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Left-wing policy initiatives aimed at helping the disadvantaged generally begin from a central premise: that people are born more or less as blank slates, more or less the same, and only differential treatment since birth explains all the difference in individual outcomes.
This approach manages to coexist with the overwhelming evidence that cognitive ability — human intelligence — has a significant heritable component. We are not blank slates, at least not when it comes to our ability to think, yet while the evidence is overwhelming — see here, here and here — the Left, in particular, is hostile to the idea, or even discussing it.
The reason, at least on the surface, is well-intentioned. Progressives can say, with some justice, that categorising people by intelligence is an ethical nightmare. The use of epistocracy – government by the clever – to justify everything from the oppression of women to slavery goes all the way back to Aristotle. It is no coincidence that “intelligence testing” and eugenics emerged at the same moment. Indeed, the history and validity of measuring and testing “intelligence” is itself fraught with controversy.
But in seeking to push back against narratives that could be used to encourage bigotry, the Left has blinded itself to the biggest contemporary inequality story of all: the emergence of a new cognitive elite.
Consider ‘John’. Our hypothetical John is a poster boy for social mobility: born amid the industrial decline of a post-industrial community, to working-class parents, he did well at school and won a scholarship to a top university. John did not go back home, but instead moved to a flourishing global city for a career in financial services. He married another high flyer, and they live a middle-class life in a leafy suburb.
John could be British or American, Canadian or Australian. He has counterparts — Jean, Hans, Gianni — in many other countries. His story is a textbook case of meritocracy in action, rewarding the determination, hard work and natural ability of someone from a working-class background with a successful career in a field far removed from that of his parents.
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SubscribeIt will forever affect my views on articles by this writer that I read in future that she appears to be prepared to use words like “hereditary” and phrases like “cognitive ability”, apparently without having looked them up and discovered what they mean.
“Differences of dignity or worth do not follow from differences of intelligence.” Funny how she spends the article railing against left-wing assumptions about intelligence and hereditary traits then makes her own dogmatic statement without evidence or argument.