By the title of this letter, it would seem I am demeaning the intelligence of my countrymen. But the point is, Americans are intelligent and, by choice, can be industrious. How is it then they have sunk to idiot status. First a few words about a Russian psychologist/educator.
One way Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky explained the hierarchy of human intelligence was through the use of what he called zones. Simply, it’s safe to say, that through mental effort and intellectual pursuits an individual can develop more complex thinking patterns and become more efficient at problem solving; that is, in practical ways we would deem this person more intelligent. From birth he can expand his given mental capacity to a huge extent. Thus, each person has a possible range of development from the most indolent to exceptional, what he refers to as a person’s zone. We can extend this idea across the population, a general attitude toward the value of analysis, toward the value of critical thinking.
We have, as a society, accepted as the norm the lower limits of this public zone. We welcome the ease of emotional involvement that overwhelms even the most basic thought processes as we watch the ubiquitous cat videos on YouTube or vicariously place ourselves at the side of SEAL team 6 as they hunt bad guys in the Middle East or smoke pot with soon demised teens in that ever present, isolated cabin in the woods inhabited by a sadistic hermit. Such experience becomes a large part of our past activities, the source material for current behavior. The prevailing interest of the last few decades has been amusement and consumerism. Today, we browse our environment for entertainment. After each gratification, we look for the next. It’s as if we leapfrog from one diversion to another, shunning consideration of the significance of our behavior. Often, questioning the value of the way we spend the time amusing ourselves is considered bad form. This could be seen as a version of the childhood complaint, forget the rules, let’s just play the game.
The decade from 1965 to 1975 was different. It was a time when the general public nearly blindly idolized original thought. When someone verbalized an insight or a considered idea, the typical response was, “Heavy!” Often, words come into common use to serve a specialized meaning but, by people’s love of novelty, are overused, becoming trite, empty, conversational space fillers. Current examples? “Existential,” which movie characters utter to indicate psychic distress. Another whipping boy of intellectual wannabes is “Zen.” The latter of these in common use has less to do with enlightenment than with the composition of McDonalds hamburger meat paste. I asked students once if there were a current word for what we called “heavy.” Some smirks, a little giggling, and a not really. The discussion veered into episodes of Sponge Bob. The point? Language creates and changes the meanings of words as needed. Others fall into disuse (e.g. — “introspection”). In a climate of amusement, there is little need to reference to mental activity when your emotional response is the accepted form of communication.
We are, in Vygotsky’s terms, at the bottom of the public zone. Our attention span, a good indicator of intelligence, is often limited to five minutes as, remote in hand, we are ready to move on to the next “amusement” or “newsbyte” with a click of a button. We must determine how to raise our capabilities. Is there a key element missing that prevents our development? Next letter, we can return to a place where rational exchange becomes the common community currency.
