Let’s not be dumb about stupidity

A new prejudice has emerged — discrimination against people with low IQs. Michael Hanlon investigates The strange notion of a dumb Britain has taken hold in the national psyche. A-levels are now so simple, we are told, that they can be tackled by a goldfish. We have media studies degrees, children who don’t know who Churchill was, the whole horrible banality that is modern television. And we keep reading about how Edwardian ten-year-olds sat exams which would baffle Stephen Hawking.

The notion that society has become more stupid is, of course, tripe. It is a modern, hairshirted nostalgia myth along with the one about how kind and Christian we all used to be in the olden days, the same olden days when we sneered happily at ‘niggers’ and ‘jewboys’ and wouldn’t have dreamt of giving hundreds of millions of pounds to a bunch of Johnny Foreigners on the other side of the world, even if they got swept away by a bloody great wave. In the 1850s, probably 50 per cent of our great-great-grandparents could not read or write, for heaven’s sake. Until relatively recent times half the population were not eligible for university simply because they did not possess a pair of testicles.

In fact, we live in an overwhelmingly knowledge-based society. It is probably quite hard now for a Briton to earn a living wage if he or she is illiterate — something that was certainly not the case 100 years ago. Then, there were plenty of jobs that relied purely on brawn rather than brain. In 1900 more than a million men worked in the mines, millions more in the fields. Many of these jobs were highly skilled and required training and intelligence, but most were not.

Now the majority of those jobs have gone. The proportion of the workforce who can carry out their paid tasks with no educational qualifications is far smaller than it ever has been. The modern mines are the call centres, jobs which have become a byword for dumb Britain. But this is grossly unfair. To work in a call centre you have to be able to speak well (yes, yes, I know, but ideally you do), you have to be able to work a computer, you have to be able to understand your company’s products and services and, most of all, you have to have basic literacy and numeracy. None of this was necessary to toss bales of hay or hew coal.

This means that many people who would have spent their lives performing back-breaking, dangerous jobs for a pittance now work in modern air-conditioned offices and get four weeks’ paid leave a year. Good. But it also means that some of those people who would have been able to earn a living with their biceps are now out of work, unemployed and, in today’s society, effectively unemployable. Bad. And what do we do with these people, the cerebrally challenged, stupid, call them what you will, who have become the great elephant in the political room?

At the moment we laugh at them. Think of all those hideous and cruel TV shows designed to showcase the dim for our delectation (for that is the real point of Big Brother and Wife Swap and Holidays from Hell and all those dreadful ‘reality’ programmes). Look at that Jade Goody, doesn’t even know what East Anglia is! Probably can’t even read or write! Slag! Of course, we have always mocked our fools — but it seems to me that the vitriol directed at the not-very-bright is a nastier and more powerful concoction today than it has ever been.

In our shiny new meritocracy — for surely that is what Britain is striving to become; Tony Blair has said as much — we quite rightly decry any form of genetic discrimination. If a black man or a Chinese woman is best for the job, then give it to them. Racial prejudice is despicable and despised, rightly so. So is prejudice against the genetically disabled, the deaf and blind, and against those who have arrived at those conditions by accident or illness. But one form of genetic discrimination is still allowed — indeed actively encouraged — and that is discrimination against those with low IQs. And as the old class barriers break down and the tectonic plates of society realign, then it is these people who sink inexorably to the bottom. And, being stupid, they lack the wherewithal and especially the leadership to get themselves out.

The dangers of a society where intelligence and effort are rewarded more than accidents of birth were first noted by the British sociologist Michael Young. In his 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, Young pointed out that in a society where your status was defined by your merit — ‘intelligence + effort’ — the elite will tend to feel wholly entitled to the privileges they enjoy. This contrasts with the old class-based system which, for all the gibbering snobbery, tacitly acknowledged that your station in life was pretty much a matter of luck, and hence one should not brag too much about one’s success or sneer at the lower classes. The opposite attitude can now be seen in the United States, which is a self-avowed meritocracy (although in fact America is not nearly as meritocratic as it likes to think). There, people talk freely about ‘losers’ and ‘folk who take the bus’. Failures are failures because it’s their fault. But, of course, when it comes to intelligence — it isn’t.

The stupid, like the poor, have always been with us and it is perhaps the greatest political challenge to decide what to do with them. In most Western countries, roughly 68 per cent of the population have an IQ between 85 and 115, and the numbers living above and below these limits are fairly equal. Lots of people decry IQ tests as meaningless — ‘they are a measure of your ability to pass IQ tests’ is a common refrain — but the fact is that while a good test may not be measuring pure intelligence per se, it does seem to be measuring something that correlates very well with it.

Within and above the ‘average’ range, most people will be able to function fairly well in our society, but what about the 16 per cent or so that lie below IQ 85?

Today many of them become the genetic underclass of IQ-challenged unemployables, forever drifting along the crime-driven, drugusing margins of our society. Lots of them are in prison. Of course, we must add in the sad, mad and bad, the desperately unlucky, the infirm, the decrepit and the outsiders, but for the most part those at the bottom of the heap will be those living at the left section of the IQ curve, the people who cannot get jobs in call centres or even obtain media studies degrees. Being working class was a rum deal; being underclass is far, far worse.

Our society is now geared up to reject anyone who has seriously below-average intelligence. Intelligent people, like tall men and pretty women, have always earned far more money, had higher status and happier marriages, been healthier and less likely to be in jail than the stupid. But the point is that this is becoming more the case as society becomes more ‘advanced’, and driven by technology and data. So far, so obvious. But not to everybody, it seems. One traditional solution to the IQ problem is to deny that it exists — to deny that there is any innate, genetically determined difference in human intelligence at all. This sort of thinking led to the disaster of the social-science model, which took hold among the educational establishments in the West in the 1960s. With its insistence that all children had equal innate intelligence, the bright were left unfulfilled in schools that pandered to an average that often was not there, and the dim were left floundering as they were forced to compete on the same academic ground as the able, instead of being found a path in life which suited them.

Now scientists accept that intelligence has a large genetic component — obviously and facetiously this must be so, otherwise humans would be no brighter than halibuts. In Matt Ridley’s excellent book, Nature via Nurture, the way environment and genes work together is explained. If you have Einstein-class DNA, you still need supportive parents, and books and schooling and so on, for your potential to develop. Your environment unlocks the potential in your genes (just as a good diet unlocks your genetic potential to be tall). But that doesn’t mean that your genes don’t matter.

Therefore we must end the stigma. It is worth saying again and again: if you are stupid, it is not your fault. To do this, of course, we must accept that there is such a thing as an innate difference in cognitive abilities. This very notion is still, bizarrely, offensive to many and it is true that a number of IQ-orientated scientists have muddied the waters by attempting to make controversial attempts to link intelligence with sex, race and ethnicity. But if we simply accept that some people are brighter than others — just as some people can run faster than others or sing better or play football better or are taller or shorter or blacker or whiter (and no one gets offended by that) then we are on safe ground.

Then we must stop discriminating against the less intelligent by forcing them into an educational system that is designed to fail them. There is nothing wrong with a comprehensive system that lowers social barriers, but there is everything wrong with a comprehensive system that fails both the bright and the less bright — the disaster area known as mixed-ability teaching.

Even people who are not at all academically able can learn to do something. There are plenty of skills that do not depend on sheer cognitive ability. Some crafts, some areas of the caring professions. Technical schools, vocational academies, whatever anything is better than the sham which is the national curriculum. After all, there are a myriad human talents that do not rely on brain power. But here again, the Left has failed. In its bitter insistence on inclusivity it has, paradoxically, created a massive exclusion zone around the children who are bound to fail in any academically based sys tem. Now we have the bizarre spectacle of children whose cognitive skills are so poor that they are truly disabled, but they are being forced to ‘compete’ with those in the mainstream in the same schools. Anyone who, like me, was useless at sports will probably still be bitter at schoolday memories of coming last in races, never being picked for the football team and so on. Imagine what it must be like for children who simply lack the wherewithal to pass any exams whatsoever or even to read and write. Every hour of every day at school must be a dismal reminder of your shortcomings. Sports was, after all, only a couple of hours a week. No wonder many of these poor kids rebel.

So why do we laugh at the unintelligent? Why do we shut them out of society and devise tests which they cannot pass and make sure they roll along at the bottom of the financial and social heap for the rest of their lives? After all, we don’t do this any more to blacks or the Chinese or Jews or even the physically disabled. And if we do, we are told, quite rightly, that we are wrong.

It must be because intelligence — alone among all genetic traits — almost defines what it is to be human. Being less intelligent, in many eyes, makes you less of a man, in a deep and profound way. But being stupid does not make you a bad person, nor does it make you a person who cannot make a useful contribution to society. Rather than society pretending that they don’t exist, the unintelligent should be given a chance to do what they can do and not waste their time being forced to attempt what they can’t.

Michael Hanlon is the science editor of the Daily Mail. His book The Science of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will be published by Macmillan in May.