| Home | My photos | Forex | My trading | Contacts |
|
|
You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
|
Were they just beneficiaries of reverse discriminationINDIVIDUALS VS. CLASSES Humanism has been accused of representing collectivist morality, denying the importance of the individual. Contrary to these allegations, humanist authors have not elevated any collective body to a source of value, but have focused on persons. How can people lead more meaningful, more spiritual, more responsible lives? Humanism is a philosophy of individualism, seeing the source of value in persons (Kant, Mill, Jefferson). It differs sharply from collectivism, which maintains that individuals have value only as citizens of a special nation, representatives of a favored class or race, or participants in predetermined movements of history (Plato, Hegel, Marx). It is easy to take for granted the humanist view that value resides in persons, rather than collectives. We value ourselves, our families, and our friends as individuals, as who we are. But as people are removed from our immediacy, we tend to think of them as members of a collective — what they do or what class they belong to. These two opposing views, the individual valued as a person in his own right and the individual valued for his function in society, have both played roles in history. Both shape society today. The roots of individualism lie deep. Pericles’ classic account of democracy dates from the golden age of Greece. He commented approvingly that while not just anyone could propose national policy, anyone could judge such policy. Participation in the political life of the city-state was a duty of all citizens, not just the rich and powerful. Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War, believed that actions of individuals are instrumental in determining the course of history. In religion the doctrine that everyone has a God-given soul values each person as an individual. As early as the twelfth century, artistic depictions of judgment day showed individuals being judged on the basis of their acts. The radical views of the Reformation, that everyone should interpret Scripture for himself and that a person’s salvation depends only on his faith, add impetus to the importance of the individual. Biography and realistic portraits depict actual persons as opposed to class-based stereotypes. The classical ideal of education, as opposed to training, values the individual as an end, not just a means to collective accomplishments. Today we casually assume individualism is the only tenable view. Yet opposing views have been dominant in most of Western civilization. As old as Pericles is Plato’s proposal for a rigid, hierarchical society and his view of justice as a state in which people perform only their class-based roles. For a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire the notion of individuality was suppressed. Even the Enlightenment, which we celebrate for its egalitarian sentiments, was but a step in the right direction. Its spirit was far removed from today’s ideals of democracy and individualism. Rousseau’s general will of the people, while appearing to endorse personal freedom, substitutes “general will” for “wills” and “the people” for “people.” It leaves little room for civil liberties. His advocacy of faith in and obedience to a civil religion, under pain of death, lies closer to a dictatorship of the proletariat than to democracy. Nor did individualism and democracy fare better at the hands of the social science spawned by the Enlightenment. Saint Simon and Comte advocated autocratic government run by elite experts. The victory of the Enlightenment, modest as it was, was short lived. The Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, while it produced outstanding literature, art and music, was largely a negative reaction to the failure of the Enlightenment to meet the overly optimistic expectations of Reason. There was an unbridgeable gap between the ideals of Voltaire and Condorcet and the realities of Robespierre and Napoleon. Widespread suppression in the wake of the Napoleonic conquests ignited an anti-French nationalism that rallied around hereditary nobility and traditional religion. It provoked a wave of reactionary philosophy in diametric opposition to the philosophy of the Enlightenment with its glorification of reason and the individual and its notion of the brotherhood of all people. The Romantics stressed the ascendancy of Culture at the expense of Civilization. This had many dimensions: the priority of community over individuality, of the pastoral and rustic over the urban and cosmopolitan, of custom over contract, and of sentiment over reason. At its extreme, the glorification of the community at the expense of the individual found expression in the adulation of an atavistic, tribal religiosity and in the state worship of Hegel. Very much a collectivist, he argued for the absolute primacy of the state over the individual: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity…” “All the worth that the human being possesses — all spiritual reality — he possesses only through the state.” In keeping with this he characterized true freedom as the complete subjugation of one’s will and conscience to the state. In his view of history, the world spirit makes deterministic progress by itself, immune to influence by individuals. This metaphysical determinism — in which individuals have no role to play — was later transferred to an economic matrix by Marx. This philosophy, in which the value of an individual is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, exhausted by class, function or nationality, reflects history. European countries, with roots in the Middle Ages, were ruled by monarchs and nobility, independent of character or competence. Simply as a function of birth, nobles were more valuable than commoners and deserved a social perch from which to look down on the masses. “In some districts, where they built walled villages to separate themselves from the peasantry, the za?cianki, or ‘nobles-behind-the-wall’ constituted the whole population. They preserved their way of life with fierce determination, addressing each other as Pan or Pani, ‘Lord and Lady’, and the peasants as Ty, ‘Thou.’ They regarded all nobles as brothers, and everyone else as inferiors… They always rode into town, if only on a nag; and they wore carmine capes and weapons, if only symbolic wooden swords. Their houses may have been hovels; but they had to have a porch on which to display the family shield… As late as the 1950s, sociologists found collective farmers in Mazovia who shunned their ‘peasant’ neighbours, dressed differently, spoke differently, and observed complex betrothal customs to prevent intermarriage.” (Davies, Europe: A History, p. 585-6.) American democratic sensibilities, untarnished by the medieval experience, have found such attitudes alternately amusing and offensive. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court mocks class-bound societies with savage wit. Such barbed humor is justified. For class-bound consciousness is damaging to both individuals and societies. For one thing, the exaggerated importance of class dulls the incentive to excel. If one’s destiny is predetermined by anything — by God’s will, according to early Protestant theologians, or by karma in some interpretations of Hindu or Buddhist doctrine, or by disabilities or class or sex or race — there is little point in struggling to change. Any effort to improve must be wasted. Even well-meaning attempts to compensate for prior discrimination (as opposed to leveling the playing field) by lowering standards for selected classes have caused damage. Performance tends to reflect expectations and match standards. Lowering standards for selected groups has diminished their performance. It has also generated the view that the “beneficiaries” of lower standards are inherently less capable — for otherwise, they would not need a separate set of standards. It has led some to question the credentials of those who have excelled by the most stringent measures. Were they just beneficiaries of reverse discrimination? An attitude of realistic individualism may be preferable, even for the historically disadvantaged. “It is not necessarily a conspiracy of silence that the historical record is so thin in detailing women painters and writers of the early Renaissance or black nuclear physicists and Hispanic political leaders of the early twentieth century. Sometimes the record is thin because the accomplishments were too. I expect many people will reflexively find these observations racist. But I am not asserting that, say, people of African descent cannot compete equally — only that their ancestral culture did not give them the tools and opportunity to do so. To me the real racism lies in the condescending assumption that we must equate all cultures to assuage African Americans, or any other minorities, instead of challenging them to compete with, and equal, the best in the culture where they live now.” (William Henry III, In Defense of Elitism, p. 14.) As Shelby Steele observed (“The New Sovereignty,” Harper’s Magazine, 1992): “In a liberal democracy, collective entitlements based upon race, gender, ethnicity, or some other group grievance are always undemocratic expedients. Integration, on the other hand, is the most difficult and inexpedient expansion of the democratic ideal; for, in opting for integration, a citizen denies his or her impulse to use our most arbitrary characteristics — race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference — as a basis for identity, as a key to status, or for claims to entitlement.” While even well-meaning attempts to impose class-related standards have foundered, benign motivation itself has been rare. Most attempts to base action on class distinctions have reflected a darker visage. Genocide is the extermination of large numbers of people just because they belong to a particular class. Even though purported differences among classes have been exaggerated or totally fabricated, they have been used to justify the creation of under-classes, to deprive individuals of basic rights, and to treat people as though they were subhuman. The Nazis called the theories of relativity “Jewish physics.” They claimed to readily identify “Jewish music,” clearly inferior to “Aryan music.” Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? Is there a greater similarity among Bernstein, Bloch, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Copland, Dukas, Gershwin, Glass, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Milhaud, Offenbach, Schoenberg, Johann Strauss (whose father was Jewish) and Weill than among Berlioz, Bruckner, Chopin, Field, Grieg, Nielsen, Paganini, Schumann, Sibelius, Smetana, and Tchaikowsky — each of whom is a different nationality? Is Robert Duncanson, a distinguished member of the Hudson River School of painting and the first African-American artist to gain international fame, an oreo? Or is there something subtly African-American in his work that persistently eludes art historians and critics? This is not to deny that styles can be associated with nationalities: the German Heldentenor, French Impressionism, African-American blues, Neapolitan love songs, Jamaican reggae. But these are generalities, not constraints. George Gershwin composed exquisite blues. Jose Greco, the most famous Spanish dancer, had an Italian father and grew up in New York City. Even in the easy cases, class-based generalizations have been unreliable. Despite this and despite the disasters caused by social policies based on class considerations, they still appeal. Many are always eager to jump on the next proof of the inferiority of a class of people, typically people who had been previously looked down upon and oppressed by the society. Now that racism is regarded with abhorrence, we forget how deceptively easy it has been for such benighted doctrine to become mainstream wisdom, especially when we can cite “science.” In the mid-1800s the eminent zoologist, Louis Agassiz, claimed that the brain casings of blacks were smaller than those of whites. He argued that too much education for blacks would cause their brains to expand beyond cranial capacity and that the resulting pressure would cause serious brain damage. (Paul Broca made similar claims with respect to women — their smaller brains necessarily restricted their intellectual capacity.) In the late 1800s, “In London, the Royal Historical Society sponsored a series of experiments on its Fellows showing that the brain-pans of those with Celtic names were inferior to those of Anglo-Saxon origin.” (Davies, Europe A History p. 817.) The Anthropological Society of London rejected Darwin’s theories, refusing to believe that blacks are the same species as whites. They insisted that blacks must be the result of a separate and inferior creation. In the same spirit, “…the 1903 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica contained the following entry under ‘Negro’: ‘weight of brain, as indicating cranial capacity, 25 ounces (highest gorilla 20, average European 45); …thick epidermis…emitting a peculiar rancid odor, compared…to that of a buck sheep.’” (Clive Ponting, The Twentieth Century, p. 23-4.) Even today it takes little to revive such views, but with increased sophistication and more modern “science.” The IQ controversy that has raged in recent decades provides an example. Popular scholarly books note that AfricanAmericans have lower IQs than whites, with average scores lagging by 15 points. They claim this proves African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites — so remedial programs aimed at the African-American community are doomed to fail. Several authors have implicitly suggested eugenics to maintain the intelligence of the community. In some cases this recommendation is explicit. Roger Pearson, an ex-editor of The Mankind Quarterly, often cited in Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, has written: “If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide.” (Miller, “Professors of Hate,” Rolling Stone, October 1994.) Pointed, yet reasoned, rebuttals might have been enough to dismiss this theory of genetic inferiority, had it not said what so many wanted to hear. It has been noted that several generations ago IQ tests validated popular beliefs of the time by proving that Jews are less intelligent than northern Europeans. The same tests now validate currently popular beliefs by showing that Jews are more intelligent. Somehow, proponents of IQ have not seen anything odd in this. Nor have they seen anything odd in tests showing 15-point differences in IQ between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel. Questions have been raised, not only about the statistical weakness of the results (with R2 for data in The Bell Curve typically less than 0.1), but with IQ itself. For one thing, it is questionable whether intelligence is one-dimensional and can be represented by a single number. Language, mathematics, art, music, spatial relations, athletics, humor, abilities to remember verbal or visual detail, to “read” people, to mimic, to improvise, to discern subtle differences or similarities, or to see deeper significance involve skills that may be mutually independent. Individuals may have different aptitude profiles. Multidimensional profiles cannot be captured in single numbers. With the idea that measures of mutually independent dimensions of intelligence may contain more information than a single number, Robert Sternberg at Yale University has designed multi-dimensional intelligence tests. These have greater predictive reliability than IQ in job performance — and show no race-based differences. Perhaps the weakest link in arguments that IQ tests measure differences in native intelligence is our lack of an adequate theory as to what intelligence is. IQ did not grow out of any attempt to understand intelligence. Rather, it developed from the pragmatic approach of Alfred Binet in the early 1900s. Binet, a psychologist who had noted that children’s mental abilities develop at different rates, was asked by the French government to design a test to predict how different students would perform in the French education system. He, and many successors, tried a variety of questions, keeping those that correlated most highly with predictive success. Psychometricians are too happy to look at the correlation between academic performance and results on IQ tests — which is there by design, as questions that did not correlate were dropped — and to conclude it is intelligence that accounts for both high IQ scores and academic success. This is unsound methodology. The correlation between IQ and academic success, no matter how strong, cannot support the claim that both can be explained by some unidentified third factor, intelligence, whatever that may be. Consider the difficulties, both in school and on standardized tests, of people who are dyslexic or have attention deficit disorder. Many of these individuals are brilliant. Because we have independently decided that their difficulties are not related to intelligence, we have designed alternative tests that are not biased by these problems. Is it possible that there are other, subtler, factors that adversely affect large numbers of people? Such a question is not intelligible to many psychometricians, for intelligence is defined as the result of the IQ test, and as long as these results correlate with academic success there is no need to change the test. Aside from problems related to the understanding of intelligence, the view that the underperformance by blacks on IQ tests can be explained genetically is implausible and is widely rejected by geneticists. The human race has presumably descended from the same ancestors, and it is doubtful that there have been enough generations to produce a genetic divergence sufficient to yield significantly different intelligence among races. In fact, different races are remarkably similar genetically. There is far less genetic variation within our entire species than within a single population of East African chimpanzees. Even more difficult for proponents of race-based intelligence, different phenotypic characteristics (for example, pigmentation and serology [blood types]) generate different racial classifications. So, which phenotypes should we use to define and categorize races? If we believe that underlying genetic structures are the most important factors, using phenotypic morphology to infer underlying genetic structure can lead to the wrong results. For these reasons, geneticists as well as anthropologists have argued that race is not a useful biological classification. (In general, the argument that if we cannot readily find an environmental explanation to account for a difference in test scores, then that difference must be genetic — is problematic. Nevertheless, it remains popular and was recently used to suggest that differences between mathematics scores of males and females on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests could be due to a sex-linked “math gene.”) It is not just the broad genetic and evolutionary evidence that militates against large race-based differences in intelligence. There is convincing, if nontechnical, evidence supporting the claim that there are important non-genetic components of IQ. The fact that measured IQ scores throughout the world increased by 15 points during the course of the twentieth century can hardly be taken as validating a dramatic genetic improvement. Independently, it has been claimed that listening to Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, K.448, improves IQ test scores. For children, it has been claimed that the study of music resulted in an average IQ improvement of 34 points. It is utterly implausible that auditory stimulus should have so immediate a genetic impact. That such modest changes in environment can produce so large an improvement on IQ tests belies the claims of Herrnstein and Murray (The Bell Curve), that 60% of IQ — or of Arthur Jensen, that 75% of IQ — is hard wired. This is not to deny the persistent outperformance, or underperformance, of different groups. It is rather to claim that on the basis of our present knowledge of biology, genetics accounts for none of this. The burden of explaining this rests entirely on institutional structures and cultural values. This may have positive ramifications. For we can seek to identify healthy institutions and positive cultural values and foster their development. Despite these considerations, claims of racial inferiority remain popular. It may be that people, especially those who have been demeaned and downtrodden themselves, need someone even lower to look down at. Feelings of superiority may fill some deep-seated psychological need. Even if this were the case, it is unlikely that such fulfillment would compensate for the damage threatened by this sort of belief. Humanism, centered on respect for the individual, provides a framework for the moral irrelevance of class-based distinctions. |
|
|||||||||||||||
Previous Issues
|
| ©2007 Olesia | Home • My photos • Forex • News • My trading • Contacts |