| March 15th, 2011 |
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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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