High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver

Goddard’s test questions were fired at immigrants as they stepped bewildered and exhausted off the boat at Ellis Island. (Many had never before held a pencil, and had no possible frame of reference for understanding what was being asked of them.) Goddard arrived at these staggering results: 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians, 80 percent of Hungarians, and 79 percent of Italians were diagnosed as morons. At the time, no one paused to wonder how any nation could be carrying out its sundry business with four-fifths of its citizens punching in below the mental age of twelve; ethnic quotas on U.S. immigration were in place within the decade.
    The explosive publication in 1994 of a book called The Bell Curve was an attempt to prove, yet again, the intellectual superiority of Caucasians. Written just in time to catch a new current of racism, the book drips with statistics and academic language, but its emotional heart seems bent on justifying the subordinate status of people of color in the U.S. Authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray have made extravagant claims linking IQ and race, frequently basing them on the work of researchers who received grants from the Pioneer Fund, a bluntly pro-white organization that has long denounced school desegregation and advocated sterilization to eliminate so-called genetically unfit individuals or races from society. It’s a case of science with the fingerprints of “motive” all over it.
    No matter that The Bell Curve is made of very tired stuff, not much different from mismeasuring skulls; the book was taken seriously enough to capture the cover of Newsweek , tie up the headlines and news roundups, and sell like a house afire. The authors proved one thing, without a doubt: the privileged have not yet tired of hearing how righteously they came by their place at the table.
    This whole line of inquiry, in which science is invoked to explain how we got where we are, is fatally tainted by what Hume called the “is-ought” problem. This is the philosophical error of confusing what exists with its right to exist, even though substance and scruples—what is and what ought —are entirely separate items, apples and oranges. When a mother says, “Boys will be boys,” is she explaining her son’s misbehavior, or predicting it, or forgiving it? Similarly, if we’re allowed to talk on and on about white students scoring high marks on the Stanford-Binet, it’s easy to slip a logical cog into who ought to get the better salary. And then there is all the sociobiological lore about malehumans in the primordial social scene carrying on with big sticks, sniffing every wind for a shot at infidelity; after a while, it begins to suggest absolution, a certain now-and-forever slant on masculinity.
    There’s a simpler way to sum up the “is-ought” problem. A man I know, whenever he hears a story about philandering husbands or conniving wives, pipes up: “Sociobiology could explain it!”
    And I intone: “Explain, maybe, but not excuse.”
    A creature with a big enough head to make a contract should have the sense to make one it can keep.
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    Of course, “See you later!” does not mean the same thing as “See you in court!” We make contracts on dozens of different levels. Hierarchies of urgency are understood, and so are the intrinsic values of different loyalties. Athletic contests are not marriages, although both are sweated out within bell jars of arbitrary rules. The advantage of sports is that they are quick—you decide what’s important, stake your claim, and win or lose, you still go home unscathed. It might not look possible to an anthropologist from Venus, but life here really does last beyond the Super Bowl.
    In a book called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football , Mariah Burton Nelson points out that sports are also about distinction, and perhaps that is why they assume such