Flynn, James R.

FLYNN, JAMES R. (1934-2021). A socialist and civil rights activist, James R. Flynn made his mark as a political philosopher who wrote about intelligence in relation to race. He published nearly twenty books on topics ranging from intelligence, liberalism, world history, and free speech. His best-known work challenged the academically prevailing notion that genetics determined the racial disparities manifested in IQ tests and argued instead for the importance of environmental factors, including access to economic and educational resources as well as parenting. He was also renowned for the “Flynn effect,” the notion that IQ scores were rising gradually with each subsequent generation since at least the 1930s. This development, he postulated, encouraged better moral reasoning and thereby eventually diminished racism and sexism in society.

Born in Washington, D.C., James Robert Flynn renounced Catholicism at age twelve and further solidified his secular faith in the human condition while a scholarship student at the University of Chicago. By the time he received his PhD at age twenty-four, he had cast his lot with the Left. He joined the Socialist Party and quickly moved on to civil rights activism. He met his future wife, Emily Malkin, at a protest against segregation, and together they chose the name Victor, after their idol, Eugene V. Debs, for their first child. Continuing to organize against segregation, Flynn held several professorial positions before concluding that his left-wing politics worked against academic success in the United States. In 1963, he and his family moved to New Zealand, where he taught first at the University of Canterbury and then permanently to the University of Otago. Flynn remained active in politics. He was a founding member of the New Labour Party and in the 1990s the Alliance party, several times running unsuccessfully for parliament.

Flynn won an International Achievement Award from the Mensa society, although he also garnered severe criticism in his later years. He raised the hackles of some leftists by attributing some portion of racial disparity in IQ results to the negative impact of Black parenting and, more broadly, Black culture, a highly sensitive proposition magnified by Daniel P, Moynihan in the 1960s and the highly influential “culture of poverty” theory popularized by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Flynn departed further from left sensibility in his final book, A Book Too Risky to Publish (2019), a critique of so-called “cancel culture” on campus.

Leventman, Seymour. “Race, IQ and Jensen by James R. Flynn.” Annals of the American Academic of Political and Social Science. 457(1981), pp. 225-26.

Risen, Clay. “James R. Flynn, Who Found We’re Getting Smarter, and Why, Dies at 86.” New York Times. January 27, 2021, p. B10.