Cult of Smart

* Book: The Cult of Smart. Freddie de Boer.

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Discussion

Freddie de Boer:

"Over the course of centuries, the market value of intelligence, education, and general cognitive ability has grown; we now live in a “knowledge economy”

These skills and abilities have naturally become deeply intertwined with the justification for modern meritocracy, which is to say, the notion that our system rewards or should reward the ability of the individual, their capacity for performing valuable tasks, rather than (for example) their station within a system of hereditary nobility

In the lived, casual moral philosophy that most Americans operate under, this system of meritocracy and the outsized rewards that come with cognitive/educated/skilled labor is justified because the individual can determine their outcomes within the system; if you’re smart and hardworking, you control your own destiny and can achieve the kind of lifestyle you want

If the individual doesn’t control their own destiny, if chance plays an outsized role in determining life outcomes, then there’s little reason for the average person to play ball within the system - why put your head down and be a good little worker bee if there’s no consistent relationship between your willingness to do so and the rewards you reap?

This whole edifice of modern post-nobility society, therefore, rests on a foundation of the belief that we all have equal opportunity to excel; not coincidentally, at precisely the period when dynastic systems of nobility began to crumble, Western philosophers began to stress a philosophy of equal rights in a society governed by principles of personal liberty and market economics (that is to say, liberalism)

But while we are all equal in rights, in value, and in human dignity, we are very much not equal in ability, which is a reality we are perfectly willing to countenance in certain fields (athletics, music, physical beauty) but not when it comes to academics

Unfortunately, we know that not all people are in fact equal in academic or intellectual potential, even if we deny any particular genetic influence on intelligence at all - see, for example, the consequences of prematurity

Once we acknowledge that not everyone has equal potential in every academic skill, the basic justification mechanism of modern capitalist society begins to break down, and perhaps we can critically examine the assumptions that underpin it

If we are not all made equal in our abilities, particularly in the classroom, the current American fixation on creating opportunity through turning every student into a budding Google software engineer becomes particularly perverse, destined to leave many behind who are additionally blamed for their own failure

Decades of education research demonstrates that early-life academic performance is remarkably stable throughout schooling, even in the face of concerted efforts to change that performance

Despite endless propaganda, there is no simplistic relationship between the performance of the median student and the economic, diplomatic, military, or cultural strength of a given society, all of which are likely dependent on the abilities of a small percentage of the highest achievers

Academic skills are only one small slice of the human project, and all people have something of value that they can contribute, only a tiny percentage of which is covered in grades or test scores

We would do well to further expand our redistributive social safety net (political), reduce artificial standards and open up more paths through K-12 schooling to account for different skills and interests (educational), and cease our obsessive focus on intelligence and academic ability as the central criterion of being a successful human (cultural/social)."

(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/preemies-genes-meritocracy-and-the?)