The Bell Curve- Chapter 12 Civility and Citizenship

A free society demands a citizenry that willingly participates in the civil enterprise, in matters as grand as civil enterprise and as commonplace as neighborliness. Lacking this quality, in its core meaning, a society must replace freedom with coercion if it is to maintain order. This chapter examines the contribution of cognitive ability to the capacity for civility and citizenship.

The standard theory of political involvement has assumed that socioeconomic status determines political involvement. People with high-status were thought to vote more and know and care more about political matters than do people of lower social status. But the available research reveals that the key element for predicting political savvy and involvement is educational level. People who care least about political issues are not so much poor as they are uneducated. This should come as no surprise for those who have read the preceding chapters of The Bell Curve because they already know that education is a proxy for cognitive ability. Smart people stick with school, plug away in the workforce and are loyal to their spouses. Insofar as intelligence helps people behave in these ways, it is a force for maintaining a civil society. Civilized people do not need to be tightly restrained by laws or closely monitored by the organs of state. Lacking such civility they do and society, over time, must become less free. In this respect, the previous chapter on criminality may be seen as a discussion of a growing incivility in American life and the contribution that low cognitive ability makes to the social disorder in America. Political participation is one measure of civility. When we vote our ballots account for less than a millionth of the overall outcome in most statewide elections and even less in national ones. No major election has ever been decided by a single vote. Thus, some would say, we are behaving irrationally by voting. "Man is by nature a political animal," Aristotle wrote, "and he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the 'tribeless, lawless, hearthless one' whom Homer denounces." The polling place is a reflection of civic health. In the aggregate those who do not vote, or vote inconsistently, are weaker citizens than those who vote consistently. The connection between political involvement and intelligence has been more thoroughly studies in children than adults because, until recently, school routinely gave IQ tests to children. A study of 12,000 children in grades 2 through 8 in the early 1960s asked whether they ever read about politics in the newspaper or talked about it to their parents or friends, whether they felt protected by the government or whether they ever wore campaign buttons or handed out leaflets for a candidate. The biggest surprise in the study was the finding that the IQ of the children was more important than the socioeconomic status of the parents. Bright children were more likely to discuss, read about, and participate in political activities than were slower children. The researchers also found that the gap in political development across cognitive classes tended to widen with age. The biggest surprise in the study was the impact of IQ, which was even larger than that of socioeconomic status. Brighter children even from the poorest households with uneducated parents, learned rapidly about politics, how the government works and about the possibilities for change. The gap in political development across the cognitive classes tended to widen with age while the differences due to socioeconomic factors remained static as the child grew older. In a study of older children, with few exceptions, each of the political dimensions studied strongly correlated with intelligence. This, as expected, was true for scales that measured political knowledge. The bright children were also much more aware of the potentialities of government and the duties of citizenship. When it comes to voting and socioeconomic class, college graduates vote more than high school graduates; white-collar workers vote more often that blue-collar workers; and the wealthy vote more than the poor. Of the three components of socioeconomic status- income, education and occupation- education primarily influences voting. Even for the people in the top income category ($75,000 in the 1990s) a college education added 34 percentage points to a person's probability of voting. In closing this series of chapters on intellect and social behavior, the authors point out that many, if not most, academic intellectuals hold middle-class values in contempt. They have a better reputation among the public at large where they are seen as ways of behaving that produce social cohesion and order. Throughout Part 11 of The Bell Curve they have examined departures from middle-class values: adolescents' dropping out of school, babies born out of wedlock, crime, women on welfare, etc. To end this chapter on civility and citizenship they examine the people who are doing everything right which they call the Middle Class Values Index. A male scores " Yes" in this study if by 1990 he had obtained a high school degree, or more, had been employed throughout the past year, had never been interviewed in jail and was still married to his first wife. A women got a " Yes" if she had graduated from high school, had never given birth out of wedlock, had never been interviewed while in jail, and was still married to her first husband. Those who failed any one of these conditions received a "No." Overall, 51 percent scored a "Yes" in 1990 but the "Yeses" were markedly concentrated in the bright (67 percent) and the very bright (74 percent) while the "Noes" were primarily concentrated in the dull (30 percent) and the very dull (16 percent).As intuition might suggest "upbringing" in the form of socioeconomic background played a significant role in determining who received a "Yes" in the Middle Class Values Index but it was not nearly as significant as intelligence. The modest goal of the study was to point out that the old-fashioned virtues represented throughout the index are strongly associated with intellect. Finally, what is the difference between being smart and being civil? Cognitive ability is a raw material for civility, not the thing itself. Smart people are better able to understand and reason through complex political issues but, possibly of more importance, is the fact that intelligent people are more likely to take an interest in civil matters than are their duller counterparts. The authors are quick to emphasize superior intellect is not necessary for many of the most fundamental forms of civil and moral behavior. All of us can provide abundant examples of smart people who are conspicuously uncivil and amoral. Yet these observations notwithstanding, the statistical tendencies remain. A smarter population is more likely is more likely to be a civil citizenry. Comment: Most of us senior citizens know that our country is far less civil now than it was when we were children. Although the authors do not make the connection, it seems likely that the declining mean IQ of those living in the Western world, which has been falling 1.5 IQ points a generation since the Elizabethan Era, is in part responsible for the increasing incivility of our present society. Although, to this point, the authors have limited their studies to white America, it is likely that most, if not all, of the social problems (crime, out of wedlock births, illiteracy, welfare, etc.) encountered in our inner cities are in no small part a result of the fact that the poor whites, blacks and Latinos who inhabit these slums have a significantly lower mean IQ than those who live in the predominately white neighborhoods that surround them. In any case, the ride becomes far bumpier in Part 111 when Herrnstein and Murray discuss the ethnic differences in cognitive ability and the effect these IQ differences have on societal problems we face in twenty-first century America.