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Is the West in intellectual decline?
The
Decline of Intelligence in the West
BYDAVID SOLWAY
Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ
scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the
once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late
philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in
cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed,
leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report
that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an
average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes
for NBC News, “A range of
studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining
scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”
Horowitz argues that the plummet in cognitive abilities
“could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also… fewer
scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our
collective future.” Flynn himself, who did the original research on the
eponymous effect, has stated that “The IQ
gains of the 20th century have faltered.” Flynn’s more optimistic Are We Getting Smarter: Rising
IQ in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2012; his
subsequent findings led in an opposite direction.*
The brainchild of French psychologist Alfred Binet, the IQ
construct is a controversial issue with many different interpretations and
applications. Charles Spearman proposed
the variable notion of a g factor, or general intelligence measure,
responsible for overall performance on various mental ability tests such as
memory retention, spatial processing, and quantitative reasoning. The g factor
has been compared to general athletic ability which allows a person to excel in
different fields and activities. There has been vigorous debate over the strict
equivalency between IQ scores and intelligence, but there is broad agreement on
a general waning of intelligence or, from a clinical perspective, an ebbing of
IQ scores. Of course, smart people can sometimes do poorly on IQ tests and
obtuse people can sometimes rank high on aspectual tiers of these tests. But
the consensus appears to be that the correlation approximately holds while
allowing for scalene anomalies. In effect, the g factor is
eroding.
One recalls MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the
architect of Obamacare, who referred to “the stupidity of the American voter”
as helping him to pass the controversial law. One wonders if Gruber ever heard
of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s test results purporting to show
that “the rot starts at the top.” This would implicate Gruber and his cohort in
the experience of what Piaget calls horizontal décalage,
which stymies the application of cognitive functions and logical operations to
extended tasks. In other words, Gruber et al. are also stupid,
gradually destroying the very society that enabled them to flourish. But the
rot can also start at the bottom, as a combination of generalized mental
vacancy and low-to-no-information voters furthers cultural and social
degeneration. As Morris Berman remarks in The Twilight of American Culture,
“A society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”
Why should we be surprised that an American president
should pronounce “corpsman”
as “corpseman”? Or that a Canadian prime minister says “peoplekind” in lieu of “mankind”? Or that a
Washington, D.C., mayor and his staff should have objected to a
perfectly good word like “niggardly”? Or that a Methodist pastor and
Congressman should follow the exclamation “Amen” with “a-woman,” when an
ordained minister should surely know that “Amen” is an acronym for the
Hebrew אֵל מֶלֶךְ נֶאֱמָן (El
melech neeman: “Lord and faithful King”)—or, as some scholars think, a
calque for the Aramaic “so be it”? One can multiply these gaffes, misnomers,
and malapropisms indefinitely among those who should know better—and that is
merely scratching the surface. The dumbing down phenomenon is virtually
encyclopedic in heft and extent.
One sees the same intelligence deficit in the names chosen
for some of our major social media networks. “YouTube” is cringe-worthy—just
say it dispassionately to yourself. “Facebook” is a ridiculous moniker, as well
as a dubious platform: as Niall Ferguson quips in The Great Degeneration,
Facebook is “a vast tool enabling like-minded people to exchange like-minded
opinions about, well, what they like.” Then there’s “Twitter.” A conversation
between human beings is compared to birds twittering on a digital branch—the
implicit message is that communicants are bird-brained. (Contrast to such
infelicity a beleaguered platform
like “Parler” with its French
connotation of real speech and an analogy to a living room where people gather
to converse amicably and share ideas.) The Apple logo—an apple with a bite
taken out of it—is the fruit of pure bathos and corporate stupidity,
inadvertently reminding us of the primal sin in the Garden of Eden and warning
us about the perilous quest for knowledge that tantalizes on another digital
tree. “Think different” is thus contra-indicated, an original sin. Apple,
seriously?
Top or bottom doesn’t seem to matter. In his spy
thriller Early Warning,
Michael Walsh comments about government officials who, presumably “the best
minds of the Republic,” are merely a “collection of hacks, time-servers, and
affirmative-action appointees” whose advancement depends heavily on nepotism.
“It was really pathetic, when you thought about it: that more than two
centuries of American history had come to this.” Believe it. An American congressman fears the island of
Guam will capsize. So-called “ambush journalist” Jesse Watters in Watters World interviews young
university students; the level of ignorance, functional illiteracy, and smug
self-esteem he uncovers is enough to turn the specter of our cultural
practices, general knowledge, and university system into a cosmic joke.
And so it goes. A London community activist,
asked about removing a Churchill statue during the summer of BLM love, admits
she hasn’t “personally met” Winston Churchill. A swarm of Twitter users condemns
Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Tom Brady as “racist” for defeating half-black Kansas
City Chiefs’ QB Patrick Mahomes on Super Bowl LV during Black History Month—the
fact that the great majority of Brady’s teammates are black
and are clearly Brady enthusiasts seems to have escaped their attention. Major
economic and energy policies seem planned not by cerebral giants but by
weed-addled pubescents. Bill Gates, for example,
wants to pepper the sky with aerosols to reflect sunlight out of the atmosphere
and initiate global cooling—the risks are incommensurable and
likely irreversible. Gates has what we might call “sector-intelligence” and
might do well on segments of the Stanford-Binet IQ
test, but I wouldn’t bet on his g score. The travesty of
intelligence, prudence, and wisdom is beyond calculation, and it is only
getting worse as IQ continues to slip down the great chain of thinking. This is
the world that the classic film Idiocracy extravagantly
punctures.
Why this should be is anybody’s guess. No one really knows.
Various theories have been proposed to account for accelerating neural descent,
ranging from the Dewey-inspired “progressive education”
agenda working its leveling passage from the turn of the 20th century
to the decrepit public schools and failed universities of the present day; to
the softening effect of prolonged affluence and ease on a culture; to the
debilitating influence of “smart” technology that
performs our cognitive functions for us; to the assumption that
women of higher intelligence are having fewer children, implying that women of
lower intelligence are driving population growth; to the effects of
increased media exposure and
the consequent lessening of reading; to
the emergence of the vices of envy and resentment owing to radical
egalitarianism and the rancor of the under-performing against the skilled,
hard-working, and successful, a dynamic cogently analyzed by Dinesh D’Souza
in Stealing America;
or to the merely inescapable fact of decay: as Robert Frost wrote, “Nothing gold can
stay.” One thinks, too, of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ remark in his Journal: “From much,
much more; from little, not much; and from nothing, nothing.” Whatever the
cause or causes may be, intellectual deterioration seems to be the case.
What, then, is to be done? We need to go to literature to
contemplate possibilities for restoration. The problem, says Barry Lopez
in Arctic Dreams, is
that “The good minds still do not find each other often enough.” In his
reflections on culture In Bluebeard’s Castle,
George Steiner imagined a future of small, eremitic clusters of intellectual
light dotting an arid landscape, recycling Max Weber’s notion of frail
enclaves of enlightenment as the last resort of a civilization sinking into
darkness. Walter M. Miller Jr.’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz portrayed
an obscure abbey in the Utah desert where historical knowledge is kept alive
and preserved from the “Simpletons,” even if it’s only a sacred shopping list
or a mysterious blueprint for circuit design. “Let us change the icons,” wrote
Will Durant in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of
All Time, “and light the candles.”
Berman calls this the “monastic option,” but he does not
regard it as an assembly of cenobites residing in a physical plant somewhere in
the outback. Instead, it consists of a disparate collection of individuals,
“cultural nomads,” who may not know one another but are dedicated to a life of
private decency, “the disinterested pursuit of truth, the cultivation of art [and]
the commitment to critical thinking.” The “new monks” derive from and support
“traditions of craftsmanship, care, and integrity, preservation of canons of
scholarship, critical thinking, individual achievements and independent
thought.” Their purpose is “to transmit a memory trace of what a culture can be
about.”
It’s a daunting task. The number of people incapable of
lucid argument and civil debate, whether Internet trolls, social media
vulgarians, angry progressivists, media ignoramuses and intellectually
challenged political leaders, is legion. It is therefore by no means
astonishing that the greatest civilization the world has ever known, the
Judeo-Christian West, is subsiding into a state of cognitive expiry, prone to
fantasies and delusions, unable to confront and parse the reality of the world,
oblivious to the symbiosis of man, history and nature, distracted by
pseudo-scientific baubles, bereft of spiritual substance, and foreign to the
very idea of truth.
In Social and Cultural Dynamics,
Pitirim Sorokin, one of the great thinkers of our time, distinguished between
“ideational” cultures, which are knowledge-and-spiritually focused, and
“sensate” cultures, which are primarily informational and materialistic, the
latter eventually devolving into a condition in which coercion, fraud,
debasement of the creative impulse, family breakdown, and the encroachment of
“untruth” into the human conscience (read: political correctness, fake news,
electoral debauchery) are paramount. The latter is our present cultural home,
lacking reflective capacity and experiencing a downtrend in clarity of thought
and general percipience, shaving off IQ points as clarity and percipience drop.
The concept of intelligence is complex and multifactorial, but if by
“intelligence” we mean something like the ability to see the world as it is, to
understand context, and to act in ways proven to be beneficial over time, then,
according to Sorokin, intelligence is likely to decline in the latter stages of
a “sensate” age.
The decline of intelligence—moral rectitude and creative exuberance are collateral casualties—is now in full throttle. The exceptions to the debacle—monks, nomads, people of integrity, people capable of common sense, the classically educated—represent the only viable hope for a new “ideational” age to arise out of the rubble of a “sensate” disaster. It may take another century to bring about what Sorokin called “the turn,” the slow ascent up the IQ ladder, which is cold comfort indeed. But I suspect it’s the only real comfort we have.
* The obituary in The New York Times tells only the sunnier version of the story; it omits the more alarming results of Flynn’s later research. As to be expected, the Gray Lady has grown increasingly wizened as the sensate age proceeds
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Sent to me by an optimist friend and fellow memo reader:
Republicans, Be of Good Cheer
Propaganda media and Democrats are trying to keep Republicans on the defensive with a campaign of smears, exaggerations, and outright lies.
From trying to impeach President Donald Trump (who is now a private citizen), to focusing on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to maximizing the divide between Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Trump supporters, the propaganda media and the Democrats are maneuvering to try to create a defensive Republican Party.
They want to keep the GOP crouched in a circular firing squad shooting at itself.
This is because the Democrats have real imperatives driving them to harass and attack Republicans.
First, anti-Trump and anti-Republican rhetoric is the only thing unifying an otherwise shaky coalition on the Left.
The longer they can keep making noise about Trump and Republicans, the more time they have to sign executive orders and change America through regulations without anyone noticing.
Second, the more they can focus the media on the Republicans, the less the media will cover the radical, corrupt, and job-killing actions and foreign policy blunders of the Biden Democratic Party.
Forget about the $600 million in cybertheft that Washington state Employment Security Department Commissioner Suzi LeVine presided over before being picked by President Biden for a leadership post in the Labor Department.
Forget the $11.4 billion to $31 billion in California unemployment insurance fraud in 2020.
Forget Gov. Andrew Cuomo mismanaging COVID-19 so badly that nine top public health officials have resigned.
Cuomo’s failures are so big, and the unnecessary deaths are so great, even The New York Times is beginning to cover the Democratic governor’s disaster.
Forget Gov. Gavin Newsom mismanaging California so badly there is a petition drive underway to force a recall election. This is the disaster being ignored when Democrats say they want to "make America California again."
Forget the radical House rules, which 207 Democrats voted for, to take mother, father, brother, sister, and other gender-specific words out of the House’s official rules document (imagine trying to explain that vote in most of America).
Forget President Biden’s executive order waiving Title IX for transgender males who want to compete as women — even if they have not undergone any biological changes.
To the propaganda media, the collapse of competitive women’s sports is not a big enough issue to cover.
Finally, forget Frank Biden’s ad touting his close ties to his brother that was published by a Miami law firm on Inauguration Day. And forget the number of lawyers Hunter Biden has now hired to defend himself against a range of charges involving business dealings with China, Russia, and Ukraine — which the Left and the propaganda media insisted didn’t exist prior to the election.
The list could go on, but you get the picture.
The Democrats must stay on offense because they will be crushed once the American people see what they have actually been doing. The 2022 election could potentially become a nightmare for House and Senate Democrats.
Remember 1994? House Democrats lost 54 seats and control for the first time in 40 years.
In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats and control. By every historic standard, the Democrats’ narrow five-vote majority should disappear in 2022 and Kevin McCarthy should become Speaker of the House.
Republicans have every reason to be optimistic.
Today, there are 27 Republican governors. In 23 states, Republicans control the legislature as well as the governorship.
There are 4,007 Republican state legislators to 3,312 Democratic state legislators (with Republicans on the rise). The state legislator advantage means Republicans will draw the lines for reapportionment for about four times as many House seats as the Democrats.
This further increases Republican opportunities in 2022.
Despite every effort of the Left to arouse (or manufacture) a civil war in the GOP, the party will remain largely unified and focused on creating more jobs, lowering taxes, increasing take home pay, defending America’s interests around the world — and developing solutions in health, learning, space, and other areas that matter to our future.
Ultimately, the Republican Party of entrepreneurship and hard work will defeat the Democratic Party of unemployment and redistribution.
Jobs and education will lead to continued Republican support in minority communities.
The diverse House freshmen class (the most diverse GOP freshman class in history) and President Trump’s achievement in getting the most minority votes of any Republican presidential candidate in 60 years bode well for a continued growth for a party of prosperity and opportunity.
The Left is desperate to create a pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump civil war in the GOP.
It will not happen. President Trump is by far the best known and most liked Republican. But the Republican Party is much bigger than any one person.
When you look at the achievements of Govs. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Greg Abbott, R-Texas, you can see a clear, successful future for the GOP.
We are never going to be an anti-Trump party.
We are also never going to be a Trump-only party. Unlike modern Democrats, we welcome a diversity of opinions.
Think of our future as a Trump-plus Republican Party.
The former president will play a major role, but there will be a lot of smart, creative people adding their ideas and proving their capabilities. Our bench is immensely deeper than the Democrats’.
When you look at these long-term realities, it is clear Republicans should be optimists and let the Democrats have the monopoly on bitterness, hostility, and negativity.
When you see a Democrat, smile at them. It will drive them nuts.
You are going to win, and they are once again going to sink into despair and defeatism.
To read, hear, and watch more of Newt’s commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.
Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich is well-known as the architect of the "Contract With America" that helped the Republican Party reclaim a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.
And:
A riposte to my friend's optimism:
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Market comment:
I continue to believe the market has upside from it's current level as long as the vaccine is distributed and more people are theoretically, if not actually, protected from the Covid Pandemic. Pent up demand and stimulus should insure a return to consumption.
The question will, as always, be two fold:
a) Will the government, in this instance, the Biden Administration, kill the recovery and corporate enthusiasm by it's inane policies?
b) Do current valuations already comprehend (a) leaving little room to reflect pent up demand and potentially rising corporate earnings?
I also believe there already has begun and will continue shifting elements of sector leadership. If consumers and corporations spend and borrow the financial sector should do better. If continued biotech and other technical breakthroughs persist, as I believe they will and might even accelerate, the health care sector , in it's broadest term, should also have room to expand.
Should corporations not be stymied by Biden's insane desire to increase taxes when billions of dollars remain unspent, the capital goods stock sector could have room to rise.
Finally, as consumers come out of their lockdown mentality, the energy sector, which has been very woefully depressed, should recover. Particularly would this be the case if Biden restricts American energy production. The long term prospects for historical energy sources will not, in all probability, recover to their % of the S & P but still have upside potential. I also envision consolidations will become commonplace, ie. Exon and Chevron might reconsider talking etc.
The Technology sector is extended in a price sense but, as long as the primary companies continue exceptional growth and increasing earnings and cash flows, investor enthusiasm will propel them to even higher valuations since greed and optimism is always present.
Last, stocks paying reliable dividends are beginning to regain favor as low interest rates kill returns from bonds and other more stable type investments.
Eventually, what goes up also corrects and comes down and , as with Ros and his rants, I believe by late 2021 and into early 2022 investors should be prepared to flee for these reasons:
If a and b above occur, valuations should have discounted much of the recovery glory.
Second, inflation will have become more evident and that will light a fire under interest rates thereby, introducing greater competition for stocks.
Third, the 2022 mid-terms will introduce uncertainty and the inanity of election rhetoric will deflate enthusiasm.
Fourth, if Biden is able to pass the legislation his handlers demand the consequences will be unfavorable.
Fifth, one cannot rule out Kamala taking over from a president incapable of functioning.
Six, unpredictable world events always have a way of knocking everything into a cocked hat and here I refer to Iran, China and the "always" unknowns.
But then, what do I know?
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