The vitriolic controversy developing around The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles
Murray has raised again questions about mental tests and their meaning.
One of the charges made is that the tests are themselves unfair.
But, long before the present controversy, someone replied to similar charges by pointing
out: “The tests are not unfair.
Life is unfair—and tests measure the results.”
The same could be said of the charge that tests are “culturally biased.”
Life is culturally biased.
We live twice as long as people in some of the poorer parts of the world, not because
we are more deserving, individually smarter or otherwise more meritorious, but simply
because we had the dumb luck to be born into a culture which produces cures and preventions
for deadly diseases that have ravaged the human race for centuries.
The cultural features which advance medical science have by no means been universal.
Indeed, they have been fairly recent, as history is measured, even in the civilizations where
they now exist.
Any test which tests for those kinds of features must be culturally biased—indeed, should
be culturally biased.
There may well have been individuals born into ignorant and primitive backwaters of
the world who had brain cells fully as well-functioning as those of Pasteur, Salk or other medical
pioneers, but who never developed the same capabilities and never left a trace of their
existence to benefit the rest of mankind.
If tested by our culturally biased tests, those individuals would undoubtedly have scored
low—and should have, if our purpose was the practical one of picking people actually
able to do the kinds of things that needed doing in medical science.
What would have happened under other cultural circumstances is a cosmic question—a question
for God, perhaps, but not for intellectuals who act as if they are God.
As limited human beings, we must make our choices among the alternatives actually available.
A culture-free society has never been one of those alternatives.
Any test designed to predict future performances in any field or in any society is trying to
predict what will happen in a given cultural context.
There is nothing inherently sinister about this.
These are the conditions we face—or should face.
Few things are discussed as unintelligently as intelligence.
Seldom do those who talk—or shout—about this subject bother to define their terms.
Is “intelligence” the abstract potentiality that exists at the moment of conception?
The developed capabilities with which the same individual faces the world two decades
later?
In between, all sorts of things have happened—and happened differently for different individuals
and groups.
An alcoholic or drug-addicted mother begins damaging her child even before birth.
Her irresponsibility, brutality or stupidity is almost certain to do more damage to the
child in the years that follow.
What good would it do us to know that child’s innate potential at the moment of conception?
It certainly would not enable us to predict what is likely to happen now that he is what
he is.
Suppose that we had such a miraculous test and discovered that we started out with an
Einstein and ended up with an idiot.
Would that mean that the test was unfair because it showed that he was an idiot?
Or would it mean that life itself was tragically unfair—not only to him, but to the whole
society that now has to contend with him as he is?
Maybe such a test would have some social value as a means of shocking us into a realization
of what enormities result from subsidizing teenage pregnancy, for example.
Yes, it would be hard on all concerned, including the public, to deny welfare to the teenager.
But would it be worse than what happens because we cannot bring ourselves to deny it?
Such questions could at least be asked if we had the kind of miraculous test hoped for
by some.
But there is no sign that we are even close to developing such a test.
The much-vexed question of heredity versus environment, and of possible intergroup differences
in inherited potential, are better able to produce heated controversies than enlightened
reasoning.
Does anyone seriously doubt that heredity plays some role in some differences?
Or that it is seldom the whole story?
The Bell Curve itself says: “It should be no surprise to see (as one does every day)
blacks functioning at high levels in every intellectually challenging field.”
But that did not stop the shouts of those who are in the business of shouting.
Anyone who actually reads the book—which may not include all of its critics—will
discover that race is not even considered in the first 12 chapters.
That is hardly what the book is about, though that is what the noise is about.
My own view as a former teacher is that most American students, of whatever background,
are operating so far below their capacity that the limits of that capacity is an academic
question.