There is a great love of certitude implicit in all this, and those impressed by it often merge religious and social and economic notions, discovering likeness in this supposed absolute clarity, which is really only selectivity and simplification. Listening to these self-declared moralists and traditionalists, it seems to me I hear from time to time a little satisfaction in the sober fact that God, as our cultures have variously received him through the Hebrew Scriptures, seems to loathe, actually abominate, certain kinds of transgression. Granting this fact, let us look at the transgressions thus singled out. My own sense of the text, based on more than cursory reading, is that the sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer. Since many of the enthusiasts of this new theology are eager to call themselves Christians, I would draw their attention to the New Testament, passim.
I have heard pious people say, Well, you can’t live by Jesus’ teachings in this complex modern world. Fine, but then they might as well call themselves the Manichean Right or the Zoroastrian Right and not live by those teachings. If an economic imperative trumps a commandment of Jesus, they should just say so and drop these pretensions toward particular holiness — which, while we are on the subject of divine abhorrence, God, as I recall, does not view much more kindly than he does neglect of the poor. In fact, the two are often condemned together.
I know those who have taken a course in American history will think this merger of Christian pretensions and bullyboy economics has its origins in Calvinism and in Puritanism. Well, Calvin and the Puritans both left huge literatures. Go find a place where they are guilty of this vulgarization. Or, a much easier task, find a hundred or a thousand places where they denounce it, taking inspiration, always, from the Bible, which it was their quaint custom to read with a certain seriousness and attention. We have developed a historical version of the victim defense, visiting our sins upon our fathers. But I will say a thing almost never said among us: we have ourselves to blame.
Communism demonstrated the great compatibility of secularism with economic theology, and we may see the same thing now in the thinking of many of our contemporaries. On the assumption that American society is destined to extreme economic polarization, certain brave souls have written brave books arguing that those who thrive are genetically superior to those who struggle. They have higher IQs.
So we are dealing with a Darwinian paradigm, again, as people have done in one form or another since long before Darwin. The tale is always told this way — the good, the fit, the bright, the diligent prosper. These correspond to the creatures who, in the state of nature, would survive and reproduce. But — here our eyes widen — civilization lumbers us with substandard types who reproduce boundlessly and must finally swallow us up in their genetic mediocrity, utterly confounding and defeating the harsh kindness of evolution. This peril once posed itself in the form of the feckless Irish. But they became prosperous, enjoying, one must suppose, a great enhancement of their genetic endowment in the process, since I have never heard that the arts and professions have had to stoop to accommodate their deficiencies. This theory is so resilient because it can always turn a gaze unclouded by memory or imagination on the least favored group in any moment or circumstance, like the Darwinian predator fixing its eye on the gazelle with the sprained leg, perfectly indifferent to the fact that another gazelle was lame two days ago, yet another will be lame tomorrow.
The Social Darwinist argument always arises to answer, or to preclude, or in fact to beg, questions about social justice — during trade wars or in the midst of potato famines. We are not quite at ease with the chasm that may be opening in our society, and some of us seek out the comforts of resignation. And these comforts are considerable. Viewed in the light of science, or at least of something every bit as cold and solemn as science, we see manifest in this painful experience the invisible hand of spontaneous melioration, the tectonic convulsions meant to form the best of all possible worlds.
But, at the risk of a little discomfort, let us try another hypothesis, just to see if it has descriptive power as great or even greater than the one favored by sociobiology. Let us just test the idea that our problems reflect an inability to discover or prepare an adequate elite. Obviously the thought of deficiency at the top of society is more alarming than deficiency at the bottom, but that is all the more reason to pause and consider.
When we speak of an elite, do we mean people of high accomplishment, people who do valuable work with great skill, people who create standards and articulate values? Are we speaking of our brilliant journalists, our noble statesmen, the selfless heroes of our legal profession? To be brief, what part of the work of the culture that is properly the responsibility of an elite actually functions at the level even of our sadly chastened hopes? Are our colleges producing great humanists and linguists? Is spiritual grandeur incubating in our seminaries? How often do we wonder if the medical care we receive is really appropriate?
For the purposes of these sociobiologists, membership in the elite seems to be a matter of income. But doctors and professors and journalists are so much a part of the morphology of our civilization that they will be with us until goats are put to graze in our monuments, and will probably be pulling down a decent salary, too, by whatever standards apply. Their presence in roles that are ideally filled by competent people does not make them competent. “But IQ!” they will answer. Yes, and since our society is, statistically speaking, in the hands of people with high IQs, we have no trouble at all finding a good news magazine, and we can always go to a good movie, and we are never oppressed by a sense of vulgarity or stupidity hardening around us. “But that is condescension to the masses,” they will say. “You have to do things that are very stupid to make enough income to qualify for a place in this elite of the bright and worthy.” Yes. That accounts, I suppose, for the rosy contentment of the man in the street.
Or perhaps they would offer no such tortuous defense. Perhaps they would say that if an elite is defined as a group of highly competent, responsible people with a special gift for holding themselves to exacting standards, we have at present rather little in the way of an elite. Then perhaps a high IQ correlates strongly with sharpness of the elbows, and simply obtains for people advantages to which they have no true right. Qualities consistent with the flourishing of the individual can be highly inconsistent with the flourishing of the group. History makes this point relentlessly. We have forgotten that democracy was intended as a corrective to the disasters visited upon humanity by elites of one kind and another. Maybe the great drag on us all is not the welfare mother but the incompetent engineer, not the fatherless child but the writer of mean or slovenly books. When our great auto industry nearly collapsed, an elite of designers and marketing experts were surely to blame. But the thousands thrown out of work by their errors were seen as the real problem. No doubt many of these workers figure among the new lumpenproletariat, as the Marxists used to call them, people who just are not bright enough.
These grand theories are themselves no proof of great intelligence in the people who formulate them. Obviously I am shaken by the reemergence of something so crude as Social Darwinism. But my point here is that regrettable changes in our economy may not simply express the will of the market gods, but may instead mean something so straightforward as that those whose decisions influence the economy might not be good at their work. If they were brighter, perhaps no pretext would ever have arisen for these ungracious speculations about the gifts of the powerless and the poor.