Statistically, the average American is becoming more stupid. Perhaps that’s why there have been so many books on the virulent virus of dimwittery, such as How to Deal with Idiots (And Stop Being One Yourself), Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Communicate Effectively with Each in Business (and in Life), and, most helpful of all, Why Your Cat Thinks You’re an Idiot.
The decline was first detected by the researcher James Flynn in 2017. For many years, he had noted the opposite: in every decade of the 20th century, average I.Q. scores rose by three to five percent in the U.S. (and in many other developed countries). This upward trend came to be known as the positive Flynn effect.
In 2017, the data revealed a negative Flynn effect for the first time. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon published a 2023 study showing a decline between 2006 and 2018 in logic, vocabulary, visual and mathematical problem-solving, and analogical reasoning. Only scores for spatial reasoning increased.
“The line can’t go up forever,” remarked the study’s lead author, Elizabeth Dworak. “It’s called the ceiling effect. You eventually hit that threshold.” If Dworak is right, and humanity has hit its cognitive ceiling, perhaps we do the decent thing and hand the baton to A.I. Hey, we’ve had a good run.
But Dworak is describing a plateau, while her research suggests a downward slope. Why would there be such a fall? Perhaps the negative Flynn effect is due to computers and smartphones. As these devices spare us cognitive labor, the human mind has less to do. Intelligence is therefore less of an evolutionary imperative than it once was. While human intelligence rose in developed countries very quickly during the 20th century, thanks in part to technological advances, this theory suggests that it’s now doing the opposite. At least we’re still sharp enough to perceive the irony.
Another possible explanation is advanced in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which argued that average American intelligence was falling because misbegotten government policies were encouraging stupid persons to breed stupid children and beckoning a more stupid class of immigrants than hitherto was settling in the U.S. The unspoken corollary was that low-I.Q. Americans must be stopped—somehow!—from multiplying and that immigration controls should keep out foreign-born ignorami.
In 2006, Mike Judge seemed to endorse something like these measures with his film Idiocracy. In the movie, Luke Wilson plays Joe Bauers, an American of average intelligence selected for a government experiment involving cryogenic hibernation. But the test goes wrong, and Joe remains frozen for 500 years. “Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence,” the narrator informs us, adding that “with no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most—and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” In the world of 2505, Fox News is the only broadcaster, the most popular TV show is called Ow! My Balls!, and a sports drink called Brawndo has replaced drinking water.
When Trump was first elected, in 2016, Ethan Coen, the film’s co-writer, tweeted that he never expected Idiocracy to become a documentary. The Web site AlterNet countered that “we are not living in an idiocracy, we are living in an oligarchy, for which political stupidity is one of many symptom [sic] caused by the large, malignant cancer of inequality and runaway capitalism.” In World War I, British troops were held to be lions led by donkeys: perhaps the negative Flynn effect has given us societies where donkeys are led by donkeys.
That theory would, of course, be heavily contested by the present incumbent of the White House. He self-designates as a “stable genius” who “aced” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which actually checks for early signs of dementia. Interviewed by Fox News’s Chris Wallace in 2020, Trump was asked about this. “I took the test, too, when I heard that you passed it,” Wallace said. “It’s not the hardest test. They have a picture and it says, ‘What’s that?,’ and it’s an elephant.” As Max Benwell observed in The Guardian, “For Trump to claim these are hard is worrying because for any cognitively healthy person, they shouldn’t be.” Indeed, if passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment is proof of genius, then we’re all geniuses, and the whole category becomes meaningless.
That said, I am not convinced that Americans are getting less intelligent. I.Q. tests are dubious markers of human cognitive abilities. For example, they have been found to have encoded cultural biases that unfairly and disproportionately diagnose Black Americans as at below-average intelligence. One of the pioneers of I.Q. testing, the superbly named Edwin G. Boring, remarked in 1923: “Intelligence is what the tests test,” a statement whose Euclidian circularity suggests that an aptitude for I.Q. tests may indicate nothing more than an aptitude for I.Q. tests. In which case, scoring poorly on an I.Q. test would not constitute proof of stupidity either.
While I was writing my book A Short History of Stupidity, I was impressed by another definition of stupidity that pre-dates I.Q. testing by roughly two and a half millennia. In Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades I, Socrates indicted the titular 19-year-old aristocrat, a self-regarding would-be leader convinced he had what it took to enter politics despite having none of the requisite skills, for his stupidity. To make this point, Socrates distinguished between agnoia, or ignorance, a forgivable defect that one might overcome, and amathia, which means an unwillingness to learn. It was that latter trait that Socrates took to be the hallmark of stupidity.
In his lack of self-knowledge and disinterest in improving himself, learning from experts, or acknowledging his own shortcomings in order to overcome them, Alcibiades was the prototype of Trump, who once bragged, “I do have actually much more humility than a lot of people would think.”
When Hannah Arendt looked into the eyes of Nazi mass murderer and architect of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann, across a Jerusalem courtroom 1961, she noted that Eichmann was “perfectly intelligent,” but she was also struck by his absolute inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” That is what Arendt meant by her much-quoted phrase the “banality of evil.” “It was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous,” Arendt wrote of Eichmann, “as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality …There’s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.” Indeed, for Arendt, our leading moral task is to overcome that stupidity, that moral blindness. I see no evidence that the president of the United States has ever attempted that valuable work. (Just to be clear to any passing lawyers, I am not at all suggesting Trump is a Nazi.)
For Arendt and Socrates, self-examination precipitated a kind of conversion experience, not from ignorance to knowledge but from unwitting ignorance to what you might call informed ignorance: a recognition of the limits of one’s intelligence, which is the beginning of wisdom. Thus, it is Trump’s unshakable confidence in his own purported genius, against all the evidence to the contrary, that is the true mark of stupidity.
Stuart Jeffries is the author of several books, including A Short History of Stupidity and Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern
