Does being smart make you a 'better' person?

Post By Louis Kinross

When I was at university (yes, decades ago!) I think I felt that I was somehow "responsible" for my intelligence. That I'd made a choice to be "smart" while others make choices to be athletes or runway models or contractors.

I think I was even a bit smug about it. 

I remember a conversation with a friend that went something like this: "If you could be smart OR beautiful—but not both—what would you choose?"

I was flabbergasted when my friend (who happened to be brilliant and was once a child model) chose beauty. She felt it was more important to be beautiful than smart, she said. She felt it could get her further in the world. 

This seemed shallow to me. I thought of beauty as something that a person had little control over. You're either born with looks that fit Western standards of beauty—or you're not. And looks can't tell you anything about who a person is inside, I thought. Looks can't make you a "good" person.

It's taken me all these years, and the birth of my son with intellectual disability, to realize that I didn't in any way "earn" my intelligence, or "work hard for it," and it certainly wasn't a "choice."

It was an aptitude bestowed on me at birth. It was luck.

For some reason, I'd grown up believing that smart people got where they were because of some combination of moral superiority and hard work. That they'd chosen to be smart. And that there was some kind of higher good associated with intellect that didn't exist with other human attributes.

I was reminded of this mindset when I saw intelligence described as "the highest virtue" in this article by Columbia University professor Rachel Adams, who has a son with Down syndrome.

Her piece begins: "Last week, a doctor told us our 4-year-old son's IQ is 67."

Adams recounts the process of having her son tested and, how, even though she knows the weaknesses of standardized testing, the results were devastating.

"Much as I recognized the flaws in the test, I found it impossible not to care about the results," she writes. "I know how much they matter. Between us, my husband and I have nearly 25 years of higher education, three master's degrees, two Ph.Ds and a J.D. We've gone far in life by being extremely good test takers. I teach at an Ivy League university where intelligence is held to be the highest virtue. It was cause for celebration when the SAT scores of our first year entering class outranked those of Yale's. I see the opportunities made available to students who, because of talent or training, know how to succeed at standardized tests."

It was Adams pairing of intelligence with "virtue" that made me balk.

I've always considered virtues to be various kinds of human goodness. In this online Oxford dictionary reference virtue is described as:

"Behaviour showing high moral standards: A quality considered morally good or desirable in a person."

Virtue is also described as a "useful" quality of a thing (e.g. "these are his greatest virtues") and in the archaic sense of chastity.

By describing intelligence as "the highest virtue" at Columbia, Adams seems to give it a moral quality (though perhaps she meant simply to say it is the most "useful" human attribute).

Intelligence—which is largely dicated by our parents' genes—has nothing inherently to do with goodness. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad.

Because Adams ranks intellect 'numero uno" among virtues, the reader is nudged to consider the traditional theological virtues of faith, hope and charity (love). Is Adams suggesting that intellect has surpassed these as a moral good?

I don't think she is—because she goes on to say that the best rejoinder to her son's low IQ score was to be found at home, in "the warm reality of my complicated child," a boy she sees as "clever and funny and full of potential."

I do, however, think Adams is underscoring how quick our culture is to define intellect as the most precious of human qualities, and to assign a moral characteristic to it: Smart people are good people. 

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Sunday, August 4, 2013

Love: It defies measure

  Imagine my surprise and delight when I received this story by Eric Fischer, dad to Segev, 15, in Israel. Many of you know Eric as the author of I am a broken man/You can't break me, a personal blog that Eric recently closed. Eric was born in Holland and has lived in many places. He's trained in traditional Chinese medicine and shiatsu and is an intuitive bodywork therapist. Thank you Eric for this important piece! Louise

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Love: It defies measure
By Eric Fischer

I have to wonder at the audacity with which we are judged by others. 

Of course it happens to us each day and we may even be guilty of it. But nowhere is it more alarming than when we feel our children’s lives deemed unworthy because they are severely disabled. 

As a parent providing round-the-clock care for my son for 15 years, there are many constants in what has become our tiny, hermit-like life. Unfortunately, judgment is one of them.

It may come in the form of "What is the point?" when discussing the care of my son. "Isn’t he suffering?" is asked, sometimes in tandem to suggest that I've had no reason to be taking care of him all these years. “You have no life," is the nail in the coffin.

It seems incomprehensible, even to those well-intentioned, that my life providing 90 plus hours of care to my son each week is as fulfilling as it is difficult. That in the process of this caring there is a place for personal growth: an opportunity to experience a connectedness at the deepest level of our humility, an opportunity to define our humanity.

Each day my son has countless seizures and multiple respiratory therapy sessions. He must be fed and toileted and given a large number of medications. Surgeries have left him scarred and debilitated as his paralyzed body slowly collapses in on itself.

Strangely, the practical difficulties this presents don't disturb me nearly as much as the ignorance expressed by people who feel the need to project negativity on our lives. This includes doctors who counsel "You should think about having another child, don’t bother with this one,” to bioethicists who maintain that a sick child, if also disabled, doesn't possess a life worth living.

For years I remained calm when these comments were made. After all, we're all mature adults, simply discussing matters dispassionately, aren’t we?

I tried to convince whoever I was speaking with by gently pointing out the good moments in our life. I never invoked the "sanctity of life" dictum, so frowned upon by academics. In The Netherlands they've already found a way around the "sanctity of life" argument: the bioethics of utilitarianism hold sway and, without a public referendum, the term "unbearable suffering" has become the catch-all to justify doctors encouraging parents to agree to "assisted dying" of newborn disabled children.

But this view is based on more than one omission. We are human beings, still caught in a process of development and indeed, in need of development. As evolving beings we need to progress in some of our most lofty virtues, such as caring for one another and the understanding it brings of our inherent equality as humans. The ethics behind discounting the worth of a disabled, ill child suggests that we are only equal when we are "the same."

I no longer attempt to defend my position in these discussions. Instead, to those who judge my son's life as meritless I say: "Try it." Raise an extremely physically and mentally compromised child and then, and only then, tell me what you think. You can't express opinions with deep, life-and-death ramifications when you lack basic knowledge of the subject.

Of course most people won't have the opportunity to try this kind of "extreme parenting." So the next best thing, for those who want to develop an informed opinion, is to speak to parents who are raising, or have raised, these children. Yes, speak even to the parents who have lost their child. Ask them about their experience and I dare you to find someone who weighs in solely with regret. Ask them if it was worth it. Ask them if it contributed something real to their lives.

I don’t think many parents, when their child is given a strange look at the park, enter into a discussion of bioethics with the perpetrator. And I find everyday people who give “the look” are not usually in the least bit nefarious. 

However, I am worried about policy makers, bioethicists who sit on medical boards, like the ones in Great Britain, Belgium and Holland, or someone like Peter Singer in the United States. These people cloak their bias in reasonable-sounding arguments: as Horace called it, ecipimur specie rectie (We are deceived by the semblance of what is right).

Many people are dazzled by our information age's ability to express the human genome in a series of ones and zeroes in a computer. But we can't reduce our love of and care for a child to a number, to a quantity of human worth.

Caring night and day for a disabled person changes us. Allowing it to change us is an exceptional and worthy endeavour, especially in light of the fact that we naturally recoil from change. Change makes us uncertain, and parents willing to partake of this life are the very definition of courageous pioneers.

"Given the chance, would you do it again?" is a question asked of parents like me on forums and in news story comments. It's often used as a trump card to silence those who defend the value of children like ours.

Would I do it again, if given the choice? Allow my life to be turned upside down and inside out? To lose financial stability, any semblance of certainty in life, and comfort? To see aches and pains and chronic fatigue turn to ailments? To watch others continue their lives with social connections, vacations and friends?

Would I choose to suffer the heartache of those moments when my son’s life seemed to slip away, only to marvel and be filled with gratitude as he bounced back, again and again? And until when? Would I choose to share in those simple moments of connection, when life is reduced to its most valuable elements?

Yes. In a heartbeat, I would.