Bell Curve

254 Cognitive Classes and Social Behavim Civility and Citizenship 255telligence associated with the behaviors associated with "middle-class values"?The answer is that the brighter young people of the NLSY are also the oneswhose lives most resemble a sometimes disdained stereotype: They stick withschool, are plugging away in the workforce, and are loyal to their spouse. Insofara$ intelligence helps lead people to behave in these ways, it is also a forcefor maintaining a civil society.America's political system relies on the civility of its citizens-"civilitynnot in the contemporary sense of mere politeness but accordingto an older meaning which a dictionary close at hand definesas "deference or allegiance to the social order befitting a citizen.""' Thewording of the definition is particularly apt in the American case. Civilityis not obedience but rather "allegiance" and "deferencev-wordswith old and honorable meanings that are now largely lost. The objectof these sentiments is not the government but a social order. And thesethings are required not of a subject hut of a citizen. Taken together, theelements of civility imply behavior that is both considered and considerate-preciselythe kind of behavior that the Founders relied upon tosustain their creation, though they would have been more likely to usethe word virtue than civility.'"The point is that, given such civility, a free society as envisioned bythe Founders is possible. "Civil-ized" people do not need to be tightlyconstrained by laws or closely monitored by the organs of state. Lackingsuch civility, they do, and society must over time become much lessfree. That is why civility was relevant to the Founders' vision of a freesociety and also why it remains relevant today. In Part IV, we considerfurther the link between intelligence and the polity. At this point, weask what the differences are between people that explain whether theyare civil. Specifically, what is the role of intelligence?Much of what could go under the heading of civility is not readilyquantified. Mowing the lawn in the summer or keeping the sidewalksshoveled in the winter, maintaining a tolerable level of personal hygieneand grooming, returning a lost wallet, or visiting a sick friend are notentirely dictated by fear of lawsuits or of retaliation from outraged neighbors.They likely have an element of social engagement, of caring abutone's neighbors and community, of what we are calling civility. Mostsuch everyday acts of civility are too fleeting to he caught in the net ofobservation that social science requires.Fortunately, the behaviors that go into civility tend to be of a piece,and some acts leave clear traces that can be aggregated and studied. Inthe preceding chapter, we examined one set of such behaviors, crime.Crime is important in itself, of course, but it also captures the negativepole of disassociation from society at large and the community in particular.Everything we know about the lives of most criminals suggeststhat in their off-duty hours they are not commonly shoveling the sidewalk,visiting sick friends, or returning lost wallets--or doing the myriadother things that signify good neighbors and good citizens. In thatlight, the chapter on crime may be seen as a discussion of a growing incivilityin American life and the contribution that low cognitive abilitymakes to it.POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AS AN OUTCROPPING OFCIVILITYPolitical participation is not the thing-in-itself of civility. Most of us canrecall acquaintances who show up reliably at town council meetings andare hectoring, opinionated, and generally destructive of community life.Rut, as always, we are talking about statistical tendencies, and for thatpurpose political participation is not a bad indirect measure.Consider the act of voting. We have friends, conscientious in manyways, who do not vote and who even look at us, registering and voting,often at some inconvenience, with bemused superiority. They point outwith indisputable accuracy that our ballots account for less than a millionthof the overall outcome of most statewide elections, not to mentionnational ones, and that no major political contest in United Stateshistory has ever been decided by a single vote.''' Are we behaving irrationallyby voting?14'Not if we value civility. In thinking about what it means to vote, apassage in Aristotle's Politics comes to mind. "Man is by nature a politicalanimal,'' Aristotle wrote, "and he who by nature and not by mereaccident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; heis like the 'tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,' whom ~ omer denounce^."^The polling place is a sort of civic hearth. In the aggregate (though notalways in every instance) those who do not vote, or who vote less consistently,are weaker in this manifestation of civility than those who dovote consistently. Think inwardly about why you try to keep up with issuesthat affect your neighborhood or at least try to do some cramming