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?
At the same time, the number of voters who pay no taxes is increasing towards 50%. This is the 'rat voting base, and the 'rats have every reason to continue to dumb them down in failed gubmint skools and increase the size of the dependent class.
When this dumbed down, non-tax paying class reaches 50%, watch out.
Err. but don't you know people who, with time and effort could make a stab at Nano tech, learn some Navajo, understand the concepts of plumbing, and climbing, even if they did not have the physical ability for those last two? I have associated with liberals, who while practicing medicine or teaching anthropology nevertheless profess a rudimentary knowledge of solid state physics, play at solving complex math problems, and believe they have the answers to all our social problems. don't you know this type too?
This is where I believe the author is coming from, and he goes on to say there are people who could not grasp any of the above. If they could grasp plumbing, they could make an above average living, but there are problems to solve in plumbing that are sometimes formidable.
Why have the costs risen so much? I have theory that the govt. subsidies in the name of grants are the cause. As long as the govt keeps subsidizing the cost the universities will keep raising the cost.
Actually, as someone cursed with a relatively high IQ (as likely most Freepers are [how humble]), I look at it slightly differently.
Being brighter than most, just seems to make my errors more brilliant. Smart people make intelligent theories, which if not tested in the real world can result in stupendous errors. See the politics of the University system.
Visit American Mensa. You'll find some games and info there.
"Well, that would not be necessary Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. (Slams down left fist. Right arm rises in stiff Nazi salute.) Arrrrr! (restrains right arm with left) Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years." |
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