Intelligence and Wisdom

I want here to make a long aside on intelligence. I have met far too many people, particularly among the colleged elite (note: if you have a college degree, you are a kind of elite; most people do not have one), who treat intelligence as a moral virtue or – God help us – the only moral virtue. This is extraordinarily foolish and I use that word (as you will see) carefully. Intelligence, as a trait, is a mix of inborn factors and perhaps early upbringing – again, I don’t want to descend into the swamps here; the key thing is that by the time we are mature enough to understand it, it isn’t susceptible to much change. Consequently, intelligence isn’t a virtue (in the moral sense) at all but simply an attribute about a person, like an attractive face, red hair, height and so on. Being intelligent does not make one a better person; it is merely the luck of birth. It carries all of the moral virtue of being good at basketball or League of Legends; less, really, since one has to show discipline and practice in those things (though for the already intelligent, there is a strong element of intellectual training necessary to really harness that inborn trait, much like natural talent at sports or e-sports). If you had the luck to be born smart, you ought – in my view – to feel obliged to give back just as if you had had the luck to have been born rich or beautiful.

Here I think it is crucial to separate intelligence from wisdom; the moral virtue lies in the latter. Intelligence is one’s ability to think through complex problems; it is an inherent ability with no moral value (but it does, of course, have use-value). Wisdom concerns one’s judgement and consequent code of conduct. I have seen too many students berate themselves – often quite cruelly – as being ‘stupid,’ because they have made some mistake (in situations, by the by, where I can be almost perfectly certain that said students, by virtue of being in my classroom, were in the top 25%, probably the top 15%, of the intelligence distribution). And on the one hand, I cringe because the self-criticism I hear from them is one that elevates intelligence to a moral virtue (they are a ‘bad person’ for being ‘stupid’) and at the same time an in-born, immutable trait that they cannot change. They are declaring (they think) not only that they have no worth (which is not true) but also the impossibility of worth. But of course they haven’t been stupid, but rather they have been foolish. The difference is that wisdom and foolishness is about choices and judgement; we can make the choice to be wiser in the future. A single foolish decision doesn’t make a fool. We have not yet found a way to make a stupid person intelligent, but we have refined many paths for the foolish person to reach to wisdom; indeed, all children are fools and must become wise as they mature.

It may be the case that it is easier for intelligent people to be wise, because they can more rapidly puzzle out life’s problems and find helpful solutions; I am unconvinced, having known a great many terribly smart, terribly foolish people (I mean, I went to graduate school in history – none of us there could have had very much sense) who in their foolishness thought they were smart enough to live without wisdom. It is certainly the case that there are great stores of wisdom, quite clearly labeled as such, available to anyone without the ability or inclination to puzzle out the basic principles of wisdom on their own. To be honest, I would advise the intelligent to use those stores as well; attempting to think one’s way to wisdom is a path full of peril, hubris and error. I have met many people who achieved a real measure of wisdom through these stores and who were often quite a bit wiser than some of the super-smart people I have known (and, as an aside, being an academic plays absolute havoc with your ability to assess normal intelligence when your entire peer-group is very smart; I suggest avoiding ever descending entirely into an academic bubble – maintain non-academic friends!).

Intelligence is an important, but quite frankly, overrated thing in our society; in almost any relationship, we ought to prefer the wise person to the intelligent one. link Bret Devereaux