Essentialism Again

The meaning of Mismeasure

A few years ago, after the Afghanistan withdrawal, our wealthy neighbors who own several homes did something very admirable: they temporarily donated the house next to ours to an extended family of Afghan refugees. It was a super-interesting experience. A couple of the adult men had been translators for the US army, which is why they needed to flee and why they eventually (after a truly frightening month camped outside the airport) escaped. The women, however, were 100% rural Afghanis. They spoke not a single word of English, were deeply religious, filled traditional roles in the home. They didn’t wear shoes.

We spent a certain amount of time trying to socialize, sitting silently in their living room sipping tea. There was nothing to say, not a single point of contact between their experience and ours. Maybe their kids, who were cute and learned English rapidly. But imagine for a second an awful situation that destroys your home and forces you to jump on a plane, eventually getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, in a profoundly Muslim culture, not understanding the language. You have no money, no job, no home.

Under circumstances like that, the idea that someone might pull out a test kit and ask those women to complete matrices of abstract symbols to determine their “IQ” is just unimaginably ridiculous. How could anyone ever take such an idea seriously? But this is what IQ fetishests have been doing for 100 years, from the early days at Ellis Island to the Richard Lynn national IQ stuff to Rindermann et al last week.

The answer to the question of how anyone could ever think this was a good idea is essentialism. To the IQ fetishists, an IQ test is kind of like a full-body CT, showing the inner reality of someone’s cognitive capacity, with an implication that this inner trait is likely to be passed on to their children. If one of my refugee neighbors had abdominal pain, you wouldn’t think twice about scanning them; the essentialists think an IQ test does this cognitively instead of anatomically.

These ideas about intelligence were most famously expressed by Stephen J Gould, in the too-often-maligned classic, The Mismeasure of Man. I have defended Gould elsewhere and won’t do it again here. In fact, I will emphasize where I disagree with him. Gould took his on-target historical criticism of essentialism about intelligence to the conclusion that IQ testing in general is a useless and retrograde activity. I don’t think that’s true: I think you can build a non-essentialist view of cognitive testing that unifies it with behavioral measurement in general. (See Chapter 7 of my upcoming book!) This post explores some of the ideas in that chapter.

IQ testing is a way of assessing the current status of someone’s ability to get correct answers to abstract questions, in the same sense that an anxiety questionnaire is a way of assessing a person’s tendency to answer Yes to questions about being anxious. Both operate in the here and, measuring people from the outside in, not the other way around. Both of them are good predictors of certain kinds of outcomes that matter.

I will go so far as to put this in terms of how I would frame a defence of Rindermann et al if I were forced to do so. They could say, look, it doesn’t really matter why these refugees are getting low scores on IQ tests. One way or another they are, and those scores are an index of the fact that it is going to cost money to educate and integrate them. It’s like observing (as they do) that they don’t have any money in their bank accounts. They are poor, uneducated, and it is going to take money to help them. We don’t think it is worth spending that money.

I hasten to add that I don’t agree with that argument, but at least it makes clear that the core of it is political, not biological. The two philosophy-based replies to the article do a good (if not sufficiently negative, IMHO) job of showing that the IQ argument doesn’t really have anything to do with the ethical argument (never mind the Christian one) of our responsibility to help refugees. But if someone wants to argue that as a matter of ethics, politics, and economics we shouldn’t do anything for refugees, that’s an argument they can make. Just leave out the fake biology.