下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Intelligence is the term we use for the ability to understand connections. All human beings have this ability, which is perhaps primarily characterised by its being limited: everyone understands something, no one understands everything. But the limits to understanding are drawn differently and are final in each one of us. That traumatic experiences or great sensitivity to external conditions can lower one's level of understanding and that great efforts of will can increase it doesn't mean that intelligence is a relative quality, only that it is potential, in the sense that it can be either fully exploited or not used to the full. The concept of intelligence is by its nature comparative, for if the ability to understand connections was equal for everyone, as the ability to scratch oneself is possessed equally by everyone without differentiation, then the concept of intelligence would be meaningless. One is only intelligent if one is more intelligent than others. And since intelligence is itself a connection that must be understood based on one's own mental ability, those more intelligent than oneself are often difficult, even impossible, to distinguish. The person who is more intelligent will perceive you clearly, all your cognitive limitations will be apparent to them, whereas you won't see the more intelligent person as being more intelligent than yourself, but only that part of the intelligent person which is visible within the limits to your thought, rather like how a dog sees everyone else as dogs. In egalitarian societies intelligence is one of the most ambivalent entities, since the difference which intelligence represents is insurmountable, and insurmountable differences are of course fundamentally non-egalitarian. In that respect intelligence resembles beauty, which is another problematic entity in egalitarian societies. The solution has been and still is to pretend it doesn't exist or that it isn't important, a game of pretence which begins at school, where both intelligence and beauty are communicated through mixed messages: on the one hand one is taught that looks are not important, that what counts is the inner person and that all people are equally valuable, while at the same time this fundamental ethical principle, which everyone agrees on and which pervades every level of knowledge, on the other hand is continually contradicted by the disproportionate attention and better treatment accorded to beautiful pupils over ugly ones by teachers, other adults and fellow pupils. Intelligence also breaches the doctrine of equality, but in a different way, for while beauty isn't a threat, perhaps because it is so ineluctable and in a certain sense so final, intelligence is threatening, for we all know how to think, we are all able to understand connections, and that some people think better, that some people understand more connections and with greater ease, can be hard to accept. While the threat is constant, it feels more acute during one's school years, since that is one of the few phases in life during which one's mental abilities and capacity to understand are not only continually tested but also graded, thus exposing the differences between people in this respect. All the intelligent people I went to school with at some point or other tried to hide their intelligence, to tone it down, since the consequence of appearing intelligent was that they were ostracised, they were unpopular and in a few cases were even bullied. That never happened to any of the beautiful people I went to school with, on the contrary, they were all greatly sought after. In the gymnas the most intelligent pupil was named Gjermund, and during one break we wrote with a black marker in large letters on the noticeboard that ran along one whole wall of the classroom, GJERMUND IS UGLY. We meant it ironically, for that is the kind of thing primary school students would do, while we were in the gymnas and we felt that by parodying primary school pupils we were changing the message and turning it into something else, something harmless. But it didn't seem that way to Gjermund, his face went white when he saw it, and there were tears in his eyes. He pretended not to notice, however, and so the moment passed, at least for us. But no one removed the letters, so for him it must have been different, since he had to see that sentence every day for the rest of the school year. How he has done later in life I have no idea, but I do know one thing, that society's view of intelligence changes in adulthood, for even an egalitarian society needs people who distinguish themselves through their superior intelligence, and the function of school is not primarily to convey knowledge but to differentiate, so that the intelligent students end up on the right shelf, while all the others are taught that there is no difference between people, so that later they will accept being governed by the intelligent.