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Grey Matter

Sunday, February 4, 2018 12:25

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This post wanders around a little, but that is an attraction of blogging, it isn’t necessary to tie everything together. Intelligent readers do that, fill in the gaps and raise other issues themselves.

Yet intelligence is a rum notion isn’t it? We have many other words for it which don’t mean quite the same thing. Clever, smart, astute, brainy, highbrow, bright, perceptive and so on. Look them up, there are lots, although as an intelligent person perhaps you don’t need to look them up.

How about knowledge? To my mind that’s another rum notion, not unconnected with intelligence. We don’t usually expect knowledgeable people to be unintelligent and vice versa, yet the notion of knowledge can be just as problematic as intelligence.

Here’s the oddity – at least to my mind it’s an oddity. If a person is knowledgeable then he or she is generally regarded as intelligent, but it does not seem to matter too much what they are knowledgeable about. General knowledge or almost any area of specialised knowledge will do, particularly if it has some bearing on human nature. Are there any areas of knowledge which don’t have at least some bearing on human nature? Possibly not.

However, intelligent and knowledgeable people can be remarkably dull, conventional and apparently uninterested in exploring the world of possibilities beyond their comfort zone. They may have built a solid personal philosophy and it may be quite an edifice as these things go, but surprisingly often the edifice is all there is. It seems to serve much the same purpose as a pundit’s stock standpoints. There seems to be little joy in it too. Joy? Why not?

Take the currently popular phrase “virtue signalling” for example. An excellent phrase which seems to be an acute insight or maybe it clarifies insights we already had. Unfortunately it seems to apply to numerous intelligent and knowledgeable public figures who should know better but clearly don’t. In spite of their intelligence and knowledge they go in for virtue signalling. Perhaps we all do, but some seem to go in for it as a key part of what they are, as an essential ingredient of their personal philosophy, their pundit’s standpoints.

When you first heard the phrase “virtue signalling”, how long did it take you to grasp its meaning and assess its widespread applicability and usefulness? A second or two is my guess. Presumably we already knew what virtue signalling is before we first heard the phrase, but how did we assimilate it so quickly?

Maybe that is the charm of insights, the way they rapidly sharpen and clarify what we already possess. The charmof insights did I say? Yes – insights are certainly charming, alluring, beguiling, appealing, attractive. There is an emotional aspect to them. How could there not be?

To my mind some intelligent people are like collectors, they collect insights and a phrase such as virtue signalling is just such an insight. Rather a good one. So insight collectors collect it, absorb its power and its charm into the depths of their personality. Its popularity tells us so.

Yet there is something a little nerdy about this notion of collecting insights. It sounds like stamp collecting but intelligent people can be somewhat nerdy. They like insights, hunt them down and enjoy plucking them from all kinds of nooks and crannies, almost as if a day without picking up a new insight is a day lost, wasted, misused.

However – and this is interesting too – many otherwise intelligent people seem to be afraid of insights. That is another emotion insights can generate – fear. People can be genuinely afraid of them, afraid of the disturbance they create, the insecurity, the threats. There is even something primitive in rejecting insights, something ancient, as if a wild beast has been spotted lurking in the wilderness just beyond the home-place.

Where does that leave intelligence though? If someone avoids insights, especially those which challenge conventions, then how is that intelligent behaviour? It is much the same with knowledge. Insights which challenge conventional knowledge may not even be accepted as knowledge.

For example?

For example Donald Trump is providing us with a number of insights into US politics, the power of large bureaucracies, the bias in mainstream media, the power of the establishment and distraction politics. Trump is good at distraction. He may yet stumble but so far it has been as interesting and enjoyable as insights should be. But is everyone enjoying the insights Trump so obligingly provides? I don’t think so.

What joyless souls they are.

Source: http://akhaart.blogspot.com/2018/02/grey-matter.html

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