Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  The first major study of the issues the Great Society was meant to help rectify was Equality of Educational Opportunity, by James Coleman and others, released through the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., in 1966.67 The Coleman Report, the most thorough study of naturally desegregated schools in America, concluded that the socioeconomic level of a student’s school had more effect on his or her achievement than any other measurable factor except the socioeconomic level of his or her home. In other words, blacks were better off in desegregated schools because, in general, those schools were more likely to be middle class. Blacks were not better off if desegregation merely meant they transferred to schools where the whites were as poor as the blacks. British thinking had followed American ideas and created, in the mid-1960s, what were called Educational Priority Areas; as their name implied, these aimed to boost disadvantaged groups in disadvantaged socio-economic areas. However, in one study, All Our Future, by J. W. B. Douglas and others and published in 1968, their conclusion was that the gap between middle-class and working-class pupils had not been reduced, in any appreciable way, by such social engineering.68

  The real controversy started at the end of the 1960s with an article in the Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist from the University of California at Berkeley, headed ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ This long review article (there was no new research material, merely a reanalysis of studies already published) began, ‘Compensatory education has been tried and apparently it has failed.’ Jensen argued that as much as 80 percent of the variance in IQ is due to genes and that therefore the approximately 15 percent difference between the average IQ score of whites and blacks was due mainly to hereditary racial differences in intelligence. It followed, Jensen said, that no program of social action could equalise the social status of blacks and whites, ‘and that blacks ought better to be educated for the more mechanical tasks to which their genes predisposed them.’69 At times it must have seemed to blacks as if there had been no progress since Du Bois’s day.

  Less contentious than Jensen but far more influential in the long run was the study carried out by Christopher Jencks, professor of sociology at Harvard, and seven colleagues.70 Jencks, another student of David Riesman, had always been interested in the limits of schooling, about which he had written a book in the early 1960s. After the Coleman Report was published, Daniel Moynihan and Thomas Pettigrew initiated a seminar at Harvard to reanalyse the data. Moynihan, Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor, had produced his own Moynihan Report in March 1965, which argued that half the black population suffered from ‘social pathology.’ Pettigrew was a black psychologist. Jencks and others joined the seminar, which grew over the years into the Center for Educational Policy Research, of which Jencks’s book Inequality was the first important result.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the findings of Inequality shocked and infuriated a great many people on both sides of the Atlantic. The main results of the Harvard inquiries, which included a massive chapter examining the effects of cognitive skills on advancement in life, its relation to school and to race, among other variables, was that genes and IQ ‘have relatively little effect on economic success’, ‘school quality has little effect on achievement or on economic success’; and therefore ‘educational reform cannot bring about economic or social equality.’ More particularly, the study concluded, ‘We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on genetic differences in men’s capacity for abstract reasoning, since there is nearly as much economic inequality among men with equal test scores as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality primarily on the fact that parents pass along their disadvantages to their children, since there is nearly as much inequality among men whose parents had the same economic status as among men in general. We cannot blame economic inequality on differences between schools, since differences between schools seem to have very little effect on any measurable attribute of those who attend them…. Economic success seems to depend on varieties of luck and on-the-job competence that are only moderately related to family background, schooling, or scores on standardised tests. The definition of competence varies greatly from one job to another, but it seems in most cases to depend more on personality than on technical skills. This makes it hard to imagine a strategy for equalising competence. A strategy for equalising luck is even harder to conceive.’71

  The impact of Inequality undoubtedly stemmed from the sheer quantity of data handled by the Harvard team, and the rigorous mathematical analysis discussed in detail in a series of long notes at the end of each chapter and in three appendices, on IQ, intergenerational mobility, and statistics. Jensen was put in his place, for instance, the Harvard study finding that the heritability of IQ was somewhere between 25 and 45 percent rather than 80 percent, though they took care to add that admitting a genetic component in IQ did not make one a racist.72 They commented, ‘It seems to be symbolically important to establish the proposition that blacks can do as well on standardised tests as whites. But if either blacks or whites conclude that racial equality is primarily a matter of equalising reading scores, they are fooling themselves… blacks and whites with equal test scores still have very unequal occupational statuses and incomes.’73 Regarding desegregation, the Harvard team concluded that if applied across the board, it would reduce the 15-point gap in IQ between whites and blacks to maybe 12 or 13 points. While this is not trivial, they acknowledged, ‘it would certainly not have much effect on the overall pattern of racial inequality in America.’ They then added, ‘The case for or against desegregation should not be argued in terms of academic achievement. If we want a segregated society, we should have segregated schools. If we want a desegregated society we should have desegregated schools.’ Only political and economic change will bring about greater equality, they said. ‘This is what other countries usually call socialism.’74

  Given the news about freedom and equality then coming out of socialist countries, such as Russia and China, it is perhaps not surprising that this final message of the Harvard team did not catch on. On the other hand, their notion that schools could not bring about the equality that the blacks wanted was heeded, and the leaders of the civil rights movement began to concentrate their fire on segregation and discrimination in the workplace, which, it was now agreed, had a greater effect on economic inequality than schooling.

  Traditional school came under a very different kind of attack in Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, a Viennese who had studied at the Gregorian University in Rome and as an assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rico parish in New York City. His main aim was to develop educational institutions for poor Latin American countries (he also worked in Mexico), and he argued that schools, far from liberating students from ignorance and teaching them to make the most of their capabilities, were actually, by 1971, merely boring, bourgeois ‘processing factories,’ organised anonymously, producing ‘victims for the consumer society.’75 Teachers, he said, were custodians, moralists, and therapists, rather than conveyors of information that taught people how to make their lives more meaningful. Illich therefore argued for the complete abolition of schools and their replacement by four ‘networks.’ What he had in mind, for example, was that children should learn about farming and geography and botany on the land, or about flight at airports, or economics in factories. Second, he called for ‘skill exchanges,’ whereby children would go to ‘skill models,’ say, guitar players or dancers or politicians, to learn those subjects that they really felt interested in. Third, he advocated ‘peer matching,’ essentially clubs of people interested in the same subject – fishing, motorcycles, Greek – who would compare progress and criticise each other.76 Fourth, he said there was a need for professional educators, in effect people experienced in the first three networks outlined above, who could advise parents where to send their children. But teachers as such, and schools as such, would be abolished. Deschooling Society was an unusual book in that its prognosis wa
s as detailed as its diagnosis. It formed part of the intellectual thrust that became known as the counterculture, but it had little real impact on schools.

  The Great Society lost its chief navigator, and therefore its way, in March 1968 when President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. One reason for this was the war in Vietnam. In 1968 America had nearly half a million troops in Asia, 25,000 of whom were being killed annually. Before he left office, Johnson announced his policy of ‘affirmative action,’ under which all government contractors had to give preferential treatment to African Americans and other minorities. He was being optimistic: 1968 descended into violence and conflict on all fronts.

  On 8 February, three black students were killed in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when they attempted to desegregate a bowling alley. On 4 April Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis, and for a week there was rioting and looting in several U.S. cities in protest. In June Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in California. The Miss America contest in the United States was disrupted by feminists. But America was not alone. In Britain a new race relations act was deemed necessary. In July in Czechoslovakia, the USSR refused to withdraw its troops after Warsaw Pact exercises – this followed moves by the Czech government toward greater press freedom, the removal of censorship, easier religious assembly, and other liberal reforms. This was also the year of widespread student rebellion, rebellion against the war in Vietnam, against racial and sexual discrimination, and against rigid tuition policies in universities around the world – in the United States, Britain, Germany (where there was an attempt on the life of the student leader Rudi Dutschke), in Italy, but above all in France, where students co-operated with workers who occupied factories and campuses, barricaded the streets of major cities, forcing several changes in government policy, including a rise of 33 percent in the minimum wage.

  The student rebellions were one aspect of a social phenomenon that had a number of intellectual consequences. The social phenomenon was the ‘baby boom,’ a jump in the number of births during and immediately after World War II. This meant that, beginning in the late 1950s, coinciding with the arrival of the affluent society (and, it should be said, widespread availability of television), there occurred a highly visible, and much more numerous than hitherto, generation of students. In 1963, following the Robbins Report on higher education in Britain, the government doubled the number of universities (from twenty-three to forty-six) almost overnight. Books such as Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, alongside disillusionment with traditional left-wing politics after Stalin’s death and the increased publicity given to his atrocities, not to mention the brutal Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, had come together to create the New Left (with initial capitals) around 1960. The essence of the New Left, which was a force in several countries, was a fresh concern with Marx’s concept of alienation. For the New Left, politics was more personal, more psychological; its proponents argued that involvement was the best way to counter alienation, and that such self-conscious groups as students, women and blacks were better agents of radical change than the working classes. The Campaign for (Unilateral) Nuclear Disarmament, an early focus of involvement, received a massive boost at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. But the civil rights and women’s liberation movements were soon joined to the Cold War as a focus for radical engagement. The demonstrations and rebellions of 1968 were the culmination of this process. Similarly, the Woodstock music festival in 1969 illustrated the other stream of 1960s student thought – personal liberation not through politics but through new psychologies, sex, new music, and drugs, a cocktail of experiences that became known as the ‘counterculture.’

  One man who distilled these issues in his writings and provided a thread running through the decade was an American figure who, in some ways, was to the last half of the twentieth century what George Orwell had been to the first: Norman Mailer. Like Orwell, Mailer was a reporter and a novelist who had seen action in war. Throughout the 1960s he produced a series of books – An American Dream (1965), Cannibals and Christians (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1969) – that chronicle, as their very titles reveal, a violent decade. In An American Dream, Steve Rojack, the central character (hero is very definitely not the word), is a much-decorated war veteran, a congressman, and at the time the story starts, a television personality with his own show – everything an American could hope to be.77 Yet in the first few pages he strangles his wife, creeps along the corridor to have (violent) sex with the maid, then throws his wife out of the apartment window from a great height in the hope that she will be so mangled by the fall and the traffic that any evidence of the strangling will be destroyed. He is unsuccessful in this, but never punished, for strings are pulled, on others’ behalf as well as his own. He loses his TV show but in the course of the three days that the novel lasts, two other people – one a woman, one a black man – endure a much worse fate, being killed as a result of Rojack’s activities. What runs through the novel is the fact that nothing that happens to Rojack really touches him; he is a complete narcissist. This, says Mailer, is what America has come to. Another 1960s book was Henry Steele Commager’s Was America a Mistake? Mailer certainly thinks Steve Rojack was.78

  The Armies of the Night carries the subheading, ‘History as a Novel/The Novel as History.’ Ostensibly, the main part of the book tells the inside story of the March on the Pentagon on 21 October 1967, by up to 75,000 people demonstrating against the Vietnam War.79 Mailer’s account is a novel only in the sense that he refers to himself throughout in the third person and takes the reader backstage – backstage both in the organisation for the march and backstage of Mailer as well. The other ‘characters’ in the novel are real people – Robert Lowell, Noam Chomsky, and Dr Spock among them. Mailer describes his various forms of jealousy, of Lowell for instance; his own embarrassing performance at a lecture the night before the march; his love for his wife. So what he offers is an early example of what would later be called radical chic; it is taken as read that the book-buying public will be interested in what a celebrity gets up to behind the scenes of a political event; readers will automatically understand that celebrities are now part of the picture in any political movement and will follow the story more easily if they have someone to identify with, especially someone with a confessional tone. In the course of the story the marchers are attacked; Mailer (along with about a thousand other demonstrators) is arrested and spends a night in the cells, as a result of which he misses a party in New York. This being a novel, in one chapter Mailer is able to give an account of the Vietnam War and why he thinks America’s involvement is wrong. The second, shorter section, ‘The Novel as History: The Battle of the Pentagon,’ gives a more general account of the same events, including many quotes from newspapers. In this section, Mailer shows how the newspapers often get things wrong, but he also shows how they expand and fill out what he has to say in the first part. Mailer is using the march as an example of several trends in contemporary American life and thought: how violence is very near the surface; how the media and ‘image’ matter as much as substantive events; how the press are one of the armies of the night as well as indispensable bringers of light; above all how no one method of truth-telling is enough.80 His fundamental point, what links The Armies of the Night with An American Dream, and what finally lays to rest the pattern of thought prevalent in the 1950s, may be described in this way: Mailer was an antiexistentialist. For him, violence – boundary situations – actually dulls thinking; people stop listening to each other. Thinking is the most intense, the most creative, form of living but, surrounded by violence, views become polarised, frozen. Vietnam was freezing thought in America.

  The 1960s had begun with a significant increase in tension in the Cold War. The later years of the decade saw yet another round of events that reflected the very different attitudes to freedom, equality, and justice in Communis
t countries.

  On 10 November 1965 a young literary critic in Shanghai, named Yao Wenyuan, writing in Literary Current, attacked a play, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, which had been written four years before by Wu Han, deputy mayor of Beijing. The play was about an honest Ming dynasty official who took exception to the emperor’s land policy and was punished simply for being so forthright. Though it was set many years in the past, Mao Zedong took the play as an attack on himself and used it as an excuse to introduce change on a massive scale. What became known as the Cultural Revolution had two aspects: it was a major political move by Mao, but it also had an important, devastating impact on the artists, intellectuals, and academics of China, who suffered extraordinary deprivations of freedom of thought and action.