Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> I don't know if IQ tests are a valid measure of a person's capacity
> for intellectual life, but it's interesting that raw performance
> on IQ tests has increased steadily over the past 80 years in
> every nation where data is available. At least in terms of
> some cognitive abilities, the American population is not being
> "dumbed down" as strange bedfellows on both right and left assume.
>
My experience has always been, both in political work and in teaching, that taken one at a time and in an interactive relationship people are far more intelligent and open then they are in groups. The student sitting in the instructor's office is often a rather different creature from the student in the classroom or sitting in his/her room writing a paper. We are a species that lives by solidarity, and what we see as mass ignorance and/or stupidity can also be seen as a more or less spontaneous expression of that solidarity. It is not unreasonable to trust one's leaders. It probably worked pretty well in fact for a couple million years of pre-human and human history, and has only in the last handful of thousands of years been a tendency that fucks things up.
I think that along these lines -- seeing support for imperialist outrage as a sort of misdirected solidarity -- is where to look for at least a beginning to grasping the contradiction Yoshe pointed out in her response to my post on "Hate America." In my post I just used the pair stupidity/ignorance, but stupidity carries its own internal contradictions. (I'm thinking as I type here.) Something like misdirected solidarity can perhaps rapidly reverse direction when people began to discover the misdirection. ????
Carrol