MindSpinner

Every since Outer Life posted his essay on IQ, I’ve been drawn to ponder the notion of quantifying intelligence with a number. I hadn’t thought about IQ tests in a long time. I don’t love tests (excepting take-home essay tests, given intriguing questions ;->).

On a personal level, I thought first about what I have and haven’t achieved in my life relative to a number that is supposed to correlate with potential. IQ scores interrogate us that way. (They might set artificial boundaries, too, in our minds, depending on our scores. We may also ruefully note that they never make us smarter than we were yesterday.)

Some people’s lives are arrows shot into the air, aspiring to see how high and how far they can fly. And some aren’t, either for important reasons or no reason at all. IQ is perhaps the bow, strung and fitted with an arrow, pulled back according to the strength of a will, and aimed according to a purpose - or leaned against the wall, unstrung, gathering a thin layer of dust because sometimes, for a season, life isn’t archery.

Outer Life pointed out that we tend to keep our IQs secret, and theorizes that touting numbers may be something past mere bad form. In a thoughtful reply to my own comment, he notes “… I sense that deep down we are all dogs in a pack, eager to order ourselves if only given the chance. Keeping IQs secret may be our last defense against the objective ordering that seems to rule the lives of other pack animals.” I’ve thought about this for the better part of a week. I have thought sadly about human beings as animals who order themselves in packs.

We have many packs, I think, and the people who care most for ordering put great energy into that project, with or without objective or viable criteria. Clearly though, intellectual potential is not reliably the variable we use to order ourselves. In some packs, superior intellectual capacity is a matter of suspicion and distrust. To be in our pack, you must not seem very much smarter than we, or we will define you as one of those damned intellectuals who spin what we suspect to be sophistry and try to make us think, using big words (like sophistry) and whole paragraphs and pages to make us dizzy when we are trying to keep life very simple - us and them, good and evil and us always good and God on our side no matter what we do. Witness the American electorate at work. Want to be elected in this country? Talk like a cowboy, and keep it simple. Too simple, indeed, to account for reality or to make anything actually work. We promote to the head of the pack those who make us feel psychologically secure (which only scares the bejesus out of those of us who perceive the dangers of such an approach and order our own packs differently - according to wisdom, intelligence, character and that priceless ability to account for and maneuver gracefully to good effect in complexity).

But finally, I’ve decided that my dissatisfaction with IQ is something very simple. The score is a mind poured into a number, like a genie sucked back into a bottle, corked and opaque. An IQ score is not meaningless, but it remains incredibly reductive. It doesn’t help me to know the substance of a mind or the efficacy of a life. You could tell me that Shakespeare possessed an IQ of 167, but I’ll apprehend his conscious and unconscious genius only by encountering his mind on the page.

Likewise, you can tell me, if you know, how many gallons of water there are in the sea, but I will not care so much about this. I will care about the physics of wind and current and waves, about the life within, about the sad toll pollution takes and what ships lie wrecked at bottom, about endlessly moving beauty and terrible force, the taste of salt on my tongue and the bubbly fingers of waves that wash up around my ankles and slip the sand away from under my toes. And I will care about how light reflected on water always strikes a path from wave to wave to reach the eye that looks to see.

(Permission to use this photo generously granted by Phrixus.)

What need do I have of a number that quantifies a mind? What I want to know, instead, is the mind itself. It’s the voyage that matters to me more than knowing, if I could, the number of gallons that slosh in a particular sea.

As for Outer Life, who always takes readers on a voyage into thought - you, yes you, your secret’s out. We know how many gallons are in your sea. Enough for fine sailing to places we might not otherwise have ventured. Accept a salute, and thanks.

That same deep thanks I owe to others whose blogs and comments I’ve come to look to, week in and week out. It is good to know the minds - and hearts - we meet here in this un-place.