Knowledge And Decisions

The leading I.Q. “experts” were also members of eugenics societies devoted to preventing the reproduction of “inferior” stocks.¹¹⁶ However, the political impossibility “at present” of convincing “society” that low I.Q. groups “should not be allowed to reproduce”¹¹⁷ made the “experts” predict a “decline in American intelligence” over time.¹¹⁸ After a later survey of data generated by the mass testing of soldiers in World War I, testing expert Carl Brigham — later creator of the College Board SAT — concluded that “public action” and “legal steps” were needed to prevent the “decline of American intelligence.” Such steps should be “dictated by science and not by political expediency,” and included immigration laws that would be not only “restrictive” but “highly selective,” and other policies for “prevention of the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population.”¹¹⁹ Virtually identical conclusions were reached at the same time by Rudolf Pintner, another leading authority and also the creator of a well-known mental test: “Mental ability is inherited. ... The country cannot afford to admit year after year large numbers of mentally inferior people, who will continue to multiply and lower the level of intelligence of the whole nation.”¹²⁰

These were not the views of the village racist. They were the conclusions of the top contemporary authorities in the field, based on masses of statistical data, and virtually unchallenged either intellectually, morally, or politically within the profession at the time. Controversies raged between the “experts” and others — notably Walter Lippman¹²¹ — but such critics’ conclusions were contemptuously dismissed as “sentiment and opinion” as contrasted with the “quantitative methods” of the new science.¹²²

In many ways this episode illustrates far more general characteristics of intellectual-political “relevance”: (1) the almost casual ease with which vast expansions of the amount and scope of government power were called for by intellectuals to be used against their fellow citizens and fellow human beings, for purposes of implementing the intellectuals’ vision, (2) the automatic presumption that differences between the current views of the relevant intellectuals (“experts”) and the views of others reflect only the misguided ignorance of the latter, who are to be either “educated,” dismissed, or discredited, rather than being argued with directly in terms of cognitive substance (that is, the intellectual process was involved primarily in giving one side sufficient reputation not to have to engage in it with non-“experts”), (3) the confidence with which predictions were made, without reference to any prior record of correct predictions nor to any monitoring processes to confirm the future validity of current predictions, (4) the moral as well as intellectual superiority that accompanied the implicit faith that the current views of the “experts” represented the objective, inescapable conclusions of scientific evidence and logic, and their direct applicability for the public good, rather than either the vogues or the professional self-interest of these “experts,” and (5) a concentration on determining the most likely alternative conclusions rather than whether any of the conclusions had sufficient basis to go beyond tentative cognitive results to sweeping policy prescription.