The Coming Storm

www.fredoneverything.net ^ | 4/29/2004 | Fred Reed

[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?

[beebuster2000]

bt

[Dudoight]

Pretty interesting. I don't disagree with his observations at all.

[IronJack]

The entire socialist structure is founded on denial, most egregiously, the denial of fundamental biological inequities that manifest in divergent social and economic strata. To the Left, these are signs that the system is wrong, and that all must be adjusted on its Marxist, procrustean bed. So-called "affirmative action" (which is neither, by the way) is a sterling example.

[Dust in the Wind]

Dumb as dirt bump

The elite do not understand, or perhaps more correctly refuse to admit, how very limited are the dull.

Lack of common sense is inherent in all IQ ranges.

[vanmorrison]

I agree with Reed's observations. The first time I encountered the ideas Reed describes was when I saw the film "Zardoz" in college. I later learned that the movie was based on the play "Return to Methuselah" by GBShaw. Readers here might find Shaws' conclusions shocking, yet inevitable.

Consider that, in the US, more people are murdered in cities like Detroit every year than the number of soldiers we've lost in Iraq. Who is the real enemy here?

[The Good Doctor]

And of course much of the "intellectual elite" and much of the social underclass comprise the Democratic party. (Warren Buffet, Rodney King etc.)

People with lots of brains and lots of money "team with" (i.e. use) people with little brains and little money to get the votes to reach into the pocket of people with regular brains and regular money (i.e. the rest of the Country).

[LeGrande]

I couldn't disagree more with the post. With only a few exceptions, most of the highly intelligent (educated) people that I know, are specialists. In their field of expertise, they are very good, but once out of their area of expertise they are generally below average in ability.

In my work I routinely run into highly intelligent people who suffer from severe tunnel vision. If their area of expertise can't fix the problem then as far as they are concerned there is discernible solution. They have to hire me to fix the problem :)

I have yet to meet the person who is equally at home with nano technology, Navajo, plumbing and climbing.

[bert]

Then there is Anita Hill. She was one of the bright cowboys. Discovered on the Oklahoma plains, declared to be a prodigy she was lauded with affirirmative action boosts up the chain to Yale and then to employment in DC.

When she arrived there and was cast out unprotected into the real world, there was a revelation. She was not bright. she was not any where near the equal of the really bright who congregate in DC. Really bright, black and otherwise got the promotions.

Anita Hill was at best only ordinary. She was used and then discarded by the mill that grinds up and discards what ever is politically expedient.

[jpsb]

Good thing articles' premise is incorrect.

[Lady Jag]

Usually the ones who pretend to be smart or have MBAs are your tunnel vision people and are fakes, not very smart at all.

Mensa & Intertel-qualifying high IQ people have problems in that they are jacks of all trades and often have problems settling on one. That's why some people think they're flaky. They don't usually make it big and get rich because they enjoy/participate in their own diversity so much.

[schu]

Bump for later

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

Correct. I am around some very bright professionals who think it is a miracle of science when my electrician partner and I can add extra 120 volt duplex receptacles, cutting them into the walls of their offices. Some of these people call an electrician when their computer printers quit working (someone turned off the power strip) or when a light goes out in a bathroom (bulb burned out).

[TN4Liberty]

The author assumes that "intellegence" is a single factor. I would argue that intellegence has many facets, and most people have specific areas in which their native intellegence is above average. Some intellegent people cannot "do math," but somehow manage to understand and troubleshoot mechanical systems better than the "math intellegent" people.

The second factor that the author ignores is the culture of hard work. Less gifted people can surpass more gifted people simply by working harder. The motivation to work hard is taught by the community, and may explain any stratification of results better than some assumption about somehow inbreeding groups based on intellegence.

[Agnes Heep]

I would tend to dispute the idea that people from the "underclass," as this article puts it, are somehow below average in intelligence. I think they confuse intelligence with knowledge. I've often said of this person or that, "Oh, he's very intelligent ... he just doesn't know anything." People who grow up in a one-parent environment devoid of intellectual stimulation where learning is stigmatized become deprived of the resources that make future learning difficult, if not impossible, and develop worldviews that are decidedly antisocial. Many of them have very high intelligence indeed, and unfortunately that intelligence gets used in the service of some rather undesirable goals.

[TalBlack]

I don'y buy the premise of the article at all. I believe the gene pool is too diverse to allow hard stratification.

If there is a stratification occuring it is in the dumbing down of students with respect to classical Western thought. Kids today are systematically being denied their intellectual heritage and history. In short many of them don't know how to think, which plays in to the hands of the Hillary Clintons of the world who are CERTAIN that THEY can do all the thinking that is neccessary for society.

[man of Yosemite]

Often brilliance develops from very normal parents, and high IQ may even be detrimental in some ways. As you pointed out, some geniuses don't function well in society and may be hindered by their intellect. Many successful people arose out of poor conditions, and many children of the same disappeared into obscurity.

[bd476]

Interesting read or food for thought before lunch?

The following statement is bothersome:

"...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..."

One might wonder if the above statement is an educated reflection or could it be a personal, all encompassing condemnation of senior classmates from the editorialist's past?

[Tax Government]

If, generation after generation, the smartest take themselves out of the gene pool, the results will be just what we see.

The implication appears to be that smart people might isolate themselves, creating a distinct, self-sustaining high-IQ population.

About this, I would say: 1) it would take a very long time -- more than a few generations; 2) the genetic pressure for selection is low -- a lot of non-genetic factors, including birth-time events, help determine whether a particular individual is "intelligent"; 3) natural forces opposite it -- the process of sexual attraction causes complementary and opposite people to marry, and acts a leveling force; 4) trying to do this is not new -- humans have been self-selecting desirable traits forever; 5) let's try to do it -- self-selection should be encouraged; 6) the supposed winners may really be losers -- complaints about stratification are laughable, because what people usually call "intelligence" is more like a set of shared beliefs or social relationships, than any native ability that could be inherited.

Now, will somebody please bio-engineer inheritable genes for language learning and homemaking? I want my kids and grandkids to mine for spouses the world's pool of "unintelligent" people supposedly left behind by this intelligence-stratification process. By doing this, they will avoid marrying into the increasingly inbred, self-declared "intelligent" class, and help ensure genetic diversity for their own offspring.

[MissAmericanPie]

This is kind of a sky is falling senario. Actually, some of these thugs are keenly intelligent. I have found they have a keen sence of self preservation. It is the middle class that suffers, not the gated community elite. Attacks on their kids at school, in their own neighborhoods, at the mall, parks, etc.

Twenty of them arrived to attack my son one sunset evening, his crime? Returning their taunts over his sixth stolen bike. Fortunately, I had just pulled out of my driveway to pick him up from a friends house twelve houses down.

He was running down the street, leaned over, holding his side, the gang right behind him on their stolen bikes. I pulled up and he screamed, "Kill them Mom, kill them all". He had obviously been beaten, I asked if he was stabbed or shot, he said no. Interestingly enough, the gang leaders mom had followed to watch, what she was doing there I can't guess, they were blocks from their home. Maybe she was there to instruct, or admire, or protect.

I remember those possibilities going through my mind as I left my car and chased her and her brood down a drainage ditch, as they attempted to lose the enraged beast, loose on the street and closing the distance, me. The end result of this encounter was several of the group following the example of the ring leaders family, they moved from the area, in search of a far safer, more peaceful, neighborhood.

The middle class, can handle it, and so far, are doing a pretty good job of standing up and teaching some manners to gang members and their families. It use to be that these little encounters could be avoided. There was flight from the cities to the suburbs, now flight from the suburbs to the country or small towns. Now neighborhoods are uniting in neighborhood associations against gang impact and to preserve some resemblence of their normal quiet standard of living. Gangs are confronted whenever they show up on a block. They are questioned about what they are doing on that block if they are obviously not just passing through.

Not many can make the commute from country to city job, so the confrontations and incidents are growing. So far, the old belief about gangs has proven true, they are cowards that can't cut it one on one. They melt away when confronted and their loose association with each other isn't based on strong enough stuff to afford a solid foundation. Everyone in the area is determined that our neighborhoods will not be given over to them, period. With the unfortunate middle class as a buffer, the elite will be safe in their gated communities for a long time to come.