Never Let Me Go is a book about a bunch of unusual kids, who grow up without really understanding how unusual they are. They go to a special school, and the school is particularly intent on having the kids show creativity, and produce artwork. The reason the school wants artwork is… oh, I shouldn’t spoil it. The kids don’t really understand why. All they understand is that to have an artwork chosen by the school officials is an honor.
And therefore it is a basis for social hierarchy.
To the kids, art isn’t an outlet for creativity, it isn’t a matter of amusement, but a matter of achievement. There’s one kid who drew a silly picture one of an elephant one time, and as a result the kids perceive him as lagging behind. For years, he gets teased, pranked, and throws huge tantrums. He finds peace when a teacher takes him aside and tells him it’s okay to be less creative. The other kids are scandalized by the very idea.
I’ve been thinking about this story, and how it resembles our own situation. The truth is, we grew up into a system that we didn’t really understand, but where we understood that being smart was an achievement. We’ve had personal experience building social hierarchies around perceived intelligence, before even understanding what a social hierarchy is, or why intelligence is important. We’ve pinned the labels “smart” or “stupid” on other people, and had them pinned to ourselves, often on flimsy evidence, and these labels have governed the early years of our lives.
One difference is that in Never Let Me Go, the kids eventually leave the school, and the value of “creativity” doesn’t really get reinforced anymore. In the real world, “intelligence” gets reinforced over and over, because communicating, reasoning, and decision-making continue to be valuable skills, at least until we retire. But does that necessarily make the hierarchy based on intelligence more justified? If the kids in Never Let Me Go spent most of their lives in that special school (trying to avoid spoilers here *wink*), would that mean that their “creativity”-based hierarchy was justified?
I have no problem with passing judgment on a person’s reasoning, just as I might pass judgment on a person’s artwork. It is important for society, as a whole, to be productive, and creative, and wise. This requires that we have a healthy tradition of criticism. But I do not think it is necessary to give ourselves so much grief over it. The value of a person does not come from their productivity, does not come from some “intelligence” that supposedly determines the quality of their work. We do not need to erect complicated social hierarchies based on intelligence.
Nate Hevenstone recently had a series about intelligence and ableism, starting with a history of the concepts, and ending with Ania’s Ableism Challenge. The Ableism Challenge asks writers to try, for one month, to stop using a set of words, such as “stupid” and “lame”. I responded to this challenge a few years ago, and was proud to find that I personally didn’t use the words very much to begin with.
Over the years, my thoughts on this have developed more. I think the challenge is a useful exercise, that can help writers better grasp the issue. But I don’t think the end goal is really to excise these words from our vocabulary. The end goal is to excise the concepts from our vocabulary.* No synonyms for “stupid” will do. The problem is not in the specific word or its history, the problem is that we need to stop invoking the hierarchy that we’ve been inculcated into since we were kids.
*To add some wrinkles, I would not say that this is true of every word on Ania’s list. For example, I think “lame” is bad specifically because of its history. There isn’t any inherent problem with a mild pejorative that has “lost all colour from overuse”. Seriously, whatever. I don’t use “lame” because sometimes it refers to people with mobility impairments, not because I think it’s uncreative.
Again, it’s fine and even necessary to criticize people’s work. Some people, like our president, produce evil work of such magnitude that it absolutely impacts their value as human beings. But the evil of Donald Trump is not remotely equivalent to the kids who had “stupid” answers to the teacher questions.
I can’t blame people who aren’t up to the Ableism Challenge. It is very difficult to escape the social hierarchy of intelligence that we all grew up in. But I think it is worth it to try, not only to fight ableism, but for our own personal growth.
It’s not equivalent. It is a matter of degree.
Intelligence is a rational basis for hierarchy because those who have it will be a benefit to society and those who lack it will be a burden.*
It is a mark of a civilised society that those who can shoulder those burdens do so cheerfully, or at least without complaint.
*This is a VERY short, crude summary, lacking definitions and qualifiers for the sake of brevity and clarity.
This is quite simply not true. Intelligence can certainly help benefit society, but it can just as easily be a detriment. The bankers who caused the great recession were individually very intelligent people after all. Intelligence is a tool like any other, and what matters is how you use it. Whether someone uses it for good or bad depends on very different factors than pure intelligence alone.
As for people who lack intelligence being a burden, that’s only true in the strictest sense of the word, because the only people who lack intelligence entirely are people who are braindead and on life support. I’m guessing you mean people of below average intelligence instead? And those can absolutely be a benefit to their society in a multitude of ways.
@sonofrojblake,
Describing Trump as a “burden” is one of the more sympathetic and humanizing things you could say about him, since we have all been a burden to society at one point or another. And you just said we should shoulder burdens cheerfully, and I can’t say I want to shoulder Trump cheerfully?
@Dauphni, 2: There’s a danger of getting lost in the weeds of definitions, so I shall not dispute your rebuttal.
In my experience this whole concept of “Intelligence as a basis for hierarchy” is bullshit of the highest order, because it’s not happening. At all. Intelligence is a trait a posteriori assumed of the already-successful, NOT one that is actually rewarded in the real world. It’s a trait that people want to believe is associated with success so they can believe in a just-world meritocracy – it’s what they want to THINK is hierarchically rewarded, not at ALL a thing that actually is.
I tell you this as someone who’s spent their whole life 1) being described by all sorts of people as a genius and 2) being treated like absolute shit and discarded at the first opportunity.
In practical terms, intelligence is a goddamn curse unless you’re also born with enough advanced social skills to cover it up. People react to this by becoming resentful because they imagine the presence of a smart person makes them look stupid.
QFT – and yet another corrupting gift that comes to us courtesy of Galton.
@abbeycadabra,
I totally feel you, which is why I avoided saying that “stupid” people are necessarily treated worse than “smart” people. I try not to compare struggles of different people, on general principle.