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《别以智商论英雄》
The War on Stupid People
As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ1) wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack2) for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees.
The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions3) and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve4) off a cliff rather than use a pejorative5) for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s-bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
It’s popular entertainment, too. An evening of otherwise hate-speech-free TV-watching typically features at least one of a long list of humorous slurs on the unintelligent. Reddit regularly has threads6) on favorite ways to insult the stupid, and fun-stuff-to-do.com dedicates a page to the topic amid its party-decor ideas and drink recipes.
This gleeful derision7) seems especially cruel in view of the more serious abuse that modern life has heaped upon the less intellectually gifted. Few will be surprised to hear that, according to a long-running federal study, IQ correlates with chances of landing a financially rewarding job. Studies have furthermore found that, compared with the intelligent, less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence.
Rather than looking for ways to give the less intelligent a break, the successful and influential seem more determined than ever to freeze them out8). The employment website Monster captures current hiring wisdom in its advice to managers, suggesting they look for candidates who, of course, “work hard” and are “ambitious” and “nice”—but who, first and foremost, are “smart.” To make sure they end up with such people, more and more companies are testing applicants on a range of skills, judgment, and knowledge. In addition, many employers now ask applicants for SAT9) scores (whose correlation with IQ is well established); some companies screen out10) those whose scores don’t fall in the top 5 percent.
Yes, some careers do require smarts. But even as high intelligence is increasingly treated as a job prerequisite, evidence suggests that it is not the unalloyed11) advantage it’s assumed to be. The late Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris argued that smart people can make the worst employees, in part because they’re not used to dealing with failure or criticism. Multiple studies have concluded that interpersonal skills, self-awareness, and other “emotional” qualities can be better predictors of strong job performance than conventional intelligence. Moreover, many jobs that have come to require college degrees, ranging from retail manager to administrative assistant, haven’t generally gotten harder for the less educated to perform.
At the same time, those positions that can still be acquired without a college degree are disappearing. The list of manufacturing and low-level service jobs that have been taken over, or nearly so, by robots, online services, apps, kiosks12), and other forms of automation grows longer daily. Among the many types of workers for whom the bell may soon toll: anyone who drives people or things around for a living, thanks to the driverless cars in the works at (for example) Google and the delivery drones undergoing testing at (for example) Amazon, and most people who work in restaurants, thanks to increasingly affordable and people-friendly robots, and to a growing number of apps that let you arrange for a table, place an order, and pay—all without help from a human being.
Meanwhile, our fetishization13) of IQ now extends far beyond the workplace. Intelligence and academic achievement have steadily been moving up on rankings of traits desired in a mate; researchers at the University of Iowa report that intelligence now rates above domestic skills, financial success, looks, sociability, and health.
“Every society through history has picked some traits that magnify success for some,” says Robert Sternberg, an expert on assessing students’ traits. “We’ve picked academic skills.”
What do we mean by intelligence? We devote copious14) energy to cataloging the wonderfully different forms it might take—interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic15), spatial, and so forth—ultimately leaving virtually no one “unintelligent.” But many of these forms won’t raise SAT scores or grades, and so probably won’t result in a good job. Instead of bending over backwards16) to find ways of discussing intelligence that won’t leave anyone out, it might make more sense to acknowledge that most people don’t possess enough of the version that’s required to thrive in today’s world.
Many people who have benefited from the current educational system like to tell themselves that they’re working hard to help the unintelligent become intelligent. This is a marvelous goal, and decades of research have shown that it’s achievable through two approaches: dramatically reducing poverty, and getting young children who are at risk of poor academic performance into intensive early-education programs. But there’s little point in discussing alleviating17) poverty as a solution, because our government and society are not seriously considering any initiatives capable of making a significant dent in the numbers or conditions of the poor.
That leaves us with early education, which, when done right—and for poor children, it rarely is—seems to largely overcome whatever cognitive and emotional deficits poverty and other environmental circumstances impart in the first years of life. As instantiated by dozens of experimental programs, early education done right means beginning at the age of 3 or earlier, with teachers who are well trained in the particular demands of early education. Unfortunately, public early-education programs rarely come close to this level of quality, and are nowhere near universal.
Confronted with evidence that our approach is failing we comfort ourselves with the idea that we’re taking steps to locate those underprivileged kids who are, against the odds, extremely intelligent. Finding this tiny minority of gifted poor children and providing them with exceptional educational opportunities allows us to conjure the evening-news-friendly fiction of an equal-opportunity system, as if the problematically ungifted majority were not as deserving of attention as the “overlooked gems.”
We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out18) the less-well-IQ’ed. This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees. Among other things, the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious19) of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant.
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished20), was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate21) giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
就在不久前的20世纪50年代，仅拥有中等智力还不足以严重限制我们的人生轨迹。智商还不太会影响我们有怎样的伴侣，过怎样的生活，受到别人怎样的看待。不论是在流水线上还是在办公桌后，好工作的要求还大多围绕着正直、职业道德、交际能力这几个方面。老板们通常并不要求大学文凭。
然而，在21世纪前10年，那些不大聪明的人迎来了苦日子。那些自以为聪明的人公开嘲笑没有自己聪明的人。如今，人们高度关注微侵略和迫害，可是却听任对不聪明人的讥讽。有些人宁愿坠崖身亡也不愿说出带有种族歧视、外貌歧视和身体残疾歧视的词，却乐于动辄骂人笨蛋：实际上，产生分歧时把别人贬低为“笨蛋”几乎已经成为条件反射
这也成了受大众欢迎的娱乐形式。人们晚上看电视可能一句仇恨的话也不会说，但通常却会从一长串诙谐的侮辱性话语中选至少一个恶搞傻人。Reddit上经常有一连串帖子讲述最受人喜爱的羞辱笨蛋的方法。趣事网(fun-stuff-to-do.com)也在其繁多的派对装饰创意和饮料制作法之外开辟了一个网页，专门讨论这一话题。
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文章摘自：《新东方英语》杂志2017年1月号
