Why I don’t take High IQ’s too seriously

After reading this blog entry, you will understand why I have never felt the obligation to contribute money to my alma mater, Columbia University.

I graduated from Columbia College, the Ivy League school at Columbia University.  My class was filled with smart people – high IQ’s.  As an alumnus, I receive Columbia College Today – published by the Columbia College Office of Alumni Affairs and Development for alumni, students, faculty, parents and friends of Columbia College.  A few years ago, I attended the 50^th class reunion.

What strikes me about too many of the people I met at Columbia is not so much how smart they are – they are smart – but what elitists they are, their lack of common sense, naivete, and how easily they pontificate on things they know little about – perhaps because they have no idea what they don’t know.  They are all too willing to think that they can solve society’s problems by telling you how to live.

The following excerpt from Alumni News, by Bob Ratner, a classmate of mine and a retired Sociology professor, illustrates why I don’t take high IQ’s too seriously.  As you read this excerpt, remember that visitors to Cuba do not get to decide what is shown to them and get lied to about what life in Cuba is like.  Yet BR accepts what he was shown as representative and what he was told as the truth.  He then lectures the rest of us, who know better.  He also fails to see the adverse impact of an economy controlled by the Government, and refuses to attribute any of Cuba’s destroyed economy to Fidel’s policies and, instead, puts all the blame on Fidel’s critics.  He also cannot refrain from bad-mouthing the Cubans who fled Cuba for freedom and literally created the Miami of today.  What hutzpah, naivete, arrogance, pomposity, and condescension.  Note the comment about Professor Mills – which suggests that at least some of the faculty suffered from the same faults.

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. . . my main reason for writing was to compliment Ken Scheffel for his remarks about Cuba in the Winter 2016-17 Class Notes (I await Part II of his reflections) and to throw in my two cents on this important subject.  I have been upset by the vitriolic unbalanced criticism of Fidel Castro by some commentators in the wake of his death.  His detractors seem to forget the murderous dictatorship, bolstered by United States mafia bosses, which Castro’s revolutionary movement supplanted.  How, really, could Castro have led Cuba for 50 years, staved off U.S. military aggression and endured periods of economic peril, had the people not been for him?  How did a poor country, made poorer by the senseless U.S. embargo, survive to achieve the heights of national literacy, free education and expert medical care?  Why is Fidel lionized by so many world leaders if he was the villain depicted by his opponents, who chose exile rather than accept the necessary changes wrought by the revolution?

My first impression of Castro came in 1959 when he and his cigar-chomping confederates arrived in Jeeps and battle fatigues on the Columbia campus.  One of my professors at the time was C. Wright Mills, a renowned iconoclast who was soon to write a book defending the Cuban Revolution (Listen, Yankee, 1960).  I had already taken Mills’ third-year social stratification course in which (a few of you may remember) I replied, to Mills’ query about the significance of Thanksgiving, that “it was the one day of the year when all classes, low, middle and high, could eat the same bird”.  It doesn’t seem quite so funny now, but it drew gales of laughter and applause back then.  In the senior year seminar, Mills’ teaching favorably inclined me toward the changes taking place in Cuba.

Over the course of my career at the University of British Columbia (still Columbia, just a different country), I made two visits to Cuba, one as a member of a group of 20 North American criminologists on a study tour of the Cuban criminal justice system (1985) and the other as a participant in an international academic conference (2000).  On the first visit our group was introduced to diverse examples, in action, of the courts, prisons, civil and political systems, including lengthy interviews with key officials.  I asked hard questions, sometimes upsetting my U.S. colleagues, but our hosts answered with alacrity, insisting cleverly that, “There are no indiscreet questions, only indiscreet answers.”

Our tour ended with an evening dialogue with one of the many Neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.  A party militant (or “professional”) conducted the group meeting, but all of our questions were answered by the assembled villagers with gusto and apparent candor.  If it was staged, they were wonderful actors.  On our last day, my Canadian colleague and I visited a family at their home in Havana.  The husband had once taught at my university, moved to Cuba, married and had three children, one of whom had just returned from Kiev University to help celebrate his parents’ 25^th anniversary.  Soon after we arrived, a party member, described by our host as a friend, knocked on the door and joined us for the full three hours.  This seemed a little ominous at first, but we proceeded to have an animated discussion where no question went unanswered.  Of course, I wondered about the presence of a party official at each of the two supposedly informal occasions, more than suggesting that the situations were being monitored to assure that the “wrong” messages were not conveyed to outsiders.  Even so, the exchanges were frank and robust, portraying a Cuban society that was still in struggle but thankfully liberated from an ugly past.

The academic conference that I attended in 2000 came not long after the “special period,” during which Cuba suffered new privations after the loss of its bulwark Soviet Union trade partner.  Now buses and taxis had returned to the streets and Cuba was no longer reeling economically, although the U.S. embargo continued.  But there was ample evidence of blight; even at the convention center flustered delegates emerged from bathroom stalls that were without toilet paper, still an unaffordable luxury in many public places.  Yet most of the people I spoke with told me that they loved Fidel and would fight to preserve the values enshrined by the revolution.  Clearly, however, they wanted more in the way of material comforts and hoped for some relaxation of Political constraints.  Developments since then have made both achievable if Fidel’s critics would relent and enable change to take a salutary course.

I hope to visit Cuba again and I urge all of you to do the same . . .before Donald either closes the door or opens it to the same old reprobates. Cheers.