Dyslexia is a disability affecting mentation, and some brilliant people suffer from it. My brother suffers from a confusing suite of trauma-related mental disabilities and is nonetheless the single most intelligent person I have ever met. That is wrong, he says, because he knows many mentally disabled people who were also very intelligent. Retarding the Discourse argues that the word “retard” equates mental disability with stupidity. I don’t disagree with the larger argument – that being intelligent is not guarantee of moral superiority nor is it something that makes one more or less deserving of humane treatment.
All of them brilliant, to be sure.īut there are more important things than brilliance. But it also has its insane Kaczynskis, its murderous Kissingers, its hidebound and mediocre Victor Davis Hansons. The right tail has its altruistic Schweitzers, its intuitive and holistic Einsteins, to be sure. Later, the definition is broadened, conceding that IQ tests do measure something that Clarke himself described as possessing, a quality of “smart” that the tests were measuring successfully, something that united all of the students at the school for brilliant kids that Clarke attended because he was brilliant:Įven among the brilliant kids in that school I went to one could find avaricious thugs, dullards, ideologues, and sociopaths. Intelligence – defined initially as “whatever is measured by IQ tests” – does not entail any other attributes, such as “ compassion, judgment, common sense, intellectual flexibility, wisdom.” The argument, briefly summed, is that intelligence is not a moral success or failing. He then links back to his previous post, “ Retarding the Discourse,” posted at Coyote Crossing, and says the reasoning is the same. Chris Clarke posting at Pharyngula has written a condemnation of the use of the insult, ‘moron,’ in response to a challenge from a reader.īut he’s right about my not having offered my opinion on the use of the word “moron”.