[extropy-chat] Intelligence of Leaders (was Re: it's allunderstandable, except)

[pjmanney]

Lee wrote:
>> Here's a serious question then with respect to this hypothesis:  is  
>> there evidence that the average US President was more intelligent  
>> prior to 1913, and if so what kind of average discrepancy are we  
>> talking about?
>
>I don't know!  And I sure wish I did. But the change probably came
>with the election of Jackson, which was more democratic. We may
>surmise---as I think Simonton did---that before 1828 the Presidents
>were smarter.
>
>Now, in my opinion, incidentally, this is not necessarily a defect in
>the American system. The president is not God. He or she has policy
>formulations determined by the best staffs that he or she can find.
>A good judge of character and ability to delegate is probably more
>important than a very high IQ.  Reagan was more successful than
>Carter, and Roosevelt was more successful than Hoover, though
>in each case I strongly suspect the last mentioned in each case of
>having a much lower IQ than the former.  Hoover was probably
>the brightest U.S. president of all, but he embraced even before
>Roosevelt the same government-meddling policies that caused the
>great depression. (This is the Austrian view.)  If only Harding or
>Coolidge could have remained president just a bit longer (so writes
>Paul Johnson, IMO the world's greatest living historian), a great
>deal of evil in the 20th century would have been averted.

Actually, I'd vote for the first Roosevelt, Teddy, as the smartest US President after the Founding Fathers period.  He was a true polymath -- a historian, a scientist, a naturalist, a writer.  He was a great communicator, able to talk to anyone, of any type, and be understood.  And an unbelievably savvy politician and diplomat to boot, who actually listened to the people and did what he believed they wanted and needed doing.  His progressive stances were downright prescient.  And he had balls of steel to stand up against his entire Republican party and Gilded-Age Wall Street, who owned them even back then, to do what he believed was right.  If I could clone a politician right now and run him for president in 2008, it'd be him.  I'd even vote Republican for the first time in my life.  TR, where are you???

There is much to be said that the electorate in the past was smarter as well and it had nothing to do with IQ.  It had to do with the fact that the electorate read and paid what we might view today as excessive attention to politics.  Political debates could be days long affairs in the 19th C. and were attended widely and reported on avidly.  Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example.  The issues were complex and divisive and both men held the attention of the crowd for an entire day of debating, where each man could talk for up to 3 hours at a time!  More importantly, they actually understood what the hell Douglas and Lincoln were arguing about!

Neil Postman writes extensively on this subject in "Amusing Ourselves to Death."  Read the chapters "Typographic America" and "The Typographic Mind."  It's a beautiful, brilliant analysis of just how verbally literate the pre-visual (movie/TV/advertising) world was and how they actively used their literacy.  This was the final flowering of the Enlightenment mind, here in the US.  The downhill slide began with visual advertising at the turn of the 19th C. and its coffin was nailed by television.  

Before the slide, however, almost every free-born American could read and the political system took this as an assumption.  And politics was played out accordingly.  Of course, there was negative campaigning and mud slinging going on.  I'm sure there was in Ancient Athens.  But in the televisual world, instead of substantive debate, we now live on the sound-bite and the image.  There's not much political substance there, because it's simply impossible to transmit the necessary information in those types of formats.  We vote on the best smile, now.  Just like Miss America.

Even tonight's results are not about real substance.  They are about "getting the bums out."  No IQ necessary, from either voters or politicians.  Just pure emotion.

Respectfully,
PJ