ANOTHER Modest Proposal

Another 527 Group? How about Dummies For Bush? W has self-defined himself as a dumbass; stupid, but cunning. His malapropisms abound and astound. W is proud of his mispronunciation of nuclear. In his mind (using the term loosely), there is honor in mediocrity. Frat-boy jocularity passes for wit. I hate to think what Dr. Samuel Johnson would say of him if W had been born in another place (London) at another time (early 18th century). The good Dr. Johnson would dismiss W as a babbling idiot. Now, who would join (and support) Dummies For Bush? They're everywhere. Anyone with a W bumper strip or a W lapel pin is a prime candidate. Not only does W self-define, but all of the Bush supporters self define themselves as dummies. This cognitive underclass elected W in 2000. May the Almighty have mercy on our souls if W is given 4 more years by them. If this is (fair & balanced) dismay, so be it.

[x Jerusalem Post]
In praise of mediocrity
by Bret Stephens

Friday, July 26, 2002 -- Poor Roman Hruska. In April 1970, the Nebraska Republican took to the floor of the Senate to defend the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell, a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, to the United States Supreme Court. It was a trying time. Questions had been raised about Carswell's commitment to civil rights. Betty Friedan testified that he was a sexist. The judge's rulings tended to be overturned on appeal, so he was considered an intellectual lightweight. And the administration was hurting, too. A defeat for Carswell would be the second consecutive rejection by the Senate of a Nixon Supreme Court nominee (the first was Clement Haynsworth), something the president could ill afford in the run-up to the midterm elections.

In this atmosphere, Hruska delivered the remark that would become his epitaph. "It has been held against this nominee that he is mediocre," he told the Senate chamber. "Even if he is mediocre there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that there."

Needless to say, Hruska's defense did not do much to help Carswell, who went down in a 51-45 vote and was later indicted for soliciting a male prostitute in a Florida shopping mall. Hruska's reputation fared little better. At the time of the nomination, the Nebraskan had been a senator for 16 years and held seats both on the appropriations and the judiciary committee, where he was known by colleagues as a "workhorse," a "senator's senator," and a contender for the GOP leadership. Yet becoming the champion of the mediocre man also made him the epitome of one, and he never lived it down. When he died, in 1999, every obituary of him reprinted the comment, about which Hruska himself was said to be much abashed.

WHICH IS A PITY, because Hruska was on to something.

Nobody, of course, wants to be thought of as mediocre, least of all as intellectually mediocre. Most of us, of course, are. The typical person has an intelligence quotient somewhere in the vicinity of 100; very few of us have IQ's that go much higher than 120. And yet, as in Garrison Keillor's mythical Lake Wobegon, we have persuaded ourselves that we're all "above average." We may not, after all, be all that clever. Yet the belief that we are, even if self-deceiving, is essential if we're to run our race in life in the hopes of actually getting somewhere.

This is especially important today, in the West, where the work we do requires greater mental exertions than physical ones, and where success in our careers seems to be so closely correlated with having brains to spare.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, published in 1994, social scientists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray noted how "Modern societies identify the brightest youths with ever-increasing efficiency and then guide them into fairly narrow educational and occupational channels. These channels are increasingly lucrative and influential, leading to the development of a distinct stratum in the social hierarchy."

Compounding this trend, Herrnstein and Murray argued, is the fact that the members of this stratum tend to marry one another, passing on not just their looks, but also their smarts, to their children. The result was a kind of self-perpetuating and socially impregnable class of natural aristocrats.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, is a cognitive underclass that also intermarries, and also passes on its lower-grade intellectual traits along with the problems that go with them: 48 percent of those living in poverty come from the bottom fifth of the intelligence distribution, as do 66% of high-school dropouts, as do 62% of those in jail. Peering into the future, Murray and Herrnstein espied a two-tier society in which the upper tier would do "whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below," if necessary by imposing a "custodial state" upon the lower-tier.

IT'S A FRIGHTENING scenario, inspired, I suspect, by present-day realities in places like Mexico and Brazil. It also comes disturbingly close to describing Europe.

Today, "Europe" exists principally on two levels. There is the Europe of nations: Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Belgians, French, etcetera. And there is the Europe of Europeans: a rarified, English-speaking elite that moves comfortably between Paris and London and Frankfurt and Brussels.

Europeans in the first category tend to be fairly stationary, wedded to (often unionized) jobs as machinists or cabbies or petty bureaucrats, and reactionary in their politics.

Europeans in the second category are highly mobile, cultured and smart. Domestically, their politics are integrationist; they are the Europe of open borders, pan- European legislation and the euro. Internationally, their politics are liberal-multilateralist; they believe in "global solutions," the goodness of the UN, the efficacy of foreign aid and so on.

Dividing the groups are educational credentials, reflecting a system in which children are quickly streamed according to their cognitive abilities. In Germany, for example, children who test poorly typically end up in Hauptschule, which ends in the eighth grade and usually leads to some form of vocational training. Their slightly better qualified peers go to Realschule, which ends in the 10th grade, while the best qualified are sent to a 13-year Gymnasium, leading to university education.

The upshot is that by the time most Europeans are 20, their life chances have pretty much been determined, and the crossover possibilities are slim. For many, of course, this bifurcation merely reflects the truth of who they'll ever be. But anyone who's spent time in Europe and encountered train conductors fluent in four languages, or barmen reading Dickens between pulls at the tap, know how much human capital is wasted in the bargain. Europe, too, has its late bloomers, those whose real talents simply couldn't be gauged in a grade-school exam. But their potential goes untapped and is squandered.

Meanwhile, their elite counterparts move in a very different direction: to the European Commission, to the law, to the civil services of their home countries, or to multinational companies such as McKinsey or JP Morgan. These are each, in their way, mandarinates, in which advancement is gotten by way of tests, connections, performance reviews and the like - essentially, an extension of the educational systems from which they came. Taken together, they reinforce the mentality that working within existing systems, rather than creating new ones, is the surest path to success. And so the corporatist mentality perpetuates itself.

FORTUNATELY, matters are otherwise in the United States.

In his first annual message to Congress, Abraham Lincoln made the essential point: "There is not," he said, "of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.... The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all - gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all."

Lincoln was speaking at a time when America was a predominantly agricultural society, when sheer sweat still counted for a lot. And yet the message contains the basic premise of American-style capitalism: that, much more than smarts, hard work, prudence, initiative and independence ultimately are what determine success and failure in America. Even today, that remains largely true.

Consider the state of American education. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report entitled A Nation at Risk. It warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people." Among other "indicators of risk," it noted that average verbal SAT scores had fallen by over 50 points between 1963 and 1980; that international comparisons of student achievement had American children falling behind in almost every discipline; that 13% of all 17-year-olds were fully functionally illiterate. The report also insisted that "education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country," and that without full-fledged educational reform "our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation" would be overtaken.

But as Roman Hruska's old friend Bob Dole might have said: Whatever.

Nearly 20 years after the report was issued, American preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation - and just about everything else, for that matter - remains unchallenged. This is not because America's educational system has turned a corner; by several indicators it's become worse. Rather, it's because educational achievement turns out not the great predictor of success that it is in Europe.

Graduates of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale will in all likelihood do well in life, and do so in fields such as medicine and law where high IQ and decent education is essential. Yet that does not mean the more poorly schooled are at too serious a disadvantage. H. Lee Scott, Jr., the president and CEO of Wal Mart, is a graduate of Pittsburg State University; AT&T's Michael Armstrong attended Ohio's Miami University; GE's Jack Welch went to the University of Massachusetts. All three men are surely bright, but no less important is their immense drive, basic horse sense and their willingness to take risks. Yet none of these virtues are easily acquired, and may in fact be discouraged, by attending a top-flight school.

Then too, beyond entry-level offers, few US employers care very much for academic qualifications. What matters is a positive attitude toward work, "people skills," and the ability to get the job done. And in a predominantly service economy having a mediocre IQ works just fine, especially since the advent of widespread computing technology diminishes the need for all but basic numeracy. To be, say, a franchise manager, or a personal trainer, or a sales executive does not require a better than average intellect. Yet each of these jobs may command comfortably middle class incomes.

Finally, political success in America is an area where intellectual brilliance counts for relatively little. Roman Hruska may have been an intellectual mediocrity, but he was a four-term senator with a significant record of legislative success. Gerald Ford was famously unbright, but his decency carried him far and did the country good. Ditto for Franklin Roosevelt (a second-rate intellect, a first- rate temperament, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. so famously put it), Ronald Reagan, and, perhaps, the office's current occupant. By contrast, America's most brilliant presidents - from Herbert Hoover the wonder boy to Jimmy Carter the nuclear engineer - have notoriously been America's worst.

IN THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, Aristotle famously defines intelligence as the sum of moral virtues. By contrast, mere cleverness - IQ, in today's parlance - does not even rank as a virtue, since it contributes neither to goodness nor wisdom, and may be employed toward opposite ends.

The greatness of the United States lies in the fact that, over time, it has tended to place a higher value on ordinary decency than on extraordinary cleverness. The Soviet Union, after all, richly rewarded its greatest talents, as does Europe today. By contrast, America has thrived because it created an environment in which intellectual mediocrities could also prosper, in which their limited capacities for intellectual development would not stand in the way of their ambition so long as they were willing to play by the rules and cultivate the right habits of mind and heart.

In his commencement speech at Yale last year, President George W. Bush offered graduates the following wisdom: "To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students - I say, you, too, can be president of the United States."

Amen.

Bret Stephens is editor of the Jerusalem Post.

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