simulated intelligence

American universities have done a decent job of churning out smart, technically astute and relatively capable individuals, but it is questionable whether they have taught us knowledge of true value-- how to understand our privilege and place in society. We’re taught to perform well on SATs and AP exams, which soon become MCATs, grad school applications and interviewing, but we’re not necessarily taught how to question the assumptions of our society, or to understand from a critical point of view, our role in the world. We’re taught how to succeed well in the system, but not taught how to question or change the system.

From the article The Disadvantages of an Elite Education quoted in my previous post:

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

Not that this is anything new, famous sociologist C. Wright Mills writes of bureaucratization and the lack of big picture understanding amongst many intelligent individuals, many decades before we see its vivid instantiation in the swanky bars and clubs of New York City:

Great and rational organizations- in brief, bureaucracies- have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large has not. Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men often cannot reason about the great structures- rational and irrational – of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any ideas of the ends they serve, and there is the increasing suspicion that those at the top as well- like Tolstoy’s generals- only pretend they know. The growth of such organizations, within an increasing division of labor, sets up more and more spheres of life, work, and leisure in which reasoning is difficult or impossible. The soldier, for example, ‘carries out an entire series of functionally rational actions accurately without having any idea as to the ultimate end of this action’ (Mannheim, Man and Society) or the function of each act within the whole. Even Men of technically supreme intelligence may efficiently perform their assigned work and yet not know that it is to result in the first atom bomb.

Ortega Y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses also projected a hint of it back in the 1930s. He was referring to the masses (and Europe), but I think the description, quoted from the article At the Forest’s Edge by Anthony Daniels can apply quite well to many of today’s recent graduates of elite universities:

The picture Ortega draws of the mass man is not an attractive or flattering one, but Ortega is not a snob who simply excoriates the appalling habits and tastes of those below him in the social scale. For him, mass man is the man who has no transcendent purpose in life, who lives in an eternal present moment which he wants to make pleasurable in a gross and sensual way, who thinks that ever-increasing consumption is the end of life, who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply and who, above all, has a venomous dislike of any other way of living but his own, which he instinctively feels as a reproach. He will not recognize his betters; he is perfectly satisfied to be as he is.

Mass man accepts no fundamental limits on his own life. Any limits that he may encounter are purely technical, to be removed by future advance. He believes that life is and ought to be a kind of existential supermarket, that an infinitude of choices is always before him, in which no choice restricts or ought ever to restrict what is possible in the future. Life for mass man is not a biography, but a series of moments, each unconnected with the next, and all deprived of larger meaning or purpose.

Mass man does not have to be poor or stupid. He can be both highly paid and highly intelligent, in a narrow way, and he can also be very highly educated, or at least trained; indeed, as knowledge accumulates, and as it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to master more than the very smallest portion of human knowledge, so connected thought (of the kind of which mass man is incapable) becomes rarer and rarer. Mankind collectively knows more than ever before, says Ortega, but cultivated men grow fewer.


* I do not write this as someone who is better than and above all of this, nor do I write this as someone who claims to possess “true intelligence.” I have been frustrated with my college education at an elite institution, because it left me with a bunch of interesting questions, cocktail conversation topics, and scattered technical expertise, but no real knowledge. As a fairly recent college graduate and a Christian who is called to see the world as God sees it, I am fumbling about trying to gain some true knowledge and vision (and dare I say, wisdom?)