I knew the Supreme Court of the US was weighted heavily in favor of the elite products of high-powered law schools, high-powered federal work experience, and high-powered theories.
But this chart of the make-up of the Supreme Court in recent years at the New York Times (May 2, 2009) was still something of a stunner to me.
One hundred percent of SC justices are former federal judges.
How many now are state judges? Nil.
How many now are private lawyers? Nil.
How many now are elected officials? Nil.
How many now are government lawyers? Nil.
How many now are law professors? Nil.
As Adam Liptak, the SC correspondent at The Times, justifiably complains,
“None of the justices have held elective office. All but one attended law school at Harvard or Yale. And the only three justices in American history who never worked in private practice are on the current court..”
But then Liptak holds up as a model, David Souter, a former attorney-general of the State of New Hampshire.
This, as trial lawyer Norm Pattis points out, is like depending on a sprinter to win a marathon.
“When is the last time a lawyer who made his living from fees earned
representing ordinary working people sat on the Supreme Court?”
But the question could be asked of many more government insitutions.
When was the last time the SEC was staffed with officials from small banks and thrifts?
When was the last time a mayor from a small-town made it to the White House?
We talk about localism a lot. But in practice we’re heavily prejudiced against it.
A small-town resume, we presume, is fit only for small-towns.
There are a lot of reasons for this but I’ll focus on a couple that strike me at once (and I’ve blogged on them recently):
(1) It used to be that education fitted you to exercise judgment. These days we avoid judgment altogether, confusing it with judgmentalism.
In the absence of the ability to judge (and any common standard to judge by), we become victims of public relations and marketing. When no one can agree on substance, image becomes everything.
Brands rule. Harvard and Yale are the best known national brands, so we outfit our justices in them.
(2) Increasing specialization means that fewer people feel capable of pronouncing judgment about something, even if they felt it was permissble to. They look instead to experts to make their choices for them. The media, which has a disproportionate effect on nearly every choice made, tends to focus on experts who come from the same educational and socio-economic background. The circle of the elite thus tends to get smaller and clubbier with every year.
This is basically the message I got from “The Bell Curve,” that extraordinarily controversial book of a few decades back. What they summed up was the idea that those with superior intelligence were separating themselves from society and creating elite cliques who fashioned the rules by which all others must perform. The end result of which was that all who did not fit the intellectual and intelligence strata of those few elite were effectively forced out of effective participation in general society.
I found their work (in that book) to be frightening not in that it pointed out that there are indeed differences in intellectual capacity, but rather that those differences were being used to create divisions and effectively sideline all but the “very best,” a very narrow and unwholesome view of the value of human lives, in my opinion.
This survey confirms their worries.
– NonE
Hi NonE –
Yes, it’s frightening, but not, in my opinion, because these elites are truly that smart.
That is a mythology created by selection, branding of certain kinds of schools, selective aptitude tests and so on.
What you have is highly indoctrinated people, few of whom are really all that intelligent in any meaningful way.
Undoubtedly, some of them score well on tests, can solve certain logical puzzles fast, can do meticulous work that conforms to patterns set by their peers, but is that all there is to real intelligence? I doubt it.
Creative intelligence is a very different and much less predictable quantity.
But even if we concede intelligence on the part of our elites, if doesn’t follow, as you point out, that that’s all that’s needed in society.
I’m not even talking about emotional or social intelligence, or moral worthiness, or talents of other kinds. Intelligence of the measurable verbal kind is a part of intelligence. Insight, perception, depth, experience come in other ways and from other people.
And then what about the practical wisdom of living, the skills and knowledge accumulated at a subverbal level by craftsmen and artisans whose wisdom more directly affects society every single day.
Murray’s work brings in a whole different dimension.
At university, when I innocently asked why discussing IQ differences was taboo, a young professor told me (in a shocked tone) that it was because it had “social policy implications.”
That is, if it were shown that women generally showed less aptitude for math than men, then math programs would discourage women from applying or at least, not go out of their way to encourage them.
In my naivety, I didn’t actually follow this reasoning. I thought if it were shown that women were deficient in that area, all the more reason to encourage women to work harder in that area.
Instinctively I grasped that balance and correction, well roundedness were part of education. My professor, well-schooled in the ideology of the expert class, automatically subscribed to the theory of specialization based on the state allotting scarce resources to whoever showed most evidence of being “deserving” of it – which is central planning.
Whereas, if the market determined such things, women would go into math related courses inspite of having less aptitude, because the market would reward them better….