The Smart Culture. Robert L. Hayman Jr.

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      Another century later, and much finally has changed. Suffrage is now genuinely universal. Public or private discrimination based on race, gender, or disability now violates federal law. The promise of legal equality, at least, is now a reality.

      Yet by every social, political, and economic measure, the hierarchies of race, gender, and disability endure. And to explain the reality of inequality in the face of professed equality, we make recourse still to the same old myths:

      • The myth of identity: that the salient differences among groups of people—race, gender, disability—are biological.

      • The myth of merit: that our social, political, and economic markets are free and neutral, and only occasionally corrupted by the bias of individual discrimination.

      • The myth of intelligence: that the unequal outcomes of social, political, and economic competition reflect the inborn inequities of nature.

      • The myth of equality under law: that equality can never transcend the empty realm of form, for the law is limited by tradition and powerless in the face of the natural order.

      Thus the mythology of smartness endures. And it is all untrue. And the real tragedy is this: by now, we should know better.

      We should know that the biological differences among groups of people are trivial, and that the salient differences are generated through the processes of social interaction.

      We should know that our markets reflect the preferences of the people who have structured and maintained them, and that these biases—structural and unconscious—constitute the real discrimination.

      We should know that unequal outcomes—in education, in employment, and yes, on tests of smartness—reflect the cumulative advantages and disadvantages of centuries of discrimination, and the same biases that pervade all of our culture.

      We should know that our laws and traditions are only what we choose to make them, and that equality can be as real as we dare.

      All of this we should now know, yet somehow refuse to believe. And in rejecting the liberation offered by contemporary understanding, we have rejected as well the very best of our national heritage. We abandon the egalitarian vision of the people who founded and reconstructed our nation; we embrace instead their tragically flawed mythology.

      Smart people do get ahead. They stay ahead. But it is not only natural.

      One question haunts this book: for all the talk about “socially constructed this” and “culturally determined that,” for all the critiques of the “natural order” and all the appeals to equality, isn’t it undeniably true that some people—and perhaps some groups of people—are just plain smarter than others?

      The answer is simple and obvious: yes, some people—and perhaps some groups of people—are smarter than others.

      It’s the explanation that’s complicated. Because the fact is that both the question and the answer are meaningless unless we are clear about what we mean by “smart.” The problem is that we often are not very clear, and we often are not in agreement, and so our assertions about the relative smartness of some people as compared to others are too easily misunderstood, and it becomes far too easy to assume that their profound smartness—and other people’s lack of it—is more natural, more inevitable, and more inherently meaningful than it really is.

      So let me try to be clear about what I mean when I say that some people—and perhaps some groups of people—are smarter than others.

      Some people are less “smart” than others for identifiable physiological reasons. Neurological disorders often have direct effects on cognitive ability; sometimes these disorders may so affect a cognitive ability that we will say that the person is cognitively impaired. If the impairment is spread among a wide enough range of cognitive abilities, it may be possible to say that—in most cultural contexts—the person will be less smart than the norm. Here, however, a certain note of caution is in order: in some discrete contexts, our cognitively impaired person may be quite smart after all—smart, that is, at some things, if not at most.

      Some people don’t do as well as other people on standardized measurements of “intelligence.” Ideally, “intelligence” means the ability to succeed in the culture; standardized measurements of intelligence should thus measure the relative ability to achieve cultural success. Someone with less measured intelligence should then have—if everything goes according to plan—less ability to succeed in the culture. Again, it may be possible to say that in most cultural contexts, the person will be less smart than the norm.

      Here, many notes of caution are in order. It is easy to assume that these intelligence differences that we have measured represent natural variations among people, variations that are fixed in the biological makeup of the individual. But that is not necessarily—and probably not often—the case.

      Nature, after all, does not dictate which qualities will correlate with cultural achievement. It is for us to decide which aptitudes—which skills and knowledge, talents and abilities, cognitive and affective traits—are valuable and which ones are not. We could exalt formal deduction, or creative analogic reasoning, or practical problem-solving skills, or moral reasoning, or empathie judgment and interpersonal skills. We decide, in other words, what will count as “intelligence.”

      Nature does not dictate which people will be afforded the optimal chances to acquire the aptitudes for cultural success. It is for us to decide who will receive the optimal chances—the cultural environment, the formal education, the social opportunity—to acquire intelligence. Research now consistently documents the profound effects of environmental stimulation on cognitive development and the equally profound effects of environmental deprivation. It is a social fact that the probabilities of growing up in comparatively stimulating and deprived environments are not equally distributed among race and class: successful people—smart people—are uniquely situated to perpetuate their advantages. And we keep them there. We decide, in other words, who will be afforded the best chance to get “smart” and stay smart.

      Nature does not dictate our response to measured differences in intelligence. We decide whether those differences should be simply ignored, actively countered, or preserved as justifications for the prevailing inequities. In the United States, we long ago stopped talking about regional differences in “IQ,” as well as most ethnic disparities. The gender disparities, meanwhile, we eliminated by modifying the tests. The disparities of race, however, retain a singular legitimacy. We give them that. We decide, in other words, whether we actually like our hierarchies of “smartness.”

      All of which is to say that “superior” and “inferior” intelligences are not entirely natural. On the contrary, it is substantially our decisions that make people either more or less “smart.”

      There is something concededly counterintuitive about all this. We have come to believe in smartness as an inherent quality, as something people are either born with or not. We have come to believe that it is fairly immutable, that individual limitations are pretty much fixed. And we can hardly be faulted for conceiving of it as something universal; it is hard to imagine choosing other things to count as “smart” beyond the things “we” have chosen. So the suggestion that smartness is “made” strikes us as, well, a not-very-smart suggestion.

      But then again, we know that people disagree about smartness, about whether a student or a teacher or a politician or a neighbor is “smart.” Maybe, then, smartness is not entirely inherent; maybe it does require our subjective assessment.

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