element of human nature that makes this utopian had reemerged. And that says to me, this is no longer open to argument that human beings, given the best possible circumstances, cannot possibly create egalitarian societies of the type that the idealists want.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, we thought those of us who were old enough that the end of history in ’89 to ’92 had proven that and apparently it hasn’t to a lot of people today. And, I mean, even if you look at every time pure communism, if you want to say no private property has been tried, it’s failed, especially in early Christian community, especially… The only commune that works is the family, that does work.

Charles Murray:

No. The Christian communities didn’t do badly for a while, but it just can’t-

Doug Monroe:

You can’t sustain a nation.

Charles Murray:

No, human nature will out and the denial of human nature, The Blank Slate approach to dealing with human problems is just idiotic. It is scientifically idiotic as Steve Pinker tried to point out and did point out effectively in his book back in The Blank Slate back in the early 2000s and the resilience of The Blank Slate approach is just phenomenal. You still have lots of people who believe it.

Doug Monroe:

It works politically for some reason.

Charles Murray:

Yeah.

Crosstalk Before Break About Pinker 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. I saw him speak and you and Mr. Pinker are similar in your intellectual capability. You’ve made a turn he hasn’t made yet.

Charles Murray:

Yes, which he is unhappy about.

Doug Monroe:

Which we’ll get to that question. It’s about Michael Jordan, okay? But let’s take a break. Would this be a good time?

Charles Murray:

No, I think it’s a good time to take a break.

Doug Monroe:

Are you doing okay?

Define the red/blue social structure that divides America politically?

Doug Monroe:

If you could explain the red blue social structure models that divide America politically… You write about it.

Charles Murray:

I’m trying to think of…

Doug Monroe:

The follow-up question is the political difference in towns, small cities, suburbs, and large cities. That’s my orientation. And I’ll throw in Oswald Spengler who wrote The Decline of the West that felt like culture was based on the peasant and the ordinary people and so on. But there is a divide in this country without question.

Charles Murray – 

Charles Murray:

If I were to try to characterize the red blue divide, it would be very hard for me to keep out of that description. An obvious statement about where I stand, because let me summarize it like this.

Doug Monroe:

That’s okay.

Charles Murray:

To me, the blue model is so far divorced from reality that I don’t see how it has any sustenance. You look at the blue cities and blue states and their voting records on things like immigration, on trans rights, on DEI, on a whole variety of woke understandings of human nature and of race differences and sex differences. And in all these, I’d say you have a bunch of intellectually very smart people who have embraced a view which is scientifically bankrupt. And in the red states, you don’t have the same kind of intellectual firepower going into the zeitgeist, if you want to think of it that way, but you have a much more common sense view of human nature and you have an attitude about what ought to be this country that is still much closer to the founder’s vision than the blue model which rejects the founder’s vision lock, stock and barrel.

By the People: The Dismantling of the American Experiment

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Let’s go right to By the People. Following question. You make an incredibly good argument that the federal government cannot be reformed. To get back to a prior model, a Madisonian model, could you summarize the argument, whether it’s changed since 2015 or not? But it’s a very good argument and I think a lot of people do feel that.

Charles Murray:

Let me start out by saying my one sentence version of what the American Experiment is and people who are watching can say, “Well, does this match up with my understanding or not?” But my version is that the American Experiment is the attempt to prove that people can be left free as individuals and as families and as communities to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they accord the same freedom to everyone else with the government providing a peaceful setting for those endeavors but otherwise standing aside. That’s my understanding of what the founders had in mind and that’s my understanding of what Americans took as their civic religion up until the 20th century.

When we talk about what’s happened to that, I think people fail to appreciate that the load bearing walls were knocked down as early as the 1930s. You see, you had a court case in 1937 Helvering v. Davis and it was a suit filed on the argument that the Constitution does not justify social security, that the Constitution gives no authority to the federal government to deduct wages for a retirement fund. And the defenders of that bill said, “Ah, it’s because of the phrase general welfare in the clause of the Constitution that spells out the enumerated powers.” This is an argument that had been fought out during the constitutional ratification process with everybody saying, “We’re worried that it’ll be interpreted to mean that the government can help the general welfare.” And being assured by Madison and by Hamilton that, “Oh, no, no, no, no. It’s just a meaningless phrase to introduce the enumerated powers.”

In the decision Helvering v. Davis, the Supreme Court explicitly says, “We are rejecting the Madisonian version of the interpretation of the enumerated powers and saying the federal government may operate programs for the general welfare.” It was over. In one sense, it was over with that one decision because-

Doug Monroe:

That is the truck that it’s been driven through. It’s-

Charles Murray:

Yeah, yeah, and the government didn’t drive that truck through until 1964 And that’s when all the things had been potentially possible since 1937 suddenly became actually possible. Other things happened during the 1930s, the redefinition of the Commerce Clause, which allowed the government to regulate almost anything it felt like regulating and other decisions that fundamentally changed the nature of the Constitution. So I would say that whereas the United States continued to be recognizably the same as it had been for the previous 150 years into the late 1950s and the early 1960s that the damage had already been done.

So I think people right now are focusing on what’s happened since 2014 and 15, the rise of wokeness, the rise of Trump. And me being the old guy that I am, I’m saying, “Well, actually you know what? The American Experiment in any meaningful sense had been dismantled between 1937 and 1978. And what we are witnessing now is not some weird aberration that was brought on by the left in 2014 and by Trump in 2016. We are seeing a very natural evolution away from all the restraints that the founders so carefully, tediously, intricately installed to forestall the expansion of government.”

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. That addition was kind of like Jefferson taking out life, liberty, and property and putting happiness in there. You got to be careful with your words.

By the People: Where are we at with government overreach today?

Doug Monroe:

 But so this is kind of like my question with Coming Apart. Do you think it’s gotten worse since you wrote the book in 2015 or has the progress of big brother taking over our lives been halted, stopped, delayed, or changed?

Charles Murray:

Well, we’ve had a situation which has prevailed for a long time, which is that the day-to-day life of people like you and me has never been that seriously affected. If you want to talk about privilege in one sense of the increase in the regulatory state, big brother, the pathologies that were exacerbated by the policies of the ’60s and ’70s, we have escaped most of those. I’m living in Burkittsville, Maryland. We do not have an underclass problem in Burkittsville, Maryland. We do not have a polarization problem in Burkittsville. And in a larger sense, if you go to small city and town America, you can still live in Tocquevillian America to an astonishing degree. The people whose lives have been radically changed are the people without resources. So that if you want to open a small business and you’re doing it on a shoestring, but you are faced with a government which makes you jump through 20 hoops to get the license to open that small business, you face an incredibly different problem from a person with more money faces.

So has it gotten worse for people like you and me? No, it hasn’t that much. Has it gotten worse for the person who doesn’t have much money? I can’t say confidently it’s gotten worse, but it was already quite bad. There are signs of a reversal in the regulatory problem. I don’t know how extensive those have been. I don’t know how many of those are going to disappear as soon as the next administration comes in on the left. Look, I think that we have this problem, Doug. If we don’t have constitutional restraints in place, the natural tendency of government is to increase an indirect quote of Thomas Jefferson, and that is inelectable. That is built into the nature of government. It’s built into human nature to acquire power. We are drifting and sometimes we are going to drift into worse situations, sometimes we’re going to drift into temporary improvements, but very hard to be optimistic long term.

By the People: What can citizens do in response to big government? 

Doug Monroe:

Well, you either have the rule of laws or the rule of men and if your laws can’t hold up, you have the rule of men. And so let’s get to the average person one more time. We just had the election of a new governor in Virginia and I can tell you that we are frantic. Those that would have voted the other way, we feel like a war is developing and we feel like it’s almost like the civil war all over again, except it’s about state politics. And so what can the average person do… You talk about this By the People. What can the average person do to stop a total takeover? You address this.

Charles Murray:

Yeah, I do. In By the People, I had what I consider a very ingenious idea that went nowhere, which is that the government cannot possibly enforce this vast regulatory apparatus that it has. It simply doesn’t have the power. What the government can do is go, a bureaucrat can go to an individual small business person and say, “Here’s this regulation you violated. You owe us a fine of $3,000.” And the guy says, “But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m going to fight this in court.” And the government can say to you, “You try that and we’ll put you out of business.” And the answer is, yeah, they can. They can just simply mount a legal defense that you can’t possibly afford to counter. And I says, “Suppose we had insurance for that. Suppose we had a fund which people could call upon to fight idiotic government regulations and you have civil disobedience. You’re going to be disobeying stupid regulations, but carefully chosen regulations that really are stupid and you can force the government to back off because they can’t possibly make good on all the things they have prohibited.” It’s an ingenious idea, but not all ingenious ideas are practicable, and I’m afraid this one isn’t.

Doug Monroe:

Well, I think what I would say to encourage you, of the genius of your idea, I think a number of nonprofits that are in the business of defense law broaden their mission, and they’re doing more than they would have done 10 or 15 years ago. And groups like the Free Speech Alliance that I’m part of have sprung up. So there is some aspect of the mice helping the lion.

Charles Murray:

But what else can we do? And here’s where I want to return to a statement I made briefly earlier. If you want to live a de facto free life that is not that much different from the way life used to be, get the hell out of big cities. The difference between big city life and not just small towns, but even smaller cities, is huge. And not all the problems go away. We sent our children to Frederick County Public Schools, and they were quite mediocre then, and they, I think, have probably gotten somewhat worse since then. And that’s the fault of the curriculum.

The teachers that we had in those schools included some that were some of the most brilliant teachers I’ve ever run across. Easily the equal of teachers in private schools, but the fact remains there are problems with public education that are going to pursue you even if you come to a place like Frederick County. But on the other hand, we experience none of the anonymity of big city life. And on the bright side, we experience … This is a place that if we have a plumbing problem on a Saturday night at 8:00 and the basement’s flooding, our plumber will be here probably at 9:00 because we are not just an account, we are known. And you can talk about all the ways in which doing your shopping, and knowing people, and your physicians at all the rest is old-fashioned America.

Also, old-fashioned do-it-yourself charity, so that when we had a fire that burned out a family here in Burkittsville some years ago, before the fire was out, there was this collection of things at the church steps of things that people had brought that the family would need to get by, and provisions had already been made for where they were going to live and all that. No organization, just spontaneous. That happens all the time. So you cannot change the United States on a grand scale. You have it within your power to live a life that is a very traditional American life. You can do it.

Doug Monroe:

I think that’s true. And just on the business side, what I’m seeing, I still dip my toe pretty hard in business at both large and small. Where it used to be businesses would compete to go to various states. States would … Now it’s cities. The businesses that can go anywhere, they’re looking at the downtowns, and they will not go to places like Richmond because the city hall is such a joke. They’ll go to Huntsville, or they’ll go to Greenville, or they’ll go to Charlotte.

Charles Murray:

Or they’ll go to Frederick.

Doug Monroe:

Or they’ll go to … Yeah, exactly. Or here.

Charles Murray:

We moved here in 1989. Downtown Frederick at that time was a city of maybe 45,000 people. Downtown was absolutely dead. And now you go to Downtown Frederick and it’s vibrant. Lots of boutique restaurants and so forth. What happened? You have all sorts of biotech that has moved here because we’re close to Washington, which means they have access to Washington resources, but we aren’t Washington, and the people who work in biotech like to live in chic little towns. And lo and behold, that’s what we’ve become.

Have your economic views changed over time?

Doug Monroe:

With all the talk of the problems with outsourcing manufacturing in the ’80s, ’90s, and into the 2000s with the tariff, the Trump tariff arguments that we need to bring manufacturing back, that it’s part of our global politics now, just not economic policy. And I can’t say I know your economic views, but have they changed since Reagan-Thatcher? Have you changed any of your economic views since the days of Reagan and Thatcher?

Charles Murray:

I have become persuaded that I was insufficiently concerned with my fellow American citizens when I thought about trade, and free trade, and so forth. And I believe my economist friends who talk about it’s been a net plus for us to outsource those things and that we aren’t really lowering the wages through immigration and so forth. I accept their macroeconomic conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that individuals within the system have been hurt.

Roofers who can’t make the wages they used to make because of illegal aliens on the cruise, that exists. And I, as an American, have an obligation to be heedful of their needs, as well as the macroeconomic efficiencies. That’s changed. I’ve become much more open to restrictive immigration.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I have, too.

Can libertarianism exist without Classical Judeo-Christianity?

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Another staccato question is, I’m talking to your old libertarian self, and I’m asking you, can the way you think of Madison, can that exist without the classical Judeo-Christian value system that the West had for a long time? We call it CJC at Praxis Circle, classical meaning Greek and Roman into Judaism, into Christianity, and 2,000 years of value development. Could a libertarian have popped up without that? I’m sure you’ve gotten that question.

Charles Murray:

I think that the Western tradition with its individualism was absolutely crucial in creating the conditions under which the American experiment could take place. That was never going to happen in more family centered of societies such as East Asia and South Asia.

Can we sustain a libertarian society in the absence of that? No, but we could augment the population selectively with people who were getting into high-trust societies versus low-trust societies. And basically, if you have people moving into the country who are comfortable with high-trust behaviors and social interactions, I think you can probably incorporate them into a libertarian society. Can we incorporate Muslims into a libertarian society? I think that’s impossible.

Doug Monroe:

You think that’s possible?

Charles Murray:

Impossible.

Doug Monroe:

Impossible. It’s interesting. I interviewed a Muslim who I think quite a lot of, and he would say the same thing. And he loves Jefferson. He loves UVA. He loves the Constitution. He’s written books about it.

What are your thoughts on post-liberalism and Christian nationalism?

Doug Monroe:

What do you think of the more recent discussion? I’m going to throw these two in the same category, post-liberalism, all the discussion about post-liberalism and Christian nationalism. Any comments on either of those two?

Charles Murray:

I don’t know much about post-liberalism at this point. There are so many posts.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything’s post.

Charles Murray:

I can’t keep track of all of that.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, and I understand.

Charles Murray:

Christian nationalism is part of a larger problem of nationalism, which has grown up. I am reminded of Bill Buckley’s statement that there is no one who is more patriotic than I am, and there is not in me a shred of nationalism.

Doug Monroe:

I’ve forgotten that.

Charles Murray:

I think that statement is compatible. Those two positions are compatible. I still think they’re compatible. What’s happened in the last 10 or 15 years is a growing number of whites who are saying, “No, they aren’t compatible. You must incorporate nationalistic elements.” And I think this is potentially extremely dangerous, independently of the Christian involvement in it.

Doug Monroe:

Well, a follow-up question there. What if Rusty Reno says, “The three F’s mean something to me as a guidepost, faith, family, and flag,” could that fit into your scheme? It doesn’t necessarily … He’s not throwing down the gauntlet on any [inaudible 01:46:32].

Charles Murray:

No, that doesn’t scare me at all.

Doug Monroe:

That doesn’t. Okay.

Charles Murray:

I have a real problem with people who seem to be saying that somehow more recent Americans who’ve arrived cannot be real Americans. There is certainly no sense in which people who immigrated here as late as the late 1800s and early 1900s are not 100% wholly, fully Americanized. But I’ll tell you what, I also meet a lot more recent immigrants who are more devoted to America’s ideals than most Americans are. And I run into them all the time.

And so I find this legacy Americans business to be very problematic. I have no problem with people being proud of their people coming over in the Mayflower. That’s just fine. I do have a problem with them saying that somehow makes them more American than people who got here more recently.

Doug Monroe:

I get it 100%. And I think everyone would agree with that. They’re there, and it’s amazing. So you’re getting to the statistical problem versus the individual problem.

Taking Religion Seriously: From Agnostic to Christian 

Doug Monroe:

Okay. With great pleasure, I moved to taking religion seriously, and I feel a little bit like Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney saying, “Do you remember when they said you were dead?” or I’m talking to the famous man who has, all of a sudden, become a Christian, maybe it wasn’t that sudden. But I have to ask the one big question that if I didn’t ask one question … I only asked you one question, it would be this one. Over a long time, you went from being agnostic to Christian. How?

Charles Murray:

Well, you don’t want me to recite the whole book from cover to cover.

Doug Monroe:

No, no, you don’t have to. I don’t want to answer it for you either. I know the answer.

Charles Murray:

Point number one is slowly, because the process, identify the start of it with 1985, okay, and we’re talking a long time since 1985, and it’s not until maybe the last five, six years that I’ve been comfortable saying that, “Yeah, I’m basically a Christian now.” And so it’s been slow.

The trigger was my wife. She gave birth to our first child, Anna, in 1985, and she came to me a couple of months later, and she says, “You know, I love Anna far more than evolution requires,” which is a statement that is worthy of my Yale PhD wife because she is completely comfortable with the evolutionary psychology that means that women with babies had better love them and have better be patient with them because if you want to pass on your genes, you better be that way. And she was saying, “No, I feel like I’m a conduit for some greater love.” And this led her to go on a … She was agnostic that she was the same as I am. I was.

And perhaps I should spell that out, didn’t dislike religion, I respected religion, didn’t seem to be an important aspect of my life, and did not identify myself with any belief system. And she started to try to figure out what she had been experiencing, and that eventually led her to Quakerism, and she started going to Quaker Meeting. I said, “This is great. I’ll stay home and take care of the baby.” And I watched her as years went on, and it came down to this. She does not dilute herself. She’s not making things up. She’s not that kind of person. And she was reaping rewards from this search that I envied.

And so I set out to try to keep up with her. And the fact is I’m not very spiritually perceptual. I’m like a semi-tone-deaf person with music. And so I had the tools available to me of assembling evidence, and looking at it, and trying to decide what’s plausible. And so I was taking the tools I brought to the rest of my career and applying them to religion, and I do not want anyone to misunderstand, Doug. This is not the best way to do it. If you are open to spiritual perception in a way that I was not, I think, for probably reasons beyond my control, I think a lot of it’s some people have an appreciation of music, other people don’t. It’s just inborn. I was taking the road that was open to me as opposed to the road my wife took, which is the better road to take.

Taking Religion Seriously: Is spirituality a talent? 

Doug Monroe:

That’s a perfect lead-in to my next question. And this is an observation. I’ve loved your book, and to me, we should use it in our courses we’re designing for this purpose. It’s just beautifully written. It’s short. It’s incredibly well researched. I love the way you do your sections, where if you want to read more, that’s a Charles Murray thing you do, and it’s incredibly valuable, but you don’t see this observation.

My question is this, is spirituality a natural talent? Why does it matter? Is John Paul II to the supernatural as Michael Jordan is to basketball or Albert Einstein is to physics? Is there a talent?

Charles Murray:

Yes. I’m absolutely convinced of that. And part of the reason is that it has so many other human traits are the same way. I’ve mentioned music appreciation. I have a late friend who was a professional violist. When he listened to music, he was having an entirely different experience from the experience I have. I enjoy music. He was taking things away from it that were so much greater. But a museum, I don’t have a good eye, and I go, and I look at a famous painting, and I’m not moved by it. I maybe look at it for a minute.

After doing human accomplishment, I’m better at appreciating the technical expertise, but I’m still it’s … Other people look at that same picture and have an utterly different experience. Same thing is true of spirituality. Some people can plumb these steps. And so I don’t know the details of John Paul II spirituality, but I’m willing to believe he was way, way better than … He was way at the top of the bell curve of spirituality. And so I will never be able to have insights that he had, but I can draw upon the wisdom of his insights in some ways the same way I can draw upon the insights of my wife to move along in the direction of deciding what I believe.

Taking Religion Seriously: Can someone come to faith intellectually? 

Doug Monroe:

Some of these are real simple questions, and they don’t necessarily relate to chapters in your book. We have the chapters. I don’t have your insights that I’m asking you about that people really are debating all this quite a bit, but you did not have a born-again experience. Okay. There was no born-again experience. I wouldn’t call even Katherine and so on quite that. It was a gradual thing.

Does that mean that people can become believers even in their hearts through an intellectual pathway? Is that possible?

Charles Murray:

We can’t, and I’m identifying myself with this group, approaching it intellectually. We have to settle for a second-best understanding of what’s going on. I conclude the book by saying that I sometimes feel like a little boy whose face is pressed against the glass watching a party on the other side that he can’t join. And that’s true. And you know what? I could never have become a theoretical physicist because I’m just not good enough in math. No way I could have done that.

Well, I can never become a John Paul II. Does that mean that I can’t read about physics and have an appreciation of some of it? Does this mean I can’t have a sense of what I can do in religion that has enriched my life and be grateful for that? Yeah, I can do that.

Doug Monroe:

Well, I think the fact that you perceive in all those areas that you can’t go to the extreme of the best shows that you have some of that to appreciate that, that’s just got to be true.

Taking Religion Seriously: What kind of God do you believe in? 

Doug Monroe:

So what kind of God do you believe in, or gods, or whatever?

Charles Murray:

Okay. Well, no, the … I am a big proponent of constantly stopping yourself from anthropomorphizing God. And the analogy I use is my dog’s relationship to me and my relationship to God. My dog loves me and knows certain things about me, but does that dog have the least idea what I’m doing when I sit in front of that computer monitor and tap on the keys? No, completely unknowable.

And similarly … Let me take a question that bothers a lot of Christians. If you have a personal loving God, how can you possibly have one who prevents suffering in the world? And I personally have never thought that’s a big deal. For me, if God is going to create human beings that have agency and that have dignity as human beings, there is going to be suffering in the world because the only way you prevent that is by taking away everything that makes us human. So I am still conflicted because the evidence that God is a far more personal God than I would have thought possible is very hard to put aside.

The evidence regarding certain miraculous cures of a variety of other miraculous events, not just in the Bible but in today’s life. I’m not talking about touchy-feely people relating experiences. I’m talking about pretty doggone well-documented cases. There are lots of evidence on them.

Doug Monroe:

They’re all over the place. Yeah.

Charles Murray:

And it’s really hard for me to accept that evidence without just simply saying there is a personal aspect of God that perhaps is best summed up with the concept of God is love, the agape, which is what Katherine seemed to be experiencing with the birth of our child. And so it’s still … I should resist anthropomorphizing it, but this doesn’t mean that the miracles cannot also be an extension of this unknowable God that is comprehensible in the same way that some things about me are comprehensible to my dog. Maybe miracles are the things that God does that are comprehensible to me.

Taking Religion Seriously: Defending and presenting worldview better? 

Doug Monroe:

Well, whether you know it or not, having written Taking Religion Seriously, you are now an evangelical Christian, whether you like it or not, because that’s just too useful of an instrument for evangelicals to use.

So this is a trade question we debate, but I’d be interested in your thoughts. Do evangelicals need to learn how … Remember I told you, I was going to ask you to be a theologian a little bit. Okay?

Charles Murray:

Okay.

Doug Monroe:

Do evangelicals today need to learn how to present and make better arguments for the fundamental pillars of Christian worldview? Not read the Bible, it’s God exists, truth exists, beauty exists. In other words, do they need to be able to attract Gen Zs who won’t look at scripture? Any Hindu versus they regard that as over here. Do you need to attract them in on an intellectual level, somewhat as happened to you? Is that an important skillset?

Charles Murray:

Evangelicals who have not read C.S. Lewis, I’m thinking specifically of Mere Christianity, but his entire corpus actually, should be required to read it. And with the instruction, this is how you do it. This is how you communicate with Gen Z. This is how you communicate with people who have grown up thinking that religion isn’t for them. You do what C.S. Lewis does, specifically in the first five chapters of Mere Christianity. He doesn’t mention Christianity.

The first five chapters are entirely about the moral law, starting out with the simplest of secular examples. And then at the end of the fifth chapter, all it was, he brings down the hammer. And he has sucked you in at that point to his view of the universe in a way that has opened up as he transitions to Christianity, taking in what he has to say. He is the guidebook, should be the guidebook for evangelicals, not any animation that if you pray every night for a month, you’re going to have a born-again experience. Not that I’m saying that’s what evangelicals do, but you don’t go straight to the resurrection. You approach it circuitously.

Taking Religion Seriously: Can we prove that God exists? 

Doug Monroe:

You mentioned the problem of evil, and the problem of pain and suffering. And there are some people … Again, we’re talking about the intellectual side of religion and Christianity. Some would say God is provable, okay, like Stephen Meyer. We interviewed Stephen, he’s really an amazing man. And God is not provable, and I would say that was definitely Michael Novak’s view, and he wrote a couple of books right on that point. He doesn’t say it that way necessarily.

So I haven’t asked a question like this since Jim Hall, who is head of the philosophy department at U of R, but do you think it’s possible that God designed the world so that we could be truly free as creatures and be as much like God as possible without being God? In other words, if we existed like we did today, and God every day tapped us on the shoulder and said, “Hey, watch me. You can’t do this, but I’m going to blow up that barn. Boom.” And that happened every day to everyone. That would be proof that God exists. But if that’s the case, then we would almost be like on welfare.

And I understand your analogy of the dog. I understand that you believe you are like a dog, and I do, too, really compared to God if the creator God exists. And so we can’t really know any of that, but is that a possibility? It’s the argument for freedom, okay, that some view is central to Christianity.

Charles Murray:

I looked upon it, we started out with the question of, can we prove God exists? And we certainly can look at the science of the situation and be confronted by options in which a God who created the universe so that it would permit life is, to me, the only plausible alternative. And since I am an applied statistician, to me, proof consists of a very high probability.

Doug Monroe:

Yes, yes.

Charles Murray:

And so, in that sense, here’s how I see recent history. It’s almost as if … Now I really am anthropomorphizing God, but you can think of it this way, but perhaps it’s useful as a heuristic.

Doug Monroe:

That’s okay.

Charles Murray:

Yeah, heuristic exists.

Doug Monroe:

You can be contradictory on that point if you want to. You have my permission [inaudible 02:04:53].

Charles Murray:

Okay. So let’s say that the Christian story is true. So God chooses a place which is at the very crossroads of a very advanced empire. Well, the crossroads anyway where there’s access to that larger empire at a particular moment in history, and accompanied by certain mysterious events that occur, which permits this religion to get started. That right? And this is in an environment where it can spread and does spread phenomenally, and that was just fine.

And then a couple of thousand years later, things have evolved so that a lot of people are rejecting this because for all sorts of right reasons of modernity, which seems to have disproved the Christian God, and God has worked it out. So at the same time this is going on, I’m going to have them discover a bunch of other things in science which cannot be explained by science but can be explained by religion, and that’s what’s happened.

Doug Monroe:

That’s exactly what’s happened.

Charles Murray:

So that for five centuries, we had the God of the gaps, which refers to … Well, God was used to explain those things which hadn’t been explained, and science kept explaining some of those things, and the room for God got narrower and narrower. And, in fact, science got pretty uppity after a while, and so we can explain everything. And they managed to sell that to large numbers of the population.

So God then says, “Okay, let’s throw quantum physics at them. Let’s throw DNA at them.” And so you end up with a situation in which science is saying, “Well, we’ve established as a fact that we have entangled particles in which the state of one changes identically with the state of another faster than the speed of sound.” And we have a situation in which things can be both particles and waves at the same time, and I could go through a whole bunch of other things. And we’ve also discovered the universe has a starting point. And time and again, with all of these things, you are now having situations which are consistent with the Christian view of God and supply an answer that science not only cannot yet supply, but there is reason to think that science will never be able to supply.

Now I know a lot of sciences are going to say, “No, no, no, we can still do it.”

Doug Monroe:

Well, to me, you’re saying there was the God of the gaps, and if you believe that theory, then the gaps are being narrowed, but you’re basically saying that the God of the gaps has been exploded, totally exploded, God won. Okay. We’re never going to be able to explain these things.

Charles Murray:

Let me just give you one quick example. One quick example. We’ve talked a little bit about the Big Bang Theory, not much, but the Big Bang Theory is what we’re referring to, and we say the odds against our universe existing are trillions-

… Referring to and we say the odds against our universe existing are trillions to one.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Charles Murray:

Also, you simply can take a look at the hard evidence on certain psychic phenomena. I mean extremely persuasive evidence.

Doug Monroe:

It happened to me, I can tell you.

Charles Murray:

Yeah?

Doug Monroe:

Yes. I’ll tell you after this.

Charles Murray:

Okay.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a ghost story, it’s real.

Charles Murray:

Really ghost stories that are really hard to explain away.

Doug Monroe:

They are. They’re provable.

Charles Murray:

Near death experiences. This thing called terminal lucidity where people who have advanced dementia come back for a little short period of time before they die. All of these things which have extremely persuasive proof and are simply inconsistent with a strict materialist view of the universe and of humans. They are inconsistent. The evidence for consciousness existing independently of the brain. I think you have to be treating science as a religion in order to reject all that evidence.

Taking Religion Seriously: Theo-qualia 

Doug Monroe:

Are you familiar with qualia and quale? I’m sure you …

Charles Murray:

I was once.

Doug Monroe:

Well, it’s the philosophical concept of you and I can never verify we see the same red.

Charles Murray:

Oh, yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a direct thing. We can only be confident that when we see something we both say, yeah, that’s red and there’s a consistency, right? Okay. So let’s say recorded history has been what? 5,000 years, maybe 10, but that’s the amount of time that human beings have had a personal experience and have been able to record it and provide those personal experiences to humans that come after us.

Okay. So if we start with the assumption that there is a creator God, which you have I think come to the conclusion of, and so have I, what can we say about how the creator God designed the world we experience after so many years of human experience? In other words, look back five or 10,000 years, what can we say? Even if we’re dogs, what can we say? I call those Theo qualia.

In other words, the red, but we’re saying with the experience, the red is human experience that gets to us. What can we say about God? I don’t know if you have any thoughts there, but I’m going to ask you about what you think about evolution after this and then we’ll move to the last page. It’s too deep of a question probably without …

Charles Murray:

I haven’t thought enough about that question to give you a good answer.

Doug Monroe:

Okay.

Charles Murray:

That’s the honest answer.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Okay.

Taking Religion Seriously: Thoughts on Darwin’s evolution? 

Doug Monroe:

What do you think about Darwin’s evolution now as presented?

Charles Murray:

I think that his explanation of human evolution is extremely persuasive for all sorts of reasons. I basically believe it’s correct, but I think it’s correct in the same way that I think that neuroscience has correctly made lots of advances in understanding what parts of the brain produce what kinds of outcomes.

So I’m saying of these phenomena that neuroscience cannot explain, we don’t have to say neuroscience is all wrong. All we have to do is say there is something else we have not added in. In the case of evolution, I think that we are descended from great apes in very much the way that Darwin described. I think there are still missing pieces that evolution … Consciousness itself is one of those things that evolution has a hard time dealing with. In this case, I’m still willing to believe that there is an element of God in the gaps.

Do I think as time goes on that evolutionary theory has gotten more sophisticated? Yeah, I do. I think it will continue to get more sophisticated. I also think that there will be add-ons that are outside the envelope in understanding human consciousness and those will probably be religious in nature.

Doug Monroe:

It sounds like you are along the lines of Francis Collins.

Charles Murray:

Very much so.

Doug Monroe:

Not Stephen Meyer because their belief in evolution, I would say is different.

Charles Murray:

I’m very much in the mode of Francis Collins on all sorts of things. I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know Francis Collins and I think he’s one of the wisest human beings I’ve ever known. I’m leaving aside all the controversies over COVID and all that.

I just want to assure people who have made their opinion of Francis Collins on the basis of COVID, this is actually an amazing man and a very impressive man. He, I think also rightly points to what we’ve learned about DNA, not as proof of God, but as proof that it’s really hard to see how evolution came up with DNA. That’s really hard.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. The mathematician in you will … That’s just one of the many mathematical problems, right?

Charles Murray:

Yeah.

How to convince young people of American values?

Doug Monroe:

We’re talking about America’s future now. I loved Arthur Brooks’s book, The Conservative Heart. Do you remember that?

Charles Murray:

Sure.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. I think that’s a good formula for America. Excuse me. How can we convince people, young people that it’s a good formula?

Charles Murray:

I’m thinking here of all the people in today’s elites, the elite universities and the graduates of those and all of those who are contemptuous of people of faith.  Okay. We have a situation which the large proportions of the elite are contemptuous of Christian Americans and the fact is that … They think of them as bigoted, they think of them as below average IQ. They think of them as hostile to people who don’t share their faith. The experience of living among believing Christians is completely opposite to that.

In so far, as you seem to have some movement among intellectuals back toward faith, my book is an example of it, but there are lots of others that have been going on. What you need to do to get people to recognize the virtues of Christianity is I’m afraid have enough representatives among the godless elite who are obviously good people and obviously smart people just like them who have become believers.

They will begin to give the time of day to the values of Christianity in so far as they have been brought into the conversation, which takes me straight back to C.S. Lewis because that’s what he does. He takes these people and he sucks you in and so you’re going to give a fair hearing to the arguments of conservatives and good character.

Crosstalk About Yuval Levin

Doug Monroe:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m relating you back to your AEI folk here a little bit in the last few questions. So let’s take another AEI superstar, Yuval Levin, okay? Reading his wonderful book that restored my faith in the Constitution, American Covenant, would you say is your book By the People more realistic and pessimistic? Or how would you compare the two if you can?

Charles Murray:

Doug, I read Covenant when it came out and along with all the other memory problems I have, I don’t remember it well enough to give a good answer to that question.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Okay.

A War of Words & Getting to the Facts

Doug Monroe:

So it is basically this terminology issue where so called conservatives, I hate that word, seem to always lose out, where our words become their words, they like them, they adopt them, we lose out. Don’t we need to get away to start winning the word games from left and right, conservative, liberal and start going to true and false?

That’s basically what you do. You skip the political and you just go to what you see as the factual truth. The factual truth isn’t just the first floor of the house about science, it’s also about morality. The second floor is just as true and you’ve been saying that during the whole … How do we change the dialogue more to our benefit?

Charles Murray:

Well, here’s where I think people like me and there are lots of other people besides me doing it who we don’t write in a polemical tone. I don’t write in a polemical tone on things unless … Or when I do it, let’s put it this way, I’d say, okay, from this point on to the rest of the book, I’m giving you my opinions, my interpretation, but what I always do is …

Doug Monroe:

You label your behavior.

Charles Murray:

The first part of the book I say, I’m going to lay out what I consider to be basically the facts in this case and then people can interpret them in different ways. I think that that is liberating because you are acknowledging to your reader that I’m going to start out with stuff that I don’t think you have the option of disagreeing with. I think you need to take this material on board and once you have done that, then we can argue.

So we did that obviously in The Bell Curve where we began the last chapter by saying you could read everything we’ve said about IQ and say, “This is a perfect argument for a redistributionist government that forces a greater egalitarianism on us because people with high IQs are doing wonderfully in the world and they did not earn their IQs.” It’s just the luck of the draw. That’s absolutely true. We say, “We’re going to go another way, but we’re going to explain why.” That can be done with almost any of our public policy issues.

Women in combat. There is a lot of evidence if the question is, what does it do to military effectiveness on the battlefield? We have answers to that question, which we’ve ignored and we shouldn’t ignore them. It has nothing to do with being a feminist or not being a feminist. It has to do with some very hard evidence and you can take that with the whole issue of egalitarianism and Kibbutzism and so forth.

A lot of what has happened in recent years is something that Jonah Goldberg had written a lot about, which is we’ve got to get our names right that we call things. You know who else said something like that? Confucius. That if we don’t have the right names associated with things, we can’t think about things correctly. I’ll tell you what, if we cannot label male and female as a fact and go from there and if instead we’re going to talk about transgender people and cis people, the rest of this, our dialogue is doomed.

We can make great progress if we simply start calling things by their right name. In the case of affirmative action, we also say it has systematic racism as an integral part of it. In terms of sex differences and the race differences, we first say, “Here are the things we don’t have the option of arguing about because they’re too well established.” Then we can then argue about the things that we can argue about what the right name is for it.

What we need to do is segregate … We need to determine a common ground across which we can discuss political difference. That common ground must be based on what we securely know is true as opposed to what we securely know is false regardless of your political opinions and then we can take off into the things we can debate.

Doug Monroe:

Well, I would hope if there is the other side, they would find it to their own advantage to find agreement on that and it seems that they won’t agree to anything.

Charles Murray:

To the extent you can try to force the issue on them. Explain to me why it is inappropriate to call affirmative action racist and push them onto, no, you can’t come back with a bunch of ideology, you have to come back to the meaning of racism that we are using and you’ve got to tell me your definition of racism so we can see what we have in common to argue about.

Now, what’ll happen in a lot of cases is, their definitions will be completely unacceptable, but we have the option at that point of coming back saying what you’re saying is unacceptable. Not politically. It’s unacceptable in terms of what we know to be true and false.

Doug Monroe:

At least we would have the conversation going and it would lead to further hopeful agreement.

What will American politics look like 20-30 years from now?

Doug Monroe:

What does the center, the traditional, the red, what do we need to change and what do you see out there 20 or 30 years from now? Is there anything you think we need to … Where do we need to go with this? Not to associate you with Donald Trump, but politics has moved along. Where do we go? Any ideas?

Charles Murray:

I don’t think I’m going to give an appropriate answer, which is, you know what’s going to happen?

Doug Monroe:

Yeah.

Charles Murray:

I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. I don’t know when, but at some point there is going to be a powerful, workable Democratic majority in both houses and a Democratic president. If our politics are remotely the same when that happens and by the way, it could happen … Well, majority of houses is in question even for this year. When that happens …

Doug Monroe:

2028.

Charles Murray:

Okay. When that happens, Democratic president in both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court will immediately be increased in size to ensure that they get rid of the conservative majority. The filibuster will be ended. The divisions that we have now will all arise again, but they will arise after a time of Donald Trump when the Democrats will feel even more liberated to move to the extremes because after all, Donald Trump did it. So what Donald Trump can do, we can do.

In other words, there is no hope, Doug, and there is nothing … I don’t see what can be done to prevent that from happening because I do not see our politics evolving before the next election. It’s not at all clear to me the Democrats can put up somebody in 2028 that’s electable. So it might not happen in 2028.

Unless you have a conservative president in charge for eight years, let’s say, you will not have a chance for there to be enough conservative momentum to survive a Democratic president. If you had eight or 12 years of a truly conservative president following on Donald Trump, I could see some way it works out. I find it very hard to say that’s a likelihood.

Doug Monroe:

Okay, that’s your view and I would have to … Just looking at what happened in Virginia, that could be … We may be a leading indicator as a state, I don’t know, but there is a lot of pushback going on.

Charles Murray:

Yeah, but she also got elected.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I know. That’s what I mean. We’re a leading indicator of what [inaudible 02:29:14].

Charles Murray:

The Republicans put up a very weak candidate to oppose her.

Doug Monroe:

Yeah, I know. I know.

Charles Murray:

It’s not as if conservatives have been all that clever politically the last 20 years.

Doug Monroe:

No, I know.

What is American exceptionalism and does it still exist? 

Doug Monroe:

Well, we’re going to end on coming back to what is American exceptionalism? That’s why I put this one on top. What should we be striving for that makes us exceptional that could make good things happen in the future?

Charles Murray:

Well, you think about the things that made us exceptional and you can sort of run through the list. We had an exceptional setting isolated by oceans of both sides and with the West to provide a point of expansion and all the other things that people have talked about, the very selective nature of the immigration to the United States in the 18th and 17th century. I mean, you had to be very ornery and persistent to make that journey. Okay, those are all gone. We cannot live off those any longer.

We used to be exceptional in terms of our civic culture and we still are in a lot of America. We are no longer that way in the big cities and the big cities increasingly dominate our politics. Most of all, we used to have an exceptional ideology. As Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have an ideology but be one.”

What people don’t understand is that what created America’s image that still prevailed well into the 20th century was a country in which the founder’s view of what should be was held by all Americans. It wasn’t until the 1890s that you had any serious political opposition to the Constitution and then it came with a vengeance with the progressive era.

That’s gone. That is no longer America’s religion. Remains America’s religion in the part of America you’re sitting in right now, but not dominant. So the elements of American exceptionalism are pretty much dead and so is American exceptionalism itself.

I increasingly think that what happened in the 1780s and 1770s was unique concatenation. The height of the Scottish enlightenment, the origins of laissez-faire economics, the simultaneous publication of … Not simultaneous, but the contemporaneous publication of Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, the founders in the United States, the existence of the 13 colonies with their exceptional setting. All of these things were simply weird that they all came together at the same time. Here’s where I find my gravest doubts in the middle of the night.

How many people really want to live in a world of freedom and limited government? I used to think that it was kind of latent in everybody. I no longer believe that. I believe that actually there aren’t that many who think of freedom, liberty as the founders did and think of its importance as the founders did and were willing to take on the consequences of those beliefs the way the founders were.

So you are talking to an old man who is … Meaning every cliche about old men, which is they get old and grumpy at a time when they should still be very optimistic. So I will add one last sentence. There are lots of things going on right now that are very exciting that could turn out to be absolutely sensational and make the world a better place. So I am not pessimistic about humanity in general and our ability to survive this. I am a lover of the American experiment. That’s pretty much gone and I mourn that.

Doug Monroe:

Well, it was I think Dr. Wood that wrote The Radicalism of the American Revolution and he said that it wasn’t a class thing, it wasn’t aristocracy trying to increase its bank account in founding the country. It was the founders trying to give the opportunity to be a gentleman and be free to everyone, to all men at that time. Maybe they didn’t give every man the possibility, but that came in time. So that is a beautiful vision that’s still there.

I just want to thank you. I’ve been sitting here with the Sage of Burkittsville for the last couple hours and I feel like that’s who I’ve been sitting with. I just want to thank you for a delightful experience. Thank you so much.

Charles Murray:

This was a good conversation. Thank you.

Books:

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

Taking Religion Seriously