 Preconceptions
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Mar. 15th, 2011 @ 12:07 pm 
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Some vague thought association processes have me trying to itemise my preconceptions and biases. I've come up with these so far:
- Racism correlates with stupidity.
If someone is stupid, I assume there's a significantly increased likelihood that they're racist. If someone is racist, I subtract about thirty percent from my estimation of their intelligence. I am always faintly shocked to come across someone who is intelligent and racist.
- Intelligence and personal worth are linked.
Note I said intelligence, not education. Some highly-educated people are dumb as a rock, and some uneducated people are highly intelligent. People who are intelligent but not formally educated are frequently more interesting than people who have high levels of formal education. But native intelligence - which, in my lexicon, can roughly be defined as the desire and willingness to learn - represents a substantial proportion of a person's worth as a human being.
(The rest is made up of the content of their character, with a strong emphasis on empathy and consideration for others.)
I think that definition of intelligence works for me, actually. Because the thing is? If you're willing to learn, if you're trying, then all else comes under the heading of "learning disability", to me.
Probably that's why I have near-infinite patience with people who do have issues, and absolutely none with people who don't have genuine problems and just aren't making the effort. In high school I was in the special advanced class, and of the other kids in the school, one of the people I got on with best was a girl who was in the special needs program. (We met in music class.)
Our conversations frequently required me to backtrack and explain some concept I'd glossed over, with iterations of simplification until she understood the fundamental elements of what I was trying to explain, and we could work up from there. She was never quick on the uptake and sometimes it could take a while.
But she was sweet and kind and cared about people, and she had infinite patience with my clumsy explanations until we'd arrived at mutual understanding. She wasn't stupid, she was just sort of.... I don't even know. I think she was a slow learner, at the outset, or she hadn't had enough mental stimulus and so on in her infancy and very early childhood, and then when she started school, she couldn't keep up, and everything swept ahead of her.
Hmm, I think I digress. Mostly my point is that if intellectual accomplishment were, say, a running race, a lot of people are a long way behind, but there are different reasons for that. Some people's start lines were way behind everyone else's, and some people can't run, so they have to walk, or crawl, or use a wheelchair, with or without assistance, etc.
The people who are making the effort to move forward are all good - I think it's not right to call them stupid, in the same way that you couldn't justifiably call someone lazy or weak for being unable to run a marathon with only one leg and no prosthesis or other assistance.
The people who sit down on the track and smoke are the ones who aren't worth my, or anyone's, time.
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| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sqbr |
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| Date: |
March 15th, 2011 07:39 am (UTC) |
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Hmm. I see what you're saying, but I don't think you can redefine stupidity and intelligence that way, that's not the way they're usually defined and they have too much history of being used as sticks to attack people with learning disabilities. I think if you mean willingness to learn, you should say "willingness to learn".
I personally don't link willingness to learn very strongly to worth myself: I'd rather a decent, thoughtful person who was happily ignorant than an inventive cruel person. I think genuinely caring about the effect your actions have on other people (which I think is more what I value) generally requires a certain willingness to learn about them, but it's not a straightforward correlation. I can certainly relate to finding people who are unwilling to learn irritating though :)
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| From: | sami |
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March 15th, 2011 08:00 am (UTC) |
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I guess to me the ideas of "intelligence" and "stupidity" are, in general, actually pretty ill-defined. See, for example, the way people tend to confuse education and intelligence.
It's odd that you say "used as sticks to attack people with learning disabilities" - I mean, you're right, but it's odd for me, because I spent so long being told that I was extremely intelligent, at the same time as I was criticised constantly for the results of my then-undiagnosed learning disability.
I don't think I'm necessarily entirely right to make that correlation on worth, although I am dubious about the ability to be decent and thoughtful without being willing to learn. I don't really see how it's possible if you resist new understanding to be decent or thoughtful in interacting with others.
I mean, willingness to learn doesn't mean "about everything" - someone can be happily ignorant of particular topics, but if you resist any kind of new ideas about anything, then you're going to be horrible about anything that doesn't match your existing ideas/preconceptions/etc.
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| From: | sqbr |
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March 17th, 2011 09:01 am (UTC) |
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I had a very different experience: I was told I was a good person for being naturally academic, while my less academic or less motivated friends (and siblings) were given all sorts of nasty crap.
Also, to me the sentence "Intelligence and personal worth are linked" brings up very intense associations with eugenics. I know you didn't mean it that way, but in general when people say stuff like that they are more often advocating classism/racism/abelism than talking about a willingness to learn.
"If you're entirely unwilling to learn about anything then you're probably not a totally decent or thoughtful person" is ok, but "not entirely unwilling to learn" is a long way from "intelligent".
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