LQ. in the Meritocracy

...This environmentalist dogma when applied to Russian agriculture was a dismal failure...

...While the words "due process" prohibit capricious governmental action in depriving people of life, liberty, or property, it is well established that administrative procedures satisfy the requirements of due process in many con~ texts...

...Richard Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has had the courage to present part of the voluminous evidence indicating the heritability of intelligence and he has endured the contumely of those who espouse egalitarianism and environmentalism...

...First, there was the idea that what was happening in the Soviet Union (and later in China) was justified as a rational attempt to reach rational goals...

...But this means nothing to the Court...

...And then there is the constitutional criticism...

...The Alternative January 1974 21 Even the heritable things can be affected by environment: hair can be dyed or growth stunted, for example...

...It is now irrefutable that intelligence (more precisely, IQ) is heritable...

...Identical twins raised apart end up with IQs unusually alike...

...maybe they can't take the flack or don't want to admit the failure of egalitarianism...

...It is the attitude endorsed, albeit in more sober, restrained, and judicial language, by the Supreme Court of the United States...

...in the Meritocracy, is a cogently argued elaboration of the defense of "hereditarianism" which Dr...

...Herrnstein handles this facet of the controversy carefully, noting that some of the difference in IQ between blacks and whites is no doubt due to problems specific to the black environment but that the question of a genetic intelligence difference between races has not been answered...

...Arthur Jensen find their ideas first distorted, then attacked...

...This would not only involve considerable additional funds for exhaustive investigations of eligibility, but would also (a) lead to the ultimate exclusion of some who are qualified for benefits and (b) force anyone who is qualified for benefits to go without until his investigation is complete...

...And since the government is not overly strict about letting people on the welfare rolls in the first place, it is quite likely that anyone the government decides is ineligible really is unqualified for benefits...

...the hardship to those few who might ultimately be reinstated must, it seems, always outweigh such considerations...

...They fail because we fail them and all that is required for their success is that we equalize environments to produce the New (necessarily socialist) Man...

...but again, no one urges that the Fourteenth Amendment dictates giving the taxpayer the benefits of the claimed exemption until a a judicial proceeding confirms or denies the validity of the IRS choice...

...Caute understandably focuses most of his attention on the period between the two world wars, when the triumph of Bolshevism and the decay of capitalism were seen with an exaggerated clarity, and the Soviet Union had more admirers than it was ever to have after the Second World War...

...Such individuals as Bernard Shaw, Lincoln Steffens, Andr6 Gide, the Webbs, and Henry Ward have their activities chronicled in minute, almost pedantic fashion: what speeches were made to which groups, which fronts were joined, etc...

...Government employees are fired by administrative decision...

...If IQ is principally inherited, then much of our compensatory education efforts for lowerclass children are wasted, and failure may run in the genes...

...It is merely a distinction which appeals to the particular sensitivities of the Court...

...As environmental factors are made more nearly equal for all people, genetic differences would play an even greater role than they do now...

...De-Kulakization was simply the elimination of irrational and unjust inequality...

...Some things can be inherited, like tallness or blondness, and others not, like the preference for Chevrolets over Fords...

...genetics, applied to agriculture in the West, was a distinct success...

...yet no one contends that the due process clause requires the government to continue paying such employees until the validity of their discharge has been established at a trial...

...liberals do not defend the right of the hereditariaus to be heard, or if they do, it is only after finding something in the hereditarian position to quibble about . . . they couldn't be uncritical of something labeled "fascist," could they...

...Praise or blame may not be as appropriate as we once thought...

...Foster children placed when very young in new homes have IQs more like those of their biological parents than those of their foster parents...

...and the Court, as so often in recent history, is not adverse to using the Constitution to actuate those sensitivities...

...This is but a sampling of the evidence showing that IQ is inherited and inheritance overrides environment...

...In Black's words, "While the Court will perhaps have insured that no needy person will be taken off the rolls without a full 'due process' proceediug, it will also have insured that many will never get on the rolls, or at least that they will remain destitute during the lengthy proceedings followed to determine initial eligibility...

...Unless there are environmental factors which can be identified and remedied--lxmr diet, for instance--this IQ differential would strongly inhibit black advancement even if racial prejudice were eradicated...

...The New Socialist Man allegedly could be created by manipulating his environment...

...It is one thing for the government to attempt to supply welfare assistance to those it determines to be needy...

...Cooper The Fellow Travellers The natural and proper attitude of conservatives towards fellow travellers is one of contempt...

...Conversely, Black points out, the government may respond to the Court's decision in Goldberg by becoming very strict about letting people on the welfare rolls in the first place...

...Supreme Court, I think most Americans would agree with that statement...

...Justice Black, the lone dissenter from the majority, described the probable results in this area very well...

...The fact that a given individual may be qualified for welfare by statute does not give him a "right to welfare" which is worthy of the same praise, the same veneration, the same encouragement, or even the same protection as, say, one's right to a trial by jury in a criminal proceeding, or one's right to worship as he sees fit...

...Perhaps unfortunately, the same treatment is A Postscript to the Enlightenment by David Caute Macmillan $8.95 given to many lesser figures, such as Corliss Lamont, who appears not to have done anything of interest other than join more Popular Front organizations than any other American of his generation...

...The Court indeed emphasizes this...

...Since people of similar IQs are more likely to marry each other than those of dissimilar IQs, the effect of homogenizing our environments would be to produce a hereditary elite, if the past and present correlation between IQ and success holds in the future...

...Lysenko and other I.~m~kian charlatans ruled the biosciences roost (and ruined the roosters) for several decades in twentieth-century Russia, the study of genetics was banned...

...If men are bern equal in skills, claim the first group, then they succeed or fail because of what has been done or not done for them and to them...

...Clearly blacks have suffered job discrimination, but just as clearly the white subgroup with an IQ distribution similar to the blacks' have also been relegated to the less attractive and lower wage jobs, not because of racial discrimination but because of their limited capabilities...

...Those social engineering measures which seek to make environmental factors equal for all may lead to a "meritocracy" with hereditary castes, if such castes do not already exist...

...Collectivization, for instance, was instituted in order to eliminate the idiocy of rural life and was imposed, where necessary, because of the intransigent stupidity of the peasantry...

...Artificial barriers to our development should be removed, but some barriers are inborn...

...others say people are endowed with a wide variety of abilities and disabilities at birth, endowments which are beyond the reach of social engineers...

...In addition, the decision seems likely to impose an immense burden on the state...

...For public policy to claim that such rights are equal would be absurd...

...As Herrnstein shows, there is a pattern: radicals label the ideas and their promulgators "fascist" and "racist" and try to prevent their dissemination...

...Yet both the employee and the taxpayer have clearly been deprived of property in a purely administrative proceeding, without a "pre-termination evidentiary hearing...

...They have rationalized the execution of millions (when they have deigned to notice these deaths at all) as the necessary sacrifice one must make in order to reach Marxist goals, while most egregiously declining to accept either these goals or sacrifices for their own society...

...The Coleman Report and the studies done recently on Head Start indicate that spending more money than the average on this child's education, or giving him special classes, is likely to make no difference in his future performance...

...He deals at length with the whole sorry business of the denials, made by prominent western intellectuals, of the existence in the soviet Union of purges, concentration camps, or famines, and the concurrent defense of show trials and the execution of Kulaks, Old Bolsheviks, artists, and sundry others...

...P, ev;,ew I.Q...

...The nature/nurture controversy is made more explosive by the accumulated evidence that blacks average 15 points lower in IQ than whites, which puts 80 percent or so of the white population above the black average IQ...

...We each are unique...

...His conclusion: for the wide variety of environments of white Americans and Europearls, there is a "convergence of the overwhelming body of data on measured intelligence to a figure in the vicinity of 80 percent or higher for the genetic contribution to scores on standard IQ tests...

...And it is still another matter to elevate the receipt of such payments to the status of a personal "right" guaranteed one by the Constitution of the United States...

...This, of course, is precisely the view of the rather angry and self-righteous National Welfare Rights Organization...

...The fault, dear Brutus, may be largely in our genes...

...The failure of programs like Head Start generate two different reactions: some say not enough was done, more money must be spent...

...We are diverse...

...Which is the primary determinant of intelligence: heredity, or environment...

...David Caute's book deals with these men, defined as those whose committment to Communism was made "at a distance," who chose Communism for others, but not for themselves...

...When T.D...

...Both groups, I submit, have failed to recognize that "rights," like ideas, are not created equal...

...in the Meritocracy Nature, nurture, or not sure...

...Radical epithets plus liberal quibbling make the argument that intelligence is heritable seem not only vicious but also ill-founded, when it is neither...

...A recognition of diversity of talents can lead to programs tailored to special talents or to lack of them, but "success" may be largely predetermined by heredity, in which case we shall still have to reward excellence and not reward incompetence...

...towards liberals, a sort of symbiotic competitiveness...

...The environmental handicap of being deaf from birth produces very little difference in the average IQ in comparison with the average for the population at large...

...This diversity needs freedom in which to flourish...

...He responds by considering two points which, taken together, explain beth the acceptance of Soviet atrocities and the failure of the fellow travellers to adopt a revolutionary - X _9 stance vis-a-vis their own countries...

...Herrnstein first proposed in the September 1971 Atlantic Monthly, it also contains some shocking tales of Herrnstein's villification by radical by Richard Herrnstein Little, Brown & Co...

...He takes care to demonstrate that accurate information on what was actually going on inside the Soviet Union was available, and thus that ignorance or a willingness to give the Workers' State the benefit of all reasonable doubts could not be addressed in favor of the fellow travellers...

...The Marxist creed was that environment was all, heredity nothing...

...And despite the NWRO and the U.S...

...Indeed, in a certain sense, the very function of public policy is to reflect a society's view of which fights shall be deemed most deserving of society's endorsement...

...Even though intelligence is something that is heritable, like tallness, and even though it is predominantly influenced by inheritance among whites in white environments, it can be stunted by sufficiently bad conditions, just as growth can be...

...What evidence there is seems distinctly to the contrary...

...Hogwash...

...As Black put it, "This decision is thus only another variant of the view often expressed by some members of this Court that the Due Process Clause forbids any conduct that a majority of the Court believes 'unfair,' 'indecent,' or 'shocking to their cons c i e n c e s . ' . . . Neither these words nor any like them appear anywhere in the Due Process Clause...

...At this point, Caute raises the logical question of how humane, and in some cases, intelligent men could praise so uncritically a clearly despotic regime...

...Caute makes the general claim that the fellow travellers were heirs to the Enlightenment vision of Reason ruling society, educating 22 The Alternative January 1974...

...Towards Communists one may feel hostility tempered by the respect accorded a clever and intellectually honest enemy...

...But fellow travellers are, and have been, apologists for two of the most tyrannical regimes in the history of man...

...In America today, hereditarians like Herrnstein and Berkeley's Dr...

...It is quite another to say (again quoting the dissent of Justice Black) "that the government's promise of charity to an individual is property belonging to that individual when the government denies that the individual is honestly entitled to receive such a payment...

...cry those who believe in individualism: men are infinitely varied and the free society offers the myriad possibilities appropriate for such multifaceted creatures...

...But there is, I think, an even more serious objection...

...Professor Herrnstein goes into this evidence in detail, showing its strengths and occasional shortcomings...

...Similarly, taxpayers are constantly denied exemptions by administrative deCisions of the IRS...

...It is not at all clear that the Constitution requires a "pre-termination evidentiary hearing" before the government can terminate benefits which the government itself has decided to confer...

...The ultimate implications of the Court's decision, he argued, would require the payment of benefits to any recipient whose eligibility was challeuged until he had the opportunity, no doubt with the aid of a court-appointed and publicly-paid lawyer, to present his case to the Supreme Court...

...D.W...

...7.95 distortionists, abetted by silence or faint defense from liberal opportunist~ Knowing the IQ of a child in second grade, one can predict with a high likelihood of success his IQ twenty years later (little or no change), and his social status as measured by occupational level...

...Still, the powerful Lysenko clique suppre~d the views of the hereditarians of its day, aided in this by the totalitarian Russian regime, which had a vested interest in the antiheredity position...

...These criticisms of Goldberg v. Kelly are both substantial and, to me, persuasive...

...Surely, "No termination of welfare without a pre-termination evidentiary hearing" has not yet become the twentieth-century equivalent of "No taxation without representation...

...Egalitarian policies could prevent success, but cannot eradicate failure...

...The book, I.Q...

...Some of the scholars Herrnstein has talked with admit that he is right, but won't defend his views...

...The only distinction one can draw between them and the welfare recipient is that the "property" of the latter may be a good deal more immediately important to him...

...Of course, this kind of review is a several year process, and no one supposes that, should the government win, it would have any realistic hope of recovering the money it has paid to the ineligible recipient while that process was going on...

...In a nation with a history of concern for individualism and the virtues of self-reliance and responsibility, it is inconceivable that welfare, if it is to be viewed as a "right" at all, should be considered a particularly revered right...

...but even if true, it is a distinction not mentioned, much less sanctioned, by the Constitution...