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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MikeH who wrote (5498)	1/20/2000 4:32:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

OK.... Let's cut it out on a middle ground: I would not argue that IQ is 100% of the reason for success, as I said before. I've met many successful people who are not the sharpest tools in the shed. But through hard work, and oftentimes, good luck - average and sub-average individuals can attain high earnings status. Besides, as you might be aware of, most European countries look upon that IQ stuff as an American oddity..... Note that I can see the advantage of it in terms of "social control" --it's always better to sugar somebody's pill of failure to tell her about her low IQ than about her complexion, social standing, or just any other class-biased defect. The power of the Technocracy lies in its mesmerizing deceitfulness: people just swallow its premises hook, line and sinker as they grant their personal achievement is indeed an accurate picture of some allegedly intrinsic merit. But what's the alternative to the "brainocratic leitmotiv", after all? Civil war?

To: MikeH who wrote (5498)	1/20/2000 12:39:00 PM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

Important follow-up of my previous post --actually another excerpt from N. Lemann's book thoroughly depicting the cast of mind of Chauncey, founder of America's IQtopia, or should I write Dystopia?? Whatever Tocqueville thought, the United States has always been a country with an elite, or a series of elites, overlapping, competing, and succeeding one another. Henry Chauncey did not share Conant's animus against the American elite of the mid-twentieth century. That was because he was a member of it. Indeed, the story of the Chauncey family makes a good capsule history of the progression of elites in America. The Chauncys (as the name was originally spelled) were never just ordinary folks, and they were never holders of a simple unprepossessing idea of the world. Originally they were Norman noblemen who came to England in the conquest of 1066 and wound up as barons in Yorkshire. In the 1400s they were dispossessed and moved down a notch, into the ministerial class. The Chauncy who moved to America, Charles Chauncy, born in 1592, was educated at Cambridge and became a professor of Greek there, but he was mainly a devout and opinionated Puritan minister who spent his life getting into disputes with church authorities. In 1629 he was hauled before the high commission court for publicly criticizing the Church of England's policy of allowing sports, games, and recreation on Sundays. In 1635 he was thrown into prison for publishing a lengthy treatise protesting the placing of a railing around the communion table. He won his release by writing a weak recantation--though according to a family history written by one of his descendants, he "deeply bewailed his sinful compliance" until his dying day. In 1637 Chauncy left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where, even in a community of fellow Puritans, he stood out as a vehement critic of what he regarded as excessive religious laxness. He created "much trouble," in the words of Governor John Winthrop, by expressing the view that "the children ought to be dipt and not sprinkled" at their baptism., In 1654, worn down by that controversy and other tribulations of American life, Chauncy resolved to return to England, where the Puritans had taken power and the bishop who had tormented him "had given his head to the block." He changed his mind, however, when he was made president of Harvard College, on condition "that he forbear to disseminate or publish any tenets concerning immersion baptism." Everybody thinks of America as a country where people came to escape formal social structures--a place with a genius for disorganization. Charles Chauncy represents another strain that has been present in American society all along. No amount of anachronistic pretzel-twisting can make him into a populist or a democrat. He was self-consciously a figure at the top of society. He did come here to escape an order that he found oppressive--but only because he hoped to help create a new order that would be stricter and therefore more virtuous than the old one. But where Puritans like Chauncy do connect to the modern American creed is in their idea that the state of grace was individual and irrespective of social rank. This was a radical notion, and it led in the direction of a society run by people who had earned their places by good works, rather than by an upper class selected by birth. The last controversy of Charles Chauncy's theologically combative life was over the Halfway Covenant, a Puritan doctrine that granted the privilege of automatic baptism to the grandchildren of members of the elect. Chauncy was dead set against it. Initiation into the state of grace, he felt, ought not be conferred by inheritance. [snip]