Every time I write about the way biology works against a society’s best minds, do it differently.  But I keep trying to get it right.  My latest thinking posits three kinds of intelligence, Vocational Effectiveness Intelligence, Vocational Magnitude Intelligence and Creative Intelligence, all of them genetically-determined.  These are all general intelligences.  Vocational Effectiveness is approximately what IQ tests measure: the capacity to solve common problems quickly and well.  Vocational Magnitude Intelligence might be a synonym for ambition.  The higher one’s VMQ is, the larger the contribution to your culture you will try to make.  A Ninth Symphony for a composer, say, rather than a sitcom’s theme.  As for Creative Intelligence, it’s just what its name indicates, one’s ability to be innovative.    Note that I don’t say “effectively” creative.  One needs good Vocational Effectiveness Intelligence to be that.  Add good Vocational Magnitude Intelligence to those two and you get Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s operas. Subtract Vocational Magnitude from it and you may get Richard Rodgers’ musicals.  A person whose VMQ and VEQ are both high, but whose CQ is average or lower, will be someone like most US presidents, or most Forbes 500 CEOs–efficient at doing what others have done before them.

To a good extent the double-high-VQs, as I call them, run most establishments, including the Contemporary Poetry Establishment, fighting for the double-high-VQs in the field with high enough CQs to be superior poets, but not high enough CQs to be otherstream poets. A few poets high in both CQ and VEQ but low in VMQ may break into certification, but only the triple-High-Qs in poetry most clever at concealing genius, or most incredibly lucky, will–less than a century after their births.

Biology is the reason for this.  Societies need double-High-VQs to fare well–by forming establishments that oversee the repetition at their most complex of those behaviors that have brought their society to where it is, and defending them.  High-VEQs and VMQs make up the establishments lower ranks.   High-CQs are valuable for enlivening things–providing slightly unconventional interior decoration for the standard architecture that result from the double-high-VQs’ leadership. Triple-Qs are  guarded against because if allowed, they could very well cause damage in one or more of the following ways–(1) propel their society too far in some significant field that not enough others could keep up with them well enough to exploit the resulting advances, so the field would be reduced to chaos, which would harmfully jar related fields and possible spread worrisomely far through a society’s entire culture; (2) simply burden many fields with more new knowledge than anyone can handle–including the triple-High-Qs themselves (each of whom could handle  his own field’s otherstream but not ten other fields’ otherstreams); (3) successful triple-High-Qs happening to have opposite world-views could lead to the most damaging of possible wars; (4) the advances wrought by triple-High-Qs might use up too many resources too quickly; (5) the success of even one triple-high-Q in a field would make the leaders of that field’s Establishment feel tenth-rate by comparison (inappropriately, because–ultimately–a society needs them as much as it needs its triple-High-Qs); (6) if Triple-High-Qs were rewarded on the basis of their achievements, they would flourish and tend to have more children than they do now, which would greatly increase the harm they did.

As should be obvious, I’m mostly just throwing together arguments against allowing Triple-High-Qs to become rich and famous.  I hope that my main point is nonetheless clear: A society’s second-best must defend it from its best . . . for enough time for the society to get where the best have gotten two or three generations before (which really isn’t that far, although it will seem so to those struggling merely to keep up with the society’s natural slow advance, and all healthy societies will advance, in spite of their Establishments).  Ways will  be found to keep the Triple-High-Qs from suicide (most of the time) becauwse while their discoveries and inventions must be defended against, the defense must eventually fail for the society involved to avoid stagnation and death.

first draft warning, first draft-warning, first-draft warning

I felt like I was writing mush at times while working on the above, but I didn’t slow down, wanting to get as many of my thoughts in as possible; I ad hocced many terms, like the various Qs, as needed.  I think what I’ve written is interesting but when greatly improved, and fit into my over-all view of cultural history and/or the psychology of cultural achievement or whatever, may well bother more than one Establishment enough for them to send a primary jeerer to attack it. I’m too beat now to start fixing it, or even to look at it.

Urp.

Note: it’s quite possible that biology forces even Triple-High-Qs to try to defend their society against them.

Oh, one last thing: the CQ depends (entirely) on accommodance, the cerebral mechanism I’ve mentioned here before; the VEQ has (most) to do with accelerance, another of my hypothetical brain mechanisms; VMQ depends (most) on charactration, or the cerebrum’s basal metabolism, the third mechanism of general intelligence I have posited for many years.  These all have to do with the body’s use of energy, so should be no more implausible than the body’s (mostly glandular) mechanisms’ role in physical activity.

Personal, possibly related, note: my attempt to get a museum interested in my mathematical poetry work seems to have failed to get even a thank you, not interested, letter; my earlier attempt to involve Charles Murray in a correspondence the kind of thing I write about above seems to have failed, too–no response; but I wrote him in care of The New Criterion, so some cretin there may have thought it not important enough to pass on to Murray, or may have simply lost it as things get lost in busy companies.  Let’s see, I also have a letter-to-the-editor of Free Inquiry I haven’t heard back about; it still could appear in the next issue, not yet out, though–or the one after it.  I do sympathize with the kind of people I send such material to, for cranks can be a nuisance and they can’t know for sure that if I’m a crank, I’m not the kind who makes a nuisance of himself.  I give up quickly.  I think my final attempt to be accepted through the servants’ entrance to an Establishment is a summary of my theory of general intelligence that I made as an Internet comment to a peer-review-level text at a Scientific American site that I haven’t had the gumption to put into final form and post.  So it goes.  But the activities of The Argotist against the poetry establishment in which I’ve become a main participant seem to be having some small effect. . . .

One last note: I’m involved, as I almost always am, in a round of the Computer strategy game, Civilization.  It’s not the undumbest pastime I can think of, but it should certainly seem less important to me than my psychological theorizing or my poetry.  I can’t swear it doesn’t, though.

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