Three Ways to Be a Smarter Person

The World Is Getting Stupider. Here’s How Not to Join It.

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I titled this little essay…well…you know. But really? The battle today is about being not a dumber person. The forces of ignorance, in all their guises and forms, have us surrounded today. Encircled. They’re laying siege to us. Our societies, our communities — our minds. From “ban the books!!” to shades of “burn the witch!!” we live in an era that feels profoundly dislocating because something strangely unfamiliar is happening.

The world is getting stupider.

Now, that might sound funny, but only because it’s only a joke in the sense that it’s not. Think about history for a second. What was true, for a very long time? The world was getting smarter. I don’t mean that in a linear way, or a universalizing way. But by and large, for most of parents, grandparents, even grandparents lifetimes — a great trend in human civilization was that the world was getting smarter. Great systems of education were built, then advanced across gender and castes and races. Universities opened their doors to all. Science became a true public good, and anyone could access it, or at least enough of it. And so…the world got smarter.

This was an essential part of the story of human progress. But as now know, human progress has flatlined, and is going into reverse. And part of that Great Reversal in human progress is the facepalm-inducing fact that the world is getting stupider.

There’s a reason it feels as if all the people around you are getting dumber: They are. A study published in the journal Intelligence found that American IQs are dropping for the first time in ages. An analysis of 394,378 scores on intelligence tests taken between 2006 and 2018 showed that IQs had fallen in every category except for spatial reasoning. In logic and vocabulary, computation and mathematics, and visual problem-solving and analogies, scores dropped.

Now think about how…weird everything feels. How everything feels so bewildering, unfamiliar, dislocating, strange, even sinister. It’s not everything. It’s just…people. Scientists are still out there making advances, thinkers thinking, writers writing, artists arting (can I say that?). 

But these days? You don’t know. You’re sitting at the cafe, in line at the store, walking down the street. Hey, is that person a…maniac…who “believes” that “climate change is a hoax”…and wants to wipe out the nearest girls’ school, gay bar, or library, with an AR-15? Maybe they’re just an everyday Trumpist or DeSatanist (can I call them that?), and are on a human hair trigger, ready to turn you in for…reading a book with a gay character in it. Maybe they deeply, genuinely believe in the Satanic conspiracy to rule the world with microchips that are in vaccines so that Hillary Clinton and the Illuminati can gain immortality by drinking kids’ blood (that’s Qanon, folks.)

Why do you have that creepy feeling when you dare to venture outside the door? That’s the feeling of the world getting stupider.

So the fight today isn’t just to get smarter. That part’s easy, actually. Here, let me tell you the secrets. Read. A lot.Real books, not bestsellers, and while they can overlap a bit, it’s rare they do often. Pick a favorite academic journal or three. Read those, too. Find a favorite mind, and read everything they’ve every written. Do that for the living and the dead. Make an hour every day, without fail, at least, to reflect on what you’re learning. Choose an activity that helps your mind do it — lets it just tick away without even really “thinking” explicitly — running, having a bath, making music. Turn off Netflix, Twitter, Facebook for all that time. Be uninterrupted. And finally, take some personal tuition — reach out to people for coaching, advice, lessons, learning, whatever the subject is.

Got all that? The problem isn’t that, really, though. It’s the forces of ignorance encircling us, and laying siege to our societies and minds. So that far too few of us are capable of ever doing much of that. So let’s begin with the meat of the subject. How to become a smarter as in less stupid person.

Number one. Don’t politicize science. You know what’s odd about today? Science’s claim to truth has been unseated socioculturally. Let me put that in plain English. Go on YouTube, and there, presented to you as equals, will be videos saying that “climate change is a hoax!!”…and it actually exists. There’ll be plenty more of those saying it’s a hoax, or it doesn’t matter, or so forth, in fact, because, well, there’s more money to be made that way. And for that reason, writ larger — both-sidesing — it’s now become a social norm to politicize science.

And this norm has come to dominate our societies. It’s now perfectly acceptable to take some kind of flagrantly anti-scientific, anti-reality “stance.” To play the “contrarian.” And you’ll get plenty of time, in newspapers and on cable news and so forth, because for them, controversy sells. Demagogues license all this, by not just politicizing science, but actively legislating against it. Think of how many American states have a climate change plan — LOL. Meanwhile, an impoverished country like Pakistan has a Climate Change Minister.