The Coming Storm

Maybe, Anyway

April 29, 2004

The Bell Curve, an excellent book more maligned than
read, pointed out

a trend seldom noticed. The authors called it
"cognitive

stratification," not a phrase Byron would have
chosen but serviceable

enough. It means the concentration of the intelligent.

In 1850 people of high intelligence were dispersed
through the

population. If the child of a cowboy had an IQ of 160, he
would

probably remain in the geographical region with cowboys.
He might be

more successful than most, and might choose as friends
the quicker

wits thereabouts. Yet he would be part of the community.

A cowboy could be intelligent, but didn't have to be. But
then came

the professions that required high intelligence. The
dull-witted

cannot work as programmers, chemists, engineers, doctors,
or

investment brokers. They can be decent and productive.
They cannot

write assembly code for a planetary probe.

In 1850 there were few jobs requiring the very bright.
Today they

abound. Universities began to scour the country for the
highly

intelligent. These, once found, met each other at elite
universities

or, later, in the places where the bright concentrated to
work:

Laboratories, software houses, hospitals, magazine
journalism, and

occasionally law firms. They married each other. Their
children tended

to be bright. The result has been that the bright tend to
live, play,

work, and sleep almost entirely with each other.

An opposite concentration occurs at the other end of the
curve. In the

cities the bright among the ghetto rise and leave for the
suburbs. Who

is left behind? If, generation after generation, the
smartest take

themselves out of the gene pool, the results will be just
what we see.

This is the underclass. It exists. It is larger than most
people

suspect. It is dangerous.

"Underclass" is not synonymous with
"blacks." There is a large and, I

gather, growing black middle class. There is a
substantial white

component in the underclass. In the barrios of California
one

encounters Mexican unsalvageables. Whatever their color,
they share

low intelligence, little education, bastardy, and a
tendency toward

antisocial behavior. (Or, as we call it in English,
"crime.") They

have no attachment to the standards that constitute
civilization. They

hate those above them.

Many of the insulated bright imagine themselves to be
liberal (an

arguable proposition), to care about "the
people," and to favor

"diversity." Few I'll guess have had any
contact with the underclass,

or even with people who don't have degrees. They have
never been in

South Central, never spent time in roadside stores in
backcountry

Kentucky or hung out with the crackers of Florida. They
have never

really met even normally intelligent rural people, whom
they call

"rednecks." At their parties you do not see bus
drivers or cops or

factory hands.

If they knew "the people" they would not like
them. The diversity they

ideologically approve are people they viscerally detest.
Down inside

they must know this: It is why they avoid them. The
diverso-elite

alliance is a fragile one.

The elite do not understand, or perhaps more correctly
refuse to

admit, how very limited are the dull. They can't concede
that the

course of managed improvement that they once believed in
for the

underclass, and try still to believe in, won't work. Thus
for example

they call for programs to close the "cybergap,"
and bring the internet

to the downtrodden. They don't understand that the
downtrodden can't

use the internet, and aren't interested.

The very bright assume without thinking that people can
learn anything

they choose. A woman who graduates from Yale in
biochemistry takes for

granted that if she wants to learn Italian, she can. It
will take time

and effort but she will have no doubt as to the outcome.
New digital

camera? She can figure out how to use it without the
manual. She is

used to gas chromatographs and gene sequencers. Learn
PhotoShop? She

just does it. After all, it's only software. She assumes,
unless she

thinks carefully, that people know history, politics,
literature,

because she does and everyone she knows does.

It isn't so. There are huge numbers of people who don't
read books,

have never read a book, who can't read. According to Newsweek,
forty-

seven percent of Detroit is functionally illiterate. The
illiterate

live in a mental world beyond the capacity of a
biochemist to imagine.

Try to erase from your mind everything that you have ever
read. Then

imagine regarding a camera as simply incomprehensible. Or
a checkbook.

The cognitive elite tend to favor diversity and
affirmative action.

They say that they believe that all groups are equally
intelligent,

and furiously resist evidence to the contrary. Yet by now
they have to

know it isn't true. Believing what you know to be false,
pretending to

like people you naturally loathe, stresses the tectonic
plates. A

spring is being wound.

The potential for conflict is high. The underclass - the

diversity - exacts a price. It is responsible for crime,
almost all

crime, which carries with it the cost of the prisons,
police forces,

decay of the cities, welfare both open and hidden, and a
decline in

the tenor of life.

The need to make the merely dull-witted seem not to be,
even though

they are not necessarily of the underclass, degrades the
schools. The

beneficiaries of affirmative actions, though they are
seldom of the

underclass, are frequently of the same racial groups.
This fuels a

quiet anger, a racial anger, among the middle class, who
among

themselves no longer even pretend that things are not as
they

obviously are. It isn't quite reasonable that it should
be racial, but

it is.

The elite can buy their way into safe neighborhoods and
better

schools. The economic middle class cannot. They resent
paying for

welfare, resent taking up the slack for workers who
don't, and have no

ideological attachment to diversity. As the baby boomers
retire,

suggest some, the cost of their maintenance to the
working middle

class will become so burdensome as to engender revolt.

Diversity as a spoils system just may be heading toward
its end. It's

curious: I don't know anyone who objects to hiring
without regard to

race, creed, or color. I know almost no one who isn't
angry about

affirmative action -- and about the enstupidation of the
schools for the

benefit of the uninterested, and about unending crime..
If the dam

finally breaks, what then?

Fred Reed

http://www.fredoneverything.net/UnderclassRevolt.shtml