A Country of Morons

 

An episode of Real Time with Bill Maher included commentary on a “man in the street” survey of  American adults. The question, “Which country is home to Queen Elizabeth?” yielded answers of “Egypt?” “Brazil?” The question “Which is the largest city in the world?” brought answers of “Asia,” and “England.” Clearly any such a survey report would have been edited and, conceivably, just the silly answers included in the published version. Surely a few would have known that Elizabeth is (was) at home in France!

Maher’s comment was something like, “The USA is a country of morons!”

Clearly, we’re not equally endowed with whatever equipment and experience allow one to be knowledgeable and “intelligent.” We used to have words in English to scale a person’s level of mental endowment: genius at the tip-top, moron at the bottom and between the extremes: idiots, imbeciles, and the mass of the average. Another measure used a number scale for scores achieved on a standardized test where 100 was the average score of people who wrote it: your “Intelligence Quotient,” above or below 100 became the predictor of your intellectual endowment.

I took this test in high school and I expect the results had a lot of teachers nodding in the staff room. For us test-takers, the smart, normal and stupid continuum was scale enough. The acme of wit and wisdom had to be Bernie, who would graciously guide the chemistry teacher whenever he’d get lost in a mess of covalent bonds and decomposition reactions. At the nadir was obviously Michael, who spent most of his class time organizing his pencil box.

Mind you, it’s easy to confuse a headful of facts with a headful of wit. People sometimes develop a speciality—usually related to remembering facts or a calculation process—called a “savant syndrome.” Ask a certain “idiot savant” what day of the week you were born if your nativity happened on December 14, 1941 and watch him knit his brow for mere seconds and say, “Sunday.” (I just checked with Microsoft’s Bing AI-assisted search engine, and he would be right.)

Jeopardy winners may be intelligent as Einstein, but their success depends more on memory “savantism” than on wit. At least that’s how I console myself when I’ve played along and ended up with a negative score.

So if Maher is right and the country (USA in his case) is peopled preponderantly by morons and, possibly, idiots without “savant syndrome,” does this bode well for the nations’—indeed for humanity’s—future? Lacking the memory of facts (history), unable logically to project possible futures from current events, unschooled in dividing the absurd from the authentic, is there any hope?

Firstly, we ought to ask ourselves if Maher’s pronouncement on the state of the union merits a lot, a little, or no credit. Does a preponderance of commentators who’ve proved their credentials agree with him? Does Maher’s livelihood depend on making such statements? Is there reliable data to back up a flood-of-morons conclusion?

Second: Let’s be realistic about the possibilities accruing to any given birth (the drug, Thalidomide, caused many people to be born with limiting birth defects, a reminder that “being born” doesn’t take place on a level playing field!) Much as we might deplore the restricted ability to reason, the unreadiness even to learn, the tendency to form strident opinions on the basis of questionable sources, part of us has to keep in mind that this is, has always been and will always be the standard, human condition.

Third: Regarding the many people in our time who make a living criticizing what rednecks do, or what the morons do, or what the woke people, or the Republicans, the Christians, the Jews, women, men, LGBTQ+ people, lawyers, politicians, etc., etc., do, we ought to keep the following principle in mind: if a person says the f**k word a lot on social media, for example, he/she/they may well draw an audience of people who are not averse to that word, even find that hearing it repeatedly acts as vindication of their own way of expressing their feelings. If a behaviour produces a benefit (reward)—in this case of “likes” and/or thumbs-up emojis—it will be repeated, enlarged.

Geniuses and morons are alike in their susceptibility to what B.F. Skinner called “operant conditioning,” the application of reward or punishment in different schedules to produce habits, even addictions. “Smart” people devise operant conditioning schemes to keep people gambling; the unpredictable-as-to-timing-and-amount reward schedule is applied to ensure that addiction or, at least, habitual behaviour, continues.

An irony is that even the knowledgeable, logical devisers of such schemes are subject to being hooked by the same regime—being “hoist on their own petard,” as it were.

How is this relevant? If a group in a community forms around an idea that, for instance, the town council is putting birth control chemicals in the water, and if you’re on the council or know the people and workings of the council and know this conspiracy theory to be absurd, what makes for a logical reaction in the interest of community harmony? The group will reward each other on social media and in demonstrations, possibly. Attempts to extinguish the group’s influence through critical comments on the same media may also be rewarding for them in that it acknowledges their existence and reinforces the idea that you’re part of the conspiracy to deprive them of children, that their position is one of only two.

The best response in this case might well be to do nothing that acknowledges the existence of a controversy at all. If no such additive is in the water, that will reveal itself in time.

Fourth and last: Let’s drum the moron, imbecile, idiot and similar pejoratives out of the English language for good. Let’s refrain from labelling one another on the basis of innate or acquired abilities … or lack thereof. Good parents know better than to shower their gifted daughter with praise and rewards while they heap indifference on a son who’s held back in school and has to have Velcro shoe ties. He didn’t choose his limits, nor she her giftedness.

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As teachers, we’ve been licensed to work in classrooms with children only after a strenuous four-year, post-secondary training. When it comes to education, we know stuff about which a general public might have only a vague impression. Things like “set to learn,” “learning readiness,” “visual vs auditory strength and weakness,” “cognitive functioning,” “introversion/extroversion,” “peer bonding,” etc., and we know that the most efficient learning takes place when the teacher is guided by the nature and endowment of the individual students. This is realistic if a class session includes one teacher and four or five children working together on a specific skill or understanding. In such a situation, the very necessary learnings of respect for differences, cooperation, effective communication, and other social skills can be inculcated while the children master as much as they’re able of, say, “vanishing- point perspective in a painting.”

But because schools are first and foremost places where parents can deposit their children between nine and three o’clock while they apply their freed-up time as they wish, budgets demand that kids be taught in bunches of twenty-five or so per educator. The net effect of this outdated scheme for delivering education should be obvious: most children are schooled in a style that neither harnesses their strengths nor addresses their weaknesses, so they gradually find comfort for their frustrations down rabbit holes where they hide, or band together with others and create a world in which they find at least a modicum of self-esteem and respect. We know some of these rabbit holes as drug cultures, drop-out-ism, gang culture, and most recently, social media trolling, etc.

The delivery of education following the assembly-line model provides hot beds for the growing of what Maher sees as “moron-ism.” It facilitates the production of a population segment that is lacking in basic knowledge, life skills, logical reasoning, social graces and therefore vulnerable to the misinformation of exploiters like Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Rupert Murdoch, Fox News and the burgeoning array of YouTube commentators spouting their one-sided rhetoric in hopes of becoming famous and independently wealthy like mega-church faith healers.  

The failure of education-delivery to keep pace with changing times shouldn’t surprise anybody. The conservative impulse in all of us wants always to pull back on the reins of change. A change from assembly-line delivery would affect employment conditions for parents, playground and sports field organization, any number of dependent changes we’re reluctant to contemplate. Unfortunately, when education lags too far behind the veritable explosion in technology, the gap is bound to bring with it negative consequences. Those consequences are already patently clear to anyone paying attention.

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No advancement in education is going to erase the spread of intellectual endowment in the population. In a democracy like Canada, some people will vote a certain party because they understand the implications of its policies; others will vote for a certain party with hardly a clue because they aren’t able to understand the issues, which in a modern society and nation, can be extremely complex.

When it comes to, say, how space and time are two perspectives on the same concept, I have to confess to being an utter moron.