In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould digs into the history of some of the ugly language we use to talk about intelligence:

Taxonomists often confuse the invention of a name with the solution of a problem. H. H. Goddard, the energetic and crusading director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, made this crucial error. He devised a name for “high-grade” defectives, a word that became entrenched in our language through a series of jokes that rivaled the knock-knock or elephant jokes of other generations. The metaphorical whiskers on these jokes are now so long that most people would probably grant an ancient pedigree to the name. But Goddard invented the word in [the twentieth] century. He christened these people “morons,” from a Greek word meaning foolish.

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 188

In Goddard’s telling, “morons” were at the top of a ranking of the “feeble-minded” that moved downward in intelligence through “imbeciles” to “idiots.” All were associated with low morality and criminality, and the assumed inability to contribute productively to society (as measured in wages). Morons were, however, the most dangerous of the group:

[For Goddard, the] moron threatens racial health because he ranks highest among the undesirable, and might, if not identified, be allowed to flourish and propagate. We all recognize the idiot and imbecile and know what must be done; the scale must be broken just above the level of the moron.

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 191

And what, pray tell, must be done? Here’s Goddard, in his own words:

“[Morons] are not only lacking in control but they are lacking often in the perception of moral qualities; if they are not allowed to marry they are nevertheless not hindered from becoming parents. So that if we are absolutely to prevent a feeble-minded person from becoming a parent, something must be done other than merely prohibiting the marrying. To this end there are two proposals: the first is colonization, the second is sterilization.”

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 194

Goddard himself was in the business of colonization—what we might refer to today as institutionalization, but I think his choice of words is instructive. Here is the real ambition of any notion of intelligence as measurable and hierarchical: the declaration and identification of an inferior class who can be justifiably oppressed. Whether in institutions or refugee camps, via sterilization or the refusal of health care, through mass deportations or immigration restrictions, all of these efforts serve the same end.

Some years ago, while chatting with a friend, we both realized that it’s nigh impossible to insult someone’s intelligence in the English language without invoking that violent ableism. Ever since, I’ve found myself thinking, what is the point of calling someone a “moron” or an “idiot”? What does it do?

Among other things, it reinscribes the notion of intelligence as something quantifiable and ordinal, as something that some people have more of than others. This is, to be clear, not a notion with any verifiable basis. As Gould capably shows, every effort to quantify intelligence has been beset by racist tautologies, errors of logic, mathematical mistakes, and repeated instances of fraud. We presume that intelligence is quantifiable but more than a century of efforts to adequately quantify it have failed. Our language carries those efforts along with it, having not received the message: that whatever intelligence is, it isn’t something we can rank or measure. Yet the idea keeps coming back. Gould again:

The reasons for recurrence are sociopolitical, and not far to seek: resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked?

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 28

Sound familiar?

In recent days, I’ve seen the word “moron” and terms with related heritage (“dumb,” “stupid,” etc.) appear in a number of news pieces critical of the administration’s accidental leak of war plans. And, I get it—I’m as likely as anyone to reach for those words in moments like this, that seem to call so clearly for them. But I suspect those words are the master’s tools, and the sharp end of the their blades will harm not incompetent and reckless oligarchs and their minions, but the disabled, the poor and unhoused, immigrant workers and students, and all their kith and kin—which is to say, all of us. And I will go a step further: that any notion of intelligence as quantifiable and quantified contains within it that seed of oppression, of the impulse to colonization and worse. We would be wise to stop nurturing its growth.

I’ve written before about the Army intelligence tests: an experiment in which millions of Army recruits were subject to an early version of the IQ test. As Stephen Jay Gould documents, the tests were chaotically—almost deliriously—managed. Illiterate recruits were given a version of the test in which proctors walked around yelling inscrutable instructions and pointing at pictures on sheets of paper; many of these recruits did not speak English as their first language, and had never before used a pencil. Gould shares some of the instructions given to the proctors:

The idea of working fast must be impressed upon the men during the maze test. Examiner and orderlies walk around the room, motioning men who are not working, and saying, “Do it, do it, hurry up, quick.” At the end of 2 minutes, examiner says, “Stop! Turn over the page to test 2.”

Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, page 236

This is, as Gould notes, diabolical. How could a test given under these conditions possibly evaluate some innate quality of “intelligence”? But the designers of the test were so enamored of their theories of racial hierarchy that they either couldn’t perceive the irrationality of their own design, or else they knew it for a facade. The practice of the eugenicist is invariably that of the error or the con.

But that phrase, hurry up, quick, struck a bell—I had heard it before. In Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, human colonizers arrive on the planet Athshea, seven lightyears from Earth and rich in trees—a rarity on their deforested home world. The Athshean people are small, furred, and green; the humans name them “creechies,” deem them to be of lesser intelligence (an error, as it turns out), and proceed to enslave them, rape them, and kill them with impunity. In the opening pages, we see the Captain of New Tahiti Colony rise in the morning, and yell to an Athshean:

“Ben!” he roared, sitting up and swinging his bare feet onto the bare floor. “Hot water get-ready, hurry-up-quick!”

Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, page 10

Le Guin’s concatenation of the phrase transforms it from merely extreme into something sinister: the way the words roll out all together escalates the inane redundancy, the empty urgency. Speed is not useful to the task at hand; the hurried pot does not boil faster. Rather, the purpose of the haste is to prevent any semblance of rest, to prohibit even a moment of peace. But rest is reserved for those deemed sufficiently wise, and sufficiently human.

The Captain will eventually learn that Ben’s ingenuity far exceeds his own—a lesson that comes at a very steep price for them both. Whether our present-day and present-Earth supremacists will ever learn remains to be seen.