Knowledge And Decisions

A similar pattern of disregarding alternative variables is followed in discussions of “income distribution,” where statistical results about people in various phases of their economic life cycle are spoken of as if they referred to socioeconomic classes in the usual sense of people stratified in a certain way across their lifetimes. The “top 10 percent” of wealth holders may conjure up visions of Rockefellers or Kennedys, but they are more likely to be elderly individuals who have finally paid off their mortgages, and who may well have been among the statistical “poor” in data collected when they were younger. The point here is not whether income or wealth differences are greater or less than might be desired from some point of view or other. The more basic question is whether there is sufficient congruence between the statistical categories and the social realities to make any conclusion viable. To declare that “dry statistics translate into workers with poverty-level incomes”¹¹⁰ may be politically effective but it asserts what is very much open to question.

The negative cognitive effects of political “relevance” can be further illustrated with Darwin’s theory of evolution. The political application of Darwin’s biological concept of “survival of the fittest” involved not simply an extension but a distortion of the concept. What was in Darwin a causal principle of biological evolution pertaining to species became in its political application an evaluative principle pertaining to individuals. The systemic tendency toward adaptation of organisms to their respective environments became an intentional triumph of individuals evaluated as superior not merely within a particular set of social environmental circumstances, but politically justifying one set of circumstances rather than another.¹¹¹ This political application distorted the Darwinian principle. Lazy amorality might be the “fittest” quality to survive in a sufficiently extreme welfare state, for example, or ruthless ambition in a sufficiently extreme laissez-faire economy without adequate law enforcement. Darwin himself did not make the political applications and distortions known as “social Darwinism.” It was Herbert Spencer in England, William Graham Sumner in America, and countless disciples in both countries who turned the Darwinian principle of biological change into a political principle justifying the status quo.

Darwinism at least retained its integrity within biology. But the young field of psychology was not so fortunate in its rush to establish its claims to scientific stature and political “relevance.” Intelligence tests began in France in 1905 with a politically defined policy goal — the sorting out of students with low academic aptitudes to be placed in special schools. The test developed for that purpose by Alfred Binet in France was translated and adapted for American youths by Lewis Terman of Stanford University as the Stanford-Binet I.Q. Test. It was also politically adapted to American issues — the controversies then raging over American immigration policy.

Unlike earlier generations of immigrants, the immigrant groups arriving in the United States in the 1880s and afterwards were no longer of northern and western European stock, but largely eastern and southern Europeans who differed culturally, religiously (many being Catholic or Jewish) and genetically from the American population at large, as well as from earlier immigrants. The serious social stresses associated with the emergence of every new ethnic minority in the urban economy and society were seen as peculiarities of these new and “unassimilable” immigrants. Vast amounts of data showed that these “new” immigrant groups had higher incidences of social pathology — and lower I.Q.’s. To the new field of psychology, the immigrants’ low I.Q.’s were an opportunity to establish the political “relevance” of their profession along with its cognitive (“scientific”) claims.

The leading test “experts” of the era — including Terman, Goddard, and Yerkes — insisted that they were presenting “not theory or opinions but facts” and facts of relevance “above all to our law-makers”¹¹² They were “measuring native or inborn intelligence.”¹¹³ Their results indicated “the fixed character of mental levels.”¹¹⁴ Intelligence tests would “bring tens of thousands” of “defectives” under “the surveillance and protection of society.”¹¹⁵ All of this was said at a time when the I.Q. test had existed for less than a decade in the United States.