Temptation of the “High IQ Stupid”: Preferring Theory to Reality - Patheos

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Agree with her or not, Peggy Noonan is one of our most interesting and provocative pundits.  In her Wall Street Journal column The Boiling Over of America [behind a paywall], she discusses the recall of San Francisco’s soft-on-crime district attorney Chesa Boudin.

San Francisco is one of America’s most liberal cities, and yet the vote to recall the progressive criminal justice reformer was overwhelming (60%-40%)  due to the upsurge of crime occasioned by the D.A.’s woke refusal to prosecute.  Noonan notes that minority citizens voted to recall at a higher rate than white, affluent, college-educated citizens.  She writes (my bolds),

This is because they suffer more and have fewer protections when crime spikes and homeless encampments seize new ground.

This is what the foes of progressives are saying: We won’t let our city go down. We won’t accept the idea of steady deterioration. We will fight the imposition of abstract laws reflecting the abstract theories of people for whom life has always been abstract and theoretical. We can’t afford to be abstract and theoretical, we live real lives. We wish to be allowed to walk the streets unmolested and with confidence. This isn’t too much to ask. It is the bare minimum.

Drawing on the leadup to the election and its aftermath, she goes on to generalize about extreme progressives:

One is they don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.

Another characteristic: They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent. . . .

Here the third distinguishing characteristic: The progressive can’t understand why [after he is “fired”]. He tells reporters the voters are “in a bad mood” because of inflation and housing costs.

A final characteristic of progressive politicians is that they tend to be high-IQ stupid people. They are bright and well-educated but can’t comprehend the implications of policy. They don’t understand that if an 18-year-old is repeatedly arrested for assaulting people on the street and repeatedly let go, his thought may not go in the direction of, “What a gracious and merciful society I live in, I will do more to live up to it.” It is more likely he will think, “I can assault anyone and get away with it. They are afraid of me.”

But Noonan doesn’t let conservatives off the hook.  Republicans say that the rash of mass shootings is not a gun problem but a mental health problem.  And yet many conservatives oppose laws to prevent teenagers from buying weapons, even as they blame the culture for making young people unstable, and oppose red flag laws that might identify some of these mentally ill folks and prevent them from carrying out their murderous delusions.

I would argue, though, that sometimes it is important to stand for principle, despite the “practical” consequences.  This is so especially when it comes to moral truths and human rights issues.  And yet, I accept that it’s possible for people of all convictions to be “high-IQ stupid” by clinging to theory rather than reality.  I don’t know my IQ but I am highly-educated, and I can recognize this temptation in myself, a tendency that is probably an occupational hazard of us academics.

Our preference for theory over reality can be found not only in politics but in other areas of life, including religion.  In fact, this was one of the main points of tbe 18th century Lutheran thinker J. G. Hamann:  We often treat Christianity as a set of abstractions rather as a mighty reality–as if God were just an idea rather than an actual, living Person; as if God were not physically manifest in Jesus Christ; and as if the Holy Spirit is not really at work in our lives through the tangible Word and the Sacraments.

Photo:  Peggy Noonan by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://ift.tt/uZEHQ6v>, via Wikimedia Commons

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