America Hates Intelligence

I’m smart.

You can call that statement arrogant, if you want. You are also welcome to challenge it, if you’d like. What you’ve read on this blog should be enough to convince you either way if I am or not.

It’s not necessarily important in this context if I am smart or not. More important is that my peers have considered me smart. This comes with a variety of connotations, of course. I have been called the whole gamut of childish insults associated with being intelligent (nerd, geek, dweeb, dork, etc.).

All of them are true, of course. I love Harry Potter and Star Wars, for fuck’s sake.

But they’re a symptom of a weird problem in the United States, a de facto attack on intelligence. As a society we pay lip service to intelligence. We claim that we want the highest test scores in the world, but do very little to actually move from our middle-of-the-pack rankings for reading, math and sciences.

In America we exult performance far more than we exult intelligence, even if that performance requires intelligence, we pay more attention to the performance than the thought behind it. If something is willfully intelligent, it is often derided as pretentious or oblique, especially if it does not conform to standard forms.

It’s other countries that truly value intelligence, it seems. In America, the cultural celebrities who are thrown a party to meet with the President are the winners of the Super Bowl every year.

In Iran this year, something very different happened. A young man, Mahmoud Vahidnia, stood in front of a man who is considered one of the world’s cruelest dictators, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For twenty minutes the student debated with the country’s supreme leader, taking him to task for not allowing criticisms and influence television and radio reports of Iranian revolution.

Who was this kid? How did he even get into the position to be able to criticize his country’s leader?

He won a Gold Medal. No, not in any sporting event, he won the gold medal in Iran’s National Math Olympics.

In comparison, winning the top math competitions in the United States result in, um, $2500 in scholarships.

A note about me: If someone tells me that they don’t know about something I’m talking about, I like to explain it to them. From a complex issue like the possible new business models of the music industry to something as simple as explaining to an 18-year old who Mega Man is. (THIS IS MEGA MAN, DANA)

A few years ago I was talking with a young woman about some issue or another, I don’t remember the exact context. I do, however, remember her reply when, after expression her ignorance about an idea or a person or something, I attempted to explain that thing to her.

She said, “Chris, why would I want to learn about that? I’m not in school.”

I was far more shocked at this reply than I rightly should have been. After all, this is a nation that resents “intellectualism,” which is a dirty word in politics. In fact, to be elected to the most important decision-making positions in the country, it is almost imperative that you do not come off like you actually graduated college, lest you be described as “elitist.”

Hell, we elected Dumbo twice.

In American society there is actually active discouragement of being smart, to the point where people genuinely see nothing wrong with the question “Why would I want to learn?”

Taken to an extreme level, how do we progress as a species if we discourage learning? If we view those who are educated as “elitists” or give negative connotations to words like “intellectual” how is American society supposed to, um, do anything worthwhile on the world stage?

How are we supposed to make medical advancements?

How are we supposed to make scientific progress?

If we discourage recreational learning, we reduce our ability to make connections between events, meaning we make mistakes that could be avoided. Learning about things you aren’t taught is how you understand the more implicit circumstances behind events.

Hell, learning on your own is simply how you don’t sound like an idiot.

As we discourage learning, we promote idiocy.

As we discourage intelligence, we promote ignorance.

It seems the thirteen stripes on the American flag now stand for the highest global ranking of our schools.

What a grand ole flag.