We are so much smarter and better now than past generations, right? RIGHT?
[NOTE: I wrote the first part of the following post in 2013. Since then, the problem and the hubris it describes have increased exponentially. So I thought it might be a good time to re-post it and add some new remarks.]
I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again.
But I thought I’d present the quote anyway because—like so much of Bloom’s oeuvre—it shows his uniquely facile mind and brilliant observations.
It was from an audio recording of a lecture that Bloom had given back in (to the best of my recollection, anyway) the mid-1980s. I had tried to transcribe it faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:
You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.
Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.
Bloom was not a cultural relativist; he believed it was a pernicious influence that had taken over American education. Time has proven him correct, has it not?
That’s where the original 2013 post ended. But I’ll add a 2021 addendum, which is that so many students – perhaps even the majority – no longer say, or no longer are allowed to say, “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on.” The prevailing notion is that students are too outraged and violated by even hearing about history that doesn’t conform to current standards and that the remedy is to not learn about it or even be reminded of it, except in the context of how evil it was and how the current descendants of those evil people must pay a price. The price can be monetary and/or to stand at the back of the line when jobs and influence are handed out and/or the need for public confession of sins.
I would also add that Bloom, when speaking in the 80s, mentioned that history was then seen as the “history of the enslavement of women.” That way of teaching history isn’t gone, but it has now been at least partially eclipsed by the idea of history as the history of the enslavement of black and brown people at the hands of white people. The NY Times’ 1619 Project is an excellent example of the latter, in which American history was rewritten and distorted in order to fit the all-important prevailing narrative that is meant to shape the minds and policies of generations to come.
And now IQs, contra the Flynn Effect (which says that IQs have been inexplicably rising for decades), are officially dropping.
Whew! That’s a relief.
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I worry that drugs are making us more creative than we actually are.
–Lily Tomlin, sometime in the 70s
That IQs are dropping is no surprise. High IQ individuals are having a lot fewer kids (if any). And the converse…
A recent meme I saw said something to the effect—
1970s car manuals explain how to adjust engine valves yourself.
Today’s car manuals explain that you shouldn’t drink the battery water.
We are way dumber. Personally, I don’t know how lawyers wrote documents without word processing.
NorCal. To be fair, in those days you could do the valves. Our dealer no longer has “mechanics”. They have “technicians”.
when i told my SIL (44 yo) 3 or 4 years ago that he would never say “i disagree with what you say, but i’ll defend your right to say it”, he didn’t disagree.
Cornhead:
Legal secretaries who knew shorthand (extinct)?
He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe
He was familiar with the outlook of students (1) enrolled at selective institutions and (2) ensconced in academic programs. NB, the institution he was most associated with was the University of Chicago. If I’m not mistaken, their vocational programs are for post-baccalaureate students only. (They have law, medicine, business, public policy, social work, and ‘molecular engineering).
Art Deco:
Of course Bloom wasn’t a pollster or sociologist doing research on hundreds of universities across the land. But he didn’t have to be that to make keen observations about university students over time. He was a professor who noticed the changes in student (and faculty) thought over decades spent at various institutions. Over the years as a professor, he had also done a lot of thinking about the function of the university and of an education in the humanities. He taught (according to Wiki) first at the École Normale Supérieure and France and also taught in Germany, as well as adult education at the University of Chicago. Then he taught regular students at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago.
“He taught (according to Wiki) first at the École Normale Supérieure and France and also taught in Germany, as well as adult education at the University of Chicago. Then he taught regular students at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago.”
Gee. this guy couldn’t hold down a steady job 😉
Then he taught regular students at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University of Chicago.
All of these are selective research universities. Cornell has a vocational aspect and I would assume Tel Aviv and Toronto do as well.
He knew a segment of the student body. The youth studying accounting at a state college he never met.
There’s truth here. I have a couple of friends who believe as a matter of faith that they and their children are much smarter than past generations because they selected spouses for intelligence rather than looks. Nevermind that both of them met their spouses at the same small-town high school where their own respective parents met. Both are super-woke.
Art+Deco despite usual obtuse pettifogging does have a point here. There’s more to life than the so-called cognitive elite — especially in a very late stage civilization where social mobility ain’t what it used to be. If you’re White in Flyover Country it takes a *lot* more than raw IQ to get into the Ivies.
Also Ivies today select for white people who are sociopathic enough to want to jump through a bunch of virtue-signalling hoops from age of ~11 in order to get past the admissions zampolits. This automatically filters out a lot of high functioning autist genius types who are congenitally compelled to describe things as they are rather than as the current PC ideology requires. No way Isaac Newton would have gotten into Princeton in the current year.
Also, it’s not just the ‘Cognitive Elite’ which matters. Really what keeps a society functioning and limits its success is the size of the Smart Fraction: accountants, jobbing lawyers, skilled technicians, all the folks who don’t just follow routines, but have foresight and problem-solving ability.
There *are* of course a whole bunch of other factors in play. Associative mating is much more common among cognitive elite today than in the past. We no longer live under anything remotely looking like Darwinian Selection and therefore mutational load has been rising since the early 1800s and accelerating massively with expansion of sanitation and invention of antibiotics.
It’s hard to imagine anyone reading Plato’s Dialogues, Cicero, Sir Thomas Browne, and could go on endlessly making a list, imagining that people today are smarter than people in the past. Problem is that just about nobody in ye self-perpetuating credentialed ‘Cognitive Elite’ today *has* read them or sat through a bunch of seminars with the likes of Bloom. Ignorance truly is ego-preserving bliss for them.
Hahaha … I always wondered what could possibly induce ugly people to have sex with each other.
It appears it is driven by a competitive urge. Of course liberals are more into feelings, than beauty, and as the Zap-man has mentioned here, have a much higher disgust threshold.
Still, there has to be some resentment bubbling away there. There is no negative biological correlation between being well formed and intelligent that I have read about; though the good-looking may in fact coast a bit on their looks, and be less driven to compensate.
The eventual result of your friend’s plan? A race of Elton John look-a-likes.
Can’t see that working out long haul.
Speak of the Devil and he appears …!
@DNW:
You didn’t imagine for a moment that I wouldn’t feel compelled to pontificate on this of all topics? 🙂
I do think there *is* some correlation between physical beauty (== symmetry / proportionality) and intelligence and mental health. But it’s complicated by confounding factors and one cannot discount that extreme outlier intelligence may well be due to fortuitous mutations.
Dutton has some convincing arguments:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310006-how-to-judge-people-by-what-they-look-like
Smart people might manage to have smarter kids by marrying for brains rather than looks, but it’s not going to raise the average IQ. What do we suppose is happening to the pretty but not-so-bright potential partners they overlooked? At most you might predict larger statistical “tails” on the bright and not-bright sides, with few middlin’-types resulting from smart-ugly-spouse-plus dumb-pretty-spouse pairings.
That’s assuming IQ has anything to do with genetics, which I’m surprised any self-respecting progressive would admit these days.
Bauxite:
Your super woke acquaintances should have been smarter in the selection of their parents.
@Texan99:
There’s also the small matter of Reversion to the Mean. It’s very easy for us to get too ‘smart’ and mess ourselves up. Evolution wants successful men to marry beautiful women and beautiful women to pick the most successful men. We mess with that at our peril.
Zaphod:
Intelligence is my favorite drug, but it has its drawbacks:
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The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. More than a quarter (26.7 percent) of the sample reported that they had been formally diagnosed with a mood disorder, while 20 percent reported an anxiety disorder—far higher than the national averages of around 10 percent for each. The differences were smaller, but still statistically significant and practically meaningful, for most of the other disorders. The prevalence of environmental allergies was triple the national average (33 percent vs. 11 percent).
–“Bad News for the Highly Intelligent: Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/
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That matches my anecdotal impressions. Excuse me while I blow my nose and rub my eyes.
@Huxley:
Totally agree! All the more reason for Neurosurgeon Dick to marry a Good-looking Bird with child-bearing hips rather than Brainy Dr Jane from the Pathology Lab.
That’s a win-win: less mutational load for his kids (he’s married a very laterally symmetrical female) and stops her marrying Tom the Thug and popping out little low IQ psychopaths. Jane? Who cares about Jane? She’s likely to abort them or use contraception or wait until too old to reproduce well anyway.
Elon Musk almost gets it right. He consorts with Bimbos, but he didn’t get the memo about them not being Cluster B Cluster@#$#s. Or, being far smarter than I am, he groks that Quantity has a Quality all of its Own. I dunno.
Art Deco:
He never pretended to have met them – or a completely representative sample of all the students at every type of college – nor did I say that he did. He met plenty of college students in the US and around the world, however, and those were the students (at elite colleges) who tended to grow up to be setting policy and teaching future generations. He also taught night school for a while, as I already said, and night school even at an elite university has a very very different student pool than the regular student body.
Bloom was describing the trends he saw that were alarming. I think he was spot on and that time has borne him out.
Had another random thought. We’ve been talking about arrogant ignorance of people today thinking they’re smarter than people in the past and I’ve been off on my regular IQ/mutational load thing.
What about declining attention span? We’re in the very early days of this, but ~10 years on from the mass adoption of smartphones, the signs are not good. What if even highly intelligent people become unable to focus attention long enough to digest (say) Gibbon’s or Spengler’s prose? All other things being equal, we risk losing access to vast chunks of human experience simply because we’ll all be too ADHD to read the original authors.
And this is just from observing adults. Imagine what it does to the neuro-development of children.
@PS Huxley: Go easy on the snuff! 😀
Zaphod:
I think you’re correct. I’ve noticed it for years. Even I have had more trouble digesting long books these days – or maybe, because I do so much reading already online, I just don’t want to read too much more.
I’ve noticed it with movies, too – not for me, but in younger people. They often don’t have the patience for the slower-paced movies of earlier times.
Searching, unsuccessfully, for that lost Bloom video got me sample-listening, I find time to read and watch long movies but not internet videos of length, to this one from the same time period. This is an interesting statement and not exactly what this excerpt might make one think.
“The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities. That makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable. That removes the sense that there is an outside, outside our cave as Plato would say.
It is not feelings or commitments that will render a man free but thoughts, reasoned thoughts. Feelings are largely formed and informed by convention. Real differences come from differences in thought and fundamental principle.”
September 11, 1987 – Allan Bloom Ubben Lecture at DePauw University. At 33:43.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO6rW7LEMzo
I have never been completely confident in predicting intellect or personality based on looks, or as Dutton’s reviewers termed it, physiognomy.
Life experience tells us there is something to it, but within limits. Research, one reads, has shown Republican women are better looking than Demo females who are more mannish in appearance; that Barbie shaped women are probably more fecund; and that conservatives are on average better looking and happier and more positive – though whether they are happier because they are treated better or because they are more symmetrical (and what that implies physiologically) is unsettled.
I thought at one time – and it was an amusing shock to me – that I had accidentally developed a skill by which I could probably predict which British actress was a lesbian.
It originated with my noticing a peculiar and somewhat distinct dental feature (an oddly flattened upper dental arch coupled to a curious and somewhat elfin look) that struck me as notable in some who I thought looked odd and kind of David Bowie-ish in the upper maxilla area. (I think I used the right terminology here …)
I noticed the feature first, and then much later picked up that they were that way from news reports.
[Picture in your mind Glenda Jackson, and that actress from Lair of the White Worm, and then one of the chicks from that show about women in New York, which I have to admit I never watched. There are others but I cannot recall what they were in. Improbably, the female star in the old Harrison Ford movie involving the Amish, though relatively attractive, had a bit of that look too. Well, not a matter to be taken too seriously.]
After getting a laugh out of my imagined perspicuity, I quit noticing. Probably in part because I quit watching boring movies just for the hell of it, and thus never saw the type anymore.
@DNW:
Within Reason and Limits agreed.
Still we wouldn’t have survived on the African Savannah without ability to note patterns and file them away as stereotypes.
I do maintain that (pace Rogers & Hammerstein who certainly never had a dog in the fight, no siree) you do have to be Carefully Taught to *not* notice certain patterns.
https://youtu.be/VPf6ITsjsgk
Understanding that like fish we swim in (preconditioned) waters is not a bad thing.
Worth a look:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275659296_By_their_words_ye_shall_know_them_Evidence_of_negative_selection_for_general_intelligence_in_vocabulary_usage_since_the_mid_19th_century
Associative mating is much more common among cognitive elite today than in the past.
Show your work.
Zaphod. Interesting proposition. I wonder–not reading the study–how they figured the vocabulary and word usage in the Dickensian areas of nineteenth-century Europe.
My wife, a retired high school teacher, said that she thought she noticed a decline in passive vocabulary. IOW, “What is this?” when encountering a word they might not use is more common now than when she began teaching in the early seventies.
My experience, might not apply to others, is that lots of reading will load up your passive vocabulary, since you can get it from context, or ask somebody. Like your parents–which brings up another issue.
There is the “thirty million word gap” between social classes–under some dispute as to results but not that it exists.
My father gave me a bunch of what were called “boys’ books” from the Twenties. They were interesting in a couple of ways. “Poppy Ott” told me that before Niagara started its work, there was a substantial drainage of the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. Turns out to be true and I heard it first in a boys in getting in boys’ trouble in a dusty little Illinois river town.
Don Sturdee told me what an Aeolian Harp is–being spooked by one in a pyramid. One of his uncles was a scientist and the other an explorer. Learned a lot there.
Roy Blakely’s scouting buddies were forever finding out stuff. His Haunted Camp presumed knowledge of things like PTSD, poor farms, why a WW I transit camp might be, metaphorically, haunted. How Canadians pronounce “Toronto”. But if you didn’t know, you were led to understand.
Baseball Joe had a friend who was an anglophile and who was being defrauded by somebody bucketing stocks. Twelve year old boys were expected to know this, or ask somebody.
Asking my Mom about how to pronounce “Hugh”, the name of a character in Garry Grayson’s Hill Street Eleven, I was saved from calling somebody I might encounter with that name “Huff”.
And the Radio Boys.
And Dick Prescott at West Point. That was so old that the highest rated Branch for grads was Engineers, not Infantry.
My precocious nine-year old granddaughter finished her Babysitters Club series. Have to ask for a look.
My folks got us Landmark Books. All kinds of stuff for kids written by, afaik, those who wrote for adults MacKinley Kantor did the one on Gettysburg, for example. Once a month, year after year. There was one on the RCMP. D-Day Wright Brothers.
Not so much with time spent on video games.
Om – Shouldn’t we all have. 🙂
Anyway, my point was that the last two generations of their family (and almost certainly more) have all drawn spouses from the same small-town gene pool, yet they are convinced that better breeding has made them and their children smarter than previous generations.
Its further evidence for me that woke progressivism is a religion masquerading as science.
If you can’t attract looks, not having any to speak of yourself, you can comfort yourself that you have brains. It’s a desperately unfortunate position to be in and i wouldn’t throw it in anybody’s face.
For complicated reasons, I once was in a building where, among other things, there was a dance class for six year old girls, give or take a year or so. It was pretty upscale. There were about a dozen young mothers there presumably waiting to pick up the kids. I figured most of them had been homecoming court eligible not too many years earlier. Maybe all of them.
Memory fades but I do recall our HS valedictorian and salutatorian were quite attractive women.
@Richard Aubrey:
I’m not certain that everyone in a Dickensian Slum or (going back a bit further) in one of Hogarth’s etchings admonishing folk not to overdo the Gin was likely to be found with head buried in Swift/Addison/Steele/Fielding, etc.
But think, for example, of Scott’s Waverley Novels. They’re not exactly full of short pithy one-liners. And these were wildly popular best sellers pirated and translated all over and devoured by quite ordinary people.
You make a very good point about children’s and adolescent literature back when. And there were also things like Richard’s Topical Encylopedia, UK Magazines such as Look and Learn, and so on. So much context has been lost that must be difficult for young people today to get up to speed. And then there’s the whole issue of not knowing what you don’t know (E D Hirsch was banging on about loss of cultural literacy back in the 80s or early 90s).
There are good things today. A while back I commented somewhere about re-reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and being able to look up locations in Google Maps and StreetView + find out what happened to people and places he mentions in the last 40 years. But we’ll never again discover Uncle Remus by flashlight under the blankets at 5 or 6 when we’re supposed to be sleeping. I was laughing too much and got busted.
We’re so smart now that this is the first time in the history of mankind [can I use that word?] that we’ve forced healthy people to quarantine themselves. Or perhaps I should say, we’ve allowed our governments to do so. I suppose it’s smarter than sacrificing a virgin, but not by much.
I do think that there’s another possible reason for longer more convoluted English prose pre 1900: Latinity. Educated people were trained from an early age to not expect a sentence to make sense until they had finished reading it (feature, not bug of Latin word order being more flexible due to being much more inflected than English). This has been lost.
There was also emphasis on Latin composition, not just reading… so people got into the habit of writing in certain way and this must have rubbed off on their English composition. If you do something enough, it becomes instinctive. Commentator James Delingpole makes the point that Oxbridge PPE graduates may be largely full of #@$%, but the practice of compiling weekly essays and defending them one-one-one in the Tutorial System makes them extremely confident and convincing bull#@$%ers. That’s because they don’t have Art+Deco there to make them show him the work.
@Jimmy:
Where you going to find a Virgin these days?
Asking for a Friend.
Kindly step this way into the Wicker Man, please Sir.
@Richard Aubrey:
Dorothy L Sayers was famously unattractive and yet possessed of great intelligence and erudition. So there’s a counter factual to my argument. She couldn’t score the kind of man she really wanted in real life, so she had to invent Lord Peter Wimsey and gave us a treasure trove of detective novels.
That’s because they don’t have Art+Deco there to make them show him the work.
Zaphod:
But who Art+Deco’s the Art+Decos? Certainly not Art+Deco.
Dorothy Sayers had a number of lovers, one husband and one child (not with her husband). Beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder.
Zaphod, neo:
I’m concerned about attention spans too. I stopped reading novels when my career took off. Then I went back and discovered the newer novels had become insufferably woke. Nonetheless, I also noticed I didn’t have the patience to read the Good Stuff I liked before.
However, from programming and math I know that nothing good comes until you strap in and really focus for big blocks of time until you live in that world.
I look back at older novels and marvel that many of them sold well and people read them for pleasure. Take this long ripe single sentence from the first chapter of Ivanhoe:
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“The curse of St Withold upon these infernal porkers!” said the swine-herd, after blowing his horn obstreperously, to collect together the scattered herd of swine, which, answering his call with notes equally melodious, made, however, no haste to remove themselves from the luxurious banquet of beech-mast and acorns on which they had fattened, or to forsake the marshy banks of the rivulet, where several of them, half plunged in mud, lay stretched at their ease, altogether regardless of the voice of their keeper.
–Sir Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”
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I’m not saying it’s bad writing, but it is more formidable than most of today’s bestsellers.
huxley:
If only “Art Deco” knew. Who is watching the watchers BTW? You were expecting a Spanish Inquisition, or someone with more granduer?
Zaphod.
In the old days, what percentage of “quite ordinary people” were literate or could afford books? And would they have been considered, if not measured, in the study about such things?
It’s said that Europeans didn’t achieve height equality between social classes until the Fifties. Much had to do with pre-and post-natal nutrition. Saw a pic of the Gloucestershire Regiment marching to the POE for Korea. Four files back out of the picture. Officers walking along side, all taller than the Other Ranks. Bulldog Drummond’s author kept going on about the guy’s immense size. We learn he was SIX FEET TALL. So I might wonder about cognitive differences as well.
My father, born in 1920, claimed to have seen every movie made between 1925 and 1943. There were a lot of them; you got two for the price of admission. His view is that the lords and detectives genre, and the US version, was escapist. For a dime you got out of the Depression and into the world of stately homes, butlers, whiskey on the sideboard.
When I was growing up, the Windsor television station–I lived near Detroit–ran NHL and old Brit movies. So I saw something of what my father referred to.
I got the Unpleasantness at The Bellona Club on youtube some time back.
Rosemary Sutcliff had her problems, physically. I think her YA protagonists would attract traditional young women readers. Except her guys are bound up by things no fellow can do–or not do–which is likely to complicate the dating schedule.
Asked at a bookstore for something by her. Got a sneer and directed to the warrior princess shelf.
I discovered that Junior Scholastic is still a thing. I got “The Chocolate Pilot”, the dressed-up version of The Candy Bomber of Berlin Airlift fame. I was pleased to find the context explained without blaming the US. It was pretty clear. And Boys’ Life is still around. I think the last one I saw, not too many years ago, had the feature about a Scout saving somebody’s life. I think that used to be in each issue. Always some Scout doing that sort of thing.
Coincidentally, I saw Tom Brokaw doing a presentation on The Candy Bomber before the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra. Halvorsen appeared. This is a thing they do. Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey fame did a lengthy presentation on the origin of “It Is Well With My Soul” and the family involved. Have to find out some more.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has shipped over fifty million kids’ books, free over the years. All you have to do is ask and one arrives every month up to age five. Age appropriate. But you have to WANT it…. And read it to your kid.
Intelligence is whatever the intelligence test tests. As a general rule, the test is designed, with some prayer I imagine, to see about things necessary to success in this society. Verbal skills. Numeracy. Mechanical….remember the diagrams of pulleys and so forth and you had to figure out which way the last one turned?
Nobody’s interested in spatial orientation, at which Australian aborigines excel. Can’t afford to forget where you left the waterhole.
On a different issue which may affect mating:
Went to see my nine-year old granddaughter pitching in a softball tournament. She’s pretty good. Practicing, she went a little wide and cracked the siding on a neighbor’s garage. Hope nobody tells her about the brushback.
Not far from me, a catcher was warming up a pitcher. Her back was to me. She’d drop to a squat, glove in front, right hand behind her. Catch, stand, return the ball. Repeat. After a while if occurred to me this kid’s done sixty knee-benders. I remember having done eighty in jump school….
One blonde mite with a strike zone about eight inches high got walked to first. Stole second because she could, sliding under a good throw. Single sent her to third. After which she stole home, another good slide.
My son is frustrated that a lot of them throw from the elbow instead of the shoulder but they do not throw like girls and they do not run like girls.
I saw a basketball game where one of the kids was dribbling down the floor, fending off the opposition with the left arm. Which meant she was confident of her skill and didn’t have the left hand ready to catch a mistake. This was ten and under league.
Used to be, guys figured their athletic ability, even without any training but pickup games in junior high, was superior to womens’ Going to be more difficult to be impressive. So, then what?
Art+Deco wrote, ” ‘Associative mating is much more common among cognitive elite today than in the past.’ Show your work.”
Please see Charles Murray (2012), Coming Apart .
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P.S. Art+Deco, thanks for being the rigor monitor.
And, OM, thanks for recognizing secretaries.
My father (born 1923 in Boston) was a reader. He introduced me to two of his boyhood favorites: the John R. Tunis series of sports novels and Joseph Altsheler’s French-and-Indian War adventures. I discovered the “We Were There” YA historical novels and related YA fiction on my own at the local public library. And there was the Scholastic Book Services program at school. Robb White’s “The Lion’s Paw” was a favorite; so was Russell G. Davis’ “Marine at War”, a very understated but quietly powerful precursor memoir to Eugene B. Sledge’s much-more-famous “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa”. Still have my SBS copy of Davis’ book; wished I’d kept my copy of White’s. Davis, a Massachusetts-born Marine, authored several other YA books set in exotic locations around the world. He taught at a prep school in the Berkshires after the war and did a stint with USAID in the 1950s before settling into an academic position at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I wonder whether his USAID gig was cover for something spooky.
Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Warrior Scarlet” was another grade-school favorite.
My parents sponsored our reading. They subscribed to a book-of-the-month club for kids–that’s how I got my copy of “The Wind in the Willows” with illustrations by E. H. Shepard–and various Time-Life Books series (Great Ages of Man, Great Museums of the World, etc.). Mom got me subscriptions to “Jack and Jill” (a kids’ mag) and–once I got the fishing bug–“Outdoor Life”. Wish I’d saved those too.
Attention spans and cognitive skills generally: my *impression* (pace, Deco) is that those have been declining since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Social skills too.
Forgot to mention another staple of 1960s kidhood: the “Classics Illustrated” comic books. I especially remember the CI version of “All Quiet on the Western Front”. It was extremely well done.
Please see Charles Murray (2012), Coming Apart .
Murray’s bibliography has a single reference to an article in American Journal of Sociology published in 1994.
As recently as 1928, only about 6% of each cohort were passing through institutions which granted baccalaureate degrees or 1st professional degrees. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have indicators which tended to pair people of similar intelligence levels. What you’ve got to demonstrate is that there’s a significant difference in the results consequent to using one indicator over another.
In the old days, what percentage of “quite ordinary people” were literate or could afford books? And would they have been considered, if not measured, in the study about such things?
Richard Aubrey:
I’d have to run it down, but I recall reading that Americans in Colonial times had a higher literacy rate than we do today.
Hubert, I have always been an avid reader. I was the kind of kid that would take a volume of the encyclopedia to bed if nothing else. I read all the Rob White books. I liked ‘The Lions Paw’ a lot too but my favorite of his was ‘No Man’s Land’. I discovered ‘Silent Ship, Silent Sea’ first and I was hooked.
I still have almost every book I have ever owned. I just can’t part with them. I have at least 1000 volumes on military, technical and world history alone.
Chases Eagles,
Thanks for the tip about “No Man’s Land”–I’ll look into getting a copy, if I can find one at a reasonable price. White’s books command a Boomer Nostalgia premium.
I’ve got most of his other books, including “Up, Periscope”, “Torpedo Run”, “The Survivor”, “Deathwatch”, and the one that hooked you, “Silent Ship, Silent Sea”. Note for WWII USN history buffs on this forum (looking at you, Om): “Silent Ship…” is based on the story of the USS Jarvis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jarvis_(DD-393)
Talk about a ghost ship. White grew up in the Philippines, graduated from the USNA (Class of 1931, two years after Robert Heinlein), and served in the Navy during WWII. He was the father of storyteller and NPR commentator Bailey White.
The thing about White’s books and other YA literature from that period is that is accessible but not condescending or sugarcoated. They took the “adult” part of “young adult” seriously.
Huxley. I’ve heard that. Unofficially, I’ve heard the lowest literacy was when huge numbers of non-English speaking immigrants were here, first generation. They may have been literate in their own language.
But I was speaking of the UK or Europe.
Among the Puritans, it was universal, I believe. Literate in this case not meaning “literary”, but better than just barely able to write one’s name. Sufficient to read the bible and broad sheets and write letters. Rather like literacy is defined nowadays [ until recently anyway] as the ability to read and comprehend a newspaper.
Not so universal in the frontier South. But there, many of the scions of the great families were educated in England, so reported Hackett Fischer and others, I believe.
Assortative mating has gotten a lot of attention with regard to everything from body size, to intelligence, to ideological divides.
Canadians of course, being one of the most famous examples of a population become politically compliant and neutered through a process of conscious self-selection and assortative mating. LOL ( sorry Canada, we don’t have much room to talk nowadays)
And famously, this:
Evidence of Assortative Mating in Autism Spectrum Disorder
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322319312843
Hubert:
Thanks for the link to the USS Jarvis.
I’d have to run it down, but I recall reading that Americans in Colonial times had a higher literacy rate than we do today.
Don’t think so. Data on illiteracy we have from about 1880 onward. The non-black population in 1880 was not universally literate (somewhat under 10% were illiterate). (NB, social hypochondria sells a certain sort of government spending, so you see terms like ‘food insecure’ and ‘functionally illiterate’).
Art Deco:
Show your work.
Show your work.
When you’ve learned the distinction between citing a datum and making a controversial assertion about social behavior (for which the data set with be scanty), I’ll get around to it.
There is data in the Digest of Education Statistics and (IIRC) the Statistical Abstract of the United States on this subject.