Much will be asked

Since I've written a bit lately about people who have chosen to become much more stupid than they need to be, let me take a moment to also discuss how this same dynamic can afflict actual geniuses — or at least those geniuses who seem most eager to have us think of them as geniuses.

What I mean is that I'm not terribly impressed by Mensa.

I think I'm supposed to be, and I would have expected I would be, but I can't find much reason to be impressed by them.

"Mensa International: The international high IQ society" (redundancy is a mark of genius, apparently) is an association of some of the smartest, sharpest minds on the planet. But what have they done for us lately? Or, well, ever?

You might think, given their collective brainpower, that the rest of us would speak of Mensa in tones of reverent gratitude for all the wonderful solutions their cumulative genius had found for the world's intractable problems. But we don't speak of them this way because applying their brainpower to solving the world's problems is not what Mensa is all about.

It seems to be more of a support group — a collection of really intelligent people who think highly of intelligence:

Mensa has three stated purposes: to identify and foster human

intelligence for the benefit of humanity, to encourage research in the
nature, characteristics and uses of intelligence, and to promote
stimulating intellectual and social opportunities for its members.

I think that's a bit confused. "Fostering intelligence for the benefit of humanity" seems to swallow its own tail. Intelligence serving intelligence for the sake of intelligence seems like a closed circle. What is all this intelligence, ultimately, for?

As bright as these folks are, I'm not sure they really understand what the word "genius" means. For example, I have no idea how high Harper Lee scored on the Stanford-Binet test, but I don't care. It seems to me she has a clearer claim to the title of genius than many of these Mensa members who seem so eager to claim it.

On her side of the ledger we have To Kill a Mockingbird. On their side we have some impressive test scores. Which is the better measure of genius? Creating something luminous and indelible? Or impressing others with test scores?

What I'm getting at here, to paraphrase Winston Groom, is that genius is as genius does. Or as someone else once said, By their fruit ye shall know them.

Mensa members might point out that their organization was not founded to do anything or to bear fruit, but that's just my point. The group, by it's own definition, is self-serving — and that's not what genius is for or what genius is.

The association gives off an aroma of self-entitlement — an attempt to acquire the recognition due to genius without the accomplishment that title necessarily entails. It seems to be — to quote another famous genius — an attempt to claim credit for the 1-percent inspiration without putting in the 99-percent perspiration. I want to see these people sweat "for the benefit of humanity."

Their test scores may reveal the capacity for genius, but real genius doesn't stop there on the threshhold, proud of its unrealized potential. Real genius creates, invents, discovers, envisions, unmasks and reveals. It gives something to the rest of the world — the phonograph, Atticus Finch, polio vaccine, Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, the Bo Diddley beat, key lime pie, the First Amendment, the theory of relativity, the 14th Amendment, the Chrysler building … or that oil-spill containment system our geniuses have apparently forgotten to get around to inventing just yet.

What I'm suggesting here is that these very intelligent people might achieve more and better leverage — better exercise, in all senses of that word — their intelligence if they shifted their gaze and their priorities outward.

Here again I turn to my favorite passage from E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful:

So this is the first question I suggest we have to face. Can we
establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists
that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not
simply acquired a "passport to privilege"? This ideology is of course
well supported by all the higher teachings of mankind. As a Christian, I
may be permitted to quote from St. Luke: "Much will be asked of him
because he was entrusted with more." It is, you might well say, an
elementary matter of justice.

If this ideology does not prevail, if it is taken for granted that
education is a passport to privilege, then the content of education will
not primarily be something to serve the people, but something to serve
ourselves, the educated. The privileged minority will wish to be
educated in a manner that sets them apart and will inevitably learn and
teach the wrong things, that is to say, things that do set them apart
…

When intelligence is viewed as a "passport to privilege" it will, as Schumacher says, inevitably go astray. It will "learn and teach the wrong things" and, in so doing, it becomes less intelligent than it might otherwise have become.

Regardless of where you begin on the bell curve of test scores, empathy and concern for others will make you smarter. And disregard for others will make you stupider.