QUOTES XXIII
Quotations about
SOCIAL CLASS
[alias SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS (SES)]
SOCIAL SCIENTISTS TEND TO PROFESS DISTASTE FOR CLASS SYSTEMS
(NOT TO MENTION CASTE SYSTEMS); AND AMERICANS REPUTEDLY
USED TO BELIEVE THAT 'CLASS' ONLY HAPPENED IN BACKWARD AREAS LIKE
EUROPE. YET, THOUGH THE IDEA OF 'THE CLASSLESS SOCIETY' ENJOYS
CONTINUING POPULARITY AS AN IDEAL, HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION-BASED
PRINCIPALLY ON INTELLECTUAL DIFFERENCES-IS PROBABLY A CONSTANT
OF THE HUMAN CONDITION. (DOUBTLESS, FURTHER RESEARCH IN NEW GUINEA
IS TO BE DESIRED.)
In recent years, social scientists have grown chary of
offering 'explanations' of social phenomena. When so many social-scientific
theories, prophecies and recipes failed in the past, 'explanation'
has seemed too precise an aspiration . Instead, social scientists
have increasingly inclined to refer merely to people's own 'understandings'
of the social world; to their own 'perceptions'; to their 'communication
of meaning'; to their 'symbolic interactions'; to their 'identities'-often
'self-constructed'; and to their '(false) consciousness'.
Purveyors of such mixtures of common sense and post-modern sociology
therefore decry attempts to trace human psychological differences
to age, gender, or race. Just as suspect as such disagreeable
group differences are biologically-based dimensions of difference
(such as g) that might be offered by a differential psychologist
as causal stand-ins.
Yet in fact, lurking not far behind this intellectual smoke-screen
is the best-known simplificatory variable of the whole lot: social
class-or 'socio-economic status' (SES) for the faint-hearted.
It is this 130-year-old variable, first popularized by Marx and
Engels, that will still be summoned up by sociologists if it is
insisted that they distinguish themselves from experts in literature,
or when they wish to rouse an audience to revolutionary fervour.
In particular, SES is commonly held by sociology's less-postmodernized
sympathizers to be capable of most of the explanatory work to
which IQ is usually assigned by the London School of differential
psychology. Indeed, most labourers in sociology and allied trades
would frankly hold the SES of one's parents during one's youth
to be the important causal factor influencing one's measured
IQ itself, as well as influencing one's finally achieved, adult
levels of educational attainment, occupational status and affluence.
Social class is the one real group difference that is allowed
by sociologists to social science.
How to resolve arguments about the causal importance of
parental SES has never been particularly obvious. For example,
high-SES foster parents tend additionally to have above-average
IQ's: so the 'rich' environment that they provide for their children
will consist partly of intellectual stimulation and support that
derive less from the father's professional occupation and income
and more from the sheer intelligence of his wife and himself.
Matters are further complicated for the researcher by the fact
that-just as many psychologists are edgy about g-
some sociologists will not commit themselves to any particular
measure of SES. However great their faith in the existence of
a hated over-class and a cheated under-class that awaits their
leadership to the barricades, 'non-positivist' sociologists can
be as reluctant to measure SES as those political conservatives
who abjure the socially divisive 'class' concept as helpful only
to revolutionaries.
Lately, important new evidence became available from a natural
experiment in France-collected by a team that was appalled
to find that the English-speaking world had not itself managed
to put down the abominable heresies of Hans Eysenck and Arthur
Jensen. Involving separated pairs of half-siblings in homes that
were very different in SES, the study found surprisingly modest
effects of class-of-rearing on the children's later IQ's (and
especially on fluid g as measured by non-verbal tests).
Again, modern evidence from both the USA and Ireland (both North
and South) is that the SES of parents quite simply shows only
a slight correlation (around r = .22) with the educational
attainments of children by their early twenties.
Yet it must be doubted whether the West will witness 'the end
of class-ism' as quickly as some hereditarian and libertarian
thinkers have envisaged (Biology & Society 4, pp.
104-109). The collapse of Eastern-European Communism in ignominy
may have sounded the death-knell for the idea that human life
is mainly structured by SES and that political endeavour must
aim to eliminate class differences; but sociologists normally
have a soft spot for Thomas Kuhn's view that discredited ideas
can enjoy a long half-life within tenured bureaucracies.
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of social class,
especially in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
*******************************************************************
INDEX to QUOTES XXIII
Page
(i) Traditional beliefs in the importance of social
class. 5
(ii) What is 'social class' and what are the differences
between the social classes? 7
(iii) How important for a child is the social class of its
parents ( and especially of the apparent 'advantage'
or 'disadvantage' that parents supply)? 12
(iv) The role of individual differences in yielding people's
own 'achieved' social class (in the course of their own lifetimes).
18
(v) Is it a good idea to have some kind of social class
system or hierarchy? 21
(vi) Is the West's (and especially Britain's) social class
system coming to an end? 24
Epilogue
(i) Traditional beliefs in the importance of social
class
"[Lenin] followed [Marx and Engels] in expressing unabashed
admiration for Jacobin terror - both for the wholesale
executions and mass drownings of condemned prisoners. He used
to say that "terror renews a country", and made no secret
of the fact that he was following Babeuf's injunction that the
conquered classes must be completely destroyed.... It was during
the time of the French Revolution that violence came to be meted
out according to class allegiance. Both in name and structure
the "revolutionary tribunals" and even the "extraordinary
commissions" (know as "Cheka" in Soviet times from
the Russian abbreviation of this phrase) are based on Jacobin
models."
Alexander SOLZHENITSYN, 1980,
The Mortal Danger. London : Bodley Head.
"We are not waging war against individual persons. We are
exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation,
do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word
against soviet power. The first questions to put are:
To what class does he belong?
What is his origin?
What is his education or profession?
And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of
the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the
Red Terror."
LATSIS (Chairman of the eastern front of Lenin's Cheka), 1918.
Cited by G.Hosking, 1987, A History of the Soviet Union.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"....we have a good deal of evidence to show that, right
from the beginning of life, one's life-chances, the chance of
surviving birth, of suffering from certain illnesses, the chances
of living in certain types of accommodation, of receiving certain
types of education and, indeed, the likelihood of earning a given
income, are very much related to divisions in our society which
we call social class."
Ivan REID, 1980, The Listener. (Reprinted in I.Reid,
Social Class Differences in Britain. Glasgow : Fontana,
1989.)
"With Marx, class had been an all-purpose weapon in the study
of society. To this day, not only in Germany but most recently
in England, where Marxism has become a pastime of sociologists
comparable in attraction to astrology in the population at large,
the cosmic question of Marxian versus Weberian interpretations
of class rages, resembling the Arian versus Athanasian
battle of definitions in early Christianity." R.NISBET,
1982, Prejudices: a Philosophical Dictionary. Harvard
University Press.
"A spectacular illustration of the elimination of social
class by the multiplication of individual variables was provided
by the Coleman Report. This report, published in the United States
in 1966, describes the largest educational study ever made. The
sample studied was constituted by a representative group of more
than 600,000 schoolchildren and students.... Among the 93 independent
variables chosen to describe the subjects of the study, the profession
of the parents is conspicuously absent.... Social class in apparently
a European myth!"
M.SCHIFF & R.C.LEWONTIN, 1986, Education and Class:
the Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford : Clarendon.
"The impress of class distinctions is superficial, and
may be compared to those which give a general resemblance to a
family of daughters at a provincial ball, all dressed alike, and
so similar in voice and address as to puzzle a recently-introduced
partner in his endeavours to recollect with which of them he is
engaged to dance; but an intimate friend forgets their general
resemblance in the presence of the far greater dissimilarity which
he has learned to appreciate."
Francis GALTON, 1874, English Men of Science.
London : Cassell, 1970.
"The experience of recent years has unfortunately demonstrated
that the petit-bourgeois inclinations of part of the working class
are unfortunately greater than we had earlier recognised."
Statement in 1937 by the exiled German Socialist Party. Cited
by M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany
1933-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
(ii) What is 'social class'
and
what are the differences between the social classes?
"The bourgeoisie has been the first [class] to show what
man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals....
the bourgeoisie....draws all nations into civilisation.... it
has created enormous cities and thus rescued a considerable part
of the population from the idiocy of rural life.... the bourgeoisie,
during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together."
Karl MARX, quoted in M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book
of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.
"[According to Jonathan Clark, Fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford,] class did not exist in Britain before Victorian times
and so cannot be used, as it traditionally has been, to explain
political developments in Britain from the Civil War onwards."
P.WATSON, 1988, The Observer, 31 i.
"....anthropometric data should be collected, [Galton] thought,
from different grades of school, as these represented the different
grades of society. In due course, an Anthropometric Committee
of the British Association published a report in which a table
appeared, classifying the population into Labouring and Non-labouring
types; the second of these was subdivided into two - Professional
and Commercial - and the first into three, and thus the
groundwork was laid for the five social classes used by the {U.K.}
Registrars-General in the earlier part of the twentieth century."
Peter COX, 1988, Biology & Society 5.
"For over fifty years the Registrar General's classification
of the community into five social class groups (plus one 'Not
Known'), based upon the employment of the head of the household,
has usefully distinguished the features of deprivation and privilege
seen in many fields, including obstetrics and perinatology....
Despite a quarter of a century of the Welfare State, obstetric
and perinatal performance, within the relatively small group [of
13,964 first-time mothers of British and European origins] derived
from our own hospital practice, reflected the social class distinctions
defined so many decades ago. The incidences of perinatal mortality,
neonatal depression and low birth weight each increased progressively
from Social Class I to Social Class V, while the incidence of
delivery by Caesarean section fell...."
J.S.CRAWFORD et al., 1986, Biology & Society .
"Weinrich (1977, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology
2) [analysing over twenty studies from the world literature]
concluded that the lower the SES, the earlier the age of first
coitus, the greater the likelihood of premarital coitus and coitus
with prostitutes, the shorter the time before engaging in extramarital
affairs, and the less stable the marriage bond."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1990, Journal of Personality 58.
"Eating habits are the principal means of determining rank.
The middle class ingest frozen or health foods. The workers tinned
and fatty comestibles. Vegetarian workers are unknown."
Charles MOSLEY, 1986, Spectator (Competition Entry),
9 viii.
"Income is, of course, both the major determinant of the
standard of living and its usual measure. Perhaps the clearest
evidence that it directly affects health is that as an occupation
goes up or down in the earnings league it moves correspondingly
in the death rates league."
Richard WILKINSON, 1987, 'Does poverty equal poor health?'
The Times, 2 iv.
"For the Soviet Union, Zev Katz enumerates six [social] strata:
nachalniks (rulers, or nomenklatura);
intelligentsia;
white-collar workers;
blue-collar workers;
kolkhozniks (those in the agricultural collectives); and
the privately employed....
The societies of "real existing socialism" are not only
clearly stratified, but they contain two different and
interacting types of stratification. To the extent that these
societies have modern industrial economies, they generate class
systems that show remarkable similarities to those existing under
industrial capitalism (including their degree of equality/inequality).
But superimposed on this class system is a quite different system
of stratification, in which privilege as well as power and prestige
are linked to political office. Following Max Weber, one may call
this a "patrimonial" system. Privilege goes with the
political job, is bestowed by the ruling elite. Furthermore, as
these jobs are "hereditized", a patrimonial stratum
(or, if one prefers, a political class) reproduces itself,
in continuous interaction with the economically functional classes."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions
about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty. Aldershot, U.K. :
Gower.
"J.R.Ackerley (Literary Editor of The Listener, 1935
- 1959) housed in his lodgings "a shifting population
of guardsmen, boxers, petty criminals and off-duty police constables,
along with representatives of the art world such as....E.M.Forster.
[This] set-up sounds rather jolly in P.Parker's account [A
Life of J.R.Ackerly]. But ultimately Ackerley's preferences
spelt heartache and disappointment, for he was seeking an Ideal
Friend on the Greek model, whereas his proletarian pick-ups had
more temporary ends in mind. The unreliability, selfishness and
slack personal hygiene of the "so-called working classes"
became a theme of Ackerley's complaints, and Forster endorsed
his criticisms. These views give a comic cast to the "socialism"
of the two authors."
John CAREY, Sunday Times (Books), 17 ix.
"[When younger] I had been too much in contact with working-class
people to share [the] almost pathetic belief [of Kurt Tucholsky
and other German socialists of the 1930's] in the virtues, the
clear-sighted revolutionary attitude, and the political
earnestness of the working class. [Tucholsky] fell victim to what
Paul Johnson has called 'the great progressive fallacy
- that certain categories of people are intrinsically
moral, merely by virtue of their predicament.'"
Hans EYSENCK, 1990, Rebel with a Cause. London : W.H.Allen.
"According to a recent MORI poll....the average British household
possesses just over 150 books (including fiction, non-fiction
and children's books).... The AB's (the professional and managerial
class) average a wall-straining 275 books; C1's (middle executive
and white collar) own 193 books; C2's (skilled working class)
possess 127; the rest (unskilled, unemployed, welfare recipients,
etc.) have an average of 79."
'Diary', Sunday Times (Books), 25 ii 1990.
"The idea that the working class is progressive has always
been one of the more amusing socialist myths."
Editorial, The Independent on Sunday, 30 ix 1990.
"'Working-class' is a euphemism I just adore."
'Lady Max' in Paul Theroux's story, 'Lady Max'. Granta 40,
1992.
"....at university I came to believe that the working classes
were in the forefront of progressive thought, which caused me
to be ever more stunned by the slow discovery that the opposite
is true. In working men's clubs I was amazed and disillusioned
by the opinions that passed unchallenged around the tables laden
with watery beer, whisky chasers and barley wine. No Colonel Blimp
could have been more nationalistic, more money-fixated, more hang-'em-and-flog-'em,
more unreasoningly racist.... 'fucking' became the only adjective
that I ever used.... I was later to learn at university that working-class
speech was as rich and varied as Standard English. The research
was done in New York, however."
Louis DE BERNIERES, 1993, 'The Brass Bar',
In B.Buford, The Best of Young British Novelists.
Granta 43, Penguin : Harmondsworth.
"The health status of Australian men in terms of premature
mortality has dramatically improved during the period 1966-86,
for men of all occupations, with the greatest improvement being
for service, clerical and sales workers, and the least improvement
for process and farm workers. Despite these improvements the marked
differences in mortality experiences remain between higher and
lower socio-economic status men....
Why is it so? In an affluent society which offers social security
to all in need, almost universal access to health and educational
services, good housing for virtually the whole population, abundant
food supplies for all and the virtual absence (with the important
exception of AIDS) of serious communicable disease, and, above
all, the absence of the blatant poverty seen elsewhere in the
world, why are there such marked differences in premature death
rates between the different social classes in Australia? In addition,
and most importantly, this study confirms these differences among
men who are virtually all in the workforce and among whom 'poverty'
is in an official sense less than 2%....
Health related to personal behaviour appears to be the likely
explanation for a proportion of the differing death rates. Tobacco
consumption is directly and inversely related to social class
in Australia, with smoking rates among professional and technical
workers at 17%, and among working class groups at 36% in 1989.
The consumption of alcohol is much higher in working class as
compared to professional class Australian men....
However....an American study (Snowden et al., 1989, Am
J. Epidemiol. 130) among members of a female religious order,
all of whom had adopted similar lifestyles since young adulthood,
demonstrated that college graduates of the religious order lived
longer and healthier adult lives than their colleagues who were
not college graduates."
J.S.LAWSON & Deborah BLACK, 1993, Journal of Biosocial
Science 25.
"To avoid controversy, we deliberately constructed an SES
index that uses the same elements everybody else uses: income,
occupation, and education. We did not have any a priori
reason for weighting any of these more heavily than the others,
so we converted them to what are called "standard scores"
and added them up to get our index-all of which would ordinarily
have caused no comment. But when it comes to The Bell Curve,
a standard SES index suddenly becomes problematic...."
C.MURRAY, 1995, Commentary 99.
(iii) How important for a child is the social class of its
parents ( and especially of the apparent 'advantage'
or 'disadvantage' that parents supply)?
{See also Quotes V, X and XVI.}
"To argue that wherever attainments are meagre, ability must
also be low, will always be precarious. Poor health, poor homes,
irregular attendance [at school], lack of interest, want of will
- these are far commoner as causes of inability to spell
and calculate than are inherent weakness of intellect and genuine
defect of mind. Certainly, the dull are usually backward; but
the backward are not necessarily dull."
Cyril BURT, 1921.
"....mental output and achievement, as distinguished from
sheer innate capacity, are undoubtedly influenced by differences
in social and economic conditions. In particular, the financial
disadvantages under which the poorer families labour annually
prevent three or four thousand children of superior intelligence
from securing the higher education that their intelligence deserves."
Cyril BURT, 1943, British Journal of Educational Psychology
13.
"[Social class of origin] is the most useful summary index
of the complex of social forces which impinge on the upbringing
of an individual."
A.H.HALSEY & I.M.CREWE, 1969, The Civil Service 3.
H.M.S.O.
"We have shown that the pattern of relative mobility chances
- or, in other words, of social fluidity - that
has been associated with the British class structure over recent
decades embodies inequalities that are of a quite striking kind.
In particular, an enormous discrepancy emerges if one compares
the chances of men whose fathers held higher-level service-class
positions being themselves found in such positions rather than
in working-class ones with the same relative chances of men who
are of working-class origins {sic}. Where the inequalities
in class chances of this magnitude can be displayed, the presumption
must be, we believe, that to a substantial extent they do reflect
inequalities of opportunity that are rooted in the class structure,
and are not simply the outcome of differential 'take-up' of....opportunities
by individuals with differing genetic, moral, or other endowments
that do not derive from their class position. At all events, this
is the interpretation that must stand, at least until some latter-day
Social Darwinists or Smilesians are able to offer some alternative
account of an empirically credible kind."
J.H.GOLDTHORPE et al. (in a research team based at Nuffield
College, Oxford), 1980, Social Mobility and Class Structure
in Modern Britain. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
"Class inequalities in educational attainment have been consistently
large during the post-war period in Scotland. In the late 1970's,
middle-class children were more than four times as likely as working-class
children to enter an advanced or degree-level course, and they
were six times as likely to enter university."
A.F.McPHERSON & D.RAFFE, 1983, Edinburgh University Bulletin.
"Although it is important to remember that regression analyses....can
never prove that differences in test scores {between children
from different ethnic groups in Britain} are actually caused by
differences in social circumstances, it is at least worth considering
the possibility that elimination of some of the more glaring instances
of social inequality might significantly affect differences in
school achievement."
N.J.MACKINTOSH & C.G.N.MASCIE-TAYLOR, 1985, 'The IQ Question'.
Appendix D to Chapter III of Education for All.
London : H.M.S.O.
"Any number of studies show that socio-economic status is
the most important, single component of psychiatric disturbance
because of the havoc it plays with the person's emotional life,
not because of any medical illness or organic impairment, though
that may be present too."
Reuben FINE, 1985, The Meaning of Love
in Human Experience. New York : Wiley.
"Our observations show that if the children of workers were
placed in the same family and social environment as the adopted
children in our study, their psychometric and school failures
and, in particular, serious failures, would diminish greatly."
M.SCHIFF & R.C.LEWONTIN, 1986, Education and Class: the
Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. Oxford : Clarendon.
"Children from middle-income Nigerian families draw more
realistically than children from low-income families (Pfeffer
& Olowu, 1987, Perc. & Motor Skills 62).... The
researchers interpreted their findings as arising from differences
in socialisation."
Psychology News 2, No. 1, 1987.
"In general, demographic variables are excellent predictors
of the IQ score, suggesting that, rather than representing an
independent predictor variable, the IQ score can also be conceptualized
as a dependent variable (e.g. Goldstein et al., 1986, J.
Clin. & Exptl Neuropsychol. 8; Karzmark et al.,
1985, J. Clin. & Exptl Neuropsychol. 7; Loehlin et
al., 1975, Race Differences in Intelligence)."
Muriel D. LEZAK, 1988,
Journal of Clinical & Experimental Neuropsychology 10.
"We are driven back once more to the conclusion that
potential genius is probably about as frequent in one class as
in another, and that it emerges in the ratio of its total opportunities."
L.F.WARD, 1906, citing J.M.Robertson with approval.
Applied Sociology. Boston : Ginn & Co.
"Where poverty is so extreme that the child may justly be
described as 'deprived', there the IQ as judged by conventional
tests is apt to be misleadingly low, and may exhibit a remarkable
improvement after a holiday in the country with nourishing food
and healthier surroundings. Above a certain minimum, however,
the economic condition of the home has little direct or
general influence: the apparent correlation between the children's
IQ's and their parents' income is due mainly to the correlation
of each with the intelligence of the parents."
Sir Cyril BURT, c. 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts
of
Intelligence. Croydon, London : J.S.Reid.
"This study has suggested that less attention may well be
given in the future to social class per se with regard
to school performance. It is a crude variable of limited direct
importance in the problem of school achievement."
G.W.MILLER, 1970, Journal of Educational Psychology 61.
"Based on the data presented in these analyses [of 101 different
studies of parental SES and children's academic attainment], it
can be concluded that - as it is most frequently used
(with the student as the unit of analysis) and traditionally defined
(using one or more indicators of parents' income, educational
attainment or occupational level) - [parental] SES
is positively, but only weakly correlated with measures of academic
achievement. In such situations, measures of SES can be expected
to account for less than 5% of the variance in students' academic
achievement.... Statistically significant findings in studies
that use an SES factor in computing an analysis of variance, t-test
or chi-squared analysis have probably misled many researchers
about the strength of the relation between SES and academic
achievement."
Karl R. WHITE, 1982, Psychological Bulletin 91.
"....it often seems that the champions of the environment
prefer to roll all domestic and public social influence up into
one enormous super-variable of 'deprivation vs privilege'.
While lambasting others for their 'simplistic scientism', social-environmentalists
can be surprisingly simplistic themselves.... the undue emphasis
on only one dimension - the social class dimension
- of environmental variance is too simple. [It] makes allowance
neither for the influence of the intellectual levels of [children's]
close acquaintances [especially of family members - see
Zajonc, 1983] nor for [growing children's] positive choice of
their own milieus and involvements from among the {numerous} possibilities
that are available to them {in advanced modern societies}."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, in C.J.Turner & H.B.Miles, The Biology
of
Human Intelligence. London : Eugenics Society.
"....the statistical biases in recruitment to the higher
civil service-favouring Oxbridge and the public schools-are
at most only trivially influenced by social bias. The social inequalities
reflected in Civil Service recruiting patterns result from the
rigorous application of meritocratic rules and not, as is sometimes
claimed, from failure to observe those rules."
M.MORAN, 1985, Politics and Society in Modern Britain.
London : Macmillan.
"....hyperactivity in early childhood is correlated about
-.50 with IQ, and juvenile delinquents and adult criminals have
lower IQ's, on average, than those of their own full siblings
with whom they were reared. [This] proves that the correlation
between IQ and socially undesirable behavior is not just mediated
by differences in social class and cultural background....
A recent study by Robert Gordon (1986), a Johns Hopkins professor
of sociology, shows that IQ statistics are much more powerful
for predicting differences in crime rates between population subgroups
in the United States than are any of the socio-economic variables
usually invoked to account for these well-known racial differences
in crime statistics."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, speaking in Blackwood, Virginia.
"Generally, the correlation between social class and delinquency
diminishes or disappears when other family variables are taken
into account. Farrington (1979), for example, found no association
between social class and delinquency when parental monitoring
was taken into account."
J.SNYDER & G.PATTERSON, 1987, in H.C.Quay,
Handbook of Juvenile Delinquency. New York : Wiley.
"....the partialling out [by N.J.Mackintosh and N.Mascie-Taylor
{see above}] of parental SES [from race differences in IQ] is
nothing more than a trick that is so familiar in the annals of
simplistic social-environmental prejudice as to have not even
the merit of audacity. Quite plainly it delivers a result {i.e.
a reduced race-difference in IQ} that would equally be
predicted from the theory that parental IQ is importantly causal
both to parental SES and (largely independently, by genetic and
interpersonal transmission) to child IQ.... Parental SES may be
correlated with child IQ not because it is causal to it but because
they both derive from the same familial sources."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Personality & Individual Differences
8.
"....IQ testers are held [by Schiff & Lewontin {see above}]
to suffer from 'brutal pessimism' about the human condition: yet
the authors of this plea for State-orchestrated equalization would
strip society of just those artificial products of capitalism,
the 'advantaged' families that alone seem capable of providing
14- (or possibly 8- ) IQ-point boosts to that small proportion
of working class children that could ever-even under the
most Mao-ist arrangements-be adopted by them."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Nature 325.
"Workers who have a strong sense of class identity need not
worry much about genes and intelligence. The correlation between
class and children's IQ in America has always been low and is
getting lower."
J.R.FLYNN, 1987, in S. & C. Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"The Prince of Lignac is lounging on the sun-deck of his
[$32M] yacht in Puerto Banuz, squinting intently at his Rolex
watch. He has to twist his wrist to a particular angle with the
sun, for the dial is so studded with sapphires, rubies and diamonds
of such coruscating brilliance that it is not easy to pick out
the hands.... The ungilded chapters of his story book open in
1918 in Rotterdam, where he was born into a poor family. His father
died when he was three months old, and his mother had to take
in lodgers to make ends meet. At high school he was one of only
two boys who had to rely on charity for his study books, and he
never forgot the humiliation of being warned to take particular
care of them so that a boy from "another poor family"
could use them the following year. It was at that moment that
young Leo decided that he would, one day, be very, very rich.
He made an unpromising start by deciding on a career in journalism,
but soon went into business on his own account. From correspondence
schools he branched out into publishing and direct mail, eventually
building a business empire comprising 19 companies spread across
five European countries."
Russell MILLER, 1987, The Sunday Times Magazine, 28 vi.
"This report argues that much of the reason social class
[and other demographic variables] have been found to co-vary with
criminal behaviour, at least regarding serious victimful offenses,
is to be found at levels of analysis which involve reproductive
biology."
Lee ELLIS, 1988, Personality & Individual Differences
9.
"Rearing-SES effects on IQ in adoption studies have been
found for young children but not in adult samples, suggesting
that although parents may be able to affect their children's rates
of cognitive skill acquisition, they may have relatively little
influence on the ultimate level attained."
T.J.BOUCHARD et al., 1990, 'Sources of human psychological
differences: the Minnesota study of twins reared apart'.
Science 250, 12 x.
"....from age 8 onwards the Educated subjects [no arrests
by age 26] had behaved in a more constructive and submissive way
than the Antisocial boys, who had been more aggressive and had
poorer concentration [according respectively to peer and teacher
reports, both p<.00005]. ....The socio-economic status
of the family did not differentiate strongly between the two groups.
....the groups did not differ in the family structure, whether
intact or not."
L. PULKKINEN, 1992,
European Journal of Personality 6, 2.
"....the children of the unskilled are more likely to die
in their first year. But the absolute numbers are tiny compared
with those in the Twenties. Thus the numbers of infants surviving
per thousand live births are, for Class I, 993, and for Class
V, 987. The single most important cause of this tiny absolute
variation is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or cot death, which
is probably related not to income but to sleeping position....
With the deaths of older adults, the only diseases known to be
class-related are smoking-related diseases."
Digby ANDERSON (Social Affairs Unit, London), 1993, 'The trap
of blaming poverty.' The Independent, c. 31 viii.
"If I were to nominate the biggest sleeper effect to emerge
from The Bell Curve debate, it would be the collapse of
SES as a way of interpreting social problems. The rationale for
liberal social policy cannot easily do without it."
C.MURRAY, 1995, Commentary 99.
(iv) The role of individual differences in yielding people's
own
'achieved' social class (in the course of their own lifetimes).
"In Minnesota....Waller (1971, Social Biology 18)
found a correlation of .724 between men's IQ's (measured when
they were in high school) and their adult occupations; but a correlation
kof only .32 between their IQ's and their own fathers' adult occupations."
A.R.JENSEN, 1973, Educability and Group Differences.
London : Methuen.
"....Waller (1971) obtained the IQ scores of 130 fathers
and their 172 adult sons, all of whom had been routinely tested
during their high school year in Minnesota. The IQ's ranged from
below 80 to above 130 and were related to social class. Children
with lower IQ's than their fathers went down in social class as
adults, and those with higher IQ's went up (r = .37 between
difference in father-son social class difference and difference
in father-son IQ). Such intergenerational social mobility has
subsequently been confirmed (Mascie-Taylor & Gibson, 1978,
J.Biosocial Science)."
J. Philippe RUSHTON, 1995, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A
Life History Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction
Publishers.
"....I must disagree....with the view put forward by
Eysenck in his book The Inequality of Man, that social
class mobility can be almost entirely explained on the basis of
genetic principles. The argument is that although social class
and intelligence are related, there is still hope for the poorer
members of society because the population genes for intelligence
are constantly being reshuffled, leading to upward and downward
changes in class position. Yet apart from shifts at the two extremes
- where it is hardly of any significance - and
with the exception of the odd blue-blooded outcast or lucky road-digger's
son, such mobility is manifestly not the case: it is certainly
not enough to satisfy any genuine social reformer."
Gordon CLARIDGE, 1985, Origins of Mental Illness.
Oxford : Blackwell.
"....if occupational status were completely dependent
on g ability and not at all dependent on adult individuals'
SES of origin, the present advantage of white middle-class children
over working-class children would be reduced by {merely} one third,
and the relationship between adult occupation status and g
ability, or IQ, would be correspondingly increased (L.G.Humphreys,
1984, in C.R.Reynolds & R.T.Brown, Perspectives on Bias
in Mental Testing)."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, Journal of Vocational Behavior 29.
"For Keith Hope's study, As Others See Us (1985, Cambridge
Univ. Press), a random sample of some 600 Scottish boys and an
equal number of girls....who had been tested when they were 11
years old were followed up when they were 28.... The results are
broadly similar to those of Jencks and others for the United States....
Sixty per cent of Scottish intergenerational social mobility is
explained by IQ"
John RAVEN, 1986, American Journal of Education, pp. 396-399.
"....longitudinal investigations commonly show a substantial
predictive power for IQ, while suggesting only a modest influence
of parental SES-especially upon IQ itself. Likewise IQ
turns out to be more predictive of later specific educational
attainments than are attainments predictive of later IQ: so g
seems to be the cause, and attainment the effect.... although
well-funded sociological studies of [inter-generational] mobility
have sometimes wilfully declined to take IQ into account {see
Goldthorpe et al., above}, Touhey's (1972, Brit. J.
soc. & clin. Psychol.) study found that sons' IQ's correlated
at around .55 with their degree of upward (vs downward)
mobility from the original social position of their own fathers....
[Again,] siblings are typically very similar in their social backgrounds,
yet their IQ's will only correlate at around .50, thus allowing
considerable divergence in their own final achieved levels of
SES"
C.R.BRAND, 1987, in S. & C. Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"In 1930 [in Britain], people of the lowest social class
had a 23% higher chance of dying at every age than people in the
highest social class. By 1970, this excess risk had grown to 61%.
A decade later, it had jumped to 150% (D.Black, 1980, Inequalities
in Health, London : D.H.S.S.).... the increasing correlation
of health and social class is explainable....when it is appreciated
that removing environmental barriers to health increases the variance
accounted for by genetic factors."
J.P.RUSHTON, 1987, Psychological Reports 60.
"....it seems to me it would be very hard to find an argument
against accepting that whatever it is that makes people score
well on intelligence tests also has the effect of moving them
towards the upper levels of the occupational class structure.
A sample of 352 people assembled because of a high score on an
IQ test {all were MENSA members} is examined and it is shown that,
while 36% of [their] fathers were in the top occupational class,
76% of the sons were in that class."
V.SEREBRIAKOFF, 1988, A Guide to Intelligence and
Personality Testing. Carnforth, Lancashire : Parthenon.
"The fairly strong correlation of intelligence with occupational
status has been documented many times: on the basis of World War
I mental testing data by Yerkes (1921, Memoirs Nat. Acad. Sciences
15) and Fryer (1922, School & Society 16); and
on the basis of World War II data by Stewart (1947, Occupations
26). {Linda} Gottfredson (1984) has made detailed analyses
of the roles of intelligence and education in the division of
labor. She presents evidence to show that: (1) occupations differ
in the general intellectual difficulty of the tasks they require
workers to perform on the job; (2) the occupational prestige hierarchy
reflects an ordering of occupations according to that intellectual
difficulty level; (3) jobs that are higher in intellectual difficulty
are more critical to the employing organization; and (4) large
differences in intelligence in the population are evident by early
school years and this distribution is not substantially changed
by school or work environments.
Recently (Gottfredson, 1986, J. Vocational Behav. 29),
she has argued that it is virtually hopeless to expect that such
differences can be circumvented in employee selection, even by
extensive training programs, because while it may be possible
to teach lower-ability persons certain job skills and knowledge
(if enough time is taken to do so), it is practically impossible
to teach the skills of good judgement and decision making that
depend on level of intellect."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
(v) Is it a good idea to have some kind of class system
or social hierarchy?
"The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there
was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive,
limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which
to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its
excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly
the whole of what we call civilisation. It cultivated the arts
and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the
philosophies and refined social relations. Even the liberation
of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without
the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism....
{However} the method of a hereditary leisure class without duties
was....extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class
had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was
not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin,
but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen
who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting
and punishing poachers."
Bertrand RUSSELL, quoted in The Idler, i-ii 1994.
"....combinations of White slaves and landless White
freemen were referred to as a "giddy multitude" with
the potential for overthrowing the dominance of the planter grandees.
"Governor Berkeley despaired of ever subduing a White underclass
of "people where six parts of seven are poor, indebted, discontented
and armed" (A.R.Ekirch, Bound for America)."
M. A. HOFFMAN II (1991). They Were White and They Were Slaves.
New York : Wiswell Ruffin House.
"By deed, [Robert] Owen's communities {in New Lanark, Scotland,
and in New Harmony, USA} have shown that production on a large
scale may be carried out without the existence of a class of masters
employing a class of hands."
Karl MARX, 1845.
"These young people {in the Hitler Youth} learn nothing but
to think as Germans and to act as Germans.... [After four years
training, we are not] prepared to give them back into the hands
of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we
take them immediately into the Party.... [If , after a further
six months,] there are still remnants of class consciousness
or pride in status, the Wehrmacht will take over the further treatment...."
Adolf HITLER, 1938, speech in Reichenberg, 4 xii.
Cited by M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, The Racial State:
Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
"If there is one thing more disturbing than a ruling class
based on privilege, it is a ruling class that believes it deserves
its position by virtue of its intelligence."
Brigitte BERGER (professor of sociology at Boston University),
1994, National Review 46, 23, 5 xii.
"....all [Owen' co-operative communities] were unsuccessful."
Chambers' Biographical Dictionary, 1990.
"Once social class exerted discipline upon taste and desire.
So did family and church. But, in the general upheaval that the
egalitarian volcano has brought about in the modern age, these
ancient disciplines are gone or grievously enfeebled. When Pandora
opened the forbidden box, the insects of avarice, envy, pride,
hate, jealousy, and other ills flew out into the world. The opening
up of the social class system has had a comparable effect in modern
society..... the great social revolution of egalitarianism, with
its destruction of all the moral disciplines that once held mankind
in check, and its devastation of the social framework within which
these disciplines flourished, is by now world-wide, and this revolution
is a long way from the zenith, even in the West."
Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices. Harvard University Press.
"Identifying someone's class tells us no more about him than
recognizing someone to be a member of a family.... no one's character,
not even his manners, can be deduced from his class. Nor can anyone's
'interests' be known from his class....
The British are, as Bagehot said, a deferential nation. But their
deference has nothing to do with servility or self-abasement.
On the contrary, they have always impressed foreigners by their
genius for combining deference with independence, an 'easy mingling
of orders' and 'a nice appreciation of the real merit' of persons,
as Mme de Stael put it, along with a universal conviction that
everyone is equal before the law....
[Egalitarians] hate class distinctions not because, as they pretend,
they pity the deprived, but because they hate all distinctions.
They consider it a sin to discriminate between those who know
and those who don't, or between the lazy and the industrious.
They are offended by any division of labour and by all standards.
They are outraged by the suggestion that men are different from
mice.... In short, classless society is the dream of those who
cannot tolerate our humanity."
Shirley Robin LETWIN, 1986, The Spectator, 26 vii.
"[The England of Ealing films, of the late 1940's,] is a
nation much more at ease with itself than any over which [the
Prime Minister, Mr Major, an advocate of the classless society]
is ever likely to preside, not least because the class structure
the Prime Minister abominates provided security and predictability
while offering incentives for those who wished to move up within
it. This was the world that Attlee (and other ex-public schoolboy
socialist ideologists) began to dismantle. They replaced a social
order of privileges and obligations with a welfare state that
first subverted and then destroyed fundamental human relationships.
We are still paying the price for that destruction today."
Simon HEFFER, 1993, The Spectator, 7 viii.
"On becoming Prime Minister, [Mr Major] was encouraged, for
form's sake, to develop one or two ideas of his own, and hit on
the concept of classlessness. His choice is instructive, for here
is another valuable source of comfort for leaders who have lost
their nerve. By indicating that they are themselves of no higher
rank than those they lead, classlessness helps them to imply,
however unwittingly, that no greater courage can be expected of
them."
Andrew GIMSON, 1994, The Spectator, 23 iv.
(vi) Is the West's (and especially Britain's) social class
system
-and concern with it-coming to an
end?
Yes!
"The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth had
no time for national loyalties. They were regarded as atavistic
and primitive, and were sure to be soon forgotten.... This world
view can be seen very clearly in that latter-day Enlightenment
figure, Karl Marx, most particularly in his central and unquestioned
contention that class would prove to be a greater source of social
mobilisation than national loyalties. This theory met with sudden
death in August 1914."
John A. HALL, 1985, Powers and Liberties: the Causes and
Consequences of the Rise of the West. Oxford : Blackwell.
"The egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential
achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. The economic
inequalities that persist, and in some cases have grown worse,
are not an outgrowth of the legal and social structure of our
society but are the legacy of a pre-liberal past."
Francis FUKUYAMA (author of The End of History),
1989, The Independent, 21 ix.
"Let us dismiss this tripe about the class war. I'm blessed
if I know where one class begins and the other ends."
Ray GUNTER (then an eminent British Labour M.P.), c. 1975.
Quoted (with disapproval of its "crude and blatant reformism")
by B.Matthews, Britain and the Socialist Revolution.
London : Communist Party (Socialist Library Pamphlet No.3)
"Our class system is dying.... Only a very large, rich country
can maintain stability and efficiency without some kind of elite,
preferably as open as possible to talent, but still confident
of its abilities and legitimacy. One of our problems is that our
{own} elite has lost that confidence, and many of those who have
pulled and are pulling it down have neither the real self-confidence
not the instinctive "feel" to take its place."
David WATT, 1986, The Times, 3 i.
"It was in 1967 that [an Oxford political scientist, Peter
Pulzer,] uttered his much-to-be-repeated dictum that 'Class is
the basis of British politics; all else is mere embellishment
and detail.' Yet already, at that time, it was ceasing to be
true." Peter JENKINS, 1987, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution.
London : Jonathan Cape.
"Several researchers have suggested that social class is
no longer as important a factor in sexual preference and practices
as was previously thought."
E.G.PADILLA & K.E.O'GRADY, 1987,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52.
"Underlying structures of society, like the organised working
class, are breaking up."
John LLOYD (Editor of the New Statesman), 1987,
The Observer (Colour Supplement), 7 vi.
"The social foundation of the principle of division, or class
struggle, [became] blurred to the point of losing all of its
radicality. We cannot conceal the fact that the critical model
in the end lost its theoretical standing and was reduced to the
status of a 'utopia' or 'hope', a token protest raised in the
name of man, or reason, or creativity, or again of some social
category - such as the Third World or the students
- on which is conferred in extremis the henceforth
improbably function of critical subject."
Jean-François Lyotard, quoted by Bart Testa, 1987,
The Idler, v/vi. (Published in Toronto.)
"The [U.K.] Government's ambitions for a third term in office
now extend to the abolition of social class. The Office of Population
Censuses and Surveys is considering substitutes for "social
class" as it revises its occupation-based class categorization
for the 1991 Census. Sociologists in contact with O.P.C.S. maintain
the change is a direct result of ministerial distaste for the
"divisive" language of class in official statistics....
A spokeswoman for O.P.C.S. said ministers were aware of the discussion,
but the motive for the change was criticism of the existing usage
as poorly grounded in sociological theory."
J.TURNEY, 1987, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
30 x.
"[A contentious, semi-official Communist Party document,
entitled Facing Up to the Future,] claims that there is
no such thing as a pure class identity, and that 'increasing numbers
of people in modern capitalism occupy contradictory class locations'.
A great swathe of people now exists who can no longer be described
as purely working class for they 'control some kind of productive
asset - skills, knowledge, organisational power over production.'
Most iconoclastic of all, [the document] goes on to proclaim
that this means that 'class cannot straightforwardly provide the
collective interest for modern socialism.'" New
Socialist, 1988, x/xi.
"Research carried out among comprehensive school and public
school teenage girls and to be published this week in Sociology,
the journal of the British Sociological Association, will be a
bitter blow to the followers of Karl Marx. It shows that, for
the comprehensive school pupils, the classless society has arrived.
Even when pressed, they found it impossible to say what class
they were from, and difficult to name the classes in British society.
By contrast, the girls at an Oxfordshire public school retained
an Upstairs Downstairs view of the world, according to the study
by Dr Elizabeth Frazer, a tutor at New College, Oxford."
Judith JUDD, 1988, The Observer, 21 viii.
"....what was once thought of as the working class had better
soon be called the consuming class - a class of which
we are all members. No party of the opposition has yet learned
to adapt itself to this. So much of it seems inimical to left
politics. It seems so acquisitive.
John LLOYD (Editor of the New Statesman), 1989,
Sunday Times (Magazine), 30 iv.
"In 1972, the wealthiest 1% of the adult population [in Britain]
owned 31% of the wealth. By 1987, a social earthquake had struck.
The top 1% owned 18% of the wealth - a drop of almost
half. Egalitarians would argue that this is still completely out
of proportion, though Soames Forsyte would be very astonished
at the change. In the Galsworthy days before the first world war,
as Lloyd George brought in his people's budget and took on the
massed lordships of Britain, the top 1% owned 69% of the country's
wealth."
Paul BARKER, 1990, Sunday Times, 18 ii.
"There is still a Real Working Class, but it's very small,
and shrinking. It survives mostly in the North and on the Celtic
fringes {of Britain}, and only in company towns, where everyone
works in the same pit or the same car plant; an individual can't
by Real W.C. in isolation - working-classness is defined
by community."
Mat COWARD, 1991, New Statesman & Society, 18 x.
"....America is another place where the polite bourgeois
culture is losing its grip. No doubt the move has been greatly
encouraged by the arrival of the hamburger-guzzling President,
whose supporters make so much capital out of the fact that he
came from the wrong side of the tracks, i.e. from the lower-middle
class. It would not be polite to invite them to consider that
the last five British prime ministers similarly came from the
wrong side of the tracks, and look where we are now."
Auberon WAUGH, 1994, The Spectator, 2 iv.
"A new study has revealed that [the Young Royals] have shunned
the clipped, conservative pronunciation of the Queen....and are
more likely to adopt traits of speech commonly associated with
the classless southern accent known as estuary English of 'high
cockney'. Like millions in the towns and counties of the Thames
estuary who have popularised the new accent, royals such as the
Princess of Wales and Prince Edward are prone to swallowing their
t's in sentences such as 'There's a lo' of i' about'."
Charles HYMAS, 1994, The Sunday Times, 11 iv.
No!?
"Nearly three quarters of [a nationwide British sample
of 1,770 people, conducted in 1984,] felt class to be an inevitable
feature of modern society, and half the sample endorsed the view
that there is a dominant class which controls the economic and
political system.... [74%] thought is was hard to move from one
class to another."
David BERRY, 1988, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
27 v.
(Reviewing G.Marshall et al., Social Class in Modern
Britain.
"....graduated taxation gives old money a leg up over new.
It tends to lock people into place, thereby obstructing class
mobility and the rotation of elites."
T.BETHELL, 1986, The Spectator, 18 x.
"It is important that we point to countries like South Africa
where the working class plays the leading role for social change,
providing a powerful argument against the people who've written
off the working class from history altogether and those who preach
'new realism' in the labour movement...."
Direct Action ("the voice of anarcho-syndicalism",
the paper of the Direct Action Movement - International
Workers' Association), 1987, No.42.
"Contemporary Western societies are characterised by a protracted
conflict between two classes, the old middle class (occupied in
the production and distribution of material goods and services)
and a new middle class (occupied in the production and distribution
of symbolic knowledge).... a large proportion of this knowledge
class depends for its livelihood on government payrolls and subsidies....
like all rising classes, the knowledge class rhetorically identifies
its own class interests with the general welfare of society, and
especially with the downtrodden (just as the early bourgeoisie
did in its own conflict with the ancien régime)."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution.
Aldershot, U.K. : Gower.
"We are moving from three-tier, class-based societies to
two-tier, occupation-based societies. On top, the specialist,
well-educated 10 to 15 per cent - us; below, the rest
in a large, ill-educated mass, fed by the opiates of consumer-communications.
And, at the very bottom, there may be a hardly educated under-class
whom we would prefer not to recognize."
Richard HOGGART, 1988, The Times, 11 vi.
"One of the most important social groups in modern France
are the so-called cadres. The occupational groups
that constitute the cadres-middle-to-high level administrative
personnel-are present in almost all advanced industrial
societies, but it is only in France that they have formed a conscious
collectivity."
Publisher's announcement, 1988, for L.Boltanski,
The Making of A Class. Cambridge University Press.
"Social status seems to be a 'universal' in human societies,
though in many modern groups it is decoupled from reproductive
success by contraception."
G.A.HARRISON, 1989, in M.Keynes et al.,
Evolutionary Studies. London : The Eugenics Society.
"[John Westgaard, 1995, Who Gets What?] has little
trouble showing that a sharply unequal British class system survives,
with a top one per cent forming the capitalist core, a further
2-3 per cent occupying the top rungs of the professions and the
peaks of government and 30 per cent being the best-placed salariat....
[His] book testifies most effectively to the salience and strength
of Marxist sociology long after Marxism has been pronounced dead."
F.WEBSTER, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
12 v.
"....an underclass of underemployed or underpaid workers
seems to be growing {in US and UK, 1975-1995}.... Professor Steve
Nickell at Oxford has recently published studies on the people
he calls "low-eds".... ....as more people ascend the
educational ladder those left behind are presumably, on average,
less bright. The underclass may actually be getting smaller, but
it is being left further behind; A welter of data supports the
impression of labour-market collapse for the low-eds."
Robin MARIS, 1995, 'Worrying fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon
underclass.' The Times, 28 ix.
Epilogue
"I propose briefly to examine four methodologies: deconstruction
{opposing 'logocentrism', i.e. verbal truth}, feminist criticism
{detecting omnipresent'patriarchy'}, the New Historicism
{the search for the 'bourgeois subject', the deplorable post-Renaissance
modern personality} and film theory
{opposing narrative realism and the 'depth illusion' of post-1919
cinema}. At first sight, the four would appear to be as widely
separated and seemingly unrelated to one another as could be imagined.
Each has its own barely penetrable terminology and claims to employ
a unique analytic method. But the terms encountered in going from
one to another of the four turn out to be many ways of representing
the same few things. In fact, all four methodologies come down
to being versions of a single, surprisingly elementary concept:
that of class struggle. ....the methodologies do not really make
discoveries about reality. Their purpose is to create a political
drama in which their practitioners first invent an exploiting
and an exploited class, and then, in a kind of symbolic imitation
of political revolutionism, proceed to deride the one and identify
with the other."
Peter SHAW (1990), 'Making sense of the new academic disciplines.'
Academic Questions 3.
"Had the Third Reich survived, the S.S. would have replaced
all existing social elites. As Hitler said in 1941, 'I do not
doubt for a moment, despite certain people's scepticism, that
within a hundred years or so from now all the German elite will
be a product of the S.S.-for only the S.S. practises racial
selection.' The S.S. was a microcosm of the modern, racially
organized, hierarchical, performance-orientated order with which
the Nazis wished to replace existing society. The S.S. would have
absorbed or destroyed all alternative bastions of power occupied
by the traditional elites."
M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, 1991, The Racial State: Germany
1933-1945. Cambridge University Press.
"Now that the class system has lost almost all its power,
it is worth saving. For class contributes to the cultural diversity
of our country. It is the indigenous multiculturalism of our people.
If we can make room for the mosque, why not the country mansion?
If we can enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival, why not the Trooping
of the Colour too?"
Julie BURCHILL, 1992, 'Who needs a classless society?' Options,
x.
"[The] quietly spoken middle classes hate the profiterole-throwing
(and much more honest) middle classes far more than anyone else
does. The food-throwers' brash celebration of their privilege
is threatening to undermine the whole show. To maintain that the
power-crazed classes keep each other in check. So we constantly
remind each other of our guilt and of our isolation from the masses.
At least it might prevent us from talking too loudly about out
salaries in the pub."
Daisy WAUGH, 1994, 'Class act.' The Idler iv/v.
"[In David Buss's study of 37 cultures] the single best predictor
of the occupational status of a man was the physical attractiveness
of his wife."
A.IRWIN, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 19
v, p.17
FINIS
{Compiled by Christopher Brand, Department of Psychology,
University of Edinburgh}
For more coverage of social class,
especially in relation to intelligence, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of
'P, B & S.'
Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group
differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh
University Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in
each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements
in the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to
human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology
of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature
and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics
of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing-especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they
exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles'
and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political
aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political
aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage
out'?
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