Sat, 22 Oct 1994 01:49:13 -0700 for <socgrad@ucsd.edu>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 01:22:26 -0600
Originator: psn@csf.colorado.edu
From: U17043%UICVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU
Subject: social hierarchy -> notions of human nature
X-Comment:  PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK
   The three books propounding IQ-hereditary-cognition-class/race-behavioral-
genetics relationships, featuring Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve, as
reviewed, on the whole favorably, in The New York Times Book Review last
Sunday, tell us, from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge and the
study of ideology, that this is what turns on the US book-reading and book-
buying public *at this time*, or more pretentiously, *in this historical
period*. The latter public is to be identified with the upper middle class.
[I've recently run across another factoid - Justin Schwartz please take note -
to the effect that sixty percent of the US adult population does not read or
does not buy a book in any given year; said factoid I'd picked up either from
Neil Postman or from Robert Hughes (ie, last year's The Culture of Complaint).
Looks exaggerated; but that may depend on what's meant by "book." - df]
 
   The upper-middles are the beneficiaries of the legislated inegalitarianism-
cum-deindustrialization social counterrevolution under Reagan-Bush (if to
lesser degree than the Really Rich), the effects whereof continue unabated,
if not more strongly than ever, to this very moment. They are interested
parties, and much more overtly, crassly so than their forebears, who read
Michael Harrington, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown (among a host of other
bestselling reformist to radical social/cultural critics and muckrakers),
were in the early 1960s: The "neo-philosophes" cast by history as harbingers
of the optimistic-to-utopian reformist legislation and extraparliamentary
radicalism of the Sixties carried on in an environmental-determinist ambience
positing a priori assumptions of human perfectibility given social-structurally
supportive, ideally participatory-democratic, mobilized communities of
dissidence articulating local needs and interests, "controlling the decisions
affecting their own lives."
   This writer, indeed, was present in Syracuse NY, when the now-loathsome
bureaugibberish locution, "empowerment," was generated in an OEO-funded
entity called the Community Action Training Center; and the prototype-verbiage
was, in particular, attributable to one Warren O. Haggstrom, PhD, Professor of
Social Work at Syracuse University, thanks to whom what became "empowerment"
acquired the Shrinko-motivational-characterologically transformative usage it
still retains. [Note: Haggstrom characterized "powerlessness" as a species of
mental disease which, if remediated by - as it turned out - spurious formal
organizations in slum neighborhoods, would impart the sense of power, which
in turn would conduce to deviance-reduction cum upward-mobility aspirations.
Which didn't occur, the prime beneficiary having been Haggstrom's career.](*)
 
   The point, before I digress more, is that, hitherto, reformist social-
ameliorationist institutional change presupposing a priori assumptions of
paramountcy of the social envioronment in facilitation of "opportunity," ie,
circulation of elites, alternated with mean-spirited conservative consolidation
and closure of elites as they were: The early nineteenth century was of the
former type, Jefferson and his pal Benjamin Rush, notably, having seen a black
man with skin disease exhibited in a circus, inferring that prolonged contact
with whites had manifested in turning the unfortunate's skin white in blotches!
Rush, the Philadelphia psychiatrist, medicalized each and every behaviour he
disliked, inventing such diseases as Masturbatory Insanity and Anomia (compul-
sive lawbreaking); the latter, of course, French-suffixed, transmitted to
Emile Durkheim who, inverting its psychiatric usage for sociology, gave us
*anomie* as memorized by undergraduates to this day.
 
   The late nineteenth century was, Robber Barons having made their money and,
inventing High Society, meaning to keep it, hereditarian and racist; babble
anent the Great Race of Anglo-Saxons crossing the Atlantic and back. Then the
Progressives arrived, with a reform that proved two-faced: "Americanizing the
immigrant," ie, coercively assimilating her/him to a standard whereby it was
sustainable conviction that the United States of America was, as it still is,
Stronger Than Dirt, they abandoned racial minorities utterly. Strife, of a
bizarre character, erupted over the tribal faction which would end up concoct-
ing the IQ tests; and it was the Jewish boy, Wechsler, who victoriously
hijacked the measurement of cognition from the *goy momzer*, Louis B. Terman,
who would have consigned *'Am Yisroel* to subhumanity/Retardation. As late as
1960, 55% of Clinical Psychologists, the majority of testers, were Jewish (as
were 60% of psychiatrists, 75% of psychoanalysts, and 80% of the latter's
Shrunkees). Blessed be the Name of Wechsler; for his test has made my good
friend Alan Spector whatever he is today; while I, myself, was assigned the
terrible burden of being "brilliant" albeit an egregiously slow, near-dyslexic,
reader, zilcho in the abstract-reasoning department, and bereft of indications
of brains other than fantastic trivia-memorizing. A job is a job. Albeit in the
end I flopped, I'd got farther than I should've; and to this day wish I'd been
raised Stupid, the probable outcome in a *goyish* family with several children.
 
   Happily, the tests redeemed themselves by privileging the Chinese immigrants
who permanently populate this computer room; and this writer can say aught ill
of them excepting only the probably-racist impatience with whatever Chinese
consider jokes. (A Chinese Milton Berle? Jack Benny? Lenny Bruce? Fantastic!)
 
   The Progressives gave way to outright terroristic racists (the KKK had five
million members in 1925) and immigration-restrictive tribalists, spurred by
fear of admitting Boshevik Hordes. Till the Great Depression and through the
1930s, even under cover of an antiracist war against Hitlerite Fascism, the
racist, elitist, WASP-heavy Establishment above and Coughlinite and America-
Firsters below, gave Stronger Than Dirt a new, reactionary-repressive twist.
(Tweedy, old-family WASPs directed the War with some uncertainty as to Who
Was The Enemy; their passive obliviation of Holocaust activities is, to recent
scholarship, complicit and culpable in the monumentally tragic result.) The
hegemony was, however, shifting: The Democrats enacted landmark legislative and
administrative measures for black people, if piddling considering what was
needed; and opened the social-mobility floodgates with the GI Bill as they
state-subsidized suburbanization.
 
   Throughout these twentieth-century turnabouts, the industrial working class
was there; it was discontented to put it euphemistically; and till the Purges
and Rightist Terror of McCarthyism was the backbone, the muscle, of Democratic
Party liberalism. Even later, a more tepid, circumspect liberalism emanated
from trade-unionism and working-class-based political machines. (To this day,
in Chicago, pro-union posters appear in advertising space on subway station
walls during labor disputes, as they never do in New York City; and the sacred
right of the working class to smoke on rapid-transit platforms may not be
abridged by the slicker, and worse, Mayor Daley who, unopposed, freely abridges
the right to expression by Minorities by denying them, given widespread lack of
home phones, permission to use phone booths after dark; these are removed and
otherwise incapacitated. [Note: Alleged Community Groups spring out of the
ground like mushrooms, supporting the uprooting of phonebooths allegedly used
by crack dealers only; the latter use booths slightly farther away. Whites are
not aware of these goings-on. Fascism-by-stealth, I call it.]
 
   These vestiges of the working class Tradition and its heroic moment in 1894,
when Atty Gen Olney shot first, asked no questions later, and thereby perhaps
saved The Whole Ball Game, are gone now, along with the working class, in
Chicago and even more so everywhere else. The classic industrial working class
is 15% of the population, and its restraining hand against the polarization of
stratification is now removed. Moreover, the Reagan-Bush legislation, as
continuing under Clinton, subsidized the motive to get rich, in contravention
of the motivational assumptions of classical political economy. "Accumulate!
Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!" But to practice that religon in
our day, bounties need be paid for conversions to the True Religion. (Dwight
David Eisenhower, of boring memory, and his Treasury Secretary, Humphrey, most
Orthodox of Republican True Believers, needed no tax subsidies to motivate the
instinct of pecuniality.)[Note: By analogy with "sexuality," where the power of
the former was, in the nineteenth century, certainly, far more formidable an
urge than the latter.]
   I can explain why this had to be so, but none of you are remotely ready for
such stuff.
 
   Without a working class, with the population polarized into the minority
paid to sell shared mental life as pseudocommodities, the remainder not paid
to think or paid not to think, wherefrom arises my suspicion that, whatever
the former are paid for is construed as thinking, a new central contradiction
of capitalism has arisen. [Note: Not with a ten foot pole will I touch hot
stuff like this here.]
   Ideology is summoned to crawl out of the woodwork to legitimate a fake,
spurious, selfishly and heritably privileged cognocrats affecting designer
genes from best boutiques. Magic numbers become heritable: Says a psychiatric
researcher of this writer's acquaintance, "My own IQ is 133, and my daughter's
IQ has also been tested at 133." Family heirloom, no?
 
   What we have here are "notions of human nature," tricked out as science. As
scientific-seeming, they may *appear to be proven*. They cannot, however, be
*falsified*, scientifically, in that the motive for the dissemination of such
notions is social and extra-scientific.
 
   The Opposition's response to these, to any, "notions of human nature" must
be to account for, to explain, why they exist from *outside* the discourses,
knowledge base, methods, and professional literature of psychometrics and human
behavioural genetics:
 
   All societies give rise to normative-idealist "notions of human nature" (as
well as folk-wisdom acknowledging lapses from idealized standards) compatible
with prevalent social conditioning and social construction in each; also, they
posit whatever sort of "human nature" is assumed or explicitly propounded as
*prior* to society-as-it-is (with the latter's conditioning and construction).
*The latter is quite impossible*. (For so far from belaboring the obvious, I'd
like to take a halt, assume a loftier view:)
 
   The only truly universal part of the natural habitat of humans in general or
in particular are society and community with their corresponding shared
culture). It is in this society - subsuming community - with community subcul-
tures, at least, the only part of each person's environment that she or he is
systematically taught from birth that it is Forbidden to transform. Yet,
transformed it is, has always been, by quotidian struggle, reformist legisla-
tion, administration, social upheaval or Revolution or Civil War, and the ever-
ubiquitous "unintended consequences."
 
   The Opposition must restate these elementary propositions iteratively, so
long as they are denied or banished from consciousness. Meanwhile, it is
legitimate for us to play the same game by highlighting deep-seated yearnings
slighted or stifled by media-propagated "notions of human nature." For
instance, wherein rightism exalts "the individual," this alludes to the
predatory-accumulative-"competitive-edge"-obsessed monad of bourgeois
individualism, an emergent construct for centuries inseparable from bourgeois
culture of the most residual sort so long as capitalism be with us. The
Opposition, therefore, appeals to stifled and suppressed cravings for
*individuation*, at this time as a rule disallowed (outside narrow spheres
of adult life whereof one such liminal state, the Halloween Party, approacheth;
but only such that the Halloween Party and suchlike "liminal states," as the
anthropologists call them, *change nothing*.
   To the eroded communities of small towns and urban neighborhoods, with their
oppressive conformities, The Opposition responds, firstly, with a hearty, "good
riddance," and critiques the obsolete, deliquescing former-Thingie with a
vision of *communities of the individuated*, such as never hitherto existed
(except, possibly, in the fiction of Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time,
1975; He, She and It, 1991).
 
   Nobody, absolutely nobody whatever, wants to be "Equal," ie, aver that she
or he construes herself-himself as *no better than anyone else*; this will
be treated with Prozac, Zoloft, whateveritis, for "poor-self-esteem!" Least
of all will those "Paid To Think" contemplate the ignominy of being "Equal"
to those who are paid-nottothink or not-paidtothink. The prospect of
communities and a wider society guaranteeing uniqueness is, however, inexorably
in contradiction with hierarchy, buttressed as the latter is by the one-dimen-
sional measuring instruments of the psychometricians. The latter, like the
State Lottery, sell Magic Numbers; but are *less fair*, in that all the winning
tickets are sold in certain neighborhoods, none in others.
 
   *You Can't Beat Something With Nothing*! To the ideology of hierarchization,
The Opposition counterposes its own vision, whose thrust must be *completely
new* and *completely different*. Which is only appropriate and quite reason-
able, given that US capitalism has revolutionized itself twice over since World
War II, as Marx long ago warned us is something capitalism *will do* (should
you ever be nodded out, complacent, or excessively-certain of anything,
especially). We are, have been, asleep at the switch beyond even what might
be charitably called *egregiously*. There is no adequate sociological
macrotheory for the fantastic irrationalities of the USA (though I've tried
my limited best to come up with some pieces of it).
 
   Time to get to know the Beast better to understand its odder excrescences,
like the present IQ-aristocracy game.
 
Daniel A. Foss
<to all a good night>