January 4, 2019The link between Thinking and Intelligence is shaky, jaundiced, cracked, spurious, smelly, and perhaps non-existent. Just because you might be smart on one of your better days doesn’t mean you know how to think. And besides, intelligence tests are really stupid.
Intelligence tests are stupid because they determine only one sliver of the intelligence sphere, and the bit these tests measure are the very easiest sliver to measure. So when you’re in awe of someone with, say, an IQ of 181 or whatever, it’s fine to appreciate, “Dude can determine how many times a 5 x 7 x 11 x 2.03 trapezoid can fit into a 21 x 41 x 3 triangle,” and Dude delivers the answer in less time than it takes to crack an egg.
Dude has performed quite a feat while you cracked an egg. Yes, and let’s put the achievement in some perspective (especially since you haven’t solved the problem, and you already ate the omelet). These tests measure static relationships: a problem that sits still, is well-defined, with crisp edges. Which is all great, it’s good to measure stuff about the square root of a round peg and how many pies fill a pie shop at sea level, and we agree that the ability to manipulate abstractions is pretty miraculous. Yet these “intelligence tests” ignore all the other rich and fascinating and dynamic forms of intelligence with which humans are blessed when they’re not too annoyed.
A quarterback has about two seconds to assess [1.] whether or not throw the football; [2.] if not, how to get rid of it; [3.] if so, which of three or four guys to throw it to while each zigzags at more than twenty miles an hour while another guy from another team is really bothering your guy; [4.] and conduct these assessments while giant mean people are trying to hurt you; [5.] and then, as the two seconds or so rapidly wind to a conclusion, you evade a mean person and hurl a spiral right into the palms of a sprinting teammate who is himself being hounded by two more giant mean people who want to hurt him.
What the quarterback has just done demands complex forms of intelligence operating in unity. The skill sets are extremely difficult to even list, let alone measure, in a “Football Quarterback Intelligence Test,” and that’s why no such test exists. Sure, you can quantify foot speed and arm strength, but you can’t quantify the ability to make quick, cogent decisions while your feet are dancing to complete the pass — a difficult athletic feat even when isolated from the infinite variables in frantic game action and it might be snowing or raining — when mean people are trying to hurt you.
And an IQ test for music? Well, music schools do test sight reading, which is an amazing skill: to be able to play a score as complicated as Beethoven simply and purely by manifesting into sound bunches of weird annotations on a sheet of paper. Sight reading music is almost as measurable as comparing the area of a trapezoid to the area of a triangle. Yet sight reading music does not figure into intelligence tests. And to complicate this IQ morass even more, many of the world’s greatest musicians can’t read music at all.
Music. You are talking about highly intelligent, complicated, multi-layered, emotionally transcendent manipulations of the air waves. And not one note of all this power and truth registers on any intelligence test.
Look at the skills demanded of a sailor. A sailor reads the wind the way a musician reads the score, and translates the wind into well-trimmed sails and a responsive rudder, while navigating a rolling seascape clear to Polaris.
Carpenters render two dimensional small scale blueprints into full scale three dimensional spaces. Layers of skill and physicality intersect rhythmically and sequentially to make this happen: you integrate spatial abstractions plus brute strength and a delicate touch with intimate knowledge of, for example, the distinct way a nail grabs Douglas fir as opposed to the way a nail grabs southern yellow pine.
We can all be cynical about the very term “political intelligence,” in part because of the tendency of power to corrupt. Nevertheless, many elected officials do aspire to public service, and to do so demands melding moral ideals, language and social skills, and well-conceived practical solutions while navigating the shoals of absurdity and venality.
The list goes on and on. Let’s pause to celebrate. Yay, Yay, and Yay for all the myriad forms of human intelligence! Yay for the baton twirlers! Yay for cellists! Yay for dressage! Yay for sommeliers! Yay for quilters! Yay for comedians! For a species that can be so dumb, we sure are smart! Yay for all the skill sets we haven’t named and Yay for the many, many more invisible skills that never been named.
Yay for everything beyond the scope of what’s measured in a puny, static, dry, heartless, boxed-in IQ test, which includes pretty much everything, and it’s pretty much miraculous.
Add to this the fact the IQ scores do not predict success in living a human life, partly because how in the hell do you define success except that you know when you got it, and it comes and goes, and partly because the many elements that make life rewarding are far too complicated to measure, and partly just because.
So, in conclusion: It’s not so much that IQ tests are stupid as it is that our faith in these tests is stupid.
Only that’s not the conclusion. So calm down. We’re just now approaching the point.
Broad awareness of the fact that IQ measures only a tiny sliver of the miraculous sphere of human intelligence is exemplified in the emergence of Emotional Intelligence in the cultural conversation. It’s become so familiar in many circles that it’s known as “EQ,” as opposed to “IQ”.
Everyone here at our lab (it’s in the basement) (the comedy department is upstairs) (just thought you might want to know) says this EQ thing is really great. We’re all for it, and we want it to have a nice life. Yes, yes, and yes to the importance of Emotional Intelligence!
However, the pitfall with this EQ bandwagon onto which a lot of way cool way smart people have hopped is the tendency to assume that EQ is it. Since we figured out EQ might be more important than IQ, the intelligence question has been resolved, right?
Wrong.
Emotional Intelligence, critical as it is for living a full, fun, expansive, loving, human life, is still only one sliver of the intelligence sphere. It’s a critical sliver, to be sure, along with the boxed-in sliver measured by those clever tests; but still, these are slivers, and no single sliver is sufficient.
Consider this proof from the lab: you can have a high IQ and deftly assay trapezoids and triangles until the next Einstein is born, and still be a blathering, indebted, neurotic, angry, myopic mess. And you can have high EQ, keenly attuned to the feelings of others, and still be a blathering, indebted, neurotic, angry, myopic mess.
So if high IQ and high EQ are not sufficient to live a full, rich, fun, expansive life, what in the hell does it take to get there?
Consider Global Intelligence.
Global Intelligence?
Global Intelligence blossoms from a full-spectrum ecology of intelligences, plus more: call it the umbrella sense; a sense of place in the bigness; citizenship in the universe.
Wait, let’s slow down here.
Let’s think of it in terms of microcosms and the macrocosm.
Microcosms. Go small, way small, and burrow into all the details from which rewarding outcomes are assembled. Aside from the welcome exception of good fortune, rewarding outcomes accrue from artfully and thoughtfully executed efforts in optimal sequences. With technical excellence. Pursuit of mastery is a great teacher. Whatever the arena, be it storytelling or brewing or diesel mechanics, the details matter and the details are a portal to grandeur.
And vital engagement with elemental grandeur can loft us to the macrocosm, the bigness . . . this delicious, abiding sense of the ethos and the drift and the flows of possibility.
Global Intelligence is the dimension where the vitality and the criticality of the details merge and collaborate with a well-earned sense of the whole.
The mind is a lens and the field of vision is everything.
Global Intelligence is the sphere — and the richer your fluency in multiple slivers, the richer and wiser your life will be. The way harmony and dissonance and timbre merge in an orchestra.
All the intelligences are ripe for inclusion. Everything. Deeds of loving kindness, curiosity, knowledge of the world, the art of conversation, gymnastics, animal husbandry, sense of direction, a sense of awe and gratitude, needle point, baking, stone masonry, stock trading. They are all good and noble, and each can potentially enrich your spheriority.
Global Intelligence is the love child of the fruitful marriage of opposites: irreverence and respect; freedom and responsibility; play and work; ascetic and sybaritic; the atomic and the cosmic.
Consider “Global Intelligence” as fluid, boots-on-the-ground, worldly enlightenment: Global Intelligence is not a destination. You never get there. It is an aspiration. It is an arc. You’re the quarterback on an infinite playing field, and the more you stretch and the more you embrace, the better your game.
But there is no score in this game, and victory comes in the form of happy outcomes, understanding and wonder. And Global Intelligence begs new questions, such as, What is thought for? What’s the highest and best use of Thinking? In an ideal world, what we supposed to do with it?
Jonathan Marcus’ memoir, Everything is Happening at Once, is now available on Amazon.
Click here for free download of Everything is Happening at Once, Chapters 1 & 2.
