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Seven-Sided Gem
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What's the last culture? One that will take a bit more explaining, as I have to swim upstream against more than one thread of American culture. What is it that I have to swim up against? "This is an idea whose time has come." "It's the wave of the future." "We're entering the third millenium."
If I were to speak of "an idea whose time has come, and gone," or "the wave of the past," it would be less clear that I was speaking a compliment. If I were to say, in the most reverent of tones, "We're standing at the forty-second latitude and eighty-seventh longitude.", you'd have every right to accuse me of a non sequitur. I believe that "We're entering the third millenium." is also a non sequitur, even though it is spoken as a statement of great significance.
There are two ideas closely intertwined: the doctrine of progress, which says we are better, nobler, wiser people than those who came before--a temporal version of ethnocentrism, which says that ideas like machines grow rust and need to be replaced--and period awareness, which goes beyond the historicist observation that all of us, past and present, exist in a historical-cultural context and are affected by it; period awareness fixes an unbridgeable chasm between the people who walked before and us; they are in a hermetically sealed box. The net respect is to believe that the peoples of the past cannot talk with us: we can point out how they were less enlightened times, but they certainly cannot criticize us.
My second novel, Firestorm 2034, is the story of a medieval in 21st century America. In the course of researching medieval culture, thinking about it, and trying to convey it, it left a mark on me in many ways similar to Malaysia and France. Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a masterpiece of humor that is often mistaken for a reasonable treatment of medieval culture; my novel reverses it in more ways than one. Not only is it a medieval in America, but more deeply I reject the belief that the most significant difference between the medievals and us is that we have better technology. There is a wealth of culture and wisdom that has been largely lost.
What is one such area? The present issue of My Generation, the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons, has a cover story about "Jeff Bridges: Beautiful Dreamer." On the cover, he has black hair tinged with silver, although I would forgive you if you glanced and said it was brown. It's a few inches longer than mine. He's curled up, slouching, with his arms over his knees, wearing faded jeans, white socks, and tennis shoes. The man looks like a teenager. This is not an accident. I have never seen a My Generation cover with a woman who looks old enough to be admitted to the AARP, and when I first saw that periodical, I mistook it for a GenX magazine.
Why? The core idea is that there is a short period of glory--I'll say from fifteen to twenty-five years, although some of you might place the beginning and end a little differently--and before that point, you're only a child, meaning curiously enough that you don't have access to adult pleasures; you can't drink, you can't drive--and after that point, you're a has-been. This message is ubiquitous, present not only in children's TV shows but equally in a magazine for retired people. And, in a certain manner, it makes perfect sense.
It makes perfect sense if there is nothing more to have in life than physical pleasure. Before fifteen, you can't acquire as much pleasure as someone with adult resources; after twenty-five, your capacity for youthful pleasure diminishes. And so, if one starts by assuming that the whole point of life is to have pleasure, that the point of science is to create a Utopia of spoiled children, then it follows quite simply that a child is nothing much and someone past the age of thirty is a has-been. It follows quite simply for us, but the medievals saw it differently.
The medievals believed that the entire purpose of this life is as a preparation, an apprenticeship, a beginning, to an eternity gazing on God's glory. It means that, even in this life, there is infinitely more to seek than physical pleasure. There is more to desire. There is virtue, both earthly, natural virtues, and the merry, heavenly, deiform virtues. One can begin to be a heavenly person, enjoy Heaven's joys, and know God.
The words, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die," voice a pessimistic philosophy: enjoy pleasure because there's nothing more and we have a grim life. The medieval view sought much more than pleasure, and in following it, I want to grow more. I don't believe I'm leaving the time when I can enjoy the only good in life, pleasure. I believe I have different fruits in season coming. Some people dread their thirtieth birthday. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to turning thirty, forty, fifty, to when my hair turns tweed and then white. I'm looking forward to growing in wisdom: the interesting part of my life isn't ending, but just beginning.
What about intelligence testing? I like Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door; it's a children's book with a little boy, Charles Wallace, whose IQ is "so high it's untestable by normal means." I like the story and Charles Wallace; I identify with him, and in reference to that passage began to wish the same were true of me, that my IQ were so high it was untestable by normal means. I even tried to convince myself, in moments of pride, that this was true.
It came as a great disappointment to learn not only was this literally true, that my IQ was literally so high as to be untestable by normal means, but that the threshold was so low. If the authors of the Binet-Simon test, paradigm example of the good IQ test, were to be told, "This test you've made, doesn't really distinguish average from below average, but shows a remarkably fine discrimination at the upper strata of human intelligence," they would have regarded the test as a failure, pure and simple. The Binet-Simon test is a test for inferiority. Sources I've seen differ as to why; one gently states that it was meant to identify special needs people and give them that extra boost of special education they need to function in life. Another says, less charitably, that it's to identify certain people as inferior: exclude them; stop 'wasting' resources on them. In either case, it is less than clear to me that this is the model of test for organizations like Mensa.
Some other high-IQ societies use an adjusted model of test, where they take off the time limit, because they recognize that rushing people doesn't get best behavior, and put all the problems on anabolic steroids. This can probably boost the ceiling a little, but it has its own problems. It's a bit like taking an office where work isn't getting done, and making everybody work twenty more hours a week: if work isn't getting done, five more hours might help a little, but twenty won't fix the problem. Howard Gardner, multiple intelligence theorist, spends most of Extraordinary Minds arguing for a multiplicity of genius; in the beginning, he asks if there's anything common to all kinds of genius, and says, yes, he'd identify three things:
According to Gardner, a genius fails more, and more spectacularly, than an average person.
This notwithstanding, if you're trying to get into Mega Society East, what counts on the test is not what you get right; it's what you get wrong. It's not the absolutely brilliant answers you had to questions two, five, and seven; it's the fact that you missed something on questions one, four, and nine. Given the cognitive diversity at the upper end of the spectrum, there are limitations to even high-ceiling tests.
Is there any alternative? I would say yes, and I believe a hint of it comes from a story about a high school physics student. After the unit covering air pressure, the teacher wrote on an exam, "Explain how to use a barometer to determine the height of a tall building." The student wrote, "Tie a rope around the barometer, lower it from the top of the building until it hits the ground, make a mark on the rope, pull it up, and measure the length of the rope. (There are other ways of doing this.)"
This put the teacher in a bit of a bind. He called in one of his colleagues, and explained what had happened. The colleague said, "In a way that demonstrates your knowledge of physics, explain how to use a barometer to determine the height of a tall building." The student said, "Go to the top of the building with a barometer and a stopwatch. Drop the barometer, and measure the time before the barometer splatters on the ground beneath. Then use the formula y = 1/2 at2 to calculate the height of the building." The teachers conferred and gave him almost full credit.
The teacher asked what some of the other ways were: "Go outside on a sunny day, and measure the height of the barometer, the length of the barometer's shadow, and the length of the building's shadows, and use ratios to determine the height of the building." "This probably isn't the best way, but go into the basement, knock on the superintendent's door, and say, 'Mr. Superintendent! I have a fine barometer for you if you will only tell me the height of the building!'"
What this story screams out to me is not just that the student is bright enough that he could see the desired answer about calculating from the difference in air pressure. I'm positive of that. It's not just that he could give several alternate approaches. It's that he would. It's that he behaved like a gifted mind does when it's been completely insulted.
That gives a hint of an indirect approach: don't try IQ-normal-style cognitive strain questions, but look for a very different kind of thinking, and the effects of living in a world where most other people are two, three, four, five sigma below you. I wrote up the basic ideas, and e-mailed Paul Cooijmans, head of Giga and Glia. He suggested I start my own high-IQ society. I thought that was a little more ambitious than I wanted to take on now, but I did create a test. I wrote it up, gave it to heads of some high-IQ societies to distribute, received very kind responses from Gina LoSasso of the Mega Foundation and Nik Lygeros of the Pi Society... and have gotten two tests filled out, which I haven't looked at because I want to read them together. The test may turn out to be nothing more than an interesting fizzle. Even then, I thought it might be interesting enough to share.
What about the glass wall? The symbol relates to me to three layers, or levels, of maturity in dealing with others. The first layer is not recognizing there is a difference. In childhood, even when I scored high in the MathCounts competition, I might have realized there was something called intelligence and I had more of it, but not that I thought all that differently: I treated others as if they were the same as me underneath. That is a recipe for giving and receiving hurt.
When I finally let myself see that there were differences, I tried to fit in through blending in. In the short run, that's much better; there are far fewer incidents. Over time, it costs--the cost of a false self. There were some things in myself I wasn't showing anyone, not even myself.
After that, I began to erect a glass wall about myself, something that would keep things out of view before I was confident people were ready, but not permanently--and would let me draw others in. I don't think this is a final resting place--in fact, I'm almost positive it isn't--but it seems a definite step ahead of the other two steps.
What's inside the glass wall? Much of this speech hints at things inside the glass wall, but I'd like to give one concrete example.
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Seven-Sided Gem
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