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COMMENTARY

The Ominous, New Cognitive Elite

December 3, 1994

By CHARLES A. MURRAY

Also published in The Philadelphia Inquirer

In the last half century, society has undergone a hidden revolution. Fifty years ago, most of the people in the top few percentiles of the IQ ladder were not college graduates, and those who did go to college usually went to the nearest state college. Today, these most talented American youths not only go to college, but are channeled with astonishing efficiency into a handful of elite universities. Isolated from the rest of society, associating only with their own kind, exposed to a uniform intellectual conventional wisdom about everything from ethics to aesthetics to politics, this new class—a “cognitive elite”—has over the same half century moved into positions of influence throughout American society.

Its formation as a class coincided with a drastic expansion of the reach of federal power. Fifty years ago, intellectuals had strong ideas about how American society ought to be run but, like Archimedes, they lacked a place to stand. Today, they operate as senior bureaucrats and congressional staff (and occasionally even elected officials), the lawyers who lobby for the laws and regulations, the professors who lay down the intellectually correct line, or the journalists who interpret the news—and if they can get their way, their bright ideas turn into federal law. The cognitive elite now does have a place to stand, and it has been used to disastrous effect. The cognitive elite’s mischief cuts across political labels. Its distinctive features are utter confidence that they know best how ordinary people should live their lives and a fascination with complications and rules.

One effect of the cognitive elite’s kind of rules has been to make life difficult for ordinary people to reap the rewards that their abilities should command. This country was once great at letting people parlay determination, commonsense, and hard work into a good living. Anyone who has tried to open a small business recently knows how much things have changed. If you want to strike out on your own these days, you had better be smart in the IQ sense of the term for reasons that have nothing to do with providing a valued service for customers but everything to do with jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

Another effect of the new rules has been to make it harder for communities to run local life. Ask anyone who has served on a town council or tried to run a voluntary social service or become active in a local school. Again and again, common-sense steps to deal with local problems run afoul of the schemes set in law by the Ira Magaziners of the cognitive elite—schemes that tend to be elaborate, ineffectual, and utterly out of touch.

The ascendancy of the cognitive elite has made life more difficult for everyone, but most especially for those at the low end of the bell curve of cognitive ability, who are least able to navigate through the brave new rules crafted by the cognitive elite. Many of our gravest social problems—violent crime, mounting births out of wedlock, inner city decay—have been aggravated by this development.