The cover story for this quarter’s Intel­li­gent Life is an arti­cle argu­ing that, con­trary to most recent opin­ions, the pop­u­la­tion isn’t, in fact, becom­ing dumber and we are at the dawn of an ‘age of mass intel­li­gence’.

This quote from Ira Glass, the cre­ator of This Amer­i­can Life, gets to the core of the argu­ment quite succinctly.

“When peo­ple talk and write about cul­ture, […] it’s apoc­a­lyp­tic. We tell our­selves that every­thing is in bad shape. But the oppo­site is true. There’s an abun­dance of really inter­est­ing things going on all around us.”

It’s an inter­est­ing arti­cle and one worth read­ing, but I do have some qualms. The argu­ment itself—that we are in an age of mass intelligence—is essen­tially unsat­is­fy­ing and left me hun­gry for some­thing a bit more… sub­stan­tial. The arti­cle is, as the above quote alludes, first and fore­most about cul­ture; not intel­li­gence. And can we really equate high cul­ture with high intelligence?

To (ab)use an exam­ple used in the arti­cle: when the Oprah Book Club (or any other book club, for that mat­ter) rec­om­mends Anna Karen­ina and sales of the book con­se­quently flour­ish, does this nec­es­sar­ily mean that the pur­chasers under­stand the book? Are the masses inter­pret­ing the novel as a para­ble of inner con­flict and are they sym­pa­this­ing with Tolstoy’s dis­dain for his Russ­ian aris­to­cratic peers? Or are they read­ing it as just a tragic love story—a Russ­ian Romeo and Juliet, so to speak? Essen­tially: do they really under­stand the novel, or are they just enjoy­ing it? (Both are very fine rea­sons to read any book, but are vastly different.)

Dis­clo­sure: I didn’t enjoy Anna Karen­ina; the above state­ments may con­tain gross gen­er­al­i­sa­tions; and I don’t believe that the pop­u­a­tion is get­ting dumber, but would hes­i­tate just as much to say it’s get­ting more intel­li­gent. Rather, ‘high’ cul­ture has been com­mod­i­fied and is now avail­able to a much wider audi­ence. This, in itself, is not a bad thing.