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 didnt 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 Ill guess have had any contact with the underclass, or even with people who dont 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 cant concede that the course of managed improvement that they once believed in for the underclass, and try still to believe in, wont work. Thus for example they call for programs to close the cybergap, and bring the internet to the downtrodden. They dont understand that the downtrodden cant use the internet, and arent 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, its only software. She assumes, unless she thinks carefully, that people know history, politics, literature, because she does and everyone she knows does.
It isnt so. There are huge numbers of people who dont read books, have never read a book, who cant 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 isnt 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 underclassthe diversityexacts 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 isnt 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 dont, 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. Its curious: I dont know anyone who objects to hiring without regard to race, creed, or color. I know almost no one who isnt 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?
This is from the article, (I rechecked to make sure he actually said it.)
The premise of the article is that cognitive classes are insulated from one another, do not meet interact or understand one another, and would be at each other's throats if they did.
Now this is in the article too. You clearly are right that the classes do meet and interact. But they stratify over time because they intermarry and have brighter offspring thatn they would if they did not marry in their own class. But so what, we both agree the article does not fit enough of society to matter.
There are enough high IQ who marry out of their group and others who are in the group who don't support socialism, affirmative action, or other liberal causes just because of their IQ.
Yes, the underclass definitely has the protected status to reproduce, and gains the funding and the judicial protection necessary to gain votes for the underclass. This is not a good well thought out plan. I would not mind having birth control be a requirement while on welfare.
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, its only software. She assumes, unless she thinks carefully, that people know history, politics, literature, because she does and everyone she knows does
Now this is in the article too. You clearly are right that the classes do meet and interact. But they stratify over time because they intermarry and have brighter offspring thatn they would if they did not marry in their own class. But so what, we both agree the article does not fit enough of society to matter.
That is where I agree with the article and the author. It's not so much that IQ levels seek each other out but that welfare encourages a certain type of low-class people and encourages many to migrate in from countries that don't offer welfare. We do see a certain type of people making up the bulk of our prison and street thug populations but I think they are more the result of the government handout programs that encourage unwed and teen pregnancies and promote irresponsible lifestyles. Growing up with a simple but hard working father these kids would have a good chance at life --- but growing up with single mother and her series of boyfriends and one night stands moving in and out of the house, these kids don't have much of a chance at anything.
The smartest are born to parents with intelligence ranging from average to brilliant, probably most to those 1-2 std devs above average (because a small portion of average parents have kids that bright, and there just aren't many parents brighter). It is not - remotely - like IQ "breeds true" like hair color or something. Any more than all the kids of basketball players will be 7 feet tall.
As for your comments about welfare, thankfully it is not up to you. We had ridiculous eugenic nonsense in this country before and we don't need it again. If you want Americans to be brighter on average 100 years from now, convince smart people to end their love affairs with tiny to non-existent families, divorce, abortion, and sodomy.
Oooh, is that a little too close to home? Always easier to make up imaginary vices of the poor to manage via state power, isn't it?
Indeed.
I can't argue with anything he's got here. Though I'm sure that Charles Barron would "squeal like a pig" if he saw that...[g]
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The Effete Elite and the dumb RAT sheeple they propose to speak for...MUD
A-HA! There it is, and I have not seen it articulated before on FR.
My late uncle had many clever sayings that were grounded in home-grown common sense. He had a saying that mirrors yours here. He used to say "Want-To will beat Can-Do if Can-Do don't want to." Or, desire will succeed over qualifications if the desirous person really wants to accomplish something.
I'll just take it back to my beloved Fraternity's motto:
Achievement in Every Field of Human Endeavor.
And, obviously, I truly believe that.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am not at all interested in using the power of the state. I would like to see welfare ended, then what you want, welfare families would look to jobs and self reliance, (giving them help in return for not baring children seems a good bargin, as long as the reproduction would be reversible when they later are not in need of handouts.) It is not an imaginary vice to have sex when you can't affort a family, only when you take steps to actually have the family does it become a "vice" as you call it. But there is nothing "imaginary" about it.
I have no idea how to convince the "smart" liberal community to stop making mascots of the poor, divorced, and single mothers. Likewise the liberal coalition wants the votes of homosexuals and those with a concern that abortion will be made illegal. They have to be defeated politically to get their influence out.
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