Download Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

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Inequality, higher education, and eugenics. (Dec. 2012)
It has been almost a year ago that I read Coming Apart: The State of
White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray, 2012. I meant to write an
article then on how his book fits into eugenics, but other issues got in the
way. It might have been for the best however, as over the months his
book has been discussed often and mentioned in articles dealing with
inequality. Note that Charles Murray is the pariah who coauthored The
Bell Curve in 1994, documenting the genetic basis for differences in
racial intelligence, so it was somewhat surprising that he was given as
much exposure as he did in Coming Apart. The equalitarian dogma after
all is firmly entrenched in the mass media, and is readily accepted both
by liberals and conservatives alike—even though evolutionary
orthodoxy readily adheres to the view that group selection will produce
racial differences between competing population groups. On the Left
and on the Right, the belief is that Blacks fail and East Asians excel
because of culture, not genes. In that framework, both Murray and those
reviewing his book both looked at culture as the culprit dividing White
America into castes, while genetic changes underlying this trend were
apparent in Coming Apart, but not fully developed. I will link the data
into a eugenic explanation that is readily accepted but never mentioned
as "eugenics in action."
Eugenics became increasingly popular towards the end of the 19th
Century until about the Second World War, when Nazi ideology,
according to the eugenic myth, revealed it as a pseudoscience. A careful
reading of the history of eugenics however reveals that in fact it lived on
for several decades, and morphed into programs such as Planned
Parenthood, and later was subsumed into the genomic revolution still
developing. Still, the eugenic agenda as a state sponsored program has
abated, while cultural changes have made natural eugenics a new force
in dividing populations into cognitive castes with increasing inequality.
In Coming Apart, Murray lays out the changes that took place after the
Second World War. From 1940 to about 1970, America was never so
equal in income and status, at least for White people. After the war jobs
were plentiful, average people were now going on to higher education
thanks to the GI bill, and people were less inclined to marry the girl next
door and more inclined to marry someone as smart as they were. We
were entering the age of associative mating—like-minded people were
aggregating into more definable castes naturally. Murray notes, "Perhaps
the most general cultural difference—one that can be bad or good
depending on individual cases—is that mainstream America is a lot
more relaxed than the new upper class about their children. I don't mean
that other American parents care less, but that, as a group, they are less
inclined than upper-class parents to obsess about how smart their baby
is, how to make the baby smarter, where the baby should go to
preschool, and where the baby should go to law school."
So while Americans are separating into breeding castes based on
cognitive abilities, the public is still naïve about what makes a person
intelligent. The common notion that intelligence is environmental still
predominates thanks to the media's adherence to the egalitarian dogma,
while psychometricians using behavior genetics and increasingly
molecular genetics have recognized that intelligence is primarily
genetic—60 to 80% as one approaches adulthood. So while the Left has
been able to maintain the dogma that cognitive ability is a matter of
socio-economic status (SES), assortative mating— at least among the
upper class—is driving the elite to marry while the neighborhood
dullards stay behind in the hood and marry their equals. And this split is
accelerating as each generation becomes more inclined to marry
according to ability—even across racial divides. At the upper end of the
continuum: Whites, East Asians, and Jews are increasingly marrying
each other as they gravitate towards the most prestigious universities,
while less intelligent Whites, Hispanics and Blacks gravitate towards
less demanding advanced education, a high school degree, or dropping
out of school entirely. The creation of a caste society is then firmly
entrenched.
As Murray points out, "The segregation of the college system now
means that the typical classroom in a third-tier public university is filled
with students who are not much brighter than the average young person
in the nation as a whole, whereas the typical classroom in an elite school
has no one outside the top decile of cognitive talent, and many who are
in the top hundredth or thousandth of the distribution. Both sets of
students are technically 'college educated' when they get their BAs, but
that's where the similarity stops…. The reason that upper-middle-class
children dominate the population of elite schools is that the parents of
the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the
smartest children. For example, one of the basics for having a decent
chance of getting into an elite school is a high SAT score, with 'high'
defined as at least 700 on the SAT verbal and SAT math. Among
college-bound seniors who took the SAT in 2010, 87 percent of the
students with 700-plus scores in the math and verbal tests had at least
one parent with a college degree. Fifty-six percent of them had a parent
with a graduate degree. This is not a function of coaching—the
dispassionate studies of coaching show average gains of only a few
dozen points—but of ability to do well in a challenging academic
setting. That ability is reflected in the other measures—grades, teacher
evaluations, and many types of extracurricular accomplishments—that
admissions committees use. In that glaring relationship of high test
scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high
parental IQ, lies the reason that the tests aren't the problem and bias in
the admissions process isn't the problem. The children of the well
educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute
most of the smartest kids. They are smart in large part because their
parents are smart. That brings us to the role of homogamy."
Yes, homogamy or eugenics if you like. Murray makes bold statements
supporting this now commonly academic observation, usually falling
under the term "assortative mating." But it is all the same. "Homogamy
refers to the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics.
Educational homogamy occurs when individuals with similar educations
have children. Cognitive homogamy occurs when individuals with
similar cognitive ability have children. Before the age of mobility,
people commonly married someone from the same town or from the
same neighborhood of an urban area. The events that threw people
together seldom had anything to do specifically with cognitive ability.
Similar cognitive ability was a source of compatibility between a young
man and young woman, and some degree of cognitive homogamy
existed, but it was a haphazard process. Meanwhile, educational
homogamy was [not] high, because hardly anyone went to college. In
large proportions of married couples, both had less than a high school
education or both had a high school diploma. As the proportion of
college graduates increased, so did the possibilities for greater
educational homogamy at the top, as college graduates found they had
more potential marriage partners who were also college graduates.
Drawing on the extensive technical literature and the CPS, sociologists
Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare examined trends in 'assortative
marriage,' as it is known in the jargon, from 1940 to 2003. They found
that homogamy has increased at both ends of the educational scale—
college graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high
school dropouts grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts."
This sounds a lot like eugenics—a state sponsored program in many
countries 100 years ago—returning as a natural process when countries
promote universal education using cognitive ability as the primary
selection criteria.
Some may argue that the desire for diversity and/or multiculturalism will
dampen selection based on cognitive ability. However, research has
shown that ethnic diversity leads to increased inequality, decreasing
social capital, and eroding social trust within a community. See research
done by Robert Putnam, but also take note of nations and states with
varying diversity such as the success of northern European countries in
contrast to the more diverse southern European countries in economics,
unemployment, etc. There simply is no research that shows that diversity
in itself is preferable to a more homogeneous country or community.
But even in predominately White majority neighborhoods, there is a
separation between communities of wealth and those of despair. Murray
paints a portrait to two such communities—Fishtown and Belmont.
Fishtown is the quintessential White underclass community where many
people never marry, high rates of divorce, an increasing number of
people qualifying for federal disability insurance who are in fact "able"
but disinclined to find work, males increasingly embracing leisure time
activities like sleeping and watching television, etc.
For women the situation was no better: "For unmarried women with no
more than a high school education, labor force participation never got
higher than 83 percent. After its peak in 1986, the rate in Fishtown
declined, dropping to 74 percent in 2008, slightly lower than it was in
1960."
Belmont diverges from Fishtown in almost every criterion that measures
success—though both communities have become far less religious. So
not only are Whites separating and sorting themselves by the educational
paths they find themselves in, the communities they live in are also
increasingly self-sorting into an overclass/underclass separation. Each
community is finding a new normal for themselves. Murray does not
address class position changes, but it seems to me that in every
generation there will be those from Fishtown who will find their way
into Belmont and vice versa. Intelligent parents will have mostly
intelligent children with a few sliding down to Fishtown, while the
underclass will produce mostly dullards with a few winners headed to
Belmont.
Though more intelligent and educated than the Fishtown community,
Belmont's elite status continues to distort their worldviews. Influenced
by liberal academics and a liberal media they are generally no more
"scientific" when it comes to human nature than the Fishtown folks.
Murray observes that "[The] upper class hardly ever have babies out of
wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital
births. You will probably raise a few eyebrows even if you use a
derogatory label for criminals. When you get down to it, it is not
acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone,
with three exceptions: people with differing political views,
fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites…. As the
welfare state evolved over the twentieth century, two more specific
beliefs about the nature of Homo sapiens were woven into its fabric. The
first of these was the belief that people are equal not just in the way that
the American Declaration of Independence meant—equal in the eyes of
God and before the law—but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities
and characteristics. To some extent, this belief applies to individuals—
the idea that all children should aspire to get a college degree reflects a
kind of optimistic view that all children are naturally smart enough for
college if only they get the right kind of instruction. But the strict
interpretation of the equality premise applies to groups of people. In a
fair society, it is believed, different groups of people—men and women,
blacks and whites, heterosexuals and homosexuals, the children of poor
people and the children of rich people—will naturally have the same
distributions of outcomes in life: the same mean income, the same mean
educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and
CEOs, the same proportions who become English professors and
theoretical physicists, the same proportions who become stand-up
comedians and point guards. When that doesn't happen, it is because of
bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last forty years, the
premise that significant group differences cannot exist has justified
thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation reaching
into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the
funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate
with the phrase 'politically correct' eventually comes back to this
premise. The second of the beliefs about Homo sapiens that became an
intellectual underpinning of the welfare state is that, at bottom, human
beings are not really responsible for the things they do. People who do
well do not deserve what they have gotten—they got it because they
were born into the right social stratum."
Murray does hold out some hope for a more empirical worldview to
prevail. As I discussed above, both the Left and the Right seem to
dismiss genetics for SES or laziness respectively as the causes for
success/failure. The welfare state will then continue to be supported by
most sectors of society—minorities, Left elitists, academics, the media,
Hollywood, etc. However, there are big changes coming according to
Murray: "During the next ten or twenty years, I believe that all of these
intellectual foundations of the modern welfare state will be discredited
by a tidal change in our scientific understanding of human behavior that
is already under way. The effects of that tidal change will spill over into
every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard's Edward 0. Wilson
anticipated what is to come in a book titled Consilience. As the twentyfirst century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly
going to be shaped by the findings of biology—specifically, the findings
of the neuroscientists and the geneticists."
To date, behavior genetic studies have shown overwhelmingly that
intelligence is primarily genetic, but the Left continues to embrace the
importance of SES while dismissing the known fact that SES is
primarily genetic. High intelligent parents are also high SES parents and
that intelligence—not SES—is the reason they have more intelligent
children than the norm. Linking SES to educational attainment is the last
"confirmation bias" on the Left. By ignoring or denying the link between
SES and parental intelligence, they can continue to deny the importance
of genes in cognitive ability. Since the unraveling of the human genome,
we are now in the process of using molecular genetics to "directly" link
specific genes with cognitive ability as well as athleticism and
personality traits. Intelligence alone is not enough if a well-bred child
suffers from low conscientiousness or clinical anxiety. In the future, the
well-heeled will use genetic engineering as well as expensive private
schools to make sure they produce superior children. And with wealth,
they can even opt out of the burden of having children using surrogate
mothers, nannies, and posh boarding schools—while they continue the
good life of the super-elite.
I just finished Chrystia Freeland's new book Plutocrats. She mentions
Charles Murray's book: "the 1 percent and the 99 percent live in
different cultures; the big issue in the 2012 Republican primary was
whether Mitt Romney's hundreds of millions put him at too far a remove
from ordinary voters." (All of the discussion about Coming Apart has
been about the differing cultures, and not eugenics.) Freeland makes the
case that the new plutocrats are working super-elites rather than rentseekers, and they also tend to marry for brains rather than beauty as
often happened in the past—the rich and powerful marrying their
secretaries. She is also aware of the increased eugenic selection taking
place: "And it is graduates of Yale Law School and the like who are the
housewives of the plutocrats. In 1979, nearly 8 percent of the 1 percent
had spouses the IRS described as doing blue-collar or service sector
jobs—government speak for bosses married to their secretaries. That
number has been falling ever since. What economists call assortive
mating—the tendency to marry someone you resemble—is on the rise.
But while the aggressive geeks of the super-elite are marrying their
classmates rather than their secretaries, their highly educated wives are
unlikely to work."
The New York Times ran a story similar to the one in Coming Apart:
Two Classes in America, Divided by 'I Do,' July 14, 2012. The article
completely misses the deeper eugenic message in Murray's book:
"Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute, comparing lower-middle- and
upper-middle-income families, found that single parenthood explained
about 40 percent of inequality's growth. 'That's not peanuts,' he said.
Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly
to a norm with head-turning speed. (That change received a burst of
attention this year with the publication of [Coming Apart], which
attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the
decline of economic opportunity.)" This was a common dismissal by
those who commented on Murray's book, but some of that can be
attributed to Murray's own failure to clearly focus attention on
assortative mating as the primary cause, with income inequality resulting
from the increasingly cognitive divide.
Assortative mating was one of the primary goals of the eugenics'
movement during America's progressive era—which promoted public
health, mass mobilization, political reform, eugenics and segregation
(see Olivier Zunz in 12/2012 Foreign Affairs). Now it is occurring on its
own without any push from government or academic advocates. The
main driving force in the near future will be the understanding of the
connection between genes and a child's success later in life, a desire for
one's children to succeed, and the economic incentives of the
reproductive enhancement industry linking genomics with new selection
technologies.
Murray shows that university placement is hierarchical—placing men
and women together with similar cognitive ability—and is the primary
place where "likes" marry "likes". In The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, 2008,
he shows how people are sorting themselves into like-minded
communities based on religion, politics, worldviews, income, etc.
Bishop notes that "Psychologists know that people seek out others like
themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon
could be taking place between people and communities isn't all that
surprising. 'Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of
[eugenic/dysgenic] assortative mating,' explained social psychologist
David Myers. Assortative mating—the tendency of similar types to pair
up—has been studied as a cause of poverty and autism. But Myers was
making a different point. Our wealth, education, and ability to move
have allowed us to seek 'those places and people that are comfortably
akin to ourselves.'" This trend has steadily increased since about 1990
and shows no sign of abating. So even without match-making in college,
assortative mating will continue among the less educated as well as
among the educated who marry after leaving college. America is
dividing up into clusters of people that are alike in many ways, and
intelligence will be a strong attractor for assortative mating throughout
one's life.
As the Belmont super-elite become increasingly filtered by cognitive
ability, the Fishtown underclass will sink into irrelevancy. The breeding
pattern as I see it shaping up is such that increasingly inequality will
produce two types of populations. The super-elite will primarily be made
up of enclaves consisting of either conservative racial ethnics—
primarily Jewish, East Asian, Asian Indian, or Whites—or racially
mixed enclaves that includes primarily the same four races above. The
Fishtown Whites will eventually intermarry with Blacks, various
Amerindians, South Asians, etc. This cognitive divide will accelerate as
the super-elite begins to take advantage of genetic engineering to
enhance their children's endowments—the underclass will simply be left
behind. A recent documentary, Technocalyps Part One:
Transhuman[ism], states that the losers will not be treated well, just like
the American Indians were decimated when Whites took their lands
away from them. This time perhaps the super-elites will not make the
mistake of putting the unemployable on reservations but will just have
them sterilized. The human species will simply branch into two or more
culturally separated—then genetically separated—species.
It would be a mistake to look at this separation as the 99% against the
1%, as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done. Within the 1%
cognitive super-elite there is an increasing inequality. Yes, they control
most of the wealth around the world, but they are fragmented by
enormous inequality within—the 0.01% controls far more wealth than
the 0.1%, who controls far more wealth than the 1%. This has set up a
competitive drive within the 1% to reach the very top—the competition
is between those within the 1% as they will increasingly ignore the
needs of the 99%. This is seen by the super-elites' increasingly liberal
concerns with the environment, animal rights, support for the arts, etc.
They are turning their backs on minority issues like high incarceration
rates, the homeless, etc. The super-elite are creating a separate culture
that transcends race and national boundaries as they become globalists.
Murray summarizes: "I am predicting that over the next few decades
advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with
advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that
goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the
mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in
neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not
socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of
prison and to hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is,
and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the
live-in male is not the married biological father. These same reasons
explain why society's attempts to compensate for the lack of married
biological fathers don't work and will never work." And, "People
grouped by gender, ethnicity, age, social class, and sexual preference,
left free to live their lives as they see fit, will produce group differences
in outcomes, because they differ genetically in their cognitive,
psychological, and physiological profiles."
Eugenics failed during the progressive era because our understanding of
human behavior and genetics at that time were far more complicated
than anticipated. Now that the human genome has been unraveled and
new tools are being developed to find the correlations between a
person's genes and expressed phenotype, genetic engineering,
transhumanism, homogamy, neoeugenics, assortative mating—whatever
one wants to call it—will come into play for those who have the will and
the resources to the enhance the human condition. New human types
will emerge that are increasingly free of genetic disease and personality
types that hinder potential, increased intelligence, athleticism, and
attractiveness, leading to new humanoid species that will overtake those
who deny the biological sciences for human improvement. There will
not be a committee deciding the best human traits to be embellished—
just individuals making choices about how best to enrich their children's
journey through life. (www.neoeugenics.net)