A few fortunate persons really are ahead in almost every intellectual category, and a few unfortunate ones deficient.  Whether there exists a single quality we should call general intelligence – rather than a large collection of very different intellectual qualities – is an altogether different matter. 

In fact, an awful lot of what we call general intelligence is merely having certain very narrow intellectual traits that are admired or considered unusual.  For example, persons who are good at mathematics or scholarship are generally regarded as “smart,” and persons who are good at building cabinets aren’t usually given that label.  But a fellow who can build a cabinet may be good at lots of things, including learning how to do other things -- and a genius at manipulating abstractions or writing research articles might be a dope in every other way.  Mind you, I am not dismissing mathematical genius or scholarly excellence.  I admire them.  But they are special, not general, mental traits.

It also seems that a great many supposed differences in intelligence are really differences in personality.  Consider innovators.  We suppose that a person who often does something original has more of some hypothetical intellectual quality called “originality,” and perhaps he does, but I am not convinced that any such quality exists.  Perhaps he is just more easily bored by doing the same old thing, or less afraid of being mocked for following a different path, or more persistent at explaining to other people why the odd thing that he’s doing ought to interest them too.

Finally, intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom, which is not a kind of intelligence but an intellectual virtue.  One would expect the two to go together.  After all, if you haven't the equipment for forming good judgments or for readily drawing inferences from premises, you may have a hard time perceiving the shape of things or grasping how to live.  But it doesn’t always work that way.  Innovators are often so obsessed that they can do something that they fail to ask whether it should be done.  Intellectuals are more likely than others to be arrogant.  Persons who live badly, or who deceive themselves, may bend each of their substantial intellectual talents to maintaining their self-deceptions, rather than seeking the truth.

On the other hand, a person who is not very clever himself, but who has the moral virtues, may possess among other good qualities the old-fashioned intellectual virtue called “docility to counsel,” enabling him to exercise good judgment about who he should listen to, and who he shouldn’t, concerning matters that he understands poorly.  Wisdom comes in degrees, more and less, but in all its degrees, it is more about having a rightly ordered intellect than a big one.

None of this is an excuse for anti-intellectualism.  It does oppose a certain kind of meritocracy.  We ought to be ruled by wisdom, not by the particular sort of intellectual talent that happens to be admired in our circle.

Just because disorder is so spectacular in public life, it is easy to confuse causes with symptoms.  I am all for political reform, but our decline cannot be cured just by better policies, strategies, candidates, inventions, or techniques, for its ultimate causes are moral and spiritual.

On the whole, these causes are no better understood by the various factions of reformers than by those whom they are trying to reform, and they affect them just as strongly.  This is why our choices become less and less attractive, and why more and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better actually make them worse.

“All right, wise guy.  If our disorder can’t be cured by politics, what’s your big idea?”  I haven’t one.  But I can suggest a place to start.

Let each of us resolve, once and for all, I will not do evil so that good will result.

Think it over carefully.  Consider all the things that a person must stop believing, start believing, or remember, just for the resolution to make sense.

Reminder:  On Tuesday, March 2nd, at 1:30pm Central Time, I’ll be speaking about “The Flavors of the Common Good.”  This will be the second in a series of Conversations offered by the Common Good Project, a new initiative of the Law School, University of Oxford, England.  Anyone who would like to hear it streamed can sign up here.

I happen to be on the board of advisors for the Common Good Project, a new initiative of the Law School, University of Oxford, England.  On Tuesday, March 2nd, at 1:30pm Central Time (that's night in Oxford), I’ll be speaking about “The Flavors of the Common Good,” which will be the second in the Project’s series of Conversations.  Anyone who would like to hear it streamed can sign up here.

For those who read my longer items, the next of my commentaries on Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Divine Law, will be published in May by Cambridge University Press.  This is not the same as my earlier Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

Three new articles and book chapters of mine have also just been posted to the Read Articles section of this website:

Of Course Human Law Develops. Can Natural and Divine Law Develop?  In a symposium on “Aquinas on the Development of Law,” Aquinas Institute, held at the Blackfriars, Oxford University, Oxford, England, March, 2019.  Published in Law and Justice, No. 183 (2019).

Thomas Aquinas on Marriage, Fruitfulness, and Faithful Love.  In Theresa Notare, ed., Humanae Vitae 50 Years Later: A Compendium (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019).

’The Same as to Knowledge’.  In Christopher Wolfe and Steven Brust, eds., Natural Law Today: The Present State of the Perennial Philosophy (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018).

In the ‘seventies, when I was a welder, I didn’t see much overt racism, though no doubt there was much that I didn’t see.  Of course there had been a great deal in the recent past, and various forms of discrimination continued.  People were sensitive.  Even so, blacks and whites worked together and had beers together.  A few white guys kind of admired George Wallace, but what they liked about him wasn’t his old segregationist attitudes (which by then he was only a few years from repenting).  Rather they laughed because he wanted to “throw the briefcases of the pointy headed intellectuals into the Potomac,” an attitude for which the black guys I knew had a good deal of sympathy.  Whites and blacks where I worked talked about these things freely, with humor and without rancor.  Perhaps, privately, some fellows might not have cared much for blacks, or cared much for whites, but most of them tried to be fair.  They might not have wanted their sons to date each others’ daughters, and the reluctance was probably mutual.  But at least on the surface, they treated each other pretty much the same.

Today, a half century later, my left wing academic colleagues are certain that working class people are racists, but would be shocked to be viewed as racists themselves.  They are equally sure that the University is “systemically” racist, even though of course they, who run the system, couldn’t possibly be.  By the way, they consider it racist to believe that persons of color are sufficiently talented and disciplined to succeed in school without special preferences.  Very strange.