I‘m going to be in a debating “team”. I say team because this isn’t intended to be a co-ordinated effort to credibly win but, in the words of my captain, “a beacon in the darkness”. We’re playing it for laughs.
Our team is affirming that “ignorance is bliss”. So, as a good student, my first job is to find out whither came this phrase. Google points to Thomas Gray’s 18th-century poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. It’s a little turgid, and thickly nostalgic, and the relevant bits are, “And happiness too swiftly flies/ Thought would destroy this paradise/ No more; Where ignorance is bliss/ ‘Tis folly to be wise”.
Gray is saying we should revel in our youthful ignorance; that too much thinking will spoil our contentment.
He also writes, “I feel the gales, that from ye blow/ A momentary bliss bestow.” Which makes me think he’d love Wellington.
Scholars have seized upon the idea that ignorance in a variety of forms equates with happiness.
In 1981, University of Kentucky political scientist Lee Sigelman reported an early investigation of the notion that greater happiness is the privilege of the not-so-smart. He opens darkly: “People of intellect, aware of the world’s complexities and its limitations, are seen as vacillating between melancholy and rage, while their less-gifted counterparts, untroubled by such revelations, remain contented.”
Sigelman analysed data from two years of the US General Social Survey, which, in 1974 and 1976, included a “validated” short measure of intelligence. In psychological measurement, validity comes in a variety of flavours including construct validity (that we’re measuring the thing we think we’re measuring), ecological validity (that use of a measure can generalise to the “real” world), and concurrent validity (that things that we are confident measure the same thing produce similar results).
Sigelman found that at a simple one-to-one level, greater smarts was associated with less happiness, but this was blown out of the water by the relationship between anomia and happiness. Anomia, in this case, refers to feelings of disconnection and hopelessness. Once he controlled for these other relationships, happiness was … no longer statistically associated with intelligence.
Whenever I see this kind of result, it reminds me of that old Facebook status, “It’s complicated”. Specifically, I wonder what is complicating this one-to-one relationship?
The pandemic may provide a hint in one direction. Last year, Satoshi Kanazawa, Norman Li and Jose Yong speculated that the intelligence-happiness relationship might depend on context: what’s going on in the world, and our “ancestral” experience of context. What does that mean?
The researchers were testing their own savanna theory of happiness in which they propose that individual-level happiness reflects a little of what’s happening to us, but also that this will be particularly true for more intelligent people because they can override the nagging effect of historical but irrelevant experiences that have trickled down from our forebears. They ask what happens if we’re experiencing something that has no precedent?
Enter the pandemic. Sure, our ancestors experienced disease. But, the trio argue, not global pandemics because they require such conditions as large populations living densely that didn’t exist back then.
At a basic level, more intelligent research participants were happier heading into the pandemic (because they earned more, were healthier, etc), but they became less happy as it went on because, the researchers argue, they were smarter. The smarter you are, they say, the more able you are to see the scale and severity of the pandemic. On the other hand, the less bright stay happy because their evolutionary brain is stuck in a world where they didn’t have to worry about dying because someone ate a pangolin from a wet market or someone dropped a vial in a laboratory. Which sounds a lot like evidence in favour of Sigelman’s jaundiced view of intelligence.
