Thursday 2 May 2024
Intelligent and modern, but nonsense all the same.
She sat at the head of the table, serene, with an amused, indulgent smile on her lips as she listened to their scatter–brained nonsense; it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same.
W. Somerset Maugham - A Woman of Fifty (1946)
Stories from the Golden Age of detective fiction often describe the Scotland Yard detective as having an intelligent face. Even an apparently bovine and unintelligent face was often betrayed by the keen glances he flashed into every nook and cranny of the murder scene.
The idea of intelligence is still used of course, in spite of being a somewhat slippery notion, but modern life seems to have made it less useful and even more slippery than it was in the comparatively recent past.
Intelligence was never more than a somewhat fallible idea anyway, because supposedly intelligent people have always been capable of stupidity. Yet it could be used as an ideal, as a contrast with stupidity, but like an old Polaroid photo the contrast has faded.
Intelligence is still a usable idea, but not particularly usable when it comes to abstractions and political entanglements. It fails to capture the prevalence of so much misinformation, distortion, exaggeration and simple falsehood.
To take a topical example, there seems to be little point in describing Net Zero as an unintelligent policy. It certainly is unintelligent, but to say so doesn’t capture the nature of the beast, the political nature of it, the creepy tentacles reaching into every corner of life. If anything, the idea of intelligent and unintelligent actions has a decided tendency to evade the problem, particularly the magnitude of it.
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7 comments:
Are globopsycho intelligent or is it the same old, same old world domination thing?
They are midwits and not intelligent people like us!
The use of 'intelligence' does require sufficient background knowledge.
Sufficient background knowledge seems remarkably fluid now-a-days, so we end up with intelligent people acting, as experts', because they are clever (but without appropriate knowledge).
Still I expect there is some value in 'intelligence' being a socially acceptable synonym for 'not stupid'.
I think Net Zero might be extremely intelligent. It's a sign of great intelligence to harness the efforts of supposedly educated and influential people, all the while hiding the real intentions behind your pronouncements.
I sometimes see advertising campaigns which I think of as intelligent. "That's so clever, a lot of people will probably even buy that rubbish!"
James - intelligent in the sense that they know an advantageous bandwagon when they see one and know how to climb aboard.
Tammly - most seem to be midwits, but they know how to look after no.1.
DJ - a synonym for 'not stupid' would work, but even that usually means, 'thinks as I do'.
Sam - I don't see many ads these days as I don't watch TV and use an ad blocker online. Those I catch glimpses of seem very formulaic - just grab the attention and get the product in there. I recently came across a reference to some Google research which found that few people watch online ads.
Oi wor a simple engineer, Oi wor.
They don't teach Common Sense in Universities.
Many a time the well qualified graduate would do the most stupid of things.
They would design stuff and present it to technicians for prototype construction.
The more sensible graduate would pause and rethink when the techie asked, "Are you sure that is really what you want?" .
Others would charge on and insist, "Of course that is what I want. You just make it exactly as I specify." Result:- Sparks, a smell of cooking components and smoke.
On one memorable occasion a young graduate was bringing a bit of equipment - a length of rectangular section aluminium tubing - from somewhere to our site. He had a Mini, which had the battery in the boot. He tossed the tube into the boot and arrived at our site entrance security to get clearance for his car to enter the site. The security man said in his Eastenders accent, "Is that your car over there? The one on fire." They watched as the car, totally ablaze, sank on its rubberless wheels into the softened tarmac. Metal across battery terminals is not good.
Then Security man drolly said "I am afraid that you cannot leave your car there." Pause, "Sir."
Such larks.
Doonhamer - ha ha, that's quite a story, such larks indeed. The worst chemist I ever came across was a recent graduate. Nice chap but he didn't seem to know any chemistry, not even what I thought were the basics.
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