Albert Einstein was once famously quoted as saying, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” This debate has been raging in modern academia for decades: is humanity becoming more or less intelligent?
Recall the 2006 comedic satire “Idiocracy,” directed by Mike Judge (creator of “King of the Hill” and director of “Office Space”). The film, while not claiming any scientific basis, poses this dystopian scenario: The less intelligent breed at a higher rate than the more intelligent, thus over time society will plummet into a pit of low IQs. While being hilarious, the movie unintentionally echoes a moving philosophical point. The opening scenes of the movie play on a split-screen, with the left showing the story of a stereotypical redneck who fornicates with everything that moves, and the right portraying a couple with an average IQ of 140 who never have kids. The couple wants to wait until a better school district opportunity arises, home mortgages become less expensive, etc., and before the couple knows it, they are infertile and never conceive a child. While these are merely stereotypes, they sound oddly familiar.
This begins to slowly slide into the controversial field of dysgenics, the study of detrimental activities that produce disadvantageous traits in offspring. In this case, it is the high rate of copulation in the moronic range of the human intelligence spectrum.
However, there is a strong counterpoint to this theory. The Flynn Effect, surely coined by a selfish man named Flynn, suggests we as a race are becoming increasingly more intelligent as generations sprout. The proponents present this argument: When someone of average intellect by modern definitions takes an IQ test from 1920, he or she will score much better than a 100 (which is average human intelligence). This has been tested and verified; we are scoring better on IQ tests. The test has to be adjusted every year, to move the bell curve back down to a 100 average.
So which is it? I answer, “Yes.” Both theories make valid points, but neither is perfect. I was recently reading some excerpts from the works of Plato, and I remember thinking to myself, “This society must have been much more intelligent to comprehend these ideas.” Someone told me it was simply the archaic language. However, this is not the case. When I was president of Fellowship of Christian Athletes at my high school, we had an “Athlete’s Bible,” which was a pathetic translation into ebonics-like English. Despite this, it still presented the same wonderful philosophical ideas that a Latin Bible does. It isn’t the translation, it’s the content. I would like to consider myself an intelligent person, but I still struggle with a lot of mathematical and philosophical concepts. Perhaps society is getting dumber.
This is alarming to say because today we have the Internet quite possibly the greatest human achievement since electricity. The web provides a vast amount of information to which no other generation before us had access. How could we possibly become dumber?
But the Internet, while being a great modern tool for research, is also the bane of academic thought. There are so many blatant falsities, absurd thoughts and exaggerated statistics that anyone could prove anything. On top of that, intelligence has to fight with Facebook, which has been fostering bad grammar since 2004.
What is actually killing our society is our love for learning. With the Internet at our fingertips, we never have to browse through an encyclopedia or fumble through card catalogues. We have become lazy, a selfish society who can’t appreciate the value of education. Professors don’t teach for that huge paycheck they surely get; they teach because they get a sick, twisted pleasure out of watching us learn.
Don’t let the Internet turn you into a mindless zombie. If everyone learned to appreciate intellectualism, America would be a bit better.
Tim McGrath is a freshman majoring in  aerospace engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].