Day 54: Intelligence, Emotion, and Value.

I've been watching this show...

You know what, skip it.  If you want to know about the show that inspired this post, you can check it out over on Why Aren't They Kissing.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot recently about the value we place on intelligence versus emotion, and the more I think about it the crankier I get.  Follow me, if you will, down the rabbit hole.

Here in the rabbit hole, we only make cranky faces.

Intelligence, by definition, is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.  In essence, when we say someone has a high IQ, all we're saying is that they learn well, and can use what they learn.  And that's certainly a valuable trait to have, not only to the individual, but also to society at large.  Our most intelligent members are far more likely to make advances in any number of fields, because they have the ability to learn everything up to the current cutting edge, and they apply what they've learned in new ways.  Being smart is great, and I don't mean to devalue it.

Unfortunately, there are huge issues with the way we view intelligence and knowledge in our society.  It's so massive and overarching, it's hard to really even know where to start, so bear with me.

First, let's talk about the ways that we measure intelligence.  All of our IQ tests are very biased.  They mean crap.  I say this as someone who does well on IQ tests, so I'm not speaking out of bitterness or anything.  They measure very little beyond your ability to understand patterns, which means if you're good at patterns you do great on the test, and if patterns aren't your thing then you're hosed. 

 See these kids?  Both of them are smart.  But only one does well on tests.  And it isn't the one the teachers are always praising as being "so smart".  Chew on that, for a bit.

Intelligence shouldn't just be about patterns.  Remember, we're talking about the ability to learn and apply what you've learned.  Theoretically, this should include everything, right?  Or, at the very least, everything you do with your brain.  Anything that isn't strictly a physical skill.  Amazing athletes, therefore, would not be qualified as particularly intelligent (although they might also be intelligent, I'm just saying that their athletic prowess alone would not indicate that they were) but rocket scientists would be, and so would world-class musicians.

Anyone who just tripped up over classifying world-class musicians as intelligent has found my first issue with our view of that concept.

 Hard music is hard.





If you haven't been living under a rock, you're probably aware of the acronym STEM.  It's the term we use for the hard sciences, which also happen to be the subjects that are highly valued by society.  Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have become the holy grail of education and, by extension, intelligence in our culture. 

Quick, make a list of all the professions you automatically assume indicate intelligence.  Now, did historians make that list?  What about poets?  Screenwriters?  Painters?  Tailors?  Chefs?  Did you write down any profession that isn't classified under STEM? 

Most of us don't.  Most of us list things like scientists, doctors, and software engineers.  Lawyer makes the list fairly frequently, and isn't a STEM career, but that's basically it.  And it's not because other careers don't require the acquisition and application of knowledge.  They do.  But we don't value the types of knowledge that are being acquired and applied there, so we don't consider them as being "smart." 

What I do.  Also not STEM.

Technology is great.  I love technology, and modern medicine, and our growing understanding of the universe in which we live.  But those aren't the only things in the world, and it really grinds my gears the way we casually dismiss the value of all other types of knowledge.

Which leads me neatly to my second point: how intelligence and emotion have somehow become opposites in our collective consciousness. 

"Emotion" refers to the series of complex internal states that we pass through.  These states are evoked by external stimuli, and are manifested by changes in multiple systems within the body.  They're only minimally understood even among the medical disciplines devoted to studying them, but they impact every aspect of our daily lives.  It's remarkable that, as a species, we have learned to process and react to emotions so well, given how wide and varied a spectrum they are and how little we understand their basis.  Some of us, of course, don't process emotions as well, and some of us are particularly skilled and process not only our own emotions but those around us exceedingly well.  And yet, for reasons that baffle me, this is not viewed as a type of intelligence.  Emotional facility is viewed as some kind of esoteric magic, instead of a clear acquisition and application of a particular type of knowledge.

And this--all this--makes flames shoot up the side of my face.

See, it all comes back to power dynamics, and it's multi-layered.  We can start with the obvious, that for generations we've chosen to pretend that logic and emotion are mutually exclusive, and that they have a tendency to split along gender lines.  The dynamic there has been discussed exhaustively over many different platforms, and I'm not going to rehash it here, but it basically boils down to us devaluing the type of knowledge in which women are traditionally expected to display a facility.

It also relates to class, though.  Service professions, even those that are specialized and highly skilled, are devalued, while "leisure" professions--those that have their roots (in European culture) among the nobility who had enough disposable income that they could spend their days pondering the mysteries of the universe--are magnified.  Those leisure professions have evolved into our modern day STEM subjects, and are still mostly occupied by our upper classes.  It's not that poor children never grow up to be doctors and engineers, but it's far less likely.

Here, have some statistics that are vaguely relevant.

So, we have this heavy bias towards a certain subset of knowledge.  We treat it as the only kind that truly "counts", thus our tendency to disregard other kinds of knowledge as a marker of intelligence.  And it's creating a terrible, destructive schism in our educational system and in our economy.

See, not everyone can be an engineer, or a researcher, or a programmer.  And that's fine.  Lots of us don't want to be those things.  Some of us want to be farmers, and some of us want to be mechanics, and some of us want to be clerks for the city.  And that's great!  Those professions are highly desirable!  We need them for society to function.  And yet, we don't value them.  Not only do we not pay them well, we also don't respect them.  They're jobs that don't garner instant approbation.  We mentally rank them low on the totem pole, and we don't encourage the skills they need in school.  Our children grow up thinking that there's something vaguely shameful about being successful in a service career, so they don't consider it when they're planning what they want to be when they grow up.  And that's a damn shame, because there's nothing wrong with going into service.  It doesn't mean you're stupid, and it doesn't mean you're valueless. 

My brothers are all wicked smaht, but only one is in a STEM field.

This really bothers me.  I know that, as human beings, we have this alarming trend toward hierarchical classification, but I'm tired of our blind devotion to hard science.  I'm tired of the limited subset of knowledge that we consider worthy.  And I'm tired of watching people devalue emotion as though it somehow detracts from understanding, instead of being a thing worthy of understanding in and of itself.

What does this have to do with acceptance?

Well, remember those kids up there?  Those giant goof-balls with their tiny bodies and enormous brains?  Well, I'm coming to realize that those awesome kids may not actually do very well in school.  It's not because they aren't smart--they are--but they're not typical.  Charlotte fits in better than Elliot, but even she is a bit outside the box, and Elliot is so far outside the boundaries of "normal" that I've spent most of the past school year trying to figure out how to help construct a patchwork that fits him out of the current educational system.  My darling munchkins don't fit the mold, so our criteria for judging them shows them as being lacking.

But I don't think they're lacking at all.  I think the mold is lacking, not just for them, but for other kids, too.  The kids who want to be artists, and the kids who want to build cars.  The kids who like growing things in the dirt ,and the kids who like working with fabric, or food.  All those kids are going to spend their school years struggling to fit into that STEM mold, that judges their intelligence and their worth by a narrow, narrow segment of the wealth of human knowledge.  And I hope each of those kids has someone in their lives who accepts that the problem is with the mold, not them.

I know mine will.