2025-09-25
A Reading Note
I’ve written before about the Army intelligence tests: an experiment in which millions of Army recruits were subject to an early version of the IQ test. As Stephen Jay Gould documents, the tests were chaotically—almost deliriously—managed. Illiterate recruits were given a version of the test in which proctors walked around yelling inscrutable instructions and pointing at pictures on sheets of paper; many of these recruits did not speak English as their first language, and had never before used a pencil. Gould shares some of the instructions given to the proctors:
The idea of working fast must be impressed upon the men during the maze test. Examiner an…
2025-09-25
A Reading Note
I’ve written before about the Army intelligence tests: an experiment in which millions of Army recruits were subject to an early version of the IQ test. As Stephen Jay Gould documents, the tests were chaotically—almost deliriously—managed. Illiterate recruits were given a version of the test in which proctors walked around yelling inscrutable instructions and pointing at pictures on sheets of paper; many of these recruits did not speak English as their first language, and had never before used a pencil. Gould shares some of the instructions given to the proctors:
The idea of working fast must be impressed upon the men during the maze test. Examiner and orderlies walk around the room, motioning men who are not working, and saying, “Do it, do it, hurry up, quick.” At the end of 2 minutes, examiner says, “Stop! Turn over the page to test 2.”
This is, as Gould notes, diabolical. How could a test given under these conditions possibly evaluate some innate quality of “intelligence”? But the designers of the test were so enamored of their theories of racial hierarchy that they either couldn’t perceive the irrationality of their own design, or else they knew it for a facade. The practice of the eugenicist is invariably that of the error or the con.
But that phrase, hurry up, quick, struck a bell—I had heard it before. In Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, human colonizers arrive on the planet Athshea, seven lightyears from Earth and rich in trees—a rarity on their deforested home world. The Athshean people are small, furred, and green; the humans name them “creechies,” deem them to be of lesser intelligence (an error, as it turns out), and proceed to enslave them, rape them, and kill them with impunity. In the opening pages, we see the Captain of New Tahiti Colony rise in the morning, and yell to an Athshean:
“Ben!” he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. “Hot water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!”
Le Guin’s concatenation of the phrase transforms it from merely extreme into something sinister: the way the words roll out all together escalates the inane redundancy, the empty urgency. Speed is not useful to the task at hand; the hurried pot does not boil faster. Rather, the purpose of the haste is to prevent any semblance of rest, to prohibit even a moment of peace. But rest is reserved for those deemed sufficiently wise, and sufficiently human.
The Captain will eventually learn that Ben’s ingenuity far exceeds his own—a lesson that comes at a very steep price for them both. Whether our present-day and present-Earth supremacists will ever learn remains to be seen.
Related books
First published in 1981—thirteen years before The Bell Curve—Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man nonetheless claims to be the definitive refutation of that deeply racist book.
The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.