Only Idiots Care about IQ

On the Great Ohio Cat Massacre and Its Cultural Shockwaves

I do not know what my IQ is, but I imagine it’s rather low. Perhaps very low. I’ll never find out however, unless some vicious regime emerges and starts imposing mandatory IQ tests, which is admittedly a real possibility. But even if that happens I suppose I would try to spare them the effort by confessing in advance that, really, I’m just as dumb as a box of rocks.

That said, I find I get by just fine. I generally manage on what I like to think is a healthy attitude of docta ignorantia, just as Nicholas of Cusa recommended, but the truth is most of the time it’s probably just ignorantia. It was only when I began admitting, foremostly to myself but also to others, what an utter know-nothing I am that I, counterintuitively, was finally able, over just the past few years, to begin to speak and to write in a vein of true parrhesia, instead of always bullshitting.

Things are much better this way. I can recall, back in elementary school, whenever another kid called me “dumb” I had to rush into a corner to mumble a mantra, a sort of memorized spell affirming how smart I am and thereby counteracting the effect of the insult. And that same 7th-grader with burgeoning obsessive compulsive disorder is very much the same person who pushed his way through university with a 4.7 GPA or whatever, nothing but A+’s on my formal logic tests, and a full-fledged clinically diagnosed and medically treated case of OCD. That was rough. Now when I get the same insult as had been hurled years before on the playground I just heartily agree, and continue on with my work. Of course I’m dumb! I want to say in reply. I’m a human being!

Admittedly I have known at least a few smart human beings who break from the general mold of our species. I’ve been on committees with Nobel laureates in physics, for example, people who profoundly transformed our understanding of the nature of the physical universe through significant contributions to the discovery that it is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerating pace. Stuff like that. Smart people. I myself would have no idea how to go about demonstrating that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Literally no idea. As far as I can tell the universe isn’t going anywhere. It just kind of seems to be sitting there, more or less the same size, from day to day. But what do I know?

One of the things I’ve noticed, sitting on committees with Nobel laureates, is that —how should I put it?— nothing about their suite of extraordinary abilities seems to set them up particularly well in the world in general, at least from a Darwinian perspective of selective advantage. They might be set up well in our world, with aptitudes that we happen to value and that win them prize money and large offices and acclaim on their universities’ websites. But those are very unusual circumstances and the hard truth is that they really just got lucky to be born into a time and place that knew how to appreciate them.

I’m going to anonymize the details here, but there was this one physics Nobel laureate whose open office door I happened to be passing one day, and who called me in to show me something when he caught sight of me. He invited me to sit in the chair behind his desk, and as I sank into it I felt some kind of padded cushion beneath me. Then he flicked a switch and my butt began to vibrate.
“How much would you pay for that?” he asked.
“Is this some kind of sex toy?” I asked in turn.
“No, but there is a danger some people might suppose that it is,” he admitted. “I’m still working on that. It’s a desk-based calorie burner. You sit and work all day, while it does the exercising for you!” He asked me again how much I’d pay for it, and I answered:
“Uh, $39.99? Maybe $49.99 if it came in a box with a big ‘As seen on TV!’ logo on it at Wal-Mart.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” said the Nobel laureate.

Do you get the point I’m trying to make here? This man had a Nobel prize in physics, and he was busying himself with this silly gizmo like some Depression-era huckster who’d just come up with the idea for an electric “slimming belt”. I like to think that if I had a mind capable of understanding such things as cosmic dark energy, it would also be capable of maintaining its focus on such splendid and sublime things as my rare intellect permitted me to contemplate, rather than willingly and enthusiastically descending into the mundane realm of weight-loss gadgetry. I mean, even I, as dumb as I am, prefer to spend my time contemplating all that is eternal, all that is glorious and wonderful and mysterious in the fact that I find myself here, in this life and this universe. Whatever my IQ is, it’s enough at least for that.

All of this has been on my mind recently in the wake of candidate Trump’s rabble-rousing efforts during his recent debate with Kamala Harris, in which he suggested that Haitian migrants, temporarily holed up in Springfield, Ohio, have taken to cooking and eating that city’s local population of house pets. This triggered, I gather, a great deal of discussion in social media, driven mostly by some rude ejaculations there from the influential cretin Jeremy Kauffman, and followed up by some specious imitation of reasoning by Trump’s own large adult son, Junior. “You look at Haiti,” DJT Jr. recently explained to Charlie Kirk, “you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world.” And then he offered an anticipatory defense, by allusive appeal to empirical method: “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

I gather that a certain kind of lad on the socials eats this stuff right up, takes the measure of IQ as no less certain than the measure of mass or temperature. When in the past I have made partial alliances with some on the dissident right, in view of our shared hostility to HR-driven identitarian ideology, I have almost always had to distance myself from them immediately upon learning that for them opposition to this ideology meant, almost by definition, taking comfort in the opposing ideology of “race realism”. But I always hated Robin DiAngelo-style anti-racism only because I am so attached to a different species of anti-racism, the kind that I trace back through the commitment to “cultural parity” of the sort we can find in Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston (about whom more in a moment), Franz Boas, J. G. Herder. I think my kind of anti-racism is better; in fact I think it alone qualifies as anti-racism at all. There was a period of a few years in which my anti-racism practically guaranteed that I would be perceived as a racist, at least by educated white elites, but I knew I was right and I stuck to my convictions. Things seem to be shifting back now on the left, away from the ideological excesses of 2020-21 —the much vaunted vibe shift, very much on display, to my mind, in the messaging of the most recent DNC—, even as the right only continues to sink deeper into its own extremism.

Unlike those who assail “left-wing” institutional identitarianism from the right, as being “Marxist” and “postmodernist” (haha), I see it as entirely neoliberal, rooted in the class interests of the petty bourgeois as against the marginalized and subaltern; and I see it, moreover, as a depressing step backwards into a variety of neo-essentialism. I mean, I am a postmodernist, of sorts. I think for example that Foucault was absolutely right on target when he explicated social kinds —such as “homosexual” or “insane”— as the products of distinct and contingent discursive histories, rather than as the discovery of ontologically robust natural kinds, whose discovery and naming carves nature perfectly at its joints. Of course our social-kind terms don’t carve nature at its joints! We learned that hard lesson in the late 20th century, only then to find both the left and the right retreating into an astoundingly childish realism about their preferred systems for classifying human beings. And by now most of these realists are too young even to remember, let alone to have any sympathy for, any broadly antirealist or constructionist interpretation of social reality — for them, such discursively produced labels as “low-IQ”, “settler-colonial”, “cis”, “illegal”, “white”, etc., are as real as the squares on Mendeleev’s table of the elements.¹ What a tragic reversal!

Anyhow, I am confident that no one, not even Kauffman or Trump, Jr., would ever dream of suggesting that the Haitians who attend my church here in the 19th arrondissement of Paris are “low-IQ”. The reason for this is simple: they are not poor. The Haitian community of Paris, at least the one I know, seems to be constituted mostly of upper-middle-class exiles doing their best to get on with their lives. They give off all the usual signs of being highly norm-bound, preoccupied with social-standing and respect and so on — bref, tout comme il faut. By contrast, in Paris, at least up here around the Gare du Nord, the people at the very bottom rung of the social hierarchy seem to be the South Asians. I’m no expert, but most of them appear to come from the Dalit class, to be young men who arrived here alone in search of menial labor, without knowledge of the language, and in every way, as far as I can tell, on the extreme outer margins of French society. The Indian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, I suspect, have a very different profile: they are doctors and software engineers. Many of them are probably big fans of JD Vance, and probably wary of the poor Haitian migrants who have arrived in their community. But you can’t make any sense at all of such regional variability, as to who is on the margins and who is safely inside a given society, if you honestly think that marginality is something that attaches to “nations” or “races” as a whole, and that its root cause is some sort of static and essential inferiority.

I admit that at the level of pure perception, I as well, just like Kauffman and Trump Jr., am prone to seeing people at the bottom rung of society as inferior. This is probably to some extent an innate disposition of the perceiving mind. I see a South Asian Deliveroo guy wearing knock-off shiny tracksuit pants, a t-shirt that says “Emporio Armando”, and a pair of cheap flip-flops, and at least part of me thinks: “Can’t you get it together?!” But of course he literally can’t get it together: he ain’t got the money! And that’s all this is about! I long had the naive idea that if I were a poor migrant I would just get a really cool haircut, find a job in a record store, and use my Bohemian bona-fides for class advancement. But of course that’s absurd; if I were a poor migrant I would not have the luxury of preferring, say, early-period Smog over solo Bill Callahan.

As Descartes noted however, the real cause of error is when the will outruns the intellect, and fortunately for me this remains true when we substitute “perception” for “will”. Trump Jr.’s great mistake is to try to muster whatever power of reasoning he has in defense of his raw reptilian perception of social reality. And that power is not, as we’ve clearly seen, very useful in such matters. Of course it’s not. There are other vastly more relevant pathways of explanation for social inequality than “low IQ”. It is not that I deny the reality of differential aptitudes among human beings, but only that I deny (i) the possibility of any fixed or obvious distribution of these differences across populations as a whole, (ii) the value-independent existence of most traits that we deem to be aptitudes at all.

This latter point is for me really just a corollary of basic Darwinian theory —yes, I’m a Darwinist and a Christian; we exist!—, according to which it makes no sense to say a human being is “superior” to a fish, as one must always ask “superior at what?”, and if that “what” happens to be, say, filtering oxygen out of water through our gills, well then, sorry, the fish have us beat. And in society as in nature, appeal to aptitude or fitness —Darwin’s “fit” is standardly translated into French, incidentally, as “apte”— can make no sense at all in abstraction from a particular context and a set of particular necessities. It is only a very special set of circumstances that favors the existence of fish at all, or the existence of mostly hairless bipedal primates. And a fortiori, it is only a particular set of circumstances that make it make sense to hold up, as “superior”, someone who understands cosmic dark energy, yet spends his days dreaming up schemes for hawking fat-jiggling weight-loss pads.