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.
So you’re making a substution here that’s really important, and it gets to the heart of the issue, because this actually seems like you agree with what I wrote above: being smart is not the same as being too devoted to academics. Because no, being smart is pretty much never a deficiency. But being too devoted to academics, which is not in any respect the same thing, absolutely is. (This is kind of question-begging wording because “too” makes reference to some agreed-upon standard of how much is acceptable, but the point is that it’s way, way easier to be too smart than too devoted to academics.)
Society expects people to uphold a variety of virtues, and people who are good at one virtue but bad at all the others will get cut down to size on the basis of their weaknesses, regardless of whether this is about being a smart nerd or a dumb jock. Maximizing your social reputation means maximizing all the virtues, which is why the upper echelons of popularity were mostly very clever people.
If you’re some kind of math robot or lit snob and don’t participate effectively in other spheres of school life, you’ll be bullied for that, but that has almost nothing to do with how intelligent you are; the bullying is aimed at your (socially perceived) deficiencies, because that’s how bullying works. People who are as smart or smarter, will not be bullied if they don’t have those deficiencies, and if they have different ones they’ll be bullied differently. Nerd chauvinism is about rejecting this and arguing that actually it’s more virtuous to not be interested in sports and fashion because you’re so devoted to computers and books, or whatever, which in turn exacerbates the hostility since then people are explicitly attacking social values rather than implicitly eroding them.
So it’s true that raw intelligence, absolutely uncoupled from anything (including any kind of perceptibility or social display), is pretty much always going to be a social asset. Especially if you put that intelligence towards social purposes in a Machiavellian sort of way.
But in fact the social culture has rules, and those rules can change over time, and they’re likely to be different between different milieus. And if the rules say “popular people don’t do well in their classes because that’s Lame Nerd Shit, popular people don’t think about anything other than the tiny canon of prescribed socially-acceptable interests, popular people don’t utter sentences that convey complex ideas” – well, you can be both smart and popular under those rules, but you have to be very careful and make a lot of sacrifices and repress major parts of your mind. Even if you’re not antagonistically nerdy or whatever. Intellect is overall probably more of a social detriment than a social advantage, because whatever Machiavellian advantage you gain is more than counterweighed by all the performative playing-dumb that you have to do.
Something like “independent of other considerations, is getting straight As coded as cool or uncool?” is in fact a variable. Its value has changed between 1960 and now.