Posted on 05/02/2004 7:01:41 AM PDT by chasio649
The Bell Curve, an excellent book more maligned than read, pointed out a trend seldom noticed. The authors called it “cognitive stratification,” not a phrase Byron would have chosen but serviceable enough. It means the concentration of the intelligent.
In 1850 people of high intelligence were dispersed through the population. If the child of a cowboy had an IQ of 160, he would probably remain in the geographical region with cowboys. He might be more successful than most, and might choose as friends the quicker wits thereabouts. Yet he would be part of the community.
A cowboy could be intelligent, but didn’t have to be. But then came the professions that required high intelligence. The dull-witted cannot work as programmers, chemists, engineers, doctors, or investment brokers. They can be decent and productive. They cannot write assembly code for a planetary probe.
In 1850 there were few jobs requiring the very bright. Today they abound. Universities began to scour the country for the highly intelligent. These, once found, met each other at elite universities or, later, in the places where the bright concentrated to work: Laboratories, software houses, hospitals, magazine journalism, and occasionally law firms. They married each other. Their children tended to be bright. The result has been that the bright tend to live, play, work, and sleep almost entirely with each other.
An opposite concentration occurs at the other end of the curve. In the cities the bright among the ghetto rise and leave for the suburbs. Who is left behind? If, generation after generation, the smartest take themselves out of the gene pool, the results will be just what we see. This is the underclass. It exists. It is larger than most people suspect. It is dangerous.
“Underclass” is not synonymous with “blacks.” There is a large and, I gather, growing black middle class. There is a substantial white component in the underclass. In the barrios of California one encounters Mexican unsalvageables. Whatever their color, they share low intelligence, little education, bastardy, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. (Or, as we call it in English, “crime.”) They have no attachment to the standards that constitute civilization. They hate those above them.
Many of the insulated bright imagine themselves to be liberal (an arguable proposition), to care about “the people,” and to favor “diversity.” Few I’ll guess have had any contact with the underclass, or even with people who don’t have degrees. They have never been in South Central, never spent time in roadside stores in backcountry Kentucky or hung out with the crackers of Florida. They have never really met even normally intelligent rural people, whom they call “rednecks.” At their parties you do not see bus drivers or cops or factory hands.
If they knew “the people” they would not like them. The diversity they ideologically approve are people they viscerally detest. Down inside they must know this: It is why they avoid them. The diverso-elite alliance is a fragile one.
The elite do not understand, or perhaps more correctly refuse to admit, how very limited are the dull. They can’t concede that the course of managed improvement that they once believed in for the underclass, and try still to believe in, won’t work. Thus for example they call for programs to close the “cybergap,” and bring the internet to the downtrodden. They don’t understand that the downtrodden can’t use the internet, and aren’t interested.
The very bright assume without thinking that people can learn anything they choose. A woman who graduates from Yale in biochemistry takes for granted that if she wants to learn Italian, she can. It will take time and effort but she will have no doubt as to the outcome. New digital camera? She can figure out how to use it without the manual. She is used to gas chromatographs and gene sequencers. Learn PhotoShop? She just does it. After all, it’s only software. She assumes, unless she thinks carefully, that people know history, politics, literature, because she does and everyone she knows does.
It isn’t so. There are huge numbers of people who don’t read books, have never read a book, who can’t read. According to Newsweek,* forty-seven percent of Detroit is functionally illiterate. The illiterate live in a mental world beyond the capacity of a biochemist to imagine. Try to erase from your mind everything that you have ever read. Then imagine regarding a camera as simply incomprehensible. Or a checkbook.
The cognitive elite tend to favor diversity and affirmative action. They say that they believe that all groups are equally intelligent, and furiously resist evidence to the contrary. Yet by now they have to know it isn’t true. Believing what you know to be false, pretending to like people you naturally loathe, stresses the tectonic plates. A spring is being wound.
The potential for conflict is high. The underclass—the diversity—exacts a price. It is responsible for crime, almost all crime, which carries with it the cost of the prisons, police forces, decay of the cities, welfare both open and hidden, and a decline in the tenor of life.
The need to make the merely dull-witted seem not to be, even though they are not necessarily of the underclass, degrades the schools. The beneficiaries of affirmative actions, though they are seldom of the underclass, are frequently of the same racial groups. This fuels a quiet anger, a racial anger, among the middle class, who among themselves no longer even pretend that things are not as they obviously are. It isn’t quite reasonable that it should be racial, but it is.
The elite can buy their way into safe neighborhoods and better schools. The economic middle class cannot. They resent paying for welfare, resent taking up the slack for workers who don’t, and have no ideological attachment to diversity. As the baby boomers retire, suggest some,** the cost of their maintenance to the working middle class will become so burdensome as to engender revolt.
Diversity as a spoils system just may be heading toward its end. It’s curious: I don’t know anyone who objects to hiring without regard to race, creed, or color. I know almost no one who isn’t angry about affirmative action--and about the enstupidation of the schools for the benefit of the uninterested, and about unending crime…. If the dam finally breaks, what then?
I don't doubt that the elites know many in the non-elite class, (their groundskeepers, clerks, etc.) That does not mean they intermarry. The point of the article is that there is pressure to move from areas where the elite get little intellectual stimulation. If this is true, then the areas of stimulation may be growing. Is this the city elite? I supposed it to be the college campus, as this is my experience with it.
Likewise, there is a lot of sexual activity among the poorly educated, who we can lump with the non-intellectual group. These kids are likely born with fewer "little gray cells" and then society does not encourage the education and skill development that would compensate.
I don't think a case can be made that this is going to upset the applecart, because the sieve is leaky. (There are lots of counter examples and people are leaving the ghetto under equal opportunity conditions fast enough to keep from having a revolt. Likewise, intellectual elites have enough non-socialists to keep that activity from overcoming our society.)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Robert Anson Heinlein
It’s not so much what folks don’t know that causes problems; it’s what they do know that ain’t so.
--Artemus Ward
The most money-earning individuals in this study were , amazingly C-students - almost predictable.
A female professional is unlikely to marry an unemployed handyman, even if he's very good looking.
Unfortunately, they may instead marry an unemployed politician, good looking or not.
IQ is measured in a bunch of categories, 12-20 like spacial recognition, recall, deduction; I can't think of them right now.
Some people can have an extraordinary high score in one category, say manual dexterity, and still score Moron on an IQ test.
Obviously, in order to have the highest IQ, one must score well in at least most of them, and span those categories, thus tending to make the smartest people the most divided on what they like to do the most. (this is part of my beef with ADHD, but that's another thing).
So, yes, smart people tend to be happier and consider themselves successful, but they tend not to be wealthy or even successful by mainstream "standards".
Well, did the bone heal properly? If so then what is your point.
Country and Western music promoter Carlton Haney, who financed and promoted Bill Monroe's first Bluegrass festivals and got Willie Nelson his first gig with Porter Waggoner, suffered from chronic beck pains and was unable to find a physician who could relieve his condition. Upon examining his X-rays, he disassembled and studied a possums backbone, entered into discussions with some chiropractors and a physical therapist, and within six month had eliminated what had been a lifetime condition of suffering. He had somewhat better motivation than the merely curious, however.
Another way of looking at it: if someone has not realized that he's ignorant by 25, and taken effective steps to correct it, then he's almost certainly stupid
Truly, America is everything without them, and nothing with them.
They are an enemy, and probably the primary one. But they are not the only one, and their accomplices and abetters should also be viewed as hostile to America's best interests, as should those others who have adopted tenets of their successful modus operendi.
Women with large amounts of inherited wealth would find senior politicians attractive. The politicians would provide access to certain circles where business deals are hammered out. And it's been long noted that members of our Senatorial class seem to get excellent investment advice, as their portfolios increase at rates far exceeding the norm.
Especially when dabbling in cattle futures
You are a true Yellow Rose of Texas. But it does not hurt your position that you are not the only one in the garden.
However, beware the infestation of locusts that dooms you all.
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