Fifteen or twenty years ago, when it was fashionable to express loud and hard-edged scepticism about religious belief, one of the main attack lines against Christianity was its alleged incompatibility with Science. Dawkinsite atheists muttered imprecations against the dreaded Young Earth Creationists, who rejected entirely reams of empirical evidence about the age of the planet and clung instead to their comfortable, ideologically-motivated illusions. YECs were an easy target for anti-Christian polemic in Britain, not least because they barely exist in this country — in all my years of involvement with various churches, as far as I can recall, I have met precisely one, and I believe he has since changed his mind.
But there are other forms of scientific denialism, much more prevalent and much more accepted among well-educated, intelligent, influential people. One of the most damaging of these is what is often called blank slate-ism — the idea that all human beings are born with more or less the same potential across all fields of human endeavour, that the observable differences between, say, men and women, or between different peoples, are “socially constructed”, in the jargon, or the result of structures of injustice, or are trivial and shallow, amenable to being easily changed by well-meaning interventions. This is why we saw, for example, American feminist academics being flown to Afghanistan to give female empowerment seminars and lectures on gender theory.
Last week the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wrote a piece for The Guardian setting out her grand vision to, in her own words, “break the link between [children’s] background and what they go on to achieve”. Now, to be charitable, a lot of what she meant by this is defensible, on her own terms: she wants to restore funding for early years interventions and “Family Hubs” to improve parenting skills, to support children with complex needs or behavioural problems, to make sure children are coming to school well-fed and properly dressed. There is nothing wrong with giving everyone the best possible chance to do themselves justice.
Unfortunately, Phillipson is almost certainly underestimating the gaps that will still persist even if children from difficult backgrounds have some of their problems and barriers removed. The implicit premise of her argument, which she seems to take entirely for granted, is that characteristics like intelligence, conscientiousness and creative talent are redistributed more or less at random in each successive generation, and just need to be nurtured and developed.
This is not, of course, true. The grouping of attributes that we call intelligence — the ability to understand and retain complex information, to undertake sustained cognitively demanding work, to communicate effectively — is strongly heritable, i.e. it tends to run in families. There is a reason why the children of doctors are much more likely than average to become doctors, and it is not simply because they are exposed to medicine as a way of life, or because their houses are full of books on medicine. The over-representation of students from private schools at elite universities is often blamed on nefarious secret networks, or the power of private schools to coach and polish their pupils, but the hard fact remains that, as a rule, the families with the money to send their children to private schools have acquired that money by possessing high levels of intelligence and conscientiousness, and that they have passed on those skills to their children. One thing you notice if you read history is that Britain, like many countries, has numerous quietly distinguished academic-professional dynasties who have provided the nation with doctors, military officers, clerics, scholars and administrators for hundreds of years. The now-intertwined Darwin and Keynes families are a classic example, specialising in writers, scientists, and more recently actors.
There are plentiful caveats to this line of argument, naturally. For one thing, the rules of heredity are not set in stone. The archetype of the mentally under-powered but wealthy and privileged aristocrat — Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice But Dim, or Bertie Wooster — exists for a reason. The possession of wealth and status is not necessarily a sign of mental acuity, and the ruling classes and the gentry have often made use of social capital and networks of influence to obtain positions for their relatives that they might not have obtained by merit alone. The Windsor family, notoriously, are not an especially intellectual bunch.
And the corollary to this is that there really are lots of gifted individuals from underprivileged backgrounds, whom schools can genuinely play a key role in developing. One of the most important English judges of the twentieth century, Lord Denning, was from a very humble family, but advanced through attentive and supportive schooling, first by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor and then at a grammar school. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the First World War, Sir William Robertson, was a postmaster’s son who had risen from the rank of private. Many of us who are now ensconced in middle class careers and lifestyles have only to go back two or three generations to find decidedly non-privileged ancestors — my Victorian forebears include small-scale farmers and provincial railwaymen — and we ought to be grateful for the social and cultural changes that enabled our parents and grandparents to make the most of their skills. Thomas Gray’s Elegy In A Country Churchyard lamented the waste of human potential in his own time, the mid-eighteenth century: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” He suggested that the cemetery in question might contain “Some mute inglorious Milton”, i.e. a born poet who had never been given the chance to develop and refine a poetic sensibility.
Those in the Labour party who hope for a great equalising wave are likely to be disappointed
But even with these caveats in mind, and even remembering that moral worth and intelligence are two things rather than one, those in the Labour party who hope for a great equalising wave are likely to be disappointed. It is also true that social mobility — i.e. the movement of talented individuals up the socio-economic scale — is not something that can happen constantly through many generations. Over time, there are diminishing returns from policies designed to achieve social mobility, because those who can move up gradually do so.
Getting to the truth in this area matters deeply, because modern governments spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy in seeking to counter the supposed effects of structural injustice on achievement, when in fact they are grappling with much more intractable problems, i.e. the basic biological limits within which people are operating, however supportive their schools and families. By all means let’s clear away those obstacles that we can — and there are plenty of obstacles to children’s happiness and success that Labour prefer to ignore, like the collapse of stable marriage — but let’s do so with open eyes and a clear mind.
