In 1951 C.M. Kornbluth published The Marching Morons. In it, a man from the present is accidentally put into some form of stasis and is revived in the future. In this future society people of low intelligence greatly outnumber those who are more intelligent. The intelligencia – scientists, administrators and the like – are the only ones capable of keeping civilisation running – and they’re being overwhelmed. They need to come up with a solution to the problem of the overpopulation of idiots. The man from the present has the perspective of, to him, and at the time of the story was written, recent history.
The plan is to advertise vacations to Venus. People can get trips to this fantastic planet at bargain prices. There’s only one problem: Venus is uninhabitable. The intelligencia are putting people on rockets and shooting them into space, and then opening the airlocks to kill them. They send postcards from the “vacationers’” relatives, ostensibly from the vacationers, that give glowing reports of life on Venus. They say how great it is and the (fake) travellers say they like it so much they’re never coming back. I won’t spoil the ending, for those who want to read the story.
But it got me thinking: I mostly interact with people on these boards. No shortage of intelligent discourse here! In real life, I’ve met some people who seem to have lost the power of critical thinking. Just look at all of the chain mails people send. Where is the human race going? Is the mean intelligence of the human race growing higher, or lower? Is the Marching Morons situation – the vast majority of people being dim-witted, and the intelligent ones growing fewer in number; not the Final Solution thing – possible?
(Incidentally, the title of the story comes from the idea of counting all of the people in China by having them march past a fixed point. It’s said that by the time the end of the originl line passes, the population has been increased by normal reproduction such that one will never finish counting.)
Not too long ago there was a thread about the Flynn Effect, which proves that the average IQ has actually been growing over the years.
That may be hard to believe, but years ago, during school integration, during interviews in the crowds of angry white people you’d hear stupidity propounded that would make the guests on the Jerry Springer show sound like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[hijack]Going to the huge expense and trouble of launching someone into space just so you can secretly murder them doesn’t strike me as a particularly intelligent plan.
[hijack] Now, Solient Green, that WAS an intelligent plan, no wasteful rockets, and full recycling of the unwanted populous [/hijack]
Maybe the intelligent people in the Marching Morons were getting dumber as well, so the intelligencia would be stupid by today’s standards. That would be interesting idea, a future where Intelligence is a failing genetic trait.
Nah, the Soylent Green solution doesn’t work either because the processing of the bodies still puts more into the system than you get out of it, so there is still pollution and consumption of resources. Moreover, since they are only processing normal deaths (from the suicide parlors, the scoops, murders, and natural causes), there is still no net decrease in population, which is the root cause of the planet’s ills in the movie.
As for the Marching Morons, intelligence has been an asset to humanity for so long that it is difficult to think that a decrease in sentience would be so beneficial to a population that intelligence would be bred out.
It’s an excellent question, but due to events of the last few decades or so it’s not really projectable over the long term. 100 - 200 years from now, finely honed, direct genetic manipulation and creation of designer children will be an everyday event. Neither (real world) genetic manipulation options or effective birth control options were part of the author’s scientific landscape at the time the story was written.
As animals go, humans are already quite a bit more intelligent than they need to be, just to survive. The interaction of the rise of genetic and associated sciences, and the feedback loop effects that this will have on the intelligence of the population are unknowable, but I very much doubt thay will lead to humans becoming inherently stupider if genetic choices and options become commonplace.
Another issue is birth control. IMO as human wealth and options increase populations will (slowly) drop worldwide. In the next 100-200 years familes will (I believe) have the ability to control fertility more safely, accurately and powerfully than they do now. Numbers-wise, it’s not just middle and upper middle class families that are getting smaller. Demographically family size (in western countries) is falling across the board, just more slowly in the lower middle class and under class. If large families cease to have a positive risk-reward ratio for poor people worldwide, and cheap birth control is available, I doubt there will be an underclass population explosion.
The postulated reason for the decline in intelligence in The Marching Morons is that intelligent people tend to favour smaller families, or even to remain childless, so that relative stupidity is selected for in a Darwinian sense. I pin my hopes on it being dependent on education, rather than natural intelligence.
I must say that Jim Bob Duggar (father of fifteen) and his buddy Jim Holt (father of eight,) (who together campaigned against the teaching of evolution in Arkansas schools, and home-school their own kids to shield them from it,) recalled Kornbluth’s story to my mind. Instantly.
