The Smart Culture. Robert L. Hayman Jr.

physiological reasons. Neurological disorders often have direct effects on cognitive ability; sometimes these disorders may so affect a cognitive ability that we will say that the person is cognitively impaired. If the impairment is spread among a wide enough range of cognitive abilities, it may be possible to say that—in most cultural contexts—the person will be less smart than the norm. Here, however, a certain note of caution is in order: in some discrete contexts, our cognitively impaired person may be quite smart after all—smart, that is, at some things, if not at most.

      Some people don’t do as well as other people on standardized measurements of “intelligence.” Ideally, “intelligence” means the ability to succeed in the culture; standardized measurements of intelligence should thus measure the relative ability to achieve cultural success. Someone with less measured intelligence should then have—if everything goes according to plan—less ability to succeed in the culture. Again, it may be possible to say that in most cultural contexts, the person will be less smart than the norm.

      Here, many notes of caution are in order. It is easy to assume that these intelligence differences that we have measured represent natural variations among people, variations that are fixed in the biological makeup of the individual. But that is not necessarily—and probably not often—the case.

      Nature, after all, does not dictate which qualities will correlate with cultural achievement. It is for us to decide which aptitudes—which skills and knowledge, talents and abilities, cognitive and affective traits—are valuable and which ones are not. We could exalt formal deduction, or creative analogic reasoning, or practical problem-solving skills, or moral reasoning, or empathie judgment and interpersonal skills. We decide, in other words, what will count as “intelligence.”

      Nature does not dictate which people will be afforded the optimal chances to acquire the aptitudes for cultural success. It is for us to decide who will receive the optimal chances—the cultural environment, the formal education, the social opportunity—to acquire intelligence. Research now consistently documents the profound effects of environmental stimulation on cognitive development and the equally profound effects of environmental deprivation. It is a social fact that the probabilities of growing up in comparatively stimulating and deprived environments are not equally distributed among race and class: successful people—smart people—are uniquely situated to perpetuate their advantages. And we keep them there. We decide, in other words, who will be afforded the best chance to get “smart” and stay smart.

      Nature does not dictate our response to measured differences in intelligence. We decide whether those differences should be simply ignored, actively countered, or preserved as justifications for the prevailing inequities. In the United States, we long ago stopped talking about regional differences in “IQ,” as well as most ethnic disparities. The gender disparities, meanwhile, we eliminated by modifying the tests. The disparities of race, however, retain a singular legitimacy. We give them that. We decide, in other words, whether we actually like our hierarchies of “smartness.”

      All of which is to say that “superior” and “inferior” intelligences are not entirely natural. On the contrary, it is substantially our decisions that make people either more or less “smart.”

      There is something concededly counterintuitive about all this. We have come to believe in smartness as an inherent quality, as something people are either born with or not. We have come to believe that it is fairly immutable, that individual limitations are pretty much fixed. And we can hardly be faulted for conceiving of it as something universal; it is hard to imagine choosing other things to count as “smart” beyond the things “we” have chosen. So the suggestion that smartness is “made” strikes us as, well, a not-very-smart suggestion.

      But then again, we know that people disagree about smartness, about whether a student or a teacher or a politician or a neighbor is “smart.” Maybe, then, smartness is not entirely inherent; maybe it does require our subjective assessment.

      And we know that people can get smart. They learn knowledge, and skills, and even learn how to learn: even the vaunted “IQ” is not stable. Maybe, then, smartness is not immutable; maybe it depends on our efforts, as both teachers and learners.

      And we know that some pretty smart people are not universally smart. The most gifted Japanese haiku poet may be unable to write an instruction manual for English-speaking purchasers of Japanese-made VCRs. And no matter how good the manual, the most brilliant American brain surgeon may never master the art of programmed recording. Law students are trained to “think like lawyers”; medical and nursing students, thank goodness, are not. Maybe smartness is not an abstract, universal entity; maybe it depends on the contexts we construct.

      So the idea that smartness is partly “made” is not entirely counterintuitive; on the contrary, it actually confirms our practical experience with the concept. Still, something about the notion of a constructed intelligence seems slightly incredible: too fantastic, perhaps too optimistic. We can’t quite shake our skepticism. “Okay,” we might say, “you socially constructed wiseguy, answer me this: If people are really as smart as we make them, then do you mean to tell me that a person with mental retardation can be made smart enough to be, say, a nuclear physicist?”

      Well, here’s one honest answer: probably not. I don’t know what it takes to be a nuclear physicist; I don’t know whether it takes the kind of aptitudes that are measured by IQ tests. But if it does, then the person with mental retardation—who, by definition, did badly on an IQ test—has farther to go to be a nuclear physicist than the person who is not mentally retarded. She may, in fact, have farther to go than our patience, our resources, and our skill are capable of taking her. If that’s the case, then she cannot be a nuclear physicist—or, at least, not a very good one.

      But here’s the key: not much of this—and maybe not any of it—is natural. We—society, culture, who- or whatever is in charge here—figure pretty heavily in the determination whether a person with mental retardation, or anyone else for that matter, can be a nuclear physicist. Consider:

      Being a nuclear physicist is not a natural state: it’s a job that we made, requiring attributes that we define.

      Competence in that job is not a naturally defined condition: there are questions of degree and subjective judgments that inhere in the determination whether someone is a “qualified” nuclear physicist (or a lawyer, or a judge, or a vice president of a company, or a vice president of the United States).

      Training for that competence is not a natural process: our cultural talents and commitments determine who we will train, and how well.

      Even the mental retardation that necessitates special training is not a natural condition: we make “mental retardation”—as we make the intelligence of all people—in the complex interactions between the individual and the society in which she lives, interactions that shape her opportunities, the perceptions of her, and even, we now know, the very physiology of her brain, all in a relentless gestalt of intellectual advantage, or disadvantage.

      So maybe she can’t be a nuclear physicist. We just need to acknowledge, even in this most extreme of examples, that it’s at least partly our doing, that with some will or ingenuity, an intervention here, a cultural change there, things might, just might, turn out differently. And as the scenario gets more commonplace—as either the job or her measured intelligence grow closer to the norm—the gaps between what might be and what could be and ultimately what should be grow more narrow, and it becomes increasingly likely that if anything stands in the way of our mentally retarded subject—our neighbor, our friend, our sister—it’s something that we put there, and something that we can remove.

      If it all sounds too altruistic, or too Utopian, then it is perhaps important to remember this: not so long ago, we were fairly certain that a woman’s aptitudes did not embrace skills from the political realm. “Race” was a disqualifying characteristic throughout social and economic life, due to the perceived cognitive incapacities of some racial groups. We restricted the immigration of certain ethnic groups—most, in fact, except those from Britain and northern Europe—because of the genetic inferiority of the immigrant stock. Feebleminded people were so inferior that we institutionalized