Smart people, dumb people

[He's not impressed.]

The Heritable View of General Intelligence

What makes us smart or dumb? How can we tell and why does it matter?

Notions of intelligence have historically revolved around privilege and social status. This is what I will refer to as the hereditary view of general intelligence. It goes like this:

Intelligence is a general quality that can be perceived in how well you do at tasks valued by the privileged and powerful, that which marks or sets them apart from others. Yet it is assumed to be applicable to practically any problem.  If you don't speak the right way, think the right way, or have the right views, it is a mark of not just ignorance but lack of intelligence. Of course, narrowly defining what intelligence is or is not and how it can be detected or measured is stacking the deck toward a favored result, but that is par for the course.

Intelligence is biologically heritable. This fits in with broader nationalist and racist views and narrower class/social superiority views. Those who are believed to be inherently smarter are also perceived to be more successful, and vice versa, both suggesting and reinforcing the idea that you are born smart or dumb. Smart people therefore deserve their privilege as a birthright. They are natural leaders. No need to look to social, ecological, political, or other factors in relative success within or between societies.

Intelligence is fixed throughout one's life. This source of pride and privilege is a life-long trait. Those who have it keep it, except perhaps owing to some illnesses, injuries, or advanced age. You ought to therefore be able to pick out future leaders by looking at the aptitude of children.

The heredity view of general intelligence (HVGI hereafter) was a focus of biometricians examining heredity at the turn of the twentieth century, as it coincided with a new concern for how human variation could be explained and controlled. It just so happens that HVGI resembles whatever influential white men and those who train under them think is cool and elite. Just a coincidence, surely?

Isaac Newton rocked the world of European science so hard that many academics began to think that any good scientific theory ought to resemble Newtonian physics. This helped launch what has come to be known as physics envy, wherein people in other disciplines want(ed) to have an elegant theory with a mathematical expression and precise predictions for testing and validation. Charles Darwin, for example, used the work of Malthus to show that natural selection could be connected to mathematics. Later, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, biologists worked at synthesizing Darwinism and Mendelism in the creation of the mathematical and statistical science of population genetics, which became the lingua franca of evolutionary biology.


Physics envy has made repeated in-roads into behavioral and social sciences as well, and intelligence is a frequent focus of such efforts. But how to quantify it and set up precise predictions? Narrow definitions of readily standardized tasks is a start, and this is where such attempts always begin. But which tasks? And what counts? How to measure degrees of success? What is the quantifiable object of statistical analysis?

Here enters IQ, the intelligence quotient. But no one can really say what it is, beyond a statistical analysis of performances for a list of cognitive tasks that are said to correlate to future performances by an individual in a particular societal model of education and work. A whole flood of literature argues what IQ, and the underlying the HVGI it is supposed to represent, actually reflects and therefore what uses it might have.

The trick is in the underlying assumptions: That analytical ability related to the kinds of conceptualization used in disciplines like formal logic, mathematics, and physics are the most valuable and relevant forms or expressions of intelligence. That this perception of value and relevance is objective and not historically and culturally shaped. That the ability to correlate aptitude on a test with future success in certain tasks or situations also requiring similar ways of thinking reflects generalized ability. That this generalized ability reflects some substantive and largely fixed component residing in the size or configuration of the brain and that is inherited biologically.

Which is apparently why poor people, people who are societally marginalized or ghettoized,  and those raised in non-Western cultures sometimes appear a little on the dull side. The idea that the co-creating and interactive factors of genetics/epigenetics, the social, chemical, and ecological environments, and so on lay different foundations upon which future development is based is given polite lip service as that mixture is puzzle that cross-cultural psychologists and cultural anthropologists are still on the surface of, even with collaboration among colleagues in numerous other fields.

The idea that seemingly stable and heritable traits work out because of several layers of development that tend to go the same route over and over yet which are dependent on such multifactorial construction is daunting. When do divergences begin? How quickly do they separate? How and why? That is, based on what influences? What other forms or expressions of intelligence should we recognize? How are they and their underlying developmental influences related?We could ask these same questions,by the way, of gender-identity and sexual orientation and other complex human traits.

But hey, we can just say that there are strong correlations between certain tests and certain future outcomes, so the HVGI and its underlying assumptions are more or less valid, right?

The arguments over the HVGI are extensive and perpetual, but it cannot be denied that it originated to explain and justify societal, class, and racial differences, that it's validity and the limits of its usefulness have legitimate challenges within relevant academic and professional communities, and that it has strongly influenced popular perceptions of what being smart or dumb means, including what it looks and sounds like. 

Smart is white, dumb is non-white.

Smart is male, dumb is female.

Smart is a financially successful and socially lauded career, dumb is a socially maligned/poor paying job or unemployment.

Smart is (globally) north, dumb is (globally) south.

Smart is modernized and industrialized, dumb is traditional and agrarian.

Smart is urban, dumb is rural.

Smart is irreligious, dumb is religious.

Smart is college-educated, dumb is non college-educated.

Smart is science (especially physical sciences, i.e. physics and chemistry) and engineering, dumb is arts and humanities.

Smart is formal logic and mathematics, dumb is informally descriptive and poetic.

Smart is analytical, dumb is intuitive.

Smart is rational, dumb is emotional.

Smart is empirical, dumb is metaphysical.

Smart is quantitative, dumb is qualitative.

Smart is advanced technology and fast paced lifestyle, dumb is simple tools and leisure.

Smart is a coat and tie, dumb is jeans and a T-shirt.

Smart is an office/indoor job working with ideas, dumb is working outdoors with your hands.

Smart is quiet and subdued, dumb is loud and boisterous.

Smart is stationary and isolated, dumb is frenetic and gregarious.

Smart is detached and dispassionate, dumb is embracing and spiritual.

Can you see the cultural and historical biases a little clearer now? These aren't absolutes, but the more some person, group, idea, or activity tends one way the more they are seen in places like Europe and North America is smarter, and when they list the other way they are perceived as dumber.

This is the millieu in which the HVGI was developed and refined. Regardless of whether you think a measurement like IQ is valid or useful, it was born and developed in this kind of atmosphere and in turn it continues to subtly and not so subtly reinforce such thoughts and feelings about who and what is smart or dumb. The idea of IQ becomes contorted and used in popular presentations and entertainment as either a kind of intellectual second-sight (extremely high IQs) or as a form of frail innocence/odious ignorance (low IQs). This spills over into popular understanding and attitudes.

So how else might we think of intelligence? More specifically, of smart and dumb?

Limited by Love and Friendship

[Smile friend! You are loved.]

As human beings we constantly try to capture and classify our experiences in familiar words and the conceptual clouds associated with particular terminology. The experiences are reworked to fit into a narrative with which we are familiar, and likewise, our use of words becomes limited by how we think we are supposed to experience the world.

Simple, right?

Take the word love. It has a large conceptual cloud of anticipated meaning and nuance hovering around it, including implications of attraction, affection, inspiration, passion, and desired intimacy.

While technically love can be erotic or platonic, familial or divine, in contemporary Western societies it mostly suggests the erotic form, which tends to claim romance and intimacy as part of a triad of sexuality, which itself is reduced to a lusty physicality. And while it's OK to use the familial notion of love for close relatives and some deeply committed friends who are essentially fictive kin, the use of the word is pretty much exhausted at this point except for crude references to a supposedly but often not so intense desire for some object or experience. Such as, "Yes, I'd love a hot chocolate" as an expression of enthusiasm and appreciation.

The latter usage, the hot chocolate love, doesn't take the word too seriously, and the familial variety may or may not. In a social, sexual coupling, particularly of the long term variety, a fuller range of the implications of the word are not only possible but even expected, so that it can be an appreciation of the beauty and connection with the other, the sexual attraction and passion experienced, the familial bond anticipated or realized, and the appreciation of the invitation to greater intimacy (which is not just a synonym for sexual activity but any kind of baring a part of one's nature that is normally reserved or hidden).

These expected and accepted uses limit our ability to name and explore our broader range of experiences, experiences that might otherwise be referred to as encounters with or expressions of love. Is a person you feel a strong connection to, share fragile or timid aspects of yourself with, and feel inspired around also your spouse, close kin, or someone you've known since childhood? If so, you can say you love them. At least if you identify as a woman. Otherwise that childhood friend thing is shaky. Might want to find a euphemism for that one. Maybe for that relative, too.

What about someone who is relatively new to your life, or isn't the object of sexual desire, or isn't a close family member? You must be impulsive, needy, or hyperbolic to use that word for your experience of and sense of connection to such a person! And while you're at it, don't forget to cheapen the word, to wear it translucently thin and make it a redundant echo, by using it regularly out of obligation to identify and reify the kinds of relationships where it's usage is not only accepted but expected. Don't give it time to rest, recharge, or renew. Don't acknowledge it where it isn't permitted unless you just plan to use it everywhere without restraint.

Speaking of draining the vitality of important words, make sure that while you overuse the word love in highly confined social space, you are referring to everyone you've ever met or connected to through in person contacts and social media as a friend. But only if you are planning on using them as a convenient contrivance for practicing hollow politeness, as an audience to hide the fact that you are talking to yourself (from yourself), or as an ego massage. If you are truly going to try to cultivate relationships of significance, if not always depth, with such people, offering them respect and sincere affection, that's just lame. Or Pollyannaish. Or -- wait, did I already say lame?

Love and friendship. Simple terms belying a deep vein of potential and complexity of experience with other people, yet bound fraudulently by conventional usage and expectation. Especially for those identifying with masculine gender forms. What depths and mysteries of the heart await those who push past such convention to express and explore experiences befitting the full range of such terms rather than their limited contemporary confines through our unquestioned social constructions?

Don't think words have power? Violate their safe boundaries and follow them into a place you haven't been before. Love. Friendship. Spirit. Intimate. Passion. Glory. Fear. Help. Divine.

Then drop me a line, let me know how it went.