even learn how to learn: even the vaunted “IQ” is not stable. Maybe, then, smartness is not immutable; maybe it depends on our efforts, as both teachers and learners.
And we know that some pretty smart people are not universally smart. The most gifted Japanese haiku poet may be unable to write an instruction manual for English-speaking purchasers of Japanese-made VCRs. And no matter how good the manual, the most brilliant American brain surgeon may never master the art of programmed recording. Law students are trained to “think like lawyers”; medical and nursing students, thank goodness, are not. Maybe smartness is not an abstract, universal entity; maybe it depends on the contexts we construct.
So the idea that smartness is partly “made” is not entirely counterintuitive; on the contrary, it actually confirms our practical experience with the concept. Still, something about the notion of a constructed intelligence seems slightly incredible: too fantastic, perhaps too optimistic. We can’t quite shake our skepticism. “Okay,” we might say, “you socially constructed wiseguy, answer me this: If people are really as smart as we make them, then do you mean to tell me that a person with mental retardation can be made smart enough to be, say, a nuclear physicist?”
Well, here’s one honest answer: probably not. I don’t know what it takes to be a nuclear physicist; I don’t know whether it takes the kind of aptitudes that are measured by IQ tests. But if it does, then the person with mental retardation—who, by definition, did badly on an IQ test—has farther to go to be a nuclear physicist than the person who is not mentally retarded. She may, in fact, have farther to go than our patience, our resources, and our skill are capable of taking her. If that’s the case, then she cannot be a nuclear physicist—or, at least, not a very good one.
But here’s the key: not much of this—and maybe not any of it—is natural. We—society, culture, who- or whatever is in charge here—figure pretty heavily in the determination whether a person with mental retardation, or anyone else for that matter, can be a nuclear physicist. Consider:
Being a nuclear physicist is not a natural state: it’s a job that we made, requiring attributes that we define.
Competence in that job is not a naturally defined condition: there are questions of degree and subjective judgments that inhere in the determination whether someone is a “qualified” nuclear physicist (or a lawyer, or a judge, or a vice president of a company, or a vice president of the United States).
Training for that competence is not a natural process: our cultural talents and commitments determine who we will train, and how well.
Even the mental retardation that necessitates special training is not a natural condition: we make “mental retardation”—as we make the intelligence of all people—in the complex interactions between the individual and the society in which she lives, interactions that shape her opportunities, the perceptions of her, and even, we now know, the very physiology of her brain, all in a relentless gestalt of intellectual advantage, or disadvantage.
So maybe she can’t be a nuclear physicist. We just need to acknowledge, even in this most extreme of examples, that it’s at least partly our doing, that with some will or ingenuity, an intervention here, a cultural change there, things might, just might, turn out differently. And as the scenario gets more commonplace—as either the job or her measured intelligence grow closer to the norm—the gaps between what might be and what could be and ultimately what should be grow more narrow, and it becomes increasingly likely that if anything stands in the way of our mentally retarded subject—our neighbor, our friend, our sister—it’s something that we put there, and something that we can remove.
If it all sounds too altruistic, or too Utopian, then it is perhaps important to remember this: not so long ago, we were fairly certain that a woman’s aptitudes did not embrace skills from the political realm. “Race” was a disqualifying characteristic throughout social and economic life, due to the perceived cognitive incapacities of some racial groups. We restricted the immigration of certain ethnic groups—most, in fact, except those from Britain and northern Europe—because of the genetic inferiority of the immigrant stock. Feebleminded people were so inferior that we institutionalized them, and sterilized them, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. In each case, arguments against the conventional wisdom seemed too altruistic, too utopian.
It seems the conceit of each generation that it has reached the state of ultimate enlightenment: each age is a progressive one, each society the most perfectly egalitarian. I know a husband and wife who had a baby boy; the state took their baby away before they could even leave the hospital. They had done nothing wrong except not be smart enough: they both were mentally retarded. A generation or so ago, they would have been simply sterilized; in their day—in our day—they lost their newborn baby to the state. It’s an odd kind of progress.
But they got their baby back; they became a family after all. They will need help to succeed; their boy will need help. It is hard to know what will happen to him, hard to know how smart he will be. Maybe, in the next generation, sterilization will be back in vogue. Or maybe his daughter will be a nuclear physicist.
There’s one last thing that I think we need to acknowledge, and it’s maybe the most important of all. Even if somebody can’t be a good nuclear physicist, and even if it is somehow due entirely to her own “natural” limitations, it absolutely does not mean that she is not smart. Here, I think, is the greatest danger in the concept, the most insidious aspect of “smartness” and “intelligence” and “IQ” and “mental retardation.” From one perceived inability we induce a general inferiority: someone who doesn’t do well on standardized tests becomes “dumb” or even “mentally retarded,” and that means that not only will they not become very good nuclear physicists, they also won’t become very good citizens, or parents, or people. Being not smart at that one thing means that they are just plain not smart—at anything. And that means that they deserve—in terms of cultural success—nothing.
But it means nothing of the sort, or rather, it should mean nothing of the sort. Because there are many kinds of smartness, and people can be smart in many different ways, and the fact that they are not smart—or are not made smart—in one way does not mean that they cannot be smart in many other ways. Really bad nuclear physicists can be really good nurses; really bad nurses can be really good lawyers; really bad lawyers can be really good auto mechanics; really bad auto mechanics can be really good teachers; and any of them—but not necessarily all of them—can be really good mothers and fathers.
Here too we have made the decisions: to ignore the different kinds of smartness; to collapse it all into one general, abstract concept; and to order all the differences, as matters of degree, as more smart or less, as superior and inferior. Here too, in this final crucial way, we make some people smarter than others, by rewarding the smartness of some people and ignoring the smartness of others. We make some people smart, in short, just by choosing to call them that.
So some people are smarter than others. It would be wrong not to admit it. But wrong too not to admit that in most cases, and in most respects, we made them that way.
The remainder of this book examines in detail the mythology of smartness: as it was initially conceived by the founders of 1787 and the reconstructors of 1868; as it persists today in American science and politics; and as it has been maintained by American law. In the process, it confronts one of the most vicious myths of smartness: the myth of “races” of people that are, by nature, intellectually superior and inferior. That myth, it evolves, is an old myth, but not an ancient one; an outmoded myth, but a durable one. And it has been made durable by American law.
This book also examines a competing vision—one also promised by the founders, adopted by the reconstructors, confirmed by science, and realized, in fleeting moments, in American politics and American law. It is a vision of a nature that blesses all people—and
