In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun wrote about a gradual and long-term decay of the West. He wrote that only about 50% of French peasants in 1500 were literate but also noted that those peasants were reading novels far too complex for most (nearly all?) modern-day college professors. Quality of literacy decreased from 1500 among peasants but there was an ongoing explosion of creativity by engineers and scientists, poets and novelists, musicians and painters, and so on. But… He also claimed that the last burst of high-level creativity in the West (as of 2000 or so) came in the generation active around 1900. This generation included Einstein and Planck—physics, Camillo Golgi and Ramon y Cajal—pioneers in neurobiology, Johannes Brahms and Antonin Dvorak—musical composers, Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy—authors of fiction, Otto von Bismarck and Peter Stolypin—political leaders and serious men of serious accomplishments.
Barzun’s book might have been the high-point for an entire category of books by morally and intellectually serious historians such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Oswald Spengler, and others who analyzed the political and literary and cultural signs of some sort of decay in intellect and in forms of human order.
More recently, intelligence researchers led by Michael Woodley of Menie have found ways to estimate IQs over time by proxy measurements. For example, there is a high correlation between IQ and reflex speed; beginning in the early 1800s, the second of those attributes has been measured accurately and with increasingly large test-populations for certain populations in Europe and some other parts of the world.
In The Genius Famine, Edward Dutton and Bruce G Charlton wrote about the nature of geniuses—high IQ plus a personality verging on psychotic. On the other hand, Michelangelo as portrayed in the highly-regarded historical novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy was self-sacrificing toward family and friends but learned how to push human beings away when he needed time and space for accomplishing some great work of sculpture or painting or architecture or military engineering. Pope Julius, and others I believe, accused him of having a terribilita: “An effect or expression of powerful will and immense angry force (as in the work of Michelangelo).” (From Terribilita.)
In any case, these human beings of very high intelligence and autistic characteristics—whether those personality traits be inherent or self-trained habits—are becoming increasingly rare, especially in the United States which has academic results at or nearly at the bottom of developed nations for all levels of academic talent; the American results are particularly bad for highly talented students and many of those students, including me, go on to frustrating lives of—often—low achievement. Genius can’t be created in someone not born to it, but it can be destroyed in those born to it by bad environments such as American schools or American culture in general.
While its true that the good students aren’t necessarily the creative geniuses, even when they have extremely high IQs, it is true more often than these authors think that creative scientists are surprisingly people-oriented and also surprisingly as diligent as those who are the “prize pupils” by way of diligence and hard work and an IQ at least reasonably high, but with few signs of creativity. Take modern physics. We can see Dirac and others who are “on the autistic spectrum”, but we can also see the highly-sociable and non-conformist Richard Feynman as well as conformists—right down to their well-tailored suits—Murray Gell-Mann and Julian Schwinger. A very important corrective can be made to the portrayal of Albert Einstein in The Genius Famine, who was quite talented in languages and did well in school. Corrected facts and a better understanding can be found in this New York Times article from 1984, EINSTEIN REVEALED AS BRILLIANT IN YOUTH.
High-level geniuses seem, according to histories and biographies I’ve read, to be more complex than the models used in The Genius Famine or the next book to be discussed. At the same time, it supports the general viewpoint in those books that the world doesn’t much appreciate or support geniuses if even highly sociable geniuses have to develop `autistic-like’ strategies for getting their work done.
In At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent by Edward Dutton & Michael Woodley of Menie, the authors write about the disappearance of geniuses and about the more general background to a developing problem with dramatic drops in average IQ in the West since the Industrial Age began, circa 1800. IQ measurement began in earnest in the 20th century, but there are physiological attributes—such as reflex speed—which correlate well with IQ and were measured from the beginning of the Industrial Age by men with skills in physiology and physics and instrument-making. In addition, a simple graph in At Our Wits’ End… showing significant innovations in science and engineering by year (sometimes to solve existing problems and sometimes as a result of exploration of this world—and drawn from a standard `timeline’ history of modern science and technology) indicates that such innovations peaked in the West around 1850.
The two sets of analyses, those of Barzun and similar `literary’ thinkers and those of Woodley and similar `quantitative thinkers, agree to a frightening extent: the West is in deep trouble. It’s the sort of deep trouble which will lead to a large decrease in population over the next few generations. This might well start at any time. Expect violence and disrupted economic systems and all that comes from those sorts of disorder, including famines and epidemics and many men and women leaving no descendants. Barzun spoke of the West recovering from this sort of a situation before and guessed that, if we recover at all, it will come after—perhaps—a century of suffering and will start with some young men who discover some long-abandoned library and are fascinated by those works which are demanding—think of the so-called Renaissance which was really a revival of and end to the Medieval period and a beginning of the Modern Era. (Unfortunately, those particular young men mistakenly thought the horrible years behind them to have been typical of the entire Medieval Era and didn’t know only a century separated them from the High Middle Age, an age of prosperity and learning and high art.)
Historians, economic and other types, have discussed these sorts of situations before. In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman gives a good description of the problems during the century of troubles following the High Middle Age and, in Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark presents graphs and economic discussions of cycles in civilizational capabilities of the West from the Middle Ages up to the Industrial Age and beyond. The general scheme of those historians, complementary to that of Barzun and Woodley of Menie, is to think in terms of prosperity leading to population growth, disproportionately great among those with lesser capabilities, putting stress on an economy and causing a great loss of population which provides a “Darwinian cleansing” and opens up opportunities to those in who are laborers and craftsmen and merchants.
If we Christians wish to live up to our self-righteous claims to be the servants of God, we must start working towards some better way of handling our prosperity and our losses of prosperity, some way which avoids the loss of genetic quality during periods of increasing prosperity while honoring the sacredness of each human being as an adopted child of the God of Jesus Christ. We need to recognize that this Western Civilization which has been destroyed, largely by our drop in intelligence, was a substantial part of the communal Body of Christ—to which we have a great duty, to say the least.
I discussed these matters from a slightly different angle and also provided links to prior writings on the general topic in Here Be Dragons.