AND ANOTHER THING
We are becoming less intelligent, and the machines help us kid ourselves
PAUL JOHNSON
The completion of the first stage of the Human Genome Project opens up (it is said) dazzling prospects of longer life, bet- ter health and higher intelligence for our species. If true, it is about time. I have the impression, as a historian, that people are less intelligent than they used to be and that this process has now been going on for a century or more. It is concealed by the myriad of aids to knowledge. To be sure, my view is based on what is contemptuously called 'anecdotal evidence'. But then, that is what history inevitably is: a huge series of often unrelated facts, or interpretations, backed by the occasional anecdotal statis- tic. You can't process the past in a lab, and all efforts to treat history like physics or chemistry have ended in nonsense.
I begin by noting that public intellectual performances seem to notch down with each generation, an inverse ratchet-effect. As a highbrow television presenter, for instance, David Starkey is an intellectual pygmy com- pared with his equivalent 30 years ago, A.J.P. Taylor. In this field it has proved quite impossible to replace either Kenneth Clark or Jacob Bronowski. Bernard Williams, our most prominent philosopher (some would say that David Wiggins is better), is not a patch on A.J. Ayer, who was himself inferior to his generational predecessor, Wittgen- stein. You could say the same in France, where the middle-aged relics of the Nouvelle Philosophie look pathetic compared with Sartre and Raymond Aron, and in the Unit- ed States, where Kline's successor as head of the philosophical profession, Thomas Nagel, though admirable in his way, is not of compa- rable weight. I can't think of anyone in the present age to equal such intellectual all- rounders as Bertrand Russell and J.B.S. Hal- dane. Who are the cleverest mind-perform- ers in Britain today? Many people would agree on Richard Dawkins, Roger Scruton, Noel Malcolm, Germaine Greer and Alain de Bolton. A century ago the line-up would have been George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (with Rebecca West as the eggheads' crum- pet). Quite a difference, isn't there?
For sheer intelligence, of both a theoreti- cal and a practical kind, the last three gener- ations have failed to produce anyone remote- ly comparable to Thomas Edison, a magus who played on his electromagnets like a musician on a Stradivarius, 'displaying cun- ning in the way he neutralises or intensifies [the magnets], applying strong or weak cur- rents, and commands negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding'. Com- paring the failure of the Dome to the resounding success of the 1851 Crystal Palace is a study in declining intelligence. Richard Rogers and his kind today are cari- catures of the Thomas Telfords and Brunels of an earlier time. You can still hear some excellent lectures at the Royal Institution but nothing remotely comparable to the wizardry of Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, while not far away William Hazlitt and Coleridge were holding forth. What richness! What breadth of interest! Such men knew each other and could converse together Coleridge 'attacked chemistry like a shark', while Davy read out his own poems. We could not produce today such a phenomenon as John Maynard Keynes, who ranged over economics, philosophy, biography, history and literature — and high finance, let us not forget. And Keynes, I think, was an inferior performer to Macaulay, who strode over the whole landscape of human knowledge as if on stilts. In the 1850s you could easily have assembled a London dinner party of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, Charles Dar- win and John Henry Newman, Gladstone and Disraeli, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle and Walter Bage- hot. What would be the equivalent today? Perhaps I ought to leave it to the reader's imagination, but I am tempted to suggest we would be stuck with Stephen Fry and Julie Burchill, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winter- son, Peter Jay and the Bishop of Oxford, Tessa Jowell and Michael Ignatieff, Andrew Motion and Peter Mandelson. Quelle galore!
The reasons for the decline in intelligence are many but they can be summarised under one head: lack of use of large parts of the brain. It has been a continuing process for well over a century but is now rapidly accel- erating. The biggest area of disuse and so of decline is memory. This has been particular- ly noticeable in my own lifetime. My mother knew by heart tens of thousands of lines of poetry and stories, as well as immense stores of exact information, to recover which I would now have to consult works of refer- ence. I myself know huge chunks of poetry by heart. My children know only a few lines, my grandchildren will know none. When I was at Oxford it was still possible to find people with phenomenal memories. The most gifted of my contemporaries, David Carritt, had a visual memory of European old master paintings which was staggering in its range and exactitude, to which he added all the time, and which later enabled him to establish an unrivalled reputation for identi- fying lost masterpieces. No such person could possibly exist today, I fear. And even he had the help of a vast collection of gallery postcards which he had assembled, some- thing which John Ruskin had to do without.
As aids to knowledge improve, the need for memory and other searching skills declines. In the Renaissance a scholar might get only one opportunity to see a particular book or manuscript. He had to memorise its saliency or even the complete text. There were elaborate techniques devised to help him do so, described in detail by Frances Yates in her absorbing book The Art of Memory (now the lost art). Even in Dr John- son's day — and he had more access to books than most — he found it useful to memorise texts. He could do so at a single reading. Memorising poetry — English, Latin, Greek — at one hearing was nothing to him. I doubt if there is anyone alive today who could repeat from memory even a son- net after one reading or hearing. At one time, thousands could do so.
Memory loss is serious because huge stores of knowledge in the mind, on instant tap, make possible the creative connections which are one symptom of high intellectual performance. Also in rapid decline today are search and discovery processes. Know- ledge was hard of access, whether because its written form did not exist, or was buried in difficult texts, or texts were in short sup- ply, untranslated, libraries remote, funds unavailable, owners unwilling to lend. A person searching for knowledge had to exercise considerable ingenuity to obtain it. I am old enough to remember the time, during and just after the second world war, when shortages or absence of books made the process of educating oneself a struggle. Looking back on it, I now see it was a cre- ative and mind-enhancing struggle. Now, all that is required is to sit in front of a computer. This machine, it seems to me, is progressively shutting down, or degrading to low-performance, entire sections of the brain. I am surprised no one has yet addressed the problem. Maybe the powers do not recognise it as such. Or maybe they think they will simply tell the machine to solve it for us.
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