Evolutionary Destiny - Intelligence, The Bell Curve, And Making Way For The Best And The Brightest

Christopher Manning had been able to figure things out by the time he was two.  He could help his mother put together the Ikea table she was struggling to assemble, he got the drift of language, parsed English grammar and even managed the conditional, and understood cause and effect, risk and reward, and cost-benefit by the time he was three.

 

He slept little, keeping his parents up past eleven, could be a pill at times, but soon got the picture - throwing tantrums was simply a waste of valuable time when there was so much to learn. 

Other such bright children might have focused their intelligence and become musical prodigies, but Christopher's mind was too far-reaching and curious for the exploration and mastery of just one thing.  He might become more focused when older, but for now, the world was a marvelously complex puzzle to be solved. 

 

By the time he entered kindergarten, he was already able to read, and play chess, so boredom made him a restless, often irritable child.  His parents spoke with the teacher who patiently explained that public school was for all children, and it was her job to bring the less able up to the standard of the rest.  'We live in a democratic society', she snipped at Mr. and Mrs. Manning, parents who thought their child was the center of the universe. 

She had been promoted from one of the District's worst schools deep in the heart of the inner city to the Wilson School, one of the city's best.  Located in a solidly white, upper middle class, professional ward, Wilson defied the city's homogenizing, 'democratic' reforms which allocated millions on special education and little on the gifted and talented. Parents compensated for this bias and made way for their bright, ambitious children through aggressive PTA involvement and parent advocacy. 

The many lawyers in the neighborhood saw to it that parental investment in resource teachers was protected, and the brightest children could learn quickly at math, reading, science, and logic. 

The liberal city council, the even more progressive school board, and the teachers' union mounted their own defense of cooperative learning and advantages for the less able, and won a court battle in which the presiding judge ruled that such parental involvement went far beyond cooperation and invaded the right of the city to mandate educational programs it saw fit to administer. 

So, the Mannings took their son out of Wilson and enrolled him in a special elementary school in Virginia, a feeder for the Thomas Jefferson School for Math and Science, one of the countries best-known, and best-performing competitive public schools. 

Christopher thrived there, for it was a place where there were no artificial barriers to ability.  If a child like him was able to read at a fifth grade level, he was matched with others of the same ability and grouped accordingly.  The same went for math, science, and logic. 

Competition was encouraged at the school - the usual public school emphasis on self-esteem, coloring within the lines, multiple intelligences was completely absent, and children were taught to reach beyond what they thought possible and to test their abilities against others. The familiar 'Good job!' support of the mediocre was absent and stars were given only for the highest, objective achievement. 

The school of course came under criticism for its approach to learning, for instilling an elitist sense of privilege among the all white and Asian students enrolled there.  How would they ever learn empathy, consideration, and acceptance of those in society who had fewer advantages? If tax dollars were to be spent, then they should be apportioned according to need, not privilege. 

The principal of the school was not just an educational administrator, but politically connected; and despite the overwhelmingly liberal cast of the county, he was able to maintain an even keel and keep the naysayers at bay.  He was convinced that it was the best and brightest who should benefit most from tax dollars, for they would be the ones who would contribute most to society. 

He held his own against charges of white supremacy, elitism and racism.  He was eloquent in his advocacy for the most gifted and used to best advantage his political connections with the biggest investors in the burgeoning high-tech corridor of the county whose children were attending his school. 

In the next election, the county turned surprisingly Republican and conservative.  Virginia's southern and southwestern counties had always voted Republican but for different reasons.  Rural 'bass boat' Republicanism was not the kind emerging in Northern Virginia where it was focused on just the issues of excellence, individualism, and opportunity promoted by the principal.  The county was by no means a conservative enclave, but it at least emerged from its uniformly progressive cocoon. 

Christopher's school of course was not the only public school in the nation which had refused the cant and specious obligations of the advocates of progressive education. Not surprisingly 'competitive' schools in Texas and Florida proliferated where conservative government openly supported them. 

'Only the best for Texas' was the rallying cry of one of the state's conservative legislators, a man up from poverty in West Texas whose tenure in the state legislator was only a stepping stone to higher office.  He had taken nothing from the public trough, never once had his family relied on welfare, food stamps, or public 'generosity'.  He had made his way thanks to native intelligence, ambition, and energy; and the thousands of children like him, born at the right end of the bell curve, should not have to suffer the indignity of being told they were just like everyone else, thrown into a lumpen proletariat of mediocrity. 

The movement, thanks to Florida and Texas educators gained traction, and despite the opposition - there was nothing that infuriated progressives more than favoring the best not the least - the program expanded. 

This was helped by recent Supreme Court rulings restricting affirmative action, the most racially biased, corrosive, and destructive initiative in American higher education.  Thousands of unqualified students were admitted to universities and colleges, failed miserably despite intensive remedial education, and dropped out in debt and with no qualifications for entry into society.  These students had taken the places of those more qualified and with more social and academic potential. 

Since those rulings, schools like Christopher's were no longer under the same scrutiny and suffered less political opprobrium.  It was increasingly recognized that favoring the best and the brightest was indeed in America's interest - in everyone's interest. 

Christopher who had begun to lose his interest in study because of the depressing, enforced educational communitarianism of his old school, brightened immediately in his new, fostering environment.  In due course he went on to Thomas Jefferson, MIT, and Stanford's post-graduate program in advanced mathematics.  He never looked back. 

Thanks to the experience of Christopher Manning and the principal of the high-end public school in Virginia, the move to privatize K-12 education gained attention and currency.  The public system as currently configured was beneficial to no one.  In the District of Columbia alone, the truancy rate was over 50 percent, barely 25 percent of students read and did math at grade level, and the parents of more able students had either watched their children suffer or found the means to transfer them. 

Won't privatization lead to a sink hole of impoverished, low-performing public schools where the most able students have fled to better offerings leaving the least able alone?  Yes, but that sink hole will not be any worse or deeper than it now is.  There will always be a bell curve and the best and the brightest will always be at one end and the least able on the other.  All the best intentions of liberal educators cannot change that calculus. 

Christopher Manning prospered and so did everyone around him.  He was one of Darwin's fittest, and society, part of that evolutionary algorithm responded.

Panic In America - Ebola, Hantavirus, Global Warming And The Con Game Of New Age Healing

Felicity Jones was a born worrier.  When she was a little girl she worried that the unusually cold April with its twin frosts would deny Spring; that she would be crippled by polio and spend the rest of her life in an iron lung; that she would be orphaned, and that no man would ever love her. 

Extreme social anxiety is a relatively new psychological disorder.  In the America of earlier times, colonists, settlers, homesteaders, and shopkeepers were too busy to worry about incidentals; and in the days before modern medicine, longevity was a matter for God and Fate.  

In Felicity's day, when prosperity gave people time on their hands, anxiety was epidemic, and the consumption of mood enhancers, tranquilizers, anti-depressants, and emotional boosters followed suit.  America had become the world's most anxious nation and the most doped up, which was a good thing, for suicides maintained their basal level and barely registered in mortality statistics. 

Existential worry - the conviction that the next day might be one's last in a storm of frightful, uncontrollable African viruses, the final scorching incineration of the planet, or the nervous trigger finger setting off nuclear Armageddon - was a new psycho-social phenomenon.  In other words, in addition to personal emotional anxiety, the stock-in-trade of psychotherapy, more and more people were worried about universal disaster. 

Felicity had what had been described in the early months of the disease as 'COVID Panic' - a completely unhinged and terrifying conviction that this was The Big One, an epidemic of Biblical proportion, the plague that would wipe out entire populations.  She was not alone, for the American government with the advice and counsel of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated COVID czar, who under the guise of prudence, extreme caution, and heightened vigilance enacted draconian rules of behavior.  Masks and social distancing were mandated, shops, cafes, and restaurants were shuttered, schools were closed, and downtown office work halted. 

In previous influenza epidemics like the Hong Kong flu of 1968 a far more serious disease during which nothing much was changed and life went on, people got sick and died as they always had. Most recovered and the whole episode was filed, archived, and forgotten ('Shit happens', said hippies).  COVID on the other hand was treated like an existential nightmare; so it was not surprising that it sent many people like Felicity Jones over the edge. 

She duck-taped all her windows, retrieved her mail only after it had sat in a disinfection container for three days, scoured and rinsed all canned foods - the only foods she would eat - scrubbed her counters, sinks, and floors twice a day, huddled in an air-purified room, and triple-masked, came out only for bathroom pit stops and a hasty bite to eat. 

Just when the epidemic seemed to be slowing, scientists at the CDC announced new, even more deadly strains of the virus, and Dr. Fauci went on national prime time television to warn Americans not to let their guard down.  'This one is a real killer', he said. 

Just when Felicity thought she could relax and give a sigh of relief, she found herself redoubling her protective efforts.  Her hands were red and raw from scrubbing, she lost weight because of her restrictive diet, and she looked a mess; and now the routine had to be begun again. 

Completely shell-shocked and emotionally spent, she was in no condition to deal with any other such problems, but they seemed to keep on coming - and in fact she stayed glued to the news to hear of any new biological threat.  When Ebola broke out again in eastern Congo and spread like wildfire, she was sure that it was only a matter of weeks before this flesh-eating, alien nightmare would surface on American shores. 

When the hantavirus was reported in Texas, she again became the madwoman of Albemarle Street, a crazed, wild-haired character that children were told to stay away from.  When H2N5 emerged from an open chicken market in Shanghai and spread as far south as Guangdong and as far north as the Tibetan order, she awaited the worst. 

The arrival of the screwworm, a hideous flesh-eating creature that penetrated the skin of live animals and humans, ate their flesh and organs, rendered them mad and then killed them, she completely lost it, went around the bend, hysterical and panicked beyond hope.  If it hadn't been for Axel Burnham, a newly minted psychological advisor, coach, and healer, she would definitely have thrown herself off the Brooklyn Bridge. 

 

Axel had been a bolt-fixer on the still-human assembly line for John Deere farm equipment in Chillicothe, Ohio when he realized that there were far easier ways to make a living.  His family and friends had all gone to him for advice and counsel when they were suffering from the loss of a loved one, dealing with cancer or a troubled child, or just needed a patient listener.  'You should hang out a shingle', his Aunt Mary said. 'Hundreds of people will pay for your help.  Why do it for free?'

So Axel, an enterprising and ambitious man, went online and enrolled in a virtual learning program which would lead to a few months hands-on training and internship after which he could become a bona fide counsellor to the troubled. 

And so it was that a shaken, emotionally distraught, at the end of her rope Felicity Jones sat in Axel Burnham's small, windowless counselling room, dainty handkerchief in hand, dressed simply and as well as she could manage, and looked hopefully at the well-groomed, handsome young man in front of her. 

As new at the game as he was, Axel relied on his old-fashioned, tried and true 'sincere empathy' algorithm, a fancy way of saying listening to people's grief, an approach which had always worked in the past, although the farmers of Chillicothe were never as tightly wound and discombobulated as Felicity.  

He hesitated, wanting to open with, 'Now, what seems to be the problem?', but that sounded too much like General Hospital or the other afternoon soaps his mother watched when he was little, but simply said, 'I'm here to help you'.  

His mix of New Age nostrums, warm water therapy, a here-and-there Freudian reference, and a Whole Earth wellbeing program was just what Felicity needed to calm her nerves; and Axel was indeed a good listener.  She went on forever, banging on about COVID, Ebola, climate change, the Tsetse fly and the suffocating carbon emissions polluting every cubic foot of formerly breathable air. 

Felicity was the perfect patient for Axel to begin his new career, for she was so completely out of control and desperate for any kind of solicitude, that he could try any of the alternate therapies he had learned from The Roberts Advanced Psycho-Counselling Method online course. 

Dr. Phillip Roberts, designer of the course and a seasoned practitioner in alternative psychotherapy, had put together an eclectic mix of meditation, hatha yoga, and the practices of the martyred saints and drew on each when called for. 

Axel was particularly drawn to Roberts' focus on the martyrs.  St. Sebastian, for example, the saint who died a slow and excruciating death, pierced by a thousand arrows, had smiled in heavenly repose, so in control was he of his body and mind and in perfect harmony with the universe. 

'If he could do it, so can you', Axel said to Felicity. 

Slowly but surely, Felicity came out of her tremulous, fearful state and felt human again.  She had been foolish to worry so much about the simple matter of a virus when men and women far more evolved than she had accepted their fate and the world around them and met their maker. 

Axel tried the same deal with his next patient, a woman from the South End who had tried to kill her husband, had been sent to Ottaway for five years where she had become addicted to Fentanyl and as part of the conditions of her parole was sent to Axel.  The parole board couldn't care less about whom she went to, just so that she was out of their hair. 

He tried everything in his grab bag, and not only did nothing work but the woman called him out for 'bald chicanery'.  He was a charlatan, a snake oil salesman, a guttersnipe, and a fool, and if she had to spend one more hour with him, she would break his neck just like she tried to do with her ex-husband. 

Chastened and intimidated, Axel agreed to a compromise.  Pay him, don't bother to come in, and he would give glowing reports to the parole board. 

He felt a bit guilty about this, but he wasn't wedded to some online profession any more than he was bolting struts in the tractor factory. 

It just goes to show you what a great country America is - fucked up for sure, completely wacko on this COVID, Ebola, climate change nonsense, but the generator of entrepreneurs.  Finding a niche was what the enterprise economy was all about, and Axel had found a good one.  Off the wall, inveterate, loose-shunted worriers, gullible true believers and New Age shell game conmen like Axel.  A perfect match as old as the hills. He just had other fish to fry.

Barbarism, The Heart Of Darkness, And Human Nature - The Reality Few Want To Face

Joseph Conrad wrote about Africa and its threatening primitivism. In The Heart of Darkness, Conrad tells the story of Kurtz, who according to the manger of the Central Station, was one of the new breed of colonists sent out by the Company, charged with both dominating the ivory trade and bringing civilization to the natives.  

Yet in his tragic end he became more African than the Africans. In arrogating divinity to himself through a manipulation of tribal beliefs; and by maintaining complete control over the natives because of this assumed power, he rules absolutely, amasses a fortune in ivory, and becomes an authoritarian ruler.  Yet his assumption of African demonic spiritualism has a price.

As he speaks his last words, ‘The horror…the horror’, he finally understands that having descended completely into the primitive, having abandoned all traces of Western moral civilization, he is far worse than the natives of the jungle..  While the Africans who carry out ritual sacrifice are doing so as part of a sophisticated cosmology, Kurtz, when he encourages such sacrifice and ritual cannibalism only to promote his own longevity and power, descends into a completely amoral universe.

Marlowe, the narrator of the story, sees Kurtz as a courageous man willing to abandon his Christian beliefs and to consider the power and primitive glory of African animism.

“The earth seemed unearthly”, Marlowe says. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.

They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore.  

Marlowe is right, and Kurtz is a Nietzschean Superman, one who has been able to look over the edge of humanity and see what it really is.  Yet as much as Marlowe rightly acknowledges Kurtz’s search for understanding and meaning in the most unlikely and threatening places – it indeed takes courage to peer over the edge and to look into one’s own ‘heart of darkness’ -  he does not see the frightening, existential horror that might come of this search.  

Kurtz looked over the edge but died with the terrifying notion that not only he but all of mankind was indeed primitive; that ‘civilization’ was nothing more than a balm, a protective veneer, or at best a restraining order to violence.

Marlow forgives Kurtz for his ‘unspeakable rites’, whatever they might be and he chooses not to know.  He overlooks his arrogance and delusional conceits; but he admires his indomitable will.  Not only has Kurtz survived in the savage, primitive jungle, he has thrived.  Unlike most Westerners, he not only has adapted to the jungle, but adopted, manipulated, and used its ways.

Most of all Marlow – and of course Conrad – admire his unflinching look into his own heart of darkness.  He knows what he has done and feels no remorse.  He only feels the terrifying horror of realizing what all men are capable of.  Kurtz has never looked away, accepted his vision, and died with its horror on his lips.

“The horror, the horror’, whispered by Kurtz just before his death, was his final acceptance of his untamed, primitive soul and the inescapable barbarity of it.   The wilderness was not just an environment, but something alive, a complete, integral organism both prehistoric and terrifying in which men who, equally primeval  and uncivilized, were reminders of humanity’s savage beginnings.

Kurtz never tamed the men or the jungle but ruled over both through fear, intimidation, and an expression of absolute and indomitable will.  As death approached he understood that he had neither civilized, nor exploited, nor governed; but by means of the same primitive savagery, he expressed the same  amorality of a universally violent, aggressive, and insatiable human nature as he found in the natives.

Despite millennia of human history to the contrary, American progressives have refused to look at human nature for the hardwired, innate, ineluctable force that it is - aggressive, territorial, and self-defensive. Despite thousands of years of universal war, civil strife, savage tribalism, and unholy terror, they insist that the tide can be turned.  Absolutes have no place in a progressive vision. There is no such thing as permanence. The worst of humanity can be brought within a humanitarian, compassionate, considerate community. 

Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are not distant memories of ancient history, but features of the Twentieth Century.  Few centuries have seen the wholesale barbarism of Pol Pot who sent millions of Cambodians to their death in the killing fields, unmindful of their humanity and determined only to create a Maoist state. No century has seen genocide on the scale of Nazi Germany. Every other attempt at genocide or ethnic cleansing, such as that of Serbia in the recent Balkan war, or worse the Hutu campaign against the Tutsi is but a shadow of Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews. 

Stalin's Siberian gulags and Mao's forced marches killed millions in totalitarian regimes disingenuously claiming that collateral deaths were necessary in revolutionary times. 

Perhaps the most determined, savage, and barbaric leader in history was Genghis Khan who with his Mongol-Turkic army thundered out of the Central Asian steppes, slaughtering millions and extending his empire from Japan to Europe.  He was not the first violent leader in history for his campaign took place only in the 13th century.  He had plenty of historical ancestors in the Chinese dynasties and in Medieval Europe; but the intensity, scope, and scale of his barbarism was impressive by any standard. 

Violence of course extends far back into pre-history when the most primitive Paleolithic peoples killed each other for territory, hunting rights, and authority. 

There is a hilarious comedic riff on violence making the rounds on social media.  

The world hasn't gotten violent. It has been violent since the beginning. When Cain killed Abel there were only four people on the earth and he killed one of them.  He was responsible for killing one-quarter of the world's population.  No war, no genocide, nothing even comes close

 

That should do it for idealism, but those who want to believe in progress towards a more verdant, peaceful, accommodating world will do so regardless of the evidence to the contrary. 

'That is the miracle and mystery of humanity', said Robert Finch, Professor Emeritus at Duke University borrowing ironically from Dostoevsky who condemned humanity for buying Jesus's disingenuous claims of salvation and wanting only miracles, mystery, and authority.  

We are an adaptable, marvelously supple race, capable of change for the better.  There is no reason why now cannot be the time to once and for all tame the violent energies which have characterized us and turn them into utopian promise. 

Hope built on premise built on assumption - a familiar algorithm but unfortunately just whistlin' Dixie. Human nature will remain as is until recombinant DNA technology can extirpate the nasty bits and replace them with 'Jesus genes' as Professor Finch has called them.  However if history has shown us anything, it is that humanity is quite capable of messing things up. God only knows what a genetically modified, 'improved version' of human nature would look like. 

'There have been recent wars, no doubt', Prof. Finch goes on, 'but the savagery has been replaced by the Geneva Convention - our sane attempt to limit the horrors of war'. 

The Geneva Convention was not the panacea to horrific violence its promoters claimed that it would be. ISIS was as savage as they come, disemboweling and beheading to intimidate and instill mortal fear, thus paving the way for the march to an Islamic caliphate.  In so doing, they adopted the very techniques of Genghis Khan who impaled severed heads on stakes along the roadside leading into the next village in his path. Every major power on earth has stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

'We can't just sit by', said a peace activist in Washington; but to do what?  There have been few times of peace in history - the Cold War and Pax Romana, the first being thanks to a nuclear standoff, the second due to absolute rule of empire. 

Standoff is our best hope. Keep the missiles pointed at each other with the promise of mutually assured destruction at hand - that is giving peace a chance - and until and unless that parity comes about, be prepared for battle. 

Angola (LA) Maximum Security Prison up until recent, modest reforms, was as savage and primitive as Conrad’s jungle. It was an an inversion of society.  While same rules of human nature apply among inmates – survival, self-interest, and territorialism – since Angola is a maximum security facility where many inmates are serving multiple life sentences for murder, there are fewer consequences to the violent expressions of it.  In such a lawless environment, there is even more reason to lose whatever socialized patterns of regularized life on the outside. 



It is hard to imagine the brutality of a society without consequences.  The inversion is even more twisted, since the guards, faced with the pure, hateful menace of violent inmates who long ago shed the last vestiges of usual morality, also lose theirs:

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified…to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago.   These twenty-five inmates -- who were not involved in the escape attempt -- testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. 

They were also threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons.  They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves.  They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials.  One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years. (MR Magazine)

Not only did inmates subject each other to ‘unspeakable rites’, the prison guards were complicit in the amoral mayhem.

Although one might be quick to dismiss Angola prison as an exception –the violent, amoral men incarcerated there must be an exception – serious philosophers have doubted the essential goodness of human nature.

God destroyed the world in the flood because it has become an evil place. He acted again in Sodom and Gomorrah, but that devastation did nothing to quell the evil instincts of his Creation.  As a last effort, he sent his son to try to teach the world peace and goodness, and that too has failed.

So, there it is - violence is as common, universal, and perennial as ever.  Not a bad thing, just a thing.  If it weren't for aggressive territorialism and Darwinian competition,  civilization would not have progressed.  Look at it that way.