Terrifying statistic

Few people will be unaware of this issue, but Peterson is particularly good at bringing out just how important and intractable the problem is. Perhaps not terrifying because we live with it, but far bigger than most of the problems we are supposed to worry about.

A related problem is political honesty. Do we lay this problem on the political table and accept it as an intractable fact of life? Behind closed doors senior bureaucrats may be doing just that, but should the issue be brought into the open? If so then many members of the chattering classes will be outraged and deny that it exists or they will tout it as another government failing, implying as ever that it doesn't have to be a government failing if only enough money is spent on it.

Grey matter

This post wanders around a little, but that is an attraction of blogging, it isn’t necessary to tie everything together. Intelligent readers do that, fill in the gaps and raise other issues themselves.

Yet intelligence is a rum notion isn’t it? We have many other words for it which don’t mean quite the same thing. Clever, smart, astute, brainy, highbrow, bright, perceptive and so on. Look them up, there are lots, although as an intelligent person perhaps you don’t need to look them up.

How about knowledge? To my mind that’s another rum notion, not unconnected with intelligence. We don’t usually expect knowledgeable people to be unintelligent and vice versa, yet the notion of knowledge can be just as problematic as intelligence.

Here’s the oddity - at least to my mind it’s an oddity. If a person is knowledgeable then he or she is generally regarded as intelligent, but it does not seem matter too much what they are knowledgeable about. General knowledge or almost any area of specialised knowledge will do, particularly if it has some bearing on human nature. Are there any areas of knowledge which don’t have at least some bearing on human nature? Possibly not.

However, intelligent and knowledgeable people can be remarkably dull, conventional and apparently uninterested in exploring the world of possibilities beyond their comfort zone. They may have built a solid personal philosophy and it may be quite an edifice as these things go, but surprisingly often the edifice is all there is. It seems to serve much the same purpose as a pundit’s stock standpoints. There seems to be little joy in it too. Joy? Why not?

Take the currently popular phrase “virtue signalling” for example. An excellent phrase which seems to be an acute insight or maybe it clarifies insights we already had. Unfortunately it seems to apply to numerous intelligent and knowledgeable public figures who should know better but clearly don’t. In spite of their intelligence and knowledge they go in for virtue signalling. Perhaps we all do, but some seem to go in for it as a key part of what they are, as an essential ingredient of their personal philosophy, their pundit’s standpoints.

When you first heard the phrase “virtue signalling”, how long did it take you to grasp its meaning and assess its widespread applicability and usefulness? A second or two is my guess. Presumably we already knew what virtue signalling is before we first heard the phrase, but how did we assimilate it so quickly?

Maybe that is the charm of insights, the way they rapidly sharpen and clarify what we already possess. The charm of insights did I say? Yes – insights are certainly charming, alluring, beguiling, appealing, attractive. There is an emotional aspect to them. How could there not be?

To my mind some intelligent people are like collectors, they collect insights and a phrase such as virtue signalling is just such an insight. Rather a good one. So insight collectors collect it, absorb its power and its charm into the depths of their personality. Its popularity tells us so.

Yet there is something a little nerdy about this notion of collecting insights. It sounds like stamp collecting but intelligent people can be somewhat nerdy. They like insights, hunt them down and enjoy plucking them from all kinds of nooks and crannies, almost as if a day without picking up a new insight is a day lost, wasted, misused.

However – and this is interesting too – many otherwise intelligent people seem to be afraid of insights. That is another emotion insights can generate - fear. People can be genuinely afraid of them, afraid of the disturbance they create, the insecurity, the threats. There is even something primitive in rejecting insights, something ancient, as if a wild beast has been spotted lurking in the wilderness just beyond the home-place.

Where does that leave intelligence though? If someone avoids insights, especially those which challenge conventions, then how is that intelligent behaviour? It is much the same with knowledge. Insights which challenge conventional knowledge may not even be accepted as knowledge.

For example?

For example Donald Trump is providing us with a number of insights into US politics, the power of large bureaucracies, the bias in mainstream media, the power of the establishment and distraction politics. Trump is good at distraction. He may yet stumble but so far it has been as interesting and enjoyable as insights should be. But is everyone enjoying the insights Trump so obligingly provides? I don’t think so. 

What joyless souls they are.

Trump’s IQ

Jordan Peterson shows us why Donald Trump’s IQ is likely to be be well above average. Many people must have worked this out for themselves via similar reasoning even if they are not keen on Trump or the notion of IQ. Some won't have worked it out, but we know about those people too.

In which case, by assessing their respective careers one might suggest that Theresa May is a little more intelligent than her detractors tend to imply and Jeremy Corbyn is as thick as a plank. Not to be taken too seriously of course, but compared to Trump, both May and Corbyn are probably rather dim.

Our dumb intelligentsia

Adam Perkins has an article in Quillette - Elite Opinion vs the Wisdom of Crowds: The Intelligentsia’s Tendency to Get Things Wrong. Nothing we don’t know but a good summary of how the intelligentsia screws things up as a result of being too detached and insulated from the culture they purport to understand and diagnose. I'm not so sure about the wisdom of crowds, but the piece is worth reading.

The intelligentsia have a reputation for being out of touch and it’s easy to see why, given their stereotypical tendency to live in sheltered, affluent neighbourhoods. Therefore it should be no surprise if we turn on the TV news and see prominent, well-paid economists displaying a more relaxed attitude to uncontrolled, mass migration than those of us who live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods where the most dysfunctional migrants usually end up being accommodated. Likewise, it is only natural to expect heavily-guarded high court judges to have a more lenient attitude towards criminals than those of us who live in rougher, less protected localities.

But the detachment of the urban elite is more than just a matter of living somewhere posh — it is also a matter of culture, as noted by George Orwell in 1941: ‘This is the really important fact about the English intelligentsia — their severance from the common culture of the country’.

It all seems painfully obvious, a natural consequence of social detachment. Stimulus and response. Without the stimulus a competent response becomes difficult or impossible. Crowds may experience the stimulus where the intelligentsia do not. 

We have plenty of expressive language to nail the problem but language isn’t much of a stimulus either, not if it doesn't conform to expectations and comfort zones. Reason is rarely a reason to change one’s mind so we are perpetually saddled with influential people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk as one pithy cliché puts it. No point telling them though.

Is there such a thing as intelligence?

What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe — why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

The most problematic aspect of the EU referendum debate was the shallow nature of so many arguments. It was an important and high profile debate, but for some reason shallow was the preferred depth. Intelligence was not required - but why?

To begin with, intelligence is obviously a useful notion for elite classes to maintain their ascendancy. Nobody wants to be ruled by Mr Stupid or preached at by Bishop Dork even though we often are. So we have to pretend and elites usually attempt to appear passably intelligent even when they are not. Many struggle to keep up the charade, but they try, they do try. 

To help the charade along, a superior type of education is used to make the whole idea of elite intelligence more plausible. The natural intelligence of good breeding is supposed to be nurtured by deluxe educational methods. This costs more money than most people have which is no great surprise because that’s the whole point. Intelligence has to be somewhat exclusive.

Yet imagine if you will, a politician who says something so obviously stupid that even the mainstream media have to take note. Imagine that same politician having to back down at some later date when the stupidity becomes politically embarrassing. Not uncommon is it? I’m thinking of Naseem Shah as a fairly recent example, but there are many, many more and will be many, many more in future.

Unintelligent behaviour seems to be remarkably common even in political life where one might assume that maintaining the charade is one of the most basic requirements. Yet a lack of intelligence is particularly easy to spot if the political party you don’t support happens to be in office. We know their lot can’t be intelligent because the intelligence is mostly on our side isn’t it?

It won’t do though will it? Unless one has the hide of a rhinoceros the bias is just too obvious. Loop back to our politician who says something stupid. If he or she is also seen as a crafty political operator, then the stupidity becomes either a political slip or a cunning facade hiding devious intentions. The notion of elite intelligence is preserved.

But that won’t do either. A simpler explanation is that stupid behaviour is a sign of stupidity. Occam’s Razor don’t you know.

Perhaps so, but an even simpler explanation is that there is no such thing as intelligence. Behaviour, learned or imitated is either effective or ineffective but we don’t find out which until we launch it onto the public domain. Trial and error with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats!

Hence all that political backtracking we enjoy so much and this is the key point, the glaringly obvious clue, the reason why political classes fly kites. They can’t foresee public reaction where there is no good precedent. They have to experiment on a small scale and learn from the outcome. Naseem Shah’s observation about Israel was one such experiment. A naive one, but still an experiment. She did not foresee the outcome because she couldn’t foresee it because she didn’t have the intelligence to foresee it because there is no such thing as independent intelligence.

Intelligence is another aspect of our tendency to focus on the individual rather than the individual’s controlling environment. Intelligence is mainly a feature of those controlling environments, not so much individuals. We use imitation and cooperation to engineer intelligent environments without needing to be intelligent ourselves because we can’t be intelligent in a vacuum, without sounding boards, without feedback, without the environment.

This is what political types foster and rely on. This is why they make so many obvious blunders. They are not intelligent outside their controlling environment. Nobody is. We engineer intelligent environments by trial and error and by modifying our behaviour accordingly but we don’t need much individual intelligence to do it. Trial and error does it for us.

Except when we deny the errors. That's when hard landings take over.