Low IQ linked to conservative & prejudiced beliefs

[CuckooTuli]

So I'm pretty sure this isn't the first study to draw this conclusion. But just to remind you, next time you take one of these idiots on, you're not just fighting alongside Economics, Logic, and Not Being A Bigoted Dickhole: Science totally has your back as well.

http://jezebel.com/5879742/prejudice...d-says-science

[Acharis]

Yes! I knew it! I'm going to keep that to myself to avoid the consequences of shitstirring, but... *basks*

Oh, and also there was something else... extreme racism was being considered at one point to see if it could possibly be a mental illness - but nobody wanted to make the insanity defense possible.

(Not sure where I read that, but Google.)

[burningplain]

Hallelujah, proof at last that I'm not just being derogatory of the stances adopted by fox news and others.

[Saya]

Honestly this isn't comforting. In my experiences the left has been rightfully criticized enough for being elitist enough, and not outreaching to the working class. I don't think the right's appeal to the less educated is without merit, the liberals definitely aren't doing it and a lot of leftists are not. As long as the face of progress is that of white dudes with PhDs, of course a lot of people are going to find white people who speak on their level more appealing. Everyone knows the republicans are all rich white dudes, but Romney's opponents have been smart to attack the fact that he's insanely rich.

The idea of IQ has a lot of problems in general, including the potential for racism and being whitecentric. And I don't think it was always the case. In the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, plenty of people were working class and were racially diverse, because the war was a racist, classist one where the poor and the people of colour were sent to the front to die for their rich white officers. If you were a white college student though, you could get away with not getting sent at all or getting a support role where you wouldn't see combat. So the combat veterans were also against the war while the officers supported it. But even then there were people who felt the movement was too dominated by white college kids who didn't give a shit for their kid who died, and there wasn't a conscious movement for intersectionality.

After that, however, the right has been ingenious in dividing the left from everybody but elites. They painted anti-war protestors as people who hated veterans, veterans as heroes who got spit on by anti-war protestors, went crazy and killed Vietnamese civilians on their own as opposed to the fact that they were ordered to commit genocide, the GI Revolt is never taught and is forgotten, in the feminist movement, it moved from a largely leftist, radical collective movement to the women's studies departments of universities, and radical theory in general became more and more inaccessable to the people who would most benefit from it. IQ is generally a good prediction of how well you'll do in school, but its a very imperfect school system we have, and if you don't do well in school, you won't get into college, and you won't learn these things. And for a long long time, a lot of people didn't have access to other means of exposure to radicalism that they could understand, but they did have TV.

[AshleyO]

This is no surprise. A lack of education does tend to lead people towards the right.

[Saya]

I think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[AshleyO]

What do you mean?

[Saya]

As long as we believe that, the less educated are a lost cause, we don't try to appeal to them much and they are ripe pickings for the right. I think the Republicans appeal to them and paint liberals and leftists as elitist snobs who don't care about the average person who couldn't go to college, whereas liberals tend to acknowledge and celebrate its elitism. That isn't to say university doesn't have value or anything, its just that kind of knowledge is very inaccessible to a lot of people and its a small minority of leftists who are trying to change that.

In countries were socialist revolution happened like lets say in China, it was led but the educated elite but it was the poor uneducated who were willing to die for change and who were the canon fodder for revolution. Of course they had more of a fire under them, but I think the reasons the average blue collar Canadian or American person probably doesn't give much thought to socialism or social progress in general are varied and more complicated than just simply that they're dumb and we're smart.

Also I thought of this at work, but I don't think they counted fiscally conservative, did they? I know a fuckload of people who are "socially progressive, fiscalling conservative." Which I would say is dumb.

[Alan]

Nah, this was specifically about social conservatives.
That's why this research shouldn't be surprising nor really meaningful.
Conservatism is defined by the unwillingness to change, the faith in the state of the world as is and that at best it needs some reforms.
More dimwitted people would be more complacent and take things as they are, the worst of them despising change completely. But equally, in a post-soviet nation, it would be the leftwing who would be the less insightful, as the stupidity comes from an uncritical mind and not a set of values.

[Acharis]

Yeah... Saya does have a point. There are a few social movements/meetings based in one of the top universities in my city.


But what of the Right Wing members that are elitist, and consider the poor/less educated to just be lazy? I speak of the Randians.

[Alan]

They're smart enough to look for non-mainstream socioeconomic values, but dumb enough to buy into objectivism.

[Mordred]

Prejudice and conservative thought make the world appear much more simple.
X, Y, Z [And anyone that isn't "us"] is bad and wrong. What the leader says is true. There's no real need to think any deeper than that.
It's more easy for an unintelligent person to adapt to such a simple set of rules, other than a complex, chaotic and random system demanding him/her to pay a thought to every single detail.
And humans will naturally prefer what they can catch more easily.

[Mordred]

You do make a good point.

Interestingly, there's always some rate of a counter-movement to what you described. The youth raised in such circles, while the majority of them usually follows their parents' footsteps- Always seems to have a core of rebelation against it. While still identifying with the same class, or even referring to the "Working Class" as elitistic as for itself- The said core adapts the complete opposite attitude.
Examples are the Punk movement during the 80's, and in a very different manner, the Queer movement now.

[CuckooTuli]

Saya: re: the fracturing of the left, it's a problem. However I found an essay a while back that echoes my thoughts on why this is pretty much unavoidable (while putting it better than I could): http://www.gender-agenda.org.uk/disc...-call-to-arms/

It's talking mostly about these divisions in feminism specifically, but it definitely applies to leftist concerns on a much wider level. It's only natural that working out exactly how existing systems need to change should involve a more nuanced level of analysis (and consequently, debate) than working out exactly how the current state of affairs can be preserved.

That doesn't mean these divisions can't be a problem, of course, but it does help stamp bullshit all over those "the left can't get its shit together with any real unity and is therefore doomed" arguments you hear from left AND right-leaning people on occasion.

[Saya]

Originally Posted by CuckooTuli

Saya: re: the fracturing of the left, it's a problem. However I found an essay a while back that echoes my thoughts on why this is pretty much unavoidable (while putting it better than I could): http://www.gender-agenda.org.uk/disc...-call-to-arms/

It's talking mostly about these divisions in feminism specifically, but it definitely applies to leftist concerns on a much wider level. It's only natural that working out exactly how existing systems need to change should involve a more nuanced level of analysis (and consequently, debate) than working out exactly how the current state of affairs can be preserved.

That doesn't mean these divisions can't be a problem, of course, but it does help stamp bullshit all over those "the left can't get its shit together with any real unity and is therefore doomed" arguments you hear from left AND right-leaning people on occasion.

In fighting isn't a big deal, and its not that I don't think the left isn't unified (I think one of the most silencing thing those in the left can do is to forbid debate so we appear more unified than the right, who appear more unified than they actually are). What I'm getting at is elitism. In feminism, this has been a problem since the eighties since feminist theory moved away from the collectives into the universities, which not everyone can go to, and the language isn't as accessible as it used to be. There needs to be a balance, I think it was Judith Butler who argued against being concerned about accessibility because important things get lost that way, and it is a good point. But there needs to be a return of collectives and poetry and strike a balance between academic theory and activism. There are a few feminist texts that are easy to read and accessible, but they kinda fall more in the liberal feminist camp, like Full Frontal Feminism.

There's also gotta be an understanding of intersectionality, which a lot of leftist, very much including feminists, pay lip service to but don't put to practice very well. Like we're talking about lower IQs, but we forget how the IQ test has been used as a justification for racism (people of colour and immigrants tend to score lower than white people), and I remember in first year university psychology they told us that you have to take IQ with a grain of salt, and warned us not to take it as a be all end all measurement of what makes a person intelligent. But they don't tell you that when they put out studies like this, and instead of resolving to help lower class, minorities and the education system, we just kinda feel smug about it and move on with the rest of our day.

I feel like most causes I've been involved in are badly guilty of this, and I'm getting more and more frustrated with it. Increasingly I feel like plastering Audre Lorde quotes everywhere.

[Solumina]

Even that article was written in a smug "see we really are better than those idiots" kind of way. That sort of talk and thinking isn't helpful and only reinforces the stereotype that liberals are arrogant elitists who is out of touch with the struggles of the average Joe.

I'd also be interested to learn how the studies were carried out, the article was pretty vague about that. I'm not saying that they are necessarily wrong but it seems like they are drawing conclusions without taking culture into consideration. After all it would make sense that less intelligent kids are more likely to parrot their parents so I would be interested to know if they accounted for the parents' political leanings.

[ThaLastDaysOfMrs.R]

I would like to know what you have to say on this

[Alan]

I agreed with it until I read further than the title.
IQ means nothing and is in fact biased to westerners, because it presupposes several forms of conditioning as intelligence. But then he went on to claim that 'science backs' the 'fact' that IQ differences have a racial and genetic reason.
How can a cultural value be genetic or racial in origin?
He ends up sounding racist.

Regardless, it's true that we shouldn't care about IQ, that IQ generally means nothing, and that IQ tends to be brought up only when it falls in favor of whoever brings it up.

[Solumina]

At least one of the tests did test reasoning abilities which was nice to see, as reasoning tests are typically more meaningful and more reliable than IQ testing, but yeah most IQ tests have a lot of inherent bias and people read way too much into them as they pretty much mean nothing unless someone performs outside of the normal range, which is a lot larger than most people realize.

[Apathy's_Child]

Meh, elitism isn't much more avoidable than fracturing to my mind. Both sides will ALWAYS think the other just don't understand the big picture. And anyway, boiling complex issues down to accessible & easily understood concrete concepts involves simplification, which really, is basically what that study did. IQ may not be a reliable indicator of intelligence, and we need to be aware of its problems and biases, but it's also a more useful functional indicator than dumping people in the jungle and declaring those who make it home the smartest.

[CuckooTuli]

Originally Posted by Saya

But they don't tell you that when they put out studies like this, and instead of resolving to help lower class, minorities and the education system, we just kinda feel smug about it and move on with the rest of our day.

I feel like most causes I've been involved in are badly guilty of this, and I'm getting more and more frustrated with it. Increasingly I feel like plastering Audre Lorde quotes everywhere.

Welcome to the background noise of society... I've got to say though, if apathy has to be the norm, I'd take the smug kind over the plain ignorant kind.

As for ostensibly noble causes mired in inequality, that, again, will probably never go away - no movement can entirely avoid being marked by the culture and sociohistory from which it emerges, and not always to the good (gay gynophobia and feminist homophobia would be prime examples of this).

But although I agree that it's important to be constantly interrogating your ideals and identity politics, I also believe it's counterproductive to forget that tortured progress can still be progress;it's that whole baby/bathwater deal again. The gays and feminists in the above example held some objectionable views, but that doesn't mean they didn't accomplish anything... just that their struggle doesn't immunize them from people calling bullshit on elements of their belief systems.

Re: Lorde though, I'd tag-team that shit with bell hooks.

[Saya]

Originally Posted by CuckooTuli

Welcome to the background noise of society... I've got to say though, if apathy has to be the norm, I'd take the smug kind over the plain ignorant kind.

As for ostensibly noble causes mired in inequality, that, again, will probably never go away - no movement can entirely avoid being marked by the culture and sociohistory from which it emerges, and not always to the good (gay gynophobia and feminist homophobia would be prime examples of this).

But although I agree that it's important to be constantly interrogating your ideals and identity politics, I also believe it's counterproductive to forget that tortured progress can still be progress;it's that whole baby/bathwater deal again. The gays and feminists in the above example held some objectionable views, but that doesn't mean they didn't accomplish anything... just that their struggle doesn't immunize them from people calling bullshit on elements of their belief systems.

Re: Lorde though, I'd tag-team that shit with bell hooks.

I'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water. I'm frustrated that the left has forgot again and again and again the mistakes that it made that ultimately led to its demise. Feminism is an example of this, we become elitist and complacent, and take the movement away from the average person, nd then there's a backlash. We constantly have to reinvent ourselves because no one learns from the mistakes of what came before, and refuse to see past their own privilege.

The poorer and less educated aren't conservative because that's what stupid people do, and they're hopeless. The same demographic have been the past far more radical, as we saw in the second wave of feminism, the white, middle class college educated women only wanted to reform society, not revolution. Equality with man, instead of ending oppression for all. Many of those same women went on to renounce feminism or announced "job accomplished" in the eighties, Betty Friedan being the most famous case who so lovingly feared women having short hair and computers in their room. In the anti-war movement in the sixties, the opposition to the war was strongest among the poor. Quoting Marilyn Young, in 1966, only 27% of those with college educations favoured withdrawal from Vietnam, as opposed to 41% of those with an eighth grade education.

[CuckooTuli]

Well, I'm not sure I believe elitism & complacency are the biggest reasons for the marginalising of the left in general, or of feminism in particular. I won't take that up here though as it's a whole other topic (and maybe a future thread, thinking about it - I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the reasons for this).

But I see your point now about the study and about income & education biases. And yeah, I guess you're right about the counterproductive suggestions of irredeemability that the article's angle takes.

[Saya]

Originally Posted by CuckooTuli

Well, I'm not sure I believe elitism & complacency are the biggest reasons for the marginalising of the left in general, or of feminism in particular. I won't take that up here though as it's a whole other topic (and maybe a future thread, thinking about it - I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the reasons for this).

But I see your point now about the study and about income & education biases. And yeah, I guess you're right about the counterproductive suggestions of irredeemability that the article's angle takes.

The right pushes back, and certainly only showers the more privileged and powerful of us with any attention. And we don't fight that, and that's a problem. Why is one of the feminist issues talked about all the time is about the glass ceiling and the lack of women CEOs? Those women have a stake in patriarchy and capitalism and want to defend it. But we don't fight terribly hard to bring the really shitty issues out, its depressing, and it doesn't affect those doing the talking and getting the press. So if a low income, poorly educated woman who's working all the time and exhausted when she turns on the news, and is only used to hearing about reclaiming "slut", the glass ceiling, how The Iron Lady is such an awesome depiction of womanhood (seriously, this came up on my tumblr the other day), why would she feel included, that this is her movement?

[Elystan]

next they should do a study that correlates these things with income. In banded ranges.