On Smartness and Nerd Persecution
It’s a pretty common complaint in certain corners of the internet that one endured pretty horrible persecution from other children for being a nerd. And, since the people making these complaints are, in fact, nerds, this is often accompanied with fairly detailed intellectual theorising about why nerds would be singled out for persecution. (See here for a prime example.)
A recurring theme in these analyses is that the greater-than-average intelligence of nerds plays a central role in their relentless torment by the Popular Ones. How this explanation goes will vary from theory to theory, but there seems to be something of a consensus that nerd intelligence is not explanatorily idle here. This has always bugged me, partially for personal reasons I’ve only started to recognise.
The thing is, I have seen the situation from both sides of the intellectual performance bell curve. As a young child (until around third or fourth grade), I progressed intellectually much more slowly than most of my peers. It took me significantly longer to read or perform basic arithmetic than was the norm for them, and even then only with the help of much outside tutoring. I can remember my first year at my elementary school thinking that I was distinguished largely by having made at best trivial academic progress since I first arrived.
It eventually improved, though. By eighth grade, I was at least above average in mathematics, and exceptional in more verbally-oriented fields (mainly aside from things involving fiction). During the earlier half of high school, I continually stood out in academics, and the school was highly selective to begin with. (During the latter half, I collapsed into a burnout that rendered me incapable of meeting even minimal academic requirements, and dropped out my junior year.) So, over the course of my life, no coarse-grained ability level has been alien to me.
And the bad tail? When I struggled to make sense of single-digit addition late into first grade? So much fucking worse. And not just overall worse, either, not just worse in the final tally of the benefits and drawbacks: moving to the high-achieving end of the spectrum was a Pareto fucking improvement.
Because all the things that nerds complain about having been harassed for? When I was a dimwit, I got all that, too. I still got screamed at for talking about special interests; I still got manipulated and hurt for my dearth of social skills; I still aggravated people by coming across as conceited and pompous; I still got thrown into the bathroom and doused in water and sexually harassed for… something, I guess. Except then I also had to deal with the disappointment of the adults around me and the sneering condescension of my smarter and more popular peers. (Of course there absolutely existed brilliant social butterflies between kindergarten and graduating high school—why would this one extremely attractive trait not correlate with all the others?)
So when I read people speculating on the causal link between smartness and nerd persecution, it cuts, and smells of more than a little vanity. It would flatter my ego to think that the feature that ultimately attracted all the harassment I endured as a child was also the one that has garnered me the lion’s share of my glory and praise. But I know it’s not true.
This has largely been my impression, too. Thinking back to school, there was a very strong positive correlation between intelligence and popularity. The most popular kids were all really smart and the least popular kids were all really dumb.
In the middle it was varied, but the unpopular smart kids were always unpopular for some reason unrelated to being smart – usually something like being ugly, unfit, socially awkward, or poor, more rarely some kind of defiant flouting of social conventions like being openly gay. The nerd chauvinism thing seems like it’s specifically about the idea that being smart compensates for deficiencies in that other stuff, and the anti-nerd hostility is conventional society reasserting that no, it doesn’t, fuck off. The model cool popular kid wasn’t a dumb jock, it was Apollo. But insofar as there was some sort of ranking in the recognized social virtues, intelligence was pretty high; almost nothing was worse than being stupid.
It’s worth remembering that Every Context is Different and that Your High School is Not Archetypical (whoever you are).
In particular, I think the “persecuted contemptible brainiac vs. popular dumb jock” meme is an old one that gets more and more obsolete every year, at least in urban and liberal-suburban America.
During the days of the Boomers’ youth, I gather, it was very real indeed. Adolescent society had a very high premium on conformity, there was a very narrow range of acceptable interests, and being too devoted to academics was a strong sign that you were insufficiently devoted to winning the acceptance of your peers. During my own early-Millennial youth in the ‘90s, it was still at least sort of a thing; the very smartest and highest-achieving kids in my (liberal-suburban) school were in fact outcasts by dint of being too weird, and the valorization of the football team etc. was still a social fact that was to some extent being actively supported by the community and the administration. Looking at high school now, it seems to be true not at all.
At least to some extent, this probably has to do with the ever-increasing academic pressure on American teenagers.