Caleb Anderson: Information and intelligence are not the same thing

It seems that we live in an age of abundant information. But is this making us more, or perhaps less, intelligent? Why, with vast amounts of information at our fingertips, are we more uncertain, divided, and confused, on so many fronts?

We are swimming in information and drowning in confusion.

I recently had some time on my hands and forced myself to sit through an evening of TVNZ News, followed by a youtube clip of a recent Herald Live discussion, where two politicians were being interviewed on issues of the moment. In neither instance did I feel better informed on the topics covered. Some information (admittedly not very balanced), plenty of ego, poorly concealed agenda, lots of speaking over, point scoring, projection, and avoidance, but very little effort at fruitful engagement and sense making.

Simply opposing positions seeking justification, through the denigration of a contrary view, winner takes all!

Intelligence has generally been divided into two categories, crystalized intelligence and fluid intelligence. In short, crystalized intelligence is more about what you know (acquired knowledge), while fluid intelligence is generally about being creative (or adaptive), about possibility, about what you do with what you know.

While the left and right hemispheres are involved to some degree in almost all mental processing, and are highly integrated, the left hemisphere tends to have more to do with problem resolution, and the right hemisphere with the bigger (and wider) picture... and with sense making more generally. The left brain puts the plan into action, decides what needs to be done, and sets the wheels in motion, the right brain scopes, explores possibilities, weighs options, considers likely consequences, and reconciles contradictions.

I know that this is not what most of us were taught, but this is becoming cutting edge thinking among many leading neuroscientists.

The left brain says grab, the right brain says be careful of the consequences.

A credible case could be made that much of our thinking today is becoming heavily left brain dependent. Digital technologies and related systems, increased bureaucratisation, centralised decision making, the sheer pace at which things happen, and the volatile nature of the political and social order, tends to orient our thinking this way.

Neuroscientist, and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, takes the position, both controversially, and compellingly, that the left brain is less intelligent in the way it attends to the world than the right brain. It simply has a narrower brief. If we are overly reliant on the left brain, we will miss bits, we will be dismissive of the wider picture, of consequences and ethics.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung said that truly intelligent people:

... understand nuance

... are able to weigh (and reconcile) opposing positions

... are interested in what others have to say

... will modify their thinking

... see possibilities

... are less dogmatic

And less intelligent people ...

... look past detail

... find no middle ground

... are dismissive of divergent ideas

... seldom shift their thinking

... are anchored in absolutes

... are dogmatic

Truth is often somewhere between two, seemingly, opposing positions, smart people know this, less smart people, or those bent on a purpose, tend not to know this, or not to care.

Dogma delivers narrow, bite size, imperatives on how we should attend (make sense of) the world. In so doing it delimits and constrains. It displaces common sense, intuition, reason, collective wisdom, science, and the hard earned lessons of history, with sets of narrowly defined, non-negotiable, political absolutes.

Dogma has turned history on its head, it has overtaken our schools, captured our universities, infiltrated public media, corrupted our civil service, marginalized reason, dumbed down political discourse, replaced sense with nonsense, and simply made us less decent.

It is dismissive of democracy, and aggressively, and uncompromisingly, intolerant of dissent.

It seems to me that this is, arguably, the biggest problem that the West faces today. It is the rot at the very epicentre of the hole we are digging ourselves.

Dogma, and the left brain, in which it tends to be (at least partly) grounded, is antithetical to free thought, mechanistic, inherently resistant to revision, closed to possibility, allergic to criticism, and highly susceptible to ever cascading, and destabilizing, fringe ideas.

It is unbounded by reason.

History testifies that, in its many iterations, orientations, and disguises, dogma can cast a very long and dark shadow.

We have the potential to be more intelligent, to be less absolute, to thoughtfully weigh contradictory ideas, to be open, to see possibilities, to learn from the past, to shift our thinking from time to time, to develop a genuine capacity for empathy, to eschew dogma, and even to be less angry.

In short, as a society, we can go down the more intelligent and considered (less dogmatic) path, if enough of us choose to do so. The real question is whether our tribal (small t) orientations, agendas, fragilities, and egos, will permit this.

The stakes are much higher, and the implications more potentially devastating, and universal, for us than our forebears... to the degree that our technology and interconnectedness is superior to theirs.

There is a very real sense in which the West has untethered itself from reality, from the hard earned lessons of the past, and from the very things that have privileged us.

There is no such thing as utopia, the West was never perfect, but it once believed in something strongly enough to defend it.

We don't have unlimited time to decide whether reasoned and intelligent discourse is worth defending... before others take the initiative and decide for us.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.