Cult of Smart

* Book: The Cult of Smart. Freddie de Boer.

URL = https://read.macmillan.com/lp/cult-of-smart/

Discussion

Freddie de Boer:

"Over the course of centuries, the market value of intelligence, education, and general cognitive ability has grown; we now live in a “knowledge economy”

These skills and abilities have naturally become deeply intertwined with the justification for modern meritocracy, which is to say, the notion that our system rewards or should reward the ability of the individual, their capacity for performing valuable tasks, rather than (for example) their station within a system of hereditary nobility

In the lived, casual moral philosophy that most Americans operate under, this system of meritocracy and the outsized rewards that come with cognitive/educated/skilled labor is justified because the individual can determine their outcomes within the system; if you’re smart and hardworking, you control your own destiny and can achieve the kind of lifestyle you want

If the individual doesn’t control their own destiny, if chance plays an outsized role in determining life outcomes, then there’s little reason for the average person to play ball within the system - why put your head down and be a good little worker bee if there’s no consistent relationship between your willingness to do so and the rewards you reap?

This whole edifice of modern post-nobility society, therefore, rests on a foundation of the belief that we all have equal opportunity to excel; not coincidentally, at precisely the period when dynastic systems of nobility began to crumble, Western philosophers began to stress a philosophy of equal rights in a society governed by principles of personal liberty and market economics (that is to say, liberalism)

But while we are all equal in rights, in value, and in human dignity, we are very much not equal in ability, which is a reality we are perfectly willing to countenance in certain fields (athletics, music, physical beauty) but not when it comes to academics

Unfortunately, we know that not all people are in fact equal in academic or intellectual potential, even if we deny any particular genetic influence on intelligence at all - see, for example, the consequences of prematurity

Once we acknowledge that not everyone has equal potential in every academic skill, the basic justification mechanism of modern capitalist society begins to break down, and perhaps we can critically examine the assumptions that underpin it

If we are not all made equal in our abilities, particularly in the classroom, the current American fixation on creating opportunity through turning every student into a budding Google software engineer becomes particularly perverse, destined to leave many behind who are additionally blamed for their own failure

Decades of education research demonstrates that early-life academic performance is remarkably stable throughout schooling, even in the face of concerted efforts to change that performance

Despite endless propaganda, there is no simplistic relationship between the performance of the median student and the economic, diplomatic, military, or cultural strength of a given society, all of which are likely dependent on the abilities of a small percentage of the highest achievers

Academic skills are only one small slice of the human project, and all people have something of value that they can contribute, only a tiny percentage of which is covered in grades or test scores

We would do well to further expand our redistributive social safety net (political), reduce artificial standards and open up more paths through K-12 schooling to account for different skills and interests (educational), and cease our obsessive focus on intelligence and academic ability as the central criterion of being a successful human (cultural/social)."

(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/preemies-genes-meritocracy-and-the?)

A critique of Meritocracy

Freddie de Boer:

"The book is relentlessly focused on ameliorating the damage done to the poor and disenfranchised by our meritocratic system and in standing against our reductive obsession with a narrow set of academic values. But, predictably, it was criticized by many on the left for its suggestion that a half-century of findings in behavioral genetics are correct - that we see a consistent relationship between genetic familial relationships, with those with closer relationships having more similar academic outcomes in a wide variety of academic metrics, while adopted family members are no more similar in those metrics than any two random strangers. We’ve also seen that all manner of attempts to dramatically alter relative educational performance of groups of students have failed again and again, and we’ve seen that over the course of life we become more and more like our parents in terms of our academic outcomes. And we also have the basic knowledge that the brain is built with DNA the same way any of our bodies are, which makes it likely that differences in our genomes influence various aspects of our cognition and learning. (I laid out some of the difficult questions for pure environmentalists here.) Still, objection to any pursuit of this line of thinking is always vociferous, with many claiming that simply scientifically pursuing these questions is itself offensive. Scott Alexander recently wrote about the remarkable lengths some will go to in order to deny that the genes that literally designed our bodies have some say in whether we develop schizophrenia. People think genetic differences are unfair and proceed from there to insist that they are necessarily untrue.

I am aware that I’m not going to change many minds on this issue. But I would ask that you compare the genetic argument to the case for sympathy and support for those children born prematurely. Morally, what is the difference? Why should the claim that academic ability can be negatively impacted by prematurity - or PKU, or bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or Down syndrome, or prenatal infection, or intrauterine hypoxia - be any less offensive? Some of the angrier reactions to the book insisted that I was “saying these kids have no chance.” I am, in fact, arguing that we as a society have a duty to give them (and all of us) a better chance, regardless of the specific hurdles we face, whether disability, racism, sexism, or simply not possessing the kind of skills that are currently valued under neoliberal capitalism. I think the effort to achieve these things through education has demonstrably failed.

But set that aside: how is acknowledging that, say, fragile X syndrome causes significant intellectual impairment any worse than saying that some people have less likelihood of academic success because of their genes? Why would it be more insulting, more unfeeling, more cruel? I don’t understand how saying that some people have less natural academic talent, whatever the origins, can be controversial, but not the acknowledgement that there are some medical conditions that reduce academic potential. Is it the differences in severity? But some cognitive disabilities result in mild but still meaningful impairments. I’m arguing that the physiology and anatomy of the brain has consequences in the classroom. You can certainly dispute whether our genetic endowment influences our academic outcomes. But the idea that considering the question is offensive seems like giving in to vibes to me, seems like avoiding difficult conversations, seems like special pleading provoked by icky feelings.

I have often wondered why environmental influences on academic performance appear somehow more “polite” than genetic, to many people. I think it has something to do with the assumption that they cannot be changed, which again leads to fears of leaving children behind. As committed critics of behavioral genetics often point out, just because a condition is influenced by genetics does not mean that the condition necessarily cannot be changed. But then, the obverse is also true - just because an influence is environmental does not mean it can be changed. The negative academic consequences of lead exposure are persistent, though there are many programs that seek to provide accommodations for those who suffer those consequences. Yet no one who points out that dynamic is accused of wanting to leave the people who suffer that way behind.

Saying that not every child can excel academically is giving up on them only if we insist that academic ability is more important than any other aspect of a human being.

The goal, ultimately, is to undermine our dogged civil commitment to the American ideal that holds that we all control our own destinies, in the classroom or anywhere else. I think most people have an intrinsic sense that it’s wrong for people to suffer under things they can’t control; I think we can’t control how smart we are, for a lot of reasons. The notion that we should provide accommodation and sympathy for people who face challenges they did not create and cannot control is not quite bipartisan but at least intuitive to most. If we are made unequal, not merely rendered unequal by environment or personality or chance, then our duty to provide that accommodation and sympathy only grows. What worries me is that, because a lot of bad people in history have used genetics as a pretext to do bad things, many progressive people prefer to stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to examine the moral consequences of the random (to us) hand we’re all dealt when we’re born. That leaves us disarmed in our efforts to build a more just and equitable world. If the people who usually fight for the victims of chance refuse to engage because talk of genetics makes them squirm, who then will wage that fight?

For decades, politicians and academics and policymakers have insisted that the only way to rescue children from poverty and end various racial gaps is through more and better education. We have become a vastly more educated society in the past half-century, with extraordinary increases in the percentage of Americans with college degrees, master’s degrees, and professional degrees, and a dropout rate that’s miniscule compared to where it once was. Yet the working-age poverty rate stubbornly refused to meaningfully budge. Meanwhile, muscular programs for redistribution such as pandemic aid and major investment in American industry have resulted in the first narrowing of inequality in my lifetime, as modest as that progress may be. If nothing else, perhaps we can stop trying to educate our way out of poverty and inequality. If we do, we can recommit to a humanistic education that values enrichment first, the enrichment of children’s intellectual and emotional lives, while still providing them an opportunity to discover what they like to do, what they’re good at, and what might provide them with a reasonable amount of professional contentment. The nerds at the top will always strive, always hustle. But there’s no reason to force everyone down the same pipe, the college pipe, the job-at-Google pipe, the smart kid life."

(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/preemies-genes-meritocracy-and-the?)