One of the people culture maven and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell profiled in his 2008 blockbuster “Outliers: The Story of Success” (Back Bay Books, $11.64) is a man named Chris Langan, who supposedly has the highest IQ in the world.
This record has since been disputed but at the very least, we can agree that the man is very, very smart.
Langan grew up poor, had an abusive stepfather, and even after educating himself to the skies in philosophy, physics, mathematics, and linguistics, had been unable to achieve mainstream success. Here was a man “with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world,” noted Gladwell.
Langan wasn’t holding forth at scientific conferences or prestigious universities. He’d never learned to “play the game.” He’d worked for years as a bouncer. He’d dropped out of college rather than kowtow to the dean, now lived on a horse farm in Missouri, “seemed content,” “had farm animals to take care of, and books to read, and a wife he loved.”
But then I watched a YouTube clip of Langan in which he suggested implanting all children above the age of 10 with a birth control chip, selectively breeding out human imperfection, and basically making himself head of the world.
With an off-the-charts IQ of between 195 and 210, “faith is dead,” Langan declared. “We need a church based on logic and mathematics.”
His first priority, per Wikipedia, would be to set up an “anti-dysgenics” project. He would advocate practicing “genetic hygiene to prevent genomic degradation and reverse evolution.” He would prevent people from “breeding as incontinently as they like.”
Which got me to thinking that if you try to come at life without your moral and emotional intelligence as well as your ability to reason and compute, then you reach the same conclusion Langan did: to annihilate all that doesn’t fit in with your sanitized, straight-ahead plan.
Which in turn got me to thinking that the truest, deepest intelligence is grounded in and arises from love. Which means that the most intelligent person who ever lived was Christ.
True intelligence doesn’t seek to get rid of the imperfect. True intelligence embraces and encompasses the imperfect: the blind, the lame, the leper. True intelligence sees its own imperfection, and grasps, however dimly, that its imperfections save it from becoming monstrous.
True intelligence regards itself and asks, “Why do I suffer? Why must I die?” Intelligence regards the suffering of the rest of the world and realizes, “I’m complicit in it.”
True intelligence asks not: How can I kill the parts I don’t like? It asks: How can I give my whole heart, mind, and strength toward carrying life on?
The most intelligent man who ever lived didn’t need to develop a theory called the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), as Langan has. The most intelligent man who ever lived pretty much summed up all scientific, philosophical, and theological thought in two commandments: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37), and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).
Since Gladwell published “Outliers,” we’ve seen the rise of “artificial intelligence,” and Langan got me thinking about AI, too.
Self-renunciation, sacrifice, blood, sweat, tears, and, for that matter, joy are beyond the reach of even the highest IQ, in and of itself — and therefore certainly beyond the reach of AI.
That’s because true intelligence requires an incarnate body. Can AI share its last bit of bread with a brother? Raise a child? Sacrifice a day of rest to sit with a dying friend? Stop by the side of the road for a stranger? Help another alcoholic stay sober?
Can AI take the place of another concentration camp inmate in a starvation bunker, as St. Maximilian Kolbe did? Can AI face a firing squad, the guillotine, or the stake and die for love of its beliefs?
Can AI pray? Weep? Give birth? AI might be able to destroy human life, or control human life, but it cannot create, nourish, or sustain it.
Langan has a body but with all his intelligence, he seems never to have considered offering it up, nor laying down his life for his friends.
“Have you ever met someone smarter than yourself?” the interviewer asks near the end of the YouTube clip.
“As near as I can tell, no,” Langan responds. “And if someone walked up to me right now and claimed to be smarter than me, I’d put him through his paces. I’d try to find out how sophisticated a picture of reality he’d evolved. Try to see what he was holding in his mind simultaneously and what he could do.”
I wanted to take Langan by the hand (he still felt bad about himself at the time for working as a bouncer) and say, “This is what a truly sophisticated picture of reality looks like. This is what it looks like to simultaneously hold in your mind every idea in the world. This is what the most intelligent man who ever lived or ever will live can ‘do.’ ”
