My
engagement with this book is now officially completely out of order. This will
be the next to last post in this series and focus on the idea of the
stratification in contemporary American society not between the rich and the
poor but between what Murray calls the “cognitive elite” (the really smart people)
and everyone else.
This is a
rather simple story, but one that had not occurred to me before. There was an
era in America not too long ago when people married someone they had grown up
with or around, the high school sweetheart if you will. My own grandparents
went to school together from kindergarten on and were married shortly after
high school graduation. No one, apparently, told them how limiting this was and
they have been forced to enjoy 55 years of marriage with one another, raise
five successful children, and are tormented with a retirement of carpentry,
gardening, travel, and church service. But I am not making a point about my own
generation’s hesitancy to marry before 30, but rather the manner in which who
it is that we marry has changed.
Most of my
professors for the past two years in graduate school have been married to other
professors. It is not uncommon, as Murray points out, for two high-powered
lawyers to be married to one another; likewise a law professor and a business
professor; a stockbroker and a famous artist, etc. Rarely do we see a CEO marry
his secretary or a sociology professor marry a construction worker. In other
words, the cognitive elite marry other members of the cognitive elite in a way
that they did not do in previous generations. Of course there are exceptions to
this rule, but the practice of marrying across class divides was far more
common in the past than it is today. This is exemplified by the sequestering of
the cognitive elites in the SuperZips that I described in an earlier post.
And while
I am far from making the claim that people in elite positions—professors, CEOs,
lawyers, doctors, artists—are necessarily smarter than construction workers or
janitors or TV repair men, most in reality are. The tests bear that out well
enough. And even if the street sweeper is smarter than the English professor in
terms of IQ, the manner in which they live out their intelligence and the ways
in which they will raise their children certainly diverge.
I am
really not intending to make gross generalizations here, but the fragmentation
between Belmont and Fishtown has to be accounted for in some way. So consider,
who is more likely to encourage their children to achieve academic excellence,
teach them piano and violin, put them in tennis lessons, pay for a tutor to
teach their children French or Mandarin or to help close a gap in some other
subject, take them to museums and on trips to Europe, have a well-stocked
library in the house: the high-IQ street sweeper or the lower-IQ English
professor? There are, of course, exceptions, but the rule seems pretty
undeniable. And what this leads to is further stratification and fragmentation.
The street sweeper’s children will be smart still, but without the same access
to opportunity they start from a disadvantage. This is not to say that they
will not in the end reach a position of prominence, but the old American ideal
is fading. Expect less farm kids from Iowa to in the future break through the
ranks of the elite. If anyone from Iowa makes the jump it will most likely be
the children of professors from Iowa City, not from the cornfields around the
state. That is the new reality of this country.
And it
seems to me the element in Murray’s work least likely to change. As urban,
educated whites continue to delay marriage into their late 20s and early 30s
they will continue to marry people in the same social strata. To use a common
term, they might “slum” it from time to time but actually settling down with
someone from a different station of life would be frowned upon by their friends
and most would not seriously consider doing so anyway. So as lawyers continue
to marry lawyers and professors wed other professors, settling down at night to
read Balzac and Dostoevsky over glasses of white wine while listening to violin concertos by Bach, the fragmentation and stratification of the cognitive
elite is only likely to grow. And, again, to the detriment of Fishtown.
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