We live within the purview of a proud and pompous age. Where people tout the magnificence of their mind, the majesty of their modernity, and the wonderfully worldly weight of their intellect. An Age of Narcissus, endlessly enthralled by the spectre of self as we slowly shrivel from the inside out.
Yet it is not a love of intelligence that degrades us, nor our thirst for knowledge that slowly saps our souls. We starve not for the luster of our hunger but rather the lack of it.
There is all the difference in the world between someone who wants to know and someone who needs to know. The endless problems we find ourselves surveying in these all too modern times can in large part be summed up in a single statement.
Intentional intelligence is evil.
Allow me some clarification. I do not mean intelligence or intention are in and of themselves evil, or even many various and varied combinations of the two. What I call evil is the idea that intelligence should be a sole intention. That it should be a goal or purpose.
True greatness of mind, of action, of ability, has never been a matter of want and always been an issue of need. Newton didn’t delve into math for the sake of knowing equations, he did it because he needed math to help translate the universe. Shakespeare didn’t write because he wanted words, he wrote because words were needed to explain existence. These things we call knowledge, science, history, language, philosophy, these are tools, means to an end, not ends in and of themselves.
We see great people, and being lazy, try to copy their greatness rather than creating our own. We see them use big words, so we learn big words. We see them follow rules, so we follow those rules. We see that they know long list of names, and dates, and facts, so we memorize long lists of names, and dates, and facts. On and on we copy, we enshrine these efforts and mandate their continued existence and in all this mindless mimicry we fail to stop and wonder why. Why do letters and numbers make them great? Why does proper use of a coma or a colon elevated them in the halls of human effort?
The truth is, it doesn’t.
We did not glean the secret of their greatness, we merely glimpsed its shadow. They were great because they intended great things, all else were merely steps along the way. We cannot replicate greatness via rote recitation. We cannot package, plan, or mandate imagination. Passion and purpose cannot be standardized.
Our education system was built in a world where interest was unending but knowledge a rare and finite commodity. It now exists, all but unchanged, in a world where knowledge is instant and endless, and interest is nearly nonexistent. This is not because of any inverse correlation between interest and information. It is because true education is teaching people what they need to know, not dictating what we want them to know. It is because, in all too many instances, our response to having put the cart before the horse is to remove the horse altogether.