Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not

 

IQ 83

Mental retardation becomes the norm
in Arthur Herzog’s 1978 novel.
He considered it science fiction

Greg Klein | December 31, 2024

Even besides journalists, some people actually believe that
guy ran the U.S. and the other one was capable of doing so.

 

This is the second of a three-part series. See Part 1, a profile of Mania by Lionel Shriver.
See Part 3, a look at twisted egalitarianism in fiction and social control.

 

I first read IQ 83 fairly soon after its publication, on returning to my home country following a three-year absence. Foreign perspective stuck me with an unwelcome epiphany: Canadians are stupid.

Really stupid. Almost consistently stupid. Impossibly, incorrigibly, irredeemably, desperately, despairingly fucking stupid. O Canada, you’re dumb as shit.

That’s certainly true compared with northern Europeans, with lots of southern Europeans and with other English-speaking Westerners, possibly excepting our nitwit neighbours to the south. So back then I wondered how this American story might reflect Canadian life.

IQ 83 turned out to be a sci-fi thriller about an epidemic of stupidity that (most likely unintentionally) could serve as a metaphor. Another probably unforeseen parallel concerns the epidemic’s genesis: a lab-leaked virus. Muck from a bungled DNA experiment quickly spreads through the U.S. which, before becoming completely dysfunctional, exports the problem as a strike against enemy cognitive supremacy.

Among the first to catch the stupid sickness is James Healey, leader of the DNA research team and a genius with brains sufficient to slow the pace of cranial decline. Even so, he struggles to develop an antidote while vapid thoughts bedevil concentration. In the background, meanwhile, his family, research team and the wider society fall into chaos.

Herzog intersperses his story with discussions about intelligence. Orenstein, Healey’s psychiatrist colleague, acknowledges the limitations of using IQ tests to evaluate intelligence but says the virus affects all types of intelligence. As he explains to Healey (between lapses in his own concentration), 19th century belief “failed to distinguish intelligence from soul, human nature, sensation, wish, consciousness, perception, etc., etc.” The preoccupation with measuring what was later called IQ started in the early 1900s with Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon.

But the measurements have drawbacks that Binet and Simon realized, Orenstein says. “Binet would have resisted the notion of intelligence as a fixed and immutable number, imbued with magic by a technological society whose real ambition was to catalog and computerize human beings in order to bend them to the needs of the machine. For Binet, a truly great thinker, intelligence was the ability to adapt, learn, improve...”

Healey considers intellectual endeavour capable of heroism. That’s possible, he believes, through the discovery of what wasn’t yet known and “therefore didn’t yet exist.” A “hotshot scientist, university professor and chief of pediatric research at a famous hospital,” Healey’s a product of genetic endowment, private schools and an elite university who’s married to a tax lawyer and father of two high-IQ kids. Although not snobbish, he considers himself part of an intellectual cabal. “His gift was conceptualization. His universe had been built on his brains.”

The story opens with a pre-virus moron confronting Healey in a fit of road rage (a type of behaviour not all that common in the 1970s). Throughout the story flashbacks prompt Healey to speculate on how intelligence determines behaviour. (Herzog suggests Binet and Simon looked at it the other way around: They “saw intelligence as an attribute of behavior.”)

As Orenstein tells Healey, “Smart people are perfectly capable of making trouble too, but you do find among the borderline population and below, especially, a greater incidence of violent and destructive behavior, untrustworthy individuals, withdrawal, hyperactive tendencies, self-abusiveness, psychological disturbances, sexually aberrant behavior.”

Indeed the epidemic’s advance coincides with reported leaps of anti-social behaviour, which are used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the virus. (Even prior to its Fauci affiliation, the CDC already had contingency plans to quarantine entire cities, according to Herzog. But in this story, rapid contagion makes lockdowns redundant, while government incompetence would have made them unenforceable.)

Social disorder, however, takes place mostly in the background of this story. The novel focuses stronger attention on Healey and his circle. His team eventually descends to the level of a stick-wielding black researcher chasing a white colleague while another scientist fingers herself. Healey’s family fares no better.

Still functioning above 100, Healey muses on intelligence, ethics, altruism and order. Thinking about genes, he wonders if they were “pools of selfishness, competing with other genes of the same species in order to triumph, to mindlessly prove themselves fittest and best, then what hope was there except the intelligence of social order? ... Minus intellect, selfishness would prevail—he’d already seen it on the streets. Stupidity would lead to anarchy.”

But at one point a Canadian-style complacency briefly overtakes Healey. Doubting whether he should fight stupidity’s onset, he thinks: “In the end, stupidity might be good.” Life would be simpler among the fellowship of fools, a sentiment that often seems an unwritten law of Canucklehead society.

Presaging AI, Healey’s boss rambles on about computers with “everything that can be programmed on how our society is run; the machines can serve as managers if such becomes necessary.” At other times Herrmann, a German name of course, betrays Nazi tendencies as he enthuses about a new elite governing the idiot masses. Thwarting his declarations of cognitive superiority, though, are compulsive snatches from a lewd limerick that’s taken over his previously 200-IQ mind.

Herzog’s co-religionist character Orenstein, on the other hand, mourns his cognitive descent, which he considers an embarrassment to Jewish intellectual superiority.

Some of the data related by Herzog seems odd, although it might demonstrate how low society has sunk since the 1970s. He has Orenstein predicting the virus will drag average IQs from 100 down to 83, at the lower end of the dull-normal range of 80 to 90, where people lack “the capacity for intelligent work.” Orenstein says 16% of pre-virus Americans were already functioning at that level. The figure seems wildly underestimated for the U.S. or Canada even then—and now especially, although IQ tests are “re-normed” from time to time to maintain a 100 average throughout any societal cognitive shifts.

Even more incredibly, an “old” list of median scores by occupation, possibly already out of date by the 1970s, gives reporters a whopping 125. Maybe that sometimes seemed credible way back then (although in England more than North America) but journalism now functions at the cognitive and emotional level of teenage girls, thereby helping characterize a woefully dumbed-down society.

 

Only a stupid society would elect such shallow twits.
But do they actually run the country?

 

Much of the thriller centres on Healey’s struggle to think clearly and find an antidote. Blocking concentration are random chants, slogans, ad jingles, childish rhymes, meaningless noises, bits of shitty music and other erratic nonsense. The one foil that could stop Healey from saving the world—that short-attention-span, stream-of-consciousness rubbish—accurately reflects the “thoughts” of really average Canadians.

Although even more true now, it was clearly evident at the time Herzog was writing. Back then really average people often vocalized the type of idiocy afflicting Herzog’s characters. That’s what the averages sang, hummed and jabbered when they weren’t watching TV or listening to radio. Radio, in the years before portable electronics, poisoned almost every workplace, automobile and (when the TV wasn’t on) home, and did so constantly throughout waking hours. In the workplace, really average people could get batshit angry over any request to shut off the radio. Interestingly, gerontologists recommend constant TV or radio, if only in the background, to soothe the bewilderment of demented elders.

Post-1970s and ’80s technology brought nearly ubiquitous cellphones and social media to fill the confused void that occupies really average minds. People too stupid even for that took to drugs, more readily available and dangerous than before. An expanding caste of enormously stupid people, probably a nature-nurture result of stupid ancestry and a stupid society, largely explains Canada’s expanding caste of junkies, which might be growing at a rate unparalleled elsewhere.

Overall, Canadians give every impression of functioning at the approximate level of a 1970s IQ score of 83. That’s made this society especially susceptible to the entire range of Western decline including official ideology and its totalitarian threat. In Herzog’s story the stupid sickness afflicts everyone, from top down, making powerful government control unlikely. Certainly Canada, like other Western countries, suffers from a vacuously flaky elite. But is it necessarily paranoid to wonder if some kind of intelligent but sinister clique stands above that elite?

Intelligent but sinister—the words balance all those attributions of low behaviour to low IQ. They might also offer a pertinent definition of evil.

 

This is the second of a three-part series. See Part 1, a profile of Mania by Lionel Shriver.
See Part 3, a look at twisted egalitarianism in fiction and social control.