Is Equality Bad for You?

In every age, egalitarians have pursued the ideal of a classless society achieved through freedom of opportunity. Now a Harvard professor of psychology has branded the ideal a chimera. On the contrary, says Richard Herrnstein, educational equality and unrestricted social mobility will lead to a stratified society of hereditary castes.

Reviewing a century of research, Herrnstein concludes in the September Atlantic that intelligence is largely hereditary, that I.Q. influences social status, and that the nation already has a high-I.Q. ruling class and a lower class with I.Q.s below average. He believes, moreover, that the differences will become sharper. The better the U.S. succeeds in letting each man reach the level of his ability, says Herrnstein, the more will wealth and prestige be concentrated at the top. At the bottom, he predicts, will remain a human residue "that may be unable to master the common occupations" and were probably "born to parents who have similarly failed."

Environmental Handle. For the most part, Herrnstein avoids the racial issue, concentrating on the relative influence of "nature and nurture" (heredity and environment) in shaping intelligence. But today that subject is studied chiefly in hopes of accounting for the 15-point I.Q. difference typically found between American blacks and whites. Herrnstein's study thus becomes the latest in a series of documents that have sparked a continuing dispute over racial differences. It follows the 1965 Moynihan report that attributed many problems of blacks to their matriarchal families; the 1966 study by sociologist James Coleman that seemed to eliminate poor schools as a cause of failures, leading educators to indict black home life instead; and the controversial 1969 paper in which Psychologist Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley suggested that there might be an innate intellectual inferiority in the Negro.

Jensen weighed the factors that determine I.Q. and concluded that 80% are hereditary and only 20% environmental. Herrnstein goes beyond Jensen in stating that heredity will become even more important if scientists find external ways to improve intelligence. His reasoning: "Suppose we do find an environmental handle on I.Q.--something, let us say, in the gestating mother's diet. Presumably society would try to give everyone access to the favorable factor. But if we make the environment much more uniform, then an even larger proportion of the variation in I.Q. will be attributable to the genes. The average person would be smarter, but intelligence would run in families even more obviously than today."

To Herrnstein, this means that class status would also run in families. Removing social barriers to mobility would not change this; on the contrary, it would create biological barriers by sorting people out according to inherited differences in intelligence. Increasing the nation's wealth to make more room at the top would also be ineffective in reducing class barriers, Herrnstein reasons. Some poor people would become well-to-do, but "the growth of wealth will recruit for the upper classes precisely those from the lower classes who have the edge in native ability." This will only "increase the I.Q. gap between classes." Advances in technology compound the problem; as machines take over the easy tasks, the jobs that are left may be too difficult for the newly unemployed to manage. Consequently, "the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth do now."

This vision of "a virtual caste system" is appalling, Herrnstein admits, because it "reminds us of aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth." But there is a difference: the new aristocracy's prerogatives would stem from genuine ability and hence, Herrnstein seems to imply, would be fair enough. In a warning, perhaps unintended, to those who might rebel, he writes that "the privileged classes of the past were probably not much superior biologically to the downtrodden, which is why revolutions had a fair chance of success." Herrnstein's implication is clear: rebellion against the new intellectual elite would be more likely to fail.

Such views are certain to make Herrnstein's article at least as controversial as the studies that preceded it. Many blacks and whites will be angered by his defense of intelligence testing because they believe that the racial characteristics it discloses reflect no real differences in ability but only the cultural deprivation of blacks and the cultural bias of I.Q. tests. Because Herrnstein accepts Jensen's ideas about heredity and intelligence, as well as Jensen's contention that compensatory education has failed, he is likely to be criticized by some scientists who, like Nobel Geneticist Joshua Lederberg, have already labeled Jensen's findings "premature" and "inconclusive."

Unsettled Controversy. Response to Herrnstein's conclusions may well be conditioned by what have been called the "cultural determinants of scientific thought"--the idea that men look for scientific ways to make their social and political beliefs respectable. In the U.S., for example, the emphasis on environment as a significant factor in determining intelligence has surely been influenced by the concept that all men are created equal and the liberal belief in social mobility. On the other hand, 19th century Europeans* generally believed in the crucial importance of heredity because that belief seemed to justify the aristocracy's existence and a fixed social order. Critics of Herrnstein may well point out that one of the dangers of his report is that it will be similarly used to rationalize theories of racial superiority. But Herrnstein's supporters will agree with his insistence that the nature-nurture controversy is "simply not settled" and that investigation of racial differences should not "be shut off because someone thinks society is best left in ignorance."

*Including Social Theorist Count de Gobineau (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, 1855) and Eugenicist Francis Gallon (Hereditary Genius, 1869).

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