Intelligent Life

Today I saw a magazine called Intelligent Life. It is produced by The Economist. It’s largely full of adverts, like most magazines, but it did contain an article called “Wising Up – the age of mass intelligence”. (Bizarrely it is also giving away its content word for word, for free on the Net.) I thought the title of this article must surely be ironic, so I took a look.

You can see from the online version that it contains a lot of photos of people with things like “Millwall, Metalicca, Mahler” tattooed on their shaven heads, “Socrates” tattoos on their knuckles, and most ridiculous of all, a great big cover image of Paris Hilton supposedly perusing War & Peace.

The fact that these image are faked is evidence enough against the contention of the article. This kind of thing – precisely – doesn’t happen (or at least extremely rarely happens). I don’t find any convincing arguments in the body of the article either, though the pictures were very nearly enough to put me off reading it at all.

As one commenter says on that page, “Postmodernism had taken its toll on academic intelligence”. There is, more than anything, inverted elitism currently in the UK, as I have recently mentioned. It is supposedly cool not to be interested in high art, to be morally laissez-faire, to regard intelligent people as “boffins”. This is in fact idiocy, but it’s the trend. For this article to suggest otherwise and that all is okay, I think only serves to exentuate the problem rather than alleviate it. The publishers, in my view, are simply being contrary and controversial in order to try to sell the magazine, and not making this statement because the they believe it to be true.