Date: 	Thu, 9 Oct 1997 01:06:53 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: M-TH: Adorno, Ellul and The Bell Curve


I sent this to another line. Writing it made me think that I should study
Adorno and Ellul. So I am sending it to the line.
All the best,
Rakesh


I think the *Bell Curve* is easily understood as an intervention in an
already framed debate. The basic idea is that jobs which required unskilled
labor are being replaced by jobs which require more skill. While economists
argue about whether these jobs have been moved abroad or simply replaced in
the course of technical change (Adrian Wood v Robert Lawrence), most agree
that the demand for new skilled labor exceeds the supply. Now what
Herrnstein and Murray are saying is simple: that it would be a waste of
money to try to attempt to impart to people the general skills they will
require to do these new jobs, to work in cooperative teams, to change from
one skill-intensive task to other. Many people simply haven't inherited
enough intelligence to function in a more demanding world.  Instead of
throwing money at them (the so-called cognitive underclass), the state
should focus more on those who can be trained to function in the new more
skill intensive economy and help to ensure that they have more preppie
kids, chances being that too can make the grade. So Murray and Herrnstein
insist that it's not that they're racist, it's just unfortunate that most
minorities simply won't cut it, though they welcome the few that can.


The liberal response to this has been that it is possible to train the
cognitive underclass, to make of them lawyers, accountants,
problem-shooting shopfloor engineers, computer-using cashiers--in short to
hold out hope that they too can become upstanding, family oriented, law
abiding functionaries of a system, in which everyone can have some
specialized, "9-5" function in this immense overpowering productive
apparatus that turns out an ever greater quantity and diversity of
commodities, no matter the environmental consequences,  while forcing
people to leave all bonds (except for immediate family) behind to fill
their niche in it, to accept the specialized work it provides, and to find
satisfaction in the things it has to sell, whether consumer society really
makes us happier.

In one vision, the system really has no room for the cognitive underclass;
in the other vision, all people can be made to function properly in the
system and make the system stronger in turn.

The whole debate leaves one wondering what an anti-systemic critique would
be like. But I haven't spent much time reading people like Theodor Adorno
or Jacques Ellul or Paul Goodman or other famous anti-systematic thinkers.
Anyways, the sixties are over and there is no alternative.

rb





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