“It’s nice to be smart,” my kindly grandmother used to say to me, thinking that, truly, I was. Looking back, I’m not sure that she was right, at least not in any strict sense.
What is it to be Smart? Surely smartness involves speed, velocity. A smart person is fast on the uptake, a quick study. Smart learns things quickly. Smart excels at knowing the correct spelling, at solving math problems without paper and pencil, at learning foreign verb tenses. Smart does well—very well—on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Smart is good at memorization, too. Give Smart a list of numbers—eight, ten, a dozen, maybe more. Smart can recite them correctly. Smart can do it forward, and maybe he can do it backwards, too. Smart will not forget your phone number. (Many of these things cannot be said of me, despite my kindly grandmother’s view.)
Smart loves a multiple-choice test. He gets ’em all right almost every time. Pop quiz? Smart is done before everybody, unless there’s another Smart on hand, Smart II, in which case they compete like thieves over spoils to get done first and best. When the teacher asks a factual question, Smart’s hand shoots up so quickly that you fear shoulder damage. Smart watches quiz shows and beats all the contestants.
Smart love to compete. He wants to be the smartest kid in the class, and he often is. He finds a way to let the class know his scores and he revels if he’s on top, which he usually is. He has the highest I.Q. in the class. Because I.Q. measures…what? Well, it measures the nimbleness of the mind. It measures speed of correct reaction. Smart is an empiricist and thrives in an empirically driven world. Smart thinks that smartness is the highest measure of the mind. So he judges himself and others by their degree of, well, guess what?
Many, if not most, university disciplines are well-disposed to smartness. Languages, math, hard sciences, the so-called social sciences. All respect Smart, sometimes actually revere him. Institutions are full of smart people: The NGOs are, the government is, and so is the law firm. Medical school has its share of smarties and maybe more. In the land where there is a right answer and a wrong answer, Smart is King.
Surely, it is helpful to have people on hand whose minds move quickly, who take in information and get the (empirically) correct answer. They are necessary in hundreds of ways. They ensure the smooth running of the bureau. (Which bureau? Any bureau.) They ensure consistency in our institutions. They keep life clicking down the tracks. There is nothing at all wrong with being smart. Sir Smart, in and of himself, is just fine.
The problem is that the culture at large has overrated Smart. It has paid Smart and paid him well. He owns the best house in the neighborhood. His car is exactly the right car. His bank account is fat; his retirement savings are delectable for him to contemplate. (He’ll share the figures with you, if you ask the right way, in suitably awestruck tones, and maybe even if you do not.) Everything and everyone tells Smart that he’s the cat’s meow. He issues opinions, many opinions, and he does so with confidence. His politics are perfect. His morals are of the highest. He’s an expert on his paid-for expertise and on many other matters as well.
But as a culture, and often as individuals, we have made a crucial mistake. We have come to believe that those who are smart are also intelligent. We even think of them, without much questioning, as being wise. Worse, they think so of themselves. Someone who killed the LSATs has more power of perception and judgment than you and you and you. When I encounter these people at dinner parties, where they seem to proliferate, I wish I had a gun—a squirt gun, to be sure—to put out the fire of their confidence.
One must say it: Intelligent and smart are not the same. Some smart people are intelligent, granted. But many, maybe most, are not. Smarts can underwrite intelligence, and do so effectively. But smart can undermine intelligence, too.
I have nothing against smarts, nothing at all. The problem arises when people who are merely smart take themselves to be intelligent (or, even worse, wise) and find themselves in a culture that endorses and even encourages their view. They are elevated and their opinions along with them. The man who can murder a multiple-choice test and invent a super-duper app becomes an authority on politics and culture. He wakes up to find himself (with some effort on his own behalf) to be an influencer. And he, true to his title, does exert influence.
Intelligence is notoriously hard to define, but one could do worse than to say that intelligence involves figuring out what is right to do. And then, the second step, coming up with a way to do it. One behaves skillfully, as the Buddhists say, to bring about a desired result that is worth achieving.
How does one know what is right to do? Again, not an easy question. Surely it begins with doing one’s best to establish—or maybe better to adopt—a set of worthwhile values. To be intelligent, you have to know what you think is right and why. How do you come to such a state? The most common way is to adopt an established set of values—ethical norms that have been in place for a longtime. These values often begin with the teachings of a wise person—wisdom being a quality I shall come to. One may be a follower of Jesus, of the Buddha, of Muhammad, of the sublime intelligence (or intelligences) that created the Hebrew Bible, of Plato, or of Emerson. To be intelligent, you need to know your ethical tradition; you need to understand the values that you have inherited.
It helps to know some of the best elaborations of your wisdom tradition as they have accumulated through time. Augustine helps one understand Christianity; the rabbis who composed the Talmud aid with Judaism; on The Koran there is no end of commentary. Yet one does not need the scholars—the secondary men and women—to be intelligent. One needs an ethical base.
Does this base need to be religious? It doesn’t hurt if it is, but it does not have to be. Plato imposes no religious obligation. Nor does Schopenhauer, though he does believe that Christianity is the most profound of doctrines, focusing as it does on the sufferings of this world. My own values, for what it is worth, affirm a set of ideals: courage, the yearning for wisdom, compassion, and dedication to the creation of genuine art. I am a believer in God, but one could endorse these ideals and live by them without a commitment to a deity.
Adopting a comprehensive ethical view of the world is not easy, no doubt about it. But it is a necessary first step in becoming intelligent. Being smart may help you in this: You may be able to grasp challenging concepts more readily. But you may also find that you understand things too quickly, jump over the difficult parts, read your Bible as if you were prepping for a quiz, not equipping yourself for life.
What’s next? Trying, with all due modesty, to bring your desires and actions in line with your values. You must be as skillful as possible in pursuing your ends. It may make sense to think of yourself as a pragmatic idealist. When you know what you want to do—what your way of thinking about and valuing the world commends—then you pursue it as unselfishly as possible, avoiding harm to others.
Where do smarts come in? Smarts are pragmatic by nature—and that’s all they are. The intelligent man or woman makes sure the pragmatic plans line up with moral aspirations. Someone who is smart, smart, smart without ideals will almost certainly do harm. He’ll be a doctrinaire pragmatist: someone who thinks that truth is what gets you what you want, without thinking too much about the value of the objective. Becoming intelligent, to me, means seeking to understand the Good and then, to the best of one’s ability, living and acting in accordance with it. Wisdom? Plato said that we should wait until we are forty to begin to philosophize. It takes experience, it takes intelligence; to be smart doesn’t hurt, but it may not actually matter all that much in the quest for wisdom.
Men and women become wise by grasping ways of thought from the inside, seeing them in their strength and weakness, and proposing modifications as needed. At that point, they are engaging in philosophical or religious thought. They can tell you not only what Plato or the Gospels mean in a persuasive way, but also what questions they leave unanswered. They can register their own doubts and enquire into yours. They are the gateways to profound thought.
The only person I have encountered in life (and not on the page) who seemed to me truly wise was the philosopher Richard Rorty. Relying on William James and John Dewey, but attuned to what has been called the linguistic turn (that phase in the development of analytic philosophy that concentrated on the confusions arising from ordinary language), Rorty took hold of pragmatic thinking and brought it up to date. Almost as impressive as that achievement was Rorty’s ability to provide a deeply thought answer to any question put to him, by friend or foe, about his pragmatic world view. How does what you are saying connect with politics? What relation does it have to literature? What’s the best objection to pragmatic thinking about history? He could answer most such questions on the spot. When he encountered one that he couldn’t handle, he would invite you to return after he had given it more thought. And invariably he came back with an answer.
As an idealist, I do not endorse the pragmatic worldview, but I dearly wish I could champion my idealism with the depth of thought that Rorty brought to his pragmatism. He was, in his way, the impossible possible philosopher’s man, to recall Wallace Stevens, the man who has had the time to think enough.
Was he smart? He learned things quickly enough, but he was no whiz kid. Intelligent? Sure, though pragmatism is more a method than a set of values. Rorty completed his pragmatism with a commitment to liberalism. He knew what liberalism entailed and lived it out to the best of his ability. Conversation with him was a lesson in learning to live for and by wisdom.
You do not go to the smart guy for such a conversation. It is almost certain he does not want to explore ways of thinking and follow them as far down as one can go. Smart fixes what is broken. Smart gets a hundred. And all this is fine and good. Praise the smart men or women, but do not ask them for more than they can deliver. And when they say they can do so, ask them, politely, to sit down and listen.
Elon Musk is smart.