What Is Intelligence, and Who Has It?
By Malcolm W. Browne;
Published: October 16, 1994
THE BELL CURVE Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. By Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Illustrated. 845 pp. New York: The Free Press. $30.
RACE, EVOLUTION, AND BEHAVIOR A Life History Perspective. By J. Philippe Rushton. Illustrated. 334 pp. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. $34.95. THE DECLINE OF INTELLIGENCE IN AMERICA A Strategy for National Renewal. By Seymour W. Itzkoff. 242 pp. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. $49.95.
ONE may loathe or share the opinions expressed in the three books under review, but one thing seems clear: The government or society that persists in sweeping their subject matter under the rug will do so at its peril.
The issues raised by the scholars who wrote these books bear intimately on America's near future: its quality of life, its citizens' sense of belonging, its economic survival and the very foundations of a democratic society. They believe that America is rapidly evolving a huge underclass, an intellectually deprived population of men and women whose cognitive abilities will never match the future needs of most employers and for whom American society seems to have less use each year. The prisoners of this new underclass, the authors fear, may be permanently doomed by their intellectual shortcomings to welfare dependency, poverty, crime and lives shorn of any hope of realizing the American dream.
The numbers are far from encouraging. Indicators of national intelligence in the United States have declined compared with similar measurements of intelligence in other countries. The demographer Daniel R. Vining Jr. has calculated that America's I.Q. scores have fallen about five points since intelligence tests first came into use at the beginning of this century, and the College Entrance Examination Board says that scores for the Scholastic Aptitude Test fell from 1962 to 1990 by 11 percent in the verbal section and 5 percent in the mathematics part. The Educational Testing Service does not call the S.A.T. an intelligence test, but the test is nevertheless supposed to measure something like native brainpower.
Worst of all, say the authors, the lowest intellectual levels of the population are strongly outbreeding the brightest, and if (as most psychologists believe) intelligence is partly inherited, America is losing the cognitive base essential to coping with national problems.
In "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write, "Mounting evidence indicates that demographic trends are exerting downward pressures on the distribution of cognitive ability in the United States and that the pressures are strong enough to have social consequences." It makes little difference whether people at the low end of the intelligence scale pass on their deficit genetically or environmentally, they say: "If women with low scores are reproducing more rapidly than women with high scores, the distribution of scores will, other things equal, decline, no matter whether the women with the low scores came by them through nature or nurture."
This thesis becomes especially unpalatable when one considers the authors' observation that a large proportion of this emergent underclass is black. Unless future accommodations between ethnic groups lead to a more harmonious social structure, Mr. Herrnstein and Mr. Murray say, the potential for racial hatred seems enormous.
However much one may disagree with this assessment, the possibility that the authors may be even partly right makes these three books worth plowing through and mulling over. The articulation of issues touching on group intelligence and ethnicity has been neither fashionable nor safe for the last three decades, but these scholars argue that the time has come to grasp the nettle of political heresy, to discard social myths and to come to grips with statistical evidence.
The authors suggest that unless we do something to correct present trends, America may soon be permanently split between an isolated caste of ruling meritocrats on one hand and a vast, powerless Lumpenproletariat on the other. Society, the authors predict, will have little use for this underclass in a world dominated by sophisticated machines and the bright human beings who tend them.
This grim future may already be unavoidable.
Seymour W. Itzkoff, whose book "The Decline of Intelligence in America: A Strategy for National Renewal" is the gloomiest of the group, writes: "Our problem is simple, but oh-so-difficult to discuss, let alone accept. We are a different people than we were 50 years ago. In truth, we are not the nation that we were. Relative to the rest of the developed and developing world, we probably no longer have the intellectual capital that can profit from the available educational resources."
These books are heavily laced with statistics, bibliographic citations and ideas requiring time to consider, and they are not light reading. The authors of "The Bell Curve" tell readers that they may limit their perusal to the summaries that precede each chapter, and that they may skip the main text. Still, "The Bell Curve" is 845 pages long, and a reader who skips even the appendixes will miss many of the points the authors are at pains to make.