Admirers of the floppy-haired neo-Wodehousian Mayor of London like to point beyond his foibles (the womanising and the gaffes) and cry, "But Boris is really intelligent!". Personally I rather doubt this. I once bought a book of his journalism at an airport bookstall, and over the following couple of hours it prompted many a Paxmanian "Oh come on!" Ignoring the possibility that it's me that's not very intelligent, Boris is in hot-water again because of a speech he gave last week, and it's time to spring to his defence.
A report in the Guardian today describes Johnson as suggesting that "some people cannot do well in life because of their low IQ". Is that what he said? Here's the relevant passage.
"No one can ignore the harshness of that (free market) competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.
Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.
And for one reason or another - boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants - the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity. But we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "
It's worth noting that Johnson describes free market competition as "harsh", that it inevitably "accentuates" inequality, and that IQ tests might be of dubious value. He also suggests IQ score does not equate to "spiritual worth". None of these nuances are present in the reporting of his speech, which has been of the "Boris causes controversy by saying that thick people have no chance in life" variety.
(Actually what this means in practice is that journalists read his speech, tried to think of someone who might be offended, rang them up, read the passage over the phone and wrote down their response. Hey presto a controversy is born.)
Let's start with the facts. Some people have high IQs. Some people don't. IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests are meant to measure intelligence, although it has often been pointed out that by the time children are old enough to take them, the overlay of family background and conditioning distorts the results. IQ tests moreover only measure a certain kind of intelligence (essentially ratiocination) whereas other kinds abound. These points and others are made in a kind of Festschrift on the Guardian letters page this morning, where a lot of people who probably haven't read Boris's speech express how outrageous they found it.
No matter how many kinds of intelligence there are, home environment must have some part to play in their development; but so also must genetics. Let's not argue about the proportions please. Let's just agree that genetics has a significant part to play. Let us also assume that while there are other forms of intelligence (emotional, hand/eye, fine motor for example) the one Boris was talking about is the one which can recognise patterns, think abstractly and process information. Does possession of these abilities make it more or less likely for someone to prosper by comparison with a person who lacks them? I think the only answer one can give to this is yes.
So is Boris right when he says IQ is "relevant to a conversation about equality"? Again, I think the answer's yes; but it's where the argument goes next that's really interesting.
Social reformers have tended to argue in favour of a meritocracy, which is to say that people should be allowed to rise up according to their abilities irrespective of their social class. Now consider where this leads when you hitch the idea to the genetic wagon.
Able people tend to marry other able people, and have children who are, because of the inheritability of characteristics, rather like them. Even if the parents were working class to start with, their children tend not to be. In time these children will grow up and will tend to marry other able middle class people. According to this model, if you have something resembling a meritocracy for a century or so, the middle classes will tend to be more intelligent than the working classes.
I realise this will be a horrifying idea for many of the bien-pensants, who thought Boris was bad enough. But how could it be otherwise? If ratiocinating intelligence leads to social advancement, and if it is to a significant extent heritable, in time meritocracy is bound to lead to a stratified society with an underclass in which low intelligence is significantly over-represented.
Meritocracy, which looks such a good idea in principle, turns out in practice to lead to something out of a sci-fi novel.
The alternative, of course, is a society is rigidly stratified by social class, in which intelligent people are kept firmly in their place. This looks just as unattractive.
I don't of course have any answers to this. Like Boris, I think a society with total equality is impossible and undesirable. The centrifuge of capitalism, for all its faults, has made people materially better off to an extent that the Communists of the 1930s would have found it impossible to imagine. Even the most down-trodden of peasants in rural China prefer to work in the Apple factory than break their backs tilling the paddy fields. And capitalism has also proved to be an economic principle surprisingly consistent with the idea of self-determination and freedom, at least compared with the alternatives. But it's not pretty, it fetishes consumption and some people do much better out of it than others.
Interestingly, although Boris acknowledges the inequality that the economic centrifuge imposes, the last time I saw a survey on this it suggested that inequality was decreasing under the Tories - this is because the asinine way sociologists use to measure it depends on the median income, and if the median income falls so does inequality. I have railed about this fruitlessly several times on this site.
I find critics of Johnson's speech both baffling and, yes, contemptible. A great deal that's wrong about Britain today stems from our reluctance to face facts. Everybody in the reality-based community knows that some people are brighter than others, and the bright people tend to do better in life. Johnson's critics are in denial. Why? Partly because they think it diminishes the less able to point out that such people exist (actually Johnson went out of his way to stress their "spiritual worth"), partly because they hate the idea of pre-determination which genetic inheritance rather ominously suggests, and partly because they belong to a political credo which still thinks that everyone must get a prize.
They are missing a trick. If the kind of inherited inequality Johnson is talking about means anything, it is that some people are never going to be doctors, bankers or lawyers no matter hard they try. As Johnson wrote, "we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . " That looks to me like an argument for a more compassionate society rather than the reverse.
PS The day after I posted this, Nicholas Watt, the Guardian's political correspondent, wrote of Johnson that "the London Mayor mocked people with low IQs". This is so far from the truth that I am tempted to give up reading the paper altogether.
