[This is an essay which I though had been posted on 2012/06/02, but I left it in draft status. I don’t think this glitch in publishing date matters much.]
In an essay I published in April of 2012, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I quoted Jacques Barzun from The House of Intellect:
We [in the United States] have in fact intelligence in plenty and we use it perhaps more widely than other nations, for we apply it with praiseworthy innocence to parts of life elsewhere ruled by custom or routine.
…
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
The dumbing down of Western man isn’t a dumbing down of the individual’s intelligence but rather a loss of willingness and ability to draw upon deeper and wider sources of thought, mostly thought of great worth since it has survived some sort of selection process, similar to the selection processes of biological evolution. This is to say it has survived in such a way as to reproduce itself in various related bodies of thought, as Greek thought proved its `evolutionary worth’ by contributing in various ways to the substance and form of other civilizations, Roman and Arabic and Persian and eventually Christian thought of East and West, and so on to our day and beyond. We modern men of the West have adopted some strange understanding of ourselves as individual creatures somehow freestanding and able to benefit from our cultural heritage on a purely voluntary basis, choosing to take our political beliefs from, say, the Roman Republic and our metaphysical beliefs from the Aristotelians of Athens and our cultural beliefs from Lutheran Germany of the Renaissance and so forth. Mostly, though we worry about pleasing ourselves by selecting from a menu of surrogate experiences in front of the television, shopping and dining experiences at the local not-yet-dead mall, vacation experiences in artificial Edens — some of which were legitimate centers of human cultures before being discovered and exploited by Americans and Europeans, experiences, experiences, experiences. If you have to purchase experiences, plan the details from menus provided by corporations, live them for a while as if they were the real thing and not as meaningless as your lives back home, treasure them until you can repeat the next year… They ain’t for real and you’re being trained to give up what’s real for some imaginary circle of Hell which is quite profitable for someone.
Whew… A mouthful and no more than an expansion of what Professor Barzun claimed and what has been claimed by a variety of insightful thinkers. Let’s move on and see what can be made of this mess.
In recent decades, the measured IQs of modern human beings have risen. The trends of various public test scores even for the United States as a whole have been surprisingly good if adjusted for the different populations taking these tests. When I go out and have casual conversations with my fellow Americans, or occasionally try to have a more serious conversation, I’m struck by the apparent liveliness of their thinking processes and also struck by the way that that liveliness is directed down a small number of well-worn paths which have proven themselves to be fruitless and dangerous. Though we might think that a loss of awareness of tradition might free us for creative movements, the opposite seems to happen to most human beings. Freed of some sort of structure, and maybe some tools, from one tradition or another, human beings take to a cattle-like movement, paying attention mostly to the cow in front of them and the bull to the right and the calf to the left.
Without attachment to some rich tradition, without that intellect which is “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence,” we lose our awareness of the greater world rather than becoming free to move away from the herd. We are those herd-beasts and few are those who can so much as look wistfully away from the direction in which moves their herd. We can be members of herds moving through good pastures, moving in a morally well-ordered manner, and moving towards appropriate goals. Or… We can be members of disordered herds moving in ways and directions to no good purposes or to the purposes of exploitive men. Any disordered herd will likely come to be exploited in large or small ways.
We Americans were always vulnerable to exploitation because we are relatively bereft of intellect, but there was a day when we, including the politicians and businessmen and generals, had some serious respect for the likes of George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Taft, Garet Garrett, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling. That age of respect for men worthy of respect for their connection to intellect was just dying in my youth though it was years later before I knew about it or about any of those men. Notice the variety of men on my list. I deliberately chose a smattering of left and old-right (true conservative and not much like modern Republicans), politicians and diplomats and academics and more-or-less independent men of letters. There’s even some overlap for those with more complex vocations. Even someone so erudite, so sophisticated in her expressed thoughts, as Hannah Arendt, the Austrian-American philosopher and historian, could publish in magazines of wide circulation and get some serious distribution for serious works of history or philosophy.
What’s going on that we Americans, and apparently Europeans as well, seem to be barbarian children trying to run a complex civilization? I use the language of Jose Ortega Y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses?
I think in slightly different terms than Ortega Y Gasset and nearly all modern thinkers because I’m willing to be consistent to my Christian beliefs in all my thinking, even in realms of politics and economics and — even, even — physics and other sciences.
This world, the universe ordered to God’s purposes, is a story in which the Body of Christ is forming. This Body will not fully form in this mortal realm, but rather in the world of the resurrected. Yet, we are called and driven to intend to move into our proper roles in this Body, where I use `intend’ in the Thomistic or biological sense of being a movement in a growth or development process.
The Body of Christ itself will be the ultimate human community, like unto the Holy Trinity in that the members will retain their individuality while becoming fully members of that community which will be one. All will be shared and yet each thought and each action will come from a member or at least an organ of that Body, yet, it will be the thought or the action of all. Each of us has to play our own assigned role. Each of us has to contribute from our own talents. Yet, what we give will come from all and will be received by all in the Body of Christ, even as we are giving it and also receiving it.
Intelligence is an attribute of individual members of the Body of Christ and intellect belongs to the Body as a whole or at least to organs of that Body. Some members have intelligence directed towards matters which are properly concerns of individuals first and others have intelligences which can operate in that individual way but they are particularly sensitive to the intellect, the communal form of live intelligence. Likely it is that there are also some with limited intelligence but a talent for taking up matters settled by the intellect.
We human beings of the 21st century are still early in the process of the development of those organs of the Body of Christ which have strong relationships to the intellectual organ, but we can see some remarkable developments if we pay attention to where we are, what we have in communal relationships, relative to the human race in earlier periods. A creature who seemingly evolved to live in kinship groups of maybe 50 at most is now living in cities with tens of millions of human beings organized into a bewildering network of smaller, but still often large, communities. We can organize the building and operation of continent-wide power grids and communication networks. We have built civilizations — early forms of the Body of Christ itself as primitive fish were early forms of more sophisticated animals including social mammals, as apish creatures five million years ago were early forms of human beings. These cities have grown increasingly large over time. The Rome of Pompey is nothing compared to the city which now sits on that site. Nineveh is a village compared to Beijing. What is to come? Will we be seeing a global civilization arise over the next few centuries or will we see a group of large and small civilizations interlinked in various ways and to various degrees of tightness? Of course, given how terrible all men are at predicting the future, especially those who try, something completely different is likely to develop.
Yet, as certain sorts of participants in a very complex story, we need to have possible futures in mind that we might be better and faster able to react when opportunities and problems arise. And there are certain members of the Body of Christ who have the goal of understanding longer-range, larger-scale, more abstract matters that we might understand ourselves and our world and also anticipate those possible futures. This is the role of those who have the sorts of wider knowledge in science and history and technology and literature and the other arts and at least some knowledge of the work of the various workers which feed a large and complex human community and put up its buildings and collect trash and so forth. (To be sure, some men of high intellect and high culture are often limited in their ability to deal with some fields of human knowledge or human activity. For example, literary men often, though not always, find simple algebra to be difficult. Many well-educated men have great difficulty understanding simple laborers or even skilled craftsmen.)
Intellect, “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence,” is the knowledge and the allied thinking processes I refer to in the above paragraph. Development of a dynamic form of intellect, the process of taking in tradition and trying to adjust it to new circumstances, is not to the liking, perhaps not within the capabilities, of even most of those with some serious connection to intellect. Professor Barzun discusses in The House of Intellect the odd fact that the 20th century up to that point, 1959, and since then in my opinion, has been a period of exploiting the creativity of scientists and visual artists and creative writers and philosophers whose prime working years had mostly ended by 1900 or so. Much good has come from the hard work of expanding and developing in detail the work of Einstein and Planck, Riemann and Gauss, Tolstoy and Melville, Picasso and van Gogh, Mahler and Mendelssohn, Ford and Carnegie, and so forth. But there is a certain flatness in the creative efforts of succeeding generations, with the possible exception of the quantum physicists such as Bohr and Heisenberg and Schrodinger and especially Dirac.
Why did this explosive activity come to an end? There are a number of histories of human thought not yet written which will deal with this question. I don’t pretend to have the skills or the access to materials which would allow me to participate in the writing of such histories. Nor, to be honest, do I have enough interest in the question to make such an effort and turn away from other work. I can only claim that this loss of creative intellect, and the lost of awareness of the need of such, is the problem we face, it is the way in which men of the modern West have dumbed themselves down even as they’ve retained high levels of individual intelligence. Individual men have retained their intelligences but devoted them to analyses of upcoming drafts in the sports leagues and to politicking rather than to knowledge of human history and to efforts to understand how to move forward into new moral and social and political relationships better suited to our situation, our problems and opportunities, than are the relationships we inherited. Even the cultured men of non-creative but high levels of intellect such as Trilling and Nock are not to be often found and are not influential in forming even the higher culture for there is no such state of mind.
We lost our intellects while retaining our individual intelligences but it would have been hard for any but dedicated students of the past to have retained their intellects since the world has shown us new forms and we can keep our intellects, communal forms of living intelligence, only by moving into the future and developing new forms of intellect to correspond to the new forms of our world.