The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  Locke is strikingly indifferent to the source of cognitive differences and strikingly harsh in his judgment about their size. But that does not mean he believed people to have different rights. They are equal in rights, Locke proclaimed, though they be unequal in everything else. Those rights, however, are negative rights (to impose contemporary terminology): They give all human beings the right not to have certain things done to them by the state or by other human beings, not the right to anything, except freedom of action.

  This way of putting it is out of tune with the modern sensibility. The original concept of equal rights is said to be meaningless cant, outmoded; taking equal rights seriously, it is thought, requires enforcing equal outcomes. The prevailing political attitude is so dismissive toward the older conception of equal rights that it is difficult to think of serious public treatments of it; the Founders just didn’t think hard enough about that problem, it seems to be assumed. If he were alive today, some eminent political scientists have argued, Thomas Jefferson would surely be a social democrat or at least a New Deal Democrat.7 We are asking that you consider the alternative: that the Founders were fully aware of how unequal people are, that they did not try to explain away natural inequalities, and that they nonetheless thought the best way for people to live together was under a system of equal rights.

  The Founders wrote frankly about the inequality of men. For Thomas Jefferson, it was obvious that they were especially unequal in virtue and intelligence. He was thankful for a “natural aristocracy” that could counterbalance the deficiencies of the others, an “aristocracy of virtue and talent, which Nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society.”8 It was, he once wrote, “the most precious gift of nature,” and he thought that the best government was one that most efficiently brought the natural aristocracy to high positions.9

  Jefferson saw the consequences of inequalities of ability radiating throughout the institutions of society. The main purpose of education, he believed, was to prepare the natural aristocracy to govern, and he did not mince words. The “best geniuses” should be “raked from the rubbish annually” by competitive grading and examinations, sent on to the next educational stage, and finally called to public life.10 But if the author of the Declaration of Independence was by today’s standards unrepentaritly elitist, he was nonetheless a democrat in his belief that the natural aristocracy was “scattered with equal hand through all [of society’s] conditions,”11 and in his confidence that the electorate had the good sense to choose them. “Leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi,” he advised. “In general, they will elect the real good and wise.”12 For Madison, the “great republican principle” was that the common people would have the public-spiritedness and the information necessary to choose “men of virtue and wisdom” to govern them.13 For both Jefferson and Madison, political equality was both right and workable. They would have been amazed by the notion that humans are equal in any other sense.

  Nor were Jefferson’s and Madison’s views a reflection of their southern heritage. John Adams, that quintessential Yankee, agreed that “natural aristocracy is a fact essential to be considered in the institution of government”—or, as he put it in another instance, “I believe there is as much in the breed of men as there is in that of horses.”14 He was not as optimistic as Jefferson and Madison, for he was keenly aware that intelligence does not necessarily go with virtue, and he was fearful that Jefferson’s natural aristocracy would within a few generations have cemented its descendants’ positions into that of a ruling caste. But he did not doubt that the reality of human inequalities was of central political importance.15

  The other Founders, including Hamilton and Washington, ruminated in the same vein about the inequality of men and the political implications of that inequality. In doing so, they were following an ancient tradition. Political philosophers have always begun from the understanding that good policy must be in accordance with what is good for human beings, and that what is good for humans must be based on an understanding of how they are similar and how they differ. Aristotle put it earliest and perhaps best: “All men believe that justice means equality in some sense…. The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing.”16

  The Founders saw that making a stable and just government was difficult precisely because men were unequal in every respect except their right to advance their own interests. Men had “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property,” Madison reflected in The Federalist.17 This diversity was the very reason why rights of property were so important and why “the protection of those faculties is the first object of Government.” But the diversity was also the defect of populist democracy, because the unequal distribution of property to which it led was “the most common and durable source of factions.” And faction, he argued, was the great danger that the Constitution sought above all to confine and tame. The task of government was to set unequal persons into a system of laws and procedures that would, as nearly as possible, equalize their rights while allowing their differences to express themselves. The result would not necessarily be serene or quiet, but it would be just. It might even work.

  In reminding you of these views of the men who founded America, we are not appealing to their historical eminence, but to their wisdom. We think they were right. Let us stop using words like factions and faculties and aristoi and state in our own words, briefly and explicitly, how and why we think they were right in ways that apply today.

  The egalitarian ideal of contemporary political theory underestimates the importance of the differences that separate human beings. It fails to come to grips with human variation. It overestimates the ability of political interventions to shape human character and capacities. The systems of government that are necessary to carry out the egalitarian agenda ignore the forces that the Founders described in The Federalist, which lead inherently and inevitably to tyranny, throughout history and across cultures. These defects in the egalitarian tradition are reflected in political experience, where the failure of the communist bloc to construct happy societies is palpably apparent and the ultimate fate of even the more benign egalitarian model in Scandinavia is coming into question.

  The perversions of the egalitarian ideal that began with the French Revolution and have been so plentiful in the twentieth century are not accidents of history or produced by technical errors in implementation. Something more inevitable is at work. People who are free to behave differently from one another in the important affairs of daily life inevitably generate the social and economic inequalities that egalitarianism seeks to suppress. That, we believe, is as close to an immutable law as the uncertainties of sociology permit. To reduce inequality of condition, the state must impose greater and greater uniformity. Perhaps that is as close to an immutable law as political science permits. In T. H. White’s version of the Arthurian legend, The Once and Future King, Merlyn transforms young Arthur into an ant as part of his education in governance. In this guise, Arthur approaches the entrance to the ant colony, where over the entrance are written the words, EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.18 Such, in our view, is where the logic of the egalitarian ideal ultimately leads. It is appropriate in the ant colony or the beehive but not for human beings. Egalitarian tyrannies, whether of the Jacobite or the Leninist variety, are worse than inhumane. They are inhuman.

  The same atmosphere prevails on a smaller scale wherever “equality” comes to serve as the basis for a diffuse moral outlook. Consider the many small tyrannies in America’s contemporary universities, where it has become objectionable to say that some people are superior to other people in any way that is relevant to life in society. Nor is this outlook confined to judgments about people. In art, literature, ethics, and cultural norms, differences are not to be judged. Such relativism has become the moral high ground for many modern commentators on life and culture.

  Even the existence of differences m
ust be discussed gingerly, when they are human differences. As soon as the differences are associated with membership in a group, censorship arises. In this book, we have trod on one of those most sensitive areas by talking about ethnic differences, but there are many others. In what respects do men differ from women? Young differ from old? Heterosexuals from homosexuals? The permissible answers, often even the permissible questions, are sharply circumscribed. The moral outlook that has become associated with equality has spawned a vocabulary of its own. Discrimination, once a useful word with a praiseworthy meaning, is now almost always used in a pejorative sense. Racism, sexism, ageism, elitism—all are in common parlance, and their meanings continue to spread, blotting up more and more semantic territory.

  The ideology of equality has done some good. For example, it is not possible as a practical matter to be an identifiable racist or sexist and still hold public office. But most of its effects are bad. Given the power of contemporary news media to imprint a nationwide image overnight, mainstream political figures have found that their allegiance to the rhetoric of equality must extend very far indeed, for a single careless remark can irretrievably damage or even end a public career. In everyday life, the ideology of equality censors and straitjackets everything from pedagogy to humor. The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life—conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write—the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and—above all—truth.

  Within the realm of government, small versions of the “everything not forbidden is compulsory” mentality may be seen everywhere. The informal old American principle governing personal behavior was that you could do whatever you wanted as long you didn’t force anyone else to go along with you and as long as you let the other fellow go about his affairs with equal freedom. The stopping point was defined by the useful adage, “Your freedom to swing your arm stops where my nose begins.” In laws great and small, this principle has been perverted beyond recognition, as the notions of what constitutes “where my nose begins” stretch far out into space. The practice of affirmative action has been a classic example of the “everything not forbidden is compulsory” mentality, as the idea of forbidding people to discriminate by race mutated into the idea of compelling everyone to help produce equal outcomes by race. In tort law, the destruction of the concept of negligence grew out of an explicitly egalitarian view of the purpose of liability—not to redress individual victims for acts of irresponsibility but to redistribute goods more equitably.19 In personal life, the idea of forbidding people from interfering with members of other groups (blacks, homosexuals, women) as they went about their lives has been extended to the idea of compelling people to “treat them the same.” It is a mark of how far things have gone that many people no longer can see the distinction between “not interfering” and “treating the same.”

  Our views on all of these issues are decidedly traditional. We think that rights are embedded in our freedom to act, not in the obligations we may impose on others to act; that equality of rights is crucial while equality of outcome is not; that concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty, and truth should be reintroduced into moral discourse. We are comfortable with the idea that some things are better than others—not just according to our subjective point of view but according to enduring standards of merit and inferiority—and at the same time reject the thought that we (or anyone else) should have the right to impose those standards. We are enthusiastic about diversity—the rich, unending diversity that free human beings generate as a matter of course, not the imposed diversity of group quotas.

  And so we come to this final chapter, discussing the broadest policy implications of all that has gone before. We bring to our recommendations a predisposition, believing that the original American conceptions of human equality and the pursuit of happiness still offer the wisest guidance for thinking about how to run today’s America. These have been some of our reasons why.

  LETTING PEOPLE FIND VALUED PLACES IN SOCIETY

  With these thoughts on the table, let us return to the question that opened the chapter: How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life? The answer turns us back to the ancient concern with place.

  The Goal and a Definition

  The broadest goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel they have found, a valued place for themselves. For “valued place,” we offer a pragmatic definition: You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact that you would be missed means that you were valued. Both the quality and quantity of valued places are important. Most people hope to find a soulmate for life, and that means someone who would “miss you” in the widest and most intense way. The definition captures the reason why children are so important in defining a valued place. But besides the quality of the valuing, quantity too is important. If a single person would miss you and no one else, you have a fragile hold on your place in society, no matter how much that one person cares for you. To have many different people who would miss you, in many different parts of your life and at many levels of intensity, is a hallmark of a person whose place is well and thoroughly valued. One way of thinking about policy options is to ask whether they aid or obstruct this goal of creating valued places.

  Finding Valued Places

  The great bulk of the American population is amply equipped, in their cognitive resources and in other personal characteristics, to find valued places in society. We must emphasize that, because for hundreds of pages we have focused on people at the two tails of the bell curve. Now is a good time to recall the people in the broad part of the curve, between the extremes. In figure after figure throughout Chapter 16, the pattern was consistent: The prevalence of the social maladies we reviewed was strikingly concentrated in the bottom IQ deciles. By the time people were even approaching average IQ, the percentages of people who were poor, had babies out of wedlock, provided poor environments for their children, or exhibited any other problem constituted small percentages of the population. Translated into the themes we are about to introduce, the evidence throughout this book supports the proposition that most people by far have enough intelligence for getting on with the business of life. We believe the policies we advocate will benefit them as well, by creating a generally richer and more vital society, but it should be made explicit: Our solutions assume that the average American is an asset, not part of the problem.

  Finding Valued Places If You Aren’t Very Smart: The Traditional Context

  Nonetheless, millions of Americans have levels of cognitive ability low enough to make their lives statistically much more difficult than life is for most other people. How may policy help or obstruct them as they go about their lives? Our thesis is that it used to be easier for people who are low in ability to find a valued place than it is now.

  In a simpler America, being comparatively low in the qualities measured by IQ did not necessarily affect the ability to find a valued niche in society. Many such people worked on farms. When farms were small, technology was limited to the horse-drawn plow and a few hand tools, and the same subsistence crops were grown year after year. People who would score 80 or 90 on an IQ test could be competent farmworkers, not conspicuously distinguished from most other people in wealth, home, neighborhood, or status in the community. Much the same could be said of a wide variety of skilled and unskilled trades. Even an unskilled laborer who was noticeably lower on the economic scale was part of a community in which many others with many levels of ability lived close to him, literally and socially. Inevitably, with technological advances, the niches for the less intelligent have shrunk.

  As for the most intimate affiliations—marriage and chil
dren—there formerly was little difference between people of varying abilities: To be married meant to be responsible for each other, and for the children of that marriage, in unqualified and uncompromising ways that the entire community held to be of the highest importance. Those who met those responsibilities had a valued place in the community by definition. Those who failed conspicuously in those responsibilities were outcasts by definition. Meeting the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood did not take a lot of money and did not take high intelligence. The community provided clear and understandable incentives for doing what needed to be done.

  Urban communities were somewhat different from small towns in these respects but not unrecognizably so. The top socioeconomic layer moved off to its own part of town, but this left a broad range of people living together in the rest of a city’s neighborhoods, and the social functioning of those neighborhoods shared many characteristics with small towns. The responsibilities of marriage and children were as clearly defined in urban neighborhoods as in rural ones, and success and failure in those responsibilities were as visibly rewarded and punished.