Prompted by a note about one of my pieces in the UK Forum, which informed me that what I thought was a simple argument wasn’t, I might as well discuss a semi-issue which floats up and down like an iceberg with weights attached to it: the I.Q. score.

We’re far from the days when Bertrand Russell had to step in to protect these fellows from a lifetime at the patent office at the clerk level. Yes, even though at least one of UK’s contributors was alive at the time when Isaac Asimov was the “160-I.Q. Private” back in 1945, times have changed almost unrecognizably for those in the high-abnormal range of the distribution.

Those of you who are hep to how social changes are bulled into American society know very well what pushed the MENSAn type from useful oddity to vital national resource: the Pentagon.

Asimov-the-Genius’ tour of duty at the enlisted level was one of the last of that kind in the United States, and was in part prompted by his somewhat teenagerish behavior when he was a civilian expert working under Robert A. Heinlein. It’s an easy guess that Heinlein, exasperated at what he saw as contempt for the armed forces, got on the phone and set the draft board on Asimov. Isaac’s lack of promotion from private can easily be explained by his scholar’s attitude: people such as that don’t go very far in the armed forces, as they are at heart unreachable by “The Old Man.” This makes them somewhat less than confidence-inspiring when given the chore of commanding men under the supervision of that same Old Man.

But the success of the Manhattan Project, combined with the challenge of Sputnik, made it clear that the MENSAn type had skills that were increasingly needed. What was also clear, as of the late 1950s, was that civilian experts such as Robert Oppenheimer tended to “go soft” when outside the confines of war work, but those who were booted and put in the chain of command didn’t. This implied putting the MENSAn type into a uniform and trying to encourage an esprit de corps to prevent them from becoming a collective attitude case, like M*A*S*H’s 4077.

So they were brought in at the officer level, and the subsequent two Administrations gave them a chance to show their stuff in Vietnam. This was supposed to be the “edge” of the McNamara Pentagon: use the boys whose skills brought us the Bomb in strategic planning capacities to keep America winning.

We all know that this “edge” turned out to be a double edge. At the same time the Vietnam War was turning into an attritional war, the anti-war movement was linking accelerated learning programs with the “National Security State” - up to the level of armed threats against students in them.

This has left a two-faction divide, which still shows in political correctness:

1. ”Pro-Bright” is linked with “Pro-Pentagon”;
2. ”Anti-Pentagon” is linked with “Social Promotion.”

And they’re awfully hard to tease apart.

The Pentagon does tend to have a Whiggish approach to its development. Whatever reforms were enacted in the past was done for a good reason; to say that the Pentagons of the past went down a wrong road implies that the speaker is at heart an ignorant critic. It seems a reasonable guess that the “Lessons of Vietnam” for the Defense Department itself were similar to the lesson of Apollo 1: some mistakes are only found when the land itself is opened. If this is their lesson, then it seems to have been learned very well. (The other lesson – “no land war in Asia” – seems to have been learned too.)

This has changed the political clime of America forever. As long as there’s a link between schools for the gifted and “Iron Mountain” – a cultural association cemented in by the critics of the Pentagon – then the MENSAn will always be with you. To go anti-MENSAn leads you quite easily and gently into the hands of Judy Collins.

The peace faction among the brights is actually a hangover of the 1950s: all their habits of thought date from then or earlier. It could be said in response that the national security type of MENSAn is him- or herself a hangover from the 1960s: that they’re the kind of conservative who wishes to conserve the Kennedy Doctrine. But in defense of this kind of bright, I can say that there’s nothing more galling than one who likes wearing long hair - with the possible exception of a hallucinogen cult growing and thriving in the dark corners of MIT.

[Myself, I tend to “flaunt” my I.Q. level when penning apologetics for faith.]