of the inept.
Thus with one brutally simple idea, The Bell Curve, following centuries of “scientific” tradition, undermined the very foundations of the struggle for equality. The preoccupations of welfare state social engineers were no longer justifiable; their emphasis on, in The Bell Curve’s words, “changes in economics, changes in demographics, changes in the culture” and solutions founded on “better education, more and better jobs, and specific social interventions” seemed untenable in the face of this natural order. What mattered instead was “the underlying element that has shaped the changes: human intelligence.”
Not surprisingly, then, The Bell Curve set its sights on what should be easy targets: the practical tools of egalitarians—lawyers and the law. It is law, they suggested, that most clearly embodies our unnatural preoccupation with equality, law that redistributes our resources, levels our opportunities, and reduces our culture to the least common denominator. The Bell Curve challenged the fairness and practical wisdom of the full range of legislative enactments and judicial decisions designed to make America a more equal nation. While acknowledging the central place of equality in America’s political mythology, The Bell Curve called into serious question the realizability of this goal. Antidiscrimination laws are inefficient, desegregation counter-productive, affirmative action unwise, unfair, and perhaps immoral. In the worldview of The Bell Curve, the legal devotion to equality must sit in an uneasy tension with the combined effects of liberalism’s commitment to individual freedom and the immutable differences in human aptitude. The idea is as old as the Federalists, but now it comes with “new” scientific support: all men, it seems, were not created equal after all; it is only the law that pursues this quixotic vision.
Smart people succeed. From this simple empirical proposition emerged a counterrevolutionary policy prescription: law’s egalitarian ideal must invariably accommodate, or yield to, those inexorable commands of nature that distinguish the smart from the not-so-smart. Only smart people should succeed.
But The Bell Curve eluded a vital dilemma that inheres in its marvelously elegant empirical proposition: it is either tautological or wrong. It evolves that this central proposition holds true only because the terms of the equation, “smartness” and “success,” are not just empirical correlates, but definitionally synonymous: the culture rewards smartness with success because “smartness” is, definitionally, the ability to succeed in the culture. And, if any effort is made to imbue the terms with some independent meaning—to define “smartness” without reference to success, or “success” without reference to evidence of smartness—then the whole proposition falls apart: the equation becomes hopelessly confounded by the variables of class and culture, and whatever causal relationship remains between “smartness” and “success” begins to look, at the very least, bidirectional.
As the empirical proposition collapses, so too does the moral and political framework of The Bell Curve’s “natural” order, as well as its regressive critique of the law. It is simply not true that, throughout the history of this nation, law has been the great social equalizer, bucking the tides of natural justice. On the contrary, law has been and remains the great defender of the natural order, protecting the bounty of the “smart” from the intrusions of the “not-so-smart” while eluding all insight into the actual construction of those terms.
The Bell Curve got it backwards: law does not impose an artificial equality on a people ordered by nature; on the contrary, law preserves the artificial order imposed on a people who could be, and should be, of equal worth. Because it is culture, not biology, that makes people different. It is culture, not nature, that generates the intellectual hierarchy. And law maintains rather than challenges the smart culture.
I did pretty well in my early years of school. From the first through fifth grades, I got almost all As, and never anything less than a B +, except for in penmanship, where I tended to get mostly Ds. This last wasn’t for lack of effort, but for the life of me, I just could not master the cursive style. The disorder persists to this day.
When I was eleven my mom remarried, and we moved from our brick rowhouse into a completely detached split-level home with a driveway, a patio, and a backyard that seemed at the time large enough to get lost in. I changed schools at the same time, and got my first experience with what I now know is called academic tracking.
At my new school, the sixth grade was divided into four sections, A through D, with section A being for the really “smart” kids, B for the less smart kids, and so on down the line. Though I had a section A type record, I got assigned to section B; this, I figure, reflected either a skepticism about the academic standards at my old school or an emphasis on penmanship at the new one.
I did not fare well in section B. In section B, we were expected to talk about stuff, and most of the kids—feeling, I guess, at ease among friends—found this activity not the least bit challenging. I was another story. Most of the talk focused on current events, and while I sort of knew what was going on, and think I understood when I was told, the simple fact was that I could not bring myself to say much about the matter. And so I got mostly As on my homework, and even As on the tests, but when called on in class I was completely unresponsive. Day after day the sixth-grade teacher would call on me, sometimes for opinions, sometimes just to repeat the received wisdom of a prior lesson, and day after day I would sit in silence, staring at my desk, waiting for the teacher to move on.
I had lots of conferences with the teacher, and at least two that I can recall with the principal. They were not terribly productive. Yes, I could hear the teacher’s questions; yes, I knew the answers; yes, I knew the importance of sharing the answers with the teacher and the rest of the class. No, I was not trying to embarrass the teacher; no, I was not afraid of being wrong; no, I certainly did not cheat on my homework or on the tests. And no, I was sorry, but I did not know what the problem was, or what anyone should do to fix it.
I guess the principal came up with his own solution, because I spent a couple of days with the kids of section C. The move may have been punitive or it may have been remedial, but, in either event, I loved it. The kids of section C did not bother with current events; our focus was on drawing—and I loved to draw. In science, we drew pictures of solar systems and molecules; in social studies, we drew pictures of historical figures; in math, we drew pictures of numbers, then added anatomical features to convert them into animals or people. Precisely how the kids of section C were expected to contribute to the war against communism I do not know, but I do know our training for service was a heckuva lot more fun than section B’s.
At the same time, it worries me some in retrospect that section C’s drawing lessons were so thoroughly unencumbered by any actual knowledge of the things to be drawn. I don’t remember ever learning anything at all about the physical appearance of molecules or solar systems, let alone anything about what they did or why they were important. And about the only math I remember from my time in Section C is that a 6 is versatile enough to be any animal from a giraffe to a turtle, and a 9 can be the same animal in extreme distress, but a 2 isn’t worth a damn for anything but a snake.
We learned just as much about the historical figures. I remember a Thanksgiving lesson that required each of us to draw a picture of Pocahontas, an easy task for me, I having studied at my old school from a textbook that featured a very nice picture of the Thanksgiving heroine. The image stuck with me—she looked like a movie star, and I think I had a crush on her—and so I finished the assignment with ease, producing a credible rendition of Sophia Loren in buckskins with a feather sticking up out of her head. Some of the other kids at my drawing table—in section C we did not use individual desks—did not know Pocahontas as well as I did, and a couple of the boys drew Pocahontas as a very fierce, and very male, Indian warrior, which certainly would have made Captain John Smith’s story a more interesting one, but was, as far as I know, largely inconsistent with the historical record. But we all got the same grade on the assignment, except for the one kid who drew Pocahontas holding a bloody
