Arden on Arthur Jensen

“Genetics and race; one cannot write about Arthur and avoid it. I asked him once after dinner, on his way to the tube, if he was racist. I thought at the time that I was being a bit daring. When I look back on it I feel ashamed because I was not, as I thought, bearding the lion in his den, I was simply being callow and jejune. I came to understand that later from his answer. Anyway, what he said was this: ‘I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s irrelevant’. He did not mean that racism is morally irrelevant. He meant that against the importance of developing a proper scientific theory of individual differences in intelligence, the personal attributes of Arthur R. Jensen are trivially insignificant.”

“Arthur is a renunciate. He has chosen the stony path of scientific truth over the smoother course of popularity and public acceptance. If Arthur had worked in any other field, I’m certain that honours would have fallen into his lap, for he is a great scientist. The battle between the forces of reason and ideology is frightening, even for a bystander.”