Magic, page 26
During the 1950s, the nation was infested with television programs in which large sums were paid out to those who could come up with obscure items of information on demand (and under pressure). It turned out that some of the shows weren’t entirely honest, but that is irrelevant.
Millions of people who watched thought that the mental calisthenics indicated intelligence.[1] The most remarkable contestant was a postal employee from St. Louis who, instead of applying his expertise to one category as did others, took the whole world of factual items for his province. He amply displayed his prowess and struck the nation with awe. Indeed, just before the quiz program fad collapsed, there were plans to pit this man against all comers in a program to be entitled “Beat the Genius.”
Genius? Poor man! He had barely competence enough to make a poor living and his knack of total recall was of less use to him than the ability to walk a tightrope would have been.
But not everyone equates the accumulation and ready regurgitation of names, dates, and events with intelligence. Very often, in fact, it is the lack of this very quality that is associated with intelligence. Have you never heard of the absent-minded professor?
According to one kind of popular stereotype, all professors, and all intelligent people generally, are absent-minded and couldn’t remember their own names without a supreme effort. But then what makes them intelligent?
I suppose the explanation would be that a very knowledgeable person bends so much of his intellect to his own sector of knowledge that he has little brain to spare for anything else. The absent-minded professor is therefore forgiven all his failings for the sake of his prowess in his chosen field.
Yet that cannot be the whole story either, for we divide categories of knowledge into a hierarchy and reserve our admiration for some only, labeling successful jugglery in those and those only as “intelligent.”
We might imagine a young man, for instance, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules of baseball, its procedures, its records, its players, and its current events. He may concentrate so thoroughly on such matters that he is extremely absent-minded with respect to mathematics, English grammar, geography, and history. He is not then forgiven his failure in some respects for the sake of his success in others; he is stupid! On the other hand, the mathematical wizard who cannot, even after explanation, tell a bat boy from a home run is; nonetheless, intelligent.
Mathematics is somehow associated with intelligence in our judgments and baseball is not, and even moderate success in grasping the former is enough for the label of intelligent, while supreme knowledge of the latter gains you nothing in that direction (though much, perhaps, in others).
So the absent-minded professor, as long as it is only his name he doesn’t remember, or what day it is, or whether he has eaten lunch or has an appointment to keep (and you should hear the stories about Norbert Wiener), is still intelligent as long as he learns, remembers, and recalls a great deal about some category associated with intelligence.
And what categories are these?
We can eliminate every category in which excellence involves merely muscular effort or coordination. However admirable a great baseball player or a great swimmer, painter, sculptor, flutist, or cellist may be, however successful, famous, and beloved, excellence in these fields is, in itself, no indication of intelligence.
Rather it is in the category of theory that we find an association with intelligence. To study the technique of carpentry and write a book on the various fashions of carpentry through the ages is a sure way of demonstrating intelligence even though one could not, on any single occasion, drive a nail into a beam without smashing one’s thumb.
And if we confine ourselves to the realm of thought, it is clear that we are readier to associate intelligence with some fields than with others. We are almost sure to show more respect for a historian than for a sports writer, for a philosopher than for a cartoonist, and so on.
It seems an unavoidable conclusion to me that our notions of intelligence are a direct inheritance from the days of ancient Greece, when the mechanical arts were despised as fit only for artisans and slaves, while only the “liberal” arts (from the Latin word for “free men”) were respectable, because they had no practical use and were therefore fit for free men.
So nonobjective is our judgment of intelligence, that we can see its measure change before our eyes. Until fairly recently, the proper education for young gentlemen consisted very largely in the brute inculcation (through beatings, if necessary) of the great Latin writers. To know no Latin seriously disqualified anyone for enlistment in the ranks of the intelligent.
We might, of course, point out that there is a difference between “educated” and “intelligent” and that the foolish spouting of Latin marked only a fool after all—but that’s just theory. In actual fact, the uneducated intelligent man is invariably downgraded and underestimated and, at best, is given credit for “native wit” or “shrewd common sense.” And women, who were not educated, were shown to be unintelligent by their lack of Latin and that was the excuse for not educating them. (Of course that’s circular reasoning, but circular reasoning has been used to support all the great injustices of history.)
Yet see how things change. It used to be Latin that was the mark of intelligence and now it is science, and I am the beneficiary; I know no Latin except for what my flypaper mind has managed to pick up accidentally, but I know a great deal of science—so without changing a single brain cell, I would be dumb in 1775 and terribly smart in 1975.
You might say that it isn’t knowledge itself, not even the properly fashionable category of knowledge, that counts, but the use that is made of it. It is, you might argue, the manner in which the knowledge is displayed and handled, the wit, originality, and creativity with which it is put to use, that counts. Surely, there is the measure of intelligence.
And to be sure, though teaching, writing, scientific research are examples of professions often associated with intelligence, we all know there can be pretty dumb teachers, writers, and researchers. The creativity or, if you like, the intelligence can be missing and still leave behind a kind of mechanical competence.
But if creativity is what counts, that, too, only counts in approved and fashionable areas. A musician, unlearned, uneducated, unable to read music perhaps, may be able to put together notes and tempos in such a way as to create, brilliantly, a whole new school of music. Yet that in itself will not earn him the accolade of “intelligent.” He is merely one of those unaccountable “creative geniuses” with a “gift from God.” Since he doesn’t know how he does it, and cannot explain it after he’s done it[2] how can he be considered intelligent?
The critic who, after the fact, studies the music, and finally, with an effort, decides it is not merely an unpleasant noise by the old rules, but is a great accomplishment by certain new rules—why he is intelligent. (But how many critics would you exchange for one Louis Armstrong?)
But in that case, why is the brilliant scientific genius considered intelligent? Do you suppose he knows how his theories come to him or can explain to you how it all happened? Can the great writer explain how he writes so that you can do as he does?
I am not, myself, a great writer by any standard I respect, but I have my points and I have this value for the present occasion—that I am one person, generally accepted as intelligent, whom I can view from within.
Well, my clearest and most visible claim to intelligence is the nature of my writing—the fact that I write a great many books in a great many fields in complex yet clear prose, displaying great mastery of much knowledge in doing so.
So what?
No one ever taught me to write. I had worked out the basic art of writing when I was eleven. And I can certainly never explain what that basic art is to anyone else.
I dare say that some critic, who knows far more of literary theory than I do (or than I would ever care to), might, if he chose, analyze my work and explain what I do and why, far better than I ever could. Would that make him more intelligent than I am? I suspect it might, to many people.
In short, I don’t know of any way of defining intelligence that does not depend on the subjective and the fashionable.
Now, then, we come to the matter of intelligence testing, the determination of the “intelligence quotient” or “IQ.”
If, as I maintain and firmly believe, there is no objective definition of intelligence, and what we call intelligence is only a creation of cultural fashion and subjective prejudice, what the devil is it we test when we make use of an intelligence test?
I hate to knock the intelligence test, because I am a beneficiary of it. I routinely end up on the far side of 160 when I am tested and even then I am invariably underestimated because it almost always takes me less time to do a test than the time allotted.
In fact, out of curiosity, I got a paperback book containing a sizable number of different tests designed to measure one’s IQ. Each test had a half-hour time limit. I worked on each one as honestly as I could, answering some questions instantly, some after a bit of thought, some by guesswork, and some not at all. —And naturally, I got some answers wrong.
When I was done, I worked out the results according to directions and it turned out I had an IQ of 135. —But wait! I had not accepted the half-hour limit offered me, but broke off each section of the test at the fifteen-minute mark and went on to the rest. I therefore doubled the score and decided I have an IQ of 270. (I’m sure that the doubling is unjustified, but the figure of 270 pleases my sense of cheerful self-appreciation, so I intend to insist on it.)
But however much all this soothes my vanity, and however much I appreciate being vice-president of Mensa, an organization which bases admission to its membership on IQ, I must, in all honesty, maintain that it means nothing.
What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence.
Thus, important parts of any intelligence test measure the size of one’s vocabulary, but the words one must define are just those words one is apt to find in reading approved works of literature. No one asks for the definition of “two-bagger” or “snake eyes” or “riff,” for the simple reason that those who design the tests don’t know these terms or are rather ashamed of themselves if they do.
This is similarly true of tests of mathematical knowledge, of logic, of shape visualization, and of all the rest. You are tested in what is culturally fashionable—in what educated men consider to be the criteria of intelligence—i.e., of minds like their own.
The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own, thus giving them more evidence of “intelligence” and more examples of “intelligent people” and therefore more reason to devise additional tests of the same kind. More circular reasoning!
And once someone is stamped with the label “Intelligent” on the basis of such tests and such criteria, any demonstration of stupidity no longer counts. It is the label that matters, not the fact. I don’t like to libel others, so I will merely give you two examples of clear stupidity which I myself perpetrated (though I can give you two hundred, if you like):
1. On a certain Sunday, something went wrong with my car and I was helpless. Fortunately, my younger brother, Stan, lived nearby and since he is notoriously goodhearted, I called him. He came out at once, absorbed the situation, and began to use the Yellow Pages and the telephone to try to reach a service station, while I stood by with my lower jaw hanging loose. Finally, after a period of strenuous futility, Stan said to me with just a touch of annoyance, “With all your intelligence, Isaac, how is it you lack the brains to join the AAA?” Whereupon, I said, “Oh, I belong to the AAA,” and produced the card. He gave me a long, strange look and called the AAA. I was on my wheels in half an hour.
2. Sitting in Ben Bova’s room at a recent science fiction convention, I was waiting, rather impatiently, for my wife to join us. Finally, there was a ring at the door. I sprang to my feet with an excited “Here’s Janet!”, flung open a door, and dashed into the closet—when Ben opened the room door and let her in.
Stan and Ben love to tell these stories about me and they’re harmless. Because I have the label “intelligent,” what would surely be evidence of stupidity is converted into lovable eccentricity.
This brings us to a serious point. There has been talk in recent years of racial differences in IQ. Men like William B. Shockley, who has a Nobel Prize (in physics), point out that measurements show the average IQ of blacks to be substantially lower than that of whites, and this created quite a stir.
Many people who, for one reason or another, have already concluded that blacks are “inferior” are delighted to have “scientific” reason to suppose that the undesirable position in which blacks find themselves is their own fault after all.
Shockley, of course, denies racial prejudice (sincerely, I’m sure) and points out that we can’t deal intelligently with racial problems if, out of political motives, we ignore an undoubted scientific finding; that we ought to investigate the matter carefully and study the intellectual inequality of man. Nor is it just a matter of blacks versus whites; apparently some groups of whites score less well than do other groups of whites, and so on.
Yet to my mind the whole hip-hurrah is a colossal fraud. Since intelligence is (as I believe) a matter of subjective definition and since the dominant intellectuals of the dominant sector of society have naturally defined it in a self-serving manner, what is it we say when we say that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites have? What we are saying is that the black subculture is substantially different from the dominant White subculture and that the Black values are sufficiently different from dominant white values to make blacks do less well on the carefully designed intelligence tests produced by the whites.
In order for blacks, on the whole, to do as well as whites, they must abandon their own subculture for the white and produce a closer fit to the IQ-testing situation. This they may not want to do; and even if they want to, conditions are such that it is not made easy for them to fulfill that desire.
To put it as succinctly as possible: blacks in America have had a subculture created for them, chiefly by white action, and have been kept in it chiefly by white action. The values of that subculture are defined as inferior to those of the dominant culture, so that the black IQ is arranged to be lower; and the lower IQ is then used as an excuse for the continuation of the very conditions that produced it. Circular reasoning? Of course.
But then, I don’t want to be an intellectual tyrant and insist that what I speak must be the truth.
Let us say that I am wrong; that there is an objective definition of intelligence, that it can be measured accurately, and that blacks do have lower IQ ratings than whites do, on the average, not because of any cultural differences but because of some innate, biologically based intellectual inferiority. Now what? How should whites treat blacks?
That’s a hard question to answer, but perhaps we can get some good out of supposing the reverse. What if we test blacks and find out, more or less to our astonishment, that they end up showing a higher IQ than do whites, on the average?
How should we then treat them? Should we give them a double vote? Give them preferential treatment in jobs, particularly in the government? Let them have the best seats in the bus and theater? Give them cleaner restrooms than whites have, and a higher average pay scale?
I am quite certain that the answer would be a decided, forceful, and profane negative for each of these propositions and any like them. I suspect that if it were reported that blacks had higher IQ ratings than Whites do, most whites would at once maintain, with considerable heat, that IQ could not be measured accurately and that it was of no significance if it could be, that a person was a person regardless of book learning, fancy education, big words, and fol-de-rol, that plain ordinary horsesense was all anyone needed, that all men were equal in the good old United States, and those damned pinko professors and their IQ tests could just shove it—
Well, if we’re going to ignore IQ when we are on the low end of the scale, why should we pay such pious attention to it when they are?
But hold on. I may be wrong again. How do I know how the dominants would react to a high-IQ minority? After all, we do respect intellectuals and professors to a certain extent, don’t we? Then, too, we’re talking about oppressed minorities, and a high-IQ minority wouldn’t be oppressed in the first place, so the artificial situation I set up by pretending the blacks scored high is just a straw man, and knocking it down has no value.
Really? Let’s consider the Jews, who, for some two millennia, have been kicked around whenever Gentiles found life growing dull. Is this because Jews, as a group, are low-IQ? —You know, I never heard that maintained by anyone, however anti-Semitic.
I do not, myself, consider Jews, as a group, to be markedly high-IQ. The number of stupid Jews I have met in the course of a lifetime is enormous. That, however, is not the opinion of the anti-Semite, whose stereotype of the Jews involves their possession of a gigantic and dangerous intelligence. Although they may make up less than half a percent of a nation’s population, they are forever on the point of “taking over.”
But then, shouldn’t they, if they are high-IQ? Oh, no, for that intelligence is merely “shrewdness,” or “low cunning,” or “devious slyness,” and what really counts is that they lack the Christian, or the Nordic, or the Teutonic, or the what-have-you virtues of other sorts.
In short, if you are on the receiving end of the game-of-power, any excuse will do to keep you there. If you are seen as low-IQ you are despised and kept there because of that. If you are seen as high-IQ you are feared and kept there because of that.
