Here we are, a century older, deeper in debt, and apparently not a whole lot smarter. We have a least got to the point where psychologists who try to talk about kinds of intelligence other than those involving mathematical, verbal, logical reasoning skills have moved in out of the cold and have even written the occasional best-seller (Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, 1995). In 1993 Howard Gardner (The Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences) had gone so far as to suggest seven identifiable modes of human smartness: 1.linguistic, (Four other intelligences—naturalistic, existential, moral, and spiritual—have since been advanced but to little effect.) Which is all to the good since such a wider view puts to rest the nagging suspicion that, say, Mozart would’ve never come close to admission to M.I.T., and that, say, Shakespeare, would’ve been lucky to find employment as a paper-shredder-emptier on Wall Street. On a less grandiose level, teachers in various disciplines have long been aware of students who couldn’t, say, learn to conjugate a French verb or solve a quadratic equation if their life depended on it but who, given thirty minutes to talk to a depressed classmate could quickly establish and act on a therapeutic relationship. Yet, traditionally such a person would be labeled a dummy for failing French or math and would receive no recognition for having remarkable interpersonal intelligence. When you begin thinking about these categories, laudable as they are, problems quickly become apparent. They do little to help us cope with the maddening rises (and falls) of the likes of George W. Bush, Jimmy Swaggert, or, for that matter, Benedict XVI. Evidence for the massive stupidity of humans is hard to miss (though we conveniently continue to mostly overlook it—how many war cemeteries have you ever visited to help you remember?). Evidence for our intelligence is equally obvious and usually we’re proud as Jonestown punch about it (Nobel Prizes, Kilroy-was-here plaques on the moon, Oscars, etc.). For all that, a close study of the historical record yields the grudging feeling that: 1. We are even more stupid than we
think, and Consider, for example, metaphysics (he wrote nervously, knowing that he had instantly caused many readers to instantly click away to less demanding pages). Nevertheless, consider metaphysics (he repeated, helplessly). Having evolutionarily pulled ourselves out of the old ocean home and established a beachhead (of sorts) by means of the various clevernesses outlined above, we’re now pretty content, indeed, self-satisfied with where our efforts of consciousness have got us to: not just food and shelter, but air conditioning, SUVs galore, and more music than you can properly listen to in one lifetime in your pocket. As humans sometimes thought of as "wise" have long been pointing out, those sorts of physical comforts and delights ease our days but do very little for our nights and nothing at all for The Big Night that awaits. Yet so powerfully seductive are the delights of the day that we, the entertained race, can now spend whole lives without giving much thought to the coming night. That we might even have a built-in kind of intelligence to do just that—or at least the potential to develop such an intelligence, is beyond the pale of respectability for all but the remotest thinkers. Yet, my children, I’m here to tell you: it is so. It is so. To all those vaunted other Q’s, we needs must add another: M.I.Q. The Metaphysical Intelligence Quotient. Without it we leave our heart’s ease in the rough, tough, greedy, wholly insensitive hands of appointed, annointed ignoramuses who wouldn’t know transcendence if they stumbled over it in a dark alley and it offered them a free blowjob. With an M.I.Q., the cul de sac we presently inhabit opens out into undreamt-of realms. The dead end at last becomes a living beginning. END
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2007 Texas Chapbook Press
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