Visions of American Virtuosity in the Bell Curve

The Statistical War on Equality: Visions of American Virtuosity in The Bell Curve Stephanie Houston Grey. Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Culture Department of Communications Studies. Louisiana State University, E-mail: [email protected] This article was originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1999, 85(3): 303-329. Reprinted with permission of the editor. This essay uses Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve to examine the sedimented history of probability in America. By creating a moral cartography for the nation, the model reinforces ethnic hierarchy and difference. Three socio-graphic dynamics define this spatial rhetoric. The first creates an idealized middle to valorize sameness and normalcy, creating a universal standard of judgement. The second uses variable formation and standard deviation to manufacture the basis for difference and ranking. The third relies upon a temporal subjectivity to reinforce ethnic competition through specific progressive trajectories. The essay concludes with suggestions for a counter discourse that resists the probabilistic mandate. Keywords: The Bell Curve, race, social science, rhetoric of inquiry, American progress ethic he distance between science and politics is by providing a blueprint for public policy that T often shorter than might be imagined. projected future social needs and political During the past two centuries America's social behavior. The ability to influence and constitute and political terrain has increasingly linked, seemingly nonpartisan political narratives lent even conflated, scientific methodologies with credibility to the process of social quantification ethical practices. Driving this interpenetration of and facilitated its widespread implementation. science and virtue is a model of social Donald Levine describes this technocratic management where expertise, stemming culture, reliant on sociological precepts, as one primarily from the professionalized sciences, of "enlightened social control" where statistical played a growing role in business and measures facilitated the management of post- government.1 This trend can be traced to the World War I society.3 This philosophy of turn of the century where the successful behavioral prediction quickly spread to the measurement of the natural world led to the institutional level. Writing in 1921, Thorstein conclusion that the behavioral patterns of a Veblen argued that industrial mass production community were as predictable as migrating had become the primary mode of social and geese. For Dorothy Ross, the mixture of natural psychological organization in American culture, science and history in American consciousness assigning individuals work according to their as described by thinkers such as William scientifically determined dispositions.4 By Sumner, was key to the development of the locating people within socio-political social sciences in the Gilded Age.2 These new cartographies to maximize productivity, the methodologies were thought to enable the social sciences endorsed methodologies that smooth transition from one regime to the next naturalized roles and defined modern identity. DataCrítica: International Journal of Critical Statistics, 2009, Vol. 3, No. 1, 3-31 3 The extension of technocratic practices census procedures.12 Disciplines such as throughout government and business was economics, psychology, sociology, and political paralleled by similar developments in the science orchestrate perceptions of the social educational system. Since public schools were order by classifying and arranging clusters of the primary means for socialization on a individuals along axes that measure national scale, prerequisite skills and values for performance and desirability. As the public is entry into the workforce had to be transmitted constituted through social scientific categories accurately. Statistical tools were developed to that are subsequently revealed in graphic form quickly and inexpensively determine how to craft a visual aesthetic, an ethical standard for effectively educational institutions engaged this the nation is created and reinforced, defining task.5 Distinct from France, Germany, and even American identity as the product of a Great Britain, American came to rely on mechanistic moral order. procedures such as the Simon-Binet intelligence To best understand the cartography that test to measure the innate talents of given has propelled the social sciences demands individuals through standardized formats to examining them as discursively and historically predict their future successes and failures.6 bound phenomena. Throughout the past decade During the first World War when similar tests rhetorical scholars have begun to question and were applied to the military, social expose the assumptions that drive epistemic psychologists Robert Yerkes and Carl Brigham discourse-an effort sometimes termed the speculated that individuals of certain ethnicities "rhetoric of inquiry."13 Utilizing the principles scored lower on such measures due to of the linguistic turn as a springboard, the diminished intellectual capacities.7 These sciences are now being examined as socially eugenicist conclusions were justified by situated activities that rhetorically legitimate institutional systems that required an expedient communities. Richard Rorty writes that the means to type and organize individuals. The "only essence in which science is exemplary is process of tracking, the use of achievement tests that it is a model of human solidarity."14 In to cluster students by ability and streamline other words, the power of social science lies in their choice of adult occupation, came to fruition its capacity to establish consensus within at this time and has remained, although collectivities rather than in an ability to expose controversial, a cornerstone in American material reality. As many scholars have pointed education.9 In defense of these practices, Henry out, the specialization of scientific vocabularies Goddard would write that it is not so much a and methodologies is one of the primary means "question of the absolute numbers of persons of through which epistemic and lay communities high and low intelligence as it is whether each are traditionally demarcated.15 John Dewey grade of intelligence is assigned a part in the critiqued this burgeoning technical class for whole organization that is within its capacity."10 drawing upon the resources of the "great While Patrick Ryan recalls that it was this community" while socially and linguistically rejection of democratic individualism that led to partitioning itself from the mainstream to the initial dismissals of the technocratic project legitimate these new techniques.16 The in the 1930s, IQ and other achievement tests encryption of population descriptions in obscure continue to function as extremely effective vocabularies enhanced by highly specialized, organizational tools.11 Despite these criticisms, objective methodologies supports the mission of the quantification of the polity remains intrinsic social science to become the foil of prejudice and to America's cultural topography, defining a popular myths.17 The landmark case of Brown wide range of practices from the measurement v. The Board of Education is one such example of job productivity to determining appropriate where social psychology profoundly influenced 4 DataCrítica: International Journal of Critical Statistics, 2009, Vol. 3, No. 1: 3-31 contemporary understandings of race in racists who attempt to revive the long debunked America by directing attention away from science of eugenics which posits African- genetics and towards socio-economic American genetic inferiority.23 One critic likens deprivation.18 Such critical moments are, the text to social scientific "pornography," however, eventually undercut by the use of arguing that its decidedly extreme, racist these technical methodologies to comment upon arguments laced with statistics are paramount to social processes as they fail to acknowledge the epistemic obscenity.24 Others, more cynically, imbrication of social science within popular dismiss the book as a marketing phenomenon ideologies. Max Horkheimer suggests that the that purposefully punches the right ideological abstract nature of mathematics deflects critique buttons to stir controversy, selling almost three- through extraction from the political realm in a quarters of a million copies to date.25 The manner similar to high art when he writes that majority of critics, including some who partially the application of numbers "is not to be support the author's assertions about race, regarded as an appendix, as merely what comes question the validity of the scientific sources and after thought, but enters into theory at every methods that they employ. The fact that the point and is inseparable from it."19 To view majority of Herrnstein and Murray's data are statistics as divorced from action means the generated out of studies sponsored by the effacement of their inherent rhetoricity, extremist Pioneer Fund and the eugenics journal permitting an illusory split between form and Mankind Review as well as their celebration of content-between the symbolic and the material-a academic pariahs such as Arthur Jensen, casts cleaving that renders society a knowable, suspicion on the purity of their research.26 In predictable, and thus controllable system. addition, the authors' advocation of IQ test A significant and controversial moment in validity also raises doubt as many

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