Accountants on the Veldt
and other difficulties of history
One day around 1996 I was sitting at my desk in Canary Wharf with my back to the editor’s office when an expression of fear and constraint rippled over the faces I could see; my friends and colleagues sat more stiffly at their desks, like iron filings tugged by a magnetic field. I had been trying to concentrate, wearing headphones plugged into a walkman, so all this took place, so far as I was concerned, in silence. That only made it more eerie.
I turned round briefly to see a rather nondescript man being ushered towards the editor’s office. He was thin, of medium height, with mouse coloured hair conventionally cut. The most prominent feature were his rather large nose and the aggressive, metal framed spectacles. He looked over my shoulder at whatever I was doing, and disappeared.
Afterwards my colleagues told me that the magnetic man was David Montgomery, who then ran the Mirror group, which owned the Independent. He could have sacked all or any of us. As Private Eye reminded us almost every issue, he was known to the journalists who’d worked for him on the Mirror as “Rommel” – “Because Monty was on our side”.
Thinking of that moment later, when I was writing the Darwin Wars, I stuck in a line to say that the qualities which made a man a great hunter on the veldt were unlikely to make him a widely feared accountant.
This is a long way round to discuss the genetics of intelligence, but it may be the easiest way in. Broadly speaking, I don’t have much trouble with the idea of IQ being unevenly inherited, nor even with the idea that some groups – Ashkenazi Jews come to mind – may have on average more of it than the rest of us. But – following James Flynn – I don’t think that IQ is a good general marker of intelligence, nor intelligence of worth.
Let me explain: if we think of intelligence as the ability to recognise and then to solve problems, this ability must always be adapted to particular problems. It must always, also, be dependent on the sensory apparatus. One reason I’d be a bloody stupid bat is that I can’t hear the sounds a bat does. Within our species, though, direct sensory knowledge has been increasingly replaced by information passed through cultural channels. So the problems that our intelligence has to work on are conditioned by technologies and social pressures. Those have changed over time, sometimes with alarming rapidity, as the Flynn effect shows.
At one extreme are the Pirahã, amongst whom Daniel Everett lived. They were completely helpless in a city, as he was in their native jungle. To ask which was the more intelligent in some abstract sense seems to me futile. Perhaps the answer would lie in the ability to adjust to changed circumstances, but that is not a problem that everyone has to solve, and it probably does not correlate with other kinds of problem-solving ability.
Problems presuppose desires. To solve a problem is to remove an obstacle, and something is only an obstacle if it is in your way towards some desired end. We can imagine a kind of intelligence which is disembodied, if you like: which consists of an understanding of complexities for the sake of understanding, or for their own sake. This case is different from the sorts I have earlier considered because here the obstacle to be overcome is simply lack of understanding: once you have solved the system you don’t want to *do* anything with it.
I don’t know if anyone with such a pure love of understanding for its own sake has ever lived: the only acknowledged genius I have ever had dealings with, Sydney Brenner, was distinguished as much by his ambition as by his capacity. But a theoretical physicist might work like that. It would not be his concern if the equations he discovers will fit the world can be used later or in other contexts to build an atom bomb.
Following this line of thought, you might end up with Richard Feynman as one of the most intelligent people there has ever been, which, obviously, he was. But for a Feynman to flourish there needs to be a huge social and indeed technological infrastructure in place. There have to be books at the very least. Feynman dropped into the jungle would be at a huge disadvantage, notwithstanding his skill at bongo drums. A Feynman born among the Pirahã would never grow into the genius that the real Feynman was.
One problem with this example is that when Feynman, von Neuman, and the other theoretical physicists worked on the Manhattan Project, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and how their insights would be used. Perhaps Newton and Leibniz would make better examples of the disinterested genius, but I don’t know nearly enough about their lives, especially Leibniz. Descartes?
In fact the only person who seems to step outside the requirement for literacy and to be driven by a pure desire for understanding is Socrates. But he would, I think, have thought Wisdom worth having, which is a rathe different quality to intelligence.
Very well, says the ghost of Charles Murray: you have established that IQ is not intelligence; that intelligence is not wisdom; that IQ is of use only in societies of a certain level of social organisation and technological achievement – but those are the society we live in. In the circumstances in which you, the hapless waffler, write this, and I, the malevolent ghost, read it, IQ does measure abilities relevant to success and usefulness to society. This is true even when it varies between groups. Surely policy should take account of that.
Against this, the Social Democratic answer, voiced by Flynn, would be that IQ is developed and held back largely by social factors – and I have somewhere a photograph of a blackboard from a lecture of his on which he set out all the factors which depressed black American IQs from their original average level of 100 as children grew up in a racist and profoundly unequal society.
It’s obvious to Flynn, as to anyone who shares his temperament, that these facts impose a moral duty on rich white Americans to improve in every way the education of poor black Americans. But this temperament – and instinctive commitment to egalitarianism – is quite rare. It is not shared by a majority of American voters, even by millions who consider themselves Christians. This isn’t really surprising. It is unusual to believe that a system that advantages us is morally wrong and even some of those who profess this belief do so as a demonstration (conscious or not) that their own advantages are so entrenched that nothing can threaten them.
Nor can I see any secular arguments that could compel such voters: “History to the defeated May say ‘Alas’, but cannot help or pardon” – and we live in history. There is the argument from national self-interest which underlay a lot of the thinking behind European welfare states – that a better fed, better educated working class would make for a more effective army. That doesn’t tell us that inequality is morally wrong, nor that low IQ people are as valuable as you, gentle reader. In fact it says they are less valuable and we want fewer of them, even if no one could object to the project of making them smarter.
No, I think that if you want to maintain any kind of absolute value for people, irrespective of their usefulness to any purpose, you have to follow Auden into Christianity. He repudiated “Spain”, and, I believe, the last line of it. Yet how does that differ from the pre-Christian world he depicts in “Memorial for the City”, in which
“That is the way things happen; for ever and ever Plum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers And the hard bright light composes A meaningless moment into an eternal fact Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile: One enjoys glory; one endures shame; He may, she must. There is no one to blame.”
Yet our intuition remains: that he is forbidden to do it, she doesn’t have to take it, and that bad actors are in fact to blame. This has to come from outside the world we live in. As the last stanza of the last poem in the paperback Selected Poems has it:
What they call History is nothing to vaunt of, being made, as it is, by the criminal in us: goodness is timeless.
And David Montgomery is now one of the most powerful men in British media.