Review “At Our Wit’s End” by Edward Dutton and
Michael A. Woodley of Menie
At Our Wit’s End: Why We’re
Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for Our Future
Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie
Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2018
Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie
Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2018
We
in the West have long become accustomed to the idea that scientific and
technological progress is the normal state of things, although
decline—technological deterioration and loss of knowledge—is by no means
uncommon across world history. The contemporary West may be declining in many
ways, but what stage in our history could we point to as the summit of our
scientific knowledge and technological capability if not the present? And
wouldn’t it be absurd to suppose this progress has reached its completion?
Authors
Dutton and Woodley, however, would note that a civilization may pass its peak
long before the sum of its achievements is complete. We may look for our
greatest era not when our knowledge and capabilities were most extensive, but
when they were growing most rapidly. And that point, they believe, is already well behind us.
They
begin their study by drawing our attention to two technological breakthroughs
of the year 1969: the first flight of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet,
cutting transatlantic travel time from eight to three and a half hours, and the
first manned moon landing. At the time, most people assumed more such
aeronautical wonders lay in store. This writer can remember the ubiquitous
“artist’s impressions” of future manned flights to Mars and beyond; every
little boy of that generation wanted to become an astronaut.
But
a Concorde crashed due to human error in 2000, and all flights were
discontinued three years later. We have not returned to the moon since 1972.
The authors do not mention this, but by 2010 a NASA administrator was saying
that “perhaps [the] foremost” of the space agency’s missions was to “reach out
to the Muslim world … to help them feel good about their historic contribution
to science, math and engineering.” We are not exactly aiming for the stars any
more.
In
the authors’ view, the best explanation for such regression is extremely
simple: we
are becoming less intelligent. Other explanations have some validity: the end of the cold war,
e.g., partly accounts for the lowered ambitions of NASA, although not the end
of the Concorde. But on Ockhamist principles, as the authors write, “if we can
plausibly explain two separate events with one theory, that is superior to
having a different theory for each event.”
Intelligence
is the ability to solve problems efficiently. It has survival value because it
enables organisms to face novel challenges; instincts are reliable only for
recurring challenges. Intelligence is about 80% heritable, and during most of
the genus Homo’s time on earth, the trait has
been favored by natural selection: the earliest hominids seem not to have been
notably more intelligent than today’s great apes.
Dutton
and Woodley focus on the last millennium or so of European civilization. During
most of this evolutionarily recent period as well, there has been positive
selection for intelligence. That is because higher intelligence usually
translates into socioeconomic success (correlating at 0.7), which tends to
result in larger families. In A Farewell to Alms (2007), economic historian Gregory Clark has carefully
documented this pattern in England from the fifteenth century (as far back as
the records allow). He calls it “the survival of the richest.” Dutton and
Woodley summarize:
Between
the 1400s and the mid-19th century, in every generation, the richer 50% of the
population had more surviving children than the poorer 50%. As economic status
and intelligence are positively correlated, this led to us becoming more and
more intelligent every generation.
To
test this hypothesis, Clark looked to a number of proxies for intelligence,
including literacy, numeracy and even interest rates (which tend to go down as
intelligence rises because smarter populations display lower time preference,
resulting in less demand for loans). The results confirm the hypothesis:
intelligence continued to rise
until
the most intelligent people—the outlier, super-clever geniuses—were so numerous
and so capable that their innovations actually allowed us to take control of
our environment to an unprecedented extent. Here we had the Industrial
Revolution.
Even
a slight upward shift in average intelligence means a substantial increase in
positive outliers, and this is far more consequential than the small
improvement in the great mass of the population.
Dutton
and Woodley devote some of their most interesting pages to the topic of genius,
previously treated in Dutton’s and Bruce Charlton’s book The Genius Famine (2016) as well. Outlier
intelligence is obviously a necessary precondition of genius, but if we define
the concept in terms of outstanding intellectual breakthroughs, certain
personality traits appear necessary as well.
Personality
studies lack the objective accuracy of intelligence studies, since they must
rely on either self-assessment or peer assessment rather than direct
measurement. Still, psychologists have been able to achieve considerable
agreement on the existence of five basic dimensions of personality, viz.:
1. Extraversion—Introversion
2. Emotional
Stability—Neuroticism
3. Conscientiousness—Impulsiveness
4. Agreeableness—Disagreeableness
5.Openness/Intellect—Closedness/Instrumentalism
The
first four vary independently of intelligence, while Openness/Intellect
correlates weakly (0.3). Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability
may conveniently be grouped together as a broader Stability factor of personality, while
Extraversion and Openness/Intellect make up a Plasticity factor. These two factors themselves
correlate significantly, allowing us to infer (or construct?) a General Factor of Personality (GFP) analogous to the
General Factor of Intelligence (g).
People
with high GFP are “socially extraverted, empathic and concerned with the
feelings of others, conscientious and self-disciplined in pursuit of
socially-approved goals, have stable emotions, and [are] open to new ideas,”
which traits might be summed up as “social effectiveness.” They tend to make
more desirable mates and better employees, and to have more friends than those
with low GFP.
While
those with high GFP will generally be viewed as having “good” personalities,
the opposite qualities can sometimes be socially useful. For example, geniuses
tend not to have the most balanced personalities:
The
genius is extremely high in intelligence, but moderately low in Conscientiousness
and Agreeableness, which, when coupled with high creativity, is associated with
the personality trait Psychoticism. This is crucial to genius because genius
involves coming up with and presenting a ground-breaking and highly original
idea. Frequently, it involves solving a very difficult problem and working to
solve this—to the exclusion of most other things—for years on end.
Such
obsessive personalities may entirely lack common human interests such as
relations with the opposite sex or financial success, and they be downright
incompetent in aspects of life outside their specialized fields. The authors
provide a short biographical glimpse of Isaac Newton:
As
a child and young man, Newton would spend nearly all of his time alone and when
in company he would be silent. He had essentially no friends, formed no
relationships with women, and made very little effort to conform at all. As a
boy, his relationships with other boys tended to be antagonistic. He really
wasn’t a very nice person.
Whatever
he did, he did because he wanted to do it, he became engrossed in it and he did
it brilliantly. In a year or so, he went from knowing almost no mathematics to
being among the best in the world; and then went on to make some of the
greatest ever mathematical discoveries. Then he all-but dropped mathematics and
worked on one area of physics after another—making major discoveries, then
moving on. Newton would think solidly for hour upon hour—sometimes standing
lost in his own world half way down the stairs. For many years he hardly ever
left his college.
Geniuses
tend not to be model students. Newton’s school grades were erratic. Francis
Crick “was rejected from Cambridge and went to university in London, where he
failed to get a top degree. He then proceeded to drop out of a variety of PhD
courses” before successfully discovering the structure of the DNA molecule with
James Watson. Einstein never learned to drive a car. He “once got lost close to
his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He walked into a shop and said, ‘Hi, I’m
Einstein, can you take me home please?’” Bertrand Russell is said never to have
mastered the art of boiling water for his tea.
The
psychologist Charles Spearman, who first proposed the General Factor of
Intelligence (g), also discovered an explanation
for this phenomenon:
It
has been shown that as people become more intelligent, the relationship between
the different cognitive abilities becomes weaker, [i.e.,] they become more
specialised in the nature of their intelligence. The g factor is somewhat weaker
among such individuals—as specialised abilities become more autonomous, playing
a bigger role in influencing cognitive performance.
Rising
intelligence in England between the 1400s and the early 1800s, combined with an
increase in the country’s total population, meant that geniuses and the
macro-innovations for which they are responsible were becoming more common.
This led to a qualitative shift in the character of the entire society: what we
think of as modernization. Economic historian Gregory Clark emphasizes that
this shift involved an escape from the “Malthusian Trap,” the premodern
trade-off between population and living standards: England became the first
society in human history to experience sustained population increase and rising
standards of living simultaneously, and the same phenomenon soon spread to
other Western nations. And of course, science and technology accelerated,
reaching peak growth rates in the nineteenth century.
Dutton
and Woodley’s review of some of the innovations this revolution involved is
worth citing at length:
Someone
born in 1770 would have grown up in a world little different from 1470.
Transport would be via horse and almost everything had to be done by hand.
Production was already beginning to mechanise, because James Hargreaves had
invented the Spinning Jenny in 1764. An early steam engine had already been
forged, but it hadn’t yet caught on. However, if that person had lived until
just 1804, they would have seen the invention of the electric telegraph, the
steam ship, the submarine, the circular saw, the steam roller, a reliable
clock, the bicycle, the battery, and the steam-powered locomotive. The world of
1804 would have been dramatically different from that of 1770 or 1470.
If
this person had lived until 1870, until the age of 100, they would have seen
the electric light (1809), the steam train and the first photograph (1827), the
electro-magnet, the typewriter (1829), the sewing machine, the electric dynamo,
the calculator, the propeller, the revolver, the telegraph, rubber tyres, the
washing machine, and, in 1858, the internal combustion engine. Then there was
plastic and dynamite and we reach the year 1870. The extent and speed of change
over a lifetime like that, compared to those for hundreds of years before,
would have been astonishing.
And
this new technology assisted numerous scientific breakthroughs, especially in
the realm of public health and medicine. In the pre-industrial world, there was
a very limited understanding of the causes of illness and, therefore, illness
selected against the least healthy. But this began to change. In 1796, Edward
Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, for example. There were also many other
improvements in public health, such as better sanitation. And the simplest
explanation for why all this was able to happen was that, for so long, we had
been selected for intelligence by the rigours of natural, sexual, and social
selection.
Those
who lived during this period knew that the revolution they were witnessing was
of momentous importance but had no idea why it was occurring. Dutton and Woodley’s account is based
almost entirely on research performed since 1900, including some that is quite
recent.
It
is difficult to pinpoint the zenith of European progress. In Human Accomplishment(2006), Charles Murray
estimated that scientific breakthroughs peaked in about 1825. Dutton and
Woodley do not see a falling off until 1873, and suggest the generation born
around 1850 was the most gifted in history.
But
as early as 1857, a French physician named Benedict Morel noticed a trend that
did not bode well for the future: declining infant mortality meant that
sicklier persons were surviving to reproduce. This meant that the partly hereditary
strengths necessary for survival before the improvements in public health were
made were becoming less common in the population. Furthermore, he observed that
the ‘underclass’ of prostitutes, criminals, and the desperately poor seemed to
have particularly high fertility. Morel predicted that these two processes—the
reduction in child mortality as a check on the fertility of the ‘underclass’
and the, apparent, greater fertility of the underclass—would necessarily lead
to the population of France gradually becoming less intelligent.
Eight
years later, the British polymath Sir Francis Galton made similar observations:
There
is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler
classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the
breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive
generation less fit for a high civilisation.
Darwin
voiced similar concerns in The Descent of Man (1871).
Today
we can confirm that hereditary intelligence has been declining. Dutton and
Woodley summarize the evidence, which includes deterioration in simple reaction
times, color discrimination, the use of “difficult” words, working memory,
special perception, child developmental schedules and—most critically—frequency
of macro-innovations. In 2017, an Icelandic study found the first direct
genetic evidence that a set of alleles predictive of g has been declining in
frequency in that country’s population. More such studies can be expected in
the years ahead.
According
to a 2015 meta-analysis of studies conducted since 1927, IQ in the USA and the
UK appears to be declining at a rate of 0.39 points per decade. Declines are
also reported in Russia and a number of non-Western countries.
The
authors emphasize five reasons (besides improved public health) why this is
happening: 1) naturally gifted people have a tendency to trade mating and
parenting opportunities for the opportunity to develop their abilities, e. g.,
through higher education; 2) being forward-thinking, such people are likelier
to use contraception; 3) the modern welfare state taxes the more successful in
order to support single mothers, who can often increase their benefits by
having more children; 4) the modern movement for sexual “equality” has
encouraged the brightest women to pursue careers and postpone marriage, often
until it is too late; 5) finally, and most unforgivably, Western elites are now
deliberately sponsoring the colonization of our nations by vast numbers of
low-IQ persons from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Declining
general intelligence has been masked during the Twentieth Century by the
so-called Flynn effect, an improvement in specialized mental skills independent
of g. This may be one factor which
made possible the continued technological progress of the twentieth century.
But there is good evidence that the Flynn effect has now done about all it can
do, and lower genotypic intelligence will increasingly make itself felt.
In
the last four chapters of their study, Dutton and Woodley leave the relatively
safe realm of psychometry to consider the possible long-term significance of
Western decline. Here their predecessors are philosophers and scholars of
comparative history rather than scientists. As they note, there are three basic
ways historical development has been conceived, although they can be combined
in various ways: decline, progress, and cycles.
Inherited,
pre-reflective conceptions of history tend to follow either a cyclical pattern,
as in Hinduism and Norse paganism, or a narrative of decline, as in the story
of Adam’s fall and Hesiod’s account of successive ages of gold, silver, bronze
and clay. Progressive interpretations of history are less common before the
modern era (but cf. Part I of Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress (1975)).
Dutton
and Woodley identify the Greek historian Polybius (second century BC) as “the
first to advocate, albeit implicitly, a cyclical philosophy of the rise and
fall of civilisations wherein there was no metaphysical dimension.” He observed
a pattern recurring in the rise and fall of Greek cities which Rome as well
seemed to be following. Early societies
are
religious, have a deep reverence for the past and for older generations, are
prepared to engage in noble acts of self-sacrifice, and follow clear moral
rules. These qualities ensure that they have a sense of superiority, a sense of
their own destiny, that they are a cohesive community, and that they can be
motivated to defend their society, even unto death.
These
qualities make for success, but the resulting power and prosperity lead to
religious skepticism, loss of reverence for the past, individual self-seeking,
moral corruption and a tendency for the leading members of the society to stop
having children. Decline sets in precisely as a consequence of previous
success.
Later
thinkers such as Ibn-Khaldun, Vico, and Spengler developed similar theories.
Dutton
and Woodley suggest that many of the phenomena upon which such men constructed
their theories of history can be explained by phases of positive and negative
selection for general intelligence. Young societies have relatively low
average g and are under extreme
conditions of group selection, being unstable, dangerous, stressful places to
live. Stress is associated with fertility, as producing lots of children hedges
against the fact that relatively few may survive. It is also associated with
religiousness, which “is about 40% heritable, so it seems to be an evolved
disposition, one of the purposes of which is to help us cope with stress.”
Religiousness
is also positively associated with ethnocentrism: positive perceptions of one’s
own group and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for it, along with negative
perceptions of out-groups. Ethnocentrism has been shown by computer modelling,
if not by history itself, to beat other possible strategies such as universal
altruism, individual selfishness, and (perhaps most obviously) universal
treason, in which individuals cooperate only with those outside their group. By
encouraging ethnocentrism, religion has evolutionary survival value: when two
similar groups are in conflict, the more religious one will, ceteris paribus, triumph.
In
the early stages of civilization, society has a sense of divine purpose, is
strongly united, it is under intense selection pressure, and it is becoming
ever more intelligent, as only the richest pass on their genes. Assuming the
selection intensity for g is
strong enough, the society will develop into a civilisation—of great
intellectual ability—and become highly urbanised.
As
the standard of living increases, people shift their focus to private interests
and neglect religion. Skepticism becomes widespread, and the society loses its
sense of purpose. The elite take to contraception and cease reproducing, while
there is money available to subsidize the poor and idle—and their children. As
a result, natural selection goes into reverse.
As g declines, society will
stop working as well, levels of crime will increase, levels of trust will
collapse, and democracy will be debased. The society will stop innovating and
will eventually start to go backwards, becoming less rational and more
religious as levels of stress begin to increase. This is likely to continue
until it returns to pre-modern levels of selection for g. From this it will—in some
form—rise from the ashes.
Deserving
of special mention is the authors’ perceptive description of changing attitudes
toward intellectual pursuit under conditions of civilizational decline:
One
consequence of declining intelligence is a decrease in the degree to which
people in general venerate “intellectual” pursuits. Intelligence is correlated
with a trait known as “Intellect”: being open to new ideas and being fascinated
by intellectual pursuit. Until the 1950s, this kind of attitude underpinned the
British university. Academics were under no pressure to regularly publish or
obtain grants. They were expected to teach and were given vast amounts of time
to think and do research based on the hope that some would produce works of
genius.
Charles
Murray has observed that, in the 19th century, religion was also part of the
reason that universities were created along these lines. Their purpose was to
reach a greater understanding of God’s creation. If this academic system
involved frittering away money—with most academics not publishing anything—this
didn’t matter. Some things are more important than money, such as the glory of
God.
Since
the 1960s, universities have become bureaucratic businesses. This reflects the
anti-intellectual, anti-religious attitude that their purpose is to make money.
Academics contribute to this by getting funding, publishing frequently, and
attending conferences.
Such
institutions do not grant appointments to men like Isaac Newton:
They
will appoint what [Edward] Dutton and [Bruce] Charlton [in their book, Genius Famine] call the “head girl” (at UK
schools)—quite intelligent, socially skilled, conscientious, but absolutely not
a genius. This person will be excellent at playing the academic game and will
make a great colleague. But they won’t innovate; won’t rock the boat.
Once
this stage is reached, academic conformity to an ideological model is easily
imposed.
The
authors devote a chapter to arguing that the histories of Roman, Islamic, and
Chinese civilization can be plausibly interpreted by means of their model of
rising and then declining general intelligence. Another chapter applies the
model to European civilization since the Dark Ages.
The
book closes with some reflections on the choices open to us in the face of
civilizational decline. One possible response, of course, is to refuse to
accept declining intelligence and advocate intervention to stop and reverse it.
Sir Francis Galton, e.g., proposed financial incentives for the most
intelligent to have large families. But this obviously cannot be contemplated
as long as the current elite remains in power.
Direct
genetic enhancement may become possible in the future. But whether it is a
vestige of Christianity or a natural instinct, many persons in the West feel a
visceral distaste for “meddling with human nature.” Dutton and Woodley suggest
an even more serious objection might be “the uses to which the increasingly
distant and unaccountable globalist elites may put such technologies.” A purely
self-interested elite—or, as the authors do not point out, one particular
ethnic component of that elite—might focus exclusively on enhancing the
relative success of its own offspring, e.g., through selection for
ruthlessness.
Another
possibility might be the systematic identification and encouragement of genius,
although this would require a radical reversal of the educational trends
described above. Still another strategy might be some sort of religious
revival, though such an event may not be possible to control.
The
authors are most hopeful about the possibilities of long-term knowledge storage
to ensure that the next wave of rising general intelligence does not have to
rediscover everything for itself:
Eventually,
the winter will give way to spring and then summer. Perhaps, with a gift of
knowledge from the present to the future, because we have come so far this
time, the next Renaissance will take those who are to come even further.
Of
course, the next “revival of learning” will be a long time coming indeed if the
declining West gets overrun by an exploding population of Africans and South-
and Southwest Asians. A renewed ethnocentrism—assuming it is possible at this
late date—might increase the odds that the next renaissance will be the work of
our own descendants. But the authors do not cover this topic.
In
any case, we will long be gone before any such renaissance begins. Is there
anything we can do for our immediatedescendants? Dutton and Woodley suggest that civilizations, like
individuals, can get through the winter less painfully if they accept that it
is coming and prepare for it in advance. In the not-so-distant future,
we
won’t be able to safely fly aeroplanes, or maintain a lavish system of social
security, or keep the electricity on all of the time, or maintain law and order
everywhere, or organise democratic government or have widespread use of the
internet. Life is going to become more harsh, more dangerous, and simpler. To
give an obvious example, many houses are now entirely reliant on electricity:
no fireplace, no gas. What are these people supposed to do when electricity
becomes unreliable? Many people now commute into London from 70 miles away or
even more. How are they going to get work as trains become more and more
sporadic? They need to live closer to work, just as we all once did. If we
start planning for this—rather than kid ourselves that “things can only get
better”—then things will run far more smoothly when the time comes.
(Republished from The Occidental Observer by
permission of author or representative)