Beyond Feelings

CHAPTER 1 Who Are You?
Legislators read the test results and decided “We’ve got to do something to
keep intellectually inferior people from entering the country,” so they revised
immigration laws to discriminate against southern and central Europeans.
Eugenicists, who had long been concerned about the welfare of the human
species, saw the tests as a grave warning. They thought, “If intelligence cannot
be increased, we must find ways of encouraging reproduction among people
of higher intelligence and discouraging it among those of lower intelligence.”
The eugenicists’ concern inspired a variety of actions. Margaret Sanger’s
Planned Parenthood urged the lower classes to practice contraception.
Others succeeded in legalizing promoted forced sterilization, notably in
Virginia. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Virginia law with Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. declaring, “Three generations of imbeciles are
enough.” 9 Over the next five decades 7,500 women, including “unwed
mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems”
were sterilized. 10 In addition, by 1950 over 150,000 supposedly “defective”
children, many relatively normal, were held against their will in
institutions. They “endured isolation, overcrowding, forced labor, and physical
abuse including lobotomy, electroshock, and surgical sterilization.” 11
Meanwhile, business leaders read the test results and decided, “We need policies
to ensure that workers leave their minds at the factory gate and perform their assigned
tasks mindlessly.” So they enacted those policies. Decades later, when Edwards
Deming proposed his “quality control” ideas for involving workers in decision
making, business leaders remembered those test results and ignored Deming’s
advice. (In contrast, the Japanese welcomed Deming’s ideas; as a result, several
of their industries surged ahead of their American competition.)
These are the most obvious effects of hereditarianism but they are
certainly not the only ones. Others include discrimination against racial
and ethnic minorities and the often-paternalistic policies of government
offered in response. (Some historians also link hereditarianism to the
genocide that occurred in Nazi Germany.)
The innumerable ideas you have encountered will affect your beliefs and
behavior in similar ways––sometimes slightly, at other times profoundly.
And this can happen even if you have not consciously embraced the ideas.
The Influence of Mass Culture
In centuries past, family and teachers were the dominant, and sometimes
the only, influence on children. Today, however, the influence exerted by
mass culture (the broadcast media, newspapers, magazines, Internet and
popular music) often is greater.
By age 18 the average teenager has spent 11,000 hours in the classroom
and 22,000 hours in front of the television set. He or she has had perhaps
13,000 school lessons yet has watched more than 750,000 commercials. By
age thirty-five the same person has had fewer than 20,000 school lessons
yet has watched approximately 45,000 hours of television and close to
2 million commercials.
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