Archive for the ‘caste’ Category
on determinism and IQ, class, castes and elites
Nehru, of course, belonged to the Brahmin caste
I wrote a post recently on the stupidity of Steven Pinker’s view of determinism, his mocking of ‘the abuse excuse’ and such like, and I noted how people from elite, privileged backgrounds tend to downplay – or desperately avoid mentioning – their advantages while advocating for the ‘common sense’ compatibilism or free will positions of their class.
Something that I didn’t mention though, in that Pinker post, is a recollection that Pinker had written some kind of puff piece about the Ashkenazi Jews (‘The Lessons of the Ashkenazim’ – which I’ve not read as yet)), their high IQs and their over-representation in the fields of elite science, chess grandmastery and such. Pinker, needless to say, is Jewish. Presumably the argument will go that these Ashkenazim have higher IQs for some particular reason, be it genetic, cultural or some synergistic mixture of the two. That’s to say, a deterministic reason.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t come from an elite background. My father was an unskilled labourer, in a variety of jobs with a variety of gaps between them. My mother was the breadwinner, a nurse who managed to move up the ladder to hospital administration and then nurse education. As migrants to Australia, half the world away from my Scottish birthplace, we were cut off from the wider family, and I didn’t hear much about how any of them made their livings, and, for some reason, I wasn’t particularly curious about them, though I was curious about many other things, or, at least, a few.
Do I have an IQ? The IQ concept has of course been controversial. Is it culturally based? Can it be made less so, or more multicultural, since human culture is pretty well inescapable? Apparently the result can be reduced to a number, and based on that number you can be classed as a genius, an imbecile or anything in between. I myself have never knowingly sat for an IQ test, so I have no number to preen myself on or shake my head over. However, I have taken two tests, one at age twelve, the other at age twenty-nine, which made some difference to my life. The first test was taken at the end of my final primary school year, and had to do with students’ placement in high school the following year. The high school had introduced ‘streaming’, based, apparently on natural smarts – measured by the test I had taken, but perhaps also by other primary school results. There were eight first-year high school classes, divided in two depending on whether you wanted to take French or German as your language choice (there were only two choices, no Tamil or Pitjantjatjara). So the ‘top’ two classes were F1 and G1, going down to F4 and G4. The new students for 1969 gathered together in the grounds of the relatively new Elizabeth West High School for the name-calling. To my surprise, I was the first name called for the F1 class. I was mildly puzzled, but then, some name had to be first. But a week or so later, one of my new classmates – I still remember his name, Blair Farquar – came to me and said excitedly ‘do you know you got the top marks for the class test?’ He’d been asked by our home teacher to retrieve something from her office, and had seen and looked through the test papers, which were numbered in a pile on the desk. I was frankly shocked. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but this news really unnerved me. I felt I’d been handed a burden I didn’t really want. And looking back on it, this test, which wasn’t based on any schoolwork but on reasoning and problem solving, must have been a child of the IQ family. And also looking back, our test results weren’t based on our diligence as students. We didn’t ‘study’ for the test, it was imposed on us without notice. So I couldn’t pat myself on the back for my achievement, I’d succeeded, if that was the word, due to determining factors completely beyond my control.
In any case, I squandered my advantage over the next few years due to increasing tensions at home, and at school, to which I responded with passive resistance and a sense of anti-authoritarianism which has never since left me. As mentioned in a previous post, I dropped out of school at 15. On my last school day, I was smacked across the face by the headmaster, because I was chewing gum while he was questioning me. I’ve no idea why this bothered him so much, but I knew exactly why his behaviour bothered me, and I’d had more than enough of it. I didn’t resume any formal education until I sat for a university-entrance test, as aforementioned, in my 29th year. In the intervening years I worked in various jobs, in factories, in a hospital, and as a general dogsbody in a fancy French restaurant, and became a habitual diary writer and a mover in slightly more intellectual, but small, circles. I developed a self-mocking fantasy of myself as the smartest person without a uni degree in the known universe.
The university test was definitely not an IQ test, as it involved writing a couple of essays on a choice of topics, and as a habitual writer, this was my comfort zone. I received acceptances from the two universities in South Australia at the time, Adelaide and Flinders, which enabled me to obtain a straightforward Arts degree – certainly not a road out of poverty. Eventually, after much faffing about, including the publication of a novel, I managed to obtain enough further qualifications to score some teaching work here and there, by which time I wasn’t far off from retirement age.
I write all this, largely because I’m self-obsessed, but also to illustrate the role of determinism. If I was born to nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, or to a Dalit family in Hindu India, I wouldn’t be writing here, and I wouldn’t have scored the kind of meagre successes I might be credited with in the WEIRD world. On the other hand, had I been born to a successful and supportive Ashkenazi family, my connections and my opportunities would have been unimaginably different from what I’ve experienced. And in all this I’m as typical as most other humans on this planet.
So this is important. When you come to reflect on the free will/determinism issue, don’t be taken in by the sorts of claims I once read, I think it was on a Stanford University website, that this is a fun topic to cut your philosophical teeth on. No, it isn’t a fun topic, it cuts to the heart of who we are and what we can become. And of course it’s complex. People from impoverished backgrounds can become Nobel Prize winners, and children of the Ashkenazim can become hopeless drug addicts or career criminals. To understand why that may have happened would mean to look in detail at the determining factors, insofar as they can be uncovered. And when and if you read some of the philosophical arguments on the topic, it’s essential to note the backgrounds of the writers, insofar as they can be ascertained. It will definitely hold the key to their position on the subject – such is my determination.
References
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
returning to the race myth
‘My own personal view is that today we over-privilege and fetishise the concept of identity’.
Mark Thomas, Professor of evolutionary genetics, University College, London (quoted in Superior: the return of race science, by Angela Saini, 2019)
A couple of years ago I tackled issues of race and identity politics in a post which focussed on ‘blackface’ among other things. I don’t think there’s much I’d change about it, but my current reading of Angela Saini’s above-mentioned book, in particular the chapter ‘Roots’, which relates what anthropology has found regarding the first indicator of race amongst those who tend to obsess over it, namely skin colour, has updated my knowledge without really changing my outlook.
When we think of ‘white’ people one of the most obvious examples would be the pale, cold-weather Scots, of which I’m one. We’re not called WASPs for nothing. I was amused as an adult to find paperwork indicating that I was baptised as a Presbyterian. WTF is that? Another funny thing about my waspness is the fact that I’ve lived in sunny Australia since the age of five, my skin darkening quite splendidly every summer in the pre-sunblock era. Needless to say my intelligence dipped sharply during those months.
Saini relates a story about a 1903 archaeological discovery in Somerset, of one of the oldest human bodies ever found in Britain. Dating back some 10,000 years, he was given the name Cheddar Man as he was discovered in caves at Cheddar Gorge, and much more recently he was analysed by genetic sequencing. There was naturally a lot of interest in the genetics of this fellow, as English, or British, as cheddar cheese.
… what came as a real shock to many was that his bones… carried genetic signatures of skin pigmentation more commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa. It was probable, then, that Cheddar Man would have had dark skin. So dark, in fact, that by today’s standards he would be considered black.
Superior, Angela Saini, p167
Visual reconstructions based on the genetics also showed him to be far less WASP-looking than genteel society might condone. It was front-page news stuff, but experienced geneticists such as Mark Thomas were unfazed. The fact is that modern genomics has probably done more than anything else to scuttle the notions of fixed identities relating to blackness, whiteness, Europeaness, Asianess, Africaness, Scandinavianess or Irishness. In short the necessity of ness-ness ain’t necessarily so.
This has everything to do with genetic drift. As Thomas explains it, in pre-civilisation times, humans migrated in small groups, and would have varied physically (and of course in other ways) from those they separated from. Later, as groups grew and became more stable, there would have been an opposite effect, a greater homogeneity. Thus we see ‘Asians’, ‘Africans’ and ‘Europeans’, from our limited perspective, as near-eternal categories when in fact they’re relatively recent, and of course disintegrating with globalisation – an extremely recent phenomenon, genomically speaking.
On ‘blackness’ itself, that may have been a more recent phenomenon in our ancestry than ‘whiteness’. My good friends the bonobos, and their not-so-nice chimp cousins, tend to have light skin under their dark hair. As we moved forward in time from our ancestral link with chimps and bonobos, losing our body hair and increasing the number of sweat glands as we became more bipedal and used our speed for hunting, there would have been a selection preference for darker skin – again depending on particular environmental conditions and cultural practices. There is of course a quite large gap in our knowledge about early hominids (and there is controversy about how far back we should date the bonobo-human last common ancestor – identifying Graecopithecus as this ancestor tends to push the date further back) considering that Homo Habilis, which dates back, as far as we know, to 2.3 million years ago is the oldest member of our species identified so far. Beyond H habilis we have the Australopithecines, Ardipithecines, Sahelanthropus Tchadensis and Orrorin tugenensis, among others, which may take us back some 7 million years. DNA analysis can only take us back a few thousand years, so I don’t know how we’re ever going to sort out our deeper ancestry.
In any case, the new racial ‘ideas’, given impetus by various thugocracies in the former Yugoslavia as well as today’s Burma/Myanmar, China, India and the USA (where it may yet lead to civil war) are an indication of the fragility of truth when confronted and assaulted by fixed and fiercely held beliefs. Social media has become one of the new and most effective weapons in this assault, and when thugocracies gain control of these weapons, they become so much more formidable.
Truth of course, is, and should be its own weapon against identity politics. Knowledge should be the antidote to these supposedly indelible identities, of blackness, whiteness, Jewishness, Hindu-ness and so on. Unfortunately, too many of us are interested in confirmation than in truth. In fact, according to the psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, in their book The enigma of reason, we use reason more often to confirm beliefs that we want to be true than for any other purpose. And when enough of the ruling class are concerned to confirm erroneous beliefs that happen to advantage them, as is the case for the current Indian Hindu government, the result is a thugocracy that oppresses women as well as the so-called ‘untouchables’ and other victims of the two-thousand year old caste system.
But having just read the chapter entitled ‘Caste’ of Angela Saini’s book, I should modify those remarks. The current Indian government is only reinforcing a system the disadvantages of which are more clear to ex-pats like Saini (and some Indian students I’ve had the pleasure of teaching) than it is to those that remain and ‘belong’. It involves more than just caste and religion, as it’s practiced by Christians and others, and enforced by families and broader relational and cultural units. My own detachment from family and cultural constraints makes it easy for me to judge this rather harshly. And in faraway Australia we hear of the horrors of in-group fealty without feeling its comforts. And naturally as a working-class lad and anti-authoritarian my sympathies are definitely with the underclass.
So how do we overcome the inwardness of caste and class systems, which are ultimately destructive of genetic diversity, not to mention causing the immiseration of millions? The answer, also provided by Mercier and Sperber’s thesis, is interaction and argument. They argue that reason developed as a social rather than an individual phenomenon. Evidence of course also must play a part. Saini’s book provides an excellent example of this, and the scientific community generally does too. Mercier and Sperber give an interesting example of how the marketplace of ideas can produce effective results over time:
The British abolitionists didn’t invent most of the arguments against slavery. But they refined them, backed them with masses of evidence, increased their credibility by relying on trustworthy witnesses, and made them more accessible by allowing them to see life through a slave’s eyes. Debates, public meetings, and newspapers brought these strengthened arguments to a booming urban population. And it worked. People were convinced not only of the evils of slavery but also of the necessity of doing something about it. They petitioned, gave money, and – with the help of other factors, from economy to international politics – had first the slave trade and then slavery itself banned.
The enigma of reason: a new theory of human understanding, H Mercier & D Sperber, p314
Some would say, of course, that slavery is still flourishing. I’ve even heard the claim that Jeff Bezos is the quintessential modern slave-owner. But nobody is credibly claiming today that slavery is reasonable. It has long ago lost the argument. That’s why evidence-based argument is our best hope for the future.
References
Superior: the return of race science, Angela Saini, 2019
The enigma of reason: a new theory of human understanding, Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, 2017.