It seems the conceit of each generation that it has reached the state of ultimate enlightenment: each age is a progressive one, each society the most perfectly egalitarian. I know a husband and wife who had a baby boy; the state took their baby away before they could even leave the hospital. They had done nothing wrong except not be smart enough: they both were mentally retarded. A generation or so ago, they would have been simply sterilized; in their day—in our day—they lost their newborn baby to the state. It’s an odd kind of progress.
But they got their baby back; they became a family after all. They will need help to succeed; their boy will need help. It is hard to know what will happen to him, hard to know how smart he will be. Maybe, in the next generation, sterilization will be back in vogue. Or maybe his daughter will be a nuclear physicist.
There’s one last thing that I think we need to acknowledge, and it’s maybe the most important of all. Even if somebody can’t be a good nuclear physicist, and even if it is somehow due entirely to her own “natural” limitations, it absolutely does not mean that she is not smart. Here, I think, is the greatest danger in the concept, the most insidious aspect of “smartness” and “intelligence” and “IQ” and “mental retardation.” From one perceived inability we induce a general inferiority: someone who doesn’t do well on standardized tests becomes “dumb” or even “mentally retarded,” and that means that not only will they not become very good nuclear physicists, they also won’t become very good citizens, or parents, or people. Being not smart at that one thing means that they are just plain not smart—at anything. And that means that they deserve—in terms of cultural success—nothing.
But it means nothing of the sort, or rather, it should mean nothing of the sort. Because there are many kinds of smartness, and people can be smart in many different ways, and the fact that they are not smart—or are not made smart—in one way does not mean that they cannot be smart in many other ways. Really bad nuclear physicists can be really good nurses; really bad nurses can be really good lawyers; really bad lawyers can be really good auto mechanics; really bad auto mechanics can be really good teachers; and any of them—but not necessarily all of them—can be really good mothers and fathers.
Here too we have made the decisions: to ignore the different kinds of smartness; to collapse it all into one general, abstract concept; and to order all the differences, as matters of degree, as more smart or less, as superior and inferior. Here too, in this final crucial way, we make some people smarter than others, by rewarding the smartness of some people and ignoring the smartness of others. We make some people smart, in short, just by choosing to call them that.
So some people are smarter than others. It would be wrong not to admit it. But wrong too not to admit that in most cases, and in most respects, we made them that way.
The remainder of this book examines in detail the mythology of smartness: as it was initially conceived by the founders of 1787 and the reconstructors of 1868; as it persists today in American science and politics; and as it has been maintained by American law. In the process, it confronts one of the most vicious myths of smartness: the myth of “races” of people that are, by nature, intellectually superior and inferior. That myth, it evolves, is an old myth, but not an ancient one; an outmoded myth, but a durable one. And it has been made durable by American law.
This book also examines a competing vision—one also promised by the founders, adopted by the reconstructors, confirmed by science, and realized, in fleeting moments, in American politics and American law. It is a vision of a nature that blesses all people—and all groups of people—and of a community in which equality is not merely a legal concept but a lived condition. It is a vision of a truly smart culture, one in which “smart” means all of us.
2 The First Object of Government Creation Myths
It is the central contradiction of American life: the absurd divorce between egalitarian ideals and the reality of relentless inequality. It has been with us from the outset, and revolution, civil war, and two national efforts at reconstruction have succeeded more in re-stating the contradiction than in resolving it. We began by declaring all men equal, and a century later guaranteed all persons the equal protection of the law, and after yet another century ensured the civil rights of all Americans—and still our social, economic, and political life is dominated by inequity. There are no castes in America, and yet—maddeningly, undeniably—there are.
The rationalizations have been with us from the outset as well. All men were equal, but, by nature, that principle did not extend to women, or men without property, or American Indians, or, of course, slaves. All persons were guaranteed equality under law but, in the nature of things, that pledge did not eradicate distinctions rooted in biology, and could not redress inequalities that were social, as opposed to legal. Civil rights are guaranteed all Americans, but, naturally, that secures only an equal opportunity to succeed, and cannot ensure equal outcomes. We are, formally, all equal, but we are, really, not equal at all: platitudes aside, there is no denying the natural order.
We do not deny it; on the contrary, we have made it the law. At the founding, Rousseau’s communitarian vision yielded to an individualism that exalted, above all, the right to amass very unequal shares of property; protecting the “unequal faculties of acquiring property” became “the first object of government.” Over two hundred years later, it still is. Economic liberty leads inexorably to social inequality, and that is natural, that is just. The laws of nature have thus become our rules of law: both represent the same order.
Some are, by nature, smarter; they should get, it is only natural, more. These are the myths of our creation, the essence of the smart culture.
Prologue
As a kid, I spent most of my summers living with my grandparents, which is even less of a big deal than it sounds, seeing as how my grandparents lived just across the highway. On the other hand, just across the highway sometimes seemed like another world: the houses there had yards on all four sides—“detached” is what we call them now; as kids, we just called them “huge”—and the backyards were big enough for any game any kid could ever want to play. I had a whole different bunch of friends over at my grandparents’, and we played a whole different bunch of games. For a kid, I guess, it really was a different world.
I loved staying with my grandparents. It was a little bit because of the yard and the games but it was mostly because of them. My grandfather was a truck tire salesman and he made his living on the road, and he was great at it and he loved it, until somebody in some regional office somewhere decided that truck tires could not be sold efficiently by traveling salesmen, and they were not confused by the fact that my grandfather was already doing precisely what could not be done. So they moved my grandfather inside a store, and he became an automobile tire salesman, and he was great at this too, but he loved it a lot less. My grandfather was also a repairman—of all things mechanical and of many things familial—and he was like a father to me, and he was, I guess, one of my first real teachers. He taught me how to throw and hit a baseball, and later how to fix a car, and in between he tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle, but at this he failed, as he could not overcome my bike’s supernatural attraction to large inanimate objects like parked cars and brick walls and even, with an odds-defying accuracy, the goalposts on a football field. He also taught me my first complete sentence—“Pop-pop can fix any damned thing”—as well as my first lesson in manners, a lesson I proudly displayed to my mother on a city bus one Saturday morning, after a well-dressed man stumbled up the steps and fell to the floor: “Fall down,” I shouted helpfully, to my mom and all concerned riders, “and bust the ass!” For this, I had to wash my mouth out with soap, and my grandfather had to wash our new used car.
My grandmother was my teacher too, and in a sense had to do double duty, as she had to help me unlearn a great many of my grandfather’s lessons. My grandmother was an executive secretary, and she could type and take shorthand and take minutes and balance books and edit correspondence and I hardly know what else, except that it seems