GERTRUDE STEIN ON INTELLIGENCE, FACULTIES, HUMORS AND TEMPERAMENTS WHERE THERE IS NO THERE THERE

It has been argued that there are non bias, non linguistic determined, non culturally constructed IQ testing items which have proven that blacks in a rural village in Africa are intelligently -not necessarily intellectually- inferior to middle class whites in NYC. The same scientists, when they went into the intercity, needed people over there, from the community to help them navigate human dynamics and diverse linguistic and related coding systems. 

One can be so universal, categorical, reductionist and abstract that not longer exists as an entity in a given place; a there with no there. Intelligence is a mental construct, just like “temperament” and “humors” were for the philosophers and scientists during antiquity and the Middle Ages or faculties were for the more enlightened renaissance society of learners. Intelligence is not an organism nor a particulate set of neurons, and if you believe it exists in a given mass, then find out how it has been used by humans in all of kinds of different moments in history and particular place. 

Anyway, as my opinionated amateur “farfullero” friend -who has a temperament inclined towards beauty and inner child expressions says, “if the species that came from Africa were the first homo sapiens, who then fucked with the Neanderthals in Europe, eliminating their species from the planet, then those who resulted from the intercourse, new European mestizos, were more intelligent than the previous Europeans.” Whatever! 

I know, my friend’s faculties do not include in their intelligence a capacity to do cross cultural and historical analysis; different theres; so wacko that it does not make intelligent sense. Perhaps, it makes intuitive sense or statistical sense or spiritual sense or .... perhaps, Paulo Freire’s anecdote on the peasant who, after going through a literacy class where isolated sentences, words and  phrases taken from published texts had been studied and explained, said: those sentences and words and phrases were about the same thing they -the pesants- spoke with each other in their own words. No IQ test could have examined the sum of that peasant’s ideas and capacity to interconnect them. 

A leading Colombian educator wanted to find out why Puerto Rican children in her school were doing worse than the rest of the school population. She insisted in changing their pronunciation, so -she believed- they could then properly read aloud, as if mastering certain phonemes were prerequisites to learn to read. Luckily, she had no mutes in her school. By the way, she did not try to change the Argentinean kids who also attended the school. Wonder why!? Nor she was ever to realize that in general terms, Puerto Ricans were doing educationally and economically better than the Colombians. Ok, no ethnic or racial wars here, though, they are there where there is no there.