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February 23, 2003
Brainism
P>If you don't understand a word, look to the dictionary. If you don't understand blackfolks, look to science.This is evidently the regime in place as folks tiptoe through the minefield of heritable intelligence. I'm not going into a long expository thing here because this kind of thing is best worked through interactively, like a game of 20 questions. There is entirely too much ground to cover.
Since this matter involves The Bell Curve, I suppose it doesn't help in my distinction that I'm against it. But my primary argument against the Bell Curve is that it was a shoddy attempt to undermine the political process with weak science. In any case what I'm going to suggest is that there is a philosophical framework we should keep in mind which reigns in our scientific inquiry and directs it. Racism has no place in our republic, whether or not there are ultimately scientific findings which support certain axioms of racial supremacy. Free inquiry isn't automatically valuable.
To the subject at hand, I have no problem with the idea of heritable intelligence. It makes perfect sense that some brains are physically more well adopted to performing certain computational tasks, just as some eyes see better than others. But as you map such things onto race, it's like saying categorically that blue eyes see better than brown eyes. The external morphology we can recognize has nothing to do with the qualities of the eye's ability to see. In a society such as ours, which is predisposed to seeing things in racial terms (which have no consistent correlation to genetics) it's not surprising that things get twisted.
The question arises as to what social significance we attribute to scientific discoveries. What I cannot seem to fathom is how seemingly intelligent people have completely lost their understanding of the lessons of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. If the lessons of the corruption of a eugenically enhanced society were not made plain enough in that book, there are surely other examples. But I think this is a matter we can solve with a tiny bit of reasoning and common sense.
The reason racism is odious is because to controverts the premises of civil equality, the entire point of the French and American revolutions. But to understand this we must go a bit deeper than the common understanding of racism. I'll use the following terms. Racialism, Extrinsic Racism, Intrinsic Racism.
racialism:
The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of jews throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'jewness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.
A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.
extrinsic racism:
The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence' of a race which warrants differential treatment. These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial. The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that Jews are greedy, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a Jew. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the Jew who proves himself not greedy and call him a credit to his race.
intrinsic racism:
The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. no matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. the extrinsic racist would argue that the Jew is so greedy that he would hide his greed in order to gain other's confidence or that this generous person is simply not a Jew.(I specifically use jews in this definition because I understand that jews are not a racial group per se)
If one can quantify a particular type of intelligence which is inheritable then one is clearly saying that it is distinct and mutually exclusive. If it weren't, why bother with genetic research? As far as I know, nobody has figured out which brain shape helps one multiply numbers without the use of paper, or which gene governs the ability to speak multiple languages but that's the aim of the science. Find the definitive link. In short, the logic of genetic inheritance of intelligence works exactly as racialism does. There are genes, intelligence is expressed through the genes. You either have the gene or you don't. It's a hardware question. Ultimately the science will map the various intelligences into mutually exclusive genetic groups. These will be the races of intelligence.
I'm not going to get bogged down in questions of how much difference environment makes because it doesn't mitigate the intent of the genetic science. Analagously speaking, it doesn't matter that eyesight can be corrected, the search goes on for the gene for perfect eyesight.
In America, we are infatuated with the idea that we are a meritocratic society. That's hardly as well-wrapped a concept in reality as in theory, ask any investment counselor who deals with heirs. Nevertheless much of America operates in persuit of that principle. It is this infatuation with meritocracy which pushes the morally neutral racialism of those I'll call 'genetic expressionists' into questionable territory, into racism, and this is exactly where the Bell Curve begins.
If intelligence is meritorious, then those who are intelligent *should* have enhanced standing in our society if our society *should* be meritocratic. This is the morally provocative statement. Any way you assert it, either as a plan for a future elitism or as an apology for the present inequality, it is an express appeal for that singular value to have weight in an individual's standing. What's particularly galling about this is that of all human attributes, intelligence is probably the most amoral. Rewarding people for being smarter than their neighbor is a quick road to hell. Should the energy traders who outsmarted the State of California deserve those profits? Should the terrorists who outsmarted the entire American intelligence community be commended? Of course not. There are other things that are clearly more important to the well being of our nation than the collective intelligence of its population, or the standing of its more intelligent people within it. To suggest otherwise is to present an America which stands outside of the fold of human history.
Let's look at some practical scenarios in a future of gene mapped races of intelligences. Say that 10 years from today we have a scientifically vetted equivalent of four intelligence types. These work rather like Meyers-Briggs, and people know that they are ESTJ as well as they know their SAT scores. If the American Bar Association polls its membership and finds that it is objectively lacking in genetic intellectual diversity, should it give affirmative action points for INST intelligence types? If the Southern Pacific Railway hired an ERFX should they be indemnified at a lower rate for train collisions? If my wife divorces me when she finds out that I'm an RDES, can I sue the lab that tested me for alimony damages?
Speculation is fun. That doesn't change the fact that this country is ripe for overselling intellectual determinism, and has centuries of experience in segregating its people into neat, false, destructive higherarchies. If some genetic science makes a new class of hierarchies true, is that progress?
Swinging back around to the top. Blackfolks provide a neat if poorly understood example in all of this wishful thinking about brains and meritocracy. So the supposed gap between average black intelligence and average white intelligence bears more weight than it deserves. People seem genuinely surprised to find that whites own on average 8 times as much property than blacks. If I could, by increasing my IQ score by 15 points, gain 800% value of my assets, then I'd focus on this debate as if it really mattered. But I know it's just dancing around the same primitive fire.
Posted by mbowen at February 23, 2003 11:37 AM
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