On the April issue:

Race Relations

To the Editor:
Thank you for publishing Wilfred Reilly’s article on American race relations (“The Good News They Won’t Tell You About Race in America,” April). It seems a large portion of U.S. politicians, media professionals, and academics have an appalling lack of interest in facts. The question is why. Is it that most of our citizens are merely headline-readers and just lack the intellectual capacity to dig deeper, to read to the end, to care about the authentic truth?

Whatever the reasons, the whole “America is full of white racists” narrative saddens and frustrates me.

People of faith, who believe we are to love those different from ourselves because we all have the same Creator, seem to have lost the argument. It’s going to be nearly impossible to regain a voice in the discussion at this point.

I appreciate Commentary’s efforts to continue fighting the good fight.
Lynda MacFarland
San Diego, California

To the Editor:
The country desperately needs to read more fact-based articles—like Wilfred Reilly’s—on race. Kudos to Reilly for doing the hard work of sussing out the facts, and good on Commentary for having the fortitude to publish his essay.  When any element of race is involved, the mainstream media largely ignore facts. Instead, they feed us a steady diet of “systemic racism.” This framework, as Reilly points out with all relevant factual evidence, is simply not true. Luckily, Reilly is not a lone voice; there are many black intellectuals who agree with him.
Joe Curtis
Murray, Kentucky

To the Editor:
The United States is a nation that offers opportunity to anyone who is prepared to put forth some effort to achieve whatever he deems “success.” Encouraging a sense of victimhood in those who are unwilling or unprepared to do so benefits no one. It’s great to read an article that presents facts and data to explain what is actually happening in this country. And it’s also helpful to read someone who has lived in and experienced various areas of our society.  
Robert Depew
Chester, Maryland

To the Editor:
Wilfred Reilly’s article was very informative and well researched, and it jibes with my own experience in the country. It also convinced me that our genuine racial conflicts are exaggerated by activists and promoted by mainstream media. Politicians capitalize on emotional and incorrect information for their own personal gain. I hope we will see more well-written and insightful articles like this, but I don’t expect that they will get much attention in our current environment.
Jim Myers
Richardson, Texas

To the Editor:
What a splendid piece of commonsense, fact-based analysis offered up by Wilfred Reilly! Would that more publications carried the good, clear news of American progress in the difficult and troubled field of race relations. Thank you for publishing it.
Arnold Thackray
Pittsboro, North Carolina

The Osirak Raid

To the Editor:
Meir Y. Soloveichik’s column about Israel’s action on the Osirik reactor in Iraq reminded me that there is a common leftist criticism of this raid (“The Miracle of Osirak,” April). The left—especially the disarmament community in the United States—claims that the raid drove Iraq’s nuclear program underground and made it less visible, which in turn led to the covert program that the U.S. and its allied forces would discover during Operation Desert Storm. There’s always a path for blaming the U.S. or its allies for taking action.
Peter Huessy
Potomac, Maryland

To the Editor:
I’d only add the following note of American appreciation to Meir Y. Soloveichik’s article about Israel’s attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor. In October 1991, 10 years after the raid, then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said the following before a group from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:

“Let me tonight in front of this group thank my good friend [former Israeli Air Force Commander] David Ivry for the action Israel took in 1981 with respect to the [Osirak] reactor.” He added: “There were many times during the course of the build-up in the Gulf and the subsequent conflict [Desert Shield/Desert Storm] that I gave thanks for the bold and dramatic action that had been taken some 10 years before.”

As Cheney understood, Menachem Begin had once again shown outstanding leadership and vision.
Fred Ehrman
New York City

What Makes a Polymath?

To the Editor:
Joseph pstein’s rticle about Peter Burke’s The Polymath is interesting, but is Epstein in the best position to evaluate the work of Stephen Jay Gould (“A Gallery of Know-It-Alls,” April)? Epstein admits that he has no interest in science. Perhaps this should have stopped him from commenting on an area in which he is not an expert.

Gould wrote about evolution, evolutionary theory, geology, statistics, and the history of science, and he mastered several European languages. Is this enough to label him a polymath? I don’t know. But to call him merely a popularizer of science isn’t right. Apart from anything else, Gould regarded his popularizing essays as a continuation of his scholarly work, with the ideas contained in them expressed in popular language but not in any way “dumbed down.”
John Gava
South Australia, Australia

To the Editor:
It would be interesting to know the extent of any correlation (or lack of such) between polymathy and IQ—at least with respect to the individuals the author so anoints.
Gregory Barnard
Oskaloosa, Kansas

Joseph Epstein replies:
Apologies if I seem to have demeaned Stephen Jay Gould, for whose writing I have considerable regard, but his work seems to have been too strictly devoted to science for him to qualify as a polymath. One thinks—I think—of a polymath as someone whose learning crosses different, usually unrelated fields.

So far as I know, no studies have been done on the relation between polymathy and IQ. Of course, many of the greatest of polymaths departed the earth well before the notion of IQ was conceived. As we now know from the work of Howard Gardner and others, there are various kinds of intelligence. My own view is that IQ does not measure general intelligence, but instead chiefly measures the ability to deal with the kind of higher abstraction presented by mathematics, physics, and arcane philosophy. Which in part explains why one can have a dazzlingly high IQ and still remain a dope.