Decreased IQ, impoverished language and ruined thinking
After the babyboomers, the iQ started decreasing. Whihc explains these millennials screwed upideas and beliefs.
SUNDAY, 17.11.2019
Christophe Clavé *
Christophe Clavé
The Flynn effect, named after its designer, prevailed until the 1960s. Its principle is that the average Intellectual Quotient (IQ) continues to increase in the population. Since the 1980s, researchers in cognitive sciences seem to share the observation of an inversion of the Flynn effect, and a drop in average IQ.
The thesis is still under discussion and numerous studies have been in progress for almost forty years without succeeding in calming the debate. It seems that the level of intelligence measured by IQ tests is decreasing in the most developed countries, and that a multitude of factors can be the cause.
To this even disputed drop in the average level of intelligence is added the impoverishment of language. There are numerous studies which demonstrate the narrowing of the lexical field and an impoverishment of the language. It is not only a question of reducing the vocabulary used, but also of the subtleties of the language which make it possible to develop and formulate complex thinking.
The gradual disappearance of time (subjunctive, simple past, imperfect, compound forms of the future, past participle ...) gives rise to a thought in the present, limited to the instant, incapable of projections in time. The generalization of the tu, the disappearance of capital letters and punctuation are all fatal blows to the subtlety of the expression. To delete the word "miss" is not only to renounce the aesthetics of a word, but also to promote the idea that between a little girl and a woman there is nothing.
Fewer words and fewer verbs combined means less ability to express emotions and less possibility of developing a thought.
Studies have shown that part of the violence in the public and private spheres comes directly from the inability to put words into emotions.
Without words to build reasoning, the complex thought dear to Edgar Morin is hampered, made impossible. The poorer the language, the less thought exists.
The story is rich in examples and there are many writings from Georges Orwell in 1984 to Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 who recounted how dictatorships of all persuasions hinder thought by reducing and twisting the number and the meaning of words. There is no critical thought without thought. And there is no thought without words. How to build a hypothetico-deductive thinking without mastering the conditional? How to envisage the future without conjugation with the future? How to understand a temporality, a succession of elements in time, whether they are past or to come, as well as their relative duration, without a language that makes the difference between what could have been, what was, what is, what could happen, and what will be after what could have happened? If a rallying cry were to be heard today, it would be one addressed to parents and teachers: make your children, your pupils, your students speak, read and write.
Teach and practice the language in its most varied forms, even if it seems complicated, especially if it is complicated. Because in this effort is freedom. Those who explain all the time that it is necessary to simplify the spelling, to purge the language of its "defects", to abolish the genres, the times, the nuances, all that creates complexity are the gravediggers of the human spirit . There is no freedom without requirements. There is no beauty without the thought of beauty.
* Professor of strategy & management INSEEC SBE |
