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The life scientists have identified more than a million animal species on this planet and before their work is done it is thought that the total number will reach 2.5 million. Within this galaxy of life, we have always regarded homo sapiens as merely one of the stars. But science and society constantly challenge that simple assertion. As one anthropologist lamented a few years back, "We have discarded eternal man and cut mutable man into pieces to be enquired into by different sciences, each of which claims autonomy. The pieces fit into one another less and less."
The cutting continues and indeed the pieces fit less and less. One example involves a body of recently published research that focuses on the existence of a new aristocracy in American society. It quantifies trends of increasing privilege for a new, well-educated, "meritocratic" elite of "brights" and of decline in the economic fortunes of the "less-brights" who comprise a great majority of our population. The trends suggest growth in the disparity between the classes and an unpromising outlook for all but the privileged elite for whom income and other rewards will improve.
The substance of all this new inquiry is that homo sapiens is a far more diverse and complicated species than we have imagined in the past and that because of this diversity our society is growing increasingly fragmented. Item: A recent news story in The Washington Post revealed that in order to accommodate the "diversity" and "multicultural" interests of its students, one Northern Virginia high school has found it necessary to create 75 clubs and associations.
Since the late '40s and the '50s, it has been intellectually fashionable to carry on the dissections and reclassifications of mutable man using the tools and intuitions of the social sciences. The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, William H. Whyte, Jr.'s Organization Man, Robert Wood's Suburbia and similar books examined the modern psyche and habitats of Americans. More recently Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve. Robert Reich, the present Secretary of Labor, produced The Work of Nations. Christopher Lasch completed, shortly before his death, The Revolt of The Elites and The Betrayal of Democracy, and William Henry, before he died last year, finished In Defense of Elitism. All of these books deal with 20th-century models of homo sapiens, and the most recent ones make the point that the animal now comes in at least two incarnations -- the "bright" and the "less bright."
At the same time, demographers in the U.S. have created far more diverse classification systems based on numerous behaviors derived from political, geographic and attitudinal proclivities as well as consumption patterns and life styles. This literature includes This U.S.A. and other books by Ben Wattenburg and Richard Scammon; Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America and Edge City; Alvin Toffler's Power Shift and two books by Michael J. Weiss -- The Clustering of America and Latitudes and Attitudes.
In dealing first with the brains question -- "brights" versus a "less-bright" lumen proletariat -- The Bell Curve is useful. It aroused a great deal of controversy because of its assertions about the racial distribution of intelligence in America: Asians have more of it than whites who have more of it than blacks. But a more significant point in the book is its assertion that racial differences in intelligence are overwhelmed by the inexorable division of our people into two "classes." The first is a small "cognitive elite" representing our new aristocracy based on brains and talent rather than gender, ethnicity or hereditary wealth and social standing -- in short, a "meritocracy." This elite is distinguished by its educational attainment, knowledge and superior intelligence and by the social rewards it receives -- wealth, status and privilege. These are the same people Labor Secretary Reich calls "symbol analysts." Christopher Lasch described them as "those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate."
In this "meritocratic" system the masses are destined to be locked into a world requiring them to perform all the "non-cognitive" or "routine production" and "service" jobs of society -- housekeeping, fire-fighting and plumbing to assembly-line functions and key-punch operations.
Herrnstein and Murray describe the sorting-out process beginning with education, which increasingly determines occupation, wealth and status: "Insofar as many more people now go to college, the college degree has become more democratic during the 20th century. [The prevalence of the college degree since 1900 in the U.S. has gone from one in 50 to roughly one in three in our population.] But as it became democratic, a new elite was developing even more rapidly within the system. From the early 1950s into the mid-1960s, the nation's university system not only became more efficient in bringing the bright youngsters to college, it became radically more efficient at sorting the brightest of the bright into a handful of elite colleges."
In 1952, for example, the Harvard freshman class was overwhelmingly WASPish, drawn from the rich, high-toned Eastern prep schools and from the families of Harvard alumni. In terms of brains, however, Harvard wasn't particularly exclusive. The overall chances of being admitted were roughly two out of three and close to 9 to 1 if the applicant's father was a Harvard man. The mean verbal SAT score was only 583, well above the national mean but "nothing to brag about."
Just eight years later, Murray and Herrnstein report, Harvard had changed dramatically. There were more public than private school graduates in the freshman class. They came from all over the country; the proportion from New England dropped by a third. Admission was more difficult; only one out of three applicants was selected. SAT scores soared to an average of 678 on the verbal section and 695 on the math scale: "Many of the students who would have been admitted in 1952 were not even bothering to apply in 1960." By 1964 the average freshman at Harvard ranked in the 99th percentile on the SAT-Verbal. The other "highly selective" schools, in the Ivy League and elsewhere, reported the same phenomenon -- ''average" students who placed in the top 1 per cent of the nation's youth.
By the early 1960s, we learn from The Bell Curve, "the entire top echelon of American universities had been transformed. The screens filtering their students from the masses had not been lowered but changed. Instead of the old screen -- woven of class, religion, region and old school ties -- the new screen was cognitive ability and its mesh was already exceedingly fine."
The Wall Street Journal in February offered us an example. Paul Cappuccio, son of a serviceman who cleaned fluorescent light fixtures at Harvard, graduated from Harvard Law School with high marks. His mother, a worker in a candy factory, supplied the mints served at his law-school graduation party. Today Cappuccio earns more than $500,000 a year at one of our leading law firms.
Of the 1.2 million freshmen entering four-year colleges in the U.S. in 1990, fewer than 5 percent -- about 50,000 -- were enrolled in the 25 "top" universities and 25 "top" small colleges. In the entire U.S., about 30,000 students scored 700 or higher on the SAT-Verbal test. One third of these high-achievers -- about 10,000 -- wound up at just 10 schools -- Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, California at Berkeley, Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia. These 10 schools enrolled barely 1 per cent of entering freshmen that year but claimed 31 per cent of the high achievers.
Two things are obvious here. The first is that the highest achievers among our students constitute an "elite" -- about 1 in 400 has the ability to score 700 on the SAT-Verbal test. The second is that among the rest of the 1-to-2 million students entering college each year, both the SAT scores and the college outcomes for most will vary tremendously. A lot of them will attend "dumbed down" institutions. A College Entrance Examination Board study showed that in 1961 the average SAT- Verbal score was less than 400 at Georgia Southern, 450 at North Carolina State, 650 at Amherst and nearly 700 at Harvard. That is why not all college degrees are "equal."
SAT scores and IQ tests may not measure "intelligence," but they clearly measure who does and doesn't do well in college. Roughly a third of the students entering two- or four-year colleges do poorly on IQ tests, scoring in the bottom five deciles; their graduation rates range from zero to about 10 percent. But about 70 percent of students in the top decile get their degrees.
So the culling out and segregation by ability of students begins early in the educational process. It produces what Herrnstein and Murray call social "partitioning." It is measured by the "median overlap" among groups of people and tells us what proportion of IQs in lower-scoring groups match or exceed the median scores in the higher-scoring group. The median overlap between high school graduates and college graduates is 7 percent -- i.e., 7 percent of high school graduates match the scores of college graduates. The overlap between high school graduates and people who earn doctoral degrees or become doctors or lawyers is 1 per cent. The overlap between college graduates and people who earn PhD's., M.D.'s and LL.B.'s is 21 percent.
"It is difficult," the authors write, "to exaggerate how different the elite college population is from the population at large -- first in its level of intellectual talent, and correlatively in its outlook on society, politics, ethics, religion and all other domains in which intellectuals, especially intellectuals concentrated into communities, tend to develop their own conventional wisdoms...Many of those promising undergraduates are never going to live in a community where they will be disabused of their misperceptions, for after education comes another sorting mechanism, occupations, and many of the holes that are still left in the cognitive partitions begin to get sealed."
The first half of their book -- The Bell Curve -- is devoted to further elaborations on this theme. The "brightest" get most of the "best" jobs, becoming accountants, architects, chemists, college teachers, computer scientists, dentists, lawyers, mathematicians, natural scientists, physicians and social scientists, not to mention CEOs, brokers, bankers, government officials and journalists. The "brightest" make the best citizens, have the fewest social pathologies, raise healthier and better-behaved children and, of course, amass the greatest wealth.
Readers of COSMOS, I suspect, are not unaware in their own lives of the points being made here, and certainly not unaware of the desirability of getting a child or a grandchild into the "best" schools, not only for the education and prestige of the degree, but for "networking" purposes as well.
The authors of "The Bell Curve" emphasize "intelligence" in the two-tier society emerging in the U.S. We can argue about that. But there are certain inarguable. The first is that the "cognitive elite," representing much of the top 20 percent of the labor force, not only begin their careers at high income levels but are constantly increasing their share of the nation's wealth.
Robert Reich in The Work of Nations has assembled startling figures about the incomes of different classes of homo sapiens. In 1960, a CEO employed by one of America's 100 largest nonfinancial corporations earned, on average, $190,000 a year. That was about 40 times the wage of the average factory worker employed by the same company. After taxes, however, this CEO earned only about 12 times the wage paid to the factory worker. By the end of the 1980s, however, the pre-tax earnings of the CEO, on average, came to about $2 million a year, 93 times that of the factory worker. And the CEO's after-tax earnings were 70 times greater than the factory worker's.
For the poorest 20 percent of Americans, the years from the late '70s to 1990 were unkind -- their collective share of the national income dropped from 5.5 percent in 1970 to 3.7 percent of the total. Their family incomes declined by 7 percent while the family incomes of those in the top 20 percent increased by 15 percent. The most fortunate fifth of the population received over 50 percent of the national income for the first time in American history. A similar pattern was observed among black Americans; the lowest fifth of black families suffered a 24 percent decline in average income between 1978 and 1988, while the top 5 percent of black families increased their incomes by roughly the same amount.
Even more telling were the income shifts from producers and investors to "symbolic analysts" which is Reich's label for the "cognitive elite." He writes:
"In 1920, more than 85 percent of the cost of an automobile went to pay routine laborers and investors. By 1990, these two groups received less than 60 percent, with the remainder going to [the symbolic analysts] -- designers, engineers, stylists, planners, strategists, financial specialists, executive officers, lawyers, advertisers, marketers and the like. Today not more than 3 percent of the price of a semiconductor chip goes to the owners of raw materials and energy, 5 percent to those who own the equipment and facilities, and 6 percent to routine labor. More than 85 percent is for specialized design and engineering services and for patents and copyrights on past discoveries made in the course of providing those services.
"This pattern can be observed in the economy as a whole...the wages of production workers in the U.S. steadily declined as a percentage of gross national product, from 11.6 percent in 1949 to 4.6 percent in 1990. Over the same interval, corporate profits also declined as a percentage of gross national product. In the mid-1960s, corporate profits...reached 11.7 percent of GNP...At the end of the 1980s, profits claimed only 5.3 percent of GNP. As the portions of GNP going to routine labor and to investors steadily dwindled, the portion going to problem-solvers and -identifiers and strategic brokers steadily grew."
The great American middle class has been seriously affected. This class, usually defined in terms of family income ($15,000 to $50,000), embraced 65 percent of the population in 1970; today it is less than 50 percent. Between 1968 and 1993, according to Brad Edmondson of American Demographics magazine, the middle class share of aggregate household income declined by 5 percent. At the same time, the top 5 million households increased their incomes by up to 10 percent a year: "More and more of America's wealth," Edmondson writes, ''is concentrating in the top fifth of households -- the "cognitive elite" -- while the middle class gets less. Few have noticed it, but this well-established trend has accelerated in the 1990s." While 20 million households stayed ahead of inflation, 78 million households were getting poorer.
These trends are unlikely to change. The arguments of Herrnstein and Murray about the culling process in education and the success paths of their "cognitive elite" are virtually identical to Reich's own analysis: "Our best schools and universities are providing a small subset of America's young with excellent training in the techniques essential to symbolic analysis. When supplemented by interested and engaged parents, good health care, visits to museums and symphonies, occasional foreign travel, home computers, books and all other cultural and educational paraphernalia that symbolic-analytic parents are delighted to shower on their progeny, the education of this fortunate minority is an exceptionally good preparation for the world that awaits." This "fortunate minority" consists of only 15 to 20 percent of our school children; equal numbers are illiterate and vastly greater numbers are poorly equipped by the educational system to "compete in the high-value global economy..."
What fate awaits the poor white child in Maine, the rural South or Appalachia or the poor black child of the inner city whose very life is at constant threat in that environment? Except in the very rarest cases, these children will never be able to compete with the healthy, well-nourished, culture-devouring, computer- trained, foreign-traveling, Ivy League-educated child of symbolic-analytic parents.
These fortunate children are not only showered with advantages undreamed of in the population at large but are shielded from day-to-day contact with the world outside by virtue of the neighborhoods in which they live and the schools and universities they attend. They are even shielded as we learned during the Vietnam War from military service and other civic duties borne by the less fortunate.
For the poor and for the middle class the pool of opportunity in the American job market is shrinking. Nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980s as U.S. manufacturers shifted production to low-wage countries and "downsized" for efficiency and economy. A great many white-collar jobs also vanished. AT&T shifted the assembly of standard telephones from Louisiana to Singapore and then to Thailand in search of lower and lower labor costs. American Airlines shifted 1,000 data processing jobs to Barbados.
In 1977, it took assembly-line workers 35 hours to produce a car. Today it can be done in eight hours. As a result, the number of auto workers declined in the years 1974 to 1988 from 480,000 to 260,000. We read every day about "downsizings" at companies such as IBM, Mobil Oil and General Electric and in other prime sectors of the economy. You don't need a teller to cash your check; MOST machines do it cheaper and faster.
A lot of displaced workers wind up in lower paying service jobs in hotels, restaurants, bars, retail establishments, nursing homes, fast-food joints, airline reservations and low-level places in public bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, jobs for the "cognitive elite"have grown significantly. They accounted for about 8 percent of the labor force in 1950 and account for about 20 percent today. But the very nature of those jobs -- ''symbolic analysis" and "symbol manipulation" -- makes them unattainable for all but the "brightest" in our society.
The implications of these social and economic changes -- the division of homo sapiens into two distinct classes -- are the subject of Christopher Lasch's final book -- The Revolt of the Elites. Lasch writes:
The decline of manufacturing and the consequent loss of jobs; the shrinkage of the middle class; the growing number of the poor... No one has a plausible solution to these intractable problems, and most of what passes for political discussion doesn't even address them...
Elites who define the issues have lost touch with the people...The unreal, artificial character of our politics reflects their insulation from the common life, together with a secret conviction that the real problems are insoluble.
George Bush's wonderment, when he saw for the first time an electronic scanning device at a supermarket checkout counter, revealed, as in a flash of lightning, the chasm that divides the privileged class from the rest of the nation.
There has always been a privileged class even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings. In the 19th century wealthy families were typically settled, often for several generations, in a given locale... Wealth was understood to carry civic obligations. Libraries, museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals and other civic amenities stood as so many monuments to upper-class munificence...
The new aristocracy is different. They follow the Holy Grail of money and position wherever it leads -- usually to the East and West Coast enclaves populated by people like themselves. They are in revolt, in Lasch's view, against Middle America "as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy... [They] are at home only in transit to the high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist's view of the world -- not a perspective that is likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy."
In his book, The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gassett speculated that a revolution by the masses would threaten the existing social order and the "civilizing traditions of Western culture." Lasch views these threats now as coming from the new elites who reject middle-class values and accept no responsibility for the "exacting standards without which civilization is impossible." Their "trendiness" is hostile to enduring standards of any kind. They regard with "mingled scorn and apprehension...everything that stands in the way of progress," whether it be family values or religious fundamentalism or homophobia. "These traditionalist values are the products of provincial minds stupefied by prolonged exposure to television."
Contempt of the elite for the common man, as Lasch sees it, is in part "the loss of respect for honest manual labor. We think of creative work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life... Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience in making anything substantial."
The idea of elites and aristocracies at one end of the homo sapiens spectrum and ordinary people at the other has been around a long time -- haves and have-nots, sinners and the redeemed, superior and inferior classes and castes. The idea that humanity is divisible into two species, so to speak, is certainly shared by Reich, Lasch and the authors of The Bell Curve.
A quite different view of man is articulated by present day demographers and theorists. Alvin Toffler in his book, Power Shift, describes a process of "de-massification" in American society. Our people, he argues, are not a homogenous blob of humanity or merely two sides of a coin. They represent instead a "mosaic" of great diversity in which "mass production," "mass taste" and "mass media" are obsolete ideas. Even "mass democracy", he argues, is outliving its usefulness:
Mass democracy implies the existence of masses. But if technology permits the customization of products, if markets are being broken into niches, if the media multiply and serve continually narrowing audiences, why should politics still presume the existence of homogenous masses? With de-massification, people's needs and, therefore, their political demands diversify...force us to redefine the most fundamental democratic assumptions.
At the top of the social classes are the "meritocracy" and what remains of "old money": the Blue Blood estates, the Urban Gold Coasts, the Furs and Station Wagon set, the Pools and Patio people, and the Brains and Money crowd that includes the political class and a smattering of journalists.
The diversity of tastes and styles, Michael Weiss has written, is evidence of "the continuing fragmentation of society. Americans are divided not just according to rich or poor, black or white, city folk or country cousin. The nation has splintered into diverse factions of baby boomers and retirees, frequent-flying executives and pink-collar workers, mobile Westerners and settled Southerners.
The Claritas Corporation, a pioneer in the concept of "lifestyle segmentation," divides the country into 40 primary neighborhood "clusters," each with a colorful label. Each has distinctive socioeconomic characteristics, distinctive tastes and consumption patterns, distinctive value systems and political behaviors. They define the social classes to which all belong and reveal the great disparities in wealth, place, status and opportunity.
There are class divisions here. There are money differences. But no attempt to describe homo sapiens in terms of haves and have-nots, "brights" and "less brights" can succeed. The diversity, the many value systems, the ambitions and aspirations of the American people are not susceptible to that kind of analysis.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan had it right a few years ago when he said to even approach an understanding of American society and its problems we must "complexify rather than simplify" our way of looking at things. And that includes the way we look at homo sapiens, a species more complicated and diverse than the Darwinists or social scientists would have it.
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