Pride in Intelligence?

Via Heartiste, "A gene which may make people more intelligent has been discovered by scientists."

Heartiste rightfully sees this discovery as a major chink in the armor of progressivism. Liberals are wrapped up in the idea that intelligence is somehow formed by one's environment and not one's genes. Much of the reason for this is that so many of their prescriptions rely on this concept--but I think it's important to remember the average liberal's vanity.

It's no high praise to point out that, yes, your typical foot soldier progressive has intelligence above the average. But their folly is parallel to the principle that you can't cheat an honest man:  you can't believe in silly things if you don't think about what you believe in the first place.

This is why counter-intuitive notions like those that come from TED talks and Malcolm Gladwell are so popular. If you believe that one clever thought can completely upturn the way we think and do things, you will be always in pursuit of that mental philosopher's stone. It allows any conman with a rock polisher to gain an audience.

It's a long way from one-point-above-average to certified-genius but that's not the way it looks to the average leftist. Mostly they're looking downward at the less-intelligent around them. Because they're comparing themselves to the stupidest people they know, they take pride in their intelligence.

But one should be no more proud of one's intelligence than, say, being tall or having blue eyes. As with everything genetic, what matters is how one develops and uses one's biological gifts.

Your common leftists are the quintessence of being born on third base and thinking they've hit a triple--they'd like to strut around as if those points on the IQ test were the result of something they've achieved. If that's true, then the smaller number of points others have must be because...well, it depends on what color those people are, but's either because they are lazy or because they have been oppressed.

To take away their pride of intelligence is take away one thing they really value about themselves. Worse, it forces them to do the hard work of thinking--if we want to be good, morally-superior society and over half the population has no hope of being a professor or a lawyer or a policy-maker or even (God forbid) a CEO, then what are we to do with them?

The situation they've created reminds me of a documentary I saw many years ago, Graduating Peter. It's a cinema verite film about a borderline-functional young man with Down Syndrome as he ages out of high school. There's a lot to unpack in the film, but applicable here are the scenes in which Peter's mother harangues him to do one simple task or another, tasks that are just barely within his capacity. It was like yelling at me to derive equations--it ain't gonna be fast or easy.

The progressive agenda is similar, most obviously in the drive to send nearly every teen to college. It does no one any favors to push someone into higher education when they have no capacity to understand or use what they've been taught. No favors to anyone, that is, except those that get the tax money poured into the programs.

Being forced to admit that intelligence is genetic means that leftists will have to think about the population of low-intelligence citizens, people that aren't leaving and won't get any smarter. A moral society would find a place for them; I fear that leftists will instead find them useful as cannon fodder.