If you like, feel free to abandon this post and read this instead:
Don’t worry, the title is basically clickbait, but the essay itself is very good, and says what I’d like to say myself, very well.
If you’re still here, or have come back …
When I was at school, the teachers loved me. I was the kind of child they went into the career for. I came from nowhere, a family with no expectations that had nobody with a university background, and I picked up pretty much everything effortlessly.
I was singled out for stretch goals. When it came to the end of the year, I was the one boy picked for my work to be displayed alongside the usual diligent girls. To my astonishment, at the national exams at sixteen, I got top marks across the board, for every subject. Nobody had done that from my school before, as far as I knew, so I hadn’t known it was possible to aim at, even.
This is not boasting, because I haven’t done anything anybody would marvel at since. I say it because I want to make clear that when people talk about being “smart”, as the essay I’ve linked to does, I have reason to think about what they say. I’ve never bothered to take an IQ test, but whatever IQ tests measure, it’s clearly the kind of thing I’m good at. These are my people.
For whatever that’s worth.
And this is the thing.
People like me are the people the modern world values. We’ve won. When you see someone with a life that’s comfortable beyond belief, it’s more or less someone like me who has the big house, the supportive family, the enviable car and the bulging pension plan.
More and more, it seems, even as the part of the world with a platform pushes back against other things I am, like white and male and middle-aged, the quick adaptable intelligence is beyond reach and more unassailable than ever. If you’re not intelligent, nobody has much use for you, and the future certainly doesn’t. Your job will be automated unless you accept something menially manual for a pittance. You can’t be trusted to vote. In fact you really shouldn’t be able to decide much at all, not even for yourself, since intelligent people can clearly see you’re getting it all wrong.
The stakes are high, the consensus goes. Wherever you look, things are bad and getting worse.
Better leave it to the clever people.
… and how’s that going? Happy with the results? Or maybe it’s still that the clever people aren’t in charge enough yet? Or a different set of clever people could sort it out?
Clever people may say I’m bitter and have got it all wrong. I didn’t go to university, so I’ve remained an outsider to the real clever world, whatever my early results. Some time after the euphoria of my exam results, and while coasting for much of the following two years of education, I came to think that the academic world was a charade, and that learning to tell people what they wanted to hear me tell them wasn’t as satisfying as it was made out to be. That wasn’t the primary reason I disappointed my teachers and dropped out of education, but it was why I didn’t make any effort to go further.
Maybe that biases me.
Still, though, cleverness is overrated. All the evidence says so.
When you look at what needs fixing, even in little matters, it’s the height of arrogance to suppose that a high IQ makes a difference any more than a coat of paint fills in a trench. The requirement in terms of capability and complexity is so far off the scale that a genius and an idiot are almost indistinguishable.
But here we are, convinced that cleverness is the answer to everything. Some, that wise compassionate ivory-tower-dwellers should guide us, and others that brilliance from the worlds of business and tech has the answers. And somehow we aren’t clever enough to see that it isn’t working, either way.
Quite a few years ago, I used to enjoy discussions in the comment section of a national newspaper. Memorably, for me, I debated this issue of intelligence with someone who was a devotee of IQ tests, and I couldn’t argue against his specifics, in which he pushed for them measuring something real and valuable. He won all of that, being more experienced and having all the facts on his side. The one area he conceded, though, was what has come to seem most important to me – if I (or people very like me) design a test to rank people, and repeatedly I come out on top (or people very like me), I should be wary of what it is I’m testing for, and whether I’ve missed anything.
Clever people are good at winning arguments. Of course. It’s what clever people are good at. Intellectually nimble, with good memories for facts.
Winning arguments is not the same as being right, and we forget that.
This, I suppose, is why I still believe, above all, in democracy, for all its faults. It’s the only system we have that allows sheer variety to have a say, although we’ve distorted it in many ways and tried to damp that variety down.
I’m not really sure where we go from here, but I think those who are intelligent enough to have ideas should also perhaps be humble enough to acknowledge that it needs something else entirely.
At the very least we should be prepared to admit that we’ve rigged the game in favour of ourselves while telling everybody else it’s good for them, and perhaps they have a right to a say even if we think they’re slow. Slow, I’ve come to think, has its upsides.