Reflections Following A Walk With A Democrat

Dear K,

Genius excepted (because nobody knows how genius happens) it's my opinion that intelligence equals effort. Given a certain native equality, that man who works hardest, over years, will emerge as the smartest. We all believe this, that's why we read and study. We know that if we do, in time we will develop understanding and something like wisdom.

And there is something beyond effort, I call it "the instinct for the true", or possibly it's just a passion to see things accurately. This is harder to illustrate, since good fortune might intervene as well.

The example I always use is the difference between Alchemy and Chemistry. If two young men of exactly equal talent and with an equal passion to control the physical world each start on a course of study, but one tends toward Alchemy and the other Chemistry, in twenty years which is going to have the most understanding of the real world, and which the most power over it?

So too it is with ideas. Not all ideas are equally true, and if you have the good fortune of beginning with an idea that is true, in years understanding will develop and with it the power to control the realm contained within that basic idea. If that basic idea references men deeply, then in say, something like politics, your ability to hold sway and to influence will be greater if you start with an idea that is true than if you start initially with one that is false or narrow.

(I will note, parenthetically, that I was the one who correctly understood why Patty didn't show up. I imagine that's because I'm a Republican.)

And a final word on verbal facility. This is something I learned when I was fifteen, maybe fourteen.

My dad was an exceptionally smart guy but virtually non-verbal. It wasn't that he didn't talk, he talked a lot, it's just that he never used the right name for anything, especially when excited. When I worked with him on the farm and he was giving me instructions on something the only way I could follow him was if I sort of understood his meaning at the outset. He would call a screwdriver a wrench and a hammer a pliar. All the while he would be moving his hands so that aided understanding, but I said to myself: "How can this guy clearly be so clever when his words make no sense at all?" I concluded it was because he didn't use words for thinking, but pictures. It's many years later and now I would say that I have no idea how it is that the mind thinks but I know it has nothing to do with words.

I'll state my idea now in this separate paragraph. This is an idea I've held consciously since I was twenty-six: While words normally accompany thought, thought has no necessary connection to words. Thought always is an attempt at communication, and it's for this reason --that words have everything to do with communication-- that they normally accompany thought. But communication can be about anything and for any purpose and at any level; thus it is that words, facility with words, has no necessary connection to thought, because thought simply isn't necessary to blabber. It's by this understanding that I'm not surprised to see that great and easeful verbal fluidity is often the expression of great stupidity. In fact a fluent delivery is aided by conceptual simplicity because the mind isn't burdened by effort. And in the opposite of this it doesn't surprise me that sometimes, though it is rare, a verbal clumsiness might accompany the effort of great insight.

In general I have immense contempt for the idea that verbal fluency equates with developed intelligence. But there's always a way to judge, and that's to listen to more than one sentence at a time. It means to listen to two sentences at a time. It means to listen to many sentences, each as it builds on the former. If this does happen, if you have a series of sentences, each contributing to the sense of those stated before, then you have an organized thought, and it's only by listening to this full organization that you do justice to judging intellect.